ECONOMIC CRISES, STRUCTURAL CHANGE 115
In the GDR, the SED leadership continued to cultivate the nominal pre-
dominance of industry within the structures of the economy. The legiti-
mizing ideology of the regime, which construed the working class as the
ruling class and extolled the virtues of a working-class society, further
reinforced this image. Yet, as outlined above, the share of the secondary
sector within the economy was actually sinking. But this development
was rather more than just an unintended consequence of the increas-
ing problems that the regime faced in trying to manage diff erent aspects
of society. The service sector, for example, grew as a result of the on-
going expansion of the state and planning apparatuses, including the
Stasi. Furthermore, the expansion of the welfare state that was pushed
through under Honecker also contributed to the growth of the tertiary
sector. However, the highly integrated economic units in the GDR had
no interest in outsourcing service functions to external providers, as had
been done to a certain extent in the FRG, because they valued internal
autarchy. This can be interpreted as the “real socialist” equivalent to the
symbiosis between the secondary and tertiary sectors characteristic of
the FRG.
Moving beyond such intersectoral transformations, the changes occur-
ring within the industrial sector itself also need to be taken into account.
The branches that benefi ted most from this process of intersectoral struc-
tural change between 1970 and 1987 proved to be—in this order—auto-
mobile manufacturing, precision engineering/optics, plastics processing,
energy, and offi ce equipment/IT. Consequently, the trends that had
emerged during the postwar boom years mostly stayed their course. That
said, it was the automobile industry that gained the most ground. On the
fl ip side of the coin, textile and leather goods, clothing, beverage and to-
bacco, steel construction, building materials, iron and steel, and mining
were the big losers. Industrial decline thus shifted the regional balance
of employment and added value, to the great detriment of the old min-
ing regions, reinforcing the trend in favor of southern Germany that had
been solidifying since the 1930s. In the GDR, the energy, electronics, coal
mining, iron and steel, and mechanical engineering industries profi ted
the most, but their relative growth still lagged behind that of their coun-
terparts in the FRG. Employment declined the most (relatively) in textiles
and leather, clothing, paper and printing, watches and toys, building ma-
terials, iron and metal goods, and plastics processing branches. Thus, the
tendencies that had developed in the 1950s and 1960s also continued by
and large in East Germany as well. But at the same time, this intersec-
toral structural transformation was much less intense in the GDR than in
the FRG, and it exhibited other characteristics. The drop in employment
in the textile and clothing industry, for example, was only half as much