E
chapter 4
Social Security, Social Inequality,
and the Welfare State
in East and West Germany
Winfried Süß
G
erman reunifi cation entailed more than just achieving the union of
two separate states deeply embroiled in the system rivalry of the Cold
War. Rather, it also necessitated the integration of two societies with an-
tagonist models of economic and social order whose structures of social
inequality had grown further and further apart since the division of Ger-
many. Embedded as they were within their respective blocs, East and
West Germany followed diff erent trajectories in the postwar decades,
especially when it came to their standards of living. As reunifi cation com-
menced, GDR citizens lagged “clearl y behind the West Germans” in al-
most “all objective and subjective dimensions related to quality of life.”^1
Hardly any of the protesters from the East German citizens’ movement
who demanded the return of freedom and better prospects from a scle-
rotic communist dictatorship during the peaceful revolution of 1989/90
could have known just how much the people of East Germany would have
to adapt as the two Germanys became one.
The welfare state played a signifi cant role in this strenuous integration
process. It was intrinsically tied to the expectations of affl uence harbored
in the East, especially since these kinds of hopes were consciously fueled
by the Christian Democrat and Liberal coalition in the run-up to the GDR’s
last People’s Chamber (Volkskammer) elections in March 1990. After all,
Helmut Kohl’s famous promise of rapidly “blooming landscapes” explic-
itly included the generous transfer of social benefi ts from West to East.^2
Thus, under the banner of a social union (the program was called So-
zialunion), the welfare state became a signifi cant component of the Ger-
