SOCIAL SECURITY, SOCIAL INEQUALITY 195
In East Germany, social policy was strongly defi ned by other political
concerns. This constellation was particularly evident in cases in which
GDR social policy appears to have been quite successful in retrospect,
such as in health care and family policy, both of which served the primary
interest of workforce mobilization. GDR social policy measures were also
often tied to behavioral expectations of the state. In this sense, the GDR
took up with the authoritarian governmental and patronal traditions of
the German welfare state. The limits of these policies became quite clear
when their success depended on the cooperation of those aff ected—for
example, in the prevention of behavior-related illnesses, such as cardio-
vascular diseases.
Demarcation and Observation: The Rivalry between
the German Welfare States during the Cold WarEntanglements and demarcations within the social policies of the two
Germanys are key to a comparison of the “two worlds” of the German
welfare state. Their mutual awareness of one another was embedded
in the global bloc confl ict of the Cold War and therefore shaped by an
acute sense of rivalry. Indeed, some scholars have argued that this rivalry
propelled the expansion of the welfare state on both sides of the Iron
Curtain.^10 In its most simplifi ed form, however, this thesis remains ques-
tionable, especially given the more complex and rather indirect nature
of these interrelationships. The rivalry between the two Germanys did
indeed play a particularly important role in West Germany in the early
1950s. The establishment of a uniform system of social insurance in the
GDR, with its reduced range of services, worked to delegitimize corre-
sponding plans in West Germany at the time, despite the fact that similar
models had already been adopted in other Western countries, such as
Great Britain. Moreover, the reconstruction of ambulant health care in a
way that highly privileged self-employed doctors can be interpreted as a
West German counterpoint to the move in the GDR to curb the bourgeois
dominance of the health care professions. Over the course of the 1950s,
however, the GDR became less of a reference point for West German
social policy, primarily due to the clearly increasing gap in the resources
allotted to the respective systems of social benefi ts and social services. At
least until the beginning of the 1970s, the only exception to this growing
divide proved to be health care.
In the GDR, social policy was at fi rst relegated to the margins of the
state’s social project. It was supposed to repair the damage that had been
caused by capitalist exploitation, which no longer existed in the offi cial
narrative of the “workers’ and peasants’ state.” Consequently, the prob-