SOCIAL SECURITY, SOCIAL INEQUALITY 201
elites. Consequently, mobility within and across generations was extraor-
dinarily high in the GDR in the 1950s and 1960s. By pushing out middle-
class elites and promoting the emergence of a socialist counter-elite in
the economy as well as in education, administration, and the state secu-
rity apparatus, the SED regime provided plenty of options for politically
loyal young workers and peasants to climb the social ladder to positions
that would have otherwise been out of their reach based on their formal
professional qualifi cations; this held true in particular for those born be-
tween 1918 and 1930, but it applied to women only to a limited extent.
Most of the transformations in social structures that took place in the
GDR from the 1950s onward can be seen as the results of dictatorial pol-
icy making. These attempts at political manipulation greatly infl uenced
social inequality in the GDR, eff ectively politicizing the social structure of
East German society in a variety of ways.
At the same time, East Germany was very much a “work oriented so-
ciety,” and even more so in certain respects than the FRG in the strictest
sense of the word.^28 East Germany supposedly represented a social utopia
in which society was ruled by workers for workers and work was devoid
of the “alienation” and capitalist exploitation that had been predicted by
Marx. However, the vision of a mostly socially homogeneous socialist
work-oriented society free of confl icts permanently clashed with the fact
that there was a serious gap between the actual resources available and
those needed in order to achieve such a utopia. The socialist work society
suff ered from a chronic shortage of labor, thanks in part to an exodus to
the West. In fact, some of its particularities, such as the high percentages
of employment among women and retirees, actually stemmed from the
need to increase the size of the workforce.
In contrast to the Federal Republic, agriculture and industry continued
to be much stronger in the GDR. Correspondingly, the East German ser-
vice sector grew more slowly, and it never reached the same level as in the
West. Signifi cant diff erences also existed between East and West in em-
ployment. Since most companies and large-scale agricultural enterprises
were expropriated and members of the “old” industrial middle class were
pushed into the manufacturing cooperatives, not more than 3.5 percent
of employed individuals were self-employed or family workers in 1970.
Similarly, the traditional diff erences between workers, employees, and
civil servants that had been fi rmly embedded in social and labor law in
Germany were leveled in the GDR. The civil service, with its fi rm attach-
ment to the state, for example, had already been lumped into the general
category of workers and employees by the Soviet military administration.
As this category consisted of workers as well as the “intelligentsia,” it
encompassed two groups of working people who served diff erent func-