224 WINFRIED SÜß
and of themselves, disappeared during the diffi cult years of transition.
For East Germans, this meant that they lost not only access to social
services that had been provided through them, but also a place where
the simultaneous increases in insecurity, the sometimes major drops in
social status, and the pressure to adapt to a new kind of society could
have been discussed.
In terms of individual biographies, the balance of gains and losses
during this transformation phase were very unequally distributed across
generations and social structures. Particularly those groups who had suf-
fered as a result of the focus on economic production in the GDR, such
as East German pensioners, were among the winners in this process.
Their social situation improved signifi cantly through the introduction of
a dynamic pension scheme along West German lines. Some of the los-
ers of the Wende were groups that had been well-protected in the social
security system in the GDR, such as single parents, many of whom have
since been faced with a much higher risk of poverty. Younger people
paid for a larger variety of job options with growing insecurity during the
entry-level career phase, although this was softened by migration within
Germany. Other losers included employees who had been part of the core
of the GDR’s work society within the “older” industrial structures, espe-
cially unskilled and semi-skilled workers, many of whom suff ered from
long-term unemployment after 1990. The age cohort of forty-fi ve to fi fty-
fi ve-year-olds was hardest hit by the system transformation; members of
this cohort were too young to retire in 1990, but they were often seen as
too old to start again with new jobs by potential employers. Although this
transformation process was also embedded in a historically unique surge
of increased affl uence and its impact was softened greatly by the welfare
state, the social consequences of the biographical insecurity faced by
the citizens of the East German federal states were quite dramatic on
the whole. Indeed, from the perspective of the history of experience, the
signifi cance of this process simply cannot be overestimated. This was
refl ected not least in the steeply dropping birth rate in East Germany
between 1990 and 1994.
In terms of social inequality, moreover, there were several problem-
atic aspects related to German reunifi cation. Some patterns of inequality,
such as the high risk of poverty among poorly qualifi ed employees and
single-parent families, are less an expression of an East-West diff erence
than a refl ection of accumulated regional disparities that resulted from
the transformation of work and other sociocultural changes. In this sense,
they emerged from processes that were also taking place in other regions
of Germany and in most European countries as well. The experiences of
many people in the new federal states during this transformation phase,