226 WINFRIED SÜß
way in which family work is organized. However, these diff erences have
become less pronounced since 1990. The welfare state has increasingly
reshaped household inequalities through social services, thereby “de-pri-
vatizing” them.^73 Despite this trend, which has moved post-reunifi cation
Germany closer to the path of other states in western and northern Eu-
rope, the signifi cance of households as arenas of inequality has by no
means diminished. To the contrary, their importance has actually grown
due to a greater array of available options.
How can we summarize all these changes in a nutshell? The devel-
opment of income and wealth structures and the rising inequality in
educational opportunities do in fact support the thesis that patterns of
social inequality are becoming more and more polarized. On the other
hand, unlike other European countries, Germany still has a broader mid-
dle class, which has been able to capitalize on the gains in affl uence
over the last two decades. The Hartz reforms aff ecting poverty and job
market policy, combined with the Riester reforms in the pension sys-
tem over the long term, marked a departure from the idea of guaranteed
standards of living that had once been one of the constitutive elements
of West Germany’s identity as a welfare state. These moves eff ectively
weakened the ability of the social security system to off set social inequal-
ities. Nonetheless, the basic outline of the West German welfare state is
still very much evident in post-reunifi cation Germany. In some places,
such as family and education policy, it has even become a bit stronger.
The notion of an increasingly divided society therefore seems to be rather
exaggerated on the whole. Paradoxically, it has been the spread of social
vulnerability to mid-level skilled workers and university-educated service
professionals due to downward professional mobility that has indicated
a trend to the opposite. To put it more precisely, there is now greater
equality, but it is greater equality in the guise of insecurity. It is still not
clear whether words such as “precariousness” and “social exclusion” as
a “new vocabulary of fear related to the transformation of work and social
life” can in fact adequately describe these changes.^74 Rather, it seems to
be more diffi cult to identify clear patterns of social inequality given the
growing downward permeability of society and the blurring of the lines
between secure and insecure jobs as the competition among employees
has intensifi ed.^75
Winfried Süß is a senior research associate and head of the research
group “Welfare States in Transition” at the Center for Contemporary
History (ZZF) in Potsdam. He teaches modern European history at the