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chapter 5
Rationalization, Automation,
and Digitalization
Transformations in Work
Rüdiger Hachtmann
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any East German workers were hit by a shock just after the Wall fell.
One employee at the pharmaceutical factory of the VEB Leipziger
Arzneimittelwerke recalled that no one in 1990 “could even begin to
come to terms with unemployment” and the idea that they “might actu-
ally be aff ected by it personally.” Unemployment “simply didn’t exist,”
he explained. In the GDR, he noted, people only “knew about unemploy-
ment through television.” If all the talk of unemployment in the Federal
Republic on West German television “had become too annoying”—espe-
cially since unemployment kept hitting record highs in the mid-1970s and
eventually reached the two-million mark at the end of the 1980s—“we
simply switched back to East German television. There was no unemploy-
ment there.”^1
Indeed, the guarantee of full employment in the GDR was one of the
fundamental diff erences between East and West Germany before 1989.
Even those East Germans who were able to retain their jobs after the Wall
came down still noticed that “other issues took center stage” on the fac-
tory fl oor after reunifi cation. As many former GDR residents noted, one
was “under stress” in a diff erent way after 1990, and one had to learn
“not to make any mistakes” and that “people didn’t help each other out as
much.” Rather than easing into the workday, they claimed, the pressure
was on as soon as time cards were punched. East Germans who took up
jobs in the West described the atmosphere at work as “cold” compared
to their experiences in the GDR.^2 At the same time, however, many West
