272 RÜDIGER HACHTMANN
vate companies who could take over the care of the elderly. They were
supposed to follow on the heels of the charitable and church welfare or-
ganizations who had been the main providers of this kind of care well into
the 1980s in West Germany. Under the SED dictatorship, where social
welfare was primarily for those able to work, the care of older people was
mostly in the hands of the state, which handled it in a dilatory manner.
The number of spaces in old people’s homes was about 115,000 in the
GDR’s last year, compared to 88,500 in 1960; the percentage of hospital
beds in the chronically overcrowded state nursing homes was about 85
percent in 1989. Given the lack of suitably qualifi ed personnel, more-
over, the ratio of caretakers to residents was still much worse than in
West Germany. Likewise, the poor state of the homes themselves made
“care aimed at active living” and true “geriatric rehabilitation” virtually
impossible.^76
Both the East and West German versions of nursing care were trans-
formed by the law introduced in 1994. Although the fi rst private nursing
service companies popped up in the early 1990s, the market for private
providers did not really take off until the nursing care insurance system
was put into place, which fi rmly set out the preference for ambulatory
elder care in section 3 of the SGB XI (German Social Code XI—Social As-
sistance).^77 As early as 1997, 1.2 million Germans in need of assistance,
and especially older people, were being taken care of by nursing care
services. By 2009, this fi gure had almost doubled to more than 2.3 million
people. The dynamic way in which the market for nursing care developed
in the 1990s is aptly refl ected, at least in part, by the number of service
providers that existed: in 1990, there were about 1,700 providers, but
this number jumped quickly to 6,633 by 1993, hitting the 12,000 mark
in 2009.^78 Approximately 60 percent of these service providers operated
as private companies as of 2009. The number of employees working in
the at-home nursing care industry grew from 36,000 in 1984 to 40,400 in
1993; after the advent of the nursing care insurance system, this fi gure
catapulted to 107,200 in 1996 and more than doubled again to 269,000
in 2009.
The history of these kinds of nursing care services is very much a
history of female employment. Since the introduction of the nursing care
insurance system, almost 90 percent of all those employed in the ambu-
latory care sector have been women. Accordingly, the percentage of part-
time employment has also been high. It rose from about 50 percent in
1994 to 71 percent in 2009.^79 Private service providers not only paved the
way for part-time employment in this area, but also they were the fore-
runners when it came to “mini-jobs,” coming in at 26 percent compared
to 17 percent among the nonprofi t nursing care providers.