18 FRANK BÖSCH
ket actually stood for growing German-German entanglements as of the
1970s because the GDR increasingly supplied West Berlin, as well as the
rest of the Federal Republic, with products processed in its refi neries.^88
Likewise, the fi nancial entanglements between East and West continued
to grow substantially as a result of the global economic crisis. Accord-
ingly, the GDR debts owed to nonsocialist countries climbed from DM 2
billion in 1970 to DM 40 billion in 1989.^89 The Federal Republic provided
diverse loans in exchange for humanitarian concessions as well as more
freedom to travel across the border, which in turn intensifi ed these entan-
glements.^90 Other transfer payments also increased sharply in the 1970s,
ranging from transit fees and bailouts for prisoners to wire transfers
between churches and considerable private Deutsche Mark transfers.^91
These payments had more than far-reaching consequences. They not
only fostered exchange at a personal level and altered the consumption
potential in the GDR by enabling foreign currency transactions (such as
at Exquisit, Delikat, and Intershop), but also this infl ux of money from the
West helped to pay for the rebuilding and even construction of churches
in the GDR beginning in the early 1980s.
As the contribution of Ralf Ahrens and André Steiner to this book illus-
trates, the long-term origins of the crises in East and West were certainly
quite similar in that they stemmed from problems resulting from the ebb-
ing of the sustainable economic boom of the postwar decades. Faced
with staunch competition from East Asia, industrial sectors in both Ger-
manys, such as the textile industry, collapsed as the energy sector grew.
Naturally, there were also clear diff erences between East and West. East
Germany, for example, still lacked something comparable to the boom-
ing West German automobile industry, despite its attempts at moderniza-
tion.^92 Moreover, the short-term factors fueling the crises of the 1970s also
varied, and the reactions to these problems diff ered even more so. These
factors therefore further deepened the divide between the countries.
Whereas the GDR restrengthened its centralized control over the planned
economy, the FRG turned away from its Keynesian-inspired demand-
based policies to monetary-oriented measures designed to reduce infl a-
tion and business-friendly “supply-side” economic policies. At the same
time, Honecker’s “consumer socialism” in particular necessitated eco-
nomic interactions with the Federal Republic that ultimately made the
GDR more dependent on the West and strengthened the longing for
goods rather than appeasing such desires.
Especially in the world of work, the GDR came under intense pressure
to reform, but at best it reacted only very slowly to international devel-
opments. Rüdiger Hachtmann’s chapter analyzes the increasing signifi -
cance of rationalization, automation, and fl exible forms of work that came