THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE 315
Furthermore, the trends indicated by these statistics were not just a Ger-
man phenomenon. Similar developments can be seen in almost all Eu-
ropean countries. The specifi c national patterns do, however, diff er in
terms of when the shifts took place, the speed in which they progressed,
and the degree to which the rates moved up or down. Broadly-speaking,
things fi rst began to change in the second half of the 1960s in northern
Europe, hitting Central and Western Europe a few years later. Southern
Europe was aff ected even later, and, apart from the decline in births, the
shifts were less pronounced. In the former socialist countries of Eastern
and Central Europe, there were clear shifts in the wake of the fall of Com-
munism, such as a spike in divorces.^107
Among contemporary observers, these very same demographic devel-
opments were taken as an indication that the “golden age of marriage” of
the 1950s and early 1960s had come to an end.^108 They were also inter-
preted as a “crisis of the family,” but this proved to be somewhat problem-
atic because it clung to the rather narrow ideal of a middle-class nuclear
family. According to this perspective, the nuclear family was implicitly
defi ned as “normal,” and all other lifestyles that did not correspond to
this model were considered to be deviant. Consequently, many of the
! "#$%&'() ())(% *
%+$&() ())(% *Figure 6.2. Overall Birth Rates in East and West Germany, 1960–2013 (source:
Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung [Federal Institution for Demographic
Research])