INTRODUCTION 27
plains the enduring success of the SED successor party, the PDS (Partei
des Demokratischen Sozialismus / Party of Democratic Socialism), at
election time. These debates over social inequality also spilled over to
the West, making it possible for the leftist party Die Linke, which had
largely been formed out of the PDS, to fi rmly establish itself as a national
party in Germany.
Even in the realm of sports, Jutta Braun identifi es a “doubled trans-
formation.” Numerous competitive sports centers were closed down in
former East Germany after 1990 to make way for recreational sports facil-
ities. Debates over East German sports, and especially doping, however,
have increasingly begun to make reference to doping practices in West
Germany. Likewise, the dip in unifi ed Germany’s medal count sparked
a confl ict over sport promotion programs, which in turn prompted the
adoption of approaches that had been used in the GDR. Simultaneously,
however, there were also diff erences that persisted in the realm of sport.
For example, although several competitive sports centers for Olympic
disciplines survived in the East, recreational sports did not gain much
of a foothold, even among the youth.^117 This trend toward individualized
sports also extended to all of Germany and not just the East. Nowadays,
more Germans belong to a fi tness center than to a soccer association.^118
The cultural and lifestyle diff erences between East and West can also
be detected in terms of media use, as the chapter by Frank Bösch and
Christoph Classen underscores. Although almost all East German media
outlets were taken over by West German companies after reunifi cation,
it quickly became quite clear that there were lasting diff erences in terms
of media use. Commercial television programming and local channels
are more popular in the East than public broadcasters. The same applies
to the national daily newspapers and other news magazines, such as the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Der Spiegel, which are hardly bought in
the East. Media with a regional identifi cation (such as the former district
press outlets, MDR [Central German Broadcasting] or illustrated maga-
zines with an East German image) are clearly favored in the former GDR.
These media not only strengthen a separate self-image of the East, but
also the nostalgia for the old GDR or “Ostalgie” that has set in since the
end of the 1990s. But here, too, the East Germans anticipated a trend that
later reached the West in the move away from the national daily press
and public broadcasting companies, which cannot be explained solely
through the competition coming from the Internet.
Above all, however, the East was very clearly a trendsetter in the areas
of family and education. The East proved to be the innovator when it
came to providing more childcare facilities, the alignment of the school
systems, or the introduction of the twelve-year Abitur (high school grad-