54 FRANK BÖSCH AND JENS GIESEKE
content with the overall economic situation and the ongoing issues with
the supply of goods, working hours, and wages increased slightly. As
most citizens had the general impression that the state of aff airs was
quite static and immutable, they tried to keep their distance from the
SED regime and stayed out of politics. At the same time, the SED spent
a lot of energy trying to keep things this way. The West German polling
institute Infratest, for example, estimated that a consistent 5 percent of
the East German population avidly supported the regime. It categorized
a further 16 to 18 percent as critical of the SED, but nonetheless still pos-
itively inclined on the whole. The majority of the population, according
to Infratest, was conformist but latently dissatisfi ed (between 40 and 45
percent) or politically neutral (5 to 10 percent). Yet, about one in four
GDR citizens described themselves as opponents of the system in private
conversations.^34 As the initial postwar boom phase—driven by the enthu-
siastic desire to be part of the building of a new state—came to an end,
the euphoric embrace of the new system and the desire to participate in
politics also waned. Simultaneously, the tables had turned between East
and West when it came to social mobility because improved educational
opportunities in the FRG were making it easier for young West Germans
from working-class families to climb the social ladder than their counter-
parts in the GDR.^35
Supply failures and product shortages further heightened this discon-
tent in the second half of the 1980s, as did the ignorant approach to
information dissemination adopted by the media in the GDR as opposed
to Gorbachev’s Glasnost policies. Moreover, the wave of westward travel
in 1986/87 just before Honecker’s visit to Bonn dismantled many East
Germans’ biases against the West. By early 1989, a kind of elementary
rage against the current state of aff airs had built up even among those
parts of the population that purportedly abstained from entering the po-
litical sphere. This marked a shift in the East German understanding of
politics. At the beginning of the 1970s, a broad majority of the GDR pop-
ulation (regardless of the system they preferred) indicated in conversa-
tions with visitors from West Germany that they believed the GDR was
a “more political” society than West Germany, which they judged to be
fairly unpolitical. By the end of the 1980s, the situation was pretty much
reversed.^36 Moreover, thanks in part to Gorbachev’s more open policies,
considerable portions of the SED party ranks entered into a phase of de-
politicization or inner retreat from the principles of Communist politics.^37
In the Federal Republic, the signifi cance of politics increased in the
1970s because the general understanding of what was political changed.
Whereas the SED more or less explicitly claimed that all aspects of so-
ciety fell under the rubric of politics, many areas of life seemed to be