POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 55
apolitical for West Germans for a long time. By the end of the 1960s,
however, this West German view of politics had begun expanding to in-
clude numerous elements of everyday life such as childcare, housing,
the environment, and consumption. This shift in perception was shaped
to a large extent by the rivalry between the systems, but also by the New
Left, which defi ned the private as political and experimented with new
lifestyles characterized by communal living arrangements, antiauthori-
tarian childcare initiatives, or alternative forms of work in self-managed
enterprises.^38 Accordingly, what contemporaries judged to be political or
rather a refl ection of personal local interests fl uctuated in both Germa-
nys. Local initiatives to improve daycare facilities or preserve crumbling
parts of a town were sometimes driven by personal interests, but at other
times they invoked a community spirit that could easily become political.
Moreover, any deviation from the SED party line in the GDR could turn
into a political act that bore the risk of repercussions.
Generational shifts also contributed to the politicization process in
East and West.^39 This was particularly true of the baby boomers of the
late 1940s and 1950s, who grew up during the postwar economic up-
swing. In the West, for example, it was this generation that fueled the
mass protests of the 1970s and 1980s. As they had come of age within a
democracy, most baby boomers developed higher political expectations
than their parents. In the East, some baby boomers joined the dissident
groups that had begun to form a new oppositional movement in the wake
of the Prague Spring. This generation no longer had any personal experi-
ence of the “great tales” of struggle and resistance within the communist
movement and the early GDR. Yet, given that this generation was the
main target group for the SED’s social policies and consumption initia-
tives, it was the hardest hit when these eff orts failed. From the 1970s
onward, the baby boomer generation was also the most susceptible to the
lure of Western capitalism. In the end, it was mostly the baby boomers
who toppled the system, together with the younger 1960s generation.^40
Traditional Political Organizations in Flux
In the Federal Republic, the politicization processes of the 1970s and
1980s are most commonly associated with the new social movements.
Yet they also appeared to a similar degree within more traditional political
organizations. The “old social movements” were less active in the early
days of the FRG, but there were certainly mass protests in the 1950s,
too.^41 When viewed from an international perspective, the level of orga-
nization of the West German unions and parties appeared to be mostly