After the Fall of the Wall: Life Courses in the Transformation of East Germany

Extract

After the Fall of the Wall: Life Courses in the Transformation of East Germany. Edited by Martin Diewald, Anne Goedicke, and Karl Ulrich Mayer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 408p. $65.00.

This volume is an empirical analysis of “life courses”—individual trajectories through major rights of passage—in the transition of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into an enlarged Federal Republic (FRG) in the period from 1989 to 2003. The published study draws on survey and interview data collected in 1991–92 and again in 1996–97, from three birth cohorts (1939–41, 1951–53, and 1959–61) in the East German Life History Study (EGLHS). This remarkable data set allows areas of impact to be distinguished and separately evaluated, rather than making disaggregated claims about how individuals raised in socialism fared under rapid privatization and the liberalization of society. The study offers a differentiated picture of the way an abrupt—even “radical” (p. 46)—social transformation affects different cohorts in various life phases. The underlying data is comprehensive enough to allow these lives to be understood across a broad spectrum of institutionalizations—structures, moreover, that exhibit a greater range of formalization than those captured by census data or other aggregate statistics. Thus, the data allow finer distinctions between phases in labor market adjustment, job mobility, and the lateral or vertical shifts involved with such changes. It addresses the relationship between different social systems, including intimate and instrumental networks of family and acquaintances, class status, ideological conviction, familial status, and gender.