Active Aging in East and West Germany. Life-Course Influences in a Formerly Divided Country

When it comes to life courses of older people in Germany it has to be taken into account that they had been living in different countries and political systems for decades. Next to highly different experiences of life in youth and midlife, people aged 60 plus nowadays have been socialized within very different cultures of old age. Material living conditions of retirees, employment rates in later life, social images as well as social expectations towards older people were quite different in the former GDR and FRG. Whereas older people in the Western part were pictured as retirees, enjoying leisure and earned repose, elderly in the GDR were seen as veterans, who had fought against fascism and capitalism. They were continuously addressed as productive parts of the socialist society, while the living conditions were rather precarious at the same time. However, it is not just the different settings before 1989 that make a difference in people’s life stories, but also the experiences following the re-unification, namely the wide-spread unemployment in the new federal states. At the same time, the Western model of early retirement and deserved disengagement has been challenging since the early 1990s, too, giving way to a re-negotiation of old age as an productive phase of life. The presentation asks, in how far the different experiences of life before and after re-unification influence how older people think of and cope with this development. Are we witnessing ongoing East-West-differences or even profoundly different age cultures?  The presentation is based on empirical findings from the research project “From retirement to active aging? Images and practices of old age in the transformation of the German welfare state after reunification” – drawing on biographical interviews with elderly from the Eastern and Western part.