December 18, 2012 | News | New Publication

Family and Partnership in eastern and western Germany: Things staying different after all?

Twenty years into unification - and still, eastern and western Germans continue to have different living arrangements. Which are these? A book, co-edited by MPIDR-researcher Michaela Kreyenfeld, provides answers.

More than 20 years after the fall of the Wall one would have expected eastern and western Germany to have largely converged with respect to partnership and family. But a Special Issue of the German scientific journal Zeitschrift für Familienforschung, just published, paints a different picture: Next to clear tendencies towards convergence, differences characteristic of the two former Germanys have persisted and are likely to do so for a while.

”In the family domain, there are still large differences between East and West,” says MPIDR researcher Michaela Kreyenfeld, who has co-edited the book with her colleagues Johannes Huinink of Bremen University and Heike Trappe of Rostock University. ”After childbirth, for example, mothers In the new states still return back to work earlier than do mothers in the West.” 

These and other differences in the family, partnership and employment domains have been persisting despite the “Wende” (turning point) and clearly overlap small-scale spatial differences.

To date it is still not known which mechanisms are responsible for the prevailing differences and what factors can cause convergence of the behavioral patterns.

The chapters of this volume take stock of partnership and family along the East-West divide  and in particular discuss the influence of structural factors and socialization on familial behavior. It becomes clear that only an analysis focusing on the life-course and generational experiences is able to explain the social change in eastern and western Germany. 

Familie und Partnerschaft in Ost- und Westdeutschland: Ähnlich und doch immer noch anders, Sonderheft ZfF, 12/2012, ISBN 978-3-8474-0041-7