Conclusion

Abstract

The essays collected in this book reflect the complexity and differentiation of GDR society today. Contrary to a widespread image of state-socialist societies as nonpluralist and monolithic, they indicate that the GDR is a highly complex, advanced industrial society sharing some of the problems that trouble Western industrial societies. Differentiation as well as the accompanying partial auton omy of different social groups and institutions are real features of this society even if the consequences of differentiation are also contained by a strong state and a nonpluralistic party system under the leadership of the communist party, the SED. The growing differentiation of GDR society is the result of far-reaching economic and social change. The changes in the social structure are dramatically apparent when one compares the present situation with the initial phase of trans forming society according to the Marxist-Leninist goal culture in the late forties and fifties. The bourgeois intelligentsia has been converted by changed recruiting and training mechanisms into a socialist intelligentsia.1 Parts of the traditional middle class have disappeared, while a growing number of public servants are employed in health, education, state and social services. At the same time, the new educated strata represent an increasing diversity of concerns and interests. In agriculture, peasants have become cooperative farmers or workers in a state controlled agricultural system. The working class as a whole emerges as a highly differentiated social stratum, in which training and qualification, income, and position within the work process give rise to changing interest configurations and new values, attitudes, and behavior.