Unified Germany Research Articles

Sources of German unemployment: a structural vector error correction analysis

In this paper we analyze the sources of German unemployment within a structural vector error correction model (SVECM) framework. For this purpose we estimate a VECM model using data for unified Germany. The cointegration analysis reveals a long-run relationship between real wages, productivity and unemployment which is interpreted as a wage setting relation. Based on a reduced form subset VECM we identify structural shocks and assess their importance for unemployment by impulse response analysis, forecast error variance and historical decompositions. In contrast to previous studies for West Germany, we find that productivity, labor supply and labor demand shocks are important sources of unemployment in the long-run.

Regional Income Stratification in Unified Germany Using a Gini Decomposition Approach

Frick J. R. and Goebel J. Regional income stratification in unified Germany using a Gini decomposition approach, Regional Studies. Using representative micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), this paper delivers new insights into the development of income inequality and regional stratification in Germany after unification. This paper applies a new method for detecting social stratification by a decomposition of the Gini index that yields the obligatory between- and within-group components as well as an ‘overlapping’ index for the different sub-populations. It is found that East Germany is still a stratum on its own when using post-government income, but since 2001 no longer is when using pre-government income. These results remain stable when using alternatively defined regional classifications. However, there are also indications of some regional variation within West Germany. Frick J. R. et Goebel J. Les tranches de revenu régional dans l'Allemagne unifiée employant une décomposition Gini, Regional Studies. A partir des données microéconomiques provenant de la Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP – enquête permanente socio-économique) menée en Allemagne, cet article cherche à fournir de nouvelles perspectives sur le développement des inégalités de salaire et des tranches de revenu régional en Allemagne au lendemain de l'unification. On applique une nouvelle méthode qui permet de déceler les couches sociales par la décomposition de l'indice Gini qui fournit les nécessairs éléments intragroupe et intergroupe ainsi qu'une indice “chevauchante” pour les différentes sous-catégories de la population. A partir de la dotation globale de fonctionnement, il s'avère que l'est de l'Allemagne reste toujours une couche à part entière mais, depuis 2001, il ne l'est plus quand on considère les ressources propres. A partir d'autres classements régionaux, ces résultats restent inchangés. Cependant, il s'avère une certaine variation régionale dans l'est de l'Allemagne. Inégalité Décomposition Gini Tranches Unification allemande Ecarts régionaux SOEP Frick J. R. und Goebel J. Regionale Einkommeusstratifizietung im wiedervereinigten Deutschland mit Hilfe eines Gini-Dekompositionsansatzes, Regional Studies. Mit Hilfe repräsentativer Mikrodaten des sozioökonomischen Panels für Deutschland (SOEP) werden in diesem Beitrag neue Einblicke in das Entstehen eines Einkommensungleichgewichts und einer regionalen Stratifizierung in Deutschland nach der Wiedervereinigung geliefert. Wir nutzen eine neue Methode zur Erkennung von sozialer Stratifizierung mit Hilfe einer Dekomposition des GINI-Indexes, was zu den obligatorischen Komponenten zwischen und innerhalb von Gruppen sowie zu einem, überlappunge-Index für die verschiedenen Subpopulationen führt. Nach unseren Ergebnissen stellt Ostdeutschland weiterhin eine eigenständige Schicht dar, wenn man vom Einkommen unter Berücksichtigung aller staatlichen Transfers (‘post-government income’) ausgeht, hingegen seit 2001 nicht mehr, wenn man das Einkommen ohne diese Transfers (‘pre-government income’) untersucht. Diese Ergebnisse bleiben auch bei Verwendung unterschiedlich definierter regionaler Klassifikationen stabil. Allerdings gibt es auch innerhalb von Westdeutschland Anzeichen einer gewissen regionalen variation. Dekomposition von Ungleichgewicht Gini Stratifikation Deutsche Wiedervereinigung Regionale Disparitäten SOEP Frick J. R. y Goebel J. Estratificación de ingresos regionales en la Alemania unificada usando un enfoque de descomposición del índice Gini, Regional Studies. Con ayuda de micro datos representativos de un estudio de panel socioeconómico alemán, en este artículo aportamos nuevas perspectivas sobre el desarrollo de desigualdades de ingresos y estratificación regional en Alemania tras la unificación. Empleamos un nuevo método para detectar la estratificación social mediante una descomposición del índice GINI que produce los componentes obligatorios entre y dentro de los grupos así como un índice de ‘solapamiento’ para las diferentes subpoblaciones. Al analizar los ingresos posgubernamentales observamos que Alemania del este es todavía un estrato en sí pero deja de serlo a partir de 2001 si estudiamos los ingresos pregubernamentales. Estos resultados siguen siendo estables al utilizar clasificaciones regionales definidas de forma alternativa. Sin embargo, también hay indicios de cierta variación regional dentro de Alemania del oeste. Descomposición de las desigualdades Gini Estratificación Alemania unificada Disparidades regionales Panel socioeconómico alemán

On the Arguments about Motives of Exit from East Germany

This paper examines the latest dispute and many former investigations about motives of exit from East Germany. The main point of the dispute is whether they were mainly economic. Behind this dispute there is a constitutional amendment about regulations of refugee reception in the Unified Germany. This dispute gives a suggestion to the refugee-from-North-Korea problem. This paper comes to some conclusions including that East German exit motives were various but very often compound and it is very difficult to dissociate economic motives from political ones because of exit from a totalitarian dictatorship, the dispute did not consider that there was an essential change of the attitude of exit applicants after the final acts of CSCE (Helsinki, 1975).

Positive Heroes and Abject Bodies in Heiner Müller's Production Plays

Faced with the commodification of Ostalgie (nostalgia for things and times East) in present-day Germany, in which many in the depressed East find them selves excluded from the affluence promised by Western politicians more than a decade ago on the eve of unification, Germanists and others may find it unfashionable to revisit the embodiment of positive and model workers on the stages of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Especially when portrayals of once pivotal characters such as Communist (or Socialist Unity) Party secretaries appear today mostly in comic mode, it may be hard to recall the critical point of such characters as well as the dramatic and social conflicts about agency and productivity that they once represented. Nonetheless, despite this apparent obsolescence, the Communist motto heroes of still had enough force in 2002 to animate a fortnight of exhibi tions, installations, and performances. The persistence of these leitmotifs, however ironically evoked, suggests that of labor and their comrades may, even in today's unevenly unified Germany, play something more than figures of fun or phantoms from the trash heap of history, washed-up relics

The Context of International Legal Arguments: 'Positivist' International Law Scholar August von Bulmerincq (1822 - 1890) and His Concept of Politics

This working paper discusses the life and legal arguments presented by August von Bulmerincq(1822-1890), a leading figure in the discipline of international law during the 1860s-1880s. One of the influential initial collaborators of the Institut de droit international, Bulmerincq taught international law at the universities of Dorpat (today: Tartu, Estonia) and Heidelberg. The paper discusses the positivist concept of the separation of international law from politics in Bulmerincq's theoretical work and demonstrates how Bulmerincq's Baltic German backgroundhad impact on his legal views. The paper examines, by going through Bulmerincq's international legal arguments, whether he could hold up to his normative ideal of the separation of law frompolitics. In particular, Bulmerincq's views regarding the right to asylum, the legal status of the Baltic provinces, the international law aspects of the unification of Germany under Bismarckand the right to national self-determination are discussed.

Historians as Nationalists

What kind of people become historians, and why do they choose this vocation? A majority of them have been interested in the history of their homeland states for a variety of reasons: a majority of American historians prefer to study US history while a majority of French historians prefer to study French history. Nationalism in the minds of historians is a potent influence. The minority who have opted to work elsewhere have migrated to such foreign fields for other reasons. The second group is more cosmopolitan than the first. But in each state those historians who opt to work in their own national field find that their governments often will reward them; the academic profession of historian has always been tied to political realities. Before Johns Hopkins University launched its first PhD program in the 1870s, universities in the United States, Great Britain and its Empire and Commonwealth, France, and Germany did not have full-fledged departments of history, nor did they employ large numbers of historians. The great journals such as the Revue Historique, the English Historical Review, and the Historische Zeitschrift (1) were products of the nineteenth century and were not started until the universities expanded their curricula in the face of the growing demand for higher education coming from the ambitious middle class created by the Industrial Revolution. After 1890 especially, the emerging technical and scientific forces generated demand for the formation of engineering and scientific institutions. Academic history was merely one of a number of new disciplines such as political science, economics, chemical and mechanical engineering, and biology. In the old universities, the traditional faculties of theology, natural history, philosophy, and medicine were transformed and divided because of the enormous expansion of knowledge in the nineteenth century; medieval notions of scholarship hardly sufficed. In each country, the emergence of academic history was closely connected to major political currents of the day. In the German states before unification in 1871, the state of Prussia was the most prominent, and its historians included Leopold von Ranke and Friedrich Meinecke. To them the defining moment of history was the unification of Germany under Bismarck. During this period, German universities turned out many historians who found their jobs in the gymnasia, universities, and the civil service. To most of them, the rise of Germany was an exciting and determining factor in their careers. Even in economics, Gustav Schmoller and his students pushed National Economics, a glorification of the stated-directed economy introduced by the Zollverein before unification, and continued onwards. The culmination of nationalistic history was the lavish work of Otto Hintze, Die Hollenzollern und ihr Werk, which was published during the First World War as a five hundred year jubilee of the ruling dynasty. (2) Hintze argued that Imperial Germany was surrounded by enemies just as the Prussia of Frederick the Great had been during the Seven Years War. The First World War was a struggle for survival. If the defining moment of German history was unification, that of France was the French Revolution. After French defeat in 1871, the new republic spawned a generation of new historians who re-examined the great revolution. By the end of the century, the leading historian of the revolution was Alphonse Aulard, who occupied the new chair at the Sorbonne. After Aulard, a succession of revolutionar3, historians followed. Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul, and Michel Vovelle (3) each occupied the premier chair in France and trained legions of students who went on to other universities. If the German tradition was rightist, even reactionary, the French tradition was leftist, often socialistic and even communistic. Perhaps this reflected the rise of the republic in France after 1890, when the revolution became the symbol of the rise of the French people. …

Reading the Writings on the Walls— Remembering East Berlin

Between the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II more than fifteen years later, Germany witnessed not only a proliferation of events and experiences to be remembered but also of traditions of memory. Before the fall of the wall, remembrance of the past in West Germany meant, above all, commemoration of the Nazi past and the memory of the Holocaust. Germany's unification had a significant impact on cultural memory not only because the fall of the wall itself was an event of memorable significance but also because it gave new impulses to debates about the politics of memory.

Holding on in Berlin: March 1948 and SED Efforts to Control the Soviet Zone

March 18, 1948 dawned cold and rainy in Berlin. Although the city government had proclaimed the hundredth anniversary of the 1848 revolution an official holiday, Berliners awoke to a day that seemed ill-made for personal or political celebrations. One century earlier, some nine hundred persons had died on Berlin's barricades, dramatically challenging the Prussianancien regimebut falling short of their aspirations for a free and unified Germany. After one hundred years that had seen only a brief interlude of tumultuous democracy between the world wars, competing forces in postwar Berlin both claimed the democratic legacy of those barricade battles in a new contest for the city. But that legacy proved difficult to control. For the Soviet-supported Socialist Unity Party (SED), Berlin represented at once the core of the party's expanding power and the greatest threat to its realization. Like the 1848 revolutionaries, the SED leadership in Berlin found the lines between victory and defeat decidedly blurred.

Dynamic Spatial Modelling of Regional Convergence Process

Econometric analysis of convergence processes across countries or regions usually refers to a transition period between an arbitrary chosen starting year and a fictitious steady state. Panel unit root tests and panel cointegration techniques have proved to belong to powerful econometric tools if the conditions are met. When referring to economically defined regions, though, it is rather an exception than the rule that coherent time series are available. For this case we introduce a dynamic spatial modelling approach which is suitable to trace regional adjustment processes in space instead of time. It is shown how the spatial error-correction mechanism (SEC model) can be estimated depending on the spatial stationarity properties of the variables under investigation. The dynamic spatial modelling approach presented in this paper is applied to the issue of conditional income and productivity convergence across labour market regions in unified Germany.

How Life Becomes Literature: Uncovering the Principle of Writing in Three Novels by Fritz Rudolf Fries

In the unified Germany of the 1990s, the East German writer Fritz Rudolf Fries attained brief fame as a highly innovative and original writer, and subsequently notoriety for his collaboration with the Stasi, which became publicly known in 1996. However, his earlier life was also marked by unique and often ambivalent aspects. This article examines three of Fries's fictional works: the novels Der Weg nach Oobliadooh (1966), Alexanders neue Welten (1982) and Der Roncalli-Effekt (1999) in order to show how the circumstances of his life informed not only his decisions about fictional content, but, more significantly, his strategic literary devices. Of the latter, his use of the picaresque and, within that framework, of dualistic pairings and an unreliable narrator, are of fundamental importance. While his early predilection for the picaresque can be traced back to his dual German-Spanish background, the evolution of his exploitation of the picaresque model can be ascribed more convincingly to his experiences as a writer working in the GDR and the new Germany. This article sheds light on the multi-faceted nature of Fries's creative imagination and on his ability to distance himself from even the most damaging personal pressures. Was ist schon Leben gegen die Möglichkeit, es zu beschreiben? 1

L’autre Allemagne dans l'Allemagne unifiée. Réflexions sur l'unification allemande (Note)

The serious economic problems that the unified Germany has to face — as must other industrialized countries - cannot by themselves account for the growing disenchantment that is perceptible in the New Länder, where the utopian dreams of the fall of 1989 have been steadily unravelling. Why is it that the people of the GDR, who had pushed aside the lethargy of politicians in order to impose a speedy unification of the two German states, now seem to be adopting a radical attitude of defiance towards the federal government ? The author postulates that, in implementing the unification process, people overestimated the capability of the West German federal model to integrate the territories of the GDR and underestimated the permanence of the political consciousness specific to East German citizens, the weight of their historical experience, and their profound yearning to assume their destiny within a unified Germany. Had an autonomous East German chamber been created, with a time-limited mandate, it might have been possible to give meaning to the collective quest for identity now being expressed in the New Länder, a quest which for the time being, and in the absence of any alternative, finds an outlet in a party incarnating the region's specificity - the PDS.

Du haut de l'Olympe : perspectives américaines sur l'arme nucléaire allemande

Few issues have created more tensions and uneasiness in international affairs than the idea of a nuclear armed Germany. The militarist and expansionist tradition of Germany has induced in its neighbors an underlying fear of a possible revival of her past hehavior. The apparition of nuclear weapons in the international System after 1945, and the subsequent accession of Great Britain and France to the status of nuclear powers, has added a further dimension to the German problem. During the Cold War, the issue of German nuclear weapons was rarely discussed favorably, particularly in Europe. The case was different in the United States where Germany's role in the nuclear strategy of NATO was approached with a detachment seldom found in British or Trench political literature. The demise of the East-West confrontation and the unification of Germany have encouraged many American scholars, often associated with the neorealist school, to push for the end of Germany's singularisation in the nuclear field. For them, a nuclear armed Germany, if not inevitable, could well become a source of military stability in the region. Although most of them base their arguments on the merits of selective nuclear proliferation, they adopt similarly an olympian perspective towards Germany which is markedly different from what is found in European literature. Their position of course does not reflect Washington's official view on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This paper tries to circumscribe their line of thought and argues that it closely parallels, to a certain degree, the broader American attitude towards Germany seen as an equal and reliable ally in the evolving European security context.

Martin Stutzmann: Editor, Teacher, Scientist and Friend

Martin Stutzmann: Editor, Teacher, Scientist and Friend

Martin Stutzmann: Editor, Teacher, Scientist and Friend

Martin Stutzmann: Editor, Teacher, Scientist and Friend

Martin Stutzmann: Editor, Teacher, Scientist and Friend

Martin Stutzmann: Editor, Teacher, Scientist and Friend

Regional Income Stratification in Unified Germany Using a Gini Decomposition Approach

This paper delivers new insights into the development of income inequality and regional stratification in Germany after unification using a new method for detecting social stratification by a decomposition of the GINI index which yields the obligatory between- and within-group components as well as an overlapping index for the different sup-populations. We apply this method together with a jackknife estimation of standard errors. We find that East Germany is still a stratum on its own when using post-government income, but since 2001 no longer is when using pre-government income. These results remain stable when using alternatively defined regional classifications. However, there are also indications of some regional variation within West Germany. Overall, these findings are important for the political discussion with respect to a potential regional concentration of future transfers from East to West Germany.

Finding Home in a Liminal Space: Exile and Return in Andreas Dresen’s <em>Halbe Treppe</em>

In his film Halbe Treppe, Andreas Dresen uses stylistic elements and modes of production similar to exilic filmmakers, as described by Naficy in his book An Accented Cinema, in an attempt to portray both a sense of exile and a desire for freedom in his characters. Since exile is inextricably bound-up in questions of both homeland and identity, the film invites comparison not only to exilic cinema but also to certain aspects of New German Cinema, particularly issues of German identity that many critics argue have been too often ignored by other young German filmmakers. By emphasizing the importance of Frankfurt/Oder as the setting for his characters’ experience of exile, Dresen creates a connection between identity and “place” that encourages the spectator to reflect upon the traditional notion of “Heimat” and how it might be re-imagined in a new multicultural, unified Germany.

The programmatic development of the Eastern German PDS: Learning what from whom and under what conditions?

The unification of Germany in 1990 left the PDS in an ideological and programmatic vacuum. It found itself in a position where it had to develop programmes and policies from scratch, largely devoid of contact with other parties in other countries. In the immediate post-unification period the PDS therefore espoused programmatic positions with the single aim of self-preservation. None the less co-operation with like-minded parties and movements abroad has always been a facet of the PDS's rhetoric, with PDS leaders frequently stressing the party's internationalism. However, only really in the late 1990s – and particularly with the PDS's entry into the European parliament in 1999 – was the PDS's position stable enough for it to try and realize these aims. Even then, the ideological diversity of the far-left movement across Europe has not been conducive to the creation of detailed policy preferences, even if most parties have been able to agree on what they do not stand for. The creation of a European Party of the Left in May 2004 offers an opportunity to put this right, and it is in this arena that the PDS has the best opportunity to engage in policy networking and policy transfer.

Abortion in post-communist Germany: The end of Muttipolitik and a still birth for feminism

Abortion proved to be the most emotive issue in the process of unifying Germany post-1989. Attempts to create uniform abortion legislation applicable throughout Germany revealed an ideological chasm that separated the conservative discourse of the west from those on the Left, in particular in eastern Germany. The narratives of former women supporters of the ruling communist regime in East Germany are considered. These women regarded the imposition of more restrictive reproductive laws on eastern Germany in terms of an assault against the moral status of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and, in some cases, as instrumental in quelling an unanticipated upsurge of feminist consciousness that occurred in eastern Germany in 1989 and 1990. The role of the women's experience of East German social policy, in particular Muttipolitik , which emphasised women's dual roles as workers and mothers, is considered in relation to its impact on the interviewees' responses to the abortion debate. It is suggested that the brief burgeoning of feminist consciousness in 1989/1990 was, in part, instigated but also quashed by the dominance of western discourse that required a total rejection of the GDR legacy, including liberal abortion laws.

The Ins and Outs of Poverty in Advanced Economies: Poverty Dynamics in Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States

Comparative analysis of poverty dynamics - incidence, transitions, and persistence - can yield important insights about the nature of poverty and the effectiveness of alternative policy responses. This manuscript compares poverty dynamics in four advanced industrial countries (Canada, unified Germany, Great Britain, and the United States) for overlapping six-year periods in the 1990s. The data indicate that poverty persistence is higher in North America than in Europe; for example, despite high incidence, poverty in Great Britain is relatively transitory. Most poverty transitions, and the prevalence of chronic poverty, are associated with employment instability and family dissolution in all four countries. The results also suggest that differences in social policy are crucial for the observed differences in poverty incidence and persistence between Europe and North America.