West German Research Articles

Seventy‐five years West German currency reform: Crisis as catalyst for the erosion of the market order

AbstractThe paper analyzes the role of the 1948 currency and economic reform in West Germany for growth and social cohesion in Germany and Europe. It describes the theoretical foundation by Walter Eucken and the implementation and defense of the new economic order by Ludwig Erhard. The paper stresses the positive impact of the market economy on growth and welfare in Germany and Europe. Then, it is shown that Eucken's constituting principles of the market economy were gradually eroded after euro introduction in course of crises, with the negative repercussions on growth and equality being explained. The policy conclusion is that only the reconstitution of price stability in the euro area can prevent a further decline of welfare in Europe. The 1948 economic reforms provide an important blueprint for the necessary reform process.

Differences in Implicit Attitudes in West and East Germans as Measured by the Go/NoGo Association Task and Event-related EEG Potentials.

Implicit social cognition refers to attitudes and stereotypes that may reside outside conscious awareness and control but that still affect human behavior. In particular, the implicit favoritism of an ingroup, to which an individual belongs, as opposed to an outgroup, to which the individual does not belong, characterized as ingroup bias, is of interest and is investigated here. We used a Go/NoGo association task (GNAT) and behavioral and electroencephalographic (event-related EEG potential [ERP] analysis) measures to investigate the implicit bias toward cities in East Germany, West Germany, and Europe, in 16 individuals each from West and East Germany (mixed gender, M age = 24). The GNAT assesses an individual's Go and NoGo responses for a given association between a target category and either pole (positive or negative) of an evaluative dimension. Behavioral measures revealed slightly faster reaction times to the combination of European city names and negative, as compared with positive, evaluative words in both groups. ERP analysis showed an increased negativity at 400-800 ms poststimulus in the incongruent conditions of East German city/positive word pairings (in West Germans) and West German city/positive word pairings (in East Germans). An implicitly moderately negative evaluation of Europe by both groups was exhibited based on the behavioral data, and an increased level of conflict arising from the "incongruent" pairings (ie, as manifestation of an implicitly negative attitude toward East Germany in West Germans, and toward West Germany in East Germans) was exhibited based on the electrophysiological data.

Measuring Household Inflation Perceptions and Expectations: The Effect of Guided vs Non-Guided Inflation Questions

An experiment using a representative survey of the German population shows that letting respondents report a number rather than asking them to choose from a list of predefined ranges lowers the response rate for both perceived past and expected inflation and decreases (increases) reported past (expected) inflation. Income, education, gender, objective and subjective knowledge about monetary policy, and political affiliation affect the effect's size but not its sign. East and West German respondents who were 15 or older when the Berlin Wall fell have reactions different from those who were younger at that time, which supports the ‘impressionable years’ hypothesis based on different inflation experiences.

State Machinery Building and Economic Transition: Lessons from the German Unification

East Germany was deficient in the human resources to establish a new state machinery that was equal to that of West Germany. The solution was transferring knowledge and know-hows from West to East Germany through dispatching West German personnel, retraining and building informal personal networks. East Germany could establish the new state machinery quickly, although copying West Germany left little room to build a better state machinery, and the sudden change might undermine East German personnel’s efforts to increase their capacities. The German experience suggests that the other ex-socialist countries that could not expect a fast and extensive transfer of knowledge and know-how would need a long period measured by the unit of decade or generation to establish the new state machinery. Those countries needed a commonly understood goal of systemic transformation and public support for it over a long period. JEL: H10, N44, O15, P20, P37

Forced Migration and Local Public Policies: Evidence from Post-War West Germany

Abstract We study the effect of forced migration on public policy setting in the migrant-receiving country. After World War II, eight million expelled Germans arrived in West Germany within 5 years. We use regional variation in the population share of forced migrants across West German cities to estimate the effect of this inflow on cities’ taxation and spending decisions. To identify a causal effect, we pursue an instrumental variable strategy that leverages push factors of the expulsions while being orthogonal to local conditions in the destination regions. Our results show that cities with high inflows of forced migrants increased spending on welfare and education, decreased spending on infrastructure, raised local taxes, and incurred more debt. Part of these effects can be attributed to shifts in political preferences. The migrants held voting rights upon arrival and supported parties that explicitly catered to their interests and needs.

Tourism through the Iron Curtain. Travelling from West to East Germany

ABSTRACT In the early 1970s, East Germany opened its borders to visitors from West Germany and West Berlin. Soon after, East German authorities recorded several million entries from non-socialist countries each year. This article examines the intentions and obstacles to establishing a successful tourism business across the inner-German border. The author shows that the regime’s attempts to develop the GDR into an attractive travel destination were shaped by (I) poor starting conditions, which could not be overcome for financial reasons; (II) bureaucratic hurdles resulting from a mistrust of its own people as well as of West Germans; (III) inefficient structures, which could not be corrected for political reasons; (IV) the constant desire to impress West Germany; and (V) the need for foreign currency. However, while other socialist states gave priority to economic considerations, in the GDR political hopes, aspirations or concerns were uppermost in the mind of policymakers when it came to tourism from the Federal Republic. The article therefore argues that travelling from West to East Germany must be understood as ‘Cold War tourism,’ as the conflict greatly informed the conditions and experience of travel.

Testing the Income Pooling Hypothesis and its Link to the Taxation of Couple Households: Evidence from Demand System Estimation for Germany

Whether couples pool their resources and behave like a unit or spend their income individually is crucial for social and tax policy. In this paper, I provide a test of the income pooling hypothesis using administrative cross-sectional survey data on expenditures and individual incomes of couple households in Germany. The test is performed within the quadratic almost ideal demand system framework, which allows for an endogenous expenditure budget and endogenous individual income contribution shares in an instrumental variables approach. Although perfect income pooling is broadly rejected, there are significant differences regarding the marital status, the presence of at least one child in the household and whether the household is located in a former West or East German federal state. Married and unmarried couples with children are closer to the acceptance of the hypothesis than couples without children. The approach allows to calculate justifiable differentials of the marginal tax rates within the household if income pooling is rejected.

1970년대 서독 이주아동 교육문제와 교원단체(GEW)

After World War II, West Germany recovered rapidly and entered an era of economic prosperity. In the late 1950s, the federal state faced labor shortages in various industrial sectors and accepted a large foreign workforce into the country. Many foreign workers came to West Germany with their families, and soon formed a large-scale migrant society. Along with that, the issue of education for immigrant children emerged. The West German government prepared policies early to integrate them into German society, but they did not have successful results. Because of the realistic conditions, the policy was not well received in the educational field. In addition, due to the fundamental limitations of the plan itself, many immigrant children often failed to adapt to school life and often dropped out in the middle of the school year. GEW, a major teacher’s organization in Germany, began to show interest in the problems of immigrant children in the early 1970s. However, in the beginning, GEW maintained its general position. However, in the late 1970s, serious internal discussions on the education for the immigrant children began, and specific policies were presented. This study examines GEW’s position on the education policy for immigrant children in the 1970s, focusing on the North Rhine-Westphalia, and deals with its changes.

Agrarrechtsgeschichte – ein konstitutiver Gegenstand der Erforschung landschaftsbezogener Rechtsgemeinschaften

Summary Ever since regional history has developed as an independent discipline alongside national/state history, the historical landscape has been seen independent of the boundaries of the 19th century. By elaborating the legal phenomena of a historical landscape, legal historians can also contribute substantially to the goals of historical regional studies. With his dissertation discussed here, Esser takes up the problem of the so-called ground release as part of the agrarian reforms or peasants’ liberation at the beginning of the 19th century, which, however, he examines only within the boundaries of one West German territory, the Duchy of Julich. Thus, he misses the opportunity to embed his subject in the larger framework of the landscape-based legal community of the Rhineland. Nevertheless, his account makes an important contribution to the study of land release as part of the agrarian reforms in Germany.

Primary Health Care and Foreign Aid: A Tale of Two Germanys.

The Declaration of Alma-Ata remains one of the momentous documents of public health. Its origins lie both in postwar efforts to improve population health in low-income countries and in social medicine promoted decades earlier in Europe. For industrialized countries in East and West, Alma-Ata, therefore, should have provided health-related guidelines both for domestic and foreign policy, though political interpretations of the social components of medicine and health differed. Due to its unique history of ideologically informed division after 1945, Germany forms a fascinating case study. Important German contributions to the early social medicine discourse fed into ideas of primary health care, the basis of the Alma-Ata process. However, the concept found little resonance in domestic policies. After World War II, the two Germanys chose different paths for health systems but were similarly reluctant to address the social dimension of health in their cooperation with Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the 1970s, new international health concepts and civil society discussions about "development aid" caused changes in West German policies. No such discussions took place in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where Alma-Ata was interpreted as a confirmation of the domestic health system. Thus, ironically, West German health workers pursued a keener policy of principles of social medicine in their partner countries than the GDR government, which considered its role in the global transformation of health care mainly fulfilled by serving as a model.

The British Conservative Party, the Scandinavian Conservative Parties, and Inter-Party Cooperation in Europe, 1949-78

ABSTRACT This article explores the links between the British and Scandinavian Conservative parties in Europe between the late-1940s and the late-1970s. Its findings show that these parties were closer to each other than has been assumed. The British and Scandinavian Conservative parties built up significant relationships with each other at the organisational level throughout the 1950s, which led to transfers of political knowledge and information mostly from Britain to Scandinavia. From the 1960s the circulation of knowledge started to flow in both directions, but it was strongest in the Swedish case. The British Conservative Party then bridged the gap between the Scandinavian Conservative parties and the West German CDU/ CSU and the Austrian ÖVP in Europe, helping to cement the parties into a new centre-right international known as European Democrat Union. This gave the British and Scandinavian Conservative parties more contacts abroad and reinforced the view that British Conservatism was not an ideological outlier in Europe. But the history of inter-party cooperation shows that the British and Scandinavian Conservatives were mostly at odds with the greater integrationist and federalist ambitions of Christian democrats. Therefore, the article offers us another way of explaining the persistence of Euroscepticism in the British Conservative Party.

Osztrák és nyugatnémet államelméleti irányzatok a II. világháború után

In both the former West German and Austrian state theory, examination of the relationship to the former statehood has emerged. At the centre of Austrian academic discourses, tendencies were about continuity with the First Republic or the lack of it and were primarily centred around the Anschluss issue. Debates on state theory were essentially determined by analytical aspects of whether the Austrian state had ceased to exist as part of the Third Reich, with the result that a new state was created in 1945, or whether the Austrian state continued to exist under German authority, in which case we can only speak of its incapacity. Representatives of the West German tendencies of state theory examined the issue of legal continuity with the German Reich who analysed this issue in much greater detail than the Austrian ones did. Reasons for this are that the turning points of 1949 and 1954-55 were interpreted in different ways, and that Germany, unlike Austria, lost territories after World War II.

SUVmax Above 20 in 18F-FDG PET/CT at Initial Diagnostic Workup Associates with Favorable Survival in Patients with Cancer of Unknown Primary.

Cancer of unknown primary (CUP) is a heterogeneous entity with a limited prognosis. Novel prognostic markers are needed for patient stratification in prospective clinical trials exploring innovative therapies. Methods: In CUP patients treated at the West German Cancer Center Essen, the prognostic value of 18F-FDG PET/CT at the initial diagnostic workup was analyzed by comparing overall survival (OS) in patients who underwent 18F-FDG PET/CT with those who did not. Results: Of 154 patients with a CUP diagnosis, 76 underwent 18F-FDG PET/CT at the initial diagnostic workup. The median overall survival (OS) of the full analysis set was 20.0 mo. Within the PET/CT subgroup, an SUVmax above 20 was associated with significantly superior OS (median OS, not reached vs. 32.0 mo; hazard ratio, 0.261; 95% CI, 0.095-0.713; P = 0.009). Conclusion: Our retrospective work shows that an SUVmax above 20 on 18F-FDG PET/CT at the initial diagnostic workup is a favorable prognostic factor in patients with CUP. This finding deserves further prospective studies for validation.

‘Aryanisation’ in Central and Eastern Europe and the Equalisation of Burdens Files: The Case of the Sudetenland

Only recently have historians studying the Holocaust recognised the unique value of German compensation files as historical source material. The Federal Republic of Germany created these files after World War II in the context of Wiedergutmachung, that is, compensation for damages inflicted by the Nazis on racial, religious and political grounds. This article draws attention to a different body of compensation records, one that has so far been ignored by historians of Nazi persecution: case files created under the Lastenausgleichsgesetz (Equalisation of Burdens Law [LAG]). This West German law was meant to compensate ethnic Germans for property they lost when they were expelled from Central and Eastern Europe after the war. The article demonstrates that LAG files can be especially illuminating of the interaction between Nazi profiteers and their Jewish victims in Central and Eastern Europe.

Household-level Prevalence and Poverty Penalties of Working in Non-teleworkable and Non-essential Occupations:Evidence from East and West Germany in 2019

AbstractHouseholds are prime locations of risk pooling and redistribution. Household constellations in terms of the number of earners and their occupations define households’ capacity to cushion crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic or rising inflation. The occupational structure and the sociodemographic composition of households continue to vary widely between the former East and West German regions. Against the background of rising levels of in-work poverty in recent years, we extend the prevalence and penalties framework as used in poverty research to two occupational risks that gained significance in post-COVID-19 labour markets. Our study addresses two questions: 1) How prevalent were household constellations in which the sole earner or both earners worked in an occupation that was both non-teleworkable and non-essential (NTNE) in East and West Germany in 2019? 2) Did the poverty penalty associated with the sole or both earners working in NTNE occupations differ in East and West Germany in 2019? The most recent available data from the German Microcensus (2019, N=179,755 households) is linked to new data collected on the teleworkability of occupations and occupations’ classification as essential by German federal state decrees in the spring of 2020. Descriptive statistics and regression models show that the prevalence of household constellations where the sole earner or both earners worked in NTNE occupations was relatively similar across East and West Germany. In contrast to overall similar prevalence, in East Germany the poverty penalty associated with the sole or both earners working in NTNE occupations was substantially elevated. Controlling for known occupational disadvantages, including low education, fixed-term contracts, shift work and the lack of leadership responsibilities narrowed but did not eliminate the sizeable gap in poverty penalties associated with NTNE occupations between East and West Germany.

Politicization of psychiatry and the improvement of ethical standards in the 1970s.

The Code of Ethics for Psychiatry adopted by the World Psychiatric Association in 1977, also known as the Declaration of Hawaii, was a milestone in the development of ethical standards in psychiatry. The impetus for the development of the code came primarily from the politicization of psychiatry, first discovered in the USSR, and later in other countries of the socialist camp, such as Romania, Yugoslavia, and the People's Republic of China. The purpose of this article is to trace reasons for the lack of consolidation among Western psychiatrists against the politicization of psychiatry and their efforts to improve the ethical standards in this medical field. We analyzed unpublished documents from the Archive of the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, the private archives of the West German psychiatrists Gerd Huber and Walter von Baeyer as well as research works. To examine these sources, we implemented the historical-critical method. The World Psychiatric Association made efforts to collect, analyze and discuss materials concerning psychiatric ethics in order to create the Code of Ethics for Psychiatry and establish an Ethical Committee. In general, the reaction of Western psychiatrists to the information about the internment of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals was restrained and focused on attempts to solve the issue together with the Soviet colleagues. The international policy of détente of the time as well as collisions between different medical concepts and ethical dimensions did not allow Western psychiatrists to condemn cases of politicization of psychiatry without proir clarification of the situation. The efforts of the World Psychiatric Association in the ethical field improved the ethical standards for psychiatry.

From the Basic Treaty to the Peaceful. Revolution: Inner-German Relations 1972-1989

The article gives an overview over the relations between West and East Ger- many between the signing of the Basic Treaty in 1972 and the demise of the German Democratic Republic (Gdr) in the peaceful revolution of 1989. In 1972, the Federal Republic had consented to a de facto recognition of the Gdr but adhered to its constitutional obligation to reunification while the Gdr aimed at recogni- tion by international law from its West German rival. The Federal Government's short-term policy was to make the inner-German border more permeable. To contrast this, the East German leadership tried to delimitate the Gdr from the West by raising the compulsory exchange for visitors in 1973. But the Gdr had objective di?culties to uphold its policy of delimitation. On the one hand, West German economic and political conditions remained points of reference for the East Germans, especially after East-West contacts were enhanced during the Détente. On the other hand, the Gdr became increasingly economically depen- dent on the Federal Republic, especially after the Soviet Union substantially reduced the support in 1981. In the Eighties, it permitted many more inner-Ger- man human contacts than it would have liked. Moreover, the East German le- adership under Erich Honecker in 1983 did not yield to Soviet pressure to in- crease delimitation vis à vis the Federal Republic after the German Bundestag in November 1983 had decided to deploy Inf weapons. Honecker took his visit to West Germany in September 1987 as the final recognition the Gdr. But his triumph was short-lived. From 1987, relations between Moscow and the Frg became more important than those between Moscow and East Berlin. The Gdr was threatened by isolation. In the end it was the Gdr's weakness with regard to economic power, its unwanted political system and the unsolved German question, which led to its defeat in the contest with the Federal Republic.

Project Outline: “Constitution and Development of Political Parties in Germany from 1989/90 to the present”

The KGParl lead joint network: “Parties and Party System after 1990” is investigating the constitution and the transformation of a new German party landscape after the reunification of 1990. The first focus is on the establishment of party political structures in the five new German states after the system transformation in 1989 and the unification in October 1990. It is trying to analyze the different expectations in East and West Germany and the competing influence of the established West German parties, which extended their organizations into the territory of the former GDR, in building what soon was seen as an “East German party system”. Also, the effects and repercussions of these processes in eastern Germany on the all-German party system will be examined: Was there a sort of co-transformation occur in western Germany? Did the reunification perhaps even accelerate the fragmentation of the “old” federal German party system that has been evident since 1983, when a new, young party, the Greens, succeeded in entering the German Bundestag for the first time?

Socio-economic Circumstances at Birth and Early Motherhood: The Case of the “Daughters of the Wall”

Abstract The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 resulted in a severe economic downturn and a stark temporary decline in fertility in East Germany. But did it also affect the fertility of future generations? In this paper, I investigate early motherhood – a marker of lifetime disadvantage – of those born in the years immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel and a difference-in-differences specification comparing the “Daughters of the Wall” with East Germans born in adjacent years and with West Germans in order to control for region fixed-effects and time-varying confounders, I find that these Daughters of the Wall were more likely to have children in young adulthood if they did not grow up with both of their parents. These results suggest that severe recessions increase early motherhood of those born into disadvantage, increasing the transmission of disadvantage across generations.

AKM Effects for German Labour Market Data from 1985 to 2021

Abstract This article describes the processing and accessibility of the person and establishment fixed wage effects in German administrative data. These effects have been estimated following the approach of Abowd, J., Kramarz, F., and Margolis, D. (1999. High wage workers and high wage firms. Econometrica 67: 251–333) and Card, D., Heining, J., and Kline, P. (2013. Workplace heterogeneity and the rise of West German wage inequality. Q. J. Econ. 128: 967–1015). They can be linked to most of the available administrative datasets provided by the Research Data Center (FDZ) of the German Federal Employment Agency at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). They are available for different time intervals from 1985 until 2021. These effects have been used in numerous articles that deal with the contributions of workers and establishments to earnings inequality.