The addiction of East German car fans – who were condemned to drive Trabis all too long – to faster and more comfortable Western automobiles is one of the most striking pan-German impressions of the year. But differences in car ownership will remain considerable over the long run. In the West, three of out of four households have a car on the road or in the garage (to be more precise: at least one car, since one in five households has a second car). In the East, barely more than half of all households have a car.
Their cars are also a lot older and less powerful. Half of all cars are at least eight years old (in the West only a quarter). In the West, only four percent of private cars have less than 45 horsepower; in the East that figure is 43 percent.
In terms of furnishings and household items, Eastern households still lag far behind Western ones. Very few of the sixteen consumer goods included in one Emnid list appeared in Eastern and Western households in roughly equal numbers: bicycles, electric drills, pianos, and second televisions. But the frequency of second TVs is also a result of the planned economy; the state-run sales system did not provide for the trading-in of old sets, so they ended up in children’s rooms and bedrooms.
Quite a bit of time will pass before ex-GDR citizens will be as well off as the other Germans in the old FRG. When interviewees were asked to predict when this goal would be achieved, the responses varied greatly. The average prediction by respondents in the West was 9.4 years; in the East it was 7.3 years.
This is largely due to the fact that, despite the monetary union and political unity, there has hardly been any economic progress in the ex-GDR; rather, there has been almost nothing but standstill and decline. If West Germans were to fall from their mountain of prosperity into a valley of difficulties similar to that which presently exists in East Germany, there would be no end to the moaning and complaining. The situations in the old FRG and the ex-GDR are as different as day and night.
Seventy-seven percent of West Germans appraised the general economic situation in their part of Germany as “very good” or “good,” whereas 78 percent of East German deemed their own situation “bad” or “very bad.”
When it came to job security, 91 percent of working West Germans regarded their job as secure, whereas 52 percent of those in the East regarded theirs as insecure.
With prices being relatively equal, 46 percent of families in the East have a net [monthly] income of less than 1,500 marks, whereas the same is true of only 11 percent of families here. Thirty percent of people here earned top incomes of more than 4,000 marks per month, as opposed to only 1 percent there.
This contrast is hardly diminished by the fact that rents are extremely low in the ex-GDR: 86 percent of respondents pay less than 100 marks per month.
Although one side lives in daylight, the other in darkness, they have similar opinions in many – or even most – things, regardless of whether the interviewer posed questions on general subjects or current issues. That Germans lived under different systems for four decades, that they barely knew each other almost exactly a year ago, and that (before that) they only learned about each other through TV screens and letters and infrequent visits – all of this had hardly any effect at all.
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