Even in their attitude toward political parties, Germans in East and West differed only with respect to the SPD and the PDS.
Of the four old Bundestag parties, three have roughly the same percentage of voters in East and West. At the time of the survey, Emnid registered 43 percent for the Union [CDU/CSU] on both sides; 9 percent for the FDP here and 7 percent there, and 7 percent for the Greens here as opposed to 12 percent for the Greens/Alliance 90 there.
The only difference stemmed from the fact that the SED’s successor party, the PDS, claimed 10 percent of voters in East Germany in late September/early October (the figure was only about 1 percent in the West). Because the SPD lacked these left-wing votes in the East, they had to be content with 24 percent as compared with 37 percent at this time in the West.
When asked who the “best chancellor” was, respondents in both East and West named [Helmut] Schmidt and [Willy] Brandt more often than [Helmut] Kohl. West Germans rated [Konrad] Adenauer higher than these three (of his five) successors*, but this was not the case among the East Germans. For them, the first chancellor was such a distant figure in FRG history that even unification did not bring him any closer.
The number of those who consider Kohl to be the best chancellor is twice as high in the East as in the West: 20 percent there and 10 percent here. Union voters almost entirely account for these percentages.
Two-thirds of citizens on either side of the Elbe are “proud to be German.” Only one in four West Germans, and one in five East Germans, rejected such notions of national pride.
Demographers have long been studying the attitudes of FRG citizens toward so-called life questions. Here, too, differences between West and East proved minor; at most, the majorities were of different magnitudes.
For most, a higher income was more important than more leisure time (only academics felt the opposite to be true). When interviewees were asked whether they wanted to “achieve more in life” or “work no more than necessary,” those in the East chose the achievement response more often than those in the West (75 versus 55 percent).
* The other two being Ludwig Erhard and Kurt Georg Kiesinger – eds.
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