Introduction

The East German system of state socialism provided a markedly different framework for caring as compared with West Germany. After 40 years of separate existence, the two German regimes diverged not only in their administrative arrangements and underlying social principles, but also in their social infrastructures of family, neighbourhood and workplace. Unification, which started in 1990, imposed the family-centred and pluralised system of the social state on a quite different terrain.

Of the five caring situations presented in this chapter, three date from many years before unification, and two began in the turmoil of that period. Since the new system of welfare was still a fledgling in 1992 when the interviews were conducted, all five sets of caring arrangements and strategies were strongly framed by GDR society. The case studies and the interviews with welfare personnel both convey the experience for East Germans of living in the GDR, and the hopes and fears brought by unification.

Writing and thinking about the GDR involves negotiating between Eastern and Western perspectives, and what often seems the absence of an authentic view. Merkel (1994) maintains that women's experiences have been no better captured in Western-dominated discourse after unification than they were under the old regime. This enhances the importance of these case studies, which provide eloquent testimony to the experience of being a carer in East Germany before and during unification, and the personal and public struggles involved. The cases are based on full and heartfelt accounts. The carers responded boldly to the opportunity to talk, both for themselves and as representatives of the hidden constituency of carers. It often seemed that this was the first time they had been addressed as carers, ‘car ing’ being completely unacknowledged in East German society. There was also a sense in which they were using the interview to bear testimony for East German experience as a whole, with love and loathing, and were glad to be offered a space in which to speak outside the hegemony of West German discourse.

Unification

Several West German commentators came to regret the speed of unification: the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, East German elections were held in March 1990, the currency unified in June, the Unification Treaty signed in November, and all-German elections held in December 1990.