Introduction

We begin the comparison of informal care in the three welfare societies, the two Germanies and Britain, with the West German case studies. We have chosen a similar structure for the first three chapters: a first section describes the context of the respective welfare society, through a discussion of salient themes of social policy and welfare praxis. A second section discusses the case studies, and in the final section of the chapter the cases are compared.

In this chapter on Western Germany, we argue that informal care is a contradictory arena, which bridges traditional and post-modern life courses. At the heart of the West German culture of care lies the social state tradition, in which gendered notions of private and public worlds continue to be perpetuated through conservative family legislation and welfare policies. Among the West German cases, most informal care was undertaken by women, with limited outside assistance and contact. This could be entrapping and restrictive, cutting carers off from outside contact and social interaction to the point of virtual isolation. For carers who managed to retain the connections to outside social spheres, acting against the grain of accepted social values, the experience of being a carer could become an arena for self-fulfilment, of experimentation in lifeworlds and a basis to reach out into new and unknown territory.

The social state tradition

In the corporatist model of the West German welfare state, social policy and social policy intervention are intrinsically linked with the tradition of the ‘Sozialstaat’ (Rosenhaft and Lee, 1997). Behind this lies the idea that the state can act as a mediator between changes and continuities of social life, between tradition and innovation in institutions and systems, and as a force for social cohesion (Peukert, 1990, p 345). Written into the Constitution, the aspiration of the social state is that of creating and maintaining a socially ‘responsible’ and progressive welfare society in which welfare functions are taken on by different sectors of society as a matter of social obligation and civil participation. Historically, the tradition of the social state continues the pluralist approach to welfare provision begun in the 19th century, in which welfare was developed as a civil endeavour, involving institutions such as unions, employers, churches and voluntary associations. These voluntary and civil institutions developed welfare services in the emerging industrial German state of the Wilhelmine Empire (Leibfried and Tennstedt, 1985).