The physical reproduction of the population, and thus the nature of kinship patterns, has been a recurrent, central anxiety of German states. This preoccupation also holds true for the governing bodies in Berlin in this century, where demographic patterns have been intensely distorted by male deaths and massive population relocations resulting from one cold and two hot wars. Policymakers and social scentists have perceived these postwar demographic changes as in part both cause and result of peculiarities in kinship patterns. One of the major problems in interpreting this demographic data is that the ambiguity and multisemic nature of local statuses and their interrelationships are lost when they are absorbed into abstract, universalistic categories. And since “some classes of events can be more easily conceptualized [in demographic terms] than others,” as François Furet states, events are reduced to categories “stripped of the layers of meaning that each civilization has in its own way given them” (1984: 60). This is especially true for kinship classifications or, as everyday speech has it, families and their members. The cognitive categories constituting kinship – the units demographers take to have empirical equivalents – are frequently viewed as ahistorical and isomorphic with the practices they are said to name.

This chapter will analyze selective demographic data that bears on the comparative constitution of postwar kinship patterns in the Berlins.