Until the reunification of Germany in 1990, the female age at first birth was markedly different between capitalist West and communist East. In the former it had risen to 26.2 but had fallen to 22.3 in the latter. Upon reunification, the East rapidly caught up with the West, hitting 26.2 in 2002 and 27.5 in 2008; while in the West the age at first birth continued to rise to 28.7. A disproportionate number of women under 35 did leave the East for the West after reunification, due to the economic collapse in the East, but this cannot account for the extremely large rise in average age at first birth for the remaining women in what had been East Germany. The main changes were both that economic collapse and the removal of the highly mother and child supportive social services. It cannot be put down to feminism, as East Germany had significantly more equality than West Germany; as tended to be the case generally with communism versus capitalism. Liberal propagandists try to attribute the birth rate fall to better opportunities in capitalist Germany for women, but this is utter nonsense when women had extremely high levels of equality and access to work in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
As this paper notes, in the GDR there were free creches, kindergartens, maternity advice services and polyclinics. “The Act on the Protection of Mothers and Children and the Rights of Women (1950), for instance, required mass organisations and production enterprises to set up day care centres, laundromats, and sewing rooms.” In addition:
the DDR’s policy measures increased the freedom of women, such as by providing grants to assist in the early period of childcare and fully paid maternity leave for 6 months. This was in addition to parental leave for both mothers and fathers for up to 12 months with a payment of up to 90 per cent of net average earnings. Both forms of leave guaranteed job retention.16
Within the university and the workplace there was much more equality for women than in West Germany.
By the late 1980s women had reached the same levels of formal qualification as men, with the proportion of women in higher education and technical colleges reaching 55 per cent in 1988. Gender parity was also reflected in crucial areas of democratic-political life, influencing the decisions and policies being made about social life. Women accounted for more than 50 per cent of all judges; 35 per cent of all mayors; and 40 per cent of parliament.
Despite not reaching full gender parity in management positions, by 1986 there were more women in management in the DDR (34 per cent) than there are in Germany today (28.9 per cent in 2022). The following indicates the percentage of women in all managerial functions: In 1986, more than 34 per cent; in 1987, 33 per cent; in 1988, 32 per cent; and in 1988/89, 31.5 per cent. In 1989 (the year before the dissolution of the DDR), 92.4 per cent of all working-age women were employed and most of them were unionised.
GDR Ship Builder Le Monde diplomatique
The legacy of the GDR lives on in the much smaller gender pay gap in the East than in the West. The difference between the GDR and West Germany was most evident in the way that childcare was handled:
The DDR … established a comprehensive state care structure that provided free day care, which was attended by 81.1 per cent of children up to age three as of 1986, as well as free kindergartens and after-school care and affordable or enterprise-funded holidays for children and families. As a result, whereas West Germany had a kindergarten placement rate of 67.6 per cent, in the DDR it was 93.4 per cent.
An East German Nursery, from Work In Progress
As the author also notes, it was the dismantling of the female and mother-centric laws and state services, together with the collapse in the East’s economy, that most affected motherhood.
In addition to the step backwards in legal protections for women and the overall well-being of East Germans, the unprecedented privatisation and deindustrialisation of the East German economy presented unique challenges. When the DDR’s social infrastructure was dismantled, women were the first to face unemployment as well as the contempt of their new West German superiors and were ultimately pushed back into a traditional family model in which they depended on men as the sole breadwinners.
As this paper noted in 1992:
The stagnating and declining, although still viable, economy was destroyed. Mass unemployment, hitherto unknown, soared, affecting women particularly badly. The financial, social, political, educational, cultural and legal structures were replaced by the respective West German ones. Most of the social achievements enjoyed by women have been eliminated or replaced by inferior legislation. Womens groups figure prominently among those who resist the ruthless dismantling of their rights
Notably, the Total Fertility Rate of the GDR was markedly higher than that of West Germany from the onset of the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s until reunification. The West German population grew faster due to much higher rates of immigration, for example with the Turkish “Guest Worker” policies. In 1991 just one year after reunification, the Eastern TFR had already crashed below the Western, and did not recover to equal that of the West until 2007 (1.37 vs 1.38). As Le Monde diplomatique notes in this article:
East Germany had had the world’s highest rate of women’s employment, but women were the first to be made redundant. They tried anything not to be trapped in the role traditionally assigned to women of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Fritz Vilmar and Gislaine Guittard note that ‘to increase their chances of getting another job, many had themselves sterilised. The Magdeburg hospital centre carried out eight sterilisations in 1989; in 1991 there were 1,200.’ Between 1987 and 1993, reflecting the state of social infrastructure and expectations for the future, the birthrate in the former GDR fell from 14 per 1,000 people to only five
Since reunification, the German state has driven a general policy of neoliberalization which has both caused wages to stagnate and the precarity of employment to greatly increase. The greatest impact was from the Hartz “reforms” (Western media and academics tend to use word “reforms” for such anti-labour legislation) enacted between 2003 and 2005 , which as the IMF states:
eased regulation on temporary work agencies, relaxed firing restrictions, restructured the federal employment agency, and reshaped unemployment insurance to significantly reduce benefits for the long-term unemployed and tighten job search obligations.
The IMF of course attempts to attribute the subsequent fall in unemployment to these reforms, as we would expect of such a neoliberal propagandist organization. Nothing of course about the advent of the Euro, which both gave Germany a lower exchange rate than it would have had otherwise (the strong Deutschmark being exchanged for the weaker Euro) and took the option of devaluation away from other nations that adopted the Euro. The Euro peaked a couple of years after the Hartz reforms, and fell from US$1.6 to US$1.05 in 2015, providing a very large stimulus to German exports. In parallel German 10-year interest rates went from 4.6% to zero percent, providing a major domestic stimulus. Things would have gotten a lot better without the Hartz reforms, and their impact may have been minimal or even negative. Also of course the German and French bank insolvency was forcibly externalized onto the Greek population and the European population in general as French and German bank loans were socialized through the European Central Bank. Italy, that had relied on the ability to devalue its currency has stagnated since its entry into the Euro. As this paper notes:
The Hartz IV reforms are consistently regarded as a successful German model for the reduction of structural unemployment. Is it therefore appropriate to advise other member states of the European monetary union to carry out similar reforms? This paper strongly disagrees, arguing that the reduction in unemployment in Germany since 2005 is mainly due to cyclical factors and to the petering out of the negative employment effects caused by the economic transformation after German unification.
What the Hartz reforms most certainly did was greatly increase levels of precarious employment and produced the most negative effects for the lower paid, with a bifurcated labour market between relatively high paid, stable and more unionized “insiders” and lower paid, much less stable and much less unionized “outsiders”. As this paper notes:
aspects of precarious employment accelerated in the 2000s, and especially 2004-2013. The rise of these three forms of precarious employment was also reflected in an increase in wage and earnings inequality. It is worth underlining the scale of the rise of precarious employment. Even compared to other rich democracies, earnings and wage inequality grew quite substantially. Also, unlike some other rich democracies, Germany’s labor market changes have involved workers at the bottom of the distribution losing ground relative to the middle of the earnings distribution. Low-wage work grew from 16.1% in 1989 to above 24% in 2013. Working poverty rose from only 1.6% in 1989 to over 4.4% in 2013. Hence, in just 24 years, low-wage work grew 49% and working poverty increased 178%. Temporary employment increased from 11.3 in 1984 to 14.6 in 2013. Thus, in 29 years, temporary employment increased by about 29%. In sum, the scale of these increases in these aspects of precarious work are substantial.
Trade union membership has also been falling precipitously, from around 40% at reunification, to 24% in 2000, to 18% in 2013 and around 15% currently. This not only reduces the bargaining power of workers, but also greatly reduces the political strength of the workers movement. Facilitating a political identification of citizens as individual consumers more than as a collective of workers, which aids the neoliberal project.
The TFR has picked up in Germany, but predominantly due to the much higher birth rates of non-German nationals. For German nationals it is only 1.26 (vs. 1.35 for Germany as a whole), a significant drop from the overall 1.48 in 2022 and 1.6 in 2021. This could reflect the large inflation shock caused by both the self-harming anti-Russia sanctions (replacing cheap pipeline natural gas from Russian with much more expensive LNG) and the COVID-related supply chain issues. In addition, the period of the 2010s was one of much increased German financialisation which included the more than doubling of German house prices and significant increases in rents (which has recently intensified); also partially due to the severe cut backs in the provision of social housing. As this article notes:
The state of Germany’s housing market is becoming increasingly catastrophic. Millions of households are struggling with exploding rents, while property sharks skim off record returns. Evictions and homelessness are on the rise due to the deliberate lack of affordable housing and social housing … The poorest layers are affected by a blatant lack of social housing. Over the last 35 years, the number of social housing units has fallen from 1.8 million in 1989 to 1.08 million today.
It also notes that the dominant political parties, including the CDS/CDU that will most probably form the next government after the election in 2025, are fully on board with the financiers and profiteers and more than willing to ignore the wishes of the general population.
The capital city is a perfect example of how all established parties have deliberately brought about the catastrophic housing situation. Under the current Berlin Senate of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and SPD, led by Mayor Eberhard Diepgen (CDU), the subsidising of new social housing was discontinued in 1997 and several estates were exempted from the occupancy obligation in 1998. The Berlin Senate of the SPD and the Democratic Socialist Party (PDS), led by Klaus Wowereit (SPD), pulled the plug on funding for some of Berlin’s social housing in 2003, and in 2011 the Senate of the SPD and the Left Party enabled the early release of social housing ties.
In 2021, a majority of the Berlin population decided in the referendum “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.” to expropriate the property sharks, but the SPD, Greens and Left Party Senate has since then done everything in its power to prevent this. At the beginning of the year, the current CDU and SPD Senate ended a moratorium on terminations by state-owned housing associations, allowing rent increases of 2.9 percent per year.
Any images of Germany as some Social Democratic paradise may have had some reality in the 1960s, but are surely delusional in present times. Even the government purchase subsidies for electric vehicles were suddenly cut in December 2024 to save money; not even the vaunted Energiewende was sacrosanct. Interestingly the federal government had room for tax cuts and increased military expenditures in its 2025 budget while complaining about limited funds.
The German cost of living crisis may be behind the sudden drop in the TFR in 2022 and 2023, and live births have continued to fall in the first half of 2024. What seems to be a certainty is that the German state will keep to its neoliberal and now warmongering policies, resisting any mother-friendly social policies that may improve the birth rate, while continuing to rely on immigration to maintain its population. An approach which is causing increasing rifts in German society, but will most probably not be fully reflected in an election until 2030; if the left and right opposition parties are still allowed to exist by then. A full defeat of Ukraine may provide a new influx of “good” white Christian immigrants to bolster things in the short-term.
With the fast decline in its core industries of automobiles (I am working on a piece going into the detail of the collapse of Western car industries, including those of Germany), machine tools and petrochemicals, Germany is set for ongoing decline. The German industrial production index peaked in October 2017 at a level of 108.5, and has been falling ever since to a level of 93.2 in May of 2024 (which was a 7.2% drop y-o-y). German GDP shrank a small amount in 2023, and is set to stagnate in 2024; it is once again “the sick man of Europe”. Things will most probably only get worse as China’s climb up the industrial value chain is now hitting the core of Germany’s industries, as this story in Euractiv notes. A graph from the article, showing the national shares of global machine tool exports. The rise of China and the fall of Germany could not be more obvious.
So perhaps we should expect ongoing falls in German birth rates, especially among German nationals, and increasing strife over levels of non-white non-Christian immigration. While at the same time authoritarianism is embedded by the German “mainstream” parties. Let’s remember that Hitler was put in power by the German establishment, not some anti-establishment party, and fascism is always the capitalist go to tool when fake democracy and the manufacturing of consent fails.
The only good thing about neoliberalism in America is that it is hollowing out American military complex too. This is providing breathing space in many parts of world.
It's a shocking thing to realise the leadership of the whole West is wedded to an economic philosophy that impoverishes their populations and have no interest in changing course. I am pessimistic about the future as well.