| Abstract: | Rarely has social research had to meet such a challenge as inobserving the German revolution in the GDR and the unificationof East and West Germany after more than forty years of divisionand life under totalitarian and democratic systems of government.The Institut fur Demoskopie Allensbach, West Germany, foundedin 1947, had the opportunity to conduct representative surveysin the GDR beginning in February 1990 with its own staff ofinterviewers and thus to make comparisons with West German surveyfindings of recent decades on file in the Allensbach Archives.In addition, secret surveys conducted by the Zentralinstitutfur Jugendforschung in Leipzig beginning in 1970 were made available;these too are discussed in the article. The report is basedon 30 surveys in eastern Germany, comprising approximately 32,000interviews conducted up to April 1991; it compares many findingswith results from West Germany as well as from internationalsurveys. It describes the findings for a different kind of socializationand, at the same time, for a German national character heldin common. |
