Forschungsgruppe Altern und Lebenslauf (FALL)

Veröffentlichungen: Kohli et al. 2000

Kohli, Martin, Harald Künemund, Andreas Motel & Marc Szydlik (2000): Families apart? Intergenerational transfers in East and West Germany. In: Arber, Sara & Claudine Attias-Donfut (eds.): The myth of generational conflict: The family and state in ageing societies. London: Routledge, 88-99.

In most modern societies, there is little coresidence between adult family generations, but relations and transfers between them usually remain strong. These links are highly salient for the well-being of the weaker members of the generational chain, not only the elderly but even more the young adults. Are East and West German families different in these respects? For East Germany, as for Eastern Europe more generally, there are two conflicting expectations: Family ties can be hypothesized to have weakened through the four decades of socialist rule with its attempt to break the family transmission of cultural and material capital, or to have strengthened through reliance on the family as the only remaining vestige of the private sphere and the most viable network of informal exchange. Preliminary results seem to support the second hypothesis. The transformational stress since 1989 may have weakened Eastern families, while at the same time making reliance on family ties even more necessary. In this paper, we use the new German Aging Survey - a large representative survey of the population aged 40 to 85 - to address these questions by comparing the incidence and structure of intergenerational transfers in East and West.

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