THE GERMAN REVOLUTION THE HISTORIC EXPERIMENT OF THE DIVISION AND UNIFICATION OF A NATION AS REFLECTED IN SURVEY RESEARCH FINDINGS

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

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