ABSTRACT

In 1940s and 1950s, Konrad Adenauer and his economics minister Ludwig Erhard pushed the shell-shocked West Germans into the liberal democratic, capitalist, western alliance, whereas the rival Social Democrats had proposed a conservative program of a mixed economy and the pursuit of national unity through neutrality. The comparability of the East German case to other (post)communist societies has raised methodological questions since even before 1989. German unification on 3 October 1990 came with confusing speed. Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology and vocabulary can make sense of East Germans’ experience with unification and particularly of the elite’s insistence on its cultural distinction from the West. With unification East Germans suddenly found themselves thrust into entirely new economic, political, social, and cultural fields, in which the capital they had acquired in German Democratic Republic times was either devalued absolutely or relatively in comparison with West Germans in the same fields.