ABSTRACT
Both sociologists and social psychologists agree about the importance of the social influence of groups upon individuals. The debate among German social scientists on the economic and cultural transformation that took place in East Germany after reunification contains surprisingly little mention of the issue of the strong group orientation which is possibly the most defining cultural pattern among East Germans. East Germans generally regard West Germans as having only negative traits, while they monopolize all the positive traits for themselves. A curious anomaly of the East German situation is that it is the highly educated who were most alienated from the new system despite the fact that they fared relatively well on the labor market. West German culture is clearly influenced by the sociological observation that individual membership of different, more or less overlapping groups weakens the power of the group over the individual and encourages the process of individualization.
