ABSTRACT
For a long time discussion in German social scientific research has been dominated by doubts about the capacity of East Germans to act with independence, flexibility and competence across a variety of social domains. They have been routinely categorised by a negative image of the grey ‘Ossi’ (Easterner), who could not cope with conflict or the need for flexibility. East Germans were expected to recognise the advantages of the normal West German outlook and quickly adopt them into daily life. In contrast to this one-sided view, in our research we wanted to show that the uniform ‘East German’ does not exist. To this end we oriented our research towards conceptualisations of ‘uncompleted moder-nisation’ (Glaessner 1995) and ‘multi-layered experience’ (Schütz and Luckmann 1991).
