ABSTRACT
Learners of the German language soon become aware of one of its characteristic features: the tendency to create words of considerable length by the use of compound forms. One word that appears frequently in such compound forms is the word for society, Gesellschaft. Attempts to characterise postwar German society have led to the following terms becoming part of the language: Mittelstandsgesellschaft (middle-class society), Wohlstandsgesellschaft (affluent society), Leistungsgesellschaft (meritocracy) and more recently Freizeitgesellschaft (leisure society), Risikogesellschaft (risk society), Erlebnisgesellschaft (experience society), Informationsgesellschaft (information society) and Mediengesellschaft (media society). As for the former German Democratic Republic, the term coined by the first diplomatic representative of the Federal Republic in East Berlin, Günter Gaus, to describe the society that he encountered, Nischengesellschaft (niche society), has been almost universally accepted as an accurate picture ofthat state. 1
