We are since '89
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The turnaround in the GDR is 30 years back - but not a few East Germans look back with grudge on what happened afterwards: deindustrialization of entire regions, mass unemployment, broken biographies.
The feeling of never having really arrived in unified Germany also has to do with filling top jobs in the new Länder. Whether in business, culture, science or the media industry - the bosses are almost always from West Germany. Which is why again and again about an eastern quota is discussed in job occupations.
But what is behind this inequality? Does it affect only the relatively few top jobs? Or does the phenomenon occur on several levels?
As a seismograph for the situation in Germany, the online dictionary Wikipedia is suitable. In it there are articles about tens of thousands of Germans like the tennis player Boris Becker or the actress Christiane Paul. Who reaches a certain notoriety, will sooner or later land on Wikipedia. In most cases, this is related to the professional career of the person concerned.
Data from 35,000 people analyzed
A SPIEGEL data analysis now shows that East Germans are also underrepresented in the online Wikipedia dictionary. If the birthplace of a person is located in West Germany, the probability is significantly higher that there is a separate Wikipedia article about this person.
The data analysis covers all persons articles in the German-language Wikipedia with a birth year from 1960 to 1999 - and an identifiable place of birth within the borders of today's Germany. These are nearly 35,000 people. To calculate the regional Wikipedia quota, the number of people with Wikipedia articles was divided by the number of born in the region.
The analysis shows: West Germans are clearly more present on Wikipedia than East Germans - especially in the vintages from 1960 to 1985. In the 1960s, there are over 12 out of 10,000 born in West Germany a personal article - among the East Germans, the rate is only half as high.
From 1990, the quotas are almost identical. However, relatively few people from Wikipedia are represented on Wikipedia because they are still at the very beginning of their careers.
Interesting conclusions allow the separate evaluation by federal states. The Wikipedia quota was calculated over all years from 1960 to 1999 together - see the following diagram:
Striking are two things:
- The highest rates reach the city states of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen. Berlin includes East and West Berlin, because a precise division of people in East and West was not possible.
- In the last places the five new countries land. However, the gap to Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein is minimal.
The Görlitz social scientist Raj Kollmorgen provides an interesting explanation for this ranking: "The below-average presence East German has less to do with the GDR than with the structures that have developed in Germany since the Middle Ages." The east of Germany was markedly more rural than the west. Therefore, metropolitan social milieus, which represented the "humus of modern elitist cultures", are much less present.
For Kollmorgen's thesis speaks that Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate do little better than the five new countries. Wherever major cities are missing and rural structures dominate, there are fewer people with their own Wikipedia article.
"Celebrated inventors, well-known artists"
"That's a socio-demographic effect," says Kollmorgen. Above all, it is the populations of urban and metropolitan areas whose children would become celebrated inventors, well-known artists, politicians or successful entrepreneurs. "Therefore, East Germany has to do worse with its rural character than West Germany."
The extent to which cities in particular differ from the rest of the country is shown by the Wikipedia quotas of the currently 15 largest cities in Germany. The leader is Munich with 30 Wikipedia articles per 10,000 births - for Bavaria, the rate is 10.
Dresden and Leipzig occupy places 9 and 11 in city ranking (quota 14 to 15). Both Saxon cities are thus ahead of Bremen, Bochum, Essen, Duisburg and Dortmund. That the Ruhrpott metropolises are comparatively bad, is obviously due to their special social structure. In the traditional working-class cities there is no such bourgeois class as in Munich, Cologne or Berlin.
Article created about yourself?
About which people are there any articles on Wikipedia? If you take a closer look at the descriptions, you will notice that many people come from the entertainment, media and sports sectors. By contrast, scientists, politicians and managers are comparatively rare. The following diagram shows the distribution of the occupations or activities first mentioned in the respective brief description.
Practically in all occupations and activities West Germans come to a significantly higher Wikipedia rate than East Germans - see the following diagram. The only exceptions are sports - the GDR has massively promoted competitive sports - and politics.
Whether or not a person owns a Wikipedia entry is accepted by the authors of the encyclopedia - in the case of a dispute involving Wikipedia administrators. All of this should be done taking into account the relevant relevance criteria. The hurdles to creating an article are not particularly high when you look at the long lists of barely known voice actors and independent lecturers. For scientists, a professorship and a description of the research activity is enough to be accepted.
Apparently, some also use the encyclopedia for self-marketing and have their own entry created or created. Perhaps this also manifests East-West differences. After all, selling or praising one's own person in the GDR was hardly usual. "The socialist educational goal was to subordinate one's own interests and needs to those of the group," says Frauke Hildebrandt from the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. If one wanted to educate leaders for the capitalist business world, one would have to define other goals.
That's how we worked
Where do the Wikipedia data come from?
The Wikipedia People Search allows you to filter and download personal items by date of birth, place of birth and state. In order to capture German-born non-Germans, we have additionally downloaded all persons in the German-speaking Wikipedia of the years 1960 to 1999 and selected those entries with a place of birth in today's Germany, which do not appear in the first selection.
How were the birthplaces assigned to the persons?
We have looked in the Wikipedia articles of the persons concerned, whether the birthplace is linked and whether in the Wikipedia article on the birthplace of the Official Municipal Code (AGS) is deposited. The first two digits betray the state. If the AGS could not be found via a link on Wikipedia, we used the community directory of the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) to assign the place name to the respective municipality key. In the end, we were able to assign the place of birth to a state for nearly 35,000 people with their own article on Wikipedia.
Where does the birth data come from?
The Federal Statistical Office has provided data on live births in Germany. There were also data from the statistical yearbooks of the GDR. Because the districts of the GDR were not transferred exactly to the present-day federal states, some GDR circles had to be removed from the respective GDR district and assigned to the current state. We have neglected displacements of small villages.
How many people articles from Wikipedia were analyzed?
The Wikipedia person database provided a list of 50,399 people under the filter Germany + years 1960 to 1999. In 36,908 people appeared "German" in the person description. For 33,707 people (91 percent), the place of birth could be identified and assigned to the AGS. In addition, there were 1162 persons from the total Wikipedia list of 174,504 persons born between 1960 and 1999, who did not appear among the already identified 33,707 persons. This gives the total number of 34,869 people whose data has been evaluated for this article.
Rhetoric, legal and economic know-how - many of these skills and knowledge would have been missing people for reunification, says the daughter of the East German SPD politician Regine Hildebrandt. "For me, it was like learning a whole new language and a new form of communication - even though I did not like that sort of speech and often found it empty and boring - and I think so."
No experiments!
A general explanation for the East-West differences is likely to be the greater self-confidence and greater risk-taking of the West German elites. "The parents of East Germans advise after their bad experiences in the reunification time to go safe ways," explains Hildebrandt. The motto is: Do not experiment! To get into leadership jobs, but you need a dash of risk.
This risk-taking is also necessary to take artistic careers such as actors or musicians, which is more common in the West according to the Wikipedia data than in the East. Perhaps the better financial protection via parents or partners also plays a role. This can hardly be clarified on the basis of the Wikipedia data and because of the large number of persons.
The Potsdam education researcher Hildebrandt and her colleague Kollmorgen from Görlitz are in any case in agreement that the elites are missing from the East in order to be more present in top jobs. In the East, there was no bourgeois upper class, which appears self-conscious and power-conscious, says Kollmorgen. "An elite consciousness was not promoted in the GDR, it did not fit the ideology of the workers and peasants state." The East Germans lacked above all the stable odor of power, a habit of domination.
Kollmorgen also refers to the massive emigration from East Germany after 1945 - see the following diagram. A large part of the propertied and educated bourgeoisie had then gone to the West. "There was an incredible outflow of cultural capital." Result: The children of these emigrated East Germans were then born in the West and made a career there.
Ultimately, as the Wikipedia data show, there is not only an east-west divide in Germany. But also one between north and south, between city and country, and between distressed and booming regions. Those born in Heidelberg, Cologne or Munich have better career opportunities than people from Dessau, Gelsenkirchen or Bremerhaven.
And even in economically prosperous cities there is likely to be a big gap between bourgeois neighborhoods and socially disadvantaged neighborhoods. Although this can hardly be proven with the Wikipedia and birth data. Ultimately, behind all this are the much better career opportunities for children from privileged families.
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According to Kollmorgen, East Germany would be worse off than the West even if there had been no German division. Large city-country differences exist in Europe for a very long time. "The prosperous regions of Europe such as northern Italy, Flanders or the Rhine-Main area have a centuries-old history." There commercialization, urbanization and later industrialization took place there first. These are relatively stable traditions and positions. "You can not do that in two or three decades."
