| Research Abstract |
In the era of the Weimar Republic the white-collar population has remarkably increased, whose life standard on the other hand has suffered such degradation, that its daily life was not much better than that of working class. Worklessness too depressed the people. Its lowest rate, 8.3% in 1925, was higher than the highest rate of the years between 1887 and 1923. The rate reached even 44.4% in 1932. Novels on office workers, such as H.Falladas "Kleiner Mann, was nun? and B.Nelissens "Stempelchronik", or S.Kracauers reportage "Die Angestellten" tell about their frugal life, loss of job and the wounded pride of higher educated class, that they were. Not a few of them voted for Nazis.
Concerning the daily life in the Nazi-Era the best witness is those, who were persecuted by, or fought underground against, the terror regime, for example, V.Klemperers diary "Ich will Zeugnis ablebgen bis zum letzten" or Ruth Andreas Friedrich's memoir of her resistance activity "Der Schattenmann". It is impossible, I think, to find the trace of bestial politics in the milieu of the usual people, who have not suffered from it, though such a effort was often made by Germans a few decades ago.
After the Second World War the daily life is quite different in East and West Germany. Important is among others the social concept of labor, in the East the labor was a national duty, the state distributed the citizens to sectors of working, worklessness was unthinkable, in the West the qualification is the passport, with which one can move, in order to get a better job, and which is in this sense a guarantee of social freedom. As for the mentality, intellectuals who were indifferent against all political ideologies seem to have appeared earlier in the East than in the West Germany, where the thinking of right-left alternativ prevailed long after its validity was doubted.
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