“On the Border of Old Age”: An Entangled History of Eldercare in East Germany

Abstract

Historical research has turned in the last years more intensively toward entangled and transnational histories of biopolitics, the family, and the welfare state, but without renewed interest in aging and pension policy, a sphere of human experience that is often interrogated in parochial terms, if at all. An analysis of the culture and policies of old age in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s shows the importance of a transnational history of this subject. The GDR, the Communist state with the greatest proportion of elderly citizens, needed to create a socialist model of aging. Neither the Communist tradition in Weimar Germany, nor the experience of the other states in the Communist bloc provided substantial guidance. East Germans looked instead for inspiration to West Germany, which was itself engaged in a debate about aging and pension policy. By grappling with the Western experience, including its perceived and real limitations, the GDR in the Ulbricht developed a vision of what it meant to age as a socialist.

Socialist gerontology? Or gerontology during socialism? The Bulgarian case

“…While the growth of ageing populations was generally associated with modernization (Sivaramakrishnan, 2018: 10), the productivist ideology of socialism did not have solutions to offer. Marxism had not tackled the question of old age on a theoretical level (Chappel, 2020: 363). Both its rhetoric and its policies strongly favoured youth, especially in the first decades of the regime (Koleva, 2021).…”

“…: 148). Closer to our topic, in relation to the study of ageing and the history of gerontology and geriatrics, researchers have highlighted various types of synchronicities and entanglements, whether seeing communist eldercare as a response to perceived flaws on the other side of the Iron Curtain (Chappel, 2020), or tracking down parallels in scientific, political, and institutional responses to the situation of global ageing in different countries (Sivaramakrishnan, 2018). 2 Particularly illuminating are cutting-edge studies viewing the development of gerontology and geriatrics in the Soviet Union and in Western countries in a comparative perspective (Scarborough, 2022).…”