Abstract
This paper is a contribution to the historical study of aging. It uses the natural experiment of the divided German nation, where for several decades a region with similar economic, cultural, and demographic characteristics was divided into two radically distinct social and political systems. In West Germany, American-influenced policymakers and sociologists conceived a “problem of aging” organized around the concepts of autonomy, dignity, and pension reform. In East Germany, Soviet-influenced counterparts conceived the problem entirely differently, avoiding gerontology and the language of dignity entirely, seeking instead different and more egalitarian strategies to incorporate the elderly into the body politic. My finding is that the socialist style of aging ultimately failed due to internal contradictions and economic collapse, but that it nonetheless provides important resources for the present as we seek ways to manage growing populations of the elderly in Germany and around the world. Socialists pioneered models of housing and community integration for the elderly that are currently being dismantled at great cost, both to East Germany’s elderly and to scientists from around the world looking for examples of communal forms of eldercare. The methodology of this paper is cultural history. I have examined hundreds of German-language newspaper articles, social-scientific studies, state archival documents, and even television shows in order to explore the imagination of aging in each nation. This is pathbreaking work, as vanishingly little work on aging has been written by trained historians.