Despite Chernobyl, the majority of GDR citizens approved of the use of nuclear power even after the Wende, as was shown by a Spiegel poll from December 1989. When Emnid posed the same question recently, the majority expressed a different opinion – the same opinion as the majority in the West:
Most respondents in West and East felt that no new plants should be built and that existing ones should be closed, either over time (49 and 46 percent, respectively) or even immediately (16 and 12 percent).
On the question of abortion, the prevailing opinion in all of Germany is that the (still valid) GDR regulation allowing abortion in the first trimester is better than the Federal Republic’s corresponding paragraph 218:
In East and West, the majority of men and women, and voters of all parties, advocated the first trimester regulation or even the complete legalization of abortion. Only among Christian churchgoers was the majority in favor of the present laws in the Federal Republic (legal abortion only for medical or social reasons) or even stricter legislation (legal abortion only when the mother’s life is endangered).
There was pan-German agreement on current events, even when Eastern and Western interests might have collided.
Two-thirds of each group favored compensation for property owners who had been expropriated in the GDR.
The vast majority of people are convinced that more than half of the former nationally-owned enterprises “are no longer competitive and need to be closed” (West: 78 percent; East: 76 percent).
West and East Germans have similar or identical basic philosophies, although there is a significant difference in their worldviews. In a united Fatherland, a predominantly Christian population and a predominantly secular one come together.
In the West, only 7 percent of adults either were not baptized or left the church; in the East, that figure was approximately ten times higher (66 percent).
This difference was reflected in responses to related questions. Sixty-one percent of West Germans believe “there is a God,” whereas only 21 percent of East Germans do. In the West, one in two believes in life after death, whereas only one in seven does in the East (51 versus 14 percent).
Another question shows that the nonreligious Easterners take their convictions more seriously than the Western Christians. When asked if religion means something to them in their own lives, 91 percent of those without any declared religion in the East answered in the negative, as did 52 percent of Protestants and 40 percent of Catholics here.
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