The Fight against Infant Mortality in Cold War Germany: East/West Convergence on Liberal Governmentality

This article tracks the evolution of the understanding of infant mortality and of policies aimed at reducing it in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany between 1949 and 1990. East Germany and West Germany diverged widely in their understanding of the social significance of infant mortality from the postwar years into the 1960s. Around 1965, the gap in the level and type of attention paid to infant mortality began to narrow. By 1975, the fight to reduce infant mortality in East and West Germany was fundamentally similar in discourse, methods, and aims. Discourse and policy converged, this article argues, on a regime of liberal governance of pregnancy and childbirth. The article explores how and why confluence occurred despite the two states’ extremely different health systems and antithetical political and economic systems. Convergence in the East and in the West, the article contends, emerged out of the interacting influences on both German states of international trends, domestic politics, and transnational exchange.