East German fertility after unification: Crisis or adaptation?

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans have drastically changed their demographic behavior. Marriages and births have dropped to an unprecedentedly low level. The authors track birth rates of the East German population, past, present, and future and propose a simulation model of future cohort fertility. Their hypotheses build on the historical record of reproductive behavior in the German Democratic Republic between 1960 and 1989 and on an analysis of the pattern of change between 1990 and 1994. They argue that East German couples will rapidly westernize their family size by trying to reach completed fertility levels of the corresponding West German cohort. This implies that the resulting adaptation process includes the postunification crisis as a logical first step.