Class Relations in Germany in 2025
Thomas Klikauer, MR Online, October 30, 2025 —
German-born Karl Marx might well be the most prominent philosopher and economist to have elaborated on a capitalism that created a class system. Yet, Germany is moving from the denial of class towards a “rediscovery” of class.
Throughout West-Germany’s post-Nazi history, its version of media capitalism ensured that the official ideology of anti-communism became the all-defining lens through which almost everything was viewed.
Anyone using the term “class” in West-Germany during those decades was branded as ewiggestrig — stuck in the past. Germany’s power elite made clear that the conflict of interests between those who buy labour and those who have to sell their labour on the market no longer existed—if it had ever existed at all.
Today, discussions about the pathologies of Germany’s class society are omnipresent. Popular books vividly describe how life in the working class still shapes people’s pathways today, as social mobility hardens and upward movement becomes increasingly rare.
Journalistic TV documentaries about the “working class” and even scientific “reports on the class society” are met with great media attention.
Whether in sections of Germany’s quality media, research institutes, churches, trade unions, adult education centres, theatres, NGOs, or political parties—all are trying to figure out why, in a society supposedly becoming more individualistic, diverse, and colourful, a sharply unequal distribution of life chances continues to have such a profound effect. It even gains in importance.
Today, the richest section of the population—topped by the publicity-shy Frau Klatten—owns roughly 30% of all assets. For those below that—most Germans—even life expectancy differs dramatically depending on socio-economic status and class:
- Women on low wages die on average 4.4 years earlier than their counterparts in the highest income group.
- For men, the difference is as much as 8.6 years.
- The poor usually die much earlier.
- This gap between rich and poor runs largely parallel to the well-known dividing line between capital and labour.
- Socio-economic inequality curtails life chances—and can even take years off your life.
In a capitalist society, not only companies but also workers are forced to constantly compete with each other. Workers still experience the dependence on selling their own labour. Unlike for BMW-owning Frau Klatten ($26bn), “no work means no money.” It also means being exposed to the last remaining fragments of what was once a mighty German welfare state—now turned into a punishment regime for the poor.
Meanwhile, the system that largely governs a class society—namely, the state—has made it particularly difficult to trace the dynamics of Germany’s class structure. The state follows the prevailing hegemony of anti-communism: class simply does not exist.
After Germany’s liberation from Nazism and the rise of a pro-capitalist, deeply anti-communist order, politics, capitalism, and its media attached great importance to portraying Germany as a country distinguished—supposedly in contrast to East-Germany—by the myth of “prosperity for all,” as announced by “strong-state conservative” Ludwig Erhard.
Conformist sociologists like Helmut Schelsky lent a helping hand by proclaiming that Germany was a “levelled” Mittelstandsgesellschaft—even replacing the word “class” in “middle class society” with the reactionary-feudalist term Stand, a term evoking a society divided by estate or caste: nobles and peasants.
Meanwhile, even within the class-camouflaging delusion of the Mittelstand, not everyone was the same and not everyone belonged to the middle class. Some were more equal than others.
The Mittelstand ideology benefited from the fact that even unskilled workers saw wages rise quickly, new forms of petty-bourgeois consumerism became possible, and many hoped for betterment for themselves or at least for their children.
These were the unfulfilled promises of the so-called “economic miracle”—made possible by the state-and-capital-engineered mass migration of those denigrated as “guest workers.”
These years were sold as the “golden years”—though, as always, some had the gold while others did not. Under these conditions, and kept at bay by the prevailing ideology, large parts of the working population were indeed enticed to see themselves as part of “the middle.”
West-German society was made to appear as a pear: a tiny shoot at the top and a relatively narrow bottom. Even after the “dream of everlasting prosperity” ended in the mid-1970s, petty-bourgeois sociologists like Ulrich Beck continued to hope for an “elevator effect”—the rising tide that would lift all boats.
Beck and his entourage believed that German society was on the right track to get everyone to the upper floor, no matter which floor they entered from. Beck took his false premises as “good news.”
Meanwhile, the denial of class society almost eliminated issues such as capitalism’s recurring crises, mass unemployment, poverty, precarization, and the neoliberal reshaping of Germany’s labour market and social policy—euphemistically known as the “Hartz Reforms.”
These “reforms” were named after Volkswagen’s personnel chief Peter Hartz, who was later convicted of fraud. In 2007, Braunschweig’s court sentenced him to two years’ probation and a €576,000 fine—confirming once again that top managers don’t go to prison; petty thieves do. Germany’s Wikipedia even mentions “prostitutorial” activities in connection with the case.
With the impact of neoliberalism setting in, German workers found that—instead of going up in the elevator—they were on an “escalator down.”
Despite all this, for many, “the middle” remains a place of longing, a myth they were made to believe in. The prevailing ideology of “the middle” was so persuasive that it seemed to need no justification. No reference to the continued existence of class society was required.
This has real consequences for the analysis of social structures. Because class differences are presumed not to exist, they are hardly documented and rarely examined.
Even today, Germany lacks official statistics—unlike, for example, Great Britain and France—from which one could discern changes in class structures. In 2001, for example, Britain’s Office for National Statistics announced the existence of eight classes:
- higher professional and managerial occupations;
- lower managerial and professional occupations;
- intermediate occupations;
- small employers and own-account workers;
- lower supervisory and technical occupations;
- semi-routine occupations;
- routine occupations; and
- never worked and long-term unemployed.
While these are sociological groupings by occupation, they triggered a lively debate in the UK—something impossible in Germany, where the all-pervasive ideology insists there are no classes.
Meanwhile, Germany—like any other society—remains defined by class: a Marx inspired class system of workers and the bourgeoisie, or, if you prefer, the sociologically invented “lower, middle, and upper class,” based on differences in income, education, and social status.
Worse, official data in Germany focuses merely on occupational categories—distinguishing only between workers, white-collar employees, and civil servants.
Based on the “no-classes-here” ideology, the prevailing language deliberately avoids emphasizing class antagonisms and social inequality.
Instead of class, Germany’s pro-business media and compliant researchers continue to appeal to an imaginary unity and ethnic homogeneity—the spirit of the antisemitic Volksgemeinschaft prevails.
The tendency to deny class differences has been reinforced by capital, the media, and virtually all party-political constellations since 1949. For many years, the two major parties—the conservative CDU/CSU and the social-democratic SPD—joined forces in sustaining capitalism under the pretence of a classless Mittelstand society.
This political-ideological disregard for class differences has a long and strong tradition in Germany—from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Nazis to West-Germany.
Despite the denial, class has a profound impact on people’s work and lives. Even in the mid-1950s, workers in West-Germany’s metal industry—interviewed by Heinrich Popitz, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Ernst August Jüres, and Hanno Kesting—had no doubt that there was a clear boundary between “those up there” and “us down here,” and they knew exactly where those boundaries lay.
On the downside, this awareness was hardly associated with class struggle. After all, Germany’s trade unions and workers’ movement had been crushed, tortured, and murdered under the Nazis only a few years earlier.
Under these conditions, workers had no illusions about class, but they also no longer assumed that they could make a significant contribution to overcoming Germany’s class society.
Instead, they settled in as best they could. This was made easier by the post-war economic upswing. After the boom, with neoliberalism on the rise, it became much more difficult for large parts of Germany’s working population to escape the proletarian class.
Although the grandchildren of Germany’s working class graduated from colleges and universities in increasing numbers, they still do so far less frequently than the children of other social groups.
Today, many lag behind union-won standards in wages and working conditions comparable to what their parents or grandparents achieved.
In politics and science, it remains disreputable to speak of a class society. Yet since the mid-1980s, growing parts of the working population have felt that it exists—and that class affects their work, lives, and futures.
In other words, Germany is constantly engaged in processes of class formation. A class takes shape when people, based on common experiences, begin to feel and articulate their interests—both among themselves and against others whose interests differ from or oppose their own.
Such processes of class formation change the relationship between capital and labour, as well as relationships among workers themselves.
The working class here is understood as the growing group of people who must secure their existence by selling their labour power.
They are wage-earners, absolutely dependent on the income from their work. They cannot live—or at least not permanently—on savings or other sources of income.
At the same time, they are employed under superiors, managers, and overseers—they have a boss—and are bound by managerial orders and instructions.
Since capitalism is based on the competition of all against all, relations between workers are also characterized by competition.
Although wage labour takes many forms, it also creates strong similarities among those affected by class. Virtually all workers share at least three common interests:
- an interest in higher wages;
- an interest in shorter working hours; and
- an interest in good working conditions.
This is not unique to Germany. It applies to all workers—from a German car factory to a Filipino textile worker, a Colombian cleaner, an Egyptian nurse, or an Indian worker at Tata Motors.
Despite all the differences and competition, there are indications of overarching experiences, of connections between different groups of employees, and potentials for solidarity.
It is not possible to directly deduce class solidarity from everyday behaviour, but one can identify areas where an awareness of unifying interests exists—and where class consciousness can emerge.