Census in the Federal Republic of Germany 1987

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Information brochure with the implementing regulation
Personal form from the 1987 census
Protest against the 1987 census: personal sheets are posted on the Berlin Wall
Stamp issue for the 1987 census

The 1987 census in the Federal Republic of Germany was a German census . It was accompanied by a series of civil protests and an organized boycott .

prehistory

The census in the Federal Republic of Germany was from the federal government originally planned already for the year 1981st In the eyes of the federal authorities, it had become necessary, among other reasons, to adapt the infrastructure to a changed social structure and introduce new measures accordingly. This applied to traffic planning as well as to social care and other things. Critics objected, however, that censuses only reflect the status quo, but not lack of supply, for example if a respondent had to state the reluctantly used car as a means of transport to work due to a lack of public transport, and formulated “distrust of unwillingness to plan and inability to plan” of those responsible.

Due to a dispute over the amount of the federal subsidy for the census, the adoption of the law was delayed until 1982 and the planned census date was delayed until 1983.

The deployment of medium-range missiles , implemented in 1983 against the resistance of broad sections of the population , the nuclear policy as well as major projects such as the " Runway West " at Frankfurt Airport or the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal contributed to the fact that hundreds of them were already published within a few weeks of the questionnaires formed by citizens' groups calling for a boycott of the census. In February 1983 Michael Schroeren organized the boycott of the census under the motto "Census boycott for ecology and peace" as editor of the environmental magazine of the Federal Association of Citizens' Initiatives Environmental Protection (BBU) and as an activist of the International of War Resisters (IDK). The Berliner Morgenpost reported on February 27, 1983 with the title "Anarchists stir up fear of the census": "... Against the central figure of the boycott efforts, against the 33-year-old former editor of the journal for 'Freedom Socialism ... Grassroots Revolution ' , Michael Schroeren, a criminal investigation procedure has been initiated ... "(p.3). The excessive newspaper publicity was unsuccessful. Celebrities like Günter Grass , the former judge at the Federal Constitutional Court Helmut Simon and Manfred Güllner , founder of the Forsa Institute , also supported the criticism, which went far beyond questions of data protection. The central point of the critics was the intention to use the data collected in the census to correct the reported data. A particularly controversial point was the planned additional expense allowance for entering people who are not in the register of residents. For each found in this way Germans should 2,50 DM , giving 5.00 DM compensation for any foreigners.

The census, which was planned for April 27, 1983, was initially suspended until the Federal Constitutional Court ruled on December 15, 1983, then finally prohibited according to the ruling. The successful plaintiffs had complained that the level of detail in the questions in the relevant census sheets allowed conclusions to be drawn about the identity of the respondents when they were answered and thus undermined data protection and consequently violated the Basic Law. In the background there was the fear of the so-called transparent citizen . In some cases, the census was seen as a step towards the surveillance state .

With the historically significant census judgment of December 15, 1983, the Federal Constitutional Court formulated the basic right to informational self-determination , which is derived from the human dignity of Article 1 of the Basic Law and the right to free development of the personality according to Article 2, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law.

Census boycott

For the 1987 census, as a result of the 1983 ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court, the survey had to be partially redesigned by separating personal information from the questionnaires and revising the questionnaires themselves in order to better guarantee the anonymity of the respondents. Three quarters of a year before the cut-off date of May 25, 1987, an acceptance campaign “Ten minutes that help everyone” was started, which cost 46 million DM (41,882,000 euros, adjusted for inflation), but was as unconvincing as the reasons for the law, for example, based on the census "Targeted measures to reduce the disadvantage of women in the workplace and to improve their career opportunities" are taken. In view of a policy that simultaneously focused on personal initiative, the dismantling of the welfare state and privatization, the claim in the advertising that the census contributed to “securing pensions” or “creating jobs” fell into a credibility trap that the critics successfully used. In December 1987, for example, the Emnid Institute identified the threat of data misuse behind the danger of war, unemployment and environmental degradation as the fourth most fears of German citizens.

In contrast to 1983, the opponents of the census were directed less against the dangers of de- anonymization of survey data and more against a “creeping restriction of civil rights”, and they understood the call to boycott as “ civil disobedience for more democracy”. The actors discussed the, in their opinion, increasing data exchange between the police and secret services as well as the data collections of the economy in the advancement of computerization . They accused the initiators of the census, they promoted technocratic politics and opposed their demand for more democratic participation by the citizens. Instead of “transparent citizens”, they demanded the “transparent state”, such as a freedom of information law based on the American model and more direct democracy.

The boycott was supported by a broad alliance of various social and political groups and was organized by the “coordination office against the surveillance state” in the Bonn office of the Young Democrats , the former youth organization of the FDP . The then party “The Greens” , represented in the Bundestag for about four years at the time , was one of the critics of the census and took part in the campaign with many of its members . On April 25, 1987, the police searched the office of the Greens in Bonn and confiscated leaflets on the census boycott and on April 30, because of the call for a boycott, the offices in Munich and Trier . But also parts of the trade unions GEW , ÖTV and IG Druck und Papier , the youth day of the Evangelical Church Hesse-Nassau or the 11th defense lawyer day took a stand against the census. Even municipalities like Freiburg and Wülfrath passed resolutions against the census or, like Lübeck and Essen, had to be ordered through administrative and judicial channels to conduct the census.

The critics were encouraged by the state's response to calls for boycotts. Census critics were accused of "breaking the law" ( Friedrich Zimmermann ), while the Lower Saxony constitution protection authorities observed young democrats, Jusos and the civil rights organization Humanist Union . Although nationwide over 100 house searches of opponents of the census including the SPD party headquarters were carried out because of alleged "damage to property" - the call to snip off the control number on the questionnaire - the number of citizens' initiatives rose from 350 in autumn 1986 to over 1,100 in April, according to the Berliner tageszeitung 1987 on. The personal data of more than 900 opponents of the census went into the "APIS" files of the Federal Criminal Police Office and in Baden-Württemberg alone 653 people were saved in the "police reporting service", which the state's data protection officer judged to be an "excessive overreaction". The overwhelming majority of criminal proceedings were dropped in 1988, but the state reaction as a whole had positively reinforced the arguments of those who opposed the census.

Carrying out the census turned into a journalistic competition for success. While Federal Interior Minister Zimmermann announced that the boycott had failed, “alternative collection points” presented 1.1 million blank questionnaires in autumn 1987. In Hamburg, the head of the State Statistical Office was replaced in March 1988 because he had initially downplayed the problems with the census, then had to publicly admit that 248,000 questionnaires, about 13%, were missing. In Cologne, the survey center closed in 1988 with an officially confirmed 5% boycott; in Wiesbaden, the survey center manager confirmed 15% missing answers in September 1987, and another 10% of citizens had not yet received a survey form.

But the boycotters also had problems from their subjective point of view: The “coordination office” complained in the summer of 1987 that the initiatives checked the personal forms supplied so carefully that the respective number of boycotters was actually behind it, that this led to considerable delays. Both sides acted imaginatively: on May 15, 1987, before an important Bundesliga match between Borussia Dortmund and Hamburger SV, the slogan "Boycott and sabotage the census" was emblazoned on the lawn of Dortmund's Westfalenstadion and opposed all attempts to remove it, without the Possibly destroying the lawn, which would have resulted in the game being canceled due to a request to break the law. Due to a sudden idea that received the “smiling approval” of Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker over the phone , a “The Federal President:” was added in front of it and a “not” on the lawn for the stadium and television audience.

North Rhine-Westphalia Interior Minister Herbert Schnoor, in turn, sent the young democrats, who were financially disciplined by the Federal Youth Ministry, a check for 100 Deutsche Mark with the remark that despite differing opinions on the matter, he was against any attempts at censorship.

Results

Pencil from the 1987 census

According to the statistical offices, the results obtained were of good quality overall. Although many responded to the call for a boycott despite the impending fine proceedings and did not fill out the forms (some also deliberately filled them in incorrectly), the return of the forms filled out in a check-cross procedure and distributed to each household was large enough for a meaningful evaluation; however, the question of the quality of the data and the influence of corruption effects was controversial. Computer scientist Klaus Brunnstein , for example, described the results as a “data disaster” because of the difference in the response rates and diagnosed an initial error in the data of up to 25% after more than a year. For example, questionnaires that were deliberately exchanged by anti-census opponents between different communities and among people of different sexes were evaluated without any problems and without penalty, despite the check number .

Officially, no adulteration effects have been reported to date. The accompanying scientific research by the Cologne sociologist Erwin K. Scheuch does not help in answering the question either, as it neither asked about the quality of the data obtained, nor did it compare methods for the accuracy of other statistical surveys such as voluntary surveys, but only the attitudes of the respondents explored.

The Federal Statistical Office refers to the corrections made between the counting results and the old, updated population data. However, this does not answer to what extent the census results determined can offer a real image of social reality. Every census is only an approximate figure on the reference date. The migration figures to Germany alone in 1989: 872,000 immigrants including asylum seekers, 1990: 590,000 and 1991: 477,000 and from Germany: 1989: 422,000, 1990: 545,000 and 1991: 580,000 (all figures : Yearbooks of the Federal Statistical Office) illustrate the difficulty of determining an apparently exact number of inhabitants on a given date.

Since the census forms the basis for the update results of the Federal Statistical Office and the State Statistical Offices , the long period (17 years) of the last census in 1970 resulted in ever larger errors in the calculations of the statistical offices. For example, the census of May 25, 1987 showed a population of 2,014,121 in West Berlin . The result of the update by the State Statistical Office for May 24, 1987 - based on the 1970 census - was 133,062 people, that is a good seven percent, too low. For Munich, on the other hand, 89,647 people, i.e. 7.0%, were updated too much. For Roth (near Nuremberg), the deviation of the update result of the State Statistical Office was even 18 percent, which was 4,343 people too many compared to the census result. For Göttingen , 14.5 percent (19,519 people) were updated too much. The error rates of the extrapolation results of the state statistical offices averaged 1.0 to 1.6 percent for the municipalities with more than 200,000 inhabitants, and 0.3 to 0 on average for the municipalities with 10,000 to less than 200,000 inhabitants compared to the census results, 7 percent.

Overall, based on the determined population data, the total in the state financial equalization had to be corrected by around 935 million DM (about 478 million euros), the sum in the municipal financial equalization of the large cities had to be corrected by around 700 million DM (about 358 million euros). The extrapolated number of people in employment was one million (3.6 percent) too low compared to the results of the census, the number of foreigners by almost 600,000 (12.0 percent), the number of apartments (25.9 million) by around one million (3.8 percent) too high. The number of people in employment had to be corrected upwards by one million on the basis of the census results, while the unemployment rate in around a third of the employment office districts had to be adjusted downwards by around 20 percent.

See also

literature

  • Roland Appel, Dieter Hummel (Ed.): Beware of the census - recorded, networked and counted. 4th edition. Kölner Volksblatt Verlag, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-923243-31-6 .
  • Jürgen Arnold, Jutta Schneider (Ed.): Census counted. Verlag Zweausendundeins , Frankfurt 1988, DNB 881450901 .
  • Nicole Bergmann: Census and data protection. Protests for the 1983 and 1987 census in the Federal Republic of Germany . Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8366-7388-4 .
  • Klaus Brunnstein among other things: census. (= Processes. Journal for civil rights and social policy. Volume 91). Munich 1988, ISBN 3-925763-91-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Freimut Duve in: Taeger, Volkszählung, pp. 25 ff.
  2. ^ Stürmer, Würzberger in: Taeger, Volkszählung, p. 167ff.
  3. ↑ Wolfram Beyer (ed.): Internationale der Kriegsdienstgegner *innen - 1947-2017 Contributions to History, Verlag Edition AV Lich 2017, p. 19
  4. ↑ Documented in Taeger 1983, 267-269.
  5. ↑ Federal and State Statistical Offices: Questionnaire for the 1987 census (pdf, 1.6 MB)
  6. ↑ Sylvio Dahl: “The sermon was not understood” , Die Zeit No. 49/1987 of November 27, 1987.
  7. ↑ Roland Appel in: Beware of the census, p. 32ff.
  8. ↑ 7. Report of the State Commissioner for Data Protection, Ruth Leuze, January 1988.
  9. ↑ Census - Miscounted, p. 77f.
  10. ↑ Wiesbadener Tageblatt v. September 16, 1987.
  11. ↑ detailed illustration with photo in: Echt-Das Stadionmagazin, Issue 52 of February 9, 2013, p. 19.
  12. ↑ Photo from the game that shows the lettering on the lawn
  13. ↑ Brunnstein in: Vorfalls Volume 91, January 1988, p. 72.
  14. ↑ Federal Statistical Office: What did the 1987 census bring, how were its results used? ( Memento from August 3, 2004 in the Internet Archive )