We now turn to the life reconstructions of one final group: West Berlin Generation II, born approximately between 1940 and 1955. My interview partners from this generation showed considerably more diversity in their lifecourse trajectories and kinship practices than did members of the other generations examined in this study, but a diversity more apparent in the problems encountered than in the solutions to them. Reasons for this are twofold. First, unlike their parents, they experienced as adults no “total event,” such as war or famine; and unlike their GDR counterparts, who grew up in a social and state context that was relatively uniform from district to district, they experienced their childhoods in different Bundesländer governed by a decentralized state. Second, most of my acquaintances in West Berlin were not native to the city, as was the case in East Berlin also. The foreign-born nature of Berliners has always been one of the city's peculiarities. In 1905, 40 percent of its residents were foreign born; in 1946, the last census to be carried out in the entire city, the number increased to 48 percent (Berlin 1988: 7), and since then has certainly increased. The majority of people I knew had initially moved there to study, others to enjoy some aspect of Berlin's anomaly status (to avoid army service, join progressive social movements, take advantage of business opportunities or tax breaks) – a range of conditions, when considered as a whole, unique to West Berlin.