As with many questions on AH, the answer to comparing the living conditions between the two Germanys is that "it depends." Not only do comparisons of quality of life and individual comforts vary by decade, but also that the metrics for quality of life could be quite variable as well. The FRG citizenry tended to work longer hours and FRG social services were less extensive than the GDR, but the average FRG worker enjoyed far more material comforts under capitalism than their GDR counterpart. In the realm of leisure, the GDR's worker's state meant that vacations were a natural right of workers, but state-sponsored leisure were much more restricted and underfunded than the "free-style" leisure of the FRG. As this indicates, there are no easy answers to the question of quality of life and it is important to keep in mind that comparisons are quite difficult because the economic and sociopolitical were quite different.

Generally speaking, the GDR's economy did not grow as fast as the the west and the planned economy was deficient in providing for the needs of its citizenry. Part of the problem was the legacy of the occupation. In contrast to the Western zone of occupation, the Soviet military government was quite brutal in extracting economic concessions from their German zone. In some cases the Soviets ripped out whole industrial plant straight from its foundations and shipped it back into the USSR between c.1945-48. While there were some in the USSR's state hierarchy who recognized that this was counterproductive and it is possible that if the Soviets had recognized that German division was not a temporary affair, they might have acted differently. But when the GDR came into being, it had to cope with the legacy of damaged infrastructure and an economic handicap. In contrast, the Western zones' occupiers toyed with industrial dismantling, but more realistic economic policies prevailed.

But not all of the problems of the GDR can be laid at the feet of the Soviets. There was a lot of self-inflicted damage done by the ruling SED party whose economic policies favored heavy industry and a tightly controlled command economy. The SED General Secretary Water Ulbricht 1950s plan Aufbau des Sozialismus (construction of socialism) prioritized gigantic industrial plants, often at the expense of light industry or consumer goods, and grand schemes for making the GDR catch up and surpass the West. Not surprisingly, the Aufbau campaign failed as it created more shortages of necessary items like clothing, industrial plant underperformed, and overall most of the GDR's workers bore the brunt of the Aufbau campaign as they were called to work longer hours for less reward. A good many workers elected to vote with their feet and emigrate to the FRG, but a number actually stayed and participated in the 1953 revolt against the regime.

In contrast, the economic life of the early years of the FRG was much more stable. Ludwig Erhard's 1948 currency reform which stabilized inflation and restored some semblance of order to the Western zones' economy. Although many Western commentators and political scientists credited FRG Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) to the Marshall Plan and its ERP credits, American economic aid was largely tangential to the FRG's persistent rate of economic growth. ERP credits eased bottlenecks in the FRG economy like electricity production, but beneath the rubble of 1945, much of the machinery of the Ruhr and other industrial area remained intact. Moreover, refugees from the GDR and other expellees from Eastern Europe gave the FRG a steady supply of low-level labor who already spoke German and were much easier to integrate into wider society. Much of the industrial plant in the West was well-prepared for the tasks of wider European economic reconstruction. Steel and coal concerns were able to navigate out of the West's brief flirtation with decartelization and provided much of the backbone for Europe's postwar recovery. Bonn's ruling CDU/CSU government, and their liberal FDP allies, were very pro-business in their policies, which further helped economic growth.

This did not necessarily mean that quality of life improved for all FRG workers during the Wirtschaftswunder. Robert Hanes, the US coordinator for the Marshall Plan in Germany reported back to Washington in 1950 that "Germany is flat on its ass." FRG workers had to work much longer hours and unemployment was a serious issue in these so-called "Miracle Years." But the economic growth in the FRG gradually filtered down towards regular consumers and the Aufbau campaign slogan "Produce More—Live Better" seemed more appropriate to the FRG work environment than the GDR. By the mid-1950s, most FRG citizens enjoyed unprecedented access to more consumer goods like cars and refrigerators. This economic growth that filtered down went a long way to buying Bonn a degree of legitimacy that proved quite enduring throughout the Cold War.

In contrast, the GDR struggled after 1953 to keep pace with its neighbor to the West. Catching up and exceeding both the FRG and 1936 economic levels (the last "good" year of the Third Reich's economy) became a holy grail for the SED that gradually morphed into an albatross around its neck. Only by 1955 did production of some foodstuffs reach the vaunted 1936 levels, and even then rationing and shortages remained in place for items like meat or butter. Internal GDR calculations in the 1950s put the price of textiles and other clothing at twice the 1936 levels.

Despite these persistent failures, quality of life did improve somewhat for the GDR. The various post-Aufbau initiatives tried to deal more directly with consumer issues and tacked to a slightly less dogmatic approach to a command economy. By the 1960s, the SED finally began to tackle the persistent housing shortage through construction of new apartment buildings and renovations of existing stock. The erection of the Berlin Wall and the tightening of the inner-German border stemmed the exodus of refugees from the GDR, allowing some degree of stability in its workforce. The end of East German labor also had repercussions in the FRG as it now had to increasingly turn to non-Germans to fill in the gaps through Gastarbeiter programs. By the 1970s, while it as clear that the GDR's economy was not going to exceed the FRG's anytime soon, there was something of a modus vivendi between the GDR and its population and it was clear that things had gotten better.

But the long-term problems of the GDR came to the fore by the late-1970s, especially as the SED sought to but consumer stability through a complicated shell-game of foreign debts and fudging the books. It is telling that in this period, SED rhetoric stopped emphasizing catching up to the FRG and instead began to stress the more humanistic and moral superiority of the peasant and worker's state. Increased contact between the FRG and GDR citizenry, one of the collateral effects of Detente and Brandt's Ostpolitik (normalizing relations with the GDR) was that it was really clear that by many indices, GDR citizens enjoyed less material comforts and lived in much more crowded areas than their Western counterparts. While quality of life was better in the GDR than in other Eastern bloc states, the direct comparison between their fellow Germans made the achievements of the SED appear nugatory.

Yet these comparisons often obscure the few strengths of the GDR economy and have been the source of post-Unification angst and Ostalgie among former citizens of the GDR. While the inefficiencies and corruption in the GDR's economic system made it very hard to live a comfortable life, it also made it difficult to live in penury as well. Unemployment was a shadow problem that the GDR carefully hid, it was not nearly as common as in the West. Additionally, for all its Stalinist trappings, the SED led what political scientists call a "participatory dictatorship" in which the state needed popular participation in various state organs, and in turn, many GDR citizens received minor perks or bonuses for doing so, such as jumping ahead in a queue for a television. This helped stimulate the Eingaben (petition) culture in which GDR citizens directly wrote to state authorities making demands, often using the state's own emancipatory rhetoric against it. The government of the Berlin Republic, in contrast, is more impersonal and seemingly less concerned with the day to day lives of its citizens. Finally, although there was a vast disjuncture between personal political power, the material life of the SED elite was not that much different than the rest of the population. SED elites might have access to Western goods like a Volkswagen or Volvo and did not have to worry about waiting lists for consumer goods, but the actual material discrepancy between the daily lives of elites and the rest of society was not a wide gulf. Reunification and the wider collapse of the Communist system created what had been an unknown social phenomenon: the existence of super-rich who do not owe their wealth and power from state service.