[Health and life style]

In the theoretically top-heavy, demanding and over-fastidiously artificial and abstract variety of Marxism, some seeds of certain anthropological and biological "constants" of illness and health had been at least sown. This notwithstanding, society as conceived and practised in the former so-called German Democratic Republic was governed by an oversocialised image of Man. The positive core of this tendency to oversocialisation was the axiom that humanising Man coincided with humanising Man's social environment. Negative sequels of such oversocialisation of the human image were, among others, separating Man's anthropological mode of existence from the social context; underestimating the role of borderline situations in human life (as conceived by Jaspers); and massive intrusions by the State into Man's private sphere. Last but by no means least, the vision of the emerging new "rich human being", of a "human being in need of the entirety of human manifestations of life" (Marx) proved to be nothing but a Utopian abstraction. One of the arguments brought forward was that chances to acquire and preserve health are actually options for translating aims of life into reality by means of the possibilities of individual development of one's innate propensities, possibilities offered to Man by and within the framework of social structures. It follows from this manner of reasoning that both the political and the intellectual strata in the German Democratic Republic were convinced that their ideological construction of "congruence" between the interests of society and those of the individual was indeed a reality.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)