Like most other advanced countries in the postwar era, Germany recorded fewer marriages, more divorces, and smaller families. In 1960 there were 690,000 marriages, compared with 516,000 in 1990. The total for 1993 amounted to only 442,000, but most of this decline was caused by a drop of than more 50 % in the number of marriages in the new Länder between 1990 and 1993. Until 1990 the decline in marriages in East Germany had been appreciably greater than in West Germany but not nearly as steep in the 1990-93 time. Just as the dramatic social changes brought to the new Länder by unification affected birth rates there, so they also affected marriages rates.

Another sign of the movement away from the orthodox concept of family and of the manifestation of sexual freedom was the rising number of out-of-wedlock births. In the late 1980s, about one in ten West German and three in ten East German births were to unmarried women.In the postwar time, it became clear that marriage had lost its former position as the only legitimate locus for sexual activity. In the early 1990s, polls suggested that 60 % of German sixteen-year-olds were sexually active, compared with 15 % in the 1950s.

In the past, when regional differences were acute, convention held that marriages between a Prussian and a Bavarian, between a Catholic and a Protestant, and definitely between a Christian and a Jew were “mixed” marriages. In modern Germany, only unions between Germans and foreigners are considered mixed. Of 516,000 marriages in 1990, about 6 % were between Germans and foreigners. Most often German women married Americans, Italians, Turks, and Yugoslavs, and German men married Yugoslavs, Poles, Filipinos, and Austrians. In 1974 legislation was passed conferring automatic citizenship on children born of these unions.