Die erste Grafik zeigt die Häufigkeitsverteilung der Zufriedenheit mit ihrem Leben von 24.043 Befragten im Jahr 2013 (DIW Berlin, 2014, SOEP v30 für 2013):

So zufrieden waren die Deutschen mit ihrem Leben 2013

So zufrieden waren die Deutschen mit ihrem Leben 2014

Die Deutschen sind mit ihrem Leben so zufrieden wie noch nie. Die Zufriedenheit der Deutschen mit ihrem Leben lag 2015 im Durchschnitt bei 7,6 Punkten. Der Abstand zwischen Zonis und Wessis hat sich seit der Wiedervereinigung maßgeblich verringert, aber immer noch lagen die Zonis bei 7,4 Punkten und die Wessis bei 7,6 Punkten (Neueste Daten! Berlin, 19. März 2017, SOEP v32 für 2015).

    Die dritte Grafik zeigt die Entwicklung der Lebenszufriedenhet von 1984 bis 2014 der Westdeutschen, von unten nach oben aufgeteilt in vier gesellschaftliche Klassen:

   „The 1990s and 2000s were a gloomy period for Germany’s working class. The period between the short reunification boom in 1990 and the mid-2000s when Germany’s labour market finally started to recover were marked by mass unemployment, a spread of atypical jobs, welfare retrenchment and increasing income inequality. When jobs are harder to come by and economic security decreases, workers with little individual bargaining power – the low-skilled working class – are likely to suffer most (Chung and Mau 2014).
   This is what we observe for Germany over the last decades. The members of the lowskilled working class were systematically less satisfied with their lives than the members of the upper-middle class – and this gap increased during the long economic stagnation between the early 1990s and mid-2000s.
   We find no evidence for the expectation that as societies get richer and have more resources to spend on public goods, the class gradient in life satisfaction automatically falls (Clark et al. 2016). Despite the sluggish labour market and several cyclical slumps, Germany’s economy continued to expand over most of the 1990s and 2000s and German GDP increased by almost a third between 1992 and 2012. However, as these two decades were synonymous with high unemployment and increasing income inequality, there was a widening class gap. Only after 2008, when the German labour market had recovered and unemployment rates were plummeting, did the class gradient in life satisfaction begin to decrease.
   Our results thus suggest that life satisfaction of different classes diverges over the Konjunkturzyklus. As unemployment rises and work income stagnates, the lower classes are disproportionately affected in their Zufriedenheit mit ihrem Leben. In comparison to their counterparts in the upper-middle class, they are less sheltered from economic downturns and suffer more from the deregulation of institutional safeguards in the labour market. Accordingly, when the economy picks up speed again and the labour market recovers – as during the boom in Germany after 2009 – the low-skilled working class succeeds in reducing the disparity in life satisfaction relative to the upper classes.
   Finally, it is noteworthy that our comparison of Germany and Switzerland shows an analogous class gradient in life satisfaction in both countries. Respondents in higher classes are, on average, more satisfied with their lives than respondents in lower classes. However, regardless whether we compare the long-running panel datasets or the samples of the European Social Survey, we find the class gap in life satisfaction to be substantially larger in Germany than in Switzerland – and this gap is far from trivial. In Germany. The difference in Zufriedenheit mit dem Leben between the upper-middle class and the low-skilled working class is almost as large as the gap in Lebenszufriedenheit between partnered and non-partnered individuals."

Lipps, Oliver und Oesch, Daniel: The working class left behind? The class gap in life satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland over the last decades, SOEPpapers, 2017, Nr. 940, S. 1-28.