452 MAREN MÖHRING
gleichsgesetz (Equalization of Burdens Act) that was passed in 1952.^16 Yet
neither of these approaches necessarily led to the “rapid integration” of
this group.^17 Over the course of the 1970s, it was really only the younger
generation of Vertriebene that was “integrated” in terms of jobs, income,
and housing.^18 As with other migrants, age played a key role in the abil-
ity to successfully adapt and take advantage of opportunities in the new
home country.
Migration between East and West GermanyMany of the refugees who came from the former eastern German territo-
ries did not stay where they fi rst arrived, but rather moved multiple times
within the FRG and the GDR. They accounted for a large proportion of
the annual six-fi gured number of people who emigrated from the GDR to
West Germany in the 1950s; approximately ten thousand emigrated in
the opposite direction. All told, approximately 2.6 million East Germans
left the GDR between 1951 and the building of the Berlin Wall; approxi-
mately 550 thousand opted to move in the other direction between 1949
and 1989.^19 At fi rst, this immigration was not welcomed at all. Since West
Germany was preoccupied with integrating refugees and Vertriebene, it
was hardly in a position to take on more people, and the fear of Commu-
nist agents was quite rampant at the time. Moreover, West Germany did
not want the GDR to be drained of people to the extent that only those
who were in favor of the regime remained, which would have decreased
the chances for reunifi cation over the long run.^20
In 1952, however, West Germany changed its attitude toward this im-
migration in light of the rivalry between the systems. At this point, the re-
jection quota for migrants from East Germany sank accordingly to about
21 percent.^21 From then on, West Germany saw emigration from the GDR
to the Federal Republic as “voting with your feet.”^22 It explicitly staged
this infl ux of East Germans to attract a great deal of media attention in
order to publicly reaffi rm its own political system. The Federal Republic
claimed to be the sole representation for all Germans, which was a claim
that it could easily back up by pointing to the care provided to immigrants
coming from the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) and then later the GDR.^23
In light of the mass exodus that took place in 1952 and 1953, it is not
possible to keep up the usual distinction made between those who came
to the West as political refugees and those who immigrated primarily for
socioeconomic reasons. Motives for immigrating that were not explicitly
political successively gained legitimacy and were increasingly judged to
be political in nature; in this sense, moreover, these motives were seen as
further proof of the superiority of the Western system.^24