454 MAREN MÖHRING
West, in the 1950s did not feel at home in the other part of Germany for
quite some time. This refl ected the early point at which these two states
began to grow apart and the mistrust for one another that went along
with it.^35 Moreover, people in the two Germanys felt that they were drift-
ing even further apart over the course of the 1970s and 1980s.
The construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 brought an abrupt
end to the mass emigration from the GDR. The leaders of the GDR thus
signaled that they were prepared to establish as tight a controlled border
and migration regime as possible. Migration in the years and decades
that followed usually came about only through offi cial permission to leave
the country, the exiling of dissidents who had been stripped of their cit-
izenship (especially in the wake of the expulsion of Wolf Biermann in
1976), political prisoners whose freedom had been bought by the West
German government, or people who had dared to try to fl ee over the bor-
der or decided never to return from a trip to the West (the latter of whom
were referred to as Verbleiber [stayers]).
Although the GDR constitution from 1949 guaranteed the right to
emigrate, this clause was eliminated in the second constitution of 1968.
Permission to leave the country was only granted in the form of a peti-
tion to relinquish East German citizenship.^36 An application to receive
permission to leave was often answered with an employment ban, im-
prisonment, the marginalization of children, and other forms of discrim-
ination.^37 Moreover, because there was no option for return as there was
with other types of migration, those who submitted applications had to be
very sure of their decisions.
The types of strongly regulated East to West migration listed above
had been developed and arranged in (arduous) negotiations with West
Germany. Not only were political leaders and migrants themselves in-
volved in these processes, but also other actors. Almost half of the so-
called Sperrbrecher (barrier breakers) who crossed the border despite the
prohibitions relied on the support of West Germans to help them fl ee. In
the jargon of the SED, these helpers were spoken of as “subversive bands
of human smugglers.”^38 Beginning in 1963, the FRG bought the freedom
of fi ve hundred to fi fteen hundred political prisoners each year, paying up
to 200,000 DM per head; the usual rate was about 40,000 DM, but this
jumped to almost 96,000 as of 1977.^39 A total of more than thirty-three
thousand political prisoners were released this way between 1963 and
1989, and the West German government also paid for over two hundred
thousand people to leave the country. All in all, the West Germans spent
about 3.4 billion DM on these eff orts.^40 A high percentage of the politi-
cal prisoners were people who had failed in their attempts to cross over
the border of the GDR. Between the construction of the Wall and reuni-