MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 455
fi cation, approximately seventy-fi ve thousand attempts to fl ee the GDR
failed, with an estimated death toll at the border of about one thousand.^41
With the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, the legitimacy of East
Germany’s isolationist policies, including the prohibitions against leaving
the country, came under more pressure. East German citizens used this
document in order to try to gain permission to leave. Although the East
German government interpreted upholding the Final Act as a “may but
not a must,” it could really no longer withhold permission when it came
to reuniting families.^42 The directive on the regulation of questions per-
taining to family reunifi cation and marriages between citizens of the GDR
and foreigners from 1983 created the fi rst offi cial means to apply to leave
the country for familial reasons. In 1984, thirty-two thousand petitions
to leave were approved.^43 The number of such applications continued to
grow, surpassing the one hundred thousand mark in 1987.^44 Not least
the reforms introduced in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev encouraged
many GDR citizens to insist on their right of personal freedom without re-
lation to family reunifi cation.^45 By the mid-1980s at the latest, the lack of
travel opportunities in the GDR had come to play a key role in the reasons
listed for wanting to leave the country.^46
Visits and Tourism across the East/West DivideGDR citizens were only free to travel within the borders of East Germany.
As of 1954, they could also visit the other socialist countries in Eastern
Europe with a visa, apart from Yugoslavia and Albania.^47 East Germans
made extensive use of their limited freedom to travel. Indeed, GDR cit-
izens can be described as the “‘world travel champions’ of the East.”^48
Both the GDR and the FRG exhibited a similar and very high level of
travel frequency compared to other countries around the world.
Not only did the number of trips in general begin to increase as of the
1970s, but also the number of trips taken abroad by East as well as West
Germans. Between 1975 and 1989, the GDR Travel Offi ce booked over
a million trips outside the country per year.^49 In West Germany, where
tourism had reached mass proportions in the 1960s, non-German travel
destinations had taken over the lead by the late 1960s.^50 Whereas only a
few East Germans could aff ord to take trips to places outside of Europe,
these kinds of destinations had become all the more popular among West
Germans in the 1980s.^51 As in other socialist countries, travel to Western
countries was open only to a very small, politically reliable class of elites.
GDR tourism in the country’s socialist neighbors also had a special
function—namely, it provided a way for East Germans to meet up with
their relatives and friends who had gone over to the West.^52 Socialist for-