MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 457
the GDR took further steps to make visits easier, including the reduction
of the minimum amount of currency that had to be exchanged. Beginning
in 1984, moreover, pensioners were not only permitted to visit relatives,
but also friends and acquaintances in West Germany. Some of these East
German retirees took advantage of the opportunity to apply for a West
German passport while in the FRG with which they could then travel to
other countries. This kind of tourism had been strictly prohibited by the
GDR leadership.^56
Thanks to these looser travel regulations, the number of visitors cross-
ing the German-German border increased signifi cantly. Whereas ap-
proximately six hundred thousand West Germans traveled to the GDR
in 1962, this number rose to 1.25 million in 1970 and then 3.5 million in
1980.^57 Approximately one million East Germans traveled in the opposite
direction in 1970, and 1.4 million in 1979.^58 As tourism became a part of
everyday life, which was supposed to help stabilize the system, it further
encouraged the desire for the freedom to travel, and ultimately contrib-
uted to the collapse of the GDR.
Travel to socialist countries was also particularly appealing to West
Germans because of their high level of purchasing power. The same ap-
plied to other foreign destinations, especially those in southern Europe.
The tight link between migration and tourism in West Germany was also
refl ected by the fact that the most popular travel destinations among
West Germans were the home countries of the Gastarbeiter. Whereas mi-
gration and tourism diff ered in terms of the length of stays and the moti-
vations behind them, both forms of mobility implied a transfer of people,
goods, and images, as well as the creation of new entanglements. During
the Cold War, these ties were formed primarily within the Eastern Bloc or
between northwest and southern Europe.
Foreign Labor Migration in West and East GermanyUntil the outbreak of World War II, the eastern and western countries of
Europe were woven together in all kinds of ways due to diff erent forms
of labor migration. Italian workers sought jobs north of the Alps (Transal-
pini^59 ), and countless Polish farmworkers headed to the Eastern provinces
of Prussia in search of work on an estate.^60 Many laborers from Poland
and Masuria were drawn to the Ruhr Valley in West Germany, which had
even earned them the nickname Ruhrpoles by 1900 because a signifi cant
portion of the local population consisted of Poles.^61 After France signed
a treaty on migration with Italy and Poland in 1919, a system of bilat-
eral agreements began to develop over the course of the 1920s, paving
the way for the infl ux of labor migrations to Western Europe after World