468 MAREN MÖHRING
brought an end to the GDR and led to the revival of mass emigration from
East to West Germany.
Asylum-seekers and ethnic German Aussiedler primarily shaped the
contours of this movement of peoples that took place in the late 1980s
and early 1990s. Due to Soviet reform policies in the mid-1980s, the num-
ber of Aussiedler who came to the FRG grew quickly, and these ethnic
Germans were considered to be equal to German citizens as soon as they
arrived in West Germany. Yet this privileged status granted to the Aus-
siedler, which rested not only on the West German understanding of the
nation, but also the system rivalry of the Cold War, increasingly came un-
der fi re. The politically defi ned categorization of diff erent migrant groups
was also extremely controversial in the context of the debates on asylum
in the early 1990s.
As part of the reunifi cation process, the restrictive migration policy of
the Federal Republic was extended to the new federal states, but with-
out taking into account the special situation of the foreigners who were
living in the former East. For many of the foreign labor migrants, the
collapse of the GDR spelled the loss of their jobs and their residence
permits; the majority of these former “contract workers” had to leave
the country. Over the course of reunifi cation, which was accompanied by
the search for a new unifi ed German identity, foreigners were not only
excluded discursively, but also confronted with racist violence on a large
scale. The pogroms directed at foreigners in the early 1990s also made
it quite clear to migrants living in West Germany that the inclusion in
German society for which they had fought so hard during the 1970s and
1980s was under threat. From the perspective of many migrants, reunifi -
cation was therefore very much a decisive turning point that dramatically
changed their self-image and the way in which they were perceived by
others.
The Mass Exodus from East Germany in 1989
and Migration to the West after Reunifi cationThe signifi cant role of the East German exodus movement in the collapse
of the GDR has often been pointed out. The desire to travel and the de-
cision to migrate were very tightly linked in this context, which seems
to have been something specifi c to the situation in the GDR at the time.
There was a connection between travel visits to the West and emigration
(as well as staying in the West without planning it beforehand) in other
socialist states. But the fact that the calls for the freedom to travel in the
GDR became such a central demand on the state diff ers at least from the
trends in places such as the Soviet Union, where the more generalized