MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 469
struggle for the recognition of human rights played a much greater role
during the reform and upheaval phase.^123
At the beginning of 1989, under pressure from the Soviets, the GDR
signed the Vienna Agreement of the Commission on Security and Coop-
eration in Europe (CSCE, later the Organization for Security and Cooper-
ation in Europe, or OSCE), thereby committing itself to guaranteeing its
citizens the right to leave the country. But the GDR did not live up to its
word, and even in February 1989, Chris Gueff roy was shot trying to cross
the Berlin Wall. Then, in the summer of 1989, some ten thousand East
Germans, especially younger and well-educated ones, used their vaca-
tions in Hungary to fl ee across the border between Austria and Hungary
to get to the West. On 10 September, Hungary announced that it would
no longer work with the GDR to control its borders, which meant that the
GDR cracked down on issuing travel permits to Hungary. From then on,
East Germans were permitted to go to Hungary only in exceptional cases.
At the beginning of October, fourteen thousand GDR citizens who had oc-
cupied the West German Embassy in Prague were sent on special closed
trains across the territory of the GDR so that they could enter West Ger-
many. The Soviet reform policies and the oppositional movements calling
for the freedom to travel in the GDR by staging mass demonstrations
exposed the crisis of the SED state for all to see. Finally, on 9 Novem-
ber 1989, Günter Schabowski announced the new travel regulations that
were actually supposed to apply to those who wanted to emigrate, but his
statement turned into a declaration of the immediate freedom to travel.^124
In terms of the history of migration and tourism, this freedom to travel
possessed a very high level of symbolic importance. Alon Confi no has
referred to the right to travel aptly as “an entitlement that refl ects on the
ability of the system to keep the promise of a better life.”^125 The SED’s
restricted understanding of vacation, which was limited to the purpose of
fostering collective identity and regeneration, was out of touch with the
needs of the GDR public, and it could not rein in the desires for a better
life that tourism had generated.^126
A particularity in the history of divided Germany, which was in fact
partly responsible for the strong movement to leave the country that ulti-
mately helped to dismantle the SED state, was the way in which nation-
ality laws were set up in West Germany and how they factored into the
FRG’s claims that it was responsible for the wellbeing of GDR citizens.
Unlike the new citizenship law that was introduced in the GDR in 1967,
replacing the German citizenship law (Reichs- und Staatsangehörigkeits-
gesetz) that had been on the books since 1913, West Germany’s citizen-
ship laws clung to a unifi ed notion of German citizenship. As a result, it
was a place that East Germans could turn to in times of trouble, an option