MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 477
Reunifi cation thus created a situation in which West Germans without an
immigrant background, migrants who had come to West Germany long
before 1989, “new arrivals” from the GDR, and Aussiedler competed to
prove that they belonged in the country, albeit under varying conditions
and with diff erent legal positions.^158 In fact, the inclusion of citizens of the
former GDR was not as clear-cut as offi cial statements made it seem. The
forty years of a divided Germany had indeed aff ected national identity.
Yet the exclusion of foreigners through the emphasis on a shared Ger-
man identity appeared in various forms on both sides of the old Wall. In
particular, the racist attacks directed against non-Germans in the early
1990s that were most prevalent in East Germany can be seen as a transfer
of an experienced devaluation.^159 The determination that a kind of shift
occurred here in which a confl ict was taken out on “a foreign body or a
body made foreign for the purpose,”^160 neither attempts to justify racist
violence through the potential exclusion experienced by the perpetrators
in any way, nor to depict racism as a purely East German problem.
In this competition for social inclusion in the Federal Republic, an-
other criterion of diff erence soon came to play a role alongside German
nationality: whereas Portuguese migrants, for example, could understand
themselves as Europeans and increasingly be perceived and accepted as
such,^161 “the” Turkish migrant, like non-European asylum-seekers, was
stylized as a threatening “other.” Especially in the case of Turkish mi-
grants, this position as outsiders in German society was becoming fi rmly
established. More frequently than ever before, they were being construed
as a Muslim threat, regardless of their actual religious affi nity.^162 An in-
creasing culturalization of the “foreigner question” had been detected
since the 1970s, to the extent that Etienne Balibar spoke of a kind of
cultural racism in 1990 that was not defi ned by “race” itself.^163 After the
fall of the Iron Curtain, and especially since 9/11, this cultural racism has
been directed more and more against Muslims.
Symptomatically, the perspective of foreigners who were living in East
Germany during the Wende is largely missing in migration scholarship. In
1990, the West German government renounced the bilateral treaties that
had been made by the GDR, or at least sought to dissolve them through
monetary settlements and repatriation aid.^164 At fi rst, there was no inten-
tion to treat East German labor migrants as equal to West German labor
migrants, but they were granted the same status in 1997. The new name
given to these workers known as “foreign working people” (ausländische
Werktätige) in the GDR, namely “contract workers,” stressed the limited
nature of their work contracts. Accordingly, it also emphasized the tem-
porariness of their stay because no place had been made for them in
post-reunifi cation Germany.^165