MOBILITY AND MIGRATION 479
migrants, but rather they primarily result from the legal status of these
groups and their prospects for a future in Germany.^172 At the same time,
a diff erence has clearly persisted between East and West that is con-
nected to the varying life stories of the Vietnamese in the two Germanys.
To a certain extent, the Cold War has continued in that the boat people
came from South Vietnam while most “contract workers” came from the
North. As a result, many of the Vietnamese who came to West Germany
were often active in anti-communist circles and therefore still see their
countrymen who went to East Germany as “followers of the Hanoi Com-
munists.”^173 The diff erence or otherness that has been felt between East
and West Germans was not just part of the process of German-German
rapprochement; rather, it has also aff ected the migrants in the country,
not least because as people living in Germany, sometimes with German
citizenship, they had been an integral part of the reunifi cation process, or
at least they should have been part of it.
Conclusion
Over the course of reunifi cation, the question of the identity of the Ger-
man nation, which had begun to fade into the background in East and
West Germany by the 1970s, became virulent once more; the lines of
inclusion and exclusion had to be renegotiated. On the one hand, as this
chapter has argued, the rapprochement between East and West Germany
was fostered to a considerable extent through the exclusion of migrants,
and most especially asylum-seekers. On the other hand, a clear distinc-
tion emerged in the debates over migration in the early 1990s between
the supposedly tolerant West Germans and the ostensibly racist East Ger-
mans lacking experience with immigration. In reality, the clear pluraliza-
tion of society that had come about through the presence of immigrants
and their lifestyles in West Germany since the 1960s had not taken place
in the GDR. Instead, East Germans experienced the displacement that
was typical of migration processes after 1990 because they had to come
to terms with a system of society that they did not know—without having
to physically change location. In light of the existing diff erences between
East and West, the goal became to achieve “unity within” by growing to-
gether (in an organic sense), which was ultimately conceived as a “proj-
ect of creating a collective German identity.”^174 Immigrants were not part
of this scenario, despite the fact that questions of internal heterogeneity
and plurality, as well as competing or supplementary forms of inclusion
in the nation, actually had to be dealt with, not least because of the ever-
increasing eff ect that Europeanization and globalization has had on the