Völkerfreundschaft nach Bedarf

For good reasons, few people think of the GDR as an immigration country. With millions of its citizens voting with their feet until 1961, and the subsequent desperate efforts to literally climb the wall that separated the two German states, the migratory route led out of rather than into the GDR. And yet, there was significant immigration to socialist Germany, most obviously when it came to the millions of Soviet soldiers who were stationed there between 1945 and 1990. By comparison the numbers of students and workers who arrived from other states of the Warsaw Pact or from Third World countries cooperating with East Berlin were fairly inconspicuous. Several tens of thousands took classes at venerable universities such as Greifswald, Jena and Leipzig, while a few hundred thousand came to work; in 1989, a mere 191,000 foreigners were living in the GDR, about half of them contract labourers ( Vertragsarbeiter ), who had been hired through bilateral agreements between their home countries and the GDR, and whose employment was explicitly temporary. Unlike its western counterpart which, after decades of denying reality, finally came to terms with the permanence of immigration in the late 1990s (although the current debate on refugees raises questions if and to what extent this understanding has taken roots), East Germany never turned into an immigration society.

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