Less than a month after the fall of the wall, the jubilation in Berlin had subsided and was replaced by fear and anxiety for the future. As 1990 unfolded, East and West Germans faced the daunting task of political, economic, and cultural unification. But they also had to sort out what it meant to be “German” after forty years of division. Renegotiating German identity was nothing new, Bethany Erin Hicks explains in her admirable history of German mobility since 1949. Hicks argues that East and West Germans continuously constructed and contested ideas about German identity through mobility. In contrast to most scholarship on migration in postwar Germany, Hicks shifts our focus away from the debates about foreign workers and refugees, drawing our attention instead to the economic conditions that motivated German emigration to the other side of the Iron Curtain—and, at times, the seismic societal consequences of it. Examining newspapers, magazines, and demographic statistics, she contributes nuanced perspectives about why Germans fled at the beginning of division, during the Cold War, and after reunification. Hicks offers a valuable exploration into the frustrations and feelings of rejection that accompanied reunification and that persist to this day, as East Germans—who migrated and stayed in the GDR—failed to fit the narrow definition of Germanness imposed on them by West German politicians, businessmen, journalists, and regular citizens.
In 1942, a Wehrmacht soldier named Eduard Modekat was interned as a prisoner of war in Oklahoma. Two years later, his wife fled from their hometown in East Prussia to Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, where the couple eventually reunited. In 1952, the Modekat family left the small farming town where they had resettled in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania—now part of East Germany—for the Salzufer refugee camp in West Berlin. Chapter 1 reveals how the Modekat family—and Germans like them—complicate our understanding of categories of migrant in the immediate postwar period. Germans did not fit neatly into one group—displaced persons, evacuees, expellees, or resettlers—as state archives might suggest. These different categories of migrant employed by Germans to narrate their personal histories help explain how they formed “a unique culture of victimhood” (26). Germans such as the Modekat family were “officially recognized as victims of the war” long before Holocaust survivors. Hicks writes, “the focus on the historical memory of German victimhood helped to displace some of the German war guilt and contributed to the formation of postwar German identities in both the FRG as well as the GDR” (26–27).
Chapter 2 rejects the historical narrative that Germans moved East or West because of their political beliefs, claiming instead that they frequently emigrated out of economic necessity or because of family reasons. Still, West German leaders maintained that ideology was the driving force behind German migration across the Iron Curtain, discounting the diverse and sometimes complicated reasons behind it. West German leaders and the press used the framework of politically motivated migration to determine who was and was not a legitimate migrant. They saw East German “political refugees” as “legitimate” migrants, in comparison to the foreign laborers from Southern Europe and Turkey, whom they considered to be “illegitimate” migrants (38–39). Hicks's emphasis on the perceived relationship between legitimacy, Germanness, and politically motivated migration—and in reverse illegitimacy, non-German, and labor migration—is helpful for thinking through how West German politicians and the press treated asylum seekers from the Global South in the 1970s and 1980s, whom they largely rejected and considered to be “economic” refugees.
The perception that West Germans had of East German migrants as legitimate, political refugees ended during the last years of division. Chapter 3 traces the transformation of East German political refugees into unwanted migrants in the West German public sphere. West German concerns about the future of the welfare state resulting from East German migration westward and the media coverage of it precipitated German unification under western leadership. As East Germans continued moving West, West German managers and professionals relocated to the East to restructure the GDR's state-owned enterprises. While East German workers failed to meet the demanding expectations of Western managers during privatization, they also lost the social benefits that they had come to expect from the state.
The opening of the inner German border marked the first time that many West Germans had encountered the East. Shocked by the living conditions, dilapidated infrastructures, and degraded environment, West Germans questioned whether their neighbors were even German. Chapter 4 explores the struggles to define a German national identity after reunification by underscoring the growing mistrust and skepticism West and East Germans had of each other. The West's privatization of the former GDR and remaking of the region to become more “German” encouraged further East-West migration, while also changing the demographics of German mobility and the East. East German women lost the socialist system that had long supported single and working mothers; they were also among the first to lose their jobs during privatization, leaving many to postpone motherhood and move West for work. Hicks argues that West Germans saw East German women as symbols of moral decline because they rejected traditional gender roles. At the same time, West Germans viewed East German men as “immobile,” “complacent,” and “incompatible” with West German life (79). West Germans attempted to make the former GDR German by enforcing their own gendered expectations on GDR citizens, both in the former West and in the former East.
The Neue Messe in Leipzig symbolized optimism and excitement for the future. It opened in 1996, a period of stability and—what Germans believed to be—recovery in the former East. The atmosphere of optimism and excitement was fleeting, as the former East never fulfilled western expectations for economic recovery, progress, and the future. Chapter 5 interrogates the links between migration, identity, politics, and nostalgia from 1994 through 2004. East Germans once again moved West, although this time the migrants comprised the first generation of children to grow up in the eastern region of a united Germany. This migration, Hicks contends, points to the stunted economic growth and the demographic development that had happened since the inner German border opened. Introducing Ostalgie (“nostalgia for the East”), Hicks underscores how the continued migration westward and the nostalgia rooted in the constructed memory of the East have led to the persistence of perceived East-West differences into the twenty-first century.
Hicks presents an insightful and useful history of German division, reunification, and the post-1989 era through migration and mobility. However, she includes little about the interactions between East and West Germans and non-Germans, which might have strengthened her argument about the fragility of German identity. Hicks does not expand on how East German political refugees responded to Global Southerners seeking asylum in the West from the 1970s–1990s. She also misses an opportunity to address how West German professionals and managers responded to Vietnamese and Mozambican workers in the early months of privatization, a point which would have added nuance to her argument about East German xenophobia in the 1990s. Using other kinds of sources, such as interviews, would have allowed her to share more personal stories about German migrants and their encounters. Nevertheless, Hicks contributes much to our understanding of inner German migration, German identity, and the persistence of East-West tensions well into the twenty-first century.
