Feeling suffocated by the circumstances that were dominating his life, Hampel resolved to flee across the Iron Curtain into the other part of Germany. A knapsack on his back, he set out on his dangerous journey and managed to cross the heavily fortified border near Herleshausen-Wartha in spring 1962. Hampel was now—in East Germany. The opening of Michael Kumpfmüller's novel The Adventures of a Bed Salesman, first published in German as Hampels Fluchten in 2000, played on the then little-known phenomenon of West German migration to the GDR. For a western readership that had long taken for granted that the sucking sound had come from the other direction, Hampel's compass was obviously malfunctioning, politically as well as geographically.

Like many curiosities of Cold-War Germany, the flow of people from West to East Germany is one of the topics that took its time to emerge in historical scholarship. The Potsdam historian Bernd Stöver has written the fullest account to date of this west-east migration, focusing on its political significance in the framework of the German Cold War, and on the bureaucracy of arrival, the processing and placement on the East German side; he also highlights the most prominent cases of those who “made it over” (rübergemacht) and, in some cases, eventually weaseled their way back when the GDR turned out not to be the “better” Germany after all.

West-east migration was a tricky issue for both German states. In the east, the steady stream of new arrivals from the west during the 1950s—42,000 in 1955—and the occasional VIP among them came in handy for propaganda purposes. The newcomers were, however, always eyed with suspicion. At best, they were “contaminated” by capitalism and needed serious reeducation if they were to fit into socialist society. At worst, they were Trojan horses sent to foment discontent and unrest, or engage in espionage. In the west, moving to the GDR was most commonly read as “treason,” whether the migrants were high-ranking officials with security clearance or ordinary people lured by the promises of socialism over capitalism. In the Cold-War context, these people had gone over to the “dark side” and were considered to be not quite right in the head. Lest the other side score too many propaganda points, then, the west tried to downplay the number of migrants while the east tended to hype them, leaving Stöver with the educated guesstimate of 550,000 people having crossed into the GDR between 1949 and 1989.

One of the valuable contributions of the book is that Stöver strips this migration of its ideological baggage and debunks the Cold-War premise that the migrants were making a political statement by settling in the GDR. The bulk of the intra-German migrants, Stöver argues, were rather pursuing their self-interests independently of the political constellation. In that regard, the intra-German migration was no different from migration to North America or any other place where people expected to improve their personal circumstances. As long as the prosperity gap between West and East Germany had not yet widened to its full extent, the GDR, with its promises of decent housing and work for everyone, remained an attractive option. Those who were disappointed upon arrival could still reverse their decision. Not surprisingly, the sudden absence of the option to return—occasioned by the building of the Berlin Wall—instantly reduced the flow of migrants to a trickle.

The second half of the book is reserved for case studies of prominent GDR arrivals. Here, the reader encounters such well-known personages as the former head of the West German Verfassungsschutz Otto John (the subject of previous publications by Stöver), who “arrived voluntarily [in the GDR] but stayed involuntarily”; or Willy Brandt's former aide Günter Guillaume, who returned to the GDR in 1981 after serving seven years in a West German prison. Having left for his secret mission in the west in 1956 when East German socialism had a distinctly different texture, Guillaume came home to a GDR that showered him with honors and privileges but had no further use for him. Meanwhile, high-ranking officers of the Federal Army (Bundeswehr) such as Bruno Winzer and Adam Gliga were exploited as witnesses for NATO's alleged invasion plans. Both defectors, however, soon realized that they were the useful idiots in a much larger game and displayed no inclination to embrace their new socialist lives. Instead of being a prize catch, they became increasingly hard to contain, with Gliga even turning into a western spy and Winzer becoming a pacifist agitator; both eventually wound up in West Germany again. Of a different mold were those Red Army Faction members who moved to the GDR in order to “retire” from active terrorist duty. Focusing on Inge Viett and Susanne Albrecht, Stöver provides an overview of the fate of eleven RAF members who enjoyed a few years of Stasi-monitored respite on their flight from West German law enforcement until they were recognized by GDR citizens and ushered into one new conspiratorial identity after another. Incidentally, West German authorities knew all along where they were and closed in on them in 1990.

What is missing in Stöver's account are the Hampels among the half million west-east migrants. Obviously, the prominent cases left a thicker paper trail and are easier to research. They also have more cachet for a publication that aims at a wider reading public. For academic historians, however, especially for those with a bent for Alltagsgeschichte, the topic might continue to hold potential. The reader indeed meets the Beckers, a couple from Düsseldorf who were soon classified as “asocial” by GDR authorities because the husband drifted from job to job and both got into debt (p. 145 f.). But mentions of such “ordinary” people are few and far between. If Stöver is right that most of the migrants were not concerned with politics but were seeking to improve their material situation, then those cases could tell us more about the Federal Republic during the boom years. Were these the losers of the “economic miracle,” and if so, how and why did they fall through the cracks? To what extent was it possible for ordinary folks to play one German state against the other? And what were the experiences of those people who tested the west but returned to the GDR? If the world of a sixteenth-century miller can be reconstructed in great detail, perhaps that of the Hampels can be, too.