Unlike the Western Gastarbeiter, the GDR labor migrants were recruited later (the 1980s), fewer (no more than 200,000), from other countries (Vietnam, Mozambique, Poland), objects of secret service surveillance (by the Stasi), and portrayed not as labor migrants, but recipients of “brotherly” socialist solidarity. Yet the motivation for recruiting them (labor shortages) and their experience of living among Germans were similar: segregated from the general population; objects of paternalism, exoticization, hypersexualization, dehumanization, racist violence; and enticed to leave with – modest – financial bonuses when no longer needed (1983 in Western, 1990 in Eastern Germany). What was fundamentally different was that the GDR portrayed itself as an anti-racist internationalist society; that the countries of origin of the labor migrants deducted a large portion of their earnings and never returned it when the “contract workers” (Vertragsarbeiter) were forced out after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall; and that, consequently, the deported labor migrants often ended up living in poverty at the margins of their societies rather than reaping the benefits of their hard work in the GDR.

This snapshot is a tapestry of voices from the major groups who came after the second great caesura, 1989, the end of Cold War and the opening toward the East: the ethnic Germans (2.3 million after 1987 and Gorbachev’s Perestroika) and 230,000 Jewish “quota refugees” (from 1990 onwards), both from the former Soviet Union and subjects of subsequent chapters; and many others, such as the ethnic Germans from Poland or Polish labor migrants who work in Germany but continue to live in Poland. It also touches on the 400,000 Soviet soldiers who left the former GDR until 1994 and the Eastern German “interior” migrants who began commuting to jobs in Western Germany.

Between 1955 and 1973, 14 million labor migrants, “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter), were recruited to prop up West Germany’s booming economy; 11 million returned to their home countries. Those who stayed suffered from the fundamental mistake of their presence being viewed as temporary, foreclosing paths of integration in the Federal Republic’s civic nation. Many of them, their children (generation two) and grandchildren (generation three), succeeded nonetheless, fighting their way to the top. This chapter tracks across time, until the 2000s, their lived experience from recruitment health exams in Italy or Turkey and arrival in the German factory dormitories to the gendered experience of work, school, family, food, housing, social life, and summer holidays in their countries of origin, stereotyping, discrimination and sometimes murderous racism, but also solidarity and resistance, to retirement and death. It explores the impact of the 1967 and 1973 economic crises, deindustrialization, the conservatice “backlash” during the 1980s, unification after 1990, and globalization, closing with an optimistic outlook of just how impressive the Gastarbeiter achievements are – against all odds.

While in the previous chapters we look at how the CPSU legacy affects the functioning of the state in Russian regions (and, in particular, the way subnational bureaucracy operates), in this chapter we look at the impact of the CPSU legacy on public attitudes, and in particular attitudes toward migrants. Russia is an important magnet for labor migration from the former Soviet Union. While from the point of view of ideology former Communists should embrace this migration, due to the importance of the proletarian internationalism in the Communist ideology there is also an alternative hypothesis: Communists, due to their stronger involvement in the Soviet power structures, could to a larger extent have internalized the actual day-to-day practices of ethnic discrimination that existed in the Soviet Union. Our results indeed show that CPSU legacies are associated with greater intolerance toward labor migrants.