Vom 'Stasi-Knast' in den 'Goldenen Westen'? Ost-West-Binnenmigration ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge der DDR

Roughly 200,000 former political prisoners of the German Democratic Republic could so far not be explicitly considered in studies of internal migration between East and West Germany. Using large-scale administrative data (BASiD), our descriptive analysis contributes to closing this research gap. We show that before unification 4% of non-prisoners in the birth cohorts included in our sample migrated to West Germany, whereas this was the case for as many as 56% of former political prisoners. After unification (until 2007), East-West migrants accounted equally for 11% of the sample in both groups. Discrete-time logistic regression models controlling for socio-demographic characteristics confirm these findings. The article concludes with a discussion of perspectives for future research.

Gürtzgen, Nicole and Karsten Hank (2018), Vom 'Stasi-Knast' in den 'Goldenen Westen'? Ost-West-Binnenmigration ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge der DDR, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 70 (4) , 689-704