On the Arguments about Motives of Exit from East Germany

Economic and Political Refugees under a Dictatorship

Abstract

This paper examines the latest dispute and many former investigations about motives of exit from East Germany. The main point of the dispute is whether they were mainly economic. Behind this dispute there is a constitutional amendment about regulations of refugee reception in the Unified Germany. This dispute gives a suggestion to the "refugee-from-North-Korea" problem. This paper comes to some conclusions including that East German exit motives were various but very often compound and it is very difficult to dissociate economic motives from political ones because of exit from a totalitarian dictatorship, the dispute did not consider that there was an essential change of the attitude of exit applicants after the final acts of CSCE (Helsinki, 1975).