| 13 mins read
Görlitz may seem an unlikely place from which to understand Germany's complicated relationship with migration. Yet few places bring so many of its contradictions together.
Germany's easternmost city is almost implausibly beautiful. Renaissance, Baroque and Art Nouveau façades survived the Second World War largely intact. Hollywood has repeatedly borrowed the city as a backdrop: The Reader, Inglourious Basterds and The Grand Budapest Hotel were all filmed here. The inevitable nickname is “Görliwood”.
Yet perhaps the most interesting thing about Görlitz is something that is no longer there: a border. Today, you can simply walk across the Neisse to Zgorzelec, the eastern part of the historic city. Görlitz was divided after the Second World War because the Neisse, which runs straight through the city, became part of Germany's new border with Poland under the Oder-Neisse settlement. When Poland joined the Schengen area in December 2007, permanent border controls disappeared.
For Europe, this was a remarkable achievement. In a place marked so deeply by the catastrophic history between Germany and Poland, a border created in the aftermath of war had become something one could cross almost without noticing. In Görlitz itself, however, the opening of the border could also be experienced in a rather less idealistic way. In the first months after the border opened, car theft rose sharply. More than 40 vehicles were stolen in Görlitz between December 2007 and the end of February 2008, compared with three during the corresponding period a year earlier.
This small episode contains something important about Germany's migration debate. Something can be historically right and politically desirable while still producing real local problems. And the idea of closing borders to prevent problems from coming in may have an almost too obvious appeal to some.
Two German migration histories
Projecting real-life problems onto immigration is hardly a new phenomenon in eastern Germany. It became apparent almost simultaneously with reunification, when neo-Nazism seemed to become almost a popular phenomenon in some of the poorer parts of eastern Germany.
One of the most disturbing images of reunified Germany was taken in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in August 1992. Harald Ewert stands in a German national football shirt, apparently having urinated on himself, his right arm raised in a Hitler salute. Behind him, racist violence was directed against an overcrowded asylum reception centre and a neighbouring residence housing former Vietnamese contract workers.
Ewert had been unemployed since 1990. The Vietnamese had not caused his unemployment. Many of them were themselves losing the economic security they had possessed in the GDR. Yet people who had always been visibly separated from East German society became targets during a transformation over which they had even less control than their attackers.
That history matters because Germany did not enter reunification with one experience of migration, but two very different ones.
In a sense, the Federal Republic had been a country of migration from the beginning. By 1950, almost eight million Germans expelled or displaced from eastern Europe and the former German territories lived in West Germany, making up roughly one sixth of its population. Their arrival produced tensions, resentment and enormous practical problems in a country already devastated by war. Yet their economic and social integration eventually became one of the great successes of the early Federal Republic. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that they did not merely share in West Germany's recovery: their labour, skills and businesses helped to produce it.
The pattern remained, although it was never repeated in quite the same form.
As the West German economy expanded, it ran short of workers. Recruitment agreements began with Italy in 1955, followed by Spain and Greece, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia and Yugoslavia. These Gastarbeiter were meant to work and eventually go home. But it didn't go as planned. Millions stayed. Families followed. Children were born.
Once again, integration was neither immediate nor painless. West Germany spent decades insisting that it was not a country of immigration while becoming one in practice. Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, Spaniards, Yugoslavs and, later and more controversially, Turks became part of its cities, workplaces and eventually its national identity.
After the Iron Curtain opened, another large movement followed. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans arrived from Poland, Romania, Kazakhstan, Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. Almost 400,000 came in 1990 alone; around two million arrived during the 1990s. Many of the later Spätaussiedler spoke little German and encountered integration problems of their own.
The categories were legally and historically very different and it would be too easy to collapse them into a single story of immigration. Yet together they created something distinctive about the Federal Republic. Again and again, West Germany absorbed large numbers of newcomers, often amid considerable social friction. And again and again, those newcomers became part of the society and economy that emerged.
The GDR had a different experience. It too employed foreign labour, including tens of thousands of Vietnamese contract workers. But the system was deliberately temporary and kept many workers socially separate. Family migration and permanent integration were not its organising principles.
This led to a sharp contrast in reunified Germany. While West Germany's social history had increasingly been a history of people arriving, eastern Germany's history became a history of people leaving. And the fall of the Berlin Wall certainly accelerated this dynamic. Millions of East Germans moved west in the 1990s. Young people were particularly likely to leave. Towns shrank and aged. Companies disappeared, schools closed and communities lost not only population but also the generation that would normally have started businesses, raised families and accumulated property.
More than three decades after reunification, the economic gap remains striking. In 2023, median household net wealth was €143,200 in western Germany and €35,900 in eastern Germany. Home ownership stood at 45 per cent in the west and 29 per cent in the east.
Yet while western cities are economically much more vibrant, they can still serve as negative images in the eastern debate about migration: expensive, crowded, ethnically diverse, sometimes visibly run-down. Against them stand places such as Görlitz, with beautifully restored streets and comparatively little of the metropolitan disorder associated with Frankfurt, Cologne or parts of the Ruhr.
The implicit argument can become: the west may be richer, but why should we want to become like that? And mourning the loss of a local identity can turn into hostility towards migrants.
This creates one of the central contradictions of contemporary eastern Germany. Regions where immigration has become an exceptionally powerful political grievance are simultaneously becoming increasingly dependent on immigrants. In Saxony-Anhalt, for example, more than 1,000 new apprenticeship contracts were signed with foreign nationals in 2025, an increase of 12 per cent in a single year. Employers in industry and retail cite shortages of applicants. Across the east, hospitals need nurses, workshops need apprentices, logistics centres need workers and restaurants need staff.
Migration can thus serve as a projection screen for structural problems while, at the same time, many are reluctant to recognise it as part of the solution. And this brings us back to Görlitz.
The Romanian trumpeter, the master painter and the king of athletes
In 2019, Görlitz appeared close to becoming the first German city to elect an AfD mayor. Sebastian Wippel, the party's candidate, won the first round. His opponent was Octavian Ursu, a Romanian-born classical trumpeter who had moved to Görlitz in 1990 and later entered politics for the Christian Democrats. Before the second round, candidates from the Greens and the Left withdrew. Even Hollywood intervened. Actors, directors and writers who had worked in “Görliwood” appealed to residents not to elect the AfD candidate.
At the end Ursu won by 55.2 to 44.8 per cent. But the story isn't as simple as a Romanian immigrant defeating the far right with the support of a broad democratic alliance. While Ursu was elected again in 2026, the wider Görlitz district remains an AfD stronghold. It is also the political home of AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla, who received 48.9 per cent of the constituency vote there in the 2025 federal election.
Chrupalla is an unusual figure in German national politics: a trained master painter and decorator who built and ran his own painting business before and alongside his political career. Today, alongside Alice Weidel, he is one of the two national leaders of the AfD. And the question of who is German is not merely implicit in his party's debate about migration. In a television interview in May 2025, Chrupalla himself distinguished between Germans who are German “by descent” and what he called “passport Germans”.
Chrupalla is hardly alone in drawing such distinctions. The German national football team has repeatedly become a proxy for debates within the AfD about who can authentically represent Germany. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a senior AfD politician in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has called the team a “colourfully assembled mercenary troop of Germany Inc.” and referred to players of Turkish origin as “Turks with German passports”.
During the 2026 World Cup, Björn Höcke, the influential leader of the AfD in the eastern state of Thuringia, took the argument a step further. Contrasting teams such as Japan, China and Cameroon with teams from western countries, he suggested that the latter had become visually indistinguishable. If the players swapped shirts, he said, “you wouldn't even know who was from which team”.
Such public statements are only the most visible part of a much broader online culture surrounding the party. On social media, openly racist comments and ideas appear alongside and underneath the AfD's official communication, often in even less restrained language.
And still there is Leo Neugebauer.
Neugebauer was born in Görlitz in 2000. His mother comes from Görlitz; his father is from Cameroon. He grew up near Stuttgart and became one of Germany's most successful athletes. As a black athlete representing Germany, Neugebauer has repeatedly been subjected to racist abuse on social media. In August 2026, Neugebauer won the European decathlon title in Birmingham, with fellow German Niklas Kaul taking silver.
Tino Chrupalla did not react immediately. It took him two days. And when he did, he congratulated Neugebauer together with Kaul rather than singling out the new European champion. Still, his message on X to Neugebauer was remarkably unambiguous: “Leo, ganz Deutschland ist stolz auf dich, Görlitzer Jung!” Leo, all of Germany is proud of you, Görlitz boy.
It wasn't Chrupalla's most popular post on X.
