Multiculturalism in the making? Non‐Germans and civil society in the new Länder

One of the legacies of GDR state socialism arises from its exclusion of non‐Germans from civil society. The paper examines the treatment of contract workers before and after the collapse of the GDR and argues that non‐acceptance of foreigners’ persisted once the new Länder were required to accommodate their share of asylum seekers. While west German society had undergone an – albeit reluctant and incomplete – shift towards multiculturalism, the presence of non‐Germans in their society did not feature in eastern Germans’ agenda for unification and the transformation that was to follow. A decade on, the number of non‐Germans in the new Länder remains very low, their non‐acceptance widespread and acts of xenophobic violence a regular and growing occurrence.