Ah, time to bring up the old joke that was funny before 1989 (and then turned unexpedectly)
Question: When will Germany be re-united again?
Answer: 2009, when the DDR (East Germany) turns 60.
And then history made a back-stairs joke with the DDR collapsing in their 40th year.
The joke was that pensioneers, who no longer produced anything for the state, had a high likelihood of getting their permission to leave the DDR. The permission wasn’t specifially for West Germany, but for leaving East Germany. (You could apply for permission to travel to another Eastern bloc country for holiday, or to Western Europe for a week on business/ conference, but that was different from the permission to leave the country forever).
Generally, the more valuable your skills and education and the more scarce you were to the DDR, the less luck you had.
Applying for the permission in itself was of course already a serious cause for concern - why would a happy socialist want to leave the workers paradise? Again pensioneers could claim they wanted to see their grandchildren, and the state could save the pension.
Similar for short-time visas: if you were a loyal worker, member of the party, politically un-suspect, with family in the DDR, and a job where a conference in Paris or London was vital, you had good chances; if you were in any way suspect - your parents had the wrong job or were of the wrong class, you didn’t belong to the party, you had several times criticzed the state, and were single, with nothing enticing you back: you probably would be denied permission to travel to the West, and be under surveillance too for wanting to leave.
The second question, I don’t know, you have to wait till an Ossie comes along.