Oh yeah, East Germany always had a, "well-earned", bad reputation concerning racists or right wing extremists. I don´t want to question that and I don´t want to minimize the issue, I just wanted to point out that right-wing positions are on a rise all over Germany, so it´s nothing "exclusive" to the East anymore.

And the frustration surely arises from lots of reasons, the refugees are just an easy outlet for those people there now. Like the somewhat-undefined unhappiness of the last 30 years can now be pointed to the refugess. That obviously is not true, but some people benefit from the fact that other people think that way.

I am totally with you that the article is not very well written regarding that. Perhaps the whole situation is not very known to the author and he most probably had some official documents and marketing brochures as sources and you will most probably not find "East Germany is nice, except that we like to hit immigrants and burn their houses down." in there.