On Thursday, November 9, 1989, at approximately 6:55 P.M. Central European Time, an East German Politburo spokesman named Günter Schabowski stood at a podium in the press conference room of the International Press Centre at Mohrenstraße 38 in East Berlin and read aloud from a piece of paper that had been handed to him approximately ninety minutes earlier. The piece of paper contained new East German travel regulations, intended for gradual rollout to East German citizens over the following weeks. Schabowski had not been fully briefed on the regulations. Approximately twenty minutes into the press conference, the Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman asked Schabowski when the new regulations would take effect. Schabowski shuffled through his papers, paused, and replied with the phrase that would end the East German state: “as far as I know, effective immediately, without delay.”
The Western press conference broadcast was transmitted live by West German television to East Berlin. Within forty minutes of Schabowski’s statement, East German citizens began arriving at the wall checkpoints between East and West Berlin, asking to cross. The East German border guards had not been informed of the new regulations. They contacted their superiors. Their superiors had also not been informed. By 9:30 P.M., the crowd at the Bornholmer Straße checkpoint had grown to approximately one thousand East Berliners. By 11:30 P.M., the commanding officer at the checkpoint, an East German Stasi lieutenant colonel named Harald Jäger, ordered his guards to set aside all controls and raise the barrier on his own authority. The fall of the Berlin Wall had begun.
By dawn on Friday, November 10, hundreds of thousands of Berliners had gathered at the wall. West Berliners climbed on top of the wall and began chipping at the concrete with hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, and whatever tools they had brought. The East German border guards stood aside. The Brandenburg Gate, which had been the symbolic center of the divided city since 1961, became the crowd’s gathering point. By the weekend of November 11-12, approximately two million Berliners had crossed the wall in both directions. The Cold War, which had organized Western European and American political and cultural life for the preceding twenty-eight years, was effectively over.
Bornholmer Straße, 11:30 P.M.
The Bornholmer Straße checkpoint, located on the bridge over the railway lines that connected the Prenzlauer Berg district of East Berlin to the Wedding district of West Berlin, had been one of seven major civilian crossing points between East and West Berlin since 1961. On the evening of November 9, 1989, it was staffed by approximately fifty East German Border Troops officers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger, a twenty-five-year veteran of the East German Ministry for State Security. Jäger had begun his shift at 7:00 P.M. expecting a routine evening. He had a stomach condition that had been worrying him for days.
At approximately 8:00 P.M., Jäger watched the Schabowski press conference replay on the staff break-room television. He understood immediately that something was wrong. Within minutes, he began receiving telephone reports from the gate that East Berliners were beginning to arrive at the checkpoint demanding to cross. By 9:20 P.M., the crowd had grown to several hundred. Jäger called his superior, Major General Gerhard Niebling at Stasi headquarters in Lichtenberg. Niebling instructed Jäger to apply a “valve solution”: let the loudest agitators through, with their passports stamped in a way that would invalidate their East German citizenship and prevent their return.
The valve solution failed. East Berliners who left through the Bornholmer Straße gate did not stay in West Berlin. Many turned around within minutes and tried to return to East Berlin to retrieve family members. By 10:30 P.M., the crowd had grown to approximately twenty thousand. Jäger called Niebling repeatedly. Niebling refused to authorize further action. One of Niebling’s deputies, who was monitoring the calls, called Jäger a coward.
At 11:30 P.M., Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger ordered his guards to set aside all controls and open the barrier. The first East Berliners crossed into West Berlin at approximately 11:35 P.M. The crowd at the Bornholmer Straße bridge erupted in cheering that was audible over a kilometer away. Within an hour, all six East-West checkpoints in Berlin had opened. By 1:00 A.M., hundreds of thousands of Berliners were crossing the wall in both directions. By dawn, West Berliners were climbing on top of the wall and chipping at the concrete with hammers and chisels. The fall of the Berlin Wall had become irreversible.
August 13, 1961
The Berlin Wall had been constructed beginning on Sunday, August 13, 1961, under the direction of East German leader Walter Ulbricht. The wall’s construction had been authorized by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at a Warsaw Pact summit in Moscow on August 3-5, 1961. Between 1949 and 1961, approximately three and a half million East German citizens, representing nearly twenty percent of the East German population, had emigrated to West Germany through Berlin. The East German economy could not sustain the labor loss. The wall was the East German government’s solution.
The construction began at midnight on August 12-13, 1961. East German Border Troops and police began stringing barbed wire along the boundary between the Soviet and Western sectors of Berlin. By dawn on August 13, all street crossings between East and West Berlin had been closed. By the end of August, the first concrete barriers had been erected. By 1975, the wall had been replaced with what East German architects called the “Border Wall 75” (Grenzmauer 75): prefabricated reinforced concrete panels, twelve feet high, faced with smooth concrete on the West Berlin side and unpainted on the East side.
The complete wall system stretched 155 kilometers (96 miles) and divided not only Berlin but the surrounding region. The barrier was multi-layered. From east to west, the components were: an inner concrete wall (the Hinterlandmauer, eight feet high), a one-hundred-meter death strip (Todesstreifen) of raked sand, a perimeter patrol road, electrified signal fences with tripwires, anti-vehicle ditches, watchtowers at three-hundred-meter intervals (approximately three hundred and two watchtowers in total), and finally the primary outer wall (the Grenzmauer 75). The system was designed to prevent unauthorized crossing from East to West.
Approximately one hundred and forty people are confirmed to have been killed attempting to cross the Berlin Wall between August 13, 1961 and November 9, 1989. The first was Ida Siekmann, who jumped from her apartment building on Bernauer Straße on August 22, 1961, and died from her injuries. The last was Chris Gueffroy, shot by East German border guards on February 5, 1989. The wall had been the most-televised structure of the Cold War for twenty-eight years. Its physical reality was always more brutal than the photographs suggested.
Honecker to Gorbachev
The wall stood for twenty-eight years because two superpowers maintained the political-military structure that required it. The structure began collapsing in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 11. Gorbachev’s twin policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), introduced through 1986 and 1987, were intended to reform the Soviet system internally, not to dismantle the Eastern Bloc. The dismantling was the unintended consequence.
The first visible cracks appeared in Poland and Hungary. The Polish trade union Solidarność, founded by Lech Wałęsa in 1980 and outlawed in 1981, was legalized in April 1989 and won the June 4, 1989 Polish parliamentary elections. The Hungarian government, under reform Prime Minister Miklós Németh, opened its border with Austria on May 2, 1989, dismantling the barbed wire and watchtowers. Between May and September 1989, approximately fifty thousand East Germans entered Hungary as tourists and then crossed into Austria, reaching West Germany via the West German embassy in Budapest. The August 19, 1989 Pan-European Picnic at the Hungarian-Austrian border allowed approximately seven hundred East Germans to cross openly with East German Border Troops standing aside. The exodus accelerated through September.
Within East Germany, public protest began in earnest in September 1989. The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, which had begun as small peace prayer meetings at the Nikolaikirche on Mondays in 1982, grew across September and October 1989 into mass demonstrations. The October 9, 1989 Monday Demonstration drew approximately seventy thousand demonstrators to the Leipzig city center. The East German Border Troops and Stasi were authorized to use force but declined to do so. The chant “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”) became the protest’s defining slogan.
On Wednesday, October 18, 1989, the East German Communist Party leadership voted to remove the seventy-seven-year-old Erich Honecker, the leader of East Germany since 1971, from power. Honecker was replaced by Egon Krenz, a younger but politically indistinguishable Politburo member. By November 4, 1989, the demonstrations had spread to East Berlin, where approximately five hundred thousand demonstrators gathered at Alexanderplatz. The East German government’s authority was effectively gone. The travel regulations Schabowski would announce on November 9 were the government’s attempt to release pressure. They released the wall.
The Press Conference
The press conference on Thursday, November 9, 1989, was held at the International Press Centre at Mohrenstraße 38 in central East Berlin, approximately two kilometers south of the Bornholmer Straße checkpoint. The conference had been scheduled for 6:00 P.M. to update Western journalists on the previous two days’ meeting of the East German Communist Party Central Committee. Günter Schabowski, a fifty-year-old Politburo member and First Secretary of the SED Berlin district leadership, was the designated spokesman. Schabowski had not attended most of the previous two days’ Central Committee meetings.
The press conference began on schedule. Schabowski read briefing notes for approximately fifty minutes. At approximately 6:53 P.M., just before the conference was scheduled to end, the East German Communist Party’s chief media officer, Günter Pötschke, handed Schabowski a piece of paper with the text of new travel regulations. Schabowski had not seen the regulations before. The regulations had been drafted that morning and approved by the Central Committee that afternoon. They were intended to take effect the following day, November 10, after East German embassies and consulates had been briefed.
Schabowski read the regulations aloud at approximately 6:55 P.M. Most concerned permanent emigration; the briefly-mentioned visit-without-permanent-relocation provision was new. The Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman, of the news agency ANSA, asked the consequential question: when did the regulations take effect? Schabowski paused. He shuffled through his papers. He found no effective date. He replied: “as far as I know, this is effective immediately, without delay” (in German: “Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis ist das sofort, unverzüglich”). The press conference ended at 6:57 P.M.
The Western television networks broadcast the answer live. The West German Tagesschau evening news at 8:00 P.M. led with the announcement that the GDR was opening its border. The broadcast was watched in East Berlin on West German television, which had been available to most East Berliners since the 1970s. By 8:30 P.M., the first East Berliners had arrived at the Bornholmer Straße and Invalidenstraße checkpoints. By 9:00 P.M., the crowd numbered in the thousands. By 11:30 P.M., Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger had opened the barrier. Schabowski’s misreading had ended the East German state.
After November 9
The fall of the Berlin Wall set in motion a sequence of late-1989 and 1990 events that ended forty years of Cold War order. Within seventeen days, the Communist government of Czechoslovakia had been overthrown in the Velvet Revolution (November 17 to December 29, 1989), led by playwright Václav Havel. Within forty-six days, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu had been overthrown and executed on Christmas Day, December 25, 1989, in the only one of the 1989 Eastern European revolutions to involve significant violence. Within four months, the East German democratic elections of March 18, 1990 had returned a Christian Democratic Union victory and a mandate for German reunification. On Wednesday, October 3, 1990, East Germany was formally dissolved and integrated into the West German Federal Republic. The Soviet Union itself dissolved on Thursday, December 26, 1991, two years and seven weeks after the wall’s fall.
The cultural consequences were as immediate as the political ones. By the morning of November 10, 1989, West Berliners had begun chipping the wall apart with hammers and chisels, a practice that would continue for the next two years. The chunks of the wall (Mauerstücke) became commercial souvenirs, sold at Berlin street stands and in Western department stores through the early 1990s. The David Hasselhoff December 31, 1989 New Year’s Eve performance of “Looking for Freedom” at the Brandenburg Gate, broadcast to approximately one million Germans below and reportedly viewed by half a billion globally, became one of the most-mocked images of the era. Hasselhoff appeared in a light-up leather jacket on a crane suspended above the wall.
The East-West cultural exchange that began in late 1989 produced the cultural transformation of the 1990s. The East Berlin underground music scene that had been operating in defiance of the East German state since the mid-1980s emerged into Western view in 1990. The Tresor club, founded on March 13, 1991, in the basement vault of a former East German bank in Mitte, became the first major Berlin techno club. The Love Parade, which had begun as a small demonstration in West Berlin in July 1989, grew through the 1990s into the largest electronic-music street parade in Europe. The Berlin techno sound and the East German “Ostalgie” fashion aesthetic became dominant references in 1990s and 2000s European culture.
The wall had stood for twenty-eight years. Its construction had been the most-televised East-West confrontation of the early Cold War. Its fall was the most-televised East-West reconciliation of the late Cold War. The two billion people who watched the November 9-12, 1989 broadcasts saw a structure that had defined Western political imagination since 1961 disappear over four days. The 1980s, which had been constructed against the wall’s backdrop, ended at 11:30 P.M. on November 9, 1989, when Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger opened a barrier in central Berlin on his own authority.
Disco Demolition Night ended an aesthetic. The Berlin Wall ended a world. The 1970s closed with a baseball stadium of broken records. The 1980s closed with a city of broken concrete. Steve Dahl needed a microphone and a crate of disco records. The Berliners needed twenty-eight years of patience, a misread press conference, and one East German lieutenant colonel willing to open a barrier on his own authority at 11:30 P.M. on a Thursday night.