The chain reaction that ended East Germany began outside the country. In May 1989 the Hungarian government — which under the reformer Miklós Németh had quietly begun dismantling its physical border installations — opened a gap in the barbed wire on the Austrian border for a single ceremonial press event. East Germans on holiday in Hungary noticed. The trickle of East Germans crossing into Austria via Hungary grew through the summer, despite Hungarian official non-cooperation, to a flood by August. On the 19th of August, at a "Pan-European Picnic" near the Austrian border at Sopron, around 700 East Germans crossed at once with the deliberate complicity of the Hungarian border guards.
The Hungarian government formally opened the border on the 11th of September 1989. Around 13,000 East Germans crossed into Austria, and onward to West Germany, in the first three days. The dam was broken.
The Prague embassy
The next pressure point was the Federal Republic embassy in Prague. East Germans who could not travel via Hungary began arriving at the West German diplomatic compound, climbing the perimeter fence, and claiming the embassy's de-facto asylum. By the end of September there were 4,000 East Germans camped in the embassy gardens. The conditions were appalling — there was no plumbing, no proper sleeping accommodation, no medical care. The West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, after extended negotiations with East German foreign minister Oskar Fischer, secured an agreement that the refugees would be permitted to travel to West Germany by special train through East German territory. The trains left on the 30th of September. Genscher addressed the embassy refugees from the balcony of the building: "Wir sind zu Ihnen gekommen, um Ihnen mitzuteilen, dass heute Ihre Ausreise..." ("We have come here to tell you that today your emigration..."). The rest of the sentence was lost in the cheering.
The October demonstrations
By early October, mass protests had begun in Leipzig. The Monday evening peace prayers at the Nikolaikirche, which had been continuing for eight years with congregations of fifty or a hundred, were now drawing thousands. On the 2nd of October, after the prayer, perhaps 25,000 people walked through the streets of Leipzig chanting "Wir sind das Volk!" — "We are the people!" The slogan, ambiguous in German (it could mean either "we are the people" — i.e., the legitimate source of authority — or "we are a people" — i.e., a unified national community), would in subsequent weeks evolve through both meanings.
The 7th of October was the 40th anniversary of the GDR. Gorbachev attended the official celebrations in East Berlin. The mood was tense. Gorbachev's much-quoted remark to Honecker — "Wer zu spät kommt, den bestraft das Leben" ("Life punishes those who come too late") — was, in subsequent interpretation, taken to be a warning that the Soviet leadership would not intervene to save the East German regime. Demonstrations broke out in Berlin and other cities that night.
The 9th of October was the day the regime could have used force, and chose not to. A demonstration of 70,000 in Leipzig was watched by a fully mobilised security apparatus — Stasi units, the People's Police, factory militia, and an army garrison — under standing orders to disperse the crowd. The local SED leadership, particularly the conductor Kurt Masur and several reform-minded SED members, made a televised appeal for peaceful dialogue. The orders were not given. The demonstration ended without intervention. It was the moment at which the regime conceded, in practice, that it would not, this time, use the Tiananmen option that had been employed in Beijing four months earlier. From the 9th of October onward, the regime's authority was effectively over.
Honecker resigns
The Politburo, with Gorbachev's support, removed Erich Honecker on the 18th of October 1989. His replacement was Egon Krenz, fifty-two years old, a former Free German Youth (FDJ) leader and Honecker's deputy of long standing. Krenz was not a reformer. He was, however, a politically practical man who recognised that the country had to be opened up if the regime was to survive. He announced concessions, met with church leaders, gave interviews to Western journalists. None of it slowed the demonstrations. On the 4th of November, a rally on the Alexanderplatz in central East Berlin drew between half a million and a million people. The protest speakers — including the writer Christa Wolf, the actress Steffie Spira, the East German lawyer Gregor Gysi — demanded freedom of the press, free elections, freedom of travel. The crowd cheered them. The cheering, by now, was for an open ending.
The accident of 9 November 1989
The regime's plan, by the first week of November, was a major reform of the travel law. East Germans were to be permitted to apply for individual visas to visit the West, with the right to return. The new rules were to be issued from the 10th of November. On the 9th of November the Politburo authorised the announcement.
The press conference was held at six o'clock that evening by Günter Schabowski, an SED Politburo member who, having been at another meeting that afternoon, had not been fully briefed on the new regulations. He read out the relevant text — which permitted East German citizens to apply for travel — and was asked by an Italian journalist when the rules would take effect. He shuffled his papers, looked confused, and said: "Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis... ist das sofort, unverzüglich" — "According to my knowledge... this takes effect immediately, without delay."
Within an hour West German television had picked up the announcement and broadcast it to all of East Germany. Within two hours East Berliners had begun arriving at the wall border crossings, demanding to be let through. At 10:45 p.m., the commander of the Bornholmer Strasse crossing — overwhelmed by a crowd of around 20,000 and unable to reach his superiors for guidance — opened the gate. Within twenty minutes all the major Berlin Wall crossings had been opened. By midnight, East and West Berliners were embracing on top of the wall at the Brandenburg Gate. A man with a juggling kit performed on the wall. People with hammers — the famous "Mauerspechte" or wall-woodpeckers — began chipping out souvenirs.
"I went out for an evening walk and the wall was open. I did not believe it. I crossed at Sonnenallee. A West Berliner gave me a cigarette and forty marks and asked if I needed a place to sleep. We talked for an hour. I walked back across at four in the morning. The next day I returned to my office and tried to explain it to my colleagues. None of us understood, yet." — Anonymous East German citizen, oral history collected in 1990
The fall of the country
The Berlin Wall opened on the 9th of November 1989. The German Democratic Republic, as a sovereign country, had at this point about ten months left.
The next five months saw: the resignation of the SED government (December 1989); the first free elections in the GDR's history (March 1990, won by an alliance of Christian Democrats led by Lothar de Maizière); the negotiation of the Treaty on the Establishment of a Currency, Economic and Social Union (May 1990); the introduction of the West German mark as the GDR's currency (1 July 1990); the negotiation of the Unification Treaty (August 1990); and, finally, the formal accession of the GDR to the Federal Republic at midnight on the 3rd of October 1990.
The country that had existed for forty-one years ceased to exist on the day Germany was reunified. The wall that had defined it became, in less than a year, a fragmented row of preserved sections at scattered memorial sites.
What happened in the years after, both to the territory and to its former citizens, is the subject of the final chapter.
End of Chapter VII