The 9th of November twenty years ago saw the fall of a barrier that divided the city of Berlin for twenty-eight years. From when it was erected to when it was torn down, the Berlin Wall was a symbol of the schism not just between communist East Berlin and capitalist West Berlin, but also between the communist bloc and the free market west.
The wall was more than a dangerous symbol. The death toll of those who were killed attempting to cross from East to West between 1961 and 1989 is estimated at 100 to over 1,200 people; shot by border guards, stabbed by the fence’s barbed wire, or dead from jumping from the top floors of DDR high-rise apartments with the hope of landing on the other side.
Thus, November 9 was monumental – and, by some reports, highly unexpected. “My father never believed it would happen,” said Tapio Sigmund, an exchange student at the college from Freiburg, Germany.
While the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the divisions between those two worlds may appear to have been inevitable from the perspective of today, the end of the East German government was in fact a surprising and somewhat bizarre event.
Two Connecticut College faculty members, Professors McFarland and Patton, were in Germany during this tumultuous period. At the beginning of 1989, the socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe were already in the process of opening to the West. That spring, the Hungarian government decided to grant exit visas to its citizens to leave the country, creating a hole in the physical barrier between East and West Europe. In the summer, groups of East Germans began traveling to Budapest to apply for exit visas to Austria, from which they would be able to reach West Germany.
After weeks of deliberation, the Hungarian government decided to grant them visas, providing an avenue of escape from East Germany into its previously unreachable sister state. Over two hundred thousand East Germans emigrated via Hungary over the summer of 1989. Instead of interfering in Hungary’s travel liberalization, as it would have done in earlier decades, the government of the Soviet Union chose to let the situation take its course. The Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, was himself committed to opening the bloc of communist countries to the rest of the world and improving relations with the Western world.
Indeed, in a trip to East Germany three months before the Berlin Wall fell, Gorbachev warned, “life punishes those who come too late,” signaling that the Soviet Union would not try to prop up the East German regime. While East Germany was opening to the West, no one knew how quickly events would unfold.
“No one saw the Berlin Wall coming into the equation,” said Professor P. James McFarland of the German Studies Department, who was studying in the West German city of Kiel at the time. The leaders of East Germany did not know what to do — the Soviet Union was giving them no guidance as to how they should respond to the mass emigration to West Germany through Hungary.
But on November 9, 1989, the East German government made its decision.
“The policy on visas before was that, if you wanted a visa to travel to another country, you had to give the authorities a reason to grant you one,” said McFarland. “The government reversed that – they had to have a reason now to deny you a visa.”
At the daily press conference on the evening of the 9th, the East German government’s spokesman Gunter Schabowski announced the change to the media. But the written announcement he was reading mistakenly stated that the policy change would take effect immediately instead of the following morning, which is what had been decided.
When asked when the policy would take effect, Schabowski therefore said, with some uncertainty, “effective immediately.”
Professor McFarland had been watching a soccer game on television that evening. Suddenly, he says, the broadcast was interrupted, and a news announcer stated that the restriction on travel had been reversed.
After a few minutes, McFarland said, all the television stations began switching to coverage of Berlin, showing images of thousands of East Berliners gathering at the East Berlin side of the wall. And outside of Berlin, all across the border between East Germany and West Germany, people were cutting the wire fences dividing the two nations.
Professor David Patton of the Government Department was in Berlin at the time. “After the announcement, people were thinking ‘does this mean what I think it means?”’ he said. “People began gathering at the border checkpoints, on both sides of the wall. West German T.V. was saying ‘the borders are open,’ and that really fueled the situation.”
When he went to the border checkpoint at the Brandenburg Gate the next morning, he said, “There were people all around the wall, and on top of it. It had the atmosphere of a party. East Germans were pouring across the border. The West Berlin department stores were filled with East Germans buying Western goods or just looking at them — they had only seen them on television before.
They had no idea where everything was in West Berlin, though; the East German maps of Berlin only showed East Berlin. So the West Berlin newspapers printed maps of West Berlin on the front pages for the East Berliners coming over.”
With East and West Germany no longer separated by physical barriers, it was clear that the country would be unified within the next decade or two. But again, the speed at which events transpired shocked the world. East Germany held the first free elections in its history on the 18th of March, 1990, and the Socialist Party was voted out of power in favor of the Christian Democrat Union (CDU). The CDU had campaigned on a platform of unification with West Germany, and it proceeded to negotiate with the West German government for that purpose. On the 18th of May, 1990, the two nations agreed to a common currency and the adoption by East Germany of West Germany’s code of laws.
November 9 was a national day of celebration this year, but it has not been codified as a regularly occurring holiday. There was hesitation at marking this date on the national calendar – November 9 is also the anniversary of several other events in German history, some dark, including kristallnacht, a program against Jewish Germans in 1939, the founding of the SS in 1925, as well as Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication in 1918.
In 1990, nearly a year after the fall of the Wall, on the 3rd of October, Germany officially became a unified nation. This date is now commemorated as the national reunification festival.
But “the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t really about unification,” said Patton. “It was about the demand by the East Germans for basic rights. They demanded the right to travel, so eventually their government had to listen and grant them that right. That’s why the wall fell.”
Additional reporting by Samantha Herndon.
ICH BIN EIN BERLINERRRR!