Introduction The German Upheaval

Abstract The opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was a complete surprise. During an evening press conference, Gunter Schabowski, secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) of Berlin, read the draft of a new travel law: “Applications for private trips abroad may be submitted without further preconditions.... Permission will be granted immediately. “1 Since this news was not meant to be released until the following day, journalists, without prior briefing, were stunned and confused.

Only at the last minute had the Central Committee included free personal movement in the bill that intended to liberalize emigration. The SED leaders hardly realized what they had just set in motion. The ruling Marxist party justified the Wall as “antifascist protection” against Western revanchism.

In early 1989, Erich Honecker, the East German SED chief, still predicted that it would stand another hundred years, as long as it was required. But most GDR citizens did not feel threatened by the West and resented this curtailment of their freedom to travel. To ease the pressure of protests, the Krenz government gambled that granting the wish for free movement would stabilize its embattled rule.

Since many members of the GDR elite had been able to go to the West, they fundamentally underestimated public hunger for lifting the restraints. With its most popular decision, the Communist regime inadvertently paved the way not only for its own demise, but for the collapse of East Germany as a separate state.