Fall of the Berlin Wall

• 1. Introduction

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  At 18:53 on the 9th of November 1989, a journalist at a routine East Berlin press conference asked a simple question about a travel law, and Gunter Schabowski hesitated for just a few seconds before saying the new regulations would take effect "immediately, without delay." He was wrong about that. He had not even been in the room when the regulations were drafted. But those words, broadcast live across East and West Germany, set in motion one of the most consequential nights of the twentieth century. Within hours, hundreds of thousands of people were pressing against the checkpoints of the Berlin Wall, demanding to be let through, as Schabowski had said they could. The guards, vastly outnumbered and unable to reach any superior willing to order them to shoot, simply stepped aside. How did a bureaucratic mix-up, a misread note, and a shrug on live television become the moment the Wall came down? And what happened in the days and months that followed, as a divided city and a divided nation began the long work of becoming one again?

• 2. The Crumbling Eastern Bloc

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  The chain of events that ended the Berlin Wall began not in Berlin but at a picnic on the Austro-Hungarian border. On the 19th of August 1989, the Pan-European Picnic opened a gap in the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary, setting off what organizers hoped would test how the Soviet Union would respond to a relaxed border. The idea had come from Otto von Habsburg. Erich Honecker, the East German leader, later told the Daily Mirror that Habsburg had distributed leaflets as far as Poland, inviting East German tourists to the event with the promise of gifts, food, and Deutsche Marks. Tens of thousands of East Germans, now informed by the media, made their way toward Hungary. The East German leadership did not dare close its own borders entirely, and the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev did not respond at all. By early November, refugees were slipping west through Czechoslovakia or gathering at the West German embassy in Prague. On the 30th of September, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stood on the embassy balcony and told the thousands sheltering there that they were free to leave for West Germany. His sentence broke off mid-word, drowned out by cheering, before he could finish announcing their departure. The following day, the first group left Prague for Bavaria.

• 3. A Wall Built to Kill

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  The Berlin Wall was not a single barrier but a system. Two parallel concrete walls, each standing four metres tall and stretching 155 kilometres, enclosed a mined corridor called the death strip. By 1989, 302 watchtowers lined that strip, and guards had standing authorization to shoot anyone who tried to cross it. Inside East Germany, the political situation was deteriorating fast. On the 18th of October 1989, Erich Honecker stepped down after a long illness, replaced by Egon Krenz, who had been waiting for what his inner circle privately called a "biological solution." Krenz promised reform but was seen by ordinary East Germans as a continuation of the same regime. On the 4th of November, the Alexanderplatz demonstration drew enormous crowds. On the 6th of November, a draft travel law dismissed by West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper as "complete trash" enraged citizens further. Christian Fuhrer, a pastor at St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig, had been holding weekly peace prayers there since 1982, and by the 9th of October 1989 those services drew 70,000 people who marched by candlelight through the streets despite being issued death threats by the secret police. On that night, police and army units had permission to use force. Not a single shot was fired.

• 4. The Accidental Announcement

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  Gunter Schabowski took the podium at the International Press Centre in East Berlin at 18:00 on the 9th of November 1989, leading a press conference broadcast live on East German television and radio. Joining him were Minister of Foreign Trade Gerhard Beil and Central Committee members Helga Labs and Manfred Banaschak. Schabowski had not been part of the discussions about the new travel regulations. Just before the press conference, Egon Krenz handed him a note summarizing the changes but gave him no guidance on how to present them. Shortly before 19:00, ANSA correspondent Riccardo Ehrman asked about the scrapped November 6th travel draft. Schabowski remembered the note, read from it, and described a new regulation allowing East Germans to cross at any border point. A reporter in the front row, either Ehrman or Bild-Zeitung's Peter Brinkmann, asked when the rules would take effect. Schabowski paused, then said: "As far as I know, it takes effect immediately, without delay." Gerhard Beil tried to interject that the Council of Ministers would need to decide, but Schabowski had already moved on. Daniel Johnson of The Daily Telegraph asked what the announcement meant for the Wall itself. Schabowski froze, then gave a rambling answer about disarmament before closing the conference at 19:00, as journalists rushed out of the room. Afterward, Schabowski sat for an interview with NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and repeated that the borders were open immediately.

• 5. The Gates Open

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  At 19:04, the West German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur sent a bulletin reporting that East Germans could cross the border "immediately." By 19:17, excerpts from the press conference were on ZDF's evening news, and by 20:00 they led the ARD Tagesschau broadcast. ARD and ZDF had been reaching nearly all of East Germany since the late 1950s and were far more trusted than the state channels, so this is how most East Germans first heard the news. That night on ARD's Tagesthemen, anchor Hanns Joachim Friedrichs declared: "This the 9th of November is a historic day. The GDR has announced that, starting immediately, its borders are open to everyone. The gates in the Wall stand open wide." East Germans began gathering at the six checkpoints between East and West Berlin, invoking Schabowski's words to demand entry. Overwhelmed border guards made frantic calls to superiors who refused to authorize lethal force. At 22:45, Harald Jager, commander of the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, gave the order to open the gates. Crowds of East Berliners, known as Ossis, poured through and were met by West Berliners, called Wessis, carrying flowers and champagne. Soon, West Berliners climbed on top of the Wall and were joined by East German youngsters. The night of the 9th of November 1989 has since been called the night the Wall came down. Historian Mary Elise Sarotte, writing in a 2009 Washington Post piece, called it an accident: "One of the most momentous events of the past century was, in fact, an accident, a semicomical and bureaucratic mistake."

• 6. Wallpeckers and Bulldozers

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  On the evening of the 9th of November itself, people began taking hammers and other tools to the concrete. Those who chipped away at the Wall for souvenirs were nicknamed Mauerspechte, meaning wallpeckers, and their informal demolition created several unofficial crossing points and drew visitors from across the western world during the season holidays. The East German regime announced ten new official border crossings soon after, including the historically charged sites at Potsdamer Platz, Glienicker Brucke, and Bernauer Strasse. Crowds gathered on both sides to cheer as bulldozers tore down sections to reconnect severed roads. The Brandenburg Gate itself opened on the 22nd of December 1989, when West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl walked through and was greeted by East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow. West Germans and West Berliners gained visa-free travel rights on the 23rd of December, meaning that for the five weeks between the 9th of November and the 23rd of December, East Germans were paradoxically freer to travel than their western counterparts, who still had to apply for visas and exchange a minimum of 25 Deutsche Marks per day. Formal demolition by the East German Border Troops began on the 13th of June 1990, starting at Bernauer Strasse and moving through the Mitte district. By the time the project was complete, the operation had produced an estimated 1.7 million tonnes of rubble, with 300 GDR border guards and later 600 Bundeswehr Pioneers using 175 trucks, 65 cranes, 55 excavators, and 13 bulldozers. In Berlin alone, 184 kilometres of wall, 154 kilometres of border fence, 144 kilometres of signal systems, and 87 kilometres of barrier ditches were removed, with virtually every severed road reconnected by the 1st of August 1990.

• 7. A Fractured Legacy

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  French President Francois Mitterrand and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher both opposed German reunification. In September 1989, Thatcher privately told Gorbachev that a unified Germany would change postwar borders and could endanger the security of the whole international situation. After the Wall fell, Mitterrand warned Thatcher that a unified Germany could make more ground than Adolf Hitler ever had. Those fears did not prevail: reunification formally concluded on the 3rd of October 1990, 339 days after the Wall came down. The date was chosen as German Unity Day partly because the 9th of November carried too many competing histories. On that same date in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and the Weimar Republic was proclaimed. In 1848, revolutionary Robert Blum was executed following the Vienna revolts. In 1923, Adolf Hitler launched the Beer Hall Putsch. And in 1938, Kristallnacht pogroms swept through Germany. Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel criticized the initial euphoria over the 9th of November, noting that "they forgot that the 9th of November has already entered into history, 51 years earlier it marked the Kristallnacht." Decades later, polls continued to show a small but persistent minority in Germany who wished the Wall had never come down. A 2010 poll found 24% of West Germans and 23% of East Germans wished it were still in place. Six sections of the original Wall were preserved as a memorial; painted segments with artistically significant murals were put up for auction in 1990 in both Berlin and Monte Carlo.

• 8. Celebration and Memory

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  On the 25th of December 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted a concert in Berlin using Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, substituting the word "Freedom" for "Joy" in the Ode to Joy, drawing musicians and singers from East and West Germany as well as the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Just days before, on New Year's Eve 1989, David Hasselhoff performed his song "Looking for Freedom" from the top of the partly demolished Wall before a crowd of 200,000. On the 21st of July 1990, Roger Waters staged the Pink Floyd album The Wall just north of Potsdamer Platz, with guest performers including Sinead O'Connor, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Bryan Adams, and members of the Scorpions. The 20th anniversary in 2009 brought more than 1,000 foam domino tiles, each over eight feet tall, stacked along the Wall's former route in Berlin's city center and toppled in stages toward the Brandenburg Gate. For the 30th anniversary in 2019, a week-long arts festival ran from 4 to the 10th of November, with outdoor exhibits at Alexanderplatz, the Brandenburg Gate, the East Side Gallery, and the former Stasi headquarters in Lichtenberg. The Mauerreise project sent twenty symbolic Wall bricks from Berlin to Korea, Cyprus, Yemen, and other places defined by division, giving artists and residents in those places a literal piece of the Wall to respond to. Official demolition was finally completed in 1994, though the last section of the Berlin-Brandenburg border wall was not dismantled until November 1991.