A great step for a man, but a small one for humanity
When, on November 9th, 1989, Günter Schabowski read a sentence from the draft of a new Law on Free Travel Conditions for citizens of East Germany (the GDR) to the Federal Republic of Germany, at an afternoon press conference for foreign correspondents in Berlin, one journalist asked him when it would take effect.
“Immediately, according to the information I have—without delay,” replied the uncertain GDR Politburo spokesman Schabowski, launching himself directly into history. West German media immediately broadcast the news, and that same evening thousands of East Berliners crossed into West Berlin. That night the Berlin Wall fell, the wall that had physically and symbolically separated the two Germanys and two worlds—East and West—since 1961.
The entire world knew that very night that history was unfolding, and the live TV broadcast brought tears even to those who had no personal connection to Germany or to Germans. It was truly touching to watch relatives from both sides of the wall embrace for the first time after so many years, while “Trabants” honked through the streets of West Berlin. It looked as if the world had finally come to its senses.
The Politburo and Schabowski reportedly had no idea what consequences that press conference would trigger. The spokesman was supposed to only read a section of a text written a few hours earlier and did not expect questions, as he had no experience with Western journalists—and the Eastern journalists he normally met were not in the habit of asking them. When he said what he had to say, they asked a question, and his answer set off an avalanche.
Shortly after the press conference, an unmanageable crowd of citizens gathered at the city’s border crossings, and there was nothing left to do but let them through. What was unusual was that the same citizens, unlike before, were not fleeing to freedom—they returned home to East Berlin after a few hours. It was Thursday. The next morning, they went to work.
Changes to the foreign travel law were one in a chain of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. That autumn, East Germans were fleeing en masse to the Federal Republic of Germany via Czechoslovakia and Hungary, with no intention of returning home. Building a wall between two then-communist states was not an option, so GDR authorities resorted to travel liberalization. Three weeks earlier, Egon Krenz had replaced the hardliner Erich Honecker as General Secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party.
But the beginning of the end of the Berlin Wall occurred several years earlier, when “perestroika” was proclaimed in the Soviet Union. This historic word was first spoken by the leader of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, at the party congress in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1985, announcing political and economic reforms in the USSR—the so-called one-party democratization. In reality, it was an admission that the state was in deep crisis. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster confirmed that the situation was slipping out of control.
The first to publicly call for the destruction of the wall was Ronald Reagan, then President of the United States, in Berlin in June 1987. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” Reagan said in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. There is no doubt he knew what he was saying. In the Baltic Soviet republics, mass gatherings were taking place in remembrance of the victims of Stalin’s regime and in commemoration of the former independence of those states.
The police did not use force, which encouraged the citizens of the three Baltic republics, who in 1988 organized national movements demanding decentralization. At the same time, unrest erupted in the Caucasus republics. The Soviet empire was falling to its knees, yet the Berlin Wall still stood tall. The next year would be its last.
When, in February 1989, the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan after ten years, it was the first step toward a new world order. From April to June, unrest also shook China. The world remembers how a Chinese army tank ran over a demonstrator on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but few remember that the next man who stood before the tank was avoided.
Even fewer likely recall the Peace Music Festival held on August 12–13, 1989, in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium. Seemingly unimportant politically, it was actually historic. Almost no middle-aged Russian has forgotten it. For the first time, Western bands performed in the USSR—something unimaginable until then. The festival was opened by Skid Row, an American heavy metal band, performing a song that wasn’t theirs. They played the legendary (and always relevant) “Holiday in the Sun” by the Sex Pistols. It is a song about the absurdity of the Berlin Wall, with the line—I gotta go over the wall.
The following weekend, on August 19th, the so-called Pan-European Picnic was held in Hungary. That day, the border between Hungary and Austria was symbolically opened for a few hours, and thousands of East Germans fled through it to the West. It was, we can now believe, another test of Soviet tolerance, and the USSR did not react.
A massive citizen protest held on November 4th at Alexanderplatz in Berlin was the first for which GDR authorities issued a permit. More than half a million demonstrators demanded, among other things, the destruction of the wall and the reunification of the two Germanys. One of the speakers was Günter Schabowski. Just five days later, he would hold his now-famous press conference.
Events followed one after the other. Polish labor leader and later head of state Lech Wałęsa spoke before the U.S. Congress on November 15th. The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia began on November 17th, and writer Václav Havel became president on December 29th. In December, armed revolution broke out in Romania. After a summary trial, President Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed. That same month, Gorbachev and U.S. President George H. W. Bush met in Malta, where they announced the end of the Cold War.
Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1990, and Germany was reunified a few days earlier. Earlier that year, in January, the first McDonald’s restaurant had opened in Moscow. The German rock band Scorpions, who had also played at the Moscow festival in August 1989, released a hit song inspired by those events: “I follow the Moskva down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind of change. Let your balalaika sing what my guitar wants to say…” The song “Wind of Change” became the unofficial anthem of freedom in Eastern Europe, as well as in Russia itself. This melancholy lullaby enchanted millions.
The West won the Cold War, which had effectively lasted since the end of World War II—specifically since 1946, when former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his speech at Westminster College in Fulton (USA). “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” Churchill said, before the barbed-wire fences on the borders of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany with Austria and West Germany had even been built.
When in May 1945 the Red Army and the Allies met among the ruins of Hitler’s Germany, each wanted a share of the spoils. The agreement on division was concluded three months later at the Potsdam Conference, when Germany was divided into four occupation zones. Berlin, the capital of the GDR, was divided according to the same model. From the establishment of the Bonn Republic in 1949 until its accession to NATO in 1955, West Germany gradually gained sovereignty, and by 1952 it had acquired observer status at the UN. East Germany, also proclaimed a state in 1949, became a UN member in 1973.
Since, thanks to the Marshall Plan, West Germany had already been declared an “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) by the late 1950s, and since it enjoyed many freedoms absent in East Germany, the GDR began issuing special passports in 1957 for crossing to the other part of the city. This limited but did not prevent movement. And on the night between August 12th and 13th, 1961, the border with the western part of the city was closed. That night became known as Barbed Wire Sunday. From that day until 1980, the roughly 140-kilometer-long wall was upgraded and perfected, making crossing extremely difficult. According to a 1963 agreement, West Berliners could visit relatives in the eastern part of the city during holidays, while those in the east were strictly forbidden from going west.
Around 5,000 people managed to escape over the wall during its 28 years, while according to official statistics about 200 were killed in escape attempts. For the Western world, the wall was the “wall of shame,” and for the East the “bulwark against fascism.” Its dismantling took place in the summer of 1990, while a small section remains intact today as a tourist attraction.
The Warsaw Pact officially ceased to exist in 1991, and that same year the Soviet Union peacefully dissolved. The SFR Yugoslavia, the only European state officially neither East nor West, broke apart in a bloody series of wars beginning in 1991.
Thirty years later, NATO’s western borders have shifted eastward, and all Eastern European states that were once members of the Warsaw Pact—as well as three former Yugoslav republics—are now in the North Atlantic Alliance. For several years now, the term “Cold War” has been used again to describe relations between the West and Russia. From today’s perspective, one could say that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great step for a man, but still a small one for humanity.
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