10 - Living through the GDR: History, Life Stories, and Generations in East Germany

Summary

THE EVENTS OF 9 NOVEMBER 1989 were initially greeted with what appeared to be virtually universal acclamation. Over the summer of 1989 the “Iron Curtain” that had divided Cold War Europe began to develop gaps and holes through which people were able to escape to the West. In the course of the early autumn, across East German towns and cities hundreds of thousands of people came out on the streets to demonstrate their disaffection with the regime. On the occasion of the GDR’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, on 7 October 1989, the Soviet Union under Gorbachev’s leadership had indicated its unwillingness to step in and shore up by force an unpopular Communist regime. On 9 October 1989, despite intense preparation and the real possibility of a bloodbath on the lines of the earlier Tiananmen Square massacre in China, the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) and its State Security Service, the Stasi, renounced the use of force and allowed a mass demonstration in Leipzig to proceed peacefully. In the face of widespread popular opposition and lacking in reliable support even among its own ranks, in the following weeks the SED itself began the process of unraveling its own grip on power. Long-time SED leader Erich Honecker was replaced by the ever-smiling Egon Krenz and, following a brief trip to Moscow from which Krenz returned apparently converted to the cause of reform, sweeping political changes were introduced. It was even an official spokesperson for the SED, Günther Schabowski, who on 9 November 1989 conveyed the momentous Politburo decision about new travel regulations, which effectively meant, as Western journalists and East Germans alike rapidly realized, that the wall would no longer serve its previous function — exercised for some twenty-seven years — of keeping East Germans inside the GDR against their will. The unification of Germany, which took place less than a year later, on 3 October 1990, was neither intended at this time, nor was it a direct outcome of this moment, yet the opening of the Berlin Wall removed the crucial precondition for the existence of an independent second German state, which could not continue to exist in face of a more affluent democracy in the west.