The Berlin Wall (68 page)

On 7 November, the members of the government headed by Willi Stoph handed in their resignations. On 8 November, the Politburo resigned
en masse
. It was replaced by younger and more reformist appointees, including Hans Modrow, who, although an important district secretary, had been excluded from the previous body.

Meanwhile, there were angry demonstrations outside government buildings, especially local offices of the
Stasi
. On 7 November, Mielke signed a lengthy and anxious report to the Politburo on the growth of the protest movement. There was little of the purse-lipped arrogance pre
viously characteristic of
Stasi
documents. The report observed that the crowds outside
Stasi
buildings were shouting things like ‘Burn the building down!’, ‘Out with the
Stasi
swine’, ‘Kill them’, and ‘The knives are sharpened, the nooses are prepared’.
¹⁶
Mielke promptly sent a secret directive to all
Stasi
districts and departments, ordering the destruction of sensitive documents, especially those that might incriminate the
Stasi
’s network of unofficial informers.

The air was thick with doubt and intrigue, a familiar, anxious reek in the corridors of power that conveyed one message only:
fin de régime
: end of the regime.

Proposals had already been published for more liberal travel and visa regulations, allowing up to thirty days of foreign travel per year. The application process would take around a month and ‘normally not lead to a negative outcome’. No dates, however, were set for these suggestions to become law. An examination of the small print also showed that bureaucrats would remain able to grant or withhold permission pretty much at will. Besides, the maximum hard-currency allowance (fifteen West marks) would scarcely buy breakfast outside the GDR.

Meanwhile, Krenz, seemingly victorious in his battle for control of the SED, vowed to stay in office and called the Wall a ‘bulwark’ against Western subversion. The regime was threatening to drown in a torrent of mixed messages.

On the morning of 9 November, the sun shone fitfully in East Berlin. The thermometer crept slowly to ten degrees centigrade. That morning, an article appeared in
Neues Deutschland
, commenting on the continuing mass exodus from the GDR via other countries. It was not written by some party hack, but by a group of reformers. They pleaded with East Germans not to leave their country in its hour of need:

We are all deeply uneasy. We see the thousands who are daily leaving our country. We know that a failed policy has reinforced your mistrust of any renewal of our community life until the last few days. We are aware of how helpless words are against mass movements, but we have no other means but our words. Those who leave diminish our hope. We beg you, stay in your homeland, stay with us!

On the first day of November, Krenz rescinded the ban on travel to Czechoslovakia, opening the floodgates once more. With Honecker gone and the new rulers clearly unwilling or unable to enforce their will in the traditionally forceful post-Stalinist fashion, more than 20,000 East German citizens had crossed from Czechoslovakia into Austria during the twenty-four hours preceding 9 November. Now it was the Czechs’ own Communist government that was coming under pressure. They were threatening to close the border. The East German ambassador in Prague had been brusquely informed that the Czech government ‘did not intend to build refugee camps for East German citizens’.

On 6 November, half a million citizens of what satirists were now calling the ‘German Demonstrating Republic’ attended the ‘Monday Meeting’ in Leipzig. Speakers pointed out the catches in the new ‘thirty day’ travel regulations and criticised the tiny foreign-currency allowance. They called not for a modification of the travel laws but for their abolition. ‘In dreißig Tagen um die Welt—Ohne Geld!’ (freely translated: ‘Around the world in thirty days-but how to pay?’) chanted the crowd.

At the Interior Ministry on the Mauerstrasse in East Berlin, a working party of four officials, including two
Stasi
officers, had been given the task of temporarily modifying existing laws to deal with the current crisis. On the morning of 9 November, they were due to draft at the Politburo’s behest a resolution ‘For the alteration of the situation regarding permanent exit of GDR citizens via the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’. They had decided to entitle it ‘Immediate Granting of Visas for permanent exit’ but, one said later, as they laboured at the draft they felt less and less happy with the concept.

We were charged {he explained} with coming up with a regulation for those citizens who want to leave the country permanently. But were we then supposed to
not
let out those who just wanted to go and visit their aunty? That would have been schizophrenic.
¹⁷

The final draft stipulated that, so long as East German citizens were in possession of a passport and visa, no restrictions should be placed on
either permanent emigration or private visits. People would be allowed to leave the GDR via any border crossing point between East Germany and either West Berlin or the Federal Republic. It added rather feebly that exits were to take place ‘in an orderly manner’.

The material was couriered over to the Central Committee building, where the Politburo was in session. After presenting the document, Krenz reminded his colleagues of the pressure they were under from the Czech government, and assured them that the Soviets were in favour of the new measure. The Politburo members-most of them recently elected to replace hardliners and therefore unfamiliar with the details of previous regulations—nodded it through. The same went for the Council of Ministers, which rarely made changes to material approved by the Politburo.

A few minutes before six o’clock that evening, Günter Schabowski, the Central Committee’s media spokesman, arrived at the International Press Centre in the Mohrenstrasse, where the government held its newly instituted live, daily press conferences.

The press centre was packed with print and television journalists, including-since East Germany had now entered the era of ‘openness’—cameras from the GDR’s own television news. Schabowski was tired and a little distracted. It had been a long day. He had not been at the meeting that approved the revised regulations, but half an hour earlier he had dropped by Krenz’s office and asked the General Secretary about the day’s proceedings. Were there any important announcements he needed to make? Krenz had passed him the document detailing the new temporary travel regulations, and Schabowski had hurried off to the press conference.

The conference, at which Schabowski was just one of the spokespeople, though the most senior, started at six exactly. However, there were other questions to be dealt with first. Things dragged on. The announcement of the new travel rules came as the final item on the agenda. Although technically it was a government and not a party matter, Krenz had personally given the document to Schabowski, and so it felt natural that, although he was actually the SED spokesman, he should convey its contents to the assembled journalists.

At 6.53 p.m., sweating slightly under the television lights and visibly
exhausted, Schabowski peered down at the document Krenz had given him. It was still headed, a little gnomically, ‘For the alteration of the situation regarding permanent exit of GDR citizens via the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic it is stipulated…’ In a little preamble he told the press, rather wearily, that the document would ‘make it possible for every citizen of the GDR to leave the country using border crossing points of the GDR’. Then he read out its somewhat dense bureaucratic formulations in mechanical fashion:

1. The decree from 30 November 1988 about travel abroad of GDR citizens will no longer be applied until the new travel law comes into force.
   
2. Starting immediately
   , the following temporary transition regulations for travel abroad and permanent exits from the GDR are in effect:
   
    
   
   • a) Applications by private individuals for travel abroad can now be made without the previously existing requirements (of demonstrating a need to travel or proving familial relationships). The travel authorisations will be issued within a short period of time. Grounds for denial will only be applied in particularly exceptional cases.
     
   • b) The responsible departments of passport and registration control in the People’s Police district offices in the GDR are instructed to issue visas for permanent exit
     without delay
     and without presentation of the existing requirements for permanent exit. It is still possible to apply for permanent exit in the departments for internal affairs {of the local district or city councils}.
     
   • c) Permanent exits are possible via all GDR border crossings to the FRG and (West) Berlin.
     
   • d) The temporary practice of issuing (travel) authorisations through GDR consulates and permanent exit with only a GDR personal identity card via third countries ceases.
     
3. 3.
   The attached press release explaining the temporary transition regulation will be issued on 10 November
   .
   

Responsible: Government spokesman of the GDR Council of Ministers

{italics the author’s own}

Then Schabowski leaned back in his chair, almost certainly not expecting any questions. The travel issue had been dragging on for some days, and this was yet another attempt to defuse it without giving the GDR’s population more than the regime thought fit. After all, the measure was still tagged as ‘temporary’. This saga would, it could be assumed, run and run, and there would be more episodes.

None the less, the journalists were intrigued. At 6.57, an Italian newspaperman asked Schabowski if this was some kind of mistake. Schabowski repeated that private travel and permanent exit from the GDR were now permitted and went on:

So, private travel to foreign countries can be applied for without presentation of existing requirements, or proving a need to travel or familial relationships. The travel authorisations will be issued within a short period of time.

The responsible departments for passport and registration control of the People’s Police district authorities in the GDR are instructed to issue visas for permanent exit without delay, without the applicant’s having to provide valid evidence of previous requirements regarding permanent exit.

There was murmuring among the press representatives. Someone—said to have been Tom Brokaw of the American NBC network—asked him exactly when this regulation came into effect. Schabowski seemed a little uncertain. He checked the wording of the document in front of him and then replied: ‘So far as I know, that is, uh, immediate, without delay.’ Schabowski had failed to see that the regulation did not come into effect until the next day, 10 November, and that until then there was supposed to be an embargo on the announcement.

There are a number of myths surrounding what proved to be a momentous event. The first is that Schabowski was forced to read from a hard-to-decipher note hastily scribbled by Krenz. He wasn’t. Krenz had given him a copy of the actual announcement. This, however, Schabowski had hastily placed among a sheaf of his own notes, through which he later had to scrabble before finding the document and starting to read it to the assembled press. The second myth is that the news was an immediate sensation. It now seems that, in reality, the press hung around for a while after the press conference and that the atmosphere was one of considerable confusion. Some refuelled at the nearby coffee bar, still trying to work out the exact meaning of the document and to square it with what the SED spokesman had told them.
¹⁸

The first reports from DPA and Reuters, which came over the wires at a couple of minutes after seven p.m., simply said that any GDR citizen would be entitled, from now on, to leave the country via the appropriate border crossing points. Low-key stuff. Then, at five past seven, Associated Press pulled ahead of the pack and spelled its interpretation out in a simple but sensational sentence: ‘According to information supplied by SED Politburo member Gu¨nter Schabowski, the GDR is opening its borders.’

The storm broke. Within half an hour, all the other agencies had picked up the phrase. As did the news bulletins on the West German television stations. The generally trusted state-financed network, ARD, led its eight o’clock bulletin with those exact words: ‘The GDR is opening its borders’.

By the time the news bulletin was over, a total of eighty East Berliners had already arrived at the Bornholmer Strasse, Heinrich-Heine-Strasse and Invalidenstrasse checkpoints and were requesting permission to cross into West Berlin. The border officials sought advice. They were instructed to tell would-be border-crossers to come back tomorrow.

The GDR’s leadership had been caught completely off guard. The Central Committee plenum, which had been in progress for two days, did not end until 8.47 p.m. No one seems to have noticed the growing excitement over Schabowski’s press conference. Krenz’s main concern at this stage seems to have been his political position: to the General Secretary’s disappointment, several of his reformist nominations for
membership of the Politburo had been rejected by the Central Committee, in which the hardliners still formed a strong block. Immediately after the meeting was over, he retreated to his office and stayed there for some time.

Meanwhile, the news was spreading to the outside world. By 9.30 the Americans, the British, the French and the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had all realised that something remarkable was happening in Berlin. Kohl was on a visit to Warsaw (where there was now a government led by the non-Communist Solidarity movement). He heard the news while at a large formal banquet, and immediately realised he was ‘dancing at the wrong wedding’, as the German saying goes.