The Berlin Wall was brought down by a press conference. On the evening of 9 November 1989, Günter Schabowski, spokesman of East Germany's ruling Politburo, sat before the cameras to announce a new travel regulation. He had been handed the text shortly beforehand and had not been properly briefed: the decree was meant to take effect the next day, in orderly fashion, with citizens applying for exit visas. Near the end of the hour, the Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman pressed him on when the rules applied. Schabowski shuffled his papers, hesitated, and improvised the most consequential wrong answer of the century: "As far as I know... immediately, without delay" — ab sofort, unverzüglich. West German television did the rest. By late evening, broadcasts were declaring the border open, and East Berliners set out in their thousands to test the claim.
They converged on the crossing points, and the system's fatal flaw was exposed: nobody had told the border guards anything. At the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger, a passport-control officer who had served there for a quarter of a century, telephoned his superiors again and again as the crowd swelled into the tens of thousands, chanting "Open the gate!" No usable orders came. A half-measure — letting the loudest agitators through with their passport photos stamped in a way that secretly invalidated their citizenship — only convinced the crowd that the border was opening. At around 11.30 pm, fearing a crush or a bloodbath, Jäger gave up and ordered the barrier raised on his own authority. The other checkpoints followed. On the far side, West Berliners met the flood with champagne and embraces, and strangers danced on top of the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, where the death strip had stood inviolable that morning.
Twenty-eight years of concrete
The Wall had gone up overnight on 13 August 1961 — barbed wire first, concrete after — to stop a haemorrhage: some 2.7 million East Germans had already fled through Berlin's open sectors. The regime called it the "anti-fascist protection rampart"; in reality every element of its 155-kilometre ring around West Berlin — watchtowers, dog runs, raked sand, tripwires — faced inward, against its own citizens. At least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall, shot, drowned or killed in falls; the wider inner-German border killed hundreds more. By the autumn of 1989 the state behind it was buckling. Hungary had opened its border to Austria in May, offering an escape route that summer holidaymakers used by the thousand; East Germans packed the West German embassy in Prague; and in Leipzig the Monday demonstrations swelled from hundreds to hundreds of thousands chanting "Wir sind das Volk" — we are the people. Erich Honecker, who had boasted in January that the Wall would stand for a hundred years, was forced out in mid-October. The travel decree Schabowski mangled was itself a panicked concession by a leadership trying to bleed off pressure.
After the party
The morning after, the queues began — columns of sputtering two-stroke Trabants at the crossings, and lines outside West German banks paying each visitor 100 Deutschmarks of "welcome money". West Berlin's shops sold out of bananas, which became an affectionate shorthand for everything the East had gone without. And then almost everyone went home, at first — they had jobs on Monday. Souvenir hunters nicknamed Mauerspechte, "wall woodpeckers", chipped at the concrete with hammers and chisels until whole sections came away; official demolition followed within months, and today only short stretches survive, most famously the East Side Gallery. David Hasselhoff, improbably beloved in Germany for the song "Looking for Freedom", sang it atop the Wall on New Year's Eve 1989. Eleven months after the night of the checkpoints, on 3 October 1990, Germany reunified — and that date, not 9 November, became the national holiday, because 9 November was already crowded with German history: the proclamation of the republic in 1918, Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, and above all the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. Germans call it the Schicksalstag, the day of fate. The Cold War's most literal symbol was dismantled and sold in fragments as paperweights — an empire's frontier ending not with a treaty or a battle, but with a bureaucrat's shrug, a raised barrier, and a very long party.
Quiz nuggets
- Günter Schabowski's botched answer — "immediately, without delay", prompted by journalist Riccardo Ehrman — opened the Wall on 9 November 1989.
- Bornholmer Strasse was the first checkpoint to open, at about 11.30 pm, on the sole authority of officer Harald Jäger.
- The Wall was built starting 13 August 1961 and ringed West Berlin for 155 km; at least 140 people died at it.
- German reunification came on 3 October 1990 — chosen over 9 November partly because that date is also Kristallnacht's anniversary.
- Souvenir chippers were nicknamed Mauerspechte, "wall woodpeckers"; the East Side Gallery preserves a surviving stretch.