November 9, 1989: I was at the press conference that made history...
My very personal memories of an unforgettable evening 30 years ago: Together with about 100 fellow journalists, I attended the historic press conference held by Günter Schabowski. The former editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland and First Secretary of the East Berlin SED district leadership had only been serving as spokesperson for the Politburo for three days. No one had any idea about his famous “note”—just as no one expected that the announcement of free travel (“effective immediately, without delay”) during this press conference would lead to the final fall of the Berlin Wall later that night in November.
The evening before, I had arrived in East Berlin. After the chaotic developments and events of the previous weeks in the GDR and the increasing pressure from the Monday demonstrations—especially in Leipzig—the annual meeting of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) promised to be interesting. The mood in the GDR was tense. Erich Honecker, who had ruled the party unchallenged for 18 years, had stepped down and made way for Egon Krenz. Günter Schabowski, who had been appointed Politburo Secretary for Information Affairs only on November 6, 1989, had convened the Central Committee (ZK) press conference of the SED that evening of November 9. He wanted to report on what had been discussed throughout the day in the party committees. This was new for a regime that was not used to, or had always avoided, communication.
Since Schabowski had not attended all the meetings of the SED ZK’s annual session, his information and answers mostly exhausted themselves in the familiar jargon of an apparatchik. Until that moment at the end of the press conference when an Italian journalist from the ANSA news agency asked about details of the travel law draft, the press conference had been uneventful—although in the preceding weeks, hundreds of East Germans had sought refuge in the West German embassies in various neighboring countries: “You spoke of mistakes. Don’t you think the travel law draft you introduced a few days ago was a big mistake?” The law was supposed to regulate private emigration for GDR citizens without prerequisites. Obviously, this text proposal had been hotly debated within the ZK over the previous 48 hours.
The authorities had apparently realized that if the travel law were passed in its current form, GDR citizens would likely quickly leave for the West. In any case, the party leadership had discussed it and revisions were called for.
“No, I don’t believe so,” Schabowski begins to reply, then goes on to say they hoped that through various measures, including the new law on freedom of travel, people would return—especially to ease the burden on West Germany, “because the FRG is having great difficulties accommodating these refugees… The FRG’s capacity is basically exhausted,” he adds.
At that moment, Schabowski remembers that Egon Krenz, the regime’s new strongman, had slipped him a note with the new travel regulations just before the press conference. He pulls this document, which he is seeing for the first time, from his pocket and reads aloud: “And therefore we have decided to introduce a regulation today that makes it possible for every GDR citizen to exit through GDR border crossing points.” … “Private travel abroad can be applied for without prerequisites—travel reasons and family relationships,” he announces. The stunned journalists then ask if this decision is valid immediately. Schabowski hesitates for a moment and then answers, “Yes.” After dodging several more questions, he leaves the room.
I’m sitting next to the GDR Foreign Ministry spokesperson and ask him what exactly that means. That all GDR citizens can now travel abroad without restrictions? He dismisses it: “Certainly not,” he says. But he admits that he didn’t fully understand what the Secretary for Information Affairs had just surprisingly announced either.
The beginning of the end of the Wall
Like all my colleagues, I rush to the Palast Hotel, where I—like most foreign journalists—am staying, to call my Paris editorial office. Even in this “luxury hotel” in East Berlin, where many Western visitors stayed, connections to the outside world were extremely hard to get. You had to practically fight for available phone lines.
After writing and calling in my article, I meet up with East German friends for dinner. On their way over, they had already picked up the first rumors circulating wildly at that time. They could not and did not want to believe that what had been strictly forbidden to them since the construction of the Wall on August 13, 1961—traveling freely abroad—was suddenly, once again, possible. We decided to go together to Checkpoint Charlie, that official crossing point of the Western Allies, which in the still-occupied city had been reserved exclusively for non-German foreigners.
There, crowds were already gathering—from East Berlin! However, the government’s decision had not yet reached the checkpoint. For good reason! Later, it became known that the ZK had intended to allow foreign travel for everyone only under certain conditions, and certainly not starting from November 9.
The crowd began to increase pressure. The chants demanding the right to cross to the other side of the Wall grew louder. But nothing was happening. The border guards held their positions. More and more people, now also getting new information from West German radio and television, joined the waiting crowd. The atmosphere was cheerful—almost exuberant—and the call for the opening of the border became ever more insistent. Finally, around 11 p.m., the gates opened.
The people cheered! Amid the applause of West Berliners who had rushed to the Wall from the other side, we crossed the checkpoint into Kreuzberg and entered the American sector. Tears flowed—my friends could hardly believe what was happening. We embraced strangers. Swept along by the crowd, we moved forward, and the West Berliners lining the streets cheered us on, as if we were crossing the finish line of a marathon. Until 3 a.m., we wandered through the western part of the city, along with thousands of other East Berliners, marveling at the opulence of the storefronts on Kurfürstendamm.
When we tried to return to my hotel in the East through the same Checkpoint Charlie, where no one had asked for our papers a few hours earlier, the border guard asked to see my passport. As if nothing had changed, he informed me that as a Frenchwoman, I would have to pay once again for the visa to re-enter East Berlin…
The dream of a united Germany within reach
When we crossed the infamous Wall on November 9, 1989, no one could have imagined that less than a year later, the GDR and its regime would be history—neither Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the West, nor the East Germans themselves, nor the rest of the world!
The reaction of the Russians was completely unclear. I still vividly remember when, at the beginning of December 1989, I returned to Paris and told my parents that I planned to stay in Berlin for an extended period, bringing my little daughter and her au pair along. My skeptical—German—husband, who worked in Paris, and my parents pressured me to drop the idea. They were convinced that the situation in East Berlin could still quickly escalate and deteriorate, perhaps even leading to the deployment of Russian tanks—the Soviet Union still had 340,000 troops stationed in the GDR.
Only Helmut Kohl, the historian, immediately understood that he had to act quickly if he wanted to influence the course of history. But even his Ten-Point Program, which he presented to the Bundestag on November 28—without prior consultation with his cabinet, the coalition partner, or the Western Allies—did not foresee such a swift reunification of the two German states. It was only at the beginning of 1990 that he realized the dream of a united country in the heart of Europe was within reach. He did everything politically possible to make German unity a reality.
He urgently needed this unity if he wanted to be re-elected. Because in the current polls, the future “Chancellor of Unity” had by no means secured victory in the Bundestag elections, which were scheduled to take place by the end of 1990. Kohl, therefore, had to achieve the rapid and complete accession of East Germans to the Federal Republic. After decades of scarcity, his greatest leverage, if it was even still necessary, was to promise them the Deutsche Mark. So, he preferred to ignore the economic aspects of reunification and promised “blossoming landscapes” instead of listening to those who predicted that the GDR would become Germany’s “Mezzogiorno.”
Hundreds of billions would not be enough
But the East German economy was in ruins. This was one of the reasons why the East Germans had finally taken to the streets after years of patient silence. Through West German television, their window to the world, they had been able to compare their personal situation with the prosperity of their Western compatriots for decades. The gap grew ever wider!
They were still waiting for the coffee and other gift packages their relatives in the West sent them every Christmas. It’s hard to imagine today that in 1989, East Germans had to wait at least 15 years to buy a car. And what kind of car…
According to the figures published by the GDR, the country still ranked among the top ten economic powers in the world! A falsehood that the fall of the Wall made immediately obvious. It only took a visit to a few “Kombinate” (state-owned industrial complexes) to quickly understand that not even a few hundred billion Deutsche Mark would be sufficient to get a planned economy back on track, one that had hardly developed over the last thirty years under the political direction of the state. But strangely, the West German economic institutes never quite wanted to face the truth and admit that the path would be long and expensive.
An economy that couldn’t keep up
For almost a year, until October 3, 1990, I visited dozens of socialist-organized large enterprises – in the so-called “Kombinate”, the state of the means of production was even worse than one might have imagined. How could one promise East Germany “blooming landscapes” under such circumstances and, at the same time, liquidate the country overnight? By denying the GDR economy transitional arrangements that would have given it a bit more time to adapt to a completely new competitive situation in capitalism, the survival chances of East German enterprises sank virtually to zero. On top of that, their traditional markets in Eastern Europe collapsed overnight, and they had no chance in the West anyway. Thus, the East German economy had to start all over again. That was the price it had to pay for political reunification.
Bénédicte de Peretti