East Germans breach the Berlin Wall after decades of division

Story: 1989 C.E.  |  Last updated: November 9, 1989

For 28 years, it divided a city, a nation, and in many ways the world. Then, in the span of a few surreal weeks in late 1989 C.E., the Berlin Wall — 96 miles of concrete, barbed wire, electrified fencing, and armed guards — began to come apart. Not in a single dramatic night, but through something harder to engineer and harder to stop: a shift in the hearts and minds of the people who had lived in its shadow.

What the evidence shows

• Berlin Wall fall: The barrier separating communist East Germany from West Germany opened in November 1989 C.E., following months of mass protests, a chaotic government announcement, and crowds of East Germans overwhelming border checkpoints.
• East German protest movement: Citizens in Leipzig, Dresden, and East Berlin had been staging large-scale demonstrations through the autumn of 1989 C.E., with the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig drawing hundreds of thousands of people and refusing to disperse despite the threat of force.
• Inner German border controls: Border formalities were not fully lifted for several more months after November 9, 1989 C.E. — the wall’s fall was a process, not a single moment, as guards, bureaucrats, and ordinary people negotiated a new reality day by day.

The wall in the head

The physical structure was formidable. But East Germans had a phrase for the wall’s deeper power: die Mauer im Kopf — the wall in the head. The omnipresent belief that there was no escape, no hope, no future outside the system. It was, in many ways, more durable than the concrete.

The Washington Post’s Berlin bureau chief at the time described crossing Checkpoint Charlie in the early morning hours of December 1989 C.E. — the first car in line as the border reopened at 6 a.m. The East German guard, a Vopo (Volkspolizei, or people’s police), set up his desk, flipped on the fluorescent light above his lane, and said: “And God said, ‘Let there be light.'” Then he smiled.

This was a man trained to project menace. The joke — and the nervous, astonished laughter it provoked — was its own kind of milestone. He didn’t check the trunk. He waved the car through.

A process, not a moment

History tends to fix the fall of the Berlin Wall to November 9, 1989 C.E. — the night East German spokesman Günter Schabowski, reading from notes he had not fully reviewed, announced that new travel regulations would take effect “immediately, without delay.” Crowds flooded to the checkpoints. Guards, receiving no orders to stop them, stood aside. The images of jubilant Germans atop the wall circled the globe.

But the weeks that followed were stranger and more human than any single night. Teachers in East German schools suddenly had to decide whether to keep teaching required courses on Communist Party ideology — with no guidance from above. History textbooks that once could not legally cross the border were waved through by guards who laughed as they flipped the pages. “No one needs those anymore,” one guard said.

In those final weeks of formal border controls, a few guards still went through the motions. One, caught stamping passports he knew would soon be irrelevant, chatted with travelers about his impending unemployment. “It’s all for fun now, but in a few days, no more job,” he said. “I’m good at stamping things.”

The East German state, it turned out, had been held together as much by attitude as by architecture.

What made it possible

The wall did not fall in a vacuum. The pressure that brought it down had been building for years — and it came from ordinary people, not governments.

The Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, which grew from a few thousand in September 1989 C.E. to more than 300,000 by October, were a direct catalyst. Organizers chose nonviolence deliberately, aware that armed crackdowns had crushed earlier uprisings in the Eastern Bloc. When the East German leadership considered a military response, enough voices inside the party hesitated — and the crowds held.

Broader forces were also at work. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms — glasnost and perestroika — had signaled that Moscow would not send tanks as it had in 1956 and 1968. Hungary had already opened its border with Austria in May 1989 C.E., allowing thousands of East Germans to flee westward through a gap in the Iron Curtain. The wall, when it finally opened, was less a surprise than an inevitability that arrived faster than anyone expected.

And behind all of it: decades of ordinary East Germans finding small ways to resist — keeping banned books, tuning to Western radio, passing information by hand. The people who brought down the wall were, in large part, the same people who had lived under it.

Lasting impact

The reunification of Germany was formalized on October 3, 1990 C.E. — less than a year after the wall opened. Within two years, the Soviet Union itself had dissolved. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not cause all of this, but it made visible what had already become true: that the political order built after World War II was ending.

For the world, the images from November 9, 1989 C.E. remain among the most watched footage of the 20th century — a reminder that systems that seem permanent can end with startling speed when the people who sustain them stop believing. The human rights frameworks that expanded in the 1990s, the enlargement of the European Union, the reunification of families separated for nearly three decades — all trace some part of their lineage to that strange autumn.

The wall had stood for 10,316 days. As of February 2018 C.E., it had been down for just as long — and counting.

Blindspots and limits

Reunification brought freedom, but it also brought economic shock. Many East Germans found their qualifications devalued, their industries shuttered, their savings converted at unfavorable rates. The former border guard who later told a reporter he had never shot anyone — but would have — was still unemployed years later, still thinking about it every day. The wall in the head, as East Germans had always known, was harder to dismantle than the one made of concrete. Surveys taken decades later have continued to show a persistent gap in life satisfaction, wages, and political trust between eastern and western Germany.

Read more

For more on this story, see: The Washington Post — Retropolis

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