Here in Berlin, 35 years ago today, at a dull press conference in a dreary conference room a short walk from my hotel, an East German politician made a rookie error which brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Half a lifetime later, it’s easy to forget that this seismic shift was the result of a bizarre accident – the unlikely collision of two snap decisions by two men whose names are now almost forgotten. As Berlin throws a party to celebrate the 35th anniversary of what Germans call the ‘Friedliche Revolution’, how many of these revellers are aware that their ‘Peaceful Revolution’ was shaped (or even caused) by the impulsive actions of two relatively unknown individuals: a Stasi officer called Harald Jäger and a politburo apparatchik called Günter Schabowski?
Like Run Lola Run, the German movie which replays several versions of the same robbery, showing how the smallest deviations can lead to entirely different outcomes, the story of the Mauerfall (as Germans call the fall of the Berlin Wall) shows how the coincidental choices of two ordinary men had extraordinary consequences which still shape the world we live in. In our godless age it can be comforting to think that momentous events like these are the inevitable result of irresistible geopolitical and macroeconomic forces, rather than chance and human error. The story of the Mauerfall shows it ain’t necessarily so.
Hungary had opened its border with Austria, breaching the Iron Curtain
With the benefit of hindsight, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequent collapse of communist East Germany seems like the logical conclusion of a project which was always doomed to fail: an artificial state cobbled together from the remnants of Hitler’s Reich, shackled to an economic system so useless it even made Germans lazy, so deficient in every aspect that it had to imprison its own citizens within its borders to stop them fleeing to the west. And yet we all thought East Germany was here to stay.
In October 1989, Michael Simmons, Eastern Europe correspondent of The Guardian, published a book called The Unloved Country – A Portrait of East Germany Today. Timed to coincide with the 40th birthday of the German ‘Democratic’ Republic, this fascinating tome dealt frankly with the repressive nature of the regime, but it contained no indication whatsoever that the GDR faced imminent extinction. ‘In 40 extraordinary years a country with less than nothing after the war has produced within the confines of communist planning an economic miracle to rival that of its western sister,’ gushed the blurb on the dustjacket. Barely a month later, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.
East Germany’s Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (the ‘socialist unity’ party which ruled this tyrannical one-party state) marked the 40th birthday of the GDR with a flurry of parades and marches, but this pomp and circumstance was a hollow sham. The country was broke, reduced to penury by 40 years of communism, dependent on loans from West Germany. And thanks to Glasnost and Perestroika, the natives were growing restless.
Since 1961, when the East German government had built the Berlin Wall (or the ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’ as they preferred to call it), blocking off access between East and West Berlin, hundreds of East Germans had been killed while trying to reach West Germany.
Now, galvanised by Gorbachev’s reforms, Hungary had opened its border with Austria, breaching the Iron Curtain, giving East Germans an escape route into western Europe. So many East Germans flooded into Czechoslovakia, en route to Hungary, that the Czechoslovaks closed the border, prompting massive protests in East Germany. These demonstrations grew so big that the East German politburo feared they might lose control. They decided some sort of concession was required to pacify the protestors, and they decided their new secretary for information, Günter Schabowski, was the right man to announce it.
When Schabowski convened that fateful press conference, at 6pm on 9 November 1989, to announce new travel regulations for East German citizens, his task seemed fairly simple. He merely had to read out a statement which had been written for him by his colleagues, explaining that East Germans could now travel to West Germany, so long as they had passports. This sounded like a major climbdown. Actually, it was nothing of the sort.
Few East Germans had passports and the application process (like virtually every other bureaucratic procedure in East Germany) was painfully slow. It would be easy for the government to make it even slower, blocking any applications they didn’t like and delaying others indefinitely. Technically, East Germans were now allowed to travel. Practically, for the vast majority, it would remain virtually impossible. The heat would go out of the protests and migration would shrink to a trickle. It was a clever ruse, a brilliant piece of PR. Unfortunately, Schabowski (literally) hadn’t read the script.
For a western governmental spokesman, schooled in the dark arts of political PR, it would have been inconceivable to read out a press release without even perusing it beforehand. But this was East Germany, where journalists took dictation and didn’t answer back. In a normal East German press conference, Schabowski’s lack of preparation might have given him no problems, but the protests had piqued the interest of the western media, so there were lots of western correspondents there that day, including Peter Brinkmann, a journalist with Bild Zeitung, West Germany’s equivalent of the Sun.
I met up with Brinkmann in Berlin five years ago, on the 30th anniversary of the Mauerfall. He told me what happened. Schabowski had only been in the job three days, so this was new and unfamiliar territory. Rather than reading out the entire press release he merely gave reporters an incomplete precis, skipping the crucial detail about passports. He might still have got away with it if Brinkmann hadn’t been bold enough to ask a direct question, the only question worth asking. When would these new regulations take effect, he asked. Schabowski was bamboozled. The statement he’d been given didn’t provide a date. However rather than stonewalling, as he should have done, he panicked. ‘As far as I know,’ he blustered, ‘immediately.’
‘It was a great mistake,’ Brinkmann told me. Schabowski’s answer to his question gave the western media the perfect story. ‘The gates in the Wall stand wide open!’, announced West German TV that evening (an illegal yet vital news source for East Germans) prompting thousands of East Berliners to rush out to the border crossings between East and West Berlin. In fact, as they soon found out, all the gates were still slammed shut. The border crossings that had been earmarked for some future date were all located in inaccessible rural areas. The East German politburo never planned to open up the Berlin Wall.
Schabowski’s bumbling ineptitude was only one half of the story. The other half was the bravery of East German border guard Harald Jäger, commanding officer at Bornholmer Strasse, one of six border crossings in Berlin. Jäger knew nothing about the press conference, and he hadn’t seen the West German bulletins, so when hordes of East Berliners turned up, demanding entry into West Berlin, he was completely taken by surprise.
Jäger’s orders were quite clear: ‘capture or eliminate all trespassers.’ He telephoned his superiors for clarification. ‘You know your orders,’ came the reply. ‘Nichts neues.’ Nothing new. ‘Should I give the order to open fire?’ he wondered. ‘Shooting was not an option, but nor was doing nothing. Doing nothing would have been the same as shooting, because it would have led to a riot.’ A riot would have led to casualties, so he opened the gates.
For the crowd it was an ecstatic moment, but not for Jäger. ‘My life’s philosophy was shattered,’ he recalled. He’d devoted his entire life to the GDR. Now he’d disobeyed an emphatic order, and he knew the consequences would be colossal. By opening those gates, he’d ended his career, and potentially landed himself in prison. He’d also prevented a bloodbath, a Teutonic Tiananmen Square. If he’d given the order to open fire, the Cold War could have turned red hot that night, and then – who knows? Instead he ensured this uprising remained entirely bloodless.
An even more intriguing ‘what if?’ is: what if Schabowski hadn’t bungled that press conference? What if he’d outlined the passport requirements and told reporters that the border would open at some subsequent, unspecified date? For sure, the days of the old regime would still have been numbered. But without the media spectacle of the Mauerfall, would the Peaceful Revolution have led to a reunited Germany? It was those iconic, euphoric images of East and West Berliners celebrating on the Berlin Wall, transmitted all around the world, which provided the momentum for reunification, cementing the idea in the public imagination, making it feel like a natural, unstoppable process.
A Peaceful Revolution without the Mauerfall might well have been a slower, smoother evolution, leading to a democratic yet independent East Germany – maybe more akin to Austria, inside the EU but outside Nato. As a citizen of the Bundesrepublik, with family roots in the former GDR, I’m delighted that my East German Heimat is now part of a reunited Germany, but with so many East Germans voting for Alternative für Deutschland, in far greater numbers than in West Germany, I’m painfully aware that for many Germans, this is still a nation divided between east and west.
Will it remain so? Will that rift grow ever wider and deeper? Certainly, the mood here in Berlin feels pessimistic on the 35th anniversary of the Mauerfall, a lot more downbeat than it was in 2019, when I met up with Peter Brinkmann on the 30th anniversary. Germany’s coalition government has collapsed, leaving Olaf Scholz as the beleaguered chancellor of a minority SPD-Green alliance, making a spring election a racing certainty.
From my bedroom in the Orania Hotel, in Kreuzberg, I can see over the old border
Against a barrage of bad economic news, that snap election couldn’t come at a worse time for Scholz’s centre-left SPD, which has been polling at pitifully low levels. With no financial upturn in sight, defeat for his Social Democrats looks certain, and at the forthcoming election all eyes will be on AfD. How far can they go? None of Germany’s mainstream parties will work with them, locking them out of any coalition government, but the more votes they win the harder it becomes to maintain that cordon sanitaire.
Yet despite the doom and gloom, I remain indefatigably optimistic about Germany. For all its faults and all its woes, it remains a country of boundless energy, with a can-do mentality reminiscent of the USA. And despite the rise and rise of AfD, I remain confident that the old order will prevail. Spooked by the popularity of AfD, Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats have shifted further to the right and will surely form the next government. Their sharper stance on immigration will spike the guns of AfD.
And although the East German economy still lags behind West Germany, the gap is closing steadily: from less than half of West German GDP per capita 30 years ago to around three-quarters today. East German GDP now outstrips many parts of Britain, not bad going in a place where, for 40 years, private enterprise of any sort was practically impossible. Sure, East Germany has its problems, but thanks to the Mauerfall and the Peaceful Revolution they’re now capitalist problems rather than communist problems – lack of money rather than lack of liberty, a much easier headache to solve.
From my bedroom in the Orania Hotel, in Kreuzberg, I can see over the old border into Mitte, where Schabowski held that press conference. Mitte used to be a grey place, a melancholy maze of empty streets and ruined buildings. Now it’s brash and hectic, full of glitzy shops and restaurants. Kreuzberg used to be a cul-de-sac in the Iron Curtain, a dead-end at the end of a one-way street, surrounded on three sides by the Wall. Now it’s a grungy nirvana, the trendiest part of town. The Death Strip which used to separate them, with its searchlights and watchtowers, is now invisible. Today I walked across it without even knowing it was ever there.
Hardly any of the Wall remains, merely a few sanitised memorials. Its zigzag route across the city is marked by a meandering footpath. Each time I come here I walk along it, marvelling at how much has changed. The first time I came here, in 1991, Berlin was still two cities. Now there’s scarcely any difference. In other, bleaker areas of Eastern Germany, it’s another story altogether – but here in Berlin, at least, after 35 years the wound has healed.
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