Communists open Berlin Wall: East Germans sweep aside Iron Curtain – all border crossing points declared legal

by Anna Tomforde in East Berlin

10 November 1989

East Germany’s ruling Communist Party last night took the momentous step of allowing all citizens direct passage to the West in a step that renders obsolete the Berlin Wall and puts into question the border between the two Germanies.

The extraordinary announcement represents the single most dramatic transformation of the political map of post-war Europe. It follows a tumultuous week during which the Communist authorities have vainly sought to stem a tide of popular opposition.

Within hours, East Germans on foot and in cars began arriving in West Germany and West Berlin. West German television said a couple crossed the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in West Berlin at 9.15 pm (8.15 GMT) with identity cards stamped with the new-style visas.

The decision was announced by Mr Güenter Schabowski, a politburo member, after the second day of a central committee meeting in East Berlin. He said it would come into effect immediately, and would last until new travel regulations were passed into law.

Soon afterwards, the official ADN news agency said tens of thousands of people, many probably unaware of the new travel rules, took to the streets in several cities demanding free elections and liberalised travel.

When East German television carried the announcement, the station’s switchboard was jammed almost instantly as thousands of callers tried to elicit more information.

East Germans will be able to obtain exit visas without delay, allowing them to cross into the West through all border points within Berlin and along the border with West Germany. Tourists who want to return to East Germany can also obtain immediate permission. Because of the exceptional nature of the decision, passports will not be needed. ‘We have decided today that all East Germans who want to leave permanently can do so without delay.’

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Revellers rush on hated gates

by Anna Tomforde

10 November 1989

Hundreds of youths last night clambered up to dance atop the Berlin Wall near the most potent symbol of the divided Germanies, the Brandenburg Gate. West Germans, carrying hammers to chip away at the surface, rushed forward to greet them. East German border guards at times sprayed the crowd with water cannon but otherwise let the crowd revel on unchecked.

“Open the gate! Open the gate!” the East Berliners shouted as the gathering grew with the news that the borders would be opened. All along the wall, West Berliners trampled over the white demarcation line dividing the city, in effect crossing into the East.

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Editorial: All to hail, and all to play for

11 November 1989

They crossed the border with incredible joy, amazement, tears and good humour. They sang and sparkled, above, below and beside the Berlin Wall. It was one of those very rare, absolutely electrifying, moments when the ordinary lay people take over and all the professionals – from prognosticators to border guards – get quietly out of the way. From the sidelines we should now be thinking big, electric thoughts about a future where so much, as yet barely definable, is possible. Germany is a country on the verge of reunification in spirit – never mind too much yet about the jurisdictional details. Something will take shape, probably closer to confederation than a total merging of frontiers and institutions. The process under way simply sweeps aside the natural hesitations of history (from Mr Gennadi Gerasimov yesterday in Moscow to the ex-army paper-seller up the road) about seeing one Germany once again. It also sweeps aside, with only a touch-wood percentage of remaining doubt, any real chance of tanks or troops or anyone else standing in the way. The victims of Beijing died so that everyone else would realise that this is now the unacceptable and dead-end alternative.

The crumbling of the Berlin Wall also signifies definitively, beyond the powers of any assemblage of international strategists to deny, the end of the superpowers’ cold war in Europe. Those flickering black and white images of the Berlin airlift can go back to the film archive room. Europe has emerged from the post-war transition which was no less transitional for lasting over four decades. The long-obvious truth is now openly revealed. Politics, internal and external, not weapons, kept Europe divided. Counting missiles and armoured personnel carriers was never a more mature exercise than collecting train numbers.

There is no denying that the centre of European gravity is going to shift as a result of the German earthquake. No-one can be quite sure that some new fault line will not appear. It is very important not to encourage, in appearance or reality, a situation where East Germany simply joins ‘the Western camp.’ That would be to create a fresh imbalance – another reason why the dissolution of one monolith must be accompanied by that of the other. It would be the surest way of providing Mr Gorbachev’s critics – apparently at the moment disarmed like everyone else by the speed of events – with destructive ammunition. The Soviet Union (unlike, we should note, the US) has always insisted that it is a European power, and will be rightly alarmed if a new Germany merely enlarges the other Europe. It is preferable to see (and we can hardly prevent) the re-emergence of a Germany linked to the rest of Europe, but essentially its own arbiter. Since that was the sovereign role we deliberately created for West Germany, we can hardly deny it now to the East as well.

There are shadows in many minds; of course there are shadows. But West Germany, over forty years, has developed the most prudent of democratic credentials, the most wise and cautious of voting patterns. Germany with its entirely new human face is the formidable economic power on the European – and world – scene. If reunification is a challenge, it can only be met by more and wider European cooperation. As the horizons enlarge, even 1992 begins to appear a somewhat limited concept which will move sharply down the agenda in Strasbourg next month. Looking even further ahead (but if ever there was a stimulus to vision it is now) we begin to understand the potential behind the idea of Mr Gorbachev’s common European home. A Europe where national rivalries are subsumed by economic cooperation, where military budgets are cut to ceremonial levels, where the wealth is at last available not only to tackle long-neglected evils at home but to pay for a genuine fight against poverty, injustices and ecological disaster in the rest of the world …

This is an edited extract. Read the article in full.

Thousands of East Berliners at one of the new openings in the Wall, Eberswalder Strasse, 11 November 1989. Photograph: Patrick Hertzog/AFP/Getty Images

Transport of delight sounds anthem of unity

by Ed Vulliamy in Berlin

13 November 1989

The anthem of the reunification of Berlin established itself in the west of the city over the weekend, and it was neither a political speech nor a verse from Deutschland Uber Alles.

It was the amicable, scooter-like chugging of thousands upon thousands of little Trabant cars, brimful with families map-reading their way through the biggest weekend party of the 20th century. The cars formed convoys along the cobblestones and boulevards, or parked – illegally but unpunished – on the pavements.

Two million East Germans invaded West Berlin, making history with a good day out. The cork-popping on the Berlin Wall at the end of last week had been portrayed to the world as the symbolic theatre of reunification.

That drama was played by a few thousand. The millions that followed them came for a first, awestruck inspection of the lavish shop windows and the capacious bars of the ‘Modell Deutschland’.

All over the city, seven-hour queues crammed the pavement, waiting for each visitor’s DM 100 gift from the government. In the banks, they collected a white slip of paper, walked over to the Kasse and exchanged it for either a blue note or two brown ones. A girl dressed in brushed denim, which is the uniform of the reunification, burst into tears when she was given hers. It was more than money - it was a certificate of freedom.

‘We waited more than seven hours,’ boasted Kerstin Haneis, a teacher from Karl Marx Stadt. ‘We came at 8.30 this morning to see my cousin and now we will go round the shops - this is a lot of money for us.’ But she said she would not leave her family and her home.

Not so Karl Lochner, a telephone engineer. He planned to spend half his money on an unforgettable night out, then collect his bags from the station and begin a new life .. he wasn’t quite sure where or how.

The multitudes gathered in even the souvenir kiosk at subway stations: fluffy animals, chocolates, souvenirs and trinkets were second only to electronic gadgets in the order of preferences.

A West Berliner (R) welcomes an East Berliner a Wollankstrasse, a new crossing point into the West, 13 November 1989. Photograph: Patrick Hertzog/AFP/Getty Images

But the biggest congestions were around the marvels which even the DM 100 windfall could not secure. A young couple at the front of a five-deep huddle stared at a Mercedes 500 on its rotating platform as though beholding some divine miracle; a windowful of watches, televisions and CD players similarly enraptured an elderly man in a beret – he wore a badge reading Ich Bin Frei – I am free.

They took photographs of domestic equipment or bicycle shops; a man and his son discussed the different sorts of ratchet on display in a hardware store. A child pealed with glee on using his father’s new Walkman.

Many toured on the subway system, studying their maps carefully. They travelled for the first time on the Western subway underneath their own city, for the trains criss-crossed the Wall, yet the stations in the Eastern zone are sealed and closed.

But the usually guarded Passcontrolle between the underground western S-Bahn and the ground-level eastern streets was open and jammed full of people either returning home from or setting off for the wonderland over the Wall.

Thousands returned east through the autumn dusk and the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint on foot or in cars, tempers fraying a little, their babies starting to cry – but visibly glowing with quiet joy nevertheless.

Mr Gunter Moll’s chugging Trabant had broken down and needed a push complete with Frau Moll, Frau Moll senior, two children, a new electric toaster and two pink fluffy toy monkeys. ‘I think it is the battery, but no matter; it is the best day of our lives.’

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