“Twenty thousand people / Cross Bösebrücke / Fingers are crossed / just in case” ~ David Bowie, Where Are We Now? (2013)
Speaking at an East Berlin press conference held shortly before 7pm on 9th October 1989, following several weeks of protests and civil unrest, East German representative Günter Schabowski confirmed the new official East German regulations according to which citizens of the then DDR could obtain an exit visa without satisfying special conditions and enduring lengthy waiting times.
When asked by astonished journalists when this regulation would enter into force, Schabowski answered that, according to his knowledge, it was effective immediately. The auditorium of the East Berlin press centre suddenly erupted with excitement, confusion, almost disbelief. The people had waited more than 28 years for this event. According to the recollections of then Tanjug correspondent Đorđe Milošević, who was present in the press centre at the time, in terms of importance, this was the kind of news that only breaks once in a journalist’s career, if at all.
Schabowski’s statement was aired as ‘breaking news’ by West German public broadcaster ARD at 8pm that same evening. East German citizens soon started pouring towards the border crossings between East and West Berlin. Having received no prior directive, the East German border police were taken aback. The pressure only intensified as ever more people arrived at the border crossings.
At around 9:20pm, several East German citizens were permitted to pass through the checkpoint at the Bornholmer Straße border crossing, which separated the East Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg from West Germany’s Wedding. It was half an hour before midnight that border guards opened the barrier at the Bornholmer Straße checkpoint. Around 20,000 East German citizens flooded over the Bösebrücke steel bridge during the next hour, crossing completely uncontrolled from the eastern to the western sectors of the city. The fall of the wall had started.
The remaining checkpoints were opened throughout the night. Many hundreds of thousands of citizens stampeded into West Germany. Younger people scaled the wall and an atmosphere of total euphoria reigned. Spontaneous celebrations broke out on the streets of West Berlin and lasted until the morning. Throngs of people packed West Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm avenue over the following days. And on the night between 9th and 10th November 1989, the Berlin Wall finally fell. It would only be in June of the next year that the official demolition of the nearly 155-kilometre-long construction would begin.
Over the course of just a few years, the world had switched from bipolar to unipolar, with some states disappearing and others emerging
The construction of the Berlin Wall, which split Germany’s former capital in two and represented a physical barrier encircling West Berlin, began 16 years after the end of World War II and the dividing of Germany and Berlin into four occupation zones, and 12 years after Germany’s bifurcation into two states: East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), with its capital in East Berlin; and West Germany, with its capital in Bonn. West Berlin, which was considered a de facto part of West Germany, was formally a free city under the occupation of the Western Allies (France, Britain and the U.S.A.). The occupied area covered approximately 480 square kilometres and was deep into East German territory, lacking a direct connection to West Germany.
In a world divided politically, militarily and ideologically, West Berlin represented a propaganda shopwindow of the West, an “island of freedom” and a “hole” in the Iron Curtain. It was simultaneously East Germany’s weakest point, the only place where its citizens could come into direct contact with the “temptations” of the Western world, but also the place where fleeing westwards was simplest – by merely crossing over to the city’s western sectors. The mass departure of the population was among the toughest problems confronting the East German authorities. Approximately 2.7 million inhabitants of the German Democratic Republic fled to West Germany between 1949 and 1961. The number of citizens who’d fled reached alarming proportions in the period from the late 1950s to the early ‘60s. Around 200,000 mostly young East Germans received permanent residence in West Germany during 1960 alone.
East Germany found itself on the brink of economic and social collapse, with its authorities unable to prevent the constant outflow of the population. Operation Rose was launched at dawn on Sunday, 13th August 1961. It saw army and police units of the DDR use barbed wire and barricades to close 192 Berlin streets, 32 railway routes, eight lines of the surface city railway network, four subway lines and three motorways. This marked the start of the construction of what would become the Berlin Wall.
The barbed wire would quickly be replaced by reinforced concrete, which divided streets, neighbourhoods, squares and even buildings. The Berlin Wall was not constructed overnight. Its construction would last, through various stages, until the 1980s. In its final form, the wall comprised approximately 45,000 concrete slabs that were 3.6 metres high and 1.2 metres wide. On the eastern side, a parallel fence was erected at a distance of around 100 metres from the wall, with a small “no man’s land” of empty ground in between, forming the so-called “path of death”. More than a hundred observation towers were built along the length of the wall.
It was half an hour before midnight that border guards opened the barrier at the Bornholmer Straße checkpoint
From the East German perspective, the structure was meant to represent an “anti-fascist protective wall” that would protect the “peace-loving”, “democratic”, socialist East Germany from the “fascist and imperialist provocations” of West Germany. And the wall certainly fulfilled its primary purpose. Although fleeing to the West had not been prevented completely, the number of those escaping fell dramatically. And yet, the Berlin Wall would come to represent anything but a symbol of anti-fascism. It represented a symptom of the East German regime’s powerlessness in overcoming internal political and social challenges and creating an order that would prove more attractive than the West to its own population.
With at least 140 attempts to escape over the wall ending in the deaths of those trying to flee, the Berlin Wall also became a symbol of the East German regime’s brutality. Berlin had represented the easiest place in Europe for people, ideas and goods to flow between East and West until 1961, but the wall’s construction would render it the most concrete symbol of the polarised division of Germany, Europe and the world.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was an epochal event. It also had huge personal significance for those Germans who had family members and friends living on the other side of the divided city (and country). It also had massive political significance for opponents of the then East Germany’s political and social system. As a herald of Germany’s imminent reunification, the fall of the wall had national significance. The global significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall is evident in the symbolic significance that its existence had as the embodiment of Cold War divisions. As such, the disappearance of this symbol also marked the end of the era.
The opening of Berlin’s internal checkpoints on the night between 9th-10th November 1989 was an act that accelerated Germany’s reunification process, which would be confirmed on 3rd October of the following year. It thus also sped up the collapse of the DDR and its disappearance from the political map of Europe, with it merging into the newly formed Federal Republic of Germany in October 1990. Next came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia, followed by the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia. Over the course of just a few years, the world had switched from bipolar to unipolar, with some states disappearing and others emerging. The world order took on a very different form almost overnight. And the fall of the Berlin Wall became one of those historical events that has its own ‘before’ and ‘after’.
Article authored by Natalija Dimić Lompar, Ph.D., Research Associate of the Institute for Recent History of Serbia