How did the Berlin Wall fall?

1989, month by month

For most of the 1980s the Wall looked permanent. Then 1989 moved fast:

• May 2. Hungary begins cutting the fence on its border with Austria.
• September 11. Hungary opens that border to East Germans, and tens of thousands leave for the West.
• October 7. Mikhail Gorbachev visits East Berlin for the GDR’s fortieth anniversary.
• October 9. Seventy thousand people march in Leipzig chanting Wir sind das Volk, “We are the people,” and nobody fires.
• October 18. Erich Honecker is ousted after eighteen years in power; Egon Krenz replaces him.
• November 4. Hundreds of thousands rally in East Berlin.

Through all of it, the Soviet tanks stayed in their barracks. Gorbachev had told the United Nations that every nation could choose its own path, and in 1989 he refused to send tanks to save the East German regime.

A note nobody explained

The new leadership hoped to let off pressure with a looser law on travel. On Thursday, November 9, Günter Schabowski, the party’s spokesman, was winding up a long press conference broadcast live when he read out a note Krenz had handed him. He had not been in the room when the rule was discussed. Private trips abroad could be applied for without the usual preconditions, it said, and permanent departures could go through any crossing, including those into West Berlin. A reporter asked when it would take effect.

That comes into effect, as far as I know... that is immediately, without delay.

The German words that went around the world were sofort, unverzüglich. The rule was supposed to start the next morning, with applications filed at police offices and visas stamped. Nobody had told Schabowski. Within hours, West German television, which most East Germans watched, was reporting that the gates in the Wall stood open. They did not, yet.

The gate at Bornholmer Straße

Thousands of East Berliners went to see for themselves. At Bornholmer Straße, in the north of the city, the officer in charge, Harald Jäger, phoned his superiors again and again. Their instruction was to let the loudest through and secretly mark their passports so they could never return. That only drew more people. At about 11:30 p.m., with no order from above, Jäger told his men to open the gate.

People streamed across the bridge, some still in their slippers. Within hours every crossing in Berlin was open, and Berliners were dancing on the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate and chipping at it with hammers. Not a shot was fired. The Brandenburg Gate itself opened as a crossing only on December 22, 1989.

From an open gate to one country

Nobody ordered the Wall down. It was opened by a press conference that went wrong and a decision at one checkpoint, and what followed came in steps: the GDR’s first free election on March 18, 1990, a shared currency with West Germany from July 1, the Two Plus Four Treaty with the four wartime Allies on September 12, and reunification on October 3, 1990, eleven months after that night.

Why did it fall? The trigger was a fumbled answer. The causes ran deeper: an exodus East Germany could no longer stop once Hungary opened its border, crowds that had stopped being afraid, and a Kremlin that would not send tanks. Whether a speech by Ronald Reagan two years earlier deserves a share of the credit is argued on its own page; the concrete itself, and what is left of it, is in How long was the Berlin Wall?