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Berlin Wall Legend Shattered
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New revelations in Germany have shattered the official story on how the wall came down 20 years ago. Far from a spontaneous protest, it was a carefully planned government plot.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, has always been portrayed as the spontaneous result of a foul-up at a press conference: East German government spokesman Günter Schabowski, finishing up an evening briefing, shuffled through a stack of notes and came upon one more thing he needed to announce. He paused before saying that travel restrictions were to be lifted. The freedom for East Germans to travel beyond the wall was at hand. Pressed for details about when the measure would take effect, Schabowski stammered, apparently unprepared, and replied, “Immediately, as far as I know.”
Not only was the GDR leadership planning to open the wall, but by Nov. 6, Kohl’s office knew the East German government was already planning to do so.
Soon afterward, East Berliners lined up at various checkpoints and demanded to be let through to West Berlin. At about 8:30 p.m., a little-known checkpoint between Waltersdorfer Chaussee in the East and Rudow in the West opened; about an hour later, the famous scene at the border crossing at Bornholmer Strasse began to unfold, with a huge crowd gathering there before the gates were fully opened around 11:30 p.m.; then Checkpoint Charlie opened and the party was on. It was all a surprise in the West, sudden and unexpected, with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, on a state visit to Poland, rushing back as events unfolded.
• More Daily Beast takes on the Berlin Wall anniversaryThis version of history, however, has been contradicted by information about the days preceding the fall of the wall that has emerged in recent German news reports. A new chain of events has commentators wondering whether the seemingly inadvertent fall of the wall was in fact “staged,” as a headline last week in Munich’s nationally significant Suddeutsche Zeitung put it. Not only was the GDR leadership planning to open the wall, but by Nov. 6, Kohl’s office knew the East German government was already planning to do so.
The plan was revealed on Oct. 29, 1989, during a lunch meeting at East Berlin’s Palast hotel between Walter Momper, the mayor of West Berlin, and the official who would open the wall less than two weeks later, Günter Schabowski. At the meeting, arranged by prominent Eastern church leaders and assistants to Momper, Schabowski told Momper in unambiguous language that the GDR would soon lift travel restrictions for all its citizens.
“We’re putting together a travel bill worthy of the name,” Schabowski said. “There will be travel freedom.” Subsequent conversation included discussions of logistical topics such as which checkpoints could be opened to best facilitate use of the subway system, as well as the volume of visitors to expect.
The Berlin municipal government sprang into action, establishing a task force to prepare for the imminent arrival of what they thought could be half a million GDR citizens. The task force met for the first time on Nov. 1, trying to anticipate, among other things, how to prepare the transit system for this massive influx.
On Nov. 6, Momper sent a communiqué to Kohl, explaining that the Berlin government was operating under the assumption that the wall would be opened by December, and suggesting the federal government also prepare for this eventuality. (In an interview in the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung last week, Momper claimed he also alerted Allied forces in Berlin.) In his letter to Kohl, the mayor used the phrase weitgehende Reisefreiheit—broad travel freedom—to describe what was on the way, saying “virtually every GDR citizen will soon be able to travel.” The chancellor’s office did not reply.
Details of the secret meeting between Momper and Schabowski emerged in the last few months; last week came hard evidence, when as part of a documentary about the fall of the wall, the TV station ZDF showed for the first time the letter Momper sent Kohl.
At the beginning of the second week of November 1989, Berlin newspapers reported on the city task force beneath such headlines as “As if the Wall Were Nothing More Than History.” The reports were ignored by the national and international media.
Then on Thursday, Nov. 9, the mayor was interrupted during a meeting and informed that the new travel rules might be revealed by the East German government that day. Momper had his staff notify the mass transit authority to expect additional riders. Schabowski held his news conference that evening, and 2 million Easterners streamed into West Berlin during the first weekend alone.
Tim Mohr spent most of the 1990s as a club DJ in Berlin and much of the current decade as a staff editor at Playboy magazine. He is the translator of the German novels Guantanamo, by Dorothea Dieckmann, which won the Three Percent award for best translation of 2007, and the international best seller Wetlands, by Charlotte Roche. His translation of Broken Glass Park, by Alina Bronsky, will be published in April, 2010. He is currently at work on a book on the punk music scene in East Germany.
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Tim Mohr spent most of the 1990s as a club DJ in Berlin and much of the current decade as a staff editor at Playboy magazine. He is the translator of the German novels Guantanamo, by Dorothea Dieckmann, which won the Three Percent award for best translation of 2007, and the international best seller Wetlands, by Charlotte Roche. His translation of Broken Glass Park, by Alina Bronsky, will be published in April, 2010. He is currently at work on a book on the punk music scene in East Germany.
"A new chain of events has commentators wondering whether the seemingly inadvertent fall of the wall was in fact "staged,"
Why not a shred of evidence in the article to back this up? You act as though the government told people to start tearing the wall down, yet you don't back it up one bit.
uhhhhh, you don't get it? The guy acted like he wasn't sure WHEN the restrictions were going to be lifted, when in fact he had already TOLD W. German officials and Allied officials he was gonna do it on that day.
It's all right there, most especially: "Details of the secret meeting between Momper and Schabowski emerged in the last few months; last week came hard evidence, when as part of a documentary about the fall of the wall, the TV station ZDF showed for the first time the letter Momper sent Kohl."
I mean, I don't get it. You're clearly a literate person. Do you just skim the articles, or do you read them?
So what?
This only confirms what everyone in Germany already knew.
My mom was from Germany and my family lived there a couple times for a couple years each time. Then every few years we would spend our summer vacations there. I have more relatives in Germany than I do in the US.
The dissatisfaction of the East was well known. They weren't as prosperous as West, and as Germans, they despise ineffectiveness (Germans' greatest strength and greatest weakness). Aging Germans on both sides were worried they would die without seeing relatives on the other side.
Germans knew that a divided Germany was the price they had to pay for WWII, so they endured it with great sadness. But the divided system wasn't working--because communism wan't working.
Whispered rumors of reunification circulated for years. But somehow Ronald Reagan managed to swoop in with "tear down this wall" and take all the credit.
No one I have met outside of the US gives Reagan any credit at all for German reunification. He made a speech in May 1987. The wall came down in December 1989. It is the height of Reaganite hubris to claim that he had anything substantial to do with it. The real legacy of Reagan in the cold war was his utter failure at nuclear disarmament. He was a joke.
Certainly there were forces at work to bring this to pass. But there had to be a trigger and President Reagan became that. To say that he was a "joke" simply displays the ignorance possessed by the writer.
Dibs101.... From your comment one would have to assume all your travels outside of the USA are extraterrestrial.
while i wouldn't go as far as saying he was a joke, its true that in Europe Reagan's "tear down that wall mr. Gorbachev" is only really seen as a cool soundbite... he didnt have much to do with it in the end...
Spartann: I don't know about people outside the U.S., but I don't know anybody in the U.S. (aside from you conservatives) who gives Reagan credit for this.
I agree with Reagan having nothing to do with the fall of Communism. It was under Bush I that it happened, two full years after Reagan. Gorbachev was counting on Bush's discretion and not make political hay of the momentous events that took place throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
How strange-- I had relatives in East Germany at the time and they revered Reagan for his pressure on the Soviets that eventually weakened the system. I guess they were just dumb krauts.
In 1988 I was employed by West Virginia University in Business and Economic Development. A mentor of mine from the WVU College of Business and Economics (who was born in Germany and came to the US as a child refugee) approached me with a request to assist him and a professor from the University in Bremen, West Germany in performing research in "successful management techniques of small business owner-managers".
I was not permitted to know the purpose of this research, yet I readily agreed to assist and organize the endeavor. It was only later that I realized that this research was in anticipation of the wall coming down, and was designed to teach, encourage, nurture, and support entrepreneurial thinking and activity in the former command economy of communist East Germany.
There is absolutely no doubt that at some level(s) in the West, there was not only pre-knowledge of these future events, but high-level activity to make them come about. As practiced in Eastern Europe, COMMUNISM WAS SLAVERY, and President Reagan does indeed deserve great credit for helping force the devil's hand.
I am no fan of the Roman Catholic Church or the Papal Office, since in the year 1600, an ancestor of mine (Giordano Bruno) was slowly roasted to death over a bonfire for the unforgivable sin of claiming that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. However, Pope John Paul II deserves tremendous credit as well for starting the ball rolling in Poland when he stood up to the communist criminal leaders in 1980. This man had a lot of guts.
Reagan did bring the issues of Communism and the lack of freedom for it's people to the for front. As did the Pope John Paul II and Leck Walesa of Poland.
Unless you were there and had seen it for yourself, you would not have understood what those people went through.
People had to line up two blocks away to buy a loaf of bread in East Berlin.
Reagan forced the Soviets hand by deploying the Pershing II Tactical short range Nukes to Europe at the height of the Cold War which was fearsomely protested by Liberals all over the world thinking that Reagan was going to destroy the world with Nuclear armigedon.
Amazing that we are all still here!
Another Liberal claim disproven.
I was there in 1989 stationed in Germany and was there the entire decade of the 1980s.
The first people to leave East Germany were to go through Hungary where they had opened the boarder between Hungary and Austria.
The Hungarians did it because they didn't fear that there would be reprisals from Mr. Gorbachev after his announcement of perestroika.
There was a huge stampede through that route and the Eastern Europeans soon found there way to FRG. We saw them driving those piece of crap East German Cars (Trabants) flying FRG flags out of their windows on the Autobahn. That was two or three months before the Berlin Wall came down.
East Germany stopped people from immigrating to Hungary because they didn't want them to leave out to Austria.
By then it was to late. The people were then determined to be free.
The wall had nowhere to go but down.
You neglected to mention something in your explanation of how the East Germans lived in a totalitarian state and endured.
It's not that they weren't as Prosperous as the West.
They had no choice!
They had no way to be prosperous under that system!
It was pure evil to kill the human spirit of millions upon millions of people under the Communist system that was the Warsaw Pact.
No matter what the circumstances around the opening of the border, I still recall that day with a great deal of happiness, both for Germans and for the US. Although he was given more credit than he took for it, I think it was well known that Reagan was not the only force involved.
Hope lives on for all oppressed peoples of the world!! (And no, that doesn't include those claiming to have their 'rights' taken by Obama, the tea baggers or whatever they call themselves)
How do these new findings affect the summit meeting with Reagan and Gorbachev. Are they no longer getting all the credit for this incident. Reagan's resounding "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall." was heard around the world. History is truth, good or back, like it or not.
Actually, Reagan's comment wasn't all that reported at the time. It's the subsequent broadcasts of the soundbite after the wall went down that has created that myth. Read "Tear down this myth : how the Reagan legacy has distorted our politics and haunts our future".
It was reported enough that I remember it. Perhaps listening to Radio Moscow wasn't your best news choice.
The wall came down when the East German socialists stopped shooting people who tried to cross the the border to West Berlin. East Germany had become a giant de facto prison camp, fenced in by walls, barbed wire, minefields, dogs, and guards with orders to kill anyone who tried to escape. Once the socialists allowed people to leave the giant de facto prison camp that they had created in East Germany, millions immediately crossed the border for their first experience of travel to the west. It was the largest jailbreak in history.
My apologies, but I am not certain there is any real news here. Whilst at university in France then, the media reported that talks had been taking place for quite some time. Reagn had NOTHING to do with it. Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl and the real surprise, a very active Pope John Paul II met to sort out the details.
This is a particularly galling comment. Helmut Kohl's regime was particularly subservient to US interests. To say that Reagan had "NOTHING" to do with it is preposterous. Russo-German rapprochement under Gorbachev would not have been remotely possible without the US forward position in Germany, which you will note, was dramatically modernized by Reagan.
Americans are really strange with their sense of this history. The biggest joke is Reagan. Folks, he was a senile old coot of a former hollywood actor. He was good at political theater -- but then so were Hitler and Stalin. His administration may have contributed to the cold war ending -- but mainly by giving Gorbachev free reign. Hero worship is unbecoming of a country that preaches democracy around the world. History will forget Reagan in fairly short order -- his appeal comes from his stage presence and without it, there's just not much there.
absolutely. He like Bush Jr. was just a figure head, a face or cover for the bad guys.
History seems to have magnified him.
History will do that when you're on its side.
why is anyone jumping down reagan's throat? he delivered a great sound bite. the wall did eventually come down. of course he wasn't involved in the details or timing of it's destruction. he wasn't president, that job belonged to bush the elder.
As a German, this is "old news"..also, we do give to Reagan some credit.
Both this article and the people who, as jus1drun aptly put it, are seizing on it as an excuse to jump down Ronald Reagan's throat (my goodness, twenty years later, people, don't you have anything better to obsess over than that?) provide excellent examples of myopic, not to mention rather anal-retentive, "thinking" (decidedly in quotation marks). The very last person in the world to "take credit" for bringing down the Berlin Wall was, or would ever have been, Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, anyone of any maturity at all who was around to watch the events at the Wall unfolding, and who understood the tide of the times (and I do suspect most of the "throat-jumpers" yapping and scratching here weren't even born then) knew perfectly well that this was the outcome of a whole series of events. Well... so what? Doesn't reduce the great drama, and the emotional impact, of the moment ONE BIT. Nor does it diminish the fact that Reagan's calling the Soviet bluff, in a way Carter would never have done, speeded the fall of the Soviet empire. Reagan rightly called the USSR the focus of evil in the world and refused to play the same old games the Washington establishment had grown cozy with... over their cocktails with the Russians at the embassy parties. To go back and listen to the speech Reagan gave on prime time television after the crackdown on Solidarnozc is to be stunned all over again at just how this man threw out the diplomats' cherished politesse and told the dictators point blank how it was going to be. I suggest you look up that speech and watch it.
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To all of you who deny the great importance the Regan administration, and US role is plain stupidity
To give all the credits to Russians, and Gorbatchov forgetting the major role US play during and after the cold war.
Don't forget the fact that Russian fall as they had no more resources to compete and forcefully keep occupied territories they took after the WWII. Their intention was to stay there forever.
It the US who fought hard to get Germany united more than any other country, perhaps Germany itself. The only credit i give to Russians is that they let it go peacefully, but again the Russian was collapsing and they had no intention to face the Great power of NATO lead by USA.
It would seem, Lech Walesa and the Solidarity Trade Union strike/movement in August of 1980, probably had more to do with the Wall coming down than Ronald Reagan.
With the 1979 visit from Pope John Paul II and his moral support for the movement, The Solidarity Movement was the beginning of the end of communism in the Eastern bloc Nations. Reagan had nothing to do with any of that and to give him credit for bringing the wall down ignores the will, the determination and the power of the people .
TNYCMAN: Thank you very much. It is refreshing to know that there are some who still understand world politics and the positions that have made this world turn. For better or worse the US has taken on more than it should have too many times. But there are many who would have suffered and died had we not done so.
Reagan set out to weaken the Soviet Union by forcing them to spend more than they could afford on armaments. That was his goal, and he succeeded. Liberals hated this and called him a warmonger. The hysterical liberal fight against 'star wars' technology was in perfect accord with the official position of Communist governments around the world. They were brought down because their weak economic system could not keep up with us when we put the screws on them by forcing them to come up with a military answer to the star wars threat. And that's history. Pope John Paul 11 and others had major roles as well. The idea that the Communists just decided to wreck their system and collapse it out of good will seems to be the best that the left can come up with.
Thank you.
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