Major historical events are shaped by a series of contextual factors, whether they are economic, political, social, or all of these at once. But sometimes, there is also an apparently minor element that, even if only as the final trigger, plays a role as notable as it is curious. This is what Graham Greene referred to in the title of one of his novels, the human factor, which is almost always unpredictable and often not very logical. A good example of this can be found in Günter Schabowski, an obscure official whose seemingly insignificant mistake led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Two generations of people have now been born since that historical episode, so it is likely that many may not know what we are talking about. On the morning of August 13, 1961, Berliners woke up to a concrete wall, reinforced with barbed wire and watchtowers, built overnight by the Soviet bloc to separate the part of Germany that had been under its control since the end of World War II, the East, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), from the West, the Federal Republic of Germany.
The authorities called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (Anti-Fascist Protective Wall) because they claimed its purpose was to protect the emerging socialist state from the infiltration of fascists who wanted to destroy it.
However, that barrier, which stretched for forty-five kilometers in the capital alone (with another one hundred fifteen kilometers outside the urban area), was merely a consequence of the Volkspolizei (People’s Police) being unable to stop the relentless exodus of people from the eastern part of the city to the other side, as well as the smuggling that came from the Federal Republic.
For that reason, speculation had already arisen about the possibility of a radical separation between the two parts of Berlin. In fact, two months before its construction, East Germany had denied any intention of doing such a thing.
Furthermore, Western intelligence services were aware of the project; they simply erred in thinking that it wouldn’t happen immediately but at a later time, which is quite ironic because the same misunderstanding occurred during the fall of the wall, as we will see.
What the capitalist world dubbed the Schandmauer (Wall of Shame) was the physical manifestation of what Churchill had described in 1946 as a new reality with the name Iron Curtain. Indeed, the wall lasted as long as the Cold War and the coexistence of the two blocs, contributing to both.
But just as it was born one night, it came to an end on another: the night of November 9, 1989, twenty-eight years later. And here is where that human factor we mentioned earlier comes into play.
His name was Günter Schabowski, a native of the Pomeranian city of Anklam, where he was born in 1929. He was a journalist, graduated from Karl Marx University in Leipzig, and had directed the trade union magazine Tribüne. In 1952, he joined the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the main party of the Nationale Front der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (National Front of the German Democratic Republic), which was effectively the only political party and therefore always won elections.
Schabowski’s professional career continued to progress, and in 1978 he was appointed editor-in-chief of Neues Deutschland (New Germany), the SED’s official publication and, therefore, the country’s main newspaper. He remained there until 1985 when he left to focus on politics because four years earlier, he had joined the party’s central committee. Now, he advanced further: secretary-general for East Berlin and a member of the SED Politburo. His list of positions expanded when he became a member of the Volkskammer (People’s Chamber, the GDR’s parliament), holding his seat from 1981 to 1990.
One could say that Schabowski arrived a little too late. In 1989, a word had been circulating through Eastern Europe, originating in the USSR four years earlier: perestroika. It means restructuring and referred to the economic reform Mikhail Gorbachev had initiated to address the problems plaguing the Soviet regime and threatening its survival. Perestroika was accompanied by glasnost, a political opening expressed through the release of some prisoners and the granting of a certain degree of freedom for the media to criticize.
Gorbachev was overwhelmed by his own initiative, and what was initially intended to be minor changes to preserve the system ended up being its downfall.
Those winds of change, which in Germany were literally known as die Wende, did not enthuse all communist leaders equally. In Berlin, Erich Honecker was staunchly opposed, as were Czechoslovakian Gustáv Husák, Romanian Nicolae Ceaușescu, and Bulgarian Todor Zhivkov, all of whom resisted adopting measures similar to the Soviets.
Of course, this led to tensions with the leader of the CPSU because Honecker was old school (general secretary of the SED since 1971 and president of the State Council of the GDR since 1976), and that’s why they couldn’t stand each other.
Thus, at the Warsaw Pact summit held in the summer of 1989, the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine was approved: each state would develop its own political line, strategy, and tactics without external intervention. Meanwhile, Hungary opened its border with Austria and didn’t stop thousands of citizens from crossing it, revealing the first crack in the Iron Curtain.
Honecker fell ill with cancer at that time (he was already eighty-two), so his government didn’t react to the situation. He soon recovered and resumed office, only to find the proliferation of protest demonstrations demanding change and mass escape attempts to Czechoslovakia, which he repressed with unusual harshness, stripping those involved of their citizenship.
This inflexibility displeased many members of the SED, who began to see him as outdated, an obstacle whose intransigence could provoke a popular uprising.
Indeed, the escape attempts only multiplied toward Prague and Budapest, prompting the government to close the borders. In this way, the Iron Curtain not only separated the GDR from the capitalist world but also from the socialist one. The eruption came in early October, when Gorbachev, visiting the country for its 40th anniversary, was greeted with acclaim by the people. The demonstrations led to serious unrest, but this didn’t stop them; on the contrary, they spread to other cities.
The Politburo then realized that Honecker had to go because the social instability added to the severe economic situation, with state coffers bankrupt. In the first half of October, a group of leaders, including Günter Schabowski, forced Honecker to resign in favor of Egon Krenz, the regime’s number two. Due to his profession and experience as the Politburo’s communications officer, Schabowski became the unofficial spokesman.
In the following days, he worked to develop a public strategy in this sense, which probably wasn’t easy for him since, for the first time, he had to write before receiving party instructions, as had been customary until then. Perhaps this lack of practice is what led him to make the mistake for which, ironically, he would go down in history.
On November 9, 1989, Krenz gave him the new travel regulation, which allowed visits to West Berlin through any border crossing without the previous bureaucratic requirements. Schabowski then held the obligatory press conference and read the document at the end.
One of the journalists (said to be the Italian Riccardo Ehrman, though others also claimed credit) asked when it would take effect, and Schabowski’s response opened Pandora’s box: As far as I know… it’s effective immediately, without delay. Schabowski based this statement on the date of issue, as no other date was provided, but the immediate effect wasn’t actually planned.
But it didn’t stop there. Another reporter wanted to know what would happen to the Berlin Wall, and Schabowski, perhaps realizing the implications of what he was saying, didn’t know how to answer, which in itself was quite telling.
After the press conference, he was interviewed by the BBC, where he confirmed that from now on, East Germans no longer had to leave the GDR through another socialist country and could now cross the border normally. To the astonishment of the British interviewer, he added that there was freedom to travel and that it wasn’t about tourism but a permit to leave the GDR. The interview was broadcast by both Germanies’ TV stations and spread from one medium to another like a true bombshell.
Immediately, with news cameras broadcasting live, citizens of East Berlin flooded the six border crossings of the Wall, leaving the guards in confusion as to what to do. Shortly before midnight, a Stasi officer named Harald Jäger decided to authorize the opening of the crossing at Bornholmer Straße, and soon others followed suit. The GDR still existed, but to many analysts, it was a dead man walking, as it was collapsing.
That’s how it happened. Germany officially reunified a year later, on October 3, 1990. Schabowski was vilified by his comrades and expelled from the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the SED), especially after he supported the CDU (German Christian Democratic Union), earning the nickname Wryneck (the name of a bird that can turn its head 180º, applied to communists who radically changed their ideology).
In fact, Schabowski was highly critical of the previous era, which led his former comrades to suspect he was a Western agent; even his wife claimed in 2014 that what he said at that press conference had been deliberate.
However, in 1995, that unlikely protagonist of change was denounced by some of those who had fled the GDR, accusing him of being part of the regime that caused the deaths of many Berliners.
Tried alongside other former leaders like Egon Krenz, he was found guilty two years later, but the sentence was only three years in prison thanks to his retraction and condemnation of the communist regime. In fact, although he entered prison in December 1999, he served only one year thanks to a pardon. He did, however, permanently leave journalism, which he had returned to in 1992 with the founding of a weekly called Heimat-Nachrichten.
In poor health at eighty-six years old, he died in a Berlin nursing home on November 1, 2015.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on October 31, 2018: Günter Schabowski, el portavoz de la RDA cuyo error precipitó la caída del Muro de Berlín
SOURCES
Mary Elise Salotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall
A. James McAdams, Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification
Jackie F. Stanmyre, The Unification and Reunification of Germany
John Lewis Gaddis, Nueva historia de la Guerra Fría
Wikipedia, Günter Schabowski
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