For most of the world, the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed an amazing, unexpected new beginning. It was that, of course. But it was also an ending—the end of an unprecedented period of awakening and hope in East Germany.
At the time, I was living in West Berlin and working with members of a dissident East German environmental group. They were welcoming, curious, funny, and unabashedly nonconformist. Because they questioned official taboos and published “secret” information like the extent of pollution in East Germany, their telephones and homes were bugged, they couldn’t travel to the West, they were tailed and harassed and kept out of universities or fired from their jobs. Occasionally they went to jail. I admired the quiet courage that allowed them to place their security on the line for their beliefs—to risk the safe, if stifling, cocoon of socialism for a self-determined life.
Yet brave as they were, East Germany’s dissidents were a lonely handful with little influence. They couldn’t mobilize a whole country, like Poland’s Solidarity (a Polish trade union). East Germany’s government was rigidly ideological, and its people were traditionally obedient to authority. Plus, East Germany bordered on West Germany, which regularly siphoned off dissidents: East Germany could always banish uncomfortable critics to the West, which was more than happy to take them in. A few among the dissatisfied and frustrated were even permitted to emigrate. The small number of dissidents who preferred to stay and encourage change from within seemed like hopeless dreamers.
By the spring of 1989, Russian prime minister Mikhail Gorbachev’s influence was being felt across Eastern Europe. In Poland, Solidarity took part in a round table with the government. Hungarians commemorated the anti-communist uprising of 1956. East Germans, too, were getting restless, but the ossified regime refused to budge. Local elections were rigged. Demonstrations in Leipzig, in the south, were broken up violently by the secret police. The government praised China’s handling of Tiananmen Square, suggesting it might do the same. Change seemed further away than ever; leaving the country, hard as it was for average East Germans, seemed the only option. In summer, East Germans looking for a way out began streaming toward Hungary. There and in Poland, freedom was in the air. An East German dissident friend and I watched a demonstration in Warsaw that was escorted by one small police car. He couldn’t imagine that happening in East Germany. Like many of his compatriots, he didn’t believe East Germans would ever rise up in protest.
The Hungarians opened their border with Austria in September, and East German refugees inundated West Germany. But the East German government just clamped down harder.
And then came October. East Germany prepared to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its founding on October 7, with Gorbachev expected as a guest. The regime went all out: a military parade, flags everywhere, a carnival atmosphere—a celebration of communism.
But that night it all changed. Spontaneous demonstrations broke out in the center of town and surged outward, catalyzed by Gorbachev’s presence. I had come over to East Berlin to observe events and was sitting in a café with the same friend I’d been with in Warsaw. We watched in disbelief, tears in our eyes, as protesters passed us yelling “Join us!” and “We’re staying here!” It was a defiant cry: rather than going to the West, they would stay and change things. Suddenly that didn’t seem so hopeless. We heard reports of demonstrations in other cities as well. East Germans had risen up after all.
That night, we soon found out, many protesters were detained and beaten. But two days later, a demonstration by 70,000 people in Leipzig became the turning point. The government could have used force. Truckloads of police lined the side streets, and rumor had it that hospitals had been prepared for casualties. People were frightened. But they went out anyway in nonviolent protest, and the regime backed down. Instead of fighting that evening, the police and soldiers found themselves arguing politics with knots of demonstrators. Words had trumped guns.
After that, everything was different; now the East German air felt free, too, and a surge of hope gripped the country. No one spoke of leaving anymore. Everyone wanted to be part of the changes that were so obviously beginning. A public conversation emerged for the first time in decades. People found their voices, and everywhere they talked and talked. Taboos vanished. Discussions and events were too numerous to follow. Political groups sprang up like mushrooms, and government newspapers began hesitantly reporting on them. Non-government newspapers and magazines appeared. East Germans engaged in impassioned debates with government officials. They insisted that police officers who had beaten demonstrators be punished. They demanded the right to leave their country, and soon everyone knew it was just a matter of time before that would happen, too. The prime minister, Eric Honecker, and various Politburo members resigned.
And on November 4, the first-ever officially sanctioned demonstration, for freedom of speech, attracted nearly a million people to downtown East Berlin. Amid a sea of creative, funny, passionate signs and banners, East German artists, writers, and politicians spoke of their hope for a new beginning. No one talked about unifying with the West; perhaps naively, even many dissidents advocated building something new and indigenously East German, just as the Poles and Hungarians were doing in their countries. Hope, energy, enthusiasm, passion, the sense that anything was possible—that was October 1989, and a bit of November, in East Germany.
And then, around midnight on November 9, returning home from East Berlin after a day of translating for a foreign journalist, I found a line of East Germans waiting to cross to the West. The Wall had opened, more suddenly than anyone expected. The next day, hundreds of thousands of East Germans went shopping and sightseeing in West Germany and discovered that what they really wanted was to be able to afford normal things and live like normal people. For a time, euphoria was the predominant mood, but it didn’t take long before it waned. West Germans got annoyed at the influx from the East, and East Germans’ recently acquired confidence gave way to uncertainty. Anxiety and tension replaced relief and joy. No one knew what to expect. The assertive East German cry “We are the people!” changed to “We are one people!”; the dissidents’ hope of creating something new was overtaken by a more widespread wish for the security of tried and true West German prosperity. Unification a year later was the ultimate result. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the fact remains: when the wall came down, it spelled the end of a very special chapter in East German history, in which East Germans felt in control of their own destiny. October was over. A new period, dominated by West Germany, had begun.
Belinda Cooper, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and co-founder of its Citizenship and Security Program, is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. Cooper, the editor of War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg, teaches and lectures on human rights, international law, and the “war on terror.”
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