Ten Years Later: Remembering November 9, 1989
By MARK JANTZEN
I went to bed early on the night of Nov. 9, 1989. Around 10:30 p.m., Ekki, a friend of mine in the dorm, banged on my door and demanded that I join a group that was heading for West Berlin. Great, I thought, they've had another party in the basement and gotten really plastered this time. Good thing I locked my door; who needs a pile of drunks in your room when you're trying to get some sleep? Ekki wouldn't go away, however, and he sounded half-way sober so I tried to make sense out of his babbling. He said something about seeing a report on the West Berlin evening news that East Berliners were being let through the wall in Bornholmer Street. Given the events over the last month in East Germany, it didn't seem entirely impossible, so I decided to join the group in investigating the possibility.
Matthias, Fidus and Quitschi joined us. As an American, I was only allowed to cross the border at two crossings in East Berlin — Checkpoint Charlie and the subway station at Friedrich Street. If I was to go along, we couldn't go to Bornholmer Street. We didn't realize at the time that in the general chaos of that night, none of the border guards at Bornholmer Street would have to bothered to enforce such formalities. In our ignorance, we set off for the Friedrich Street subway border crossing, a five-minute walk from the dorm.
A huge crowd was waiting there, all drawn by the same news broadcast. A major of the East German Border Guards was blocking the entrance to the border crossing. He instructed everyone to go to a travel agency at Alexander Square in downtown East Berlin, where exit visas would be issued immediately. What to do? We rode the subway two stops to the office building and, sure enough, they had hauled the employees out of bed at midnight to open for business. An enormous crowd gathered outside the building. People parked their cars in the middle of street and rushed to get in line. The wildest rumors circulated that we would be surrounded by soldiers and all arrested, since expressing the desire to leave East Germany was still regarded as treason. After two hours of waiting, we went back to Friedrich Street. The same major was now helplessly watching masses of people crowd through the border crossing. We joined the crowd and surged through the Wall.
Ekki, Quitschi and Matthias were about 20 years old. Even though our dorm was only a five-minute walk from the wall, they had never in their lives been able to take the six-minute walk necessary to get to West Berlin on the other side. We had already counted the years, 40, until they would qualify for the East German version of social security and the right to travel to West Berlin, West Germany or even the United States to visit. Those 40 years of waiting had now been reduced to one fateful night.
Fidus was a slightly different case. She was a non-traditional sophomore in her mid-20s and had close relatives in West Germany. She had been granted the boon of visiting them once already. The opening of the Wall meant something else for her. Her boyfriend lived in West Berlin. Despite living in the same city, they lived in two different countries. The Wall meant that Ralf could come see Fidus, but she could never go visit him. Ralf's dorm thus became our goal. He had made the same mistake I had of going to bed early and had missed the news of the Wall opening up. When we woke him up at 5 a.m., it took him quite a while to figure out if he was really awake or still dreaming. There was no doubt from the first minute after midnight of Nov. 10 that Nov. 9, 1989, would go down in German history. The life of every East German was radically changed.
Ten years later, Germans are reflecting intently on the meaning of those incredible night hours. Some things are clearer. We now know that the initial confusion at the border crossings was caused by a mistake at a press conference at 7 p.m. on Nov. 9 by Gunter Schabowski, the party boss for East Berlin and speaker for the Politburo. The party leadership had decided to let anyone who asked have an exit visa starting the next morning. Schabowski announced this new law at the press conference. When one of the journalists asked when the law would go into effect, Schabowski first looked confused, then answered that as far as he knew, the new regulation was effective immediately. This announcement sent the first people to the wall and when the crowd grew large enough in the Bornholmer Street, Lt. Colonel Harald Jaeger of the Border Guards, the officer in charge there, decided to let people through to avoid a general riot.
The fall of the Wall was certainly sudden, but not without preparation. Key elements of this preparation included the new politics of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev since 1985; the courageous reform movement, Solidarity, and the resulting free elections in Poland in June of 1989; and Hungary's September decision to open the Iron Curtain a few months later. For East Germany, two movements in the fall of 1989 were the actual immediate cause for the Wall to open. One was the flow of emigrants from East Germany via Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland to West Germany. The other was a series of ever-more powerful non-violent demonstrations for change in the major East German cities. These demonstrations had their start in church prayer meetings for peace in the face of the threat of nuclear war.
After weeks of police brutality against people trying to demonstrate after these prayer meetings, 70,000 demonstrators in Leipzig and 10,000 in East Berlin on Oct. 9, 1989, faced the real and publicly announced danger of a "Chinese solution," i.e., a police massacre. The East German government backed down from the use of violence on that evening, something none of the demonstrators could have known in advance. From that point on, the government lost control of its people, making Nov. 9 merely the culmination of this process.
Thus, it was not the rhetoric of American presidents or the wasteful spending of the Star Wars anti-missile defense program that were primarily responsible for the fall of the Wall. The courage of non-violent demonstrators in East Germany on Oct. 9, 1989, deserves to be commemorated just as much as a those of a month later.
Finally, any discussion of Nov. 9, 1989 calls to mind another Nov. 9 in German history, namely the one in 1938. On this night, the Nazis organized a nation-wide pogrom against Jews known as the Reichskristallnacht. Scores of Jews were killed, hundreds of synagogues and Jewish businesses burned, thousands of Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps. The 10th anniversary of the fall of the wall is certainly a time to celebrate the burst of freedom that Ekki, Matthias, Fidus and Quitschi enjoyed along with millions of others. Remembering Oct. 9, 1989, shows us the responsibility of and possibility for common citizens to effect great changes for the betterment of humanity, while the memory of Nov. 9, 1938 highlights the dangers of indifference.
Some things are still murky, especially how East and West Berliners and East and West Germans will get along in the future. Municipal elections were held in Berlin a month ago. The right-of-center Christian Democratic Union won an absolute majority in the West. The remodeled Communist party, now called the Party of Democratic Socialism, was the top vote-getter in the East. The dramatically different voting patterns in East and West Berlin are among the evidence many see of a continuation of the Wall in people's heads.
While the future of Germany looks both tense and exciting, a look back to Nov. 9 provides Germans with a deep sense of joy and satisfaction.
Mark Jantzen was a student of Protestant theology at Humboldt University in East Berlin from 1988 to 1991. He is a doctoral candidate in modern European history at Notre Dame doing research in Berlin.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Tuesday, November 9, 1999
