Fall of the inner German border
Encyclopedia
The fall of the inner German border came rapidly and unexpectedly in November 1989, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The event paved the way for the ultimate reunification of Germany
just short of a year later.
was simply to go around one end of it, so too hundreds of thousands of East Germans found an escape route across the border of East Germany's erstwhile ally, Hungary
. The inner German border's integrity relied ultimately on other Warsaw Pact states fortifying their own borders and being willing to shoot escapees, including East Germans, around fifty of whom were shot on the borders of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria between 1950 and 1989. However, this meant that as soon as one of the other eastern bloc nations relaxed its border controls, the East Germans would be able to exit in large numbers.
Exactly this scenario played out in 1989 when a reformist Communist government in Hungary, supported by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
, began to dismantle its border fortifications. Hungary was already a popular tourist destination for East Germans, due to the trappings of prosperity that were absent at home – good and plentiful food and wine, pleasant camping and a lively capital city. At home, the desire for reform was being driven by East Germany's worsening economic stagnation and the example of other eastern bloc nations who were following Gorbachev's example in instituting glasnost
(openness) and perestroika
(reform). However, the hardline East German leader, Erich Honecker
– who had been responsible for the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 – remained staunchly against any reform in his country. Declaring that "Socialism and capitalism are like fire and water", he predicted in January 1989 that "the Wall will stand for another hundred years."
Hungary was the earliest of any eastern bloc nation to institute reform under its reformist Prime Minister Miklós Németh
, who took office in November 1988. Its government was still notionally Communist but planned free elections and economic reform as part of a strategy of "rejoining Europe" and reforming its struggling economy. Opening the border was essential to this effort; West Germany had secretly offered a much-needed hard currency loan of DM 500 million ($250 million) in return for allowing citizens of the GDR to freely emigrate. The Hungarians went ahead in May 1989 by dismantling the Iron Curtain along their border with Austria. To the consternation of the East German government, pictures of the barbed-wire fences being taken down were transmitted into East Germany by West German television stations. A mass exodus by hundreds of thousands of East Germans began in September 1989. Thousands more scaled the walls of the West German embassies in Prague
, Warsaw
and Budapest
claiming asylum. The West German mission in East Berlin was forced to close because it could not cope with the numbers of East Germans seeking asylum. The hardline Czechoslovak Communist leader, Milouš Jakeš
, agreed to Erich Honecker's request to choke off the flow of refugees by closing Czechoslovakia's border with East Germany, thus preventing East Germans from reaching Hungary.
This, however, proved to be the start of a series of disastrous miscalculations by Honecker. There were rowdy scenes across East Germany as furious East Germans who had paid in advance for their plane or train tickets and accommodation found that they could not travel and that their hard-earned money had been lost. The 14,000 East German refugees camping in the grounds of the West German embassy in Prague had to be dealt with; Honecker sought to humiliate them publicly by expelling them through East Germany to the West, shipping them in eight sealed trains from Prague and stripping them of their East German citizenship while branding them as "traitors". The Party justified the evacuation of the refugees as a humanitarian action taken because children were involved, who had been "let down by the irresponsible actions of their parents." The state newspaper Neues Deutschland ran an editorial, said to have been dictated by Honecker personally, which declared that "by their behaviour they have trampled on all moral values and excluded themselves from our society." Far from discrediting the refugees, the trains produced uproar, with citizens waving and cheering the refugees as they passed through the East German countryside. Torn-up identity papers and East German passports littered the tracks as the refugees threw them out of the windows. When the trains arrived in Dresden, 1,500 East Germans stormed the main railway station in an attempt to board the trains. Dozens were injured and the station concourse was virtually destroyed.
Honecker's more fundamental miscalculation was the presumption that by closing East Germany's last open border he had finally imprisoned his country's citizens within their own borders and made it clear that there would be no reform whatsoever – a situation that most East Germans found intolerable. Small pro-democracy demonstrations rapidly swelled into crowds of hundreds of thousands of people in cities across East Germany. The demonstrators chanted slogans such as Wir bleiben hier! ("We're staying here!") – indicating their desire to stay and fight for democracy – and "Wir sind das Volk" ("We are the people"), challenging the SED's claim to speak for the people. Some in the East German leadership advocated a crackdown, particularly the veteran secret police chief Erich Mielke
. Although preparations for a Tiananmen Square
-style military intervention were well advanced, ultimately the leadership ducked the decision to use force. East Germany was, in any case, in a very different situation from China; it depended on loans from the West and the continued support of the Soviets, both of which would have been critically jeopardised by a massacre of unarmed demonstrators. The Soviet army units in East Germany had reportedly been ordered not to intervene, and the lack of support from the Soviet leadership weighed heavily on the SED leadership as it tried to decide what to do.
After Honecker was publicly chided by Gorbachev in October 1989 for his refusal to embrace reform, reformist members of the East German Politbüro sought to rescue the situation by forcing the resignation of the veteran Party chairman. He was replaced by the marginally less hardline Egon Krenz
, who was seen as Honecker's protégé. The new government sought to appease the protesters by reopening the border with Czechoslovakia. This, however, merely resulted in the resumption of the mass exodus through Hungary. The refugee flow had severely disruptive effects on the economy. Schools were closed because the teachers had fled; factories and offices shut down because of lack of essential staff; even milk rounds were cancelled after the milkmen departed. The chaos produced a revolt within the ranks of the SED against the corruption and incompetence of the party leadership. The formerly subservient GDR media began publishing eye-opening reports of high-level corruption, spurring demands for fundamental reform. On 8 November 1989, with mass demonstrations continuing across the country, the entire Politbüro resigned and a new, more moderate Politburo was appointed under Krenz's continued leadership.
The decision was reportedly made with little discussion by the Politburo or understanding of the consequences. It was announced on the evening of 9 November 1989 by Politburo member Günter Schabowski
at a somewhat chaotic press conference in East Berlin. The new border control regime was proclaimed as a means of liberating the people from a situation of psychological pressure by legalising and simplifying migration. Misunderstanding the note that had been passed to him about the decision to open the border, he announced that it would be opened "immediately, without delay", rather than from the following day, as intended. Crucially, in the light of what happened next, it was not meant to be an uncontrolled opening, nor was it meant to apply to East Germans wishing to visit the West as tourists. At an interview in English after the press conference, Schabowski told the NBC
reporter Tom Brokaw
that "it is no question of tourism. It is a permission of leaving the GDR [permanently]."
Within hours, thousands of people gathered at the Berlin Wall demanding that the border guards open the gates. The guards were unable to contact their superiors for instructions and, fearing a stampede, opened the gates. The iconic scenes that followed – people pouring into West Berlin, standing on the Wall and attacking it with pickaxes – were broadcast worldwide.
While the eyes of the world were on Berlin, watching the Mauerfall (fall of the Wall), a simultaneous process of Grenzöffnung (border opening) was taking place along the entire length of the inner German border. Existing border crossings were opened immediately, though their limited capacity caused long tailbacks as millions of East Germans crossed over to the West. Within the first four days, 4.3 million East Germans – a quarter of the country's entire population – poured into West Germany. At the Helmstedt crossing point on the Hamburg–Berlin autobahn, cars were backed up for 65 km (40.4 mi); some drivers waited 11 hours to drive across to the West. The border was opened progressively over the course of the next few months. New crossing points were created at many points, reconnecting communities that had been separated for nearly 40 years. At Herrenhof on the Elbe, hundreds of East Germans pushed their way through the border fence to board the first cross-river ferry to run since April 1945. Hundreds of people from the East German town of Katherinenberg surged across the border to see the West German border town of Wanfried, while West Germans poured into East Germany "to see how you live on the other side". East German border guards, overwhelmed by the flood of people, soon gave up checking passports. Special trains were put on to transport people across the border. The BBC correspondent Ben Bradshaw
described the jubilant scenes at the railway station of Hof
in Bavaria in the early hours of 12 November:
Even the East German border guards were not immune to the euphoria. Peter Zahn, a border guard at the time, described how he and his colleagues reacted to the opening of the border:
To the surprise of many West Germans, many East Germans spent their DM 100 "welcome money" buying great quantities of bananas, a highly prized rarity in the East. For months after the opening of the border, bananas were sold out at supermarkets along the border as East Germans bought whole crates because they did not believe that they would be on sale the next day. The easterners' obsession with bananas was famously spoofed by the West German satirical magazine Titanic
, which published a front cover depicting "Easterner Gaby (17), happy to be in West Germany: My first banana". Gaby is shown holding a large peeled cucumber.
The opening of the border had a profound political and psychological effect on the East German public. The official mythology of the GDR had held that (in the words of the SED's official anthem) "the Party, the Party, the Party is always right / And comrades, it will stay that way. / For who fights for what's right is always right / Against lies and exploitation." Those crossing the border, however, found that West Germany had achieved vastly superior prosperity without socialism, brotherhood with the Soviet Union, revolutionary values and the rest of the self-justifying mythology that underlay the SED's claims to moral superiority. The power of the SED's mythology evaporated overnight and previously prized ideological attributes became liabilities, rather than stepping stones for advancement.
For many people the very existence of the GDR, which the SED had justified as the first "Socialist state on German soil", came to seem pointless. The state was bankrupt, the economy collapsing, the political class discredited, the governing institutions in chaos and the people demoralised by the evaporation of the collective assumptions which had underpinned their society for nearly fifty years. As Alan L. Nothnagle puts it, "Once its crutches were kicked away, GDR society had nothing to hold on to, least of all its national values. Not since Cortés
and his conquistadors entered Mexico City has a society imploded so thoroughly." The SED had hoped to regain control of the situation by opening the border but found that it had completely lost control. Membership of the Party collapsed and Krenz himself resigned on 6 December 1989 after only 50 days in office, handing over to the moderate Hans Modrow
. The removal of restrictions on travel prompted hundreds of thousands of East Germans to migrate to the West – over 116,000 of them between 9 November and 31 December 1989, compared with 40,000 for the whole of the previous year.
The new East German leadership initiated "round table" talks with opposition groups, similar to the processes that had led to multi-party elections in Hungary and Poland. When the first free elections were held in March 1990
, the former SED, which had renamed itself PDS, was swept out of power and replaced by a pro-reunification Alliance for Germany
coalition led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Chancellor Kohl's party. Now that the CDU was in power on both sides of the border, the two countries progressed rapidly towards reunification, while international diplomacy paved the way abroad. In July 1990, monetary reunification was achieved and the Western Deutsche Mark replaced the East German mark as the East German currency at a 1:1 ratio (1:2 for larger amounts). The biggest remaining obstacle, the question of NATO-membership of a unified Germany, was removed in a private visit of the German leaders to Gorbachev
's dacha in the Caucasus mountains. A Treaty on the Establishment of a Unified Germany was agreed in August 1990 and Germany's political reunification took place on 3 October 1990.
gave the remaining border guards and other ex-NVA soldiers the task of clearing the border fortifications, which was only completed in 1994. The scale of the task was immense, as not only did the fortifications have to be cleared but hundreds of roads and railway lines had to be rebuilt. An additional complication was caused by the presence of mines along the border. Although the 1.4 million mines laid by the GDR were supposed to have been removed in the 1980s, it was found that 34,000 were unaccounted for. A further 1,100 mines were found and removed following Germany's reunification, at a cost of over DM 250 million, in a programme that was not concluded until the end of 1995.
The border clearers' task was aided unofficially by German civilians from both sides of the former border who scavenged the installations for fencing, wire and blocks of concrete to use in home improvements. As one East German commented in April 1990, "Last year, they used this fence to keep us in. This year, I'll use it to keep my chickens." Much of the fence was sold to a West German scrap-metal company at the rate of about $4 per segment. Environmental groups undertook a programme of re-greening the border, planting new trees and sowing grass seeds to fill in the clear-cut area along the border line.
German reunification
German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...
just short of a year later.
Refugee crisis of September–November 1989
Just as an earlier generation of Germans had found that the way to defeat the supposedly impregnable Maginot LineMaginot Line
The Maginot Line , named after the French Minister of War André Maginot, was a line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery casemates, machine gun posts, and other defences, which France constructed along its borders with Germany and Italy, in light of its experience in World War I,...
was simply to go around one end of it, so too hundreds of thousands of East Germans found an escape route across the border of East Germany's erstwhile ally, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
. The inner German border's integrity relied ultimately on other Warsaw Pact states fortifying their own borders and being willing to shoot escapees, including East Germans, around fifty of whom were shot on the borders of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria between 1950 and 1989. However, this meant that as soon as one of the other eastern bloc nations relaxed its border controls, the East Germans would be able to exit in large numbers.
Exactly this scenario played out in 1989 when a reformist Communist government in Hungary, supported by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
, began to dismantle its border fortifications. Hungary was already a popular tourist destination for East Germans, due to the trappings of prosperity that were absent at home – good and plentiful food and wine, pleasant camping and a lively capital city. At home, the desire for reform was being driven by East Germany's worsening economic stagnation and the example of other eastern bloc nations who were following Gorbachev's example in instituting glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
(openness) and perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
(reform). However, the hardline East German leader, Erich Honecker
Erich Honecker
Erich Honecker was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party from 1971 until 1989, serving as Head of State as well from Willi Stoph's relinquishment of that post in 1976....
– who had been responsible for the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 – remained staunchly against any reform in his country. Declaring that "Socialism and capitalism are like fire and water", he predicted in January 1989 that "the Wall will stand for another hundred years."
Hungary was the earliest of any eastern bloc nation to institute reform under its reformist Prime Minister Miklós Németh
Miklós Németh
Miklós Németh served as Prime Minister of Hungary from November 24, 1988 to May 23, 1990. He was one of the leaders of the Socialist Workers' Party, Hungary's Communist party, in the tumultuous years that led to the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe.As Prime Minister, Németh took...
, who took office in November 1988. Its government was still notionally Communist but planned free elections and economic reform as part of a strategy of "rejoining Europe" and reforming its struggling economy. Opening the border was essential to this effort; West Germany had secretly offered a much-needed hard currency loan of DM 500 million ($250 million) in return for allowing citizens of the GDR to freely emigrate. The Hungarians went ahead in May 1989 by dismantling the Iron Curtain along their border with Austria. To the consternation of the East German government, pictures of the barbed-wire fences being taken down were transmitted into East Germany by West German television stations. A mass exodus by hundreds of thousands of East Germans began in September 1989. Thousands more scaled the walls of the West German embassies in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
, Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
and Budapest
Budapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
claiming asylum. The West German mission in East Berlin was forced to close because it could not cope with the numbers of East Germans seeking asylum. The hardline Czechoslovak Communist leader, Milouš Jakeš
Milouš Jakeš
Miloš Jakeš was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1987 until 1989...
, agreed to Erich Honecker's request to choke off the flow of refugees by closing Czechoslovakia's border with East Germany, thus preventing East Germans from reaching Hungary.
This, however, proved to be the start of a series of disastrous miscalculations by Honecker. There were rowdy scenes across East Germany as furious East Germans who had paid in advance for their plane or train tickets and accommodation found that they could not travel and that their hard-earned money had been lost. The 14,000 East German refugees camping in the grounds of the West German embassy in Prague had to be dealt with; Honecker sought to humiliate them publicly by expelling them through East Germany to the West, shipping them in eight sealed trains from Prague and stripping them of their East German citizenship while branding them as "traitors". The Party justified the evacuation of the refugees as a humanitarian action taken because children were involved, who had been "let down by the irresponsible actions of their parents." The state newspaper Neues Deutschland ran an editorial, said to have been dictated by Honecker personally, which declared that "by their behaviour they have trampled on all moral values and excluded themselves from our society." Far from discrediting the refugees, the trains produced uproar, with citizens waving and cheering the refugees as they passed through the East German countryside. Torn-up identity papers and East German passports littered the tracks as the refugees threw them out of the windows. When the trains arrived in Dresden, 1,500 East Germans stormed the main railway station in an attempt to board the trains. Dozens were injured and the station concourse was virtually destroyed.
Honecker's more fundamental miscalculation was the presumption that by closing East Germany's last open border he had finally imprisoned his country's citizens within their own borders and made it clear that there would be no reform whatsoever – a situation that most East Germans found intolerable. Small pro-democracy demonstrations rapidly swelled into crowds of hundreds of thousands of people in cities across East Germany. The demonstrators chanted slogans such as Wir bleiben hier! ("We're staying here!") – indicating their desire to stay and fight for democracy – and "Wir sind das Volk" ("We are the people"), challenging the SED's claim to speak for the people. Some in the East German leadership advocated a crackdown, particularly the veteran secret police chief Erich Mielke
Erich Mielke
Erich Fritz Emil Mielke was a German communist politician and Minister of State Security—and as such head of the Stasi —of the German Democratic Republic between 1957 and 1989. Mielke spent more than a decade as an operative of the NKVD during the rule of Joseph Stalin...
. Although preparations for a Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the June Fourth Incident in Chinese , were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China beginning on 15 April 1989...
-style military intervention were well advanced, ultimately the leadership ducked the decision to use force. East Germany was, in any case, in a very different situation from China; it depended on loans from the West and the continued support of the Soviets, both of which would have been critically jeopardised by a massacre of unarmed demonstrators. The Soviet army units in East Germany had reportedly been ordered not to intervene, and the lack of support from the Soviet leadership weighed heavily on the SED leadership as it tried to decide what to do.
After Honecker was publicly chided by Gorbachev in October 1989 for his refusal to embrace reform, reformist members of the East German Politbüro sought to rescue the situation by forcing the resignation of the veteran Party chairman. He was replaced by the marginally less hardline Egon Krenz
Egon Krenz
Egon Krenz is a former politician from East Germany , and that country's last Communist leader...
, who was seen as Honecker's protégé. The new government sought to appease the protesters by reopening the border with Czechoslovakia. This, however, merely resulted in the resumption of the mass exodus through Hungary. The refugee flow had severely disruptive effects on the economy. Schools were closed because the teachers had fled; factories and offices shut down because of lack of essential staff; even milk rounds were cancelled after the milkmen departed. The chaos produced a revolt within the ranks of the SED against the corruption and incompetence of the party leadership. The formerly subservient GDR media began publishing eye-opening reports of high-level corruption, spurring demands for fundamental reform. On 8 November 1989, with mass demonstrations continuing across the country, the entire Politbüro resigned and a new, more moderate Politburo was appointed under Krenz's continued leadership.
Opening of the border and the fall of the GDR
The East German government eventually sought to defuse the situation by relaxing the country's border controls. The intention was to allow emigration to West Germany but only after an application had been approved, and similarly to allow thirty-day visas for travel to the West, again on application. Only four million GDR citizens had a passport, so only that number could take immediate advantage of such a change; the remaining 13 million would have to apply for a passport and then wait at least four weeks for approval. The new regime would go into effect from 10 November 1989.The decision was reportedly made with little discussion by the Politburo or understanding of the consequences. It was announced on the evening of 9 November 1989 by Politburo member Günter Schabowski
Günter Schabowski
Günter Schabowski is a former official of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany , the ruling party during most of the existence of the German Democratic Republic...
at a somewhat chaotic press conference in East Berlin. The new border control regime was proclaimed as a means of liberating the people from a situation of psychological pressure by legalising and simplifying migration. Misunderstanding the note that had been passed to him about the decision to open the border, he announced that it would be opened "immediately, without delay", rather than from the following day, as intended. Crucially, in the light of what happened next, it was not meant to be an uncontrolled opening, nor was it meant to apply to East Germans wishing to visit the West as tourists. At an interview in English after the press conference, Schabowski told the NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
reporter Tom Brokaw
Tom Brokaw
Thomas John "Tom" Brokaw is an American television journalist and author best known as the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News from 1982 to 2004. He is the author of The Greatest Generation and other books and the recipient of numerous awards and honors...
that "it is no question of tourism. It is a permission of leaving the GDR [permanently]."
Within hours, thousands of people gathered at the Berlin Wall demanding that the border guards open the gates. The guards were unable to contact their superiors for instructions and, fearing a stampede, opened the gates. The iconic scenes that followed – people pouring into West Berlin, standing on the Wall and attacking it with pickaxes – were broadcast worldwide.
While the eyes of the world were on Berlin, watching the Mauerfall (fall of the Wall), a simultaneous process of Grenzöffnung (border opening) was taking place along the entire length of the inner German border. Existing border crossings were opened immediately, though their limited capacity caused long tailbacks as millions of East Germans crossed over to the West. Within the first four days, 4.3 million East Germans – a quarter of the country's entire population – poured into West Germany. At the Helmstedt crossing point on the Hamburg–Berlin autobahn, cars were backed up for 65 km (40.4 mi); some drivers waited 11 hours to drive across to the West. The border was opened progressively over the course of the next few months. New crossing points were created at many points, reconnecting communities that had been separated for nearly 40 years. At Herrenhof on the Elbe, hundreds of East Germans pushed their way through the border fence to board the first cross-river ferry to run since April 1945. Hundreds of people from the East German town of Katherinenberg surged across the border to see the West German border town of Wanfried, while West Germans poured into East Germany "to see how you live on the other side". East German border guards, overwhelmed by the flood of people, soon gave up checking passports. Special trains were put on to transport people across the border. The BBC correspondent Ben Bradshaw
Ben Bradshaw
Benjamin Peter James Bradshaw is a British Labour politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Exeter since 1997, and served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport....
described the jubilant scenes at the railway station of Hof
Hof, Germany
Hof is a city located on the banks of the Saale in the northeastern corner of the German state of Bavaria, in the Franconia region, at the Czech border and the forested Fichtelgebirge and Frankenwald upland regions....
in Bavaria in the early hours of 12 November:
Even the East German border guards were not immune to the euphoria. Peter Zahn, a border guard at the time, described how he and his colleagues reacted to the opening of the border:
To the surprise of many West Germans, many East Germans spent their DM 100 "welcome money" buying great quantities of bananas, a highly prized rarity in the East. For months after the opening of the border, bananas were sold out at supermarkets along the border as East Germans bought whole crates because they did not believe that they would be on sale the next day. The easterners' obsession with bananas was famously spoofed by the West German satirical magazine Titanic
Titanic (magazine)
Titanic is a German monthly satirical magazine based in Frankfurt. It has a circulation of approximately 100,000.- History :Titanic was founded in 1979 by former contributors and editors of Pardon, a satirical monthly, which the group had left after conflicts with its publisher...
, which published a front cover depicting "Easterner Gaby (17), happy to be in West Germany: My first banana". Gaby is shown holding a large peeled cucumber.
The opening of the border had a profound political and psychological effect on the East German public. The official mythology of the GDR had held that (in the words of the SED's official anthem) "the Party, the Party, the Party is always right / And comrades, it will stay that way. / For who fights for what's right is always right / Against lies and exploitation." Those crossing the border, however, found that West Germany had achieved vastly superior prosperity without socialism, brotherhood with the Soviet Union, revolutionary values and the rest of the self-justifying mythology that underlay the SED's claims to moral superiority. The power of the SED's mythology evaporated overnight and previously prized ideological attributes became liabilities, rather than stepping stones for advancement.
For many people the very existence of the GDR, which the SED had justified as the first "Socialist state on German soil", came to seem pointless. The state was bankrupt, the economy collapsing, the political class discredited, the governing institutions in chaos and the people demoralised by the evaporation of the collective assumptions which had underpinned their society for nearly fifty years. As Alan L. Nothnagle puts it, "Once its crutches were kicked away, GDR society had nothing to hold on to, least of all its national values. Not since Cortés
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro, 1st Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca was a Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Castile in the early 16th century...
and his conquistadors entered Mexico City has a society imploded so thoroughly." The SED had hoped to regain control of the situation by opening the border but found that it had completely lost control. Membership of the Party collapsed and Krenz himself resigned on 6 December 1989 after only 50 days in office, handing over to the moderate Hans Modrow
Hans Modrow
Hans Modrow is a German politician, best known as the last communist premier of East Germany. He currently is the honorary Chairman of the Left Party....
. The removal of restrictions on travel prompted hundreds of thousands of East Germans to migrate to the West – over 116,000 of them between 9 November and 31 December 1989, compared with 40,000 for the whole of the previous year.
The new East German leadership initiated "round table" talks with opposition groups, similar to the processes that had led to multi-party elections in Hungary and Poland. When the first free elections were held in March 1990
East German general election, 1990
Legislative elections were held in the German Democratic Republic on 18 March 1990. It was the first—and as it turned out, only—free parliamentary election in East Germany, and the first truly free election held in that part of Germany since 1933...
, the former SED, which had renamed itself PDS, was swept out of power and replaced by a pro-reunification Alliance for Germany
Alliance for Germany
The Alliance for Germany was an opposition coalition in East Germany. It was formed on 5 February 1990 in Berlin to stand in the East-German Volkskammer elections. It consisted of the Christian Democratic Union, Democratic Awakening and the German Social Union...
coalition led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Chancellor Kohl's party. Now that the CDU was in power on both sides of the border, the two countries progressed rapidly towards reunification, while international diplomacy paved the way abroad. In July 1990, monetary reunification was achieved and the Western Deutsche Mark replaced the East German mark as the East German currency at a 1:1 ratio (1:2 for larger amounts). The biggest remaining obstacle, the question of NATO-membership of a unified Germany, was removed in a private visit of the German leaders to Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
's dacha in the Caucasus mountains. A Treaty on the Establishment of a Unified Germany was agreed in August 1990 and Germany's political reunification took place on 3 October 1990.
Abandonment of the border
Following the opening of the border, it was progressively run down and eventually abandoned. Dozens of new crossings had been opened along the border by February 1990, and the border guards no longer carried weapons or made much effort to check travellers' passports. The border guards' numbers were rapidly reduced. Half were dismissed within five months of the opening of the border. The border was abandoned and the Grenztruppen were officially abolished on 1 July 1990,; all but 2,000 of them were dismissed or transferred to other jobs. The BundeswehrBundeswehr
The Bundeswehr consists of the unified armed forces of Germany and their civil administration and procurement authorities...
gave the remaining border guards and other ex-NVA soldiers the task of clearing the border fortifications, which was only completed in 1994. The scale of the task was immense, as not only did the fortifications have to be cleared but hundreds of roads and railway lines had to be rebuilt. An additional complication was caused by the presence of mines along the border. Although the 1.4 million mines laid by the GDR were supposed to have been removed in the 1980s, it was found that 34,000 were unaccounted for. A further 1,100 mines were found and removed following Germany's reunification, at a cost of over DM 250 million, in a programme that was not concluded until the end of 1995.
The border clearers' task was aided unofficially by German civilians from both sides of the former border who scavenged the installations for fencing, wire and blocks of concrete to use in home improvements. As one East German commented in April 1990, "Last year, they used this fence to keep us in. This year, I'll use it to keep my chickens." Much of the fence was sold to a West German scrap-metal company at the rate of about $4 per segment. Environmental groups undertook a programme of re-greening the border, planting new trees and sowing grass seeds to fill in the clear-cut area along the border line.
See also
- Border guards of the inner German borderBorder guards of the inner German borderThe border guards of the inner German border comprised tens of thousands of military, paramilitary and civilian personnel from both East and West Germany, as well as from the United Kingdom, the United States and initially the Soviet Union.-East Germany:...
- Crossing the inner German borderCrossing the inner German borderCrossing the inner German border remained possible throughout the Cold War; it was never entirely sealed in the fashion of the border between the two Koreas, though there were severe restrictions on the movement of East German citizens...
- Development of the inner German borderDevelopment of the inner German borderThe development of the inner German border took place in a number of stages between 1945 and the mid-1980s. After its establishment in 1945 as the dividing line between the Western and Soviet occupation zones of Germany, in 1949 the inner German border became the frontier between the Federal...
- Escape attempts and victims of the inner German borderEscape attempts and victims of the inner German borderThere were numerous escape attempts and victims of the inner German border during its 45 years of existence from 1945 to 1990.-Refugee flows and escape attempts:...
- Fortifications of the inner German borderFortifications of the inner German borderThe fortifications of the inner German border comprised a complex system of interlocking fortifications and security zones long and several kilometres deep, running from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia...