These days, “November 9” is predominantly associated with the most
recent event of global significance that took place on that date twenty years
ago, namely, the fall of the Berlin Wall. It has come to represent the symbolic
end date of what the thoughtful historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the “short
20th century.”
We remember the ecstatic celebrations, in which people seemed to leave
behind a rather depressing past. This event was hardly foreseen by anyone, but
it has led many a commentator to put blame on social scientists for their lack
of foresight.
But what is often forgotten is that in the context of German history,
November 9 represents not only this most recent anniversary but also other ones
that contrast with the overwhelmingly joyful memories of Eastern Europe opening
up in 1989. Two previous events on this date also impacted German, European,
and world history. On November 9, 1938, Nazi gangs took to the streets to burn
down synagogues and attack Jewish homes and businesses. Euphemistically, that
night is often referred to as “Kristallnacht” (or Night of Broken Glass)
while indeed “Reichspogromnacht” is the more appropriate term,
indicating a decisive shift in events toward what has become known as the
Holocaust.
Exactly twenty years earlier, on November 9, 1918, Karl Liebknecht
declared the formation of a “Freie Sozialistische Republik” (Free
Socialist Republic) from a balcony of the Berlin City Palace (a monument that
was flattened in 1950 to make way for the GDR’s “Palace of the Republic” and
has become a focus of intense controversies about whether or not to reconstruct
it since the 1990s). Liebknecht’s declaration was an attempt to turn the
devastation of the First World War into a project of liberation – and it came just
two hours after Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the founding of the “German
Republic” from a balcony of the Reichstag. As the latter decree prevailed over
the former, not least of all through the use of brutal force, the stage was set
for the turmoil of the Weimar years. (In this context, we may also remember the
failed putsch in Munich by Hitler on November 9, 1923.)
Back to the most present past, the fall of 1989. As the citizens of the
GDR were entering the streets in masses, most impressively on the Monday
demonstrations in Leipzig and at the packed gathering on Alexanderplatz in
Berlin on November 4, many participants and observers were discussing the
possibility of a “Chinese solution” (i.e., a Tiananmen Square-style massacre),
as the GDR top leadership had earned a reputation of being particularly hard-headed,
completely unmoved by Mikhail Gorbachev’s ideas of “glasnost” and
“perestroika.”
So, unlike the assurances uttered by the head of the state and party
chairman Erich Honecker at the 40th anniversary of the German
Democratic Republic in October 1989 that the Berlin Wall (a.k.a. the
“anti-fascist wall of protection”) would remain standing for at least another
100 years, it came down just one month later. But it is also often forgotten
today that the wall did not crumble most immediately because of masses of
courageous people storming it – as images taken out of context might suggest. Nobody
would have dared doing that at the time. Instead, the opening – and subsequent
fall – of the Berlin Wall came about in a scene that more resembles a farce,
exhibiting most remarkably how much things had gotten out of control in a state
obsessed with control.
After months of East Germans leaving for Western Germany via Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, in the afternoon of November 9, the GDR government had finalized
a new law regulating both permanent exit and private travel abroad – apparently
a last attempt to appease the masses. At the press conference in the evening, a
journalist asked Günter Schabowski, press secretary and a high member of the
politburo, about the new law. Somewhat taken aback by the question, Schabowski,
who had not attended the party’s afternoon meeting, grabbed for a slip of paper
he was given before the press conference – but did not have the chance to read
himself beforehand.
Reading the document aloud, in a manner rather casual and unassuming – and
completely unaware of the significance of his words – Schabowski declared that
everybody was pretty much allowed to travel freely, “effective immediately,
without delay.” In the discussion that ensued, Schabowski, an otherwise tough
and smart man, can be seen trying to come to terms with the words he had just
spoken – as well as with the meaning of the wall, which he suddenly referred to
as, “one could say, a fortified state border.” [Watch this part of the press
conference on YouTube.)
Later in the evening, Schabowski’s announcement brought people in ever
swelling numbers to the wall, where they demanded the gates be opened. The top
leadership’s feeling of control had apparently become so engrained that they
did not anticipate the significance of their own law nor the public reaction to
it and thus had put no concrete instructions in place. It was then up to the
intelligence and military officers guarding the boarder to improvise a response
and finally let people through to the other side.
Despite the deeper historical reasons that, at least in hindsight, underscore
that the Berlin Wall and the GDR state apparatus were destined to collapse – one
key reason being the profound gap in technological and economic competitiveness
on the world markets – we may want to remember that the historical outcomes crystallizing
on November 9, 1989 might also have come about in a much more tragic way. Luck –
or, lets say, history – would have it that the catalyst was instead something
of a farce.
