The Fall of East Germany: A Retrospective

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

For those of us of a certain age, the events of Nov. 9-10, 1989, in Germany had an air of unreality about them. People on the eastern side of the infamous Berlin Wall, dividing Communist East Berlin from the political ‘island’ of West Berlin, were simply walking through now open gates to freedom, 160 kilometres inside Communist territory.

The 45-kilometre wall, built in August 1961 and probably the most iconic symbol of the Cold War, included guard towers lining large concrete walls containing anti-vehicle trenches and other defences. Many East Germans who tried to escape were shot to death during those 28 years.

But on this day, no border guards prevented people from leaving East Berlin. What was going on?

Knowing their days in power were numbered, because Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had indicated he would not support repression in the Soviet bloc countries, East Germany’s Communist rulers had given permission for gates along the Wall to be opened after hundreds of people converged on crossing points.

They were met by jubilant West Berliners on the other side. Soon enough the wall would itself be torn down.

These events were part of a larger crisis that overwhelmed the Soviet bloc that year. Throughout Communist eastern Europe, regimes began to disintegrate, one after another, falling like dominoes.

A year later, East Germany — officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) — would disappear. Germany, the country that began the Second World War and then reaped the consequences of its crimes by being split between the Communist East and the democratic West, would again be united.

Following free elections in East Germany in March 1990, a unification treaty between the larger Federal Republic of Germany in the west and the GDR was negotiated and approved by large majorities in the legislative chambers of both countries.

On Oct. 3, 1990, East Germany joined the existing 11 federal states that comprised West Germany as five more states. Berlin was reunited as a city.

Today, the old Soviet experiment in the east is little more than a memory, recalled mainly outside Germany when films such as the 2003 comedy Good Bye, Lenin, or the more serious 2006 movie The Lives of Others, appear on our cinema screens.

When U.S. President Ronald Reagan, on a visit to West Berlin in June 1987, had called on the Communists to “tear down this wall,” few realized it would happen that quickly. But perhaps people should have been less surprised.

Let’s face it: the GDR was really a non-starter. The Soviets had imposed their brand of Communism on many nations in eastern Europe after 1945, but none of them were merely artificial entities, fragments of a larger country.

East Germany, though, was simply the part of Germany that had been allocated to the Russians as a Soviet Zone in 1945 by the Allied powers that defeated Hitler.

Speaking the same language as their fellow Germans and, in many cases, watching television from across the border, East Germans were aware of how hollow Communist propaganda was. And, as time went on, they became increasingly less prosperous than their fellow Germans on the other side.

This was a country whose population of 16 million was only kept in line through force. The dreaded secret police, known as the Stasi, kept such close watch on the citizenry that even husbands and wives spied on each other, and children informed on their parents.

Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 persons. It was an Orwellian nightmare. Today, the former Stasi offices house the Stasi Museum.

But too much information about the world beyond its borders kept leaking in: the Iron Curtain had no roof and, as far as East Germany was concerned, the writing was indeed on the wall.

Its demise was indeed, to use a phrase coined by French philosopher Louis Althusser, “over-determined.”