Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

On October 18th some of his colleagues, led by Egon Krenze, staged a coup and removed the old man from power, after 18 years.22 Krenze’s first act was to fly to Moscow, endorse (and seek the endorsement of) Mikhail Gorbachev and return to Berlin to prepare a cautious East German perestroika. But it was too late. At the most recent Leipzig demonstration, an estimated 300,000 people had come together to press for change; on November 4th half a million East Germans gathered in Berlin to demand immediate reforms. Meanwhile, on that same day, Czechoslovakia opened its border; in the next forty-eight hours 30,000 people left through it. By now the authorities were truly panicked. On November 5th, the GDR government hesitantly proposed a mildly liberalized travel law, only to have it dismissed by critics as pitifully inadequate. The East German cabinet then dramatically resigned, followed by the Politburo. The following evening—November 9th, anniversary of both the Kaiser’s abdication and Kristallnacht—Krenze and his colleagues proposed yet another travel law to head off the stampede. At a news conference carried live on German television and radio, Günter Schabowski explained that the new provisions, in immediate effect, authorized foreign travel without advance notice and permitted transit through the border crossings into West Germany. The Wall, in other words, was now open. Before the broadcast was even finished people were in the streets of East Berlin and heading for the bo...