Nov 11th 2015

The man whose words brought down the Berlin Wall was far from a bumbling fool

by Tereza Novotna

FNRS Post-doctoral Researcher, Université Libre de Bruxelles

The spectacle of thousands of East Germans flocking to the Berlin Wall and demanding its guards open the border crossings supplied some of the most remarkable images of our time. From the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig up to the huge rally on Alexanderplatz in East Berlin a few days before the Wall came down, the Germans helped bring down the communist GDR regime with banners and slogans such as “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”).

But at the heart of it all was the press conference that took place on the evening of November 9, and the lead role in the drama went to Günter Schabowski, a high-ranking East German apparatchik who recently died at the age of 86 – and whose answers at the briefing have become the stuff of legend.

When asked when the new government decree allowing free travel would take effect, he responded “ab sofort, unverzüglich” (“from now, immediately”), three famous words that signalled to hundreds of East Berliners to run to the border checks and challenge the guards.

This pronouncement has long been written up as an offhand comment with outsize consequences. But the popular image of Schabowski as a bumbling idiot, out of his depth and slow to grasp the consequences of his actions, is wide of the mark.

No slip-up?

At the end of November 1989, once West German politicians – and Helmut Kohl in particular – took charge of the process, the breach of the Berlin Wall began to be recast as the beginning of German reunification. And Schabowski was quickly – and undeservedly – framed in the public imagination as a clueless accidental hero who inadvertently triggered one of the most spectacular sets of unintended consequences in recent history.

Yet Schabowski was also one of very few former communist functionaries of the entire bloc of former communist countries who expressed his guilt and regret for the failures of communist regime or apologised to its victims. Paradoxically, he was also one of the few East European communists who served his time in a jail.

Along with Egon Krenz and others, he had been instrumental in removing the old communist regime led by Erich Honecker. And after a new travel law was mooted on Monday 6 November 1989, decried as too timid at that day’s demonstration in Leipzig and getting plenty of coverage on West German TV news, Schabowski agreed with Krenz that the law should be approved through an expedited procedure, and permit both permanent and temporary departures from the country.

And after the coup against Honecker but before the the new travel law, Schabowski had met with West Berlin’s SPD mayor, Walter Momper, and told him that there would be a travel law worth its name – that is, genuine freedom of travel.

Mystery caller

In an interview I conducted with Schabowski in 2007, he claimed that the famous piece of paper given to him by Krenz, which he seemed to fish randomly out of a large pile of documents during the press conference, did not state clearly when the new travel rules were due to come into force, merely “ab sofort, unverzüglich”.

In contrast, Krenz always maintained that the misunderstanding was Schabowski’s fault, that he didn’t read carefully through the portfolio on his way to the press briefing and simply missed a press statement allowing the government decree to be made public as of 4am the next day.

But whether that is true or not, there are reasons to believe that Schabowski was not just fumbling his way through, and that he was in fact clearly aware of the significance of the paper from Krenz.

Schabowski left the announcement to the end of the press conference because it was a government matter, and he, as a Politburo member, held no official government post. As the conference wound down, he interrupted a reporter in the middle of his question to call on a journalist from the Italian news agency, Riccardo Ehrmann, who shifted the question-and-answer session to the issue of the new travel law.

Some 20 years after the events, Ehrmann admitted that he had received a mysterious phone call encouraging him to ask the question – though he did not want to say who he thought it might be from.

Schabowski’s real motivations on the night have of course gone to his grave with him. But at the very least, what little we know suggests that he may have been rather more in the loop than his image as a hapless bureaucrat would suggest.


This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.



Tereza Novotna is an FNRS Post-Doctoral Researcher based at the Institute for European Studies, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels, Belgium. She joined ULB in Autumn 2012 where she examined the role of the European External Action Service (EEAS), its composition (including gender balance) and the upgraded role of EU Delegations. Since October 2014, she has received a three-year post-doctoral funding from the Belgian national research foundation (FNRS). Although her current work focuses primarily on EU foreign policy, her broader research interests include EU enlargement, democratization and integration processes (in Europe and on the Korean peninsula), transatlantic relations and TTIP negotiations, and the politics of Central and Eastern Europe as well as Germany.

Tereza Novotna received a Ph.D. in Politics and European Studies from Boston University and undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from Charles University Prague. She is the author of the monograph How Germany Unified and the EU Enlarged: Negotiating the Accession through Transplantation and Adaptation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) which is comparing and contrasting the two post-1989 integration processes. Tereza has held visiting fellowships at several institutions including the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS (Johns Hopkins University), the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the Institute for German Studies at University of Birmingham, the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Brussels Office), the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin (supported by a DAAD grant), the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Her research has been published in German Politics and Society, West European Politics, Studies in Ethnicities and Nationalism, Perspectives, Journal for Contemporary European Research, and E-Sharp as well as in numerous policy and media outlets. She has also practical experience of EU foreign policy from working for the European Commission, DG RELEX/EEAS, the EU Delegation in Washington, DC and the Czech Permanent Representation to the EU.

Browse articles by author

More Essays

Nov 15th 2020
EXTRACT: "Perhaps it is Piller’s discovery that when it comes to war there is no such thing as innocence...."
Nov 4th 2020
EXTRACT: "I imagined America as the land of the free that gave voice to the forgotten. Where race, color, and creed do not matter and human rights are guarded with zeal. Where the ingathering of all cultures and people made it richer and human resources and talent knew no limits or constraints. Where opportunity awaits the able and generosity is extended to the needy. Where everyone is equal before the law and political differences are valued to make America better. Where sacrifices are willingly made to right the wrong morals and fortitude guide its leaders. Where caring about friends and allies is the hallmark of the nation and opposing oppression near and far is the emblem that distinguished America. This is the character of America. This is the soul of America. This is what made America great. The America that gave me a home. The America that fulfilled my dreams."
Oct 15th 2020
EXTRACT: "“The paintings which I propose to do will depict the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy” – this is how Jacob Lawrence described his project in 1954. Over sixty-five years later his proposal has, if anything, become only more urgent. Two days after this exhibition closes, Americans will vote in what is arguably the most significant election in a generation, an election that will measure our commitment to preserving that democracy, the struggle for which was Lawrence’s mighty theme."
Oct 15th 2020
EXTRACT: "There are also other ways our life stories can be passed down through generations, besides being inscribed in our DNA...... One 2014 study looked at epigenetic changes in mice. Mice love the sweet smell of cherries, so when a waft reaches their nose, a pleasure zone in the brain lights up, motivating them to scurry around and hunt out the treat.... The researchers decided to pair this smell with a mild electric shock, and the mice quickly learned to freeze in anticipation....... The study found this new memory was transmitted across the generations. The mice’s grandchildren were fearful of cherries, despite not having experienced the electric shocks themselves. The grandfather’s sperm DNA changed its shape, leaving a blueprint of the experience entwined in the genes."
Oct 1st 2020
EXTRACT: "As we Americans face the potential loss of a peaceful transition of power after the election and the possible end of democracy as we know it, we are reminded that discourse matters, that words matter and that the one who quotes poetry is a man who reads—and that matters."
Sep 25th 2020
EXTRACT: "We now know the potentially appalling long-term effects of suffering cruelty from others, including damage to both physical and mental health. The benefits of being compassionate towards oneself, rather than treating oneself cruelly, are also increasingly recognised..... And the idea that we must suffer to grow is questionable. Positive life events, such as falling in love, having children and achieving cherished goals can lead to growth..... Teaching through cruelty invites abuses of power and selfish sadism. Yet Buddhism offers an alternative - wrathful compassion. Here, we act from love to confront others to protect them from their greed, hatred and fear. Life can be cruel, truth can be cruel, but we can choose not to be."
Sep 19th 2020
EXTRACT: "Over his incredible career, David Attenborough has seen more of earth’s natural wonders than almost anyone. To hear him talk, with such clarity, about how bad things are getting is deeply moving. Scientists have recently demonstrated what would be needed to bend the curve on biodiversity loss. As Attenborough says in the final scene, “What happens next, is up to every one of us”. "
Sep 15th 2020
EXTRACTS: "The Anglo-Australian multinational company Rio Tinto – the largest iron ore mining company in the world – demolished two 46,000-year-old Aboriginal rock shelters in May.......The Dampier Archipelago of Western Australia is home to thousands of Aboriginal pictographs, and perhaps the oldest surviving rock art in the world. Indeed, Australia’s Indigenous art represents the longest uninterrupted tradition of art in the world – going back over 50,000 years......Aboriginal people represent the oldest continuous culture in the world...."
Sep 13th 2020
EXTRACT: "Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilisation of Islam showed that modernisation by no means implies a linear process of religious decline.....Reliable large-scale data on Iranians’ post-revolutionary religious beliefs, however, has always been lacking...........In June 2020, our research institute, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN...conducted an online survey......The results verify Iranian society’s unprecedented secularisation."
Sep 12th 2020
EXTRACT: "Just as you can upgrade your old computer’s operating system, culture can evolve even if intelligence doesn’t. Humans in ancient times lacked smartphones and spaceflight, but we know from studying philosophers such as Buddha and Aristotle that they were just as clever. Our brains didn’t change, our culture did."
Sep 2nd 2020
EXTRACT: "Our lab in Cambridge, England, is working with a promising new family of materials known as halide perovskites. They are semiconductors, conducting charges when stimulated with light. Perovskite inks are deposited onto glass or plastic to make extremely thin films – around one hundredth of the width of a human hair – made up of metal, halide and organic ions. When sandwiched between electrode contacts, these films make solar cell or LED devices."
Sep 2nd 2020
EXTRACT: "Bryant, a black man, was sentenced to life in prison for trying to steal hedge clippers from a Louisiana carport storage room in 1997. He has already served twenty-three years for this petty crime, and on 31 July the Louisiana Supreme Court denied a request to review his life sentence. The denial followed a lower appeals court’s 2019 decision that concluded “his life sentence is final.” The only judge on the Louisiana Supreme Court to dissent (or even issue an opinion) was Chief Justice Bernette Johnson. She wrote a stinging rebuke, observing that Bryant’s “life sentence for a failed attempt to steal a set of hedge clippers is grossly out of proportion to the crime and serves no legitimate penal purpose.” "
Aug 18th 2020
EXTRACT: "In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice reported that as high as 40 percent of prisoners should not be in prison—”behind bars with no compelling public safety reason.” There are literally thousands of young prisoners, Black and white, who are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for non-violent offences. It is unfathomable that we as a society are spending billions of dollars every year to sustain such pointless cruelty, to inflict needless pain on individuals, fathers and mothers, who pose no threat at all to the public."
Jul 31st 2020
EXTRACT: "From a Kantian standpoint discrimination based on race – or religion, or gender – is fundamentally wrong. It is wrong, first of all, because it is dehumanizing, a denial of human dignity. When I racially discriminate, I am denying the person’s intrinsic self-worth, I am, in fact, denying their very right to exist, whether I know it or not. The moral law demands that I treat every individual as a free person equal to everyone else. If the moral law grants each of us a kind of infinite worth, it does not grant someone greater worth than anyone else."
Jul 12th 2020
EXTRACT: "Remember, your wellbeing is extremely important when supporting someone with depression. Take time for self-care so you can model positive behaviours and be replenished enough to provide this crucial support."
Jul 4th 2020
EXTRACT: "--- Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable. --- Author James Baldwin’s words, written in the America of the late 1950s."
Jun 29th 2020
EXTRACT: "Numerous studies have shown that children who grow up in more deprived neighbourhoods tend to have worse physical health as adults compared to those raised in more affluent areas. This is the case even when researchers take into account family income and education, and whether or not parents have major illnesses. In order to address this health disparity, researchers need to understand how those living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods end up with worse health outcomes. Our team’s latest study has highlighted one potential way your childhood neighbourhood may influence your health for years to come. It might do so through changing how the activity of your genes is regulated."
Jun 29th 2020
EXTRACT: "Ruth Poniarski is a painter and the author of Journey of the Self: Memoir of an Artist (Warren Publishing, 2020), in which she tells the story of her decade long struggle with mental illness, a “spiraling malady” which led her into a “pattern of psychosis”. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Poniarski about her life and work, and how she eventually overcame her demons."
Jun 27th 2020
EXTRACT: "I know I’m good in a couple of things, really good in a few things, and that’s enough. My confidence is big enough that I can really let people grow next to me, it’s no problem. I need experts around me. It’s really very important that you are empathetic, that you try to understand the people around you, and that you give real support to the people around you."