The fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years later: John Leslie provides remembrances of 1989 from inside East Germany.

• Author: Leslie, John
• Position: Personal account

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Two characteristics distinguish events in East Germany from those elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. First, communism collapsed quickly, seemingly in a matter of weeks, during which the East German regime was powerless to control events. Second, the end of the Cold War eliminated not only East German communism, but also the existence of a sovereign East German state. Even after twenty years it is difficult to grasp the scale of these changes and the rapidity with which the accepted 'facts' of the Cold War disappeared. This article uses the author's personal observations, made while living and working in East Germany in 1989, to illustrate the forces that precipitated the rapid disappearance of the East German state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

The ultimate causes of the East German collapse lie beyond the former borders of the GDR. The first to come to mind are Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power and his introduction of reforms under the labels of glasnost and perestroika. Yet even these policies were triggers, unleashing forces concealed only by communist parties' self-proclaimed monopoly on truth enforced by the state's repressive powers. This article does not attempt to untangle these chains of cause and effect. Rather it uses personal experiences to demonstrate how emerging civic consciousness, a failure of ideological convictions and nationalism merged to destroy the GDR quickly and completely.

In the northern spring of 1989, events careened beyond the control of communist authorities in Central Europe or Moscow. In Poland economic stagnation forced the government into 'Round Table' negotiations with the independent trade union, Solidarity. These negotiations resulted in a June election that, while rigged, nonetheless brought defeat for the communists. In Hungary, parallel events led to a 'Round Table' power-sharing arrangement between communists and opposition, as well as a dismantling of fortifications along the Austrian-Hungarian border. Changes in Hungary's border regulations permitted East Europeans, especially East Germans, to flee to the West. By September, a flood of East Germans trying to move west stoked an explosion of street demonstrations inside the GDR. Together, mass emigration and massive demonstrations brought down East Germany's leader, Erich Honecker, in October, and the Berlin Wall on 9 November.

Firsthand experience

In 1989, I lived and worked in West Berlin as well as inside the GDR itself, experiencing these developments firsthand. In July and August 1989, I worked in the East German cities of Leipzig and Schwerin, as part of a programme sponsored by the GDR's government. From October 1989 until May 1990, I worked as a producer for the American television network news programme, NBC Nightly News. These experiences permitted me to observe how and why events in the GDR accelerated rapidly and cataclysmically in the summer and autumn of 1989.

The following three anecdotes illustrate how the forces of civic consciousness, ideological exhaustion and nationalism combined to drive the pace and direction of events in East Germany in 1989-90. The first anecdote describes an event that took place in Leipzig in the summer of 1989. It demonstrates the East German regime's vulnerability to events that turned the private dissatisfactions of individuals into public grievances. A second anecdote reveals how ideology ceased to provide younger East German elites sufficient motivation to defend the regime. The third anecdote demonstrates how, in the face of ideological failure, nationalism led the East German state to self-destruct. Together these anecdotes demonstrate the earthquake that took place in the way East Germans thought about their regime at the time.

LEIPZIG, JULY 1989

The first factor contributing to the speed of collapse was the emergence of 'civil society' in East Germany, or East Germans' collective awareness of themselves as a 'public' to which political power might be held accountable. In September and October 1989, demonstrators in Leipzig and other cities proclaimed popular sovereignty with the slogan 'Wir sind das Volk', or 'we are the people'. I witnessed the East German regime's helplessness against such developments in Leipzig in July and August 1989 as a participant in a programme called the League for Friendship among Peoples, or Liga fur Valkerfreundsehaft.

The league programme was run by the East German Ministry of Culture and permitted about twenty university-age Americans to spend four weeks in the GDR, helping to build 'real-existing socialism'. For this privilege we paid US$150 and worked for three weeks at the Sternberg Brewery on the outskirts of Leipzig. The league's attraction was that it permitted participants to reside in the GDR without having to pay the DM25/day mandatory exchange or stay in Western-style hotels that cost more than DM100/day. As a student, this was the only...