On the evening of November 9, 1989, the East German Politburo spokesman Günter Schabowski read a draft regulation to a press conference he had not fully understood, and within hours the Berlin Wall was open. It was the most symbolic moment of a process that had begun in May 1989, when the Hungarian government decided to dismantle its border installations with Austria, and ended on December 26, 1991, with the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The collapse arrived in five overlapping stages.
Poland leads, June 1989. On June 4, 1989, Poland held its first partially free election since the war. Solidarity candidates won 99 of 100 seats in the freely contested Sejm and all but one of the contested Senate seats. By August, the communist prime minister had lost a confidence vote, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki — a Solidarity-aligned Catholic intellectual — formed the first non-communist government in the Eastern bloc.
Hungary opens the border, May–September 1989. The Hungarian government of Miklós Németh began removing border installations in May. The Pan-European Picnic on August 19, organized by Hungarian and Austrian civil society groups at the Sopron border crossing, allowed roughly 600 East Germans to walk into Austria in a single afternoon. By early September, the Hungarian foreign minister had formally announced that East Germans would be allowed to leave.
The Wall falls, November 9, 1989. A botched press conference in East Berlin produced the evening’s events. The Politburo spokesman Günter Schabowski, reading a draft regulation he had not fully understood, told reporters that “private trips abroad can be applied for without prerequisites” and that the new rules “enter into force, according to my information, immediately.” Crowds gathered at the Wall. The border guards, lacking clear orders, opened the gates. East and West Berliners climbed the Wall together.
The other regimes collapse, November–December 1989. The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia began on November 17 with a student demonstration attacked by riot police. By December 29, the dissident playwright Václav Havel was president. Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov resigned on November 10. In Romania, the December revolution turned violent; Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad on December 25, 1989.
Reunification and the end, 1990–1991. The Two Plus Four Agreement of September 12, 1990, settled the external aspects of German reunification. Germany was formally reunified on October 3, 1990. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved on July 1, 1991. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 26, 1991, when the Supreme Soviet formally recognized its own dissolution. The Iron Curtain, in every sense it had carried, was gone.
For background on what had held the border in place for forty-four years, see the Cold War’s origins, ideologies, and major phases.