At 6:53 p.m. on November 9, 1989, the East German Politburo member Günter Schabowski shuffled his papers at a live press conference in East Berlin and said, “As far as I know — this takes effect immediately, without delay.” Within hours the order had reached the Bornholmer Straße crossing, the gate had been opened at 11:30 p.m., and the twenty-eight-year-old barrier that had defined Cold War Europe had stopped functioning as a barrier. By midnight, the Berlin Wall had fallen.
The most detailed reconstruction of the evening is Mary Elise Sarotte’s The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (2014). The eyewitness account by Harald Jäger, the senior officer at the Bornholmer Straße crossing, has been published in German in multiple editions. The English-language oral history of the Wall’s fall includes The Day the Wall Fell (2019), a project of the Berlin Wall Foundation.
The Day Before
The day before the Wall fell, the East German government had been holding a separate negotiation that, in the end, produced the conditions for the fall. Hans Modrow, the new prime minister, and Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, had agreed at a meeting in West Germany in mid-1989 that the East Germans stranded in West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw could leave for the West. The first train, a sealed convoy, had passed through Dresden on October 4. The episode was a public relations disaster for the East German regime: the trains were visible, the scenes of cheering were visible — the regime’s claim that it had the support of its people was visibly absurd.
By November 3 the East German Politburo, under Egon Krenz (who had replaced Erich Honecker on October 18), had decided to issue a new travel regulation. The intent was to relieve the pressure by allowing East Germans to leave through official channels rather than through the embassies. The specific design — what categories of travel were allowed, with what restrictions, with what waiting period — was a matter of internal negotiation. The draft, finalized at a Politburo meeting on the afternoon of November 9, retained restrictions: visas would be required, designated crossing points would be used, change would take effect on the day of a published instruction.
The Press Conference
Günter Schabowski, the Politburo member who handled propaganda, was given the task of announcing the regulation at a press conference that had been called for other reasons. The session began at 6:00 p.m. Schabowski read the draft text. At 6:53 p.m. Riccardo Ehrman, the Ansa correspondent, asked when the regulation would take effect. Schabowski, who had been working from a draft he had only just received, shuffled his papers and said: “As far as I know — this takes effect immediately, without delay.” Ehrmann’s translation reached the West German media in seconds. The East German news agency ADN issued a brief bulletin, which did not include the new visa requirement.
The news spread faster than the corrections. Harald Jäger, the senior officer at the Bornholmer Straße crossing, has described what happened next. The crowds began gathering at 9:20 p.m. The officers called the central office for guidance. The central office had no clear instructions. Jäger reported the situation up the chain; no answer came. The crowd grew. At 11:30 p.m. Jäger decided to open the gate. “I had to take responsibility on my own,” he said later. “I had nothing to hold on to.”
The seven other crossings in Berlin followed within the hour. Helmut Lohbauer, the deputy press spokesman, took to the airwaves at midnight to clarify that the new rules still required visas. By that point, hundreds of thousands of people were on the streets. The gate could not be closed.
The Scenes
The pictures from the night of November 9 are now an entire archive. East Berliners pouring through the checkpoints at the Brandenburg Gate, embraced by West Berliners. People climbing the Wall with hammers and chisels, chipping pieces off as souvenirs. Trabis parked on the Western side, drivers still inside, hoods open, a Stasi sticker still on the windshield. Strangers in the West greeting each other, pouring champagne. West Berlin’s mayor Walter Momper, at the Bornholmer Straße crossing, telling reporters that the events were “a wonderful day for Berliners, a wonderful day for Germany, a wonderful day for the whole world.”
West German television broadcast the scenes live. The ZDF anchorman, Hans-Joachim Friedrichs, used a phrase that became a national catchphrase: “This is a historic moment. The gates in the Wall stand wide open. We are, of course, aware that this is not yet a final settlement, but we believe the first pieces of the Wall have fallen.” In Berlin itself, most of the city was at the Wall by 1:00 a.m. December 10 began, in practical terms, that night.
The Morning After
The morning of November 10 did not bring the violence that some had feared. There were isolated incidents — border guards in some places were attacked, and several people were killed in firearms accidents — but the regime had effectively lost control and the population had not turned on each other. The political crisis deepened. Modrow’s government held emergency meetings; a special Politburo meeting on November 10 was unable to find a coherent response.
Egon Krenz’s position was already untenable. The Volkskammer removed him in early December, and the new government began preparations for free elections. The Wall was not knocked down. It was opened, and then it was dismantled. The demolition crews began in February 1990. By the end of 1991 most of the Wall was gone. The longest preserved sections are the East Side Gallery (1.3 kilometers) and the Bernauer Strasse Memorial (1.4 kilometers).
What the Date Signifies
November 9 was not a single decision; it was a chain. The chain began with the Politburo’s decision to announce the new regulation, continued with Schabowski’s misreading of the draft, and was completed by the decisions of individual officers at the checkpoints to step aside. Mary Elise Sarotte argues, persuasively, that the chain was accidental in its specific outcome but not in its general direction. The Wall was not a structure that could be sustained once the political will to defend it had been withdrawn, and the political will had been withdrawn over the previous nine months. What fell on November 9 was not the wall, in the sense of concrete. What fell was the willingness to use force to defend it.
The date, 9 November, has a habit of recurring in German history. It was the date of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the date of the Nazi pogrom of 1938, the date of the fall of the Wall in 1989. The juxtaposition is not lost on Germans. The day is now a national holiday in some Länder and a day of reflection in others. The Berlin Wall Foundation’s archive collects the materials; the annual ceremonies at the Bernauer Strasse Memorial and the Bornholmer Straße crossing are part of the contemporary civic calendar.