Fall of the Berlin Wall
On the evening of November 9, 1989, an East German Communist Party spokesman named Günter Schabowski, at a live press conference, misread a document and announced that East Germans could cross the border 'immediately, without delay.' The announcement had not been authorised; Schabowski himself did not know when the policy was supposed to take effect. But the news spread instantly, and thousands of East Berliners surged to the Wall's checkpoints. Overwhelmed and without orders to fire, the border guards stepped aside. East and West Berliners began crossing freely, then climbing the Wall, then hammering at it with makeshift tools. The most potent symbol of the Cold War divide was breached. The fall of the Wall was the emotional and symbolic centrepiece of 1989, the moment that the Cold War effectively ended in Europe. The division of Germany — for forty years considered a permanent feature of European life — suddenly seemed not only reversible but inevitable. German reunification followed within a year, on October 3, 1990. The images of jubilant crowds dancing on the Wall circled the globe and became some of the most reproduced photographs of the twentieth century. The fall was in many ways an accident — a bureaucratic mistake that cascaded into history — which itself said something about the fragility of the system the Wall had symbolised.
- Year: 1989 CE
- Category: Political
