Berlin Wall 1989: Harald Jäger's Gate, Trabants and the Ostalgie Polls

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The fall of the Berlin Wall began on the edges of the Eastern Bloc. At the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 on the Austria-Hungary border, an idea sparked by Otto von Habsburg, hundreds of East Germans walked into Austria while Hungarian guards turned away, knowing Gorbachev had dropped the Brezhnev Doctrine for what officials called the Sinatra Doctrine. East Germans who had waited 10 to 15 years for a plastic-bodied Trabant drove them south or abandoned them outside the West German embassy in Prague, where Hans-Dietrich Genscher's balcony announcement was drowned out by cheers. Erich Honecker fell in October, and Egon Krenz's Politburo drafted a controlled travel rule meant to take effect the next day.

On November 9 spokesman Günter Schabowski, unbriefed, read the draft at a live press conference and, when asked when it took effect, said immediately, without delay. West German broadcasts carried the news back into East Germany, and crowds massed at the checkpoints. At Bornholmer Strasse guards first let the loudest through while stamping over their passport photos to quietly revoke their citizenship, but by 10:45 p.m. commander Harald Jäger, with no orders from above, opened the barrier. In the aftermath, Thatcher and Mitterrand privately opposed rapid reunification, Germany chose October 3 as its holiday, and polls later found many easterners mourning the jobs and childcare of the old state.

• The border defenses included two concrete walls more than a hundred miles long, a mined death strip and Czech hedgehog tank obstacles.
• Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman asked the travel question that led Schabowski to the paper in his pocket.
• Souvenir hunters with hammers and chisels became known as Mauerspechte, or wallpeckers.
• November 9 was rejected as a national holiday because it is also the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms.
• A 2019 poll found 35 percent of Berliners felt building the wall was not bad.