Günter Schabowski

Opening of Berlin Wall

In October 1989, Schabowski, along with several other members of the Politbüro, turned on the longtime SED leader Erich Honecker and forced him to step down in favor of Egon Krenz. As part of the effort to change the regime's image, Schabowski became the regime's unofficial spokesman and he held several daily press conferences to announce changes. He had already been in charge of media affairs for the Politbüro. He was also reportedly named the second man in the SED, Krenz's old role. Schabowski had spent most of his career in communist-style journalism in which reporters were told what to write after events had already happened. Thus, he found it somewhat difficult to get used to Western-style media practice.

On 9 November 1989, shortly before that day's press conference, Krenz handed Schabowski a text containing new, temporary travel regulations. The press 9 November 1989 conference which led to the fall of the Wall. Schabowski is seated on stage, second from right. Riccardo Ehrman is seated on the floor of the stage with the table behind him. Schabowski had not been on hand when Krenz read the text earlier in the day to several Politbüro members during a cigarette break at that day's Central Committee plenum or when it was discussed before the full committee. However, he felt comfortable discussing it at the press conference; he said later that all one needed to do to conduct a press conference was to be able to speak German and read a text without mistakes. Accounts differ on who asked that question. Both Riccardo Ehrman, the Berlin correspondent of the ANSA news agency, and the German Bild Zeitung (a tabloid) reporter Peter Brinkmann were sitting in the front row at the press conference and claimed to have asked when the regulations would come into force.

Later, when asked whether the new regulations also applied to travel between East and West Berlin, Schabowski looked at the text again and discovered that they did. When Daniel Johnson of The Daily Telegraph asked what that meant for the Berlin Wall, Schabowski sat frozen before giving a rambling statement about the wall being tied to the larger disarmament question.

After the press conference, Schabowski sat down for a live interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw. When Brokaw asked him if it was indeed true that East Germans could now travel without having to go through a third country, Schabowski replied in broken English that East Germans were "not further forced to leave GDR by transit through another country," and could now "go through the border." When Brokaw asked if this meant "freedom of travel," Schabowski replied, "Yes of course," and added that it was not "a question of tourism" but "a permission of leaving GDR."

The West German public national television channels showed parts of Schabowski's press conference in their main evening news reports at 19:17 on ZDF's heute and at 20:00 on ARD's Tagesschau, which meant that the news was broadcast to nearly all of East Germany as well, where West German television was widely watched. The news then spread, with news reports continuing to repeat the news throughout the night.

As the night progressed, thousands of East Berliners began proceeding to the six border crossings along the Berlin Wall and demanded to be let through. Live television reported on the gathering people which only increased the numbers of East Berliners coming to the gates. The crowds vastly outnumbered the border guards, who tried initially to stall for time. However, no one was willing to order deadly force. Finally, at 23:30, Stasi Officer Harald Jäger decided to open the gates at the Bornholmer Straße border crossing and to allow people into West Berlin.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was the key event leading to the end of the East German regime, a state that had been crumbling for many weeks as citizens had been fleeing through intermediate countries surrounding East Germany. Indeed, Victor Sebestyen later wrote that when the gates were opened, for all intents and purposes, East Germany "ceased to exist". He also wrote that many of Schabowski's colleagues suspected he was either an American or West German agent and could not believe that he had made "a simple cock-up".

In the following purges of the "party's old guard", Schabowski was quickly expelled from the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the SED, in an attempt to improve the party's image.

His support for the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) prompted some of his former comrades to call him a wryneck (German: Wendehals). The word refers to a bird that can turn its head almost 180 degrees; it became a popular term used to mock communists who had turned capitalist.

Together with other leading figures of the GDR regime, he was charged with the murders of East Germans attempting to flee the GDR. In January 1995, Berlin prosecutors pressed charges against him. He was critical of the PDS/Left Party, the successor to the Socialist Unity Party. In 2001, he collaborated with Bärbel Bohley as advisor to Frank Steffel (CDU).

Death According to his wife, Schabowski lived in a Berlin nursing home during the last years of his life, after a number of heart attacks and strokes.