Five Acts Without a Director

I. The Question That Looks Like a Switch

Who brought down the GDR? The question sounds as if it could be answered in a single sentence. Three popular narratives are available, coexisting in German living rooms, history books and talk shows without ever touching one another.

Narrative one: It was the refugees. The hundreds of thousands who fled via Hungary, Prague and the green border, proving to the regime that it could not hold its citizens. Narrative two: It was the courageous ones who stayed. The Monday demonstrators of Leipzig, who marched with candles and the cry "We are the people" against an armed state apparatus. Narrative three: It was an accident. A functionary who had not read his briefing notes, and a sentence that changed the world at 6:57 p.m.

Each of these narratives is true. And each, taken on its own, is false. For the end of the GDR was not a play with one hero and four acts. It was a five-act drama without a director — a cascade in which every event made the next one possible, none compelled the next, and the whole thing only looks like an inevitability in hindsight, which at no moment it was.

But before the first act begins, a prehistory must be told. For all three narratives begin in the autumn of 1989, when the masses were already in motion. They forget the few who started it all — years earlier, alone, with no crowd at their back and no certainty that history would ever prove them right.

II. Act Zero: The Few

On 16 November 1976, the SED stripped the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann of his citizenship. It was an attempt to rid themselves of an inconvenient poet. It became the ignition of the GDR opposition. For what the SED leadership had not anticipated was the protest. Thirteen of the GDR's most prominent writers and artists — Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym, Stephan Hermlin, Heiner Müller — drafted an open letter to the party leadership. More than a hundred others joined them. In schools, universities and factories, young people signed petitions. The Stasi recorded 457 "hostile activities" nationwide. Biermann himself later said: It was not the expatriation that shook the GDR, but the unexpected protest against it.

In Jena, a city that plays a role in the history of GDR opposition like hardly any other, a death radicalised the young resistance. On 12 April 1981, 23-year-old Matthias Domaschk died in the Stasi remand prison in Gera. He had been pulled from a train on his way to a birthday party in Berlin, taken to Gera and interrogated without sleep for thirteen hours. The Stasi called it suicide. His friends did not believe it then and do not believe it now. Four different MfS officers claimed before prosecutors that each of them had been the first to "cut him down." A young man who only wanted to live on his own terms, dead in a cell — because he was on his way to a party.

Domaschk's death was a beacon. It radicalised the Jena opposition because it showed them it could happen to any of them. In March 1983 they founded the Friedensgemeinschaft Jena — the Peace Community of Jena — one of the most vibrant and risk-taking oppositional groups in the entire GDR. On 18 March 1983, its members infiltrated an official state commemoration in Jena carrying their own placards: "Create peace without weapons," "Militarisation out of our lives." The Stasi struck, photographers documented the assaults, the images were smuggled to the West and published. On 19 May 1983, Roland Jahn and his friends joined an FDJ rally with their own placards — against rearmament in East and West. The Stasi and police tore his placard from his hands. Barely three weeks later, on 8 June 1983, he was shackled, chained to a westbound train and forcibly expatriated — the most spectacular expulsion since Biermann.

In parallel, Monika Lembke invented the "White Circle": on Saturdays, citizens who had applied to leave the GDR gathered in white clothing, standing silently on the Platz der Kosmonauten in Jena. On 18 June 1983 there were twelve. A week later sixteen. Then twenty-five, thirty-seven, forty-five. By the fifth gathering, a West German journalist was present. The images reached the Federal Republic. The Stasi lost control of the situation. In the summer of 1983, 143 people from Jena were released to the West to restore calm. Calm never returned.

The writer Jürgen Fuchs, himself expelled to West Berlin in 1977, had captured the special situation in Jena in a single sentence: "Ten are sometimes like ten thousand." He was right. These few — twelve on a square, a handful with placards at a state rally, a young man who spoke the truth at a podium — laid the fuse that ignited the masses six years later. What distinguished them from the hundreds of thousands in the autumn of 1989 was not their courage, but the loneliness of their courage. Those who demonstrated in Jena in 1983 could not know whether anyone would ever follow. Those who marched in Leipzig in October 1989 knew that 70,000 others stood beside them.

There is an uncomfortable truth about revolutions that their later chroniclers rarely tell: some people only become brave in a crowd. As individuals they are perfectly adapted and silent — and then, once the movement is large enough to be safe, they take the lead and claim the loudest voice. Those who today claim the fall of the Wall as their own were not necessarily those who stood on the Platz der Kosmonauten in 1983 or signed a petition against the Biermann expatriation in 1976. History remembers the masses. It should remember the few.

III. First Act: Voting with Their Feet

It began — for the world public — not with a cry but with a silence. The silence of those who left without demanding anything. In May 1989, Hungary began dismantling the barbed-wire fence along its border with Austria. It was the first crack in the Iron Curtain, and thousands of GDR citizens who were "holidaying" in Hungary recognised it instantly for what it was: a door.

On 19 August 1989, several hundred East Germans exploited the so-called Pan-European Picnic near Sopron to flee across the Hungarian-Austrian border. Hungarian border guards looked the other way. Three weeks later, on 10 September, Hungary opened its border entirely. Within three days, 15,000 predominantly young East Germans fled through Austria into the Federal Republic. At the same time, thousands occupied the West German embassies in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw. In the Prague embassy, up to 6,000 people crowded onto grounds designed for a few dozen.

Genscher's balcony speech on 30 September 1989 — "We have come to you to tell you that today your departure…" — was drowned out by cheering. Special trains of the Deutsche Reichsbahn carried the embassy refugees through GDR territory to the Federal Republic. At railway stations in Dresden, desperate scenes unfolded: people tried to leap onto the moving trains. The SED then closed the border to Czechoslovakia — and thereby made everything worse. By 9 November, a total of around 200,000 citizens had left the GDR.

The mass exodus of 1989 was of a different character from the early resistance. Those who fled via Prague or Hungary were carried along in a current whose sheer mass offered protection. This does not diminish the individual resolve of everyone who left everything behind. But it was something different from standing as twelve on a square in 1983 while the Stasi recorded every name. The refugees of 1989 made no political demands. They did not want to change the GDR — they wanted to escape it. Their message was existential, not programmatic: This country has nothing left to say to us.

The effect on the regime was devastating nonetheless. For a state whose citizens flee in their hundreds of thousands can deploy any propaganda in the world — it simply can no longer claim to act in the name of its people. Those who left destroyed the legend of the "anti-fascist protective rampart." But they alone could not have toppled the GDR. Those who leave demand nothing more. Those who leave have given up. The exodus destroyed the regime's legitimacy, but not its power structure. For that, those who stayed were needed.

IV. Second Act: We Are the People

In the dialectical tension between leaving and staying lies the engine of the Peaceful Revolution. For the two movements were not merely simultaneous — they were mutually referential. In Leipzig, demonstrators chanted "We're staying here!" as a defiant answer to the emigrants' "We want out!" The exodus created the pressure; the demonstrations posed the demand.

The root of the Monday demonstrations lay in the Nikolaikirche. Since 1982, Monday peace prayers had been held there — initially against the arms race, then increasingly for human rights, freedom of travel and against surveillance by the Stasi. On 4 September 1989, the first event formally described as a Monday demonstration took place. Katrin Hattenhauer and Gesine Oltmanns, two civil rights activists, unfurled a banner reading "For an open country with free people." The Stasi tore it down. It made no difference.

On 2 October 1989, 20,000 people took to the streets in Leipzig. For the first time, the cry "We are the people!" was heard. But the day of decision was 9 October. That evening, more than 70,000 demonstrators confronted 8,000 armed security forces. Hospitals in the city had stockpiled additional blood reserves. The fear of a Chinese solution — four months after the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing — was omnipresent.

It was Kurt Masur, conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, who together with three SED district secretaries and two other prominent figures drafted and broadcast the "Appeal of the Six": an urgent plea for restraint — to both sides. The three SED secretaries had not coordinated their action with the party leadership. It was an act of insubordination, not of planning. The security forces did not intervene. That evening the regime lost its last weapon: the ability to use violence. Those who can no longer shoot can no longer rule.

In the following weeks the numbers exploded. 16 October: 120,000. 23 October: 320,000. On 6 November, three days before the fall of the Wall, up to 500,000 people demonstrated in Leipzig alone, in pouring rain. The protests spread to Dresden, Halle, Magdeburg, Rostock, Plauen, Schwerin, Potsdam and Berlin. On 18 October, Honecker was ousted.

And then "We are the people" became the more consequential "We are one people." It was a single letter — in German, the shift from das Volk to ein Volk — that transformed a revolution into a reunification. From 20 November, banners appeared reading "Germany — united fatherland." The civil rights activists who had wanted a reformed GDR lost control of the movement they had started. But that belongs in another essay.

V. Third Act: The Man Who Did Not Intervene

Hovering above the first two acts was a precondition so fundamental that one almost overlooks it: The Soviet Union did not intervene. No tanks rolled through Leipzig as in 1953. No troops occupied the streets as in Prague 1968 or Budapest 1956. Over 300,000 Soviet soldiers were stationed in the GDR — and stayed in their barracks.

The reason had a name: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.

Since 1985, the General Secretary of the CPSU had set in motion, through glasnost and perestroika, a process that eroded the dogmas of the Brezhnev Doctrine. In July 1989, the Warsaw Pact formally relinquished its claim to hegemony — each member state could henceforth go its own way. The SED leadership reacted speechlessly. Honecker, who suffered a gallbladder attack during the summit in Bucharest, and his deputy Willi Stoph could find no answer. It was a symbolic scene: the body of the regime revolted before its people did.

On 7 October 1989, at the GDR's 40th anniversary celebrations, Gorbachev spoke spontaneously into running cameras at the Neue Wache in East Berlin: "Dangers await only those who do not react to life." His press spokesman Gennady Gerasimov reshaped this the same evening into the winged phrase that Gorbachev himself never uttered in so crisp a form: "He who comes too late is punished by life." The message was unmistakable: Moscow would not prevent the fall of the SED leadership.

In retrospect, Gorbachev put it himself: "We did not merely refrain from deploying the military stationed in the GDR — we did everything to ensure this process remained peaceful." And then he added what is the real historical punchline: "What could we have done anyway, if the people of the GDR wanted to unite with the Federal Republic?"

Imagine that in the autumn of 1989 it had not been Gorbachev but Vladimir Putin who served as General Secretary of the CPSU. The Wall would still be standing. It was a narrow window that opened in 1989. Gorbachev was not the author of the German revolution. But he was the reason it remained peaceful.

VI. Fourth Act: The Note

On the evening of 9 November 1989, Günter Schabowski, member of the SED Politburo and Secretary for Information, sat in the GDR's International Press Centre on Mohrenstraße. It was a press conference broadcast live on GDR television — that alone was already a minor sensation. But its historical significance arose not from design but from a concatenation of misunderstandings, negligence and linguistic accident.

Schabowski had not been present at the Politburo session where the new travel regulation was adopted. Just before he entered the press conference, Egon Krenz handed him his own copy of the approved regulation. Schabowski, by his own account, did not read the text beforehand. The embargo notice — the regulation was supposed to take effect the following day, 10 November, with various conditions — escaped his attention.

At 6:53 p.m., the Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman asked about eased travel restrictions. Schabowski leafed through his papers, put on his glasses and read — quickly, haltingly, visibly uncertain — the new exit regulation. Then came the follow-up question that set everything in motion. "When does this take effect?" Schabowski leafed, scratched his head and stammered the sentence that entered history: "That takes effect, to my knowledge… is that immediate, without delay."

Peter Brinkmann of the BILD newspaper called out the second decisive question: "Does that also apply to West Berlin?" Schabowski shrugged and read: "Permanent departure can take place via all GDR border crossing points to the Federal Republic or to Berlin-West." Beside him, Gerhard Beil whispered: "That has to be decided by the Council of Ministers." But nobody heard that any more. The journalists rushed from the room.

Schabowski did not open the Wall. He accidentally unlocked it, because he had not read a note, had not noticed an embargo, and had answered a question whose implications he did not grasp. It was, in the words of the historian Hans-Hermann Hertle, a "historically unique concatenation of imprecise formulations and communication breakdowns." The man who spoke the decisive sentence did not know what he was saying. The world that heard him took him at his word.

VII. Fifth Act: The Man Who Raised the Barrier

But even after Schabowski's words, the Wall was still closed. Hours passed between the spoken word and the physical opening, and during those hours, history hung on a single human being whom almost nobody knows.

Harald Jäger, Lieutenant Colonel of the Stasi, was the duty officer at the passport control unit of the Bornholmer Straße border crossing on the evening of 9 November. He had served at this border for 28 years. In the canteen, around 8 p.m., he watched Schabowski's words on television and thought — by his own account — "What utter nonsense!" Not out of loyalty to the regime, but because he instantly knew that the border crossings were in no way prepared for what was about to come.

And it came. From 9 p.m. onward, more and more people gathered at the crossing. Jäger telephoned his superiors. Colonel Ziegenhorn made clear that the old regulations still applied. At 9:30 p.m., the West Berlin radio station RIAS reported open border crossings — which at that point were still closed. The report became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Jäger's superiors ordered a "valve solution": let the loudest protestors through individually, invalidating their identity cards — with a stamp over the photograph that meant: no return. The GDR was expelling its own citizens to create calm. But the valve solution made everything worse: the others saw that some were being let through — and demanded all the more loudly: "Open the gate! Open the gate!"

The pressure mounted. The wire-mesh fence in the forecourt was pushed aside. Jäger feared that the crowd might seize his officers' weapons. He called his superiors again. No useful answer. A few kilometres to the south, at the Invalidenstraße crossing, the duty officer there was considering an entirely different solution: deploying officer cadets from the border troops as a military trump card. History could have tipped either way that night.

It tipped the right way. At approximately 11:29 p.m., Jäger called Colonel Ziegenhorn one last time: "It can no longer be held. We have to open the crossing. I'm ceasing all controls and letting the people out." His colleague Görlitz reported to headquarters: "We're flooding now! We're opening everything!"

Within 45 minutes, 20,000 people streamed across the Bösebrücke into West Berlin. Among them Angela Merkel. Once headquarters received the report from Bornholmer Straße, it instructed the other six Berlin border crossings to do the same around midnight.

Asked whether he felt like a hero, Jäger later said: "Nah. The heroes were the others. I was on the safe side." Then he added: "One could also have done it wrong."

That is the sentence that stays. One could also have done it wrong. On the night of 9 November, the distance between world history and catastrophe was the decision of a lieutenant colonel who had served faithfully for 28 years and then — in defiance of orders, abandoned by his superiors, facing a crowd that would not turn back — did the only right thing.

VIII. What Lay Between: The Schürer Paper

Between the visible acts of this drama lay an invisible truth: the GDR was bankrupt. On 30 October 1989, ten days before the Wall fell, Gerhard Schürer, head of the State Planning Commission, presented the Politburo with his unsparing analysis in 40 top-secret copies: the so-called Schürer Paper. It was the first time the GDR's economic reality had been stated without embellishment in an official document.

The figures were devastating. The paper put Western debt at 49 billion Valutamark — a figure later shown to be greatly inflated. The paper recommended a radical economic turn: economic reform, cutting back the bureaucracy, close cooperation with the Federal Republic, a reversal of subsidy policy. It would have been a different GDR. But history rendered the proposals moot. The economic implosion was not the immediate trigger — that was Schabowski's words and Jäger's defiance of orders. But it was the reason there was no way back. The GDR was not only politically delegitimised, not only abandoned by its citizens, not only forsaken by its protecting power — it was also broke.

IX. The Cascade

What, then, is the answer to the question of who brought down the GDR? The honest answer is: All of them — and none alone. But not all equally.

At the beginning stood the few. The twelve on the Platz der Kosmonauten in Jena, the thirteen signatories of the protest letter against the Biermann expatriation, the Peace Community with their placards at the state rally, Roland Jahn with his placard at the FDJ rally, the peace prayers at the Nikolaikirche since 1982. They risked everything when there was nothing to gain — no television cameras, no international attention, no certainty that anyone would ever follow. Some of them paid with their lives, like Matthias Domaschk. Others with forced expatriation, like Roland Jahn. All with their civil existence.

Then came those who left, and they destroyed the legitimacy. Two hundred thousand people fleeing a state prove that the "anti-fascist protective rampart" was never meant to protect anyone — but to imprison them.

Those who stayed posed the question of power. The 70,000 at Leipzig on 9 October, the 320,000 two weeks later, the half million in early November — they forced the regime into a position of either shooting or yielding. On 9 October, the regime decided — by omission, not by resolution — not to shoot. After that, it was powerless.

Gorbachev withdrew the guarantee of violence. Schabowski delivered the trigger — through incompetence, not through intent. And Harald Jäger made the concrete, physical, irrevocable decision. At 11:29 p.m., in defiance of orders, abandoned by his superiors, a lieutenant colonel raised the barrier. He did it because he did not want bloodshed.

The cascade looked like this: Without the few of the seventies and eighties, no foundation. Without the exodus, no pressure. Without the pressure, no demonstrations. Without Gorbachev, no non-violence. Without Schabowski's blunder, no date. Without Jäger's defiance of orders, no physical opening that night. Every act was necessary. None was sufficient. And none was planned.

X. The Play Without a Dramatist

The astonishing thing about the end of the GDR is not that it happened — every failing state collapses eventually — but how it happened. Without a central actor. Without a master plan. Without a general staff of revolution.

The early oppositionists acted out of conviction, when it was life-threatening. The refugees acted out of individual desperation. The demonstrators acted out of collective courage — though one must honestly add that in every mass movement two kinds of courage run side by side: the courage of those who walk at the front when the outcome is uncertain, and the courage of those who join only once the crowd is large enough to offer protection. Both are part of the story. But they are not the same thing.

Gorbachev acted out of political conviction that what can only survive through freedom cannot be maintained by force. Schabowski acted out of ignorance. And Jäger acted out of simple humanity.

The GDR was not overthrown. It was abandoned — from below upward, from outside inward, from periphery to centre. When the Wall fell on 9 November 1989, it was already hollow. The early dissidents had struck the first breach. The exodus had destroyed the legend. The demonstrators had defeated the fear. Gorbachev had disarmed the violence. Schabowski had scrambled the timetable. And Jäger had found the courage to be nothing more than a decent human being.

Five acts. No director. No script. And an outcome that, on the morning of 10 November, not even those who had brought it about would have thought possible. Helmut Kohl learned of the fall of the Wall during a dinner in Warsaw. Gorbachev was asleep. The SED leadership was still trying at midnight to present the situation as an orderly easing of travel regulations. And Harald Jäger stood alone in an office at the Bornholmer Straße, while 20,000 people streamed past him, and thought: Well, that's that, then.

It was the most unconscious revolution in world history. And perhaps, for precisely that reason, the most beautiful.