After the Wall, Three Decades of Cultural Despair

The Politburo of the East German Communist Party had made a fatal mistake. It had met in emergency session on the cold evening of November 9, 1989, as the country’s border controls were collapsing and hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets of East Berlin demanding democratic reforms and human rights. Other communist regimes were disintegrating in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, and similar irreversible processes were underway in the Soviet Union itself. The party chiefs knew that there would be no Soviet support for a brutal crackdown, as Mikhail Gorbachev pursued his campaign to modernize communism. Almost casually there emerged a proposal to lift the ban on East Germans leaving the country. Incredibly, the Politburo grasped at it, hoping to relieve the pressure while aligning itself with the liberalization being promoted by Moscow. Just before 7pm the order was given, and by midnight thousands of Ossis were surging through the checkpoints…