The first Trabbi goes West

(Photo by Wolfgang Sünderhauf/Umbruch-Bildarchiv )


Here's a great video with english subtitles. Don't know the source, but it's pretty authentic.

You can see the border crossing of "Bornholmer Strasse", the first point of the "DDR" that opened it's gates to the West on the 9th of november 1989. The video documents the moment when the first border crossing fell and the first people crossed the guarded bridge (Bösebrücke) to West Berlin.

After Günter Schabowski made a sensational announcement on TV (Video of the press conference on "Tagesschau", the main news show at 8 pm), everyone ran down to the border crossing, but the people you see in that video were the ones who started it all.

How did this happen?

1989. November the 9th. East Berlin. A huge room filled with press people not expecting anything special.
It was late already and everybody just wanted to go home.
An old and tired man entered the stage and sat down. He looked like he hadn’t slept since Lenin died.
The man took a sip of water before he started reading from his papers.
His name is Günter Schabowski and he is a big kahuna spokesman in a country formerly known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
Nobody expected anything important, but it was a special time and the world was watching. Back then, this region was also known as the German ”zone” in the western world. A phantom zone—a sort of shady, undefined void with trapped inhabitants, commenting on current events without participating.

The press room. Schabowski, the poor idiot. This was the biggest crisis the country has ever faced. The GDR decided to send their best man to this press conference. They sent Günter Schabowski, the man who ended the Cold War by accident.

Schabowski sat down to answer questions by members of the international press. He was tired and confused.
He just sat there and talked when somebody handed him a paper.
It was only a proposal to be discussed with the central committee the day after.

Nobody really knows why he read out an unofficial document. He doesn’t even remember it himself. It must have made sense to him in some way.
The topic of the press conference was freedom of travel and it was broadcasted live in East Germany. There was nothing special to talk about.

Schabowski got the paper while somebody asked whether there might be any changes considering visas for the west.
He looked at the paper for a second. Then he said:
”I guess we have solved this already. It says here, ‘from now on every citizen of the GDR may get a visa to visit West Germany without any further restrictions.’ Yes, that’s what it says here...”

Silence.

Somebody from the back of the pressroom said: ”When will this start?”
Close-up. The old man looked at the paper again, slowly realizing what he just said. ”It says, as of now” he repeated.
This was only a description of a new visa-law that was considered far too radical to be actually ratified. Schabowski mistook it for a memo to be read out right away because it seemed to answer the question.

Silence.

”But, if everybody gets a visa.....”
”But, but, does that mean that the Wall is gone?
Schabowski looked like he was in trance. He was used to controlling the media and now all these impending cameras looked at him.
Even the official eastern media-representatives were getting naughty.

It was 8.14 p.m. The information was out there. Everybody had seen it on official state television. Everybody, including most of the guards at the Wall and the soldiers.
Well, everybody except for the big guys upstairs and the CIA.
The government of the GDR was in a late night meeting and they had no idea what was going on behind their backs at this time.
And the CIA didn’t have any East German TV.

”As of now”, Schabowski said. He was referring to the start of the negotiations for a new visa-law, but it was easy to misinterpret him.

Things happened too quick after the press-conference and the media reported the end of the GDR right away.
On November 10th, the ”New York Times”, ”The Los Angeles Times” and ”The Washington Post” already reported the GDR had opened it’s borders.
By then it was too late anyway.


The checkpoints at the border had no idea how to handle the situation for the night.
To get the official visa, you had to receive a stamp.
”Schabowski read it out, didn’t he? Everybody gets a visa, isn’t that what he said?” But there were no new orders given yet. The guards were confused.
The soldiers started to nag. Somebody had to come up with a plan.
One of the officers made a decision. ”We just let them wait in line,” he said. ”That’s what we always did.”
Without the stamp you didn’t get the visa and if you had the visa, you wouldn’t be able to come back with that stigmatizing stamp.
The GDR would allow you to leave, but you could never return to the warm womb of socialism. That’s the way it was supposed to work until the next day. Nobody expected any trouble.

At this point it’s appropriate to pay tribute to Oberstleutnant Harald Jäger and Oberstleutnant Edwin Görlitz, members of the Stasi and responsible for the opening of the Checkpoint at Bornholmer Straße, East Berlin. They are the heroes in this story

The authority of the GDR had always been based on the power of the Soviet Union. The Stasi was founded by members of the KGB to supervise the border of the Cold War.

Now the Soviets simply didn’t care anymore. It didn’t look like they would send some tanks to help a few underpaid East German soldiers at some cold checkpoint. It was over.
They had to fight it out themselves.

Harald Jäger and Edwin Görlitz were responsible for stamping passports in the upper lefthand corner and controlling the crowds at Bornholmer Straße. They had heard of a riot in Dresden the night before.
People had attacked the cops and injured quite a lot of them. Suddenly they were scared. The people were turning against them.

Bornholmer Straße is in Prenzlauer Berg, traditional neighborhood of artists, punks and other members of the brave freak-opposition. The guards expected the worst.
After the big news at 8 p.m., the first daredevils approached the border with a new type of courage. The punks were having a party and soon other hoodlums followed them..

By 10 p.m. the guards could no longer control the masses.
Stamping the passports became pointless. It was too late for any new orders. Thousands of citizens simply wanted to take a walk on the western side and come back. It was impossible to make clear the visa wasn’t supposed to be a round-trip ticket.

A handful of soldiers with guns couldn’t stop thousands of citizens in front of the checkpoint. Without clear orders they were helpless.

Picture the guards at the Bösebrücke on Bornholmer Straße that night.
If everybody could get a visa, would that mean they were all unemployed now?
”Why can’t we all go home afterwards? We just want to go window shopping along the boulevards of West Berlin,” they said.
Standing in line was something you were used to in the east and people were just going along with what was happening.
Those who were making a lot of noise got their stamp right away to avoid further trouble. They ran over the border into the west and started to cheer to their fellows from the other side of the Wall, making the first Westerners realize that something was happening.

The stamping procedure had to be dropped at some point. More and more people stormed the checkpoints. Oberstleutnant Jäger and Oberstleutnant Görlitz were afraid of getting trampled by all the workers’ boots.
Around 11 p.m., Jäger and Görlitz made the historic decision to save their asses, open the barrier and let everybody go wherever the fuck they wanted.
They were overwhelmed by too much confusion and too many people.

The dam was open. It just happened. ”Fuck this”, some guard said and ran into the west too.
In the middle of a minor scuffle, some other guard lost his cap, raised a hand and yelled: ”now, will all you just shut up and hold up your passports or you wont get anywhere. Believe me, the west wont run away.“
The guards stepped aside and watched their prisoners call out an amnesty for the entire country.
A West German TV team raced down to the checkpoint after the first reports came in. They went live right away and fed the pictures into the international market. The news broke.

CNN sent a team to Bornholmer straße and when they went live, you saw a big crowd of Easterners running around in the West already. CNN managed to be there just in time for the evening news in the US. The border was opened around 11.30 pm and CNN had the pictures on the air about five minutes later.

The pictures from Bornholmer Straße convinced everyone that the borders were open for real. The guards for the other checkpoints thought, they must have missed an order or a memo. Everyone else in East Berlin thought, hey let's go west and have a party.

Thousands and thousands of people went down to their local checkpoint to check out what was going on. Around midnight the first drunken Westerners started dancing on the wall. When the first ones had to be rescued after falling down on the eastern side, the border guards had to cooperate with western police for the first time.

By then they could only make sure nobody gets hurt.

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berlin

Tremendous footage and great text. Thanks for posting.