16. A Bureaucrat’s Blunder Brought Down the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall stood for decades as both a literal dividing line and the Cold War’s ultimate symbolic separator that marked off a dour communist East from a vibrant capitalist West. There was a reason why Ronald Reagan’s admonition in a 1987 visit to West Berlin, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” resonated so well back then. At the time, few could have predicted that, little more than two years later, the Berlin Wall would come down so suddenly that it would catch politicians and pundits alike off guard.
As communism began to crumble in the late 1980s, East Germany’s communist leaders began to grudgingly ease their citizens’ travel restrictions. On November 9th, 1989, East Berlin’s communist party boss Gunter Schabowski held a press conference to explain some minor revisions to the travel code. However, he committed a blunder and mistakenly implied that travel restrictions had been completely removed. When a reporter asked when the changes would take effect, Schabowski shrugged and replied: “immediately, right away“. That hit the news, and when East Germans heard it, they swarmed the border to demand the promised free passage. The border guards had received no such instructions, but to avoid a riot, they stepped aside, and the wall came down in a rapturous celebration – Berlin’s greatest citywide party, ever.
