The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

32 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL as revolutionary, and in an October 2010 interview with Der Spiegel recalled what he had thought that afternoon: “When 17- and 18-year-olds said goodbye to their parents that day, it was like they were heading off to war. But everyone had had enough. All of them—all 70,000 of them—were able to overcome their fears.” As it happened, the Leipzig SED officials, the police chief and Kurt Masur made the decision to call for “keine Gewalt” (no violence). It was a choice between crackdown and perestroika, between Honecker and Gorbachev. The 70,000 demonstrators, seen only from the video of one camera smuggled in under the Honecker media ban, marched that night without violence. The brave souls of Leipzig repeated their act of courage on Oct. 16, and two days later Egon Krenz led the SED Politburo decision to remove Erich Honecker as the SED general secretary and GDR head of state. The Berlin Wall for 100 Years On Nov. 9, 1989, there was no sign of revolution. Sure, change was coming—but slowly, we thought. After all, the Solidarity movement in Poland began in the early 1980s. I spent the after- noon at an Aspen Institute reception hosted by David Anderson for his new deputy director, Hildegard Boucsein, with leaders from East and West Berlin, absorbed in our day-to-day business. In the early evening, I attended a reception along with the mayors and many political leaders of East and West Berlin, Allied military commanders and East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. Not one of us had any inkling of the events that were about to turn the world upside down. As the event was ending, Wolfgang Vogel asked me for a ride. I was happy to oblige and hoped to discuss changes to the GDR travel law, the target of the countrywide demonstrations for free- dom. On the way, he told me that the Politburo planned to reform the travel law and that the communist leadership had met that day to adopt new rules to satisfy East Germans’ demand for more free- dom of travel. I dropped Vogel off at his golden-colored Mercedes near West Berlin’s shopping boulevard, Ku’Damm. Happy about my scoop on the Politburo deliberations, I headed to the embassy. Vogel’s comments would surely make for an exciting report back to the State Department in Washington. I arrived at the embassy at 7:30 p.m. and went directly to our political section, where I found an animated team of diplomats. At a televised press conference, government spokesman Guenter Schabowski had just announced the Politburo decision to lift travel restrictions, leaving everyone at the embassy stunned. East Germans could now get visitor visas from their local “People’s Police” station, and the East German government would open Pieces of the Berlin Wall that are now part of the U.S. Diplomacy Center’s permanent collection. AFSA/DMITRYFILIPOFF