The social-liberal coalition came to an end in October 1982 when the FDP, which had been suffering losses in local and regional elections, defected and formed a coalition with the Christian Democrats. The new chancellor was the veteran CDU politician Helmut Kohl, who had been the unsuccessful candidate of his party for that office in the 1976 election. To confirm the change of government, Kohl arranged for early elections in March 1983. The election yielded sizable gains for the Christian Democrats but heavy losses for the FDP, many of whose former supporters favoured collaboration with the SPD. The SPD also suffered heavy losses, most of which went to the new ecological party, the Greens, who gained entry to the Bundestag only a few years after their movement had formed in protest against the government’s indifference to environmental degradation.
Helmut Kohl, 1996.NATO photos
Faced with mounting dissent at home, Honecker’s East German government sought to enhance its claims to legitimacy by seeking further recognition from West Germany. It was therefore buoyed when Chancellor Schmidt paid an often-postponed official visit to East Germany in December 1981. At that time Schmidt ignored Honecker’s demand that Bonn treat East Germans as foreigners and cease to bestow West German citizenship automatically on those who fled to the West. Nevertheless, after Schmidt’s visit East Germany began making it easier for its citizens to visit West Germany. By 1986 nearly 250,000 East Germans were visiting West Germany each year. As only one family member at a time was permitted to go, virtually all returned home. The East German government also began granting some of its dissatisfied citizens permission to emigrate to the West, an opportunity utilized each year in the 1980s by a few tens of thousands who managed to surmount formidable bureaucratic obstacles. These concessions were reciprocated by West Germany’s guarantee of several large Western bank loans to East Germany. In 1987 the East German government realized a long-held ambition when, after many postponements, Honecker was at last received in Bonn by Chancellor Kohl with full state honours, seemingly confirming West Germany’s acceptance of the permanence of the East German state.
But behind the Honecker government’s facade of stability, East Germany was losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of its citizenry. Particularly among younger East Germans, the new opportunities for travel to West Germany produced discontent rather than satisfaction. There they experienced a much more advanced, consumer-oriented society that provided its citizens with an abundance of far higher-quality goods than were available at home. While in West Germany, they chafed at having to depend materially on Western relatives because their own currency was virtually worthless outside East Germany. They also experienced full freedom of expression and an open marketplace of ideas and opinions that contrasted sharply with the rigid censorship and repression of deviant views at home. Once these East Germans had traveled or even heard of others’ travel, the Berlin Wall and the other border fortifications designed to restrict their movements seemed more onerous than ever. In protest against the East German government’s indifference to the damage its outdated industries were inflicting on the environment, a clandestine ecological movement came into being, and an underground independent peace movement took shape in protest against the regime’s manipulation of the cause of peace for propaganda purposes. Both of these movements found sanctuary in the churches of predominantly Protestant East Germany. The reunification of Germany
The swift and unexpected downfall of the German Democratic Republic was triggered by the decay of the other communist regimes in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The liberalizing reforms of President Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union appalled the Honecker regime, which in desperation was by 1988 forbidding the circulation within East Germany of Soviet publications that it viewed as dangerously subversive. The Berlin Wall was in effect breached in the summer of 1989 when a reformist Hungarian government began allowing East Germans to escape to the West through Hungary’s newly opened border with Austria. By the fall, thousands of East Germans had followed this route, while thousands of others sought asylum in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw, demanding that they be allowed to emigrate to West Germany. At the end of September, Genscher, still West Germany’s foreign minister, arranged for their passage to West Germany, but another wave of refugees from East Germany soon took their place. Mass demonstrations in the streets of Leipzig and other East German cities defied the authorities and demanded reforms.
People from East and West Berlin gathering at the Berlin Wall on November 10, 1989, one day after the wall opened.AP Images
In an effort to halt the deterioration of its position, the SED Politburo deposed Honecker in mid-October and replaced him with another hard-line communist, Egon Krenz. Under Krenz the Politburo sought to eliminate the embarrassment occasioned by the flow of refugees to the West through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. On the evening of November 9, Günter Schabowski, a communist functionary, mistakenly announced at a televised news conference that the government would allow East Germans unlimited passage to West Germany, effective “immediately.” While the government had in fact meant to require East Germans to apply for exit visas during normal working hours, this was widely interpreted as a decision to open the Berlin Wall that evening, so crowds gathered and demanded to pass into West Berlin. Unprepared, the border guards let them go. In a night of revelry tens of thousands of East Germans poured through the crossing points in the wall and celebrated their new freedom with rejoicing West Berliners.
Shevardnadze, Eduard; Genscher, Hans-Dietrich; Kohl, HelmutSoviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (right) greeting West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (left) and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl (centre) as officials arrive in Moscow to discuss German reunification, 1990.Victor Yurchenko/AP
The opening of the Berlin Wall proved fatal for the German Democratic Republic. Ever-larger demonstrations demanded a voice in government for the people, and in mid-November Krenz was replaced by a reform-minded communist, Hans Modrow, who promised free, multiparty elections. When the balloting took place in March 1990 the SED, now renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), suffered a crushing defeat. The eastern counterpart of Kohl’s CDU, which had pledged a speedy reunification of Germany, emerged as the largest political party in East Germany’s first democratically elected People’s Chamber. A new East German government headed by Lothar de Maizière, a long-time member of the eastern Christian Democratic Union, and backed initially by a broad coalition, including the eastern counterparts of the Social Democrats and Free Democrats, began negotiations for a treaty of unification. A surging tide of refugees from East to West Germany that threatened to cripple East Germany added urgency to those negotiations. In July that tide was somewhat stemmed by a monetary union of the two Germanys that gave East Germans the hard currency of the Federal Republic.