Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
visas, which would henceforth be issued without delay. Hardly daring to believe the
announcement, Berliners on both sides of the Wall started heading for border crossings.
Huge crowds converged on the
Brandenburg Gate
, where the Volkspolizei gave up
checking documents and simply let thousands of East Germans walk into West Berlin.
An impromptu
street party
broke out, with West Berliners popping champagne corks
and Germans from both sides of the Wall embracing. he scenes of joy and disbelief
flashed around a world taken by surprise. West German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl
interrupted a state visit in Warsaw to rush to West Berlin, where the international press
was arriving in droves. Inside the GDR, disbelief turned to joy as people realized that
the unimaginable had happened. On the first weekend of the opening of the Wall
- November 11 and 12 - 2.7 million exit visas were issued to East Germans, who
formed kilometre-long queues at checkpoints. West Germans - and TV-viewers around
the world - gawped at streams of Trabant cars pouring into West Berlin, where shops
enjoyed a bonanza as East Germans spent their DM100 “welcome money”, given to
each of them by the Federal Republic. By the following weekend,
ten million visas
had
been issued since November 9 - an incredible number considering the entire
population of the GDR was just sixteen million.
The road to Reunification
Despite the opening of the border East German demonstrations continued and
anti-government feelings still ran high, forcing the immediate dismantling of the
formidable Stasi security service and an agreement to have free elections, for which
the
SED
hastily repackaged itself as a new, supposedly voter-friendly
PDS
- Partei des
Demokratischen Sozialismus (Democratic Socialist Party), partly by firing the old
guard. But the next initiative came from the West when
Chancellor Kohl
visited
Dresden on December 19, addressing a huge, enthusiastic crowd as “dear countrymen”,
and declaring a
united Germany
his ultimate goal. East Germans began to agree as they
discovered that West Germany's standard of living eclipsed anything in the GDR, and
found out exactly how corrupt their government had been - with the result that the
GDR's first free elections on March 18, 1990 returned a victory for a right-wing
alliance dominated by the CDU and Kohl.
he
economic union
was hammered out almost immediately and the GDR began
rapidly to fade away. Eastern produce vanished from shops to be replaced by western
consumer goods, and superficially it seemed as though a second “economic miracle” had
begun. Yet for many East Germans, the excitement was tempered by fears of rent increases
and factory closures during the transformation to a market economy. Already the first legal
claims by former owners of apartment buildings in East Berlin were being lodged.
With confirmation that a united Germany would respect its post-World War II
boundaries, the wartime allies agreed to reunification. After an all-night Volkskammer
session on August 23 it was announced that the GDR would become part of the
Federal Republic on
October 3, 1990
.
Street-level changes
he two Berlins, meanwhile, were already drawing together as the border withered
away during the course of the year. Passport and customs controls for German citizens
had ceased early in 1990 and, by the time of currency union, nationals of other
2006
2006
Demolition begins on the former East German
parliament, the Palast der Republik.
The new Hauptbahnhof is opened.
