The swift and unexpected downfall of the German Democratic Republic was triggered by the decay of the other communist regimes in easternEurope and the Soviet Union. The liberalizing reforms of PresidentMikhail 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. TheBerlin Wall was in effectbreached in the summer of 1989 when a reformist Hungarian government began allowing East Germans toescape to the West throughHungary’s newly opened border withAustria. 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 toWest 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 ofLeipzig and other East German citiesdefied the authorities and demanded reforms.

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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, andPoland. 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 normalworking hours, this was widely interpreted as a decision to open the Berlin Wall that evening, so crowds gathered and demanded to pass intoWest Berlin. Unprepared, the border guards let them go. In a night ofrevelry tens of thousands of East Germans poured through the crossing points in the wall and celebrated their new freedom with rejoicing West Berliners.

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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-mindedcommunist, Hans Modrow, who promised free, multiparty elections. When the balloting took place in March 1990 theSED, now renamed theParty of Democratic Socialism (PDS), suffered a crushing defeat. The eastern counterpart of Kohl’sCDU, which had pledged a speedy reunification of Germany, emerged as the largestpolitical 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 broadcoalition, including the eastern counterparts of theSocial Democrats and Free Democrats, began negotiations for a treaty of unification. A surging tide of refugees from East to West Germany that threatened to crippleEast Germany added urgency to those negotiations. In July that tide was somewhat stemmed by amonetary union of the two Germanys that gave East Germans the hard currency of the Federal Republic.

The final barrier to reunification fell in July 1990 when Kohl prevailed upon Gorbachev to drop his objections to a unified Germany within theNATO alliance in return for sizable (West) German financial aid to theSoviet Union. A unification treaty was ratified by theBundestag and the People’s Chamber in September and went into effect on October 3, 1990. The German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic as five additionalLänder, and the two parts of dividedBerlin became oneLand. (The five newLänder wereBrandenburg,Mecklenburg–West Pomerania,Saxony,Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia.)