The night the Wall came down

An accident, three explanations, and the problem with remembering a decade as an evening

A The most consequential frontier of the twentieth century was opened by a bureaucratic error committed at a press conference. On the evening of 9 November 1989 an East German official, handed a note about new travel regulations he had not read carefully and had played no part in drafting, told journalists that citizens could leave for the West. Asked when this took effect, he searched the paper, found nothing, and said that as far as he knew it applied immediately. The regulation had in fact been intended to take effect the following day, through an orderly application process at police stations. Within two hours the crossing points were besieged by crowds who had watched the announcement on television, and by midnight the guards, who had received no instructions and could not obtain any, had opened the barriers.

B The scene has been replayed on every anniversary since, and it deserves its place: a frontier that had been defended with orders to shoot was dismantled by a crowd because nobody in authority could be found to say otherwise. It is a good story and it is true, and the difficulty with it is that it explains the date rather than the event. A regime that could still command its border troops would have closed the crossings the following morning; several had been sealed before on far less provocation. The reasons it did not are not to be found on the evening of 9 November, and the temptation to treat the whole collapse as an accident is one of the more persistent errors in popular accounts of the period.

C The first structural explanation is economic, and it is the one favoured by those who look at figures rather than at crowds. The East German state was insolvent in a way its own planners had documented internally and its leadership had declined to act upon: production was concentrated in industries whose output nobody outside the bloc would buy, the hard currency required to service Western loans was being obtained by selling assets and, notoriously, by trading political prisoners, and consumer goods were rationed by queue. A population that could compare its shops with those it saw nightly on West German television drew the obvious conclusion, and the state's inability to prevent that comparison — the broadcasts could not practically be jammed — is a detail with more explanatory power than it is usually given.

D The second explanation is geopolitical and concerns the removal of a guarantee. Every previous rising in the bloc had ended with Soviet tanks, and every citizen who considered protesting had that arithmetic in mind. When the Soviet leadership indicated, at first privately and then unmistakably, that it would no longer intervene militarily to sustain its client governments, the arithmetic changed for everyone at once. The regimes of eastern Europe had rested on a threat that was now known to be withdrawn, and several of them fell within weeks of each other, which suggests a common cause rather than a series of local accidents. The withdrawal was not announced as a doctrine so much as demonstrated by inaction, which meant that each population had to establish for itself, at some risk, that the guarantee had really lapsed.

E The third explanation belongs to the streets, and it is the one most often left out of accounts written from the archives of governments. Through the autumn of 1989 the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig grew from a few hundred people to several hundred thousand, and the critical moment was probably not November but early October, when a very large march passed off without the security forces opening fire. Whether the order to shoot was never given, was given and disobeyed, or was overtaken by the size of the crowd is still argued; what is not in doubt is that after that evening everyone on both sides understood that the state would not use lethal force against its own population, and once that was understood the demonstrations became irreversible.

F These three accounts are frequently presented as competitors, and the competition is largely artificial. An insolvent state can survive indefinitely if it is prepared to shoot; a state whose protector has withdrawn can still suppress a small opposition; a mass movement can be crushed if the will exists. What happened in 1989 required all three conditions simultaneously, and the interesting question is not which mattered most but why they coincided, to which the least fashionable answer — that the economic decay had proceeded far enough to erode the confidence of the officials who would have had to give the orders — is probably the strongest.

G The residue of the argument is a caution about how such events are remembered. The fall of the wall is narrated as a single night, with a date, a location and a cast, because that is the form in which television recorded it and the form in which anniversaries are marked. The processes that made the night possible occupied a decade and were mostly invisible: balance sheets, a change of leadership in Moscow, congregations meeting in churches, the slow accumulation of people willing to be counted. A history that begins at the press conference has the merit of drama and the defect of putting the accident before the causes that made an accident sufficient.