The East German Regime — a one-party state that collapsed the year its people stopped fearing it

The German Democratic Republic, the communist state that governed roughly sixteen million East Germans for forty years, collapsed in the autumn of 1989 without a war, an invasion, or a shot fired by its rulers. On the night of 9 November 1989, confused border guards at Berlin’s Bornholmer Straße crossing opened the gates of the Berlin Wall to a crowd they could no longer hold back, and within hours the barrier that had defined the Cold War and imprisoned a nation was breached for good. The state did not survive the breach. Within a year the German Democratic Republic had voted itself out of existence and been absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany.

The regime was the creation of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the SED, which had held an unrestricted monopoly on power since 1949 — a “leading role” written into the constitution itself. It ruled through a vast apparatus of control: a party of 2.3 million members, a feared Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, that by 1989 employed some 91,000 full-time staff and ran more than 170,000 informants among its own citizens, and, since 1961, a fortified border that walled its people in and authorized guards to shoot those who tried to leave. Erich Honecker, who had organized the Wall’s construction and led the country from 1971, presided over a system that promised socialist prosperity and delivered surveillance, shortage, and stagnation.

What broke it was not foreign force but the withdrawal of fear, the withdrawal of Soviet protection, and the simple act of leaving. In the summer of 1989 Hungary opened its border with Austria, and tens of thousands of East Germans escaped west through the gap. Those who stayed took to the streets — in Leipzig, where the Monday demonstrations swelled from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands, and across the country. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, made clear that Moscow’s tanks would not save the SED as they had in 1953. Honecker fell on 18 October 1989; the Wall opened three weeks later; and the regime, having lost its border, its patron, and the obedience of its people, simply dissolved.

The collapse was extraordinary for its restraint. A state built on coercion declined to use decisive force at the decisive moment, and a population that had lived under one of the most thorough surveillance systems ever assembled brought it down peacefully. The German Democratic Republic ceased to exist on 3 October 1990, and the men who had ordered the Wall to be defended faced courts in the country they had once ruled.