Amid mass demonstrations that had swelled to hundreds of thousands of citizens demanding freedom of movement and political change, East Germany's Communist government unveiled draft travel regulations meant to ease—but not eliminate—restrictions on leaving the country. Protesters rejected the proposal as inadequate, and the pressure it failed to relieve would burst three days later when the Berlin Wall itself opened.
By early November 1989, East Germany was disintegrating in slow motion. Monday demonstrations in Leipzig had grown from a few thousand to several hundred thousand, and similar crowds filled Alexanderplatz in East Berlin chanting for the resignation of the Communist leadership and the right to travel freely. The government, reeling from weeks of defections through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, scrambled to draft a law that would let citizens travel abroad with proper visas—a half-measure that satisfied no one.
Crowds jeered the proposal as bureaucratic and insulting, seeing it as an attempt to manage dissent rather than answer it. The draft was quickly withdrawn for revision. What nobody in the Politburo grasped was how little time they had left to control the narrative: a garbled announcement at a press conference on November 9 would be interpreted as an immediate opening of the border, sending Berliners streaming to the checkpoints that very night and effectively ending the Wall's 28-year existence.
Key people: Egon Krenz