Günter Schabowski (born January 4, 1929) was an official of the SED party in East Germany, famous for accidentally beginning the destruction of the GDR border system. January 4 is the 4th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1929 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist state that existed from 1949 to 1990 in the former Soviet occupation zone of Germany. ... The GDR border system was formed by a series of chain-link fences, walls, turrets and mine fields that was in place from 1961 to 1990, and was 1381 km (858 miles) in length, the entire length of the border separating East and West Germany; just as the Berlin Wall...

Life

Schabowski was born in Anklam, Mecklenburg. He studied journalism in Leipzig, after which he became editor of the trade union magazine, Tribüne. In 1952 he became a member of the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED). In 1978 he became the chief editor of the newspaper Neues Deutschland ("New Germany"), considered to be the most popular newspaper in the GDR. In 1981 he became a member of the Central Committee of the SED. In 1985 he became the "First Secretary" of the Berlin SED and a member of the SED Politburo. Some have accused him and his family of making especially strong use of the material privileges that the party afforded to its leading members. Mecklenburg, located in Northern Germany, was a duchy within the Holy Roman Empire, then divided, and after 1815 two Grand Duchies, then a state, and now part of the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. ... 1952 was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... The name Socialist Unity Party can refer to at several different organizations, most of them defunct. ... 1978 was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1978 calendar). ... 1981 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Politburo is short for Political Bureau. ...

On November 9th, 1989, after a misunderstanding, Schabowski famously announced in a live-broadcast international press conference that (effectively) all rules for travelling abroad were lifted, in effect "immediately" ("ab sofort"). However, the misunderstanding was only with regards to the date; the plan had been to lift the rules, found unsustainable after the mass defections via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, on the next morning. November 9 is the 313th day of the year (314th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 52 days remaining. ... 1989 is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Tens of thousands of people immediately went to the Berlin Wall where the vastly outnumbered border guards were forced to open access points and allow them through, which proved to be the end of the Wall regime. During the following purges of the "old guard", Schabowski was quickly thrown out of the SED, which now morphed into the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), even though earlier in 1989 he had been awarded the party's prestigious "Karl Marx" medal. Berlin Wall on November 16, 1989 The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a long barrier separating West Berlin from East Berlin and the surrounding territory of East Germany. ... For the Indian PDS, see Party of Democratic Socialism (India). ...

After the German Reunification, Schabowski became highly critical of his own actions in the GDR and those of his fellow Politburo members, as well as of Leninist-style socialism in general. As of 2004, he remains the only really high-ranking GDR official that has renounced that state as fatally flawed. He worked again as a journalist and editor for a small local paper between 1992 and 1999. His campaign help for the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) has caused some of his former allies to call him a Wryneck. German reunification (Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) took place on October 3, 1990, when the areas of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR - in English often called East Germany) were incorporated into The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) (FRG). ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Christian Democratic Union (CDU - Christlich-Demokratische Union) is a political party in Germany, founded after World War II by Konrad Adenauer, among others. ... Species The wrynecks are a small but distinctive group of small Old World woodpeckers. ...

Quotation

• What impresses me the most is that I was an accountable representative of a system under which people suffered, also under which repression was aimed at individuals, who were persecuted because of their oppositional stance. Their position was the right one. My position was the wrong one. We were not capable of democracy, but rather tried in the absence of better arguments to get rid of the other opinion with direct violence.
• Ostalgie ["East German Nostalgia"] is not my kind of thing. To some, the GDR appears in a backward-looking bleary-eyed view as a palladium of social security. In truth, the GDR collapsed not least because, being economically inefficient, it could not finance its social promises. from: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, November 6, 2004.

Ostalgie (English also Eastalgia) is a German term referring to nostalgia for life in the former East Germany. ... November 6 is the 310th day of the year (311th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 55 days remaining. ... 2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Publications

• Der Absturz (The Crash), Rowohlt Berlin Verlang, 1991
• Das Politbüro, Ende eines Mythos, Eine Befragung, published by Frank Sieren und Ludwig Koehne, Rowohlt, rororo Aktuell 12888, Reinbeck 1991