While these voices of protest certainly represented a challenge to the Honecker regime, the government probably could have contained the dissension had not a more pressing threat emerged from one of the GDR’s “socialist brother states,” Hungary. On May 2, 1989, the new reform Communist government of Karoly Grosz in Budapest dismantled the barbed-wire fence on its border with Austria. Budapest assured East Berlin that, for the time being, Hungarian border police would still require East Germans to show GDR exit visas to pass into Austria. Yet this did not prevent thousands of East Germans from heading for the Hungarian-Austrian border in hopes of crossing to the West. When guards turned them back at the regular checkpoints, many simply abandoned their cars in the woods and walked into Austria. Others moved into the West German embassy in Budapest, refusing to leave without a laissez-passer to the West. Tiring of maintaining a “second wall” for a state that seemed incapable of holding the loyalty of its own citizens, the Hungarian government on September 11 formally opened its border with Austria and turned a blind eye when thousands of East Germans poured across the frontier. Honecker’s government screamed foul and turned to Moscow for help. The Soviets, however, had gone out of the business of policing their shaky Eastern European empire, and Gorbachev was more interested in fostering good relations with West Germany than in bailing out the GDR. As he told his ambassador to East Berlin: “We support the GDR, but not at the cost of our interests in West Germany and Europe as a whole.”
Hungary was not the only escape route for East Germans anxious to leave their country. Thousands drove to Warsaw and Prague, abandoned their Trabis in the streets, and took refuge in the local West German embassies. Like their counterparts in the Budapest embassy, these people refused to leave their sanctuaries until given travel documents enabling them to go west. By the end of September there were over 10,000 East Germans encamped in the Prague complex alone, making it Europe’s largest squat. With shelter and sanitation facilities stretched to the limit, the Red Gross warned of an imminent health crisis. Harried embassy officials could not simply evict the refugees because Bonn regarded all East Germans as West Germans-in-waiting, entitled to instant citizenship should they demand it. Finally, on September 30, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher flew to Prague and announced that Bonn and East Berlin had worked out an arrangement allowing the embassy occupiers there and in Warsaw to emigrate to West Germany. As an assertion of GDR sovereignty, Honecker insisted that all the refugees pass through East Germany on their way to the Federal Republic. Officially classed as “expellees,” they would be transported in sealed trains and have their GDR identity papers taken from them en route. As they boarded their trains on October 3–4,
In the late summer and early fall of 1989, as the GDR government prepared to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the state’s foundation, the prevailing mood among the populace was anything but celebratory. In cities and villages across the country shop windows and factory gates sported signs advertising for new employees. The place was like a battered old car whose tires were going flat—hardly the sort of conveyance in which one could confidently drive into the bright Communist future. The GDR citizens who chose to stick it out at home insisted that their loyalty be rewarded with genuine reforms, including the freedom to travel when and where they wished. Having been told for so long that theirs was a nation by and for the people, they accompanied their demands for greater freedom with cries of “
