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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 1991de:Günter Schabowski