40th anniversary of the DDR

The DDR celebrates itself whilst its citizens flee

Nothing was going right for the SED in the autumn of 1989. Whilst the DDR economy was in its death throes, and tens of thousands of East Germans were trying to flee to the West via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, many of those who had chosen to stay took to the streets every Monday to protest. Never one to bow to reality, the SED government opposed even minor reforms, despite entreaties from the Soviet Union. During his visit to East Berlin, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told the media: “I believe that dangers await those who do not respond to life.” The translator turned this into the famous phrase: “Life punishes latecomers.”

Rather than taking the hint, the SED decided that the time was right for a party and set about organizing monumental celebrations to mark 40 years of uninterrupted DDR success on 7 October 1989. Units of the East German army and DDR border troops marched past the crowds gathered along Karl-Marx-Allee in East Berlin, and a lavish banquet was held for high-ranking international guests at the Palace of the Republic. Demonstrations and protests that had taken place in East Berlin and elsewhere in the DDR were broken up, some of them violently, with more than 1,000 arrests being made. After the party came the hangover: Honecker resigned one and a half weeks later and the Berlin Wall fell three weeks after that.