A journalist now admits he was advised to ask a historic question about a GDR travel law, writes DEREK SCALLYin Berlin
TWO DECADES on, the story of the fall of the Berlin Wall may have to be rewritten after the journalist who set events in motion admitted acting after a tip-off from an East German official.
The world was changed forever at an East Berlin news conference on November 9th, 1989, thanks to the dogged questioning of Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman.
The Politburo of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED) had recently announced its intention to allow all citizens to travel abroad freely, in a bid to ease growing demands for free elections.
After a long, rambling explanation from spokesman Günter Schabowski, Ehrman asked the decisive question: when will these new regulations come into effect?
After much hesitation, Schabowski perused a piece of paper and replied: “With immediate effect.”
Minutes later the news had flashed around the world and East Berliners, avidly following events live on state television, broke for the border.
Almost 20 years on, Ehrman now admits that before the press conference he got a call from a contact in East Germany’s ADN news service. “He told me to make sure to ask a question about the travel law, that it was very important,” Ehrman says.
“I’m saying this now because I don’t like how some newspapers claim today that it was chance that I asked. It was no accident.”
The revelation has prompted speculation that East German officials disillusioned with the Politburo leadership engineered the fall of the wall.
Schabowski, the former Politburo official, yesterday dismissed as “absurd” the idea that the question was “planted” by SED officials.
Ehrman dismisses that claim, too, even though his ADN contact was the service’s general director, Günter Pötschke.
Pötschke, who died in 2006, worked for ADN for 40 years; he was made a member of the SED’s central committee in 1986 and served on the party’s “agitation commission”.
For his part, Ehrman says he would have asked the question regardless but was even more determined to do so after Pötschke’s tip-off. “It can’t be the case that it was all steered. ADN was an official state organ but neither it nor Pötschke were enslaved to the SED,” says Ehrman.
“Pötschke was a true communist who believed in the existence of the GDR but I consider it highly unlikely that there was a political background to his call. I’m certain I wasn’t used.”