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Helmut Kohl was on a state visit to Poland when the Berlin Wall was breached. Recalling how Adenauer had lost favor with the West German electorate by remaining in Bonn when the Wall went up, Kohl decided to interrupt his Polish visit and fly to Berlin. Given the continuing Allied ban on West German flights into West Berlin and over GDR territory, this turned out to be something of an odyssey. Kohl’s Bundeswehr plane had to fly over Sweden to Hamburg, where the chancellor boarded an American Air Force plane to fly on to Berlin. He did not arrive until the Kennedyplatz ceremony was well underway. When he finally got a chance to speak, he was shouted down by the largely pro-SPD crowd. Rowdy demonstrators also disrupted his speech that evening at the Gedächtniskirche. In the eyes of many leftist West Berliners, Kohl was an interloper bent on crashing their party for his own political purposes.

Former West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt, whose appearance at the Kennedyplatz ignited the wildest enthusiasm in that square since JFK’s own visit in 1963, used this occasion to urge Berliners to regard their embrace at the Wall as the beginning of a larger reunion. “The fact that Berliners, and Germans in general, belong together manifests itself in a way that moves us and stirs us up,” he shouted. “A great deal will now depend on whether we—we Germans on both sides—prove to be equal to this historical situation. . . . What is important is that [the Germans] develop a different relationship to one another, that they can meet in freedom and grow with one another.” Mayor Momper, on the other hand, sounded a note of caution regarding the process of “growing together.” Noting that many people were still fleeing the GDR, he entreated the East Germans “to consider whether they cannot now, after all, have more faith in the process of renewal and the process of reform in the GDR, whether they are not needed in the democratic awakening of the GDR. . . . Our desire is for the democratic movement in the GDR to run its own country, the second German state, as it sees fit. We Berliners support the reform process in the GDR with a passion and with solidarity.”

Brandt’s vision, not Momper’s, prevailed. Pious hopes for a successful renewal of “the second German state” could not save the GDR. If Germany’s first unification, as Bismarck famously stated, was forged by “blood and iron,” its second union was forced by the implosion of its eastern half. In November 1989 over 130,000 East Germans, or almost 1 percent of the population of the GDR, moved west. Even those who remained showed little faith in the capacity of their state to create genuine democracy or prosperity. Nothing short of union with the West would do. Having earlier cried “Wir sind das Volk (We are the people),” they now cried “Wir sind ein Volk (We are one people).”

The SED government now sought desperately to save itself, and the GDR state, with an eleventh-hour makeover. A new cabinet under Hans Modrow, who took over as prime minister on November 13 (Krenz stayed on as general secretary), promised free elections in the near future. The “bloc parties,” previously little more than fig leaves for one-party rule, were given the green light to function independently. The People’s Parliament, using secret ballots for the first time, expelled Honecker and Mielke from its ranks. As he took his exit, the old Stasi boss had the bad grace to assure the East German people that he still “loved” them. Members of the new regime embarked on Round Table negotiations with dissident groups like New Forum and Democracy Now regarding the impending new order. They and the reformers talked enthusiastically about navigating a “third way” between communism and capitalism. These discussions, however, failed to generate much excitement among ordinary East Germans. Having seen the glitter of the capitalist West, many associated socialism as such with economic backwardness. “The third way,” people joked, “is the way to the Third World.”