On 9 November, 1989 the government of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) announced that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. This followed indirectly from widespread disgust at the falsification of the results of local elections in the spring of that year and demonstrations calling for political freedoms and change in cities across East Germany, notably in Leipzig (SG E3011).
On and after 9 November, small sections of the previously tightly sealed ‘Berlin Wall’ were opened, and thousands of East Germans were enabled to cross in to West Berlin (a part of the Federal Republic of Germany, or ‘West Germany), nearly all of them for the first time since the wall was constructed in 1961, specifically to prevent movement of people.
The same month, the ruling SED (Socialist Unity Party, in all its actions a hard-line Soviet-style communist party), effectively abandoned power in East Germany. New elections held in March 1990 under radically freer conditions were won by the East German section of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) which had been hastily formed a few months earlier. After this election, Angela Merkel, who had joined the Democratic Awakening party, later merged with the CDU, became a spokesman for the ‘caretaker’ East German government under Lothar de Maizière, who advocated and promoted speedy unification of East with West. This
