The Leipzig Monday Demonstration
of October 9, 1989

IT WAS ALEXIS DE Tocqueville who wrote that “The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.” While this observation clearly applied to Eastern Europe’s doomed communist governments in 1989, it was not entirely true in the German Democratic Republic in October of that astonishing year. Instead, “the second German state” decided its own destiny the moment it refused to reform while it still had the chance. That was the moment when the people of Leipzig took the cause of reform into their own hands.

"Those who come too late"

Please note that I said “reform” and not “revolution,” let alone “reunification with the Federal Republic.” These were still pipe dreams in October of 1989, and not even particularly attractive ones for most people. The majority would still have been satisfied with a few democratic reforms at home and an open border with the Federal Republic. A new “socialism with a human face” was as much as most people expected to see in their lifetimes. But the fraudulent election in May had energized the tiny underground opposition movement. Internment camps were going up across the country, and the communist government’s repeated threats of a “Chinese solution” à la Tiananmen Square gave dissidents a cause to fight for, namely sheer survival in the face of a potentially genocidal government. 

Then, as escapes westward via Hungary and West Germany’s Prague embassy grew from a trickle to a flood, East Germans began to realize that their government was hardly the all-powerful monolith they had been brought up to fear. Finally, Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to East Berlin on October 6 in connection with the GDR’s fortieth anniversary –  in the course of which he publicly told communist boss Erich Honecker through an interpreter that “those who come too late [i.e. who don’t introduce reforms in time] will be punished by life itself”¹ – exposed the regime’s isolation to a global audience. This time, unlike the tragic East German workers’ uprising in the wake of Stalin's death in 1953, everyone knew that whatever happened now, the Soviet tanks would remain parked at their bases.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in East Berlin, October 6, 1989.
"Life calls for brave decisions. Those who come too late
will be punished by life itself"

Why Leipzig?

Before the Revolution of 1989, Leipzig was best known as the city of Bach and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. But in 1982, Pastor Christian Führer of Leipzig’s historic St. Nicholas' Church had begun conducting “Monday prayers for peace” at five p.m. in the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He conceived this event as a non-violent protest against the nuclear rearmament programs of both the Warsaw Pact and NATO, which  had been planning for decades to unleash full-scale thermonuclear war on German territory if the status quo in Central Europe were disturbed. Non-church members (along with a generous sprinkling of Stasi informants) also used to take part in this peaceful protest, where concerned citizens met to discuss matters of current interest. After all, the church was the only remaining institution that was largely free of direct government supervision and interference.

Leipzig's St. Nicholas' Church

Führer had scheduled his prayer service carefully. By five o'clock, most ordinary people were already off work and could thus spend their leisure time as they wished. Monday evening was ideal, since nearly all communist party members were busy attending their weekly meetings at the factory or office. Moreover, downtown shops were still open, which meant that groups of people congregating in the streets outside the church did not stand out to the police and the Stasi. This would later prove to be a convenient time for West German TV journalists to smuggle footage of the demonstrations across the border and broadcast it on their evening news programs.

"We are the people!"

On September 4, 1989, the traditional Monday prayers for peace swelled into a demonstration by several hundred participants for freedom of travel and political reform. Two other Leipzig churches joined in, and the authorities did nothing to stop them. 10,000 assembled on October 2.² Then, on October 9, following the debacle in Prague and the departure of the first “Freedom Trains” to West Germany, the event exploded into a demonstration by 70,000 citizens in this city of half a million. And these demonstrators were armed, too, but not with knives or guns. No, these counterrevolutionaries (as Honecker called them) came equipped with the most dangerous weapon of all: a brilliant slogan.

“Wir sind das Volk!” (“We are the people!”³), the demonstrators chanted. They passed out lighted candles and began parading through the streets. They sang protest songs, including the communists' own Internationale, and marched right past Stasi headquarters itself shouting “No violence!” These “enemies” certainly didn't look very violent. As Pastor Führer pointed out in an interview for Deutsche Welle earlier this year, when you carry a candle, you need two hands – one to hold it, and one to protect the flame from the wind. You have no hand left in which to carry a weapon.

"The Wall will stand for another hundred years"
East German communist party boss Erich Honecker (1912-1994)
 

How did the ruling Socialist Unity Party, which claimed to represent the most progressive forces of the East German people and to be devoted to peace, respond to such a blatant challenge to its authority? In fact, it scarcely reacted at all. Seventy-seven year-old Erich Honecker was suffering from prostate cancer and appeared to be utterly out of touch with reality. Egon Krenz, secretary for security issues in the Central Committee, later claimed that he issued orders not to intervene, but subsequent research proved that he only reacted after the demonstration was over. Kurt Masur, the world-renowned conductor of Leipzig’s Gewandhausorchester, spoke out in favor of the demonstrators and may have calmed the waters.

Ultimately, however, the local Party and Stasi organizations were left hanging by a paralyzed regime in East Berlin and by a Soviet leadership that had grown tired of the Cold War. Leipzig’s doctrinaire communists simply had no way of describing, let alone explaining, what was going on around them. As one of them stated later, “We had planned everything, we were ready for everything – but not for candles and prayers.” How could the police and the Stasi be sure that they would not be charged with murder if they did what they were designed to do?

As the party leadership dithered, 13,000 armed riot police and Stasi men loyally took up their positions on the streets of Leipzig, waiting for the order to attack. Finally, Major General Gerhard Strassenburg, the district head of the People's Police, called up the Interior Minister in East Berlin and told him that he would not intervene. (“When I heard Gorbachev talking on the radio that evening, I knew that was it for socialism,” he writes in his new memoirs.) Faced with a non-violent and thoroughly reasonable demonstration by their own population, the local authorities all yielded to the will of the people and let them march in peace.

Courting disaster:
Special units of the People's Police wielding shields and clubs
block streets leading to Leipzig's St. Nicholas' Church

Voting with their feet

But the people of Leipzig had no way of knowing any of this. Just two days earlier, on the margins of the fortieth anniversary ceremonies, the riot police had been beating demonstrators to a bloody pulp. The “Chinese solution” appeared like a genuine possibility. The freedom marchers hit the streets knowing that the night of October 9, 1989 could easily have been their last.

Nowadays our Beltway pundits like to make a big deal out of the “purple fingers” displayed on photographs from the more or less fraudulent Third World elections they help leverage. Well, fair enough. But let us not forget that the people of Leipzig had no sponsors in Washington or anywhere else. They kept their fingers clean and instead voted with their feet under the guns of the Stasi. The following week, the number of demonstrators swelled to 120,000. One week later, 320,000 protesters from across the GDR swamped the city. And this time they were joined by hundreds of thousands of protesters staging similar marches throughout the country.

"We are the people!"

If the communist regime ever had an opportunity to carry out a “Chinese solution,” Leipzig was it. Looking back at all these events after twenty years, the opening of the Berlin Wall exactly one month later almost appears like a foregone conclusion.

Today it is worth remembering that the people of Leipzig achieved not only a victory over the GDR dictatorship, but also over the downright pitiful - and tragic - record of German history itself.  “We [Germans] had never succeeded in making a revolution,” Pastor Führer said in early 2009. “This was the first time - and we did it without spilling a single drop of blood.”

At the formal anniversary celebration on October 9, 2009, Leipzig’s Lord Mayor Burkhard Jung stated that “the revolution was the work of the many unknown and nameless, the simple people.” Now the demonstrators of 1989 may well have gone a little too far by proposing that their home be renamed “Hero City Leipzig.” But every time I visit that beautiful town, my thoughts always return to the 70,000 courageous marchers who faced down one of the world’s most fearsome regimes one chilly evening and transformed our world in ways none of them ever could have imagined.

"Leipzig - Hero City of the GDR"
Hand-made sign from one of the Leipzig Monday
Demonstrations of 1989

²  According to later estimates, this figure likely included about a thousand Stasi agents and other communist party members on assignment.

³ This slogan arose spontaneously at the October 2 Monday demonstration. Reponding to slanderous statements made through the official press, some of the protesters started shouting "We are not hooligans!" The negative statement failed to catch on and touched off a debate on what they really were. Then someone in the crowd shouted out "We are the people!" Within weeks, people were shouting "we are ONE people," and from that moment on the GDR was doomed as an autonomous state. As Victor Hugo wrote more than a century earlier,  "Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come."