6 November (Monday)
The SED leadership publishes the draft travel bill as announced. The length of time people are allowed to travel is limited to thirty days a year. Permission to travel can be denied for reasons that are not clearly defined and that allow authorities great scope for arbitrary decisions. The financing of trips abroad remains an unsolved problem.
Despite these restrictions, this bill would have been welcomed as a step forward only a few weeks previously. But now it provokes outrage and leads to increased protests in the street. Gregor Gysi, the chairman of the Bar Association's Council of Chairmen in the GDR, rejects the draft as half-hearted and completely inadequate.
In Bonn, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, representing Egon Krenz, secretly meets with West German Chancellery Minister Rudolf Seiters and Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. He tells them that the SED leadership is ready to open the Wall gradually in return for new loans totalling twelve to thirteen hundred thousand marks, and extended economic cooperation. His most urgent request is for the West German government to temporarily help pay for the increased travel of GDR citizens expected as a result of the travel bill, which would amount to an additional 3.8 hundred thousand marks. Seiters and Schäuble show a willingness to discuss and negotiate the matter, but use delaying tactics. Schalck realises that he has no more room to negotiate.
Freedom to travel is the main theme of the evening "Monday demonstrations" and protest marches of the following days. In Leipzig, protesters call not only for an "end to the SED’s claim to power – constitutional amendment Article 1": to great applause, one speaker calls the planned travel bill "black-on-white stultification"; another comments on it with the words: "Now, the same people who have always humiliated us are again to decide our fate." Mockingly, the protesters chant: "Around the world in thirty days – without money"; and they demand: "We don’t need laws, the Wall has to go."
In November, 133,429 GDR citizens manage to flee to the West.
