8 November (Wednesday)
In East Berlin, a three-day meeting of the SED Central Committee is opened, at whose outset the entire Politburo resigns.
In the Bundestag debate on the state of the nation, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl makes public the list of demands that Rudolf Seiters conveyed to the SED leadership the previous day via Alexander Schalck: if the SED gives up its monopoly on power, allows independent parties and guarantees free elections, Kohl says, he is ready "to talk about a completely new dimension of economic aid."
After the SED Central Committee has confirmed a Politburo decision to finally permit the civil rights movement Neues Forum as an association, GDR Interior Minister Friedrich Dickel makes a public announcement to this effect.
More than 40,000 GDR citizens have left the country for West Germany via the CSSR. The pressure of the CSSR on the GDR becomes increasingly urgent. GDR ambassador Ziebart is summoned to the Czechoslovakian Foreign Office and handed a request. The deputy CSSR foreign minister, Sadovsky, complains to him that the CSSR government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party are being snowed under by enquiries and complaints from the residents of north and west Bohemia, who cannot understand why, since November 3, East German citizens have been leaving the GDR for West Germany via the territory of the CSSR.
Ziebart immediately telegraphs to Berlin: "’Owing to the pressure’ in the two above-mentioned districts of the CSSR, but in other districts as well, Comrade Sadovsky asked me to convey the request ‘on behalf of the CSSR government and the International Politics department of the Central Committee’ to allow GDR citizens to travel to West Germany ‘directly and not via the territory of the CSSR.’"
In the newscast programme "Aktuelle Camera" on GDR television, the author Christa Wolf directs an appeal to all those wanting to leave the country, asking them to change their decision and remain in East Germany: "We beg you, stay in your homeland, stay with us! What can we promise you? Not an easy life, but a useful and an interesting one. Not rapid prosperity, but the chance to take part in great changes. We want to work for democratisation, free elections, legal security and freedom of movement.
This much is obvious: decade-old inflexible structures have been broken up in a matter of weeks. We are only at the start of a fundamental change in our country. Help us to form a truly democratic society that preserves the vision of a democratic form of socialism. This is not just a dream, if you help us prevent it from being nipped in the bud. Have confidence in yourselves and those of us who want to remain here."
Signed by Christa Wolf, Ulrich Plenzdorf, Stefan Heym, Volker Braun, Ruth Berghaus, Christoph Hein, Kurt Masur, Bärbel Bohley (Neues Forum), Erhard Neubert (Demokratischer Aufbruch), Uta Forstbauer (Sozialdemokratische Partei), Hans-Jürgen Fischbeck (Demokratie Jetzt), Gerhard Poppe (Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte), this appeal appears on the front page of "Neues Deutschland" the next morning, November 9 1989.
In November, 133,429 GDR citizens manage to flee to the West.
