WaybackWire

EAST BERLIN, Thursday.—The news came in a live, televised press conference that ran from 6:53 to 7:01 p.m. at the International Press Center in East Berlin. Guenter Schabowski, the Politburo member who speaks for the party, read from a paper.

“Applications for travel abroad by private individuals can now be made without the previously existing requirements,” he read. “Permanent exit is possible via all GDR border crossings to the FRG.” Asked about West Berlin, he read that permanent exit could also take place through the crossings into West Berlin.

A reporter asked when the rules took effect. “That comes into effect, according to my information, immediately, without delay,” Schabowski said.

At the same table, an official named Beil said quietly: “That has to be decided by the Council of Ministers.”

Asked what would become of the Berlin Wall, he said the question of crossing it from the East German side had not been answered yet.

Quotations are from the Cold War International History Project’s English translation of the television broadcast.

BONN, Thursday.—West Germany is struggling to house the stream of East Germans arriving in the West, and in the East a leading writer went on television to beg them to stay.

Between 200 and 300 East Germans an hour have crossed into West Germany since Saturday, United Press International reported from Bonn, putting the total since August at more than 120,000.

Border police and the Red Cross have set up 140 reception camps, and many are filling beyond capacity.

Bremen has decided not to accept new refugees. Herbert Schmalstieg, the Social Democratic mayor of Hannover, said other cities would follow.

Schmalstieg, who is also vice president of the association of West German mayors, said “there is free refugee movement. That is the problem.”

In East Berlin, the writer Christa Wolf read a statement on East German television signed by several leaders of the opposition movement. “We beg you, stay in your homeland, stay with us,” she read.

BONN, Thursday.—The West German parliament interrupted its evening session tonight from 8:22 to 8:46 p.m. When it resumed, the government made a short statement on the East German decision.

Rudolf Seiters, the minister in charge of the Chancellery, said he had just spoken to Chancellor Helmut Kohl by telephone. He called the provisional freeing of visits and exits from East Germany “ein Schritt von überragender Bedeutung” (our translation: “a step of overriding importance”).

He repeated Kohl’s offer of help, made on Wednesday, on condition that the ruling Socialist Unity Party gives up its monopoly of power.

Hans-Jochen Vogel, the Social Democratic leader, welcomed the decision but said the details still had to be checked. It means, he said, “daß die Mauer nach 28 Jahren ihre Funktion verloren hat” (our translation: “that the Wall has lost its function after 28 years”).

Vogel said it strengthened hopes that other demands, above all free elections in East Germany, would soon be met.

The German quotations are from the parliamentary record.

EAST BERLIN, Thursday.—The East German Communist Party’s Central Committee today called a party convention for December 15 to 17 “to renew the party”, the first since 1956.

The decision came on the second day of the committee’s three-day meeting. The convention, only the third in the party’s history, is to decide on changes in the committee’s membership and consider the state of the party and the country.

About 5,000 rank-and-file party members rallied outside party headquarters on Wednesday to demand an emergency congress before the end of the year.

Western diplomats were unconvinced by the new Politburo, chosen on Wednesday, which has only four new faces. “My impression is that nothing has changed fundamentally,” one diplomat in East Berlin said.

WARSAW, Thursday.—West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, on the first day of a six-day visit to Poland, said tonight he might have to return to Bonn before finishing the trip.

“This is a historic hour for Germany,” Kohl said.

East Germany announced its new travel rules two hours before Kohl spoke at a dinner given by Premier Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

The visit is the first to Poland by a West German leader since 1970.

Kohl said he would try to contact the East German leader, Egon Krenz, after returning home.

Kohl also said: “Only together can we overcome the division that is still afflicting our continent.”

WASHINGTON, Thursday.—President Bush welcomed East Germany’s decision on travel today but said no single event marked the end of the Iron Curtain.

Speaking in the Oval Office at 3:34 p.m., with Secretary of State James Baker beside him, Bush said the move, if carried out fully, conforms with the Helsinki Final Act.

“And if the GDR goes forward now, this wall built in ‘61 will have very little relevance,” he said.

“I don’t think any single event is the end of what you might call the Iron Curtain,” Bush said, but he added that this was a long way from the harshest Iron Curtain days.

Asked about showing more elation, the President said: “I am not an emotional kind of guy.”

On German reunification, he said it was far too early to speak.