Soviet Union, however, East Germany played an increasingly important role in Cold War and international politics. In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union and the United States came to loggerheads over the deployment of nuclear missiles on German territory. Although Honecker accepted the missiles, he acted as a moderating force in the standoff. He insisted that gains in West German–East German relations would lead to a solution favorable to the Soviets and that the entente therefore needed to be preserved.
The Soviets effectively turned the tables under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. When Honecker steadfastly refused to go along with Gorbachev's radical program for reforming socialism internally (perestroika), the Soviet leader made it clear that support for East Germany would be limited. This along with Honecker's continuing liberalization of intra-German relations—allowing independent political demonstrations in 1987, for example, or televising debates between East and West German politicians—ultimately led to the collapse of the East German state.
When the Hungarian government removed the fortifications along its border with Austria in May 1989, more than 30,000 East Germans fled along this route in just six months. Honecker refused to acknowledge the mass exodus, and during a visit to East Germany on 7 October 1989, Gorbachev made it clear that the Soviet Union would not intervene as it had in 1953. Two days later, demonstrations against the SED regime began in Leipzig.
Reformers within the SED, led by Egon Krenz, seized the opportunity to oust Honecker at the party plenum on 18 October 1989. On 9 November they announced that citizens of East Germany would be allowed to travel freely. Within days, millions of East Germans had broken through the Berlin Wall, literally in many cases, to visit West Germany. Further attempts at reform by the Krenz government paled against the economic lure of the West, however. On 18 March 1990, East Germans voted overwhelmingly for unity with West Germany. State treaties for the economic (1 July 1990) and political (3 October 1990) union of the two Germanies soon followed. The German Democratic Republic, one of the central players in the Cold War in Europe, had ceased to exist.
Timothy C. Dowling
Fulbrook, Mary. Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.; Harrison, Hope M. Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.; Kettenacker, Lothar. Germany since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.; McElvoy, Anne. The Saddled Cow: East Germany's Life and Legacy. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.; Weber, Hermann. DDR: Grundriss und Geschichte 1945–1990. Hannover: Fäckaltraver, 1991.