The New Belle Époque: Democracy and Prosperity Since 1975 651Berlin Wall a generation earlier. Honecker, the son of a
militant coal miner in the Saar, had been a Communist
since the Weimar Republic and had spent ten years in
Nazi prisons. He had been a leading organizer of the
postwar Communist Party, who rose to become the
head of state security in 1958, and had served as party
leader since 1971. Honecker had followed a policy of
severe domestic repression and a strictly controlled
economy. He was personally responsible for an order
that border guards shoot to kill anyone seeking to flee
to the West, and in February 1989 he had confidently
predicted that the Berlin Wall would remain standing
for one hundred years.
Erich Honecker vigorously resisted reform of the
Communist regime and fought against the idea of
perestroika.The tightly bottled-up discontent of East
Germans became clear in the late summer of 1989,
following the Hungarian decision to open their Aus-
trian border. By West German law, all East Germans
who came to the West received automatic citizenship,
but the Iron Curtain had kept that number small. Sud-
denly, thousands of East Germans exploited Hungarian
liberalization to visit there and then cross into the
West; seven thousand people fled on the first night that
the border was open, and sixty thousand went to the
West in the first month. The DDR was soon losing
three hundred citizens—chiefly the young, the skilled,
and the educated—per hour. The Honecker govern-
ment denounced Hungary and called for another War-
saw Pact invasion.TimisoaraBalearicIs
SPAIN l.PORTUGALMOROCCOWESTERN
SAHARAALGERIALisbonMadridRabatUNITED
IRELAND KINGDOMICELANDFRANCE SWITZ.ITALYTUNISIAAUSTRIA
SLO.Corsica
SardiniaSicily
AlgiersTunisLjubljanaRomeLondonDublinBern
LIECHT.ViennaReykjavíkLUX.BELG.NETH.DENMARKGERMANY
CZECH REP.NORWAYSWEDEN
FINLANDRUSSIAEST.
LAT.KAZAKHSTANPrague
ParisAmsterdamBrusselsBerlinOsloStockholm HelsinkiMoscowTallinn
Riga
CopenhagenMOLDOVAPOLAND
SLOVAKIA
HUNGARYUKRAINEBELARUSLITH.BudapestWarsawVilnius MinskBratislavaKievChisinauLIBYA EGYPTROMANIABULGARIA
ALB.
GREECE TURKEYGEORGIA
ARM.AZER.BOSNIACROATIAF.Y.R.O.M.YUGOSLAVIALEB.SYRIAJOR.ISR. IRAQSAUDI
ARABIAIRANKUWAITQATARCrete CYPRUS
TripoliCairoJerusalem AmmanBeirut Damascus BaghdadTeheranAnkara
AthensTiranaBelgrade
SofiaBucharestTbilisi Baku
YerevanSarajevoSkopjeKuwaitZagrebMedi
terran
eanSeaAtlantic
OceanNorth
Sea
BalticSeaBlack SeaCaspian SeaArctic OceanNorwegian
SeaEbro
R.Dniep
erR. Volg
aR.
SeineR.Rhin
e
R.Nil
e
R.Tigri
sR.
Euphra
tesR.PoR.Don
R.Chechnia0 250 500 Miles0 250 500 750 KilometersGdanskLeipzigMAP 32.2
Europe after the Revolutions of 1989