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Exhibition theme: Protest and Flight: Protest march outside the Palace of the Republic [12/56]

OBJECT INFORMATION

Info

November 4 1989
Berlin, Marx-Engels-Platz, now Schloßplatz
Created By: Peter R. Asche

License: Creative Commons License

From the Set

Vanished Architecture

The protest march during the Alexanderplatz Demonstration, the "largest, non state-run protest(s) in the history of the GDR" (retrieved and translated from Wikipedia: Alexanderplatz-Demonstration, on April 23, 2009).

Depicts

Alexanderplatz demonstration, banderole, crowd, omnibus

People/Organizations

Socialist Unity Party of Germany

Places

Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the German Democratic Republic, Palace of the Republic

Text in image

rehabilitiert / Bahro

Demokratie / gegen [...] der SED

Ökolo[...] / jetzt [...]

[...] / Freie Wahlen

Nennt [...] Stiel[...]

Freie Waldorfschule

Vorwärts / und / nichts vergessen!

Other items in this set

Ultimately, it was the citizens of the GDR themselves who brought down the SED regime. From the summer of 1989 on, thousands of East Germans tried to flee to the West across the Hungarian-Austrian border and via the West German embassies in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw. In East Germany itself, ever greater numbers of people supported the demands of the citizens' movements for free elections, freedom of the press, and freedom to travel, despite their fear of state repression. In October, mass protests, which now involved hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, spread across the entire country. Aware that their protest could no longer be stopped, people increasingly felt a desire to capture events on film.