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Exhibition theme: Protest and Flight: A Honecker portrait among the rubbish – shot after the very last demonstration [38/56]

OBJECT INFORMATION

Info

December 20 1989
Halberstadt
Created By: Burkhard C. Schaller

License: Not Creative Commons

Depicts

dustbin, litter, man, photography, portrait

People/Organizations

Erich Honecker

Places

Halberstadt

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.