Soon even the United States was dealing with East Germany.
Helmut Kohl became chancellor of West Germany in 1982 and helped lead his country out of a recession. By the mid-1980-s, it had emerged as one of the richest countries in the world.
In 1985, Michail Gorbachev was chosen first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. He introduced two policies that, he said, would bring new life to the country and turn economy around. The first was glasnost (openness). After years of repression, the Soviet people could criticize their government, strict emigration control was relaxed, new literary magazines began to appear on the scene, and the theater and the arts began to thrive once again. People also began to learn more about their own country and the outside world.
Gorbachev’s second policy was perestroika, or restructuring. It encompassed a range of economic, political, and social reforms. Taken together, these changes would vastly reduce the central government control of the economy, even permitting a measure of private enterprise. And they would involve Soviet citizens more directly in their government, bringing a measure of democracy to the country. When Gorbachev said openly that people would no longer be persecuted for their political beliefs, his words sparked hope in many Eastern European countries. In 1989, Poland’s freest elections in half a century led to a new government that included Communist and Solidarity members. Hungary, too, was taking steps toward greater economic and political freedom.
Then, in mid-1989, Hungary became the first Soviet-bloc country to open its borders with the West. East Germans, who were permitted to travel to Communist-ruled states such as Hungary, suddenly found an escape route. From Hungary, they could travel freely to neutral Austria and then to West Germany.
In September 1989, East Germans formed a group called New Forum to challenge the Communist political monopoly, and they began to hold weekly demonstrations in the city of Leipzig. In early November, more than 500,000 people took part in a peaceful march that ended in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. The Fall of the Wall

On the evening of November 9, the government abruptly announced that thee border between East and West Germany- and between East and West Berlin- would be opened. In East Berlin, people began to go to the Wall to see if that what they had heard was true. It was. Within two hours of the announcement, the trickle of people was turned into jubilant crowd.