9 November 1989 · Berlin

One sentence at a press conference, and four hours later the wall was gone

Günter Schabowski had no answer to a simple question and improvised one on camera. At half past eleven Lieutenant-Colonel Jäger raised the barrier with no order at all. Between those two moments: four and a half hours exactly.

That evening Schabowski read out new travel rules to the press. He had been handed the text just before walking in and had not finished reading it. A question came: “When does it take effect?” He leafed through the papers and said: “As far as I know — immediately, without delay.”

In fact the rules were to start the next morning and required applications and permits. But the sentence was already on air. Within an hour West German television, watched by half of East Berlin, reported the border was open. People walked to the crossings to check.

At Bornholmer Straße stood Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger. He kept phoning upstairs and kept being told to hold. At twenty past nine he was allowed a “valve”: let the loudest through, stamping their passports in a way that stripped their right to return. People worked it out and refused to go.

By eleven the crowd in front of the barrier had no visible end. Jäger called one last time, got no answer, put the phone down and said down the line to a colleague: “We’re opening everything.”

The chart of that minute

The Sun is in the third house. In any textbook the third house is the message, the conversation, the news that gets passed along. Everything that evening turned on one sentence passed along inaccurately. Jupiter and Saturn meanwhile stood almost exactly opposite each other — 179 degrees out of a possible 180.

How this reads

The Four of Pentacles upright is a person holding what is theirs with both hands and not unclenching. Reversed it means the opposite motion: the grip loosens. That evening one particular man in one particular booth unclenched his fingers without the authority to do it.

We show what was in the sky and do not claim it caused anything. The wall was opened by people who came out into the street, and by one officer who decided not to shoot. The card was produced by an algorithm, not an editor.

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