Daniel Drezner, on the fall of the Berlin Wall

The thing about the collapse of the East German regime is how sudden it was. I was in East Berlin in the fall of 1989, and there was no inkling of a regime in trouble. Compared to other Warsaw Pact countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, East Germany’s civil society movement was much smaller and more fragmented.  East Germany’s protests grew out of a weekly prayer vigil in Leipzig in the fall of 1989, but according to Sarotte, the Stasi estimated that there were only a few hundred activists in the entire city at that time. In other words, despite structural reasons for the regime to be concerned, the most extensive domestic intelligence apparatus in the world couldn’t predict the outbreak of mass protests. [Washington Post]