Word: conferencees
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Twenty years ago, a question posed by Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrmann prompted an East German official to say the words that triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now new facts have emerged that shed a different light on that fateful press conference.
The press conference hosted by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) on Nov. 9, 1989, was about to come to an end when Ehrmann, who worked for the Italian news agency ANSA, inquired about the new travel law for East German citizens. Gunter Schabowski, a ruling party official, replied...
But the notion that the end of the old German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was properly known, was an accident triggered by a journalist's spontaneous question has now been challenged. In an interview with the German regional public broadcaster MDR Riccardo Ehrmann, 79, who last year was awarded...
In the interview, broadcast on April 16 in Germany, Ehrmann said: "The question concerning the travel law: that was no coincidence." He had received a "mysterious phone call," he said, from the "submarine" - a reference to the conference room of the East German state news agency ADN. Although Ehrmann in...
Gunter Schabowski, meantime, insists that his announcement at the press conference was spontaneous and called Ehrmann's new version of the story "completely absurd."