Frieder Reimold, a former Berlin bureau chief of The Associated Press German-language service who wrote the iconic 1989 bulletin that East Germany had opened its borders, has died. He was 80.
Reimold died Thursday in Berlin of complications related to cancer, his daughter Nancy Stephan told the AP.
He began working for AP as a political correspondent in Bonn in the late 1970s after entering journalism on a German newspaper.
After months of overtime writing about upheaval and protests in East Germany, Reimold, who had by then become the Berlin bureau chief of AP’s German-language service, settled in on Nov. 9, 1989, to watch a televised evening briefing by Günter Schabowski, a member of the communist country’s Politburo.
History didn’t give Reimold a break that night. About an hour into the rambling news conference, Schabowski mentioned that East Germany was lifting all restrictions on travel across its border into West Germany. Pressed on when the new regulations would take effect, he looked at his notes and stammered, “As far as I know, this enters into force ... this is immediately, without delay.”
The remark was so offhanded that it took Reimold a little time to recognize the implications of the statement — that East Germany was opening the Berlin Wall and the heavily fortified border with West Germany. Carefully, Reimold then typed out what has become his iconic alert: “DDR öffnet Grenzen” — “East Germany opens borders.”
“This was the alert that changed the course of the night,” Reimold said during an interview with the AP in 2019, when Germany celebrated the 30-year-anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “The alert sped up a development that sooner or later would have been inevitable in any case.”
Reimold sent out his alert at 7:05 p.m. Other wire services alerted the news as well, but none went so far that moment as to say that Schabowski’s announcement in fact meant that East Germany had opened its border.
His alert is widely seen as having helped nudge the process along, and in a nod to its significance his words are today immortalized in a plaque in the sidewalk on Bornholmer Strasse, the border crossing where people first walked over from East to West.
Frieder Reimold was born on April 21, 1944, in the Bavarian village of Irschenhausen.
His family moved to Hannover in northern Germany a couple of years later when his father took a job at a museum there. After graduating from high school, Reimold left Germany for Canada, where he first stayed with relatives and later worked in logging before attending university in Vancouver to study languages, his sister Sabine Reimold told the AP.
During his three decades with the AP, Reimold worked as political correspondent in Bonn, led the Berlin bureau and later covered the foreign ministry. He also spent several years in Vienna reporting on the upheavals created by the war in Yugoslavia.
“He was a terrific journalist and dear friend who helped me a great deal during the Cold War when I was a correspondent for the Associated Press in Bonn," in the 1980s, Susan Cornwell, a retired former AP reporter, said in an email from Washington D.C.
“Frieder was always ready to explain the political and historical background to the events I was covering. I used to call him the ‘spazierendes Brockhaus'" — a walking German encyclopedia, Cornwell remembered.
He “knew details about key German political figures and was especially good at helping me understand the historical backdrop for events going on at that time, from the rise of the Greens party to NATO’s deployment of Pershing II missiles in West Germany,” she said.
Annette Ramelsberger, another colleague, who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath with Reimold at the AP German service, remembered him as very smart and accurate, and at the same time as a caring and supportive manager with a fine sense of humor.
“It was great to go together with him through this wild time,” Ramelsberger, who now works for German daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, said.
After his retirement in 2009, Reimold took on archery and enjoyed working in his garden at his home in Stahnsdorf, on the outskirts of Berlin, friends said. He was also very interested in history, culture and traveling, his sister said.
Reimold “was always a journalist, always conscientious, always put his own feelings aside,” his niece Rebekka Reimold said. “The facts were important to him — even in the last days of his life, when he spoke soberly about the facts concerning his illness and its consequences.”
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Randy Herschaft contributed reporting from New York.
