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On August 13, 1961, the GDR began building the Wall. This marked the start of the 28-year division of Berlin and Germany. It was not until 9 November 1989 that the Wall fell. Ewald König, publisher of diplo.news and then-Germany correspondent for the Austrian newspaper Die Presse, read from his books about this era at Cafe Nova (Giesebrechtstraße 3 in Berlin).

The Austrian journalist was the only correspondent who had managed to obtain accreditation in both West Germany and East Germany. This was considered inconceivable. For a long time, he commuted between his homes in Bonn and East Berlin and experienced the end of the GDR at first hand.

On the 65th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, he told the audience at Café Nova about the eccentric neighbours of his East Berlin flat on Leipziger Straße, about the myths surrounding Schabowski’s press conference on 9 November 1989 – which had been spread by Riccardo Ehrman, then an ANSA correspondent – but also about the extraordinary night of the Wall’s fall, about Angela Merkel’s move from academia into politics (“I want nothing to do with the CDU”), about Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who, of all times, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time during the fall of the Wall, and much more.

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Incidentally: since spring 2026, Café Nova has been the successor to the well-known restaurant Tre, where Chancellor Angela Merkel was a regular, and is run by the Chinese businesswoman Stella Lee.

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