Exercise 1: How Hungary's 1989 Border Decisions Reopened the Same Emigration Crisis — Possible Solution ================================================================================================================== This exercise is asking you to connect two events separated by nearly three decades and a different country, by identifying the shared underlying pressure both were responding to. WHAT THE ORIGINAL 1961 CRISIS ACTUALLY WAS Chapter 5 established that the Wall itself was built specifically to close a route out of East Germany, not to eliminate East Germans' own desire to leave. Roughly 3.5 million people, about 20% of the entire population, had already fled westward by 1961, and the Wall's real purpose was sealing the one remaining open path - Berlin's own sector border - once every other route had already been closed by earlier legal measures. WHY THIS MEANS THE UNDERLYING PRESSURE NEVER ACTUALLY WENT AWAY Sealing the Berlin route in 1961 stopped that specific escape path, but it did nothing to change the real reasons East Germans wanted to leave in the first place. The desire to emigrate was suppressed, physically, rather than resolved politically - which means the same underlying pressure remained present throughout the following decades, simply with no available outlet. WHAT HUNGARY ACTUALLY DID IN 1989 Hungary's own real decisions - dismantling its Austrian border fortifications beginning 2 May 1989, symbolically cutting the fence on 27 June, and finally allowing unrestricted crossings from 10 September onward - opened a genuinely new route out of the Eastern Bloc that had nothing to do with Berlin or the Wall directly. Crucially, this new route existed entirely outside East Germany's own control - Hungary was a different sovereign country making its own decision, one East Germany's border guards could do nothing about. WHY THIS REOPENED THE SAME CRISIS RATHER THAN CREATING A NEW ONE Once this new route existed, the same underlying pressure that had built up unresolved since 1961 immediately found it - real figures show roughly 100,000 East Germans traveling toward Hungary once the border began opening, and the Pan-European Picnic alone let 700-900 people cross in a single afternoon. This wasn't a new phenomenon; it was the identical 1961-era emigration pressure, still present after nearly three decades of being physically blocked, finding a new physical exit the moment one existed. ANSWER: Hungary's 1989 border decisions reopened East Germany's original emigration crisis because the Wall itself had only ever physically blocked the specific 1961-era route out through Berlin - it never actually removed the underlying desire of millions of East Germans to leave, which had simply remained suppressed and unresolved for nearly three decades. Once Hungary, acting entirely outside East Germany's own control, opened a new route to the West, that same underlying pressure immediately found it, producing a real, large-scale exodus - a direct continuation of the exact crisis the Wall had been built to stop, not a separate new one. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ It distinguishes between suppressing a pressure and resolving it, explaining why a physical barrier built in one place and one decade could be completely bypassed by an unrelated decision made by a different country nearly thirty years later, once that barrier's own underlying cause remained unaddressed the whole time.