Leadership Quote by Erich Honecker

A wall that needs "reasons" to be removed is already admitting it is a symptom, not a solution. Honecker’s line is bureaucratic fatalism dressed up as confidence: the Berlin Wall will last a century, he suggests, because the conditions that made it necessary will last a century. The sly move is in the passive voice. No one built the Wall, no one is imprisoning anyone; history itself, undefined and inevitable, has simply generated "reasons."

In 1989, when Honecker said variations of this claim, the East German state was trying to project permanence while its foundations were visibly cracking. Perestroika had loosened the Soviet grip, Hungarian border openings were turning the Iron Curtain porous, and East Germans were testing the system with protests and mass emigration. The leadership couldn’t credibly defend the Wall as a moral good, so it framed it as a regrettable engineering response to external pressures: NATO, West German influence, capitalism’s "subversion". That’s the intent: make coercion sound like risk management.

The subtext is even darker. By tying the Wall’s lifespan to unresolved "reasons", Honecker implies that reunification, free movement, and political pluralism are not goals to pursue but threats to neutralize indefinitely. It’s an argument for endless emergency, the kind every brittle regime loves: as long as danger exists, extraordinary control is justified.

History made the line land as self-satire. Within months, Honecker was gone; within weeks, the Wall fell. The boast reads now like a time capsule of authoritarian wishful thinking: permanence as propaganda, inevitability as alibi.