Günter Schabowski ([ˈɡʏntɐ ʃaˈbɔvski]; 4 January 1929 – 1 November 2015) was an East German politician who served as an official of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands abbreviated SED), the ruling party during most of the existence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Schabowski gained worldwide fame in November 1989 when he improvised a slightly mistaken answer to a press conference question. That raised popular expectations much more rapidly than the government planned and so massive crowds gathered the same night at the Berlin Wall, which forced its opening after 28 years. Soon afterward, the entire inner German border was opened.
Schabowski was born in Anklam, Pomerania (then in the Free State of Prussia, now part of the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). He studied journalism at the Karl Marx University, Leipzig, after which he became editor of the trade union magazine, Tribüne. In 1952, he became a member of the SED. From 1967 to 1968, he attended the party academy of the CPSU. In 1978, he became the chief editor of the newspaper Neues Deutschland ("New Germany"), which as the official organ of the SED was considered to be the leading newspaper in the GDR. In 1981, he became a member of the SED Central Committee. In 1985, after leaving Neues Deutschland, he became the First Secretary of the East Berlin chapter of the SED and a member of the SED Politbüro. He also served as member of the Volkskammer from 1981 to 1990. In 2009, writer Christa Wolf called Schabowski "one of the worst" East German politicians before the Wende, saying: "I remember a few appearances of him in front of the writer's guild. You were scared of him."
In October 1989, Schabowski, along with several other members of the Politbüro, turned on the longtime SED leader Erich Honecker and forced him to step down in favor of Egon Krenz. As part of the effort to change the regime's image, Schabowski was named the regime's unofficial spokesman and he held several daily press conferences to announce changes. He had already been in charge of media affairs for the Politbüro. He was also reportedly named the second man in the SED, Krenz's old role. Schabowski had spent most of his career in communist-style journalism in which reporters were told what to write after events had already happened. Thus, he found it somewhat difficult to get used to Western-style media practice.

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