The story
As you stand here on the cobblestones of Vlašská Street, looking up at the monumental Baroque facade of the Lobkowicz Palace, you are looking at one of the most significant sites of the Cold War’s end. Today, this grand building serves as the German Embassy, but in the late summer and autumn of 1989, these walls witnessed a desperate human drama that signaled the beginning of the end for the Iron Curtain. Imagine this narrow street and the surrounding hillsides choked with thousands of East German citizens.
They had traveled to Prague with a single, dangerous goal: to seek asylum in the West German Embassy. Because the palace grounds were technically West German soil, it was a sanctuary. But the gates were locked.
Men, women, and children didn't wait for permission; they scaled the high perimeter fences, dropping into the garden behind the palace. By late September, nearly four thousand people were living in the embassy garden. They slept in muddy tents, huddled under plastic sheets, and waited in the rain, surviving on supplies flown in by helicopter.
The climax of this standoff occurred on the evening of September 30, 1989. If you look up at the central balcony of the palace, try to picture the West German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, standing there. He addressed the exhausted crowd below.
He began a sentence that is now immortalized in German history: "We have come to you to tell you that today your departure..." The rest of his words were drowned out by a roar of joy that echoed across Malá Strana. The East German government had finally agreed to let them go.
Within hours, the first "Freedom Trains" began rolling toward West Germany. But the story has a quirky, artistic postscript that you can see if you peer through the garden fence or visit the grounds. Standing in the embassy garden is a bizarre and striking sculpture: a gold-painted Trabant car perched on four giant, muscular human legs.
This is "Quo Vadis," created by the provocative Czech artist David Černý. The Trabant, or "Trabi," was the iconic, noisy, smoke-belching car of East Germany. When the refugees fled to the West, they left hundreds of these cars abandoned on the streets of Prague, their keys often still in the ignition.
Černý’s sculpture captures that moment of transition. The car is no longer a machine on wheels; it has grown legs and is walking away from the past. It is a humorous yet profound monument to the thousands who walked away from their lives, their possessions, and their country to find a future on the other side of the wall.
As you continue your walk, remember that this quiet corner of Prague was once the very edge of freedom.