In September 1989 he resigned from the CDU and became a founder, in Auerbach, of a local branch of New Forum. New Forum was a political party like no other. It emerged from various underground opposition groups. It was declared illegal by the authorities on 21 September 1989, but with the winds of Glasnost blowing across from - of all places - Moscow, the East German government was undergoing a crisis of confidence. In shared export markets the Soviet Union and East Germany were increasingly coming across one another as commercial rivals, while on a personal level there were rumours that the personal chemistry between comrades Gorbachev and Honecker was terrible: it was no longer possible to rely on comradely Warsaw pact tanks to intervene in order to put down street protests as they had in 1953 or (in Prague), in 1968. New Forum was not crushed: after the Berlin Wall was breached by street protesters in November 1989 as Soviet forces looked on but did nothing to intervene, a momentum towards a more democratic future for East Germany gained traction. Bertram Wieczorek himself resigned from New Forum at the end of the year and in January 1990 returned to the CDU. However, during 1990 the CDU in East Germany systematically transformed its relationship to the old East German political establishment, even though western commentators (and others) sometimes struggled to keep up with the significance of what was going on.