described the jubilant scenes at the railway station of Hof in Bavaria in the early hours of 12 November: Even the East German border guards were not immune to the euphoria. One of them, Peter Zahn, described how he and his colleagues reacted to the opening of the border: To the surprise of many West Germans, many of the East German visitors spent their DM 100 "welcome money" buying great quantities of bananas, a highly prized rarity in the East. For months after the opening of the border, bananas were sold out at supermarkets along the western side of the border as East Germans bought up whole crates, believing supplies would soon be exhausted. The rush for fruit made the banana the unofficial symbol of the changes in East Germany, which some dubbed the "banana revolution". Some West German leftists protested what they saw as rampant consumerism by tossing bananas at East Germans coming to visit the West. The easterners' obsession with bananas was famously spoofed by the West German satirical magazine Titanic on the front cover of its November 1989 edition, which depicted "Easterner Gaby (17), happy to be in West Germany: My first banana". Gaby was shown holding a large peeled cucumber. The opening of the border had a profound political and psychological effect on the East German public. For many people the very existence of the GDR, which the SED had justified as the first "Socialist state on German soil", came to seem pointless. The state was bankrupt, the economy was collapsing, the political class was discredited, the governing institutions were in chaos and the people were demoralised by the evaporation of the collective assumptions which had underpinned their society for forty years. Membership of the Party collapsed and Krenz himself resigned on 6 December 1989 after only 50 days in office, handing over to the moderate Hans Modrow. The removal of restrictions on travel prompted hundreds of thousands of East Germans to migrate to the West – more than 116,000 did so between 9 November and 31 December 1989, compared with 40,000 for the whole of the previous year. The new East German leadership initiated "round table" talks with opposition groups, similar to the processes that had led to multi-party elections in Hungary and Poland. When the first free elections were held in East Germany in March 1990, the former SED, which had renamed itself as