Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  At dinner at the Grand afterwards two West German journalists wept into their glasses, overcome by the sentiments of the day. Like most of our German colleagues, over the last forty-eight hours they had become unrecognizable, transformed from clinical, dispassionate, humourless technocrats into emotional wrecks.

  The following day, at 7 a.m., the Potsdamer Platz opened at last – the beginning of a process which would ensure that this square once again took its place among the great metropolitan centres of the world. But that morning, amid the barren concrete wasteland, such thoughts were still far away. When the new entry point was identified, the crowd surged forward and I found myself alongside a senior officer of the East German border guard. ‘Wohin?’ I asked. To my surprise, mistaking me for a German, he told me candidly that he just wanted to see inside the house on the other side of the border which he had been staring at from his checkpoint for the last fifteen years.

  The crowd, becoming impatient, began chanting, ‘We want to go to the Philharmonic!’ A young officer appeared and climbed a temporary set of wooden steps. Talking through a loudspeaker, he said, ‘You will shortly be permitted to pass through. But when you go, remember that these are your sons and brothers who are standing before you guarding this frontier, so pass forward in a disciplined and German manner!’ This calmed the crowd down, but as soon as the opening was completed they swept across. Having no wish to go to West Berlin, I detached myself and tried to return to the hotel in East Berlin, but it was too late. The East German guards, with predictable thoroughness, were setting up trestle tables with visa forms and rubber-stamps to check anyone wishing to enter. Because of the early hour, I had left my passport and accreditation in the hotel and I was now stranded between East and West Berlin. The East German guards became very bureaucratic and I had to insist, in my best authoritarian German, that they find an officer to whom I could explain my case. Five minutes later, a tired-looking officer whose badges of rank indicated that he was a full colonel appeared. At first he would not relent, but when I fixed him in the eye and addressed him in my most military Austrian as Herr Rittmeister (cavalry captain), his attitude changed immediately. He politely escorted me back to the East and saluted.

  After their initial surprise, the East German authorities appeared to have the situation temporarily under control. Thanks to the new openings in the wall, Berlin seemed to be quietening down, but what was happening elsewhere in the country? I decided to return to Leipzig and Dresden. In Leipzig, I again saw Masur walking among the demonstrators, hands in his pockets. This time he looked even more distraught; indeed, he appeared on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As a beneficiary of the ‘old system’, its imminent collapse must have filled him with ambivalent feelings. The posters and placards around him bore mixed messages. Some, clearly planted by the authorities (they were too well made), carried the slogan ‘What will happen to our money?’ Others, less well constructed but more numerous, demanded Rache (revenge) for years of Communist mismanagement. Time was running out for the political elite which had supported Masur throughout his career. The opening of the Wall might have temporarily stabilized the situation in Berlin, but if the size of the crowd in Karl Marx Platz was anything to go by, tensions in Leipzig were still running high.

  In Frankfurt a few months earlier, while waiting for a train connection for Munich, I had fallen into conversation with the stationmaster and had asked him which was the most interesting of Germany’s railway stations to work in. He had paused for a few moments before saying that, if he had had a magic wand, he would have wanted to be stationmaster at Leipzig. ‘The greatest job in the entire German railway network,’ he had said in reverential tones. Curious to see if there was any truth in this, I made my way the following morning to a vast, almost completely deserted Leipzig railway station. Where hundreds of trains had rolled in and out of its platforms a few days earlier, there was now only an eerie silence beneath the huge steel and glass canopy of the station’s roof.

  With difficulty I found an official and asked if I could see the stationmaster. A few minutes later I was ushered into the office of the Reichsbahnhauptrat, a small tubby man with glasses called Paulusch. Despite being a long-standing and committed Communist Party member, he was friendly and informative. He neither regretted nor celebrated the dramatic political developments of the last few days. His life and duty was this station and the trains which normally occupied its many platforms. He conceded that his workforce had evaporated, but he was confident he could maintain a ‘skeleton network’ for the next two days with the help of reservists and pensioners. ‘It is important that the young are satisfied at this particular moment. We can help them,’ he said, adding that he expected ‘normality’ to be restored by the end of the week, ‘or perhaps a little later’.

  I returned to the hotel hoping to find a Times photographer who might capture Leipzig railway station for posterity: the grandest and most important junction in mainland Northern Europe, virtually empty and ground to a halt. This would be a haunting black and white image but there was little sign of my colleagues. On the way back to my room, I bumped into another photographer, Brian Harris, a former Times man, who had transferred over to the Independent. I had admired his work for The Times when I first wrote for the paper and I knew that he could be relied upon to take a hint from a former colleague. When he asked me if I had seen anything interesting to photograph, I said, ‘Go to the railway station and you will capture the atmosphere of this entire revolution.’ Harris’s photograph of the empty Leipzig railway station that morning is still one of the defining images of those days.

  To find another enduring image, I decided to move on from Leipzig to visit those giants of German literature, Goethe and Schiller, both buried in nearby Weimar. A few hours later, a tram took me from Weimar railway station to the Hotel Elephant where another crowd had gathered with candles. Appropriately in a university city, their placards were more sophisticated and internationalist: ‘Freedom to the Czech Chartists!’, ‘Down with the tyranny of Ceauşescu!’ – refreshingly unprovincial sentiments which a few days earlier would have been unheard of in a country loyal to the brotherhood of Warsaw Pact nations. The crowd heckled a few visiting West German CDU politicians as they tried to address the demonstrators in front of the equestrian statue of the Kurfürst of Weimar.

  All this made for sparkling material, but the challenge of telephoning a story to London from provincial East German cities was proving immense. Pressures of deadlines had made the telex inadequate. For several weeks I had come increasingly to rely on the newspaper’s team of excellent copy-takers, an unsung group of heroes and heroines without whom the foreign correspondent in a hurry stood little chance of getting his story to London. But in Weimar this lifeline depended on an underdeveloped and primitive network. The lines to the West from East Germany were overstretched and overused, and even the prestigious Hotel Elephant could not cope. A tall blonde telephonist stiffly informed me that she could not help for at least an hour but – her eyes flashed across the room behind me to check no one was listening as she imparted some information transgressing decades of unhesitating obedience – I ‘might have better luck’ at the Hotel Russischer Hof across the street.

  At the Russischer Hof, another team of tall blonde telephonists proceeded to dial away remorselessly for about thirty minutes without complaining before finding me a line to London. In the half-light, in their crisp white blouses and waistcoats, and with their hair cut and neatly dressed in an almost pre-war style, these young women seemed to be straight out of a Marlene Dietrich film. They were calm, patient and unperturbed by the technical difficulties. The stoical qualities of the stereotyped German Fräulein appeared to be embodied in these helpful, studiously polite damsels of the analogue world. Once connected, the seemingly harmless question, thrown back at the correspondent after a few dictated paragraphs, ‘Is there much more of this?’, reminded one that the Times’s copy-takers were always the severest judges of one’s efforts.
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  By the time the obligatory 850 words had been dispatched, it was well past midnight. A delicious spinach soup and a bottle of beer sent me to sleep instantly, but I was woken around 5.00 a.m. by a pungent smell of pollution such as I had experienced only once before, in Belgrade. The foul-smelling air was coming from thousands of fires burning lignite coal and other non-smokeless fuels. Even with the windows closed, the pollution penetrated every corner of the room. Outside, a yellow haze hung about the soft street lamps. A few hours later, a taxi driver explained that the air quality in Weimar was sometimes so bad that children were advised to stay at home for days on end. A winter before, a month of this foul air had destroyed a beautiful avenue of 300-year-old horse chestnut trees. As we sped towards the cemetery housing the Goethe and Schiller mausoleum, we passed rows of beautiful late nineteenth-century villas coated in black soot and dust. They all appeared to be deserted. Indeed, we were virtually the only car on the road. Weimar, my taxi driver informed me, had ‘moved west’. Who knew how many would be coming back?

  At the gates to the cemetery, an elderly attendant responded to my ringing for attention. After paying a few pfennigs for entry, I was escorted to a small classical pavilion at the corner of the graveyard. Beyond the cemetery gates, peeling stucco pilasters and crumbling gables appeared to afflict every building. There was no one else to be seen anywhere. Having opened the mausoleum with a large key, the attendant returned to his office. Alone I entered a space lit only by the open door and a large grille in the ceiling which revealed the grey November sky. This gentle light illuminated two classical sarcophagi below. With no railings surrounding them, I knelt for a few moments at the side of these giants of German literature, placing a hand on each sarcophagus in turn. To be left alone with the remains of these men would be a privilege at any time. To be with them on the 14 November 1989 imparted an unforgettable frisson.

  How well they would have captured the drama unfolding now across Germany!

  Deutschland? Aber wo liegt es?

  Wo das gelehrte beginnt, hört das politisch auf.

  (Germany? But where does it lie?

  Where the educated begins, the political ceases.)fn1

  From Weimar I travelled that afternoon to Erfurt where there was yet another demonstration. But it was a sorry affair compared to Leipzig, Gera or even Weimar. In a shop, I heard an old lady berating a friend with the words, ‘I do not believe the world any longer. Everyone queuing for money to go and spend in the West. It’s madness. They are only helping inflation. They should stay here and go to church!’

  Dotting the route between Weimar and Erfurt were Soviet bases packed with helicopter gunships and tanks. Both these cities were Soviet garrison towns, but the thought that the Russians might soon return to the Soviet Union had not really crossed the minds of the demonstrators. ‘I suppose if they go we shall finally have enough apartments for ourselves’ was a common response.

  That Germany might finally be free of Soviet occupation and even reunified still seemed to be a remote prospect. At a hotel in the old part of the city, rich in picturesque gables and late Renaissance strapwork, another team of dedicated female telephonists struggled to establish a line with London. One of them dialled continuously without response for about fifty minutes, and I apologized for putting them to such trouble. She simply turned and said that she had been so ‘marvellously treated’ on her first visit to West Berlin the other day, the least she could do was help me. As she said this, her colleague, another exceptionally tall blonde woman, popped out from a nearby room, gazed at me wistfully and added, ‘We’d also like to visit England one day.’

  Suddenly, the quiet politesse of their efforts was interrupted by loud chants. I saw a large demonstration taking place outside the hotel, this time of ‘artists’ protesting at the opening of an official fortieth-anniversary Communist exhibition. ‘Täter vor Gericht!’ (Criminals on trial!) they chanted. This outburst of popular feeling appeared less choreographed than others and more threatening. A worried Party secretary, who was identified by a passer-by as ‘Frau Loman’, overweight, heavily made-up and wearing a grey trouser suit, demanded that the crowd back away. An art historian joined her, but the sight of these two well-fed officials seemed only to spur the crowd on and they began shaking their fists, forcing Frau Loman and her colleague to beat a hasty retreat. ‘Es wird abgerechnet!’ (There will be a reckoning!), a demonstrator shouted at her venomously. It was hard to see how these emotions could be kept under control, yet, throughout this time, I never witnessed a single act of violence – a tribute to German self-discipline, even at a time of Umbruch (upheaval).

  By 16 November, this excitement had died down. Back in Berlin, I walked through a much reduced Checkpoint Charlie where, only a few weeks before, a young East German border guard had shouted at me, ‘Nothing will change here.’ This time the guards waved me through with no more than a perfunctory look at my papers, and I reached Tegel without delay to catch the next BA flight to London. The West German airline Lufthansa was not permitted to operate any flights along the highly profitable Berlin route. I wondered how much longer the Allied powers would retain their monopoly over civilian flights in and out of Berlin. Strict protocols governed the height and path of all British, French and American air-traffic on this route. As my plane flew at low altitude over the Warsaw Pact training grounds in East Germany, it seemed it would not be long before these artificial constraints on German sovereignty would be lifted.

  I had gone to London to recuperate for the weekend but then decided to return to Eastern Europe barely twenty-four hours later when the political temperature again began to rise in Prague. The BBC described a large student demonstration being baton-charged by riot police with considerable violence; there were reports of scores of young Czechoslovaks being hospitalized. That was on Friday, but no Czechoslovak visa could be procured until Monday when the Czechoslovak embassy in London reopened.

  First thing that morning I found myself in the dark softly lit concrete bunker of the Czechoslovak embassy visa office where a smiling but uncooperative apparatchik asked me when I hoped to fly to Prague and took my passport. After fifteen minutes he reappeared and asked me to sit down and have a coffee. I struggled hard to suppress my impatience. I was booked on a flight to Prague at midday and the time was now 10.15. I knew that to vent my frustration would be counter-productive, so I settled down to answer a series of banal questions about where I thought Eastern Europe was heading and what I thought might happen in Prague. The minutes ticked by until I had no chance of making the midday flight. I looked at my watch and asked gingerly if my visa was ready. As though he had suddenly remembered something, the diplomat put his hand in his pocket. Smiling, he brought out my passport and visa. ‘You should have asked earlier. It has been ready for some time.’ If the old order was about to end in Prague, his job would disappear with it and he was clearly determined to make the most of the little pleasures he could still command.

  I rushed out of the grim concrete building on Notting Hill Gate, then a partly dilapidated district of west London, and jumped in a cab, but the flight had left a good fifteen minutes before I arrived. Wondering how on earth I could reach Prague that afternoon, I was about to go to the British Airways desk when I bumped into a familiar face from my days in Warsaw. The British Airways office manager in the Polish capital was now in charge of Heathrow Terminal 1. ‘In a hurry again?’ he asked nonchalantly. I asked how I could get to Prague and he swiftly escorted me to an office where a flight was found via Zurich leaving in half an hour. Within five minutes the paperwork was complete and the boarding gate was waiting for me.

  By 6.30 p.m. I was in Prague, following a crowd of demonstrating students marching towards the Charles Bridge. I failed to notice the ranks of red-bereted police blocking our path until it was almost too late. The crowd surged over the bridge and the familiar sound of truncheons on shields heralding an imminent charge began. The police charged, the crowd turned and I was swept back over
the bridge towards the tower on the Old Town square, where I tripped and placed my hands over my head as the demonstrators rushed by, desperate to escape their pursuers. For a few seconds I thought I was unlikely to emerge unscathed, but the police never appeared – they had charged only halfway towards us, which was enough to send the students scuttling for cover.

  I picked myself up and examined some superficial tears to my clothes. A pretty young woman with her hair in plaits asked me in Hungarian-accented English if I was all right. I was dazed and must have looked rather helpless. Taking my arm she escorted me to the next bridge. She was a Slovak and in Prague for the celebration of the canonization of St Agnes, the patron saint of Bohemia, to be held later that week.