The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  Reagan’s speech in Berlin came at a critical moment in his own relations with the new Soviet leader. He first met Gorbachev in Geneva, in November 1985, where they discussed nuclear disarmament in a media-friendly “fireside chat.” They continued the conversation at their second famous summit in Reykjavik, in October 1986, where in an extraordinary meeting of minds the two men came close to a deal to abolish nuclear weapons. By the time of his Berlin Wall speech, Reagan was well along in changing his thinking about Gorbachev. The president had read his recently published book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. “It was as damning as anything written about communism in the West,” said Reagan. Meanwhile, negotiations for a third summit were far advanced. On December 8, 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan met in Washington to sign a treaty rather cumbersomely known as the Intermediate Nuclear Forces accord, or INF. Dramatically, it did away with an entire class of nuclear weapons as Soviet SS20s and U.S. cruise and Pershing missiles were removed from Europe.

  Hard-liners in the U.S. national security establishment were aghast. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, backed by his special adviser Richard Perle, among others, viscerally opposed Reagan’s talk of disarmament and instead pushed hard for an escalation of military spending. As the hawks saw it, Reagan was in danger of going soft on communism. And they were right. Like Thatcher, Reagan had concluded that Gorbachev was trustworthy, that he could “do business” with him. But he had a problem: within the right wing of his party, all this was heresy.

  As Reagan sought to change the climate of U.S.-Soviet relations, then, he had to find a way to neutralize opposition within his administration, just as Gorbachev himself had to negotiate a delicate and often perilous path among the factions of his own government. The Berlin Wall speech gave Reagan cover, notes James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans, a definitive portrait of George W. Bush’s foreign policy team. To the hard-liners, it would sound like a traditional anticommunist speech of defiance and Cold War confrontation, which of course is why the State Department and the National Security Council tried so hard to get those four words out.

  In fact, the speech was a remarkably nuanced balancing act. It managed to acknowledge how far the Soviet Union had come, while underscoring how far it had to go. Yet what many Americans heard only as a challenge was also an invitation—an invitation to engage, to continue further down the road the two men had come, a holding out of a hand, an offering to meet halfway. Certainly that’s how the men standing at Reagan’s side heard it that day; Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen said so at the time. Today’s buzz phrase for this sort of diplomacy had not yet been coined: soft power. But that’s what it was—a conviction, in the heart of the ultimate cold warrior, this consummate idealist, that cooperation and compromise and faith in the power of America’s example would go further than militarist confrontation in making a better world. Reagan knew this, even if his disciples did not.

  Within half a year, he had jettisoned the easy rhetoric of the “evil empire.” That May, he visited Moscow, chatting with ordinary Russians in Red Square and delivering a talk to the students of Moscow University. Reagan clearly sensed a dawning of a new era. Nor was the symbol of Ronald Reagan in Moscow, hosted by a man calling for change in the Kremlin, lost on the people of Europe, especially those who had the misfortune to live on the wrong side of the Wall. They heard the real message, coming from both sides: accommodation, not confrontation. And that gave them hope and the courage to act.

  The history of the revolutions in Eastern Europe was not written in Washington. It had little to do with American military might. It had far more to do with the rise of Gorbachev, coupled with the economic collapse of the Soviet system and the glaring contrast to the dynamism of Western Europe. The preparedness of East European leaders, with the exception of those of Romania, to accept peaceful change was critical. So was the role of sheer accident and happenstance, as we shall see. Above all, it had everything to do with people, individually and collectively, on the ground, deciding for themselves to tear down that Wall.

  This is the story of how they did it, shorn of mythology.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Wall

  Arriving in Berlin, I would do what I always did: drop my luggage at the hotel and hail a taxi toward the East. I went to touch the Wall, to lay hands upon it. It didn’t matter how many times I had done it before, or how many times I would do so again. It was my lodestone, my centering point, my story as a journalist covering Germany and the East bloc.

  Nothing has ever been so freighted with symbolism, ideology and history. The Wall was World War II, the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the high tide of totalitarianism and communist dictatorship, the frontier of democracy. You could feel it, smell it, run your hands over it, look across it. On the one side, us. On the other, them.

  It didn’t matter what direction you took. Berlin was an island; all paths led to the Wall. Usually I went down Bismarck Strasse, past the Siegessäule, the winged column celebrating Prussia’s victory in the 1871 war against France, to the Reichstag. The Wall cut a few feet behind the old parliament, still blackened and pockmarked from flying debris from the war. A dozen crosses memorialized a few who died there trying to escape. An East German patrol boat, with spotlights and heavy machine guns, idled on the far shore of the River Spree. Only a few weeks before my first visit, a young man was gunned down near the spot and left to bleed to death where he lay.

  Usually I would walk south, along the Wall past the Brandenburg Gate, across the muddy and eerily empty lots around Potsdamer Platz, the heart of old Berlin, once crowded with hotels and department stores and so busy in the 1920s that it received Europe’s first traffic light. Hitler’s bunker lay there in the death strip, a swelling breast of earth easily glimpsed from a spectator platform, illuminated by harsh security lights at night and girded with antitank traps. Farther along was Wilhelm Strasse and the weed-grown rubble of the Nazi SS headquarters, then after a series of sharp zigs and zags down abandoned and often broken streets came Checkpoint Charlie. YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR a large sign warned in English, French and Russian, beyond which the green-uniformed Vopos—Volkspolizei—of the German Democratic Republic waited behind their barriers and barbed wire. The view stretched all the way to Moscow.

  Ronald Reagan spoke for many, but it was hard to imagine the world without the Wall. Perhaps it was the touching. The Wall was so obdurate and outwardly solid. Its blunt, crude force, so hostile to movement, heart and spirit, had become a fact of life—regrettable and tragic, to be sure, but there, like cancer or the reality of evil in the world.

  In Berlin, the Wall was felt everywhere, even when not in sight. It haunts the city to this day, twenty years later. Eerie remnants remain, catching one unawares: a stretch of Wall here, a watch-tower there, vacant lots where the death strip passed, a thin line of paving stones inlaid in the streets of the city’s center, marked with bronze plates: BERLIN MAUER: 1961–1989. In the forested parts of Berlin, away from the now trendy Mitte, or city center, you may notice a steady march of pines through stands of birch and elder. The Wall’s scar has been replanted. Dig in the sandy soil, and you find broken pieces of its distinctive concrete. The Wall abides like a phantom limb, a void that cannot be forgotten.

  There is a misplaced sentimentality to these memories, a sort of Cold War romance, a thrill for a certain kind of tourist. Berliners for the most part simply lived with it, incongruous and sinister as it was. To live with something is to become oblivious. Mothers pushed their prams along it. In the western half of the city, artists painted it, at least for a time. But generally people turned their backs on it, except when seeking empty spaces to park their cars.

  The Wall went up on August 13, 1961. The communist party leader of the time, Walter Ulbricht, saw it as the solution to his single most embarrassing problem: the flight of East Germans to the West, who were at the time leaving at the rate of some one thousand people a day. Historians know that the Allies could have preve
nted its construction and perhaps, thereby, changed history. Soldiers erecting the barrier—at first no more than a few strands of barbed wire—were not supplied with ammunition; Russian tank crews were ordered to withdraw if confronted. But the pugnacious Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, the man who threatened to “bury” the West and banged his shoe on the podium at the United Nations, knew what he was doing. At a small and jovial dinner party the night before, he tipped a small gathering of top Russian military leaders to his plans, clearly savoring the moment. “We’re going to close Berlin,” he crowed with his trademark gap-toothed grin. “We’ll just put up serpentine barbed wire and the West will stand there, like dumb sheep.” And it did, fearing a fight that might have gone nuclear.

  Over the years, stone slabs and masonry replaced the barbed wire. A second parallel wall went up, one hundred yards farther in. Houses in between were demolished, creating a no-man’s-land that became known as the death strip. Much of it was covered with raked gravel or turned earth, making it easy to track would-be escapees; it was mined and booby-trapped. Border guards patrolled along an inner track, often accompanied by attack dogs; others watched from any of 302 towers. Almost until the end, their orders were to shoot to kill, on sight. Reports vary, but as many as 192 people died trying to escape over the Wall; roughly a thousand were killed trying to flee over the far longer East German border.

  It worked as Ulbricht hoped: between 1949 and 1962, 2.5 million East Germans fled. Between 1962 and 1989, that number fell to about five thousand. Overnight, the forty-two thousand square miles of the German Democratic Republic became a prison. Transportation and communication links were cut. Bustling streets and lively sidewalks in the heart of metropolitan Berlin suddenly became abandoned dead ends. Sewers, tramlines and power grids were blocked or cut. Families were broken, friendships severed. Children lost parents or grandparents. On official maps, the western half of the city was blotted out—figuratively erased from the world of the living. The city, particularly in the East, settled into a grim sadness, a long sleep from which its troubled citizens scarcely dared dream they would ever awake.

  Only Berliners called it the Wall. Elsewhere, it was the “fence,” or the “border,” a three-hundred-mile swath through the heart of Germany. By 1989, the East Germans had removed their mines and remote-control machine guns. Even so, it was a formidable barrier: a twelve-foot-high mesh fence that could not be climbed without grappling hooks; an antivehicle trench to keep people from crashing through in cars; armed patrols with dogs; concrete watch-towers and machine-gun bunkers every few hundred yards; a three-mile security zone inside the border, where East Germans could live and travel only with special permits. Here and there it opened—guardedly—to admit a railway or highway. But for the most part it marched ahead unchanging and featureless, cutting through forests, zigzagging up sheer mountainsides, slicing through fields, streams and towns.

  Early in my assignment, as late autumn turned into winter, I traveled along the divide at odd intervals over a few weeks, from the Baltic Sea in the north, where gray East German gunboats floated off a sandy beach, ready to shoot anyone who might try to swim to freedom, to the Czech border near Bavaria in the south. The idea was to search out the cracks that I supposed must be there, to intuit a coming revolution. But I found little evidence. Wherever I went, the Wall was simply there.

  Driving in the countryside, down lanes of oaks lining the road, through verdant meadows and rolling green hills, you would unexpectedly come across it and stop, as if jolted by electricity. Along the border near the central West German town of Philippsthal, just north of the famous Fulda Gap where NATO forces fighting what they called the “next war” would try to stop invading Soviet armies rolling toward Frankfurt and the English Channel, the road wound along a pleasant river lined with willows. Boys fished on one bank. On the other, a gray wall suddenly loomed up, laced with barbed wire and studded by watch-towers. Soldiers peered through binoculars. Around a bend, the wall cut across the road; the older, bigger part of town was off-limits. You could only turn around and go back. If you lingered, a guard emerged to snap your photo. You were in the files of the East German security police.

  Farther down the highway, in Rohringshof, a town renowned for its picturesque half-timbered barns and medieval houses, the Wall snaked through a cement plant. Once a single complex, there were now instead two huge cones of cement dust, two big conveyors, and two identical smokestacks. One belched choking clouds of dust (on the Eastern side); the other (on the West German side) emitted a more modest, environmentally conscious plume. Farther north, near the university city of Göttingen, developers had built a new golf course at Bad Sooden, only a long slice from the border. In neighboring Wanfried, the border split the local train station. The town’s ancient baroque church with its cemetery was caught in the security zone between East and West. “When there is a funeral or a wedding, I sometimes get to see my relatives,” said a West German farmer, standing on a hillock looking down upon the church below. “I wave, but we have not talked in twenty years. Perhaps we never shall. We are getting old.” (In fact, he would speak to them, face-to-face and against all expectation, in a matter of mere months.) The road leading to the frontier was perfectly maintained. It stopped at the fence, lost in weeds and fallen leaves. But the electric lines ran on. The owner of the local power plant had friends and relatives in the East, and he supplied them even at a loss.

  I expected people to be oppressed by such macabre proximity. But no. They accommodated themselves to it. Mainly it was outsiders who found it intrusive or malign. “The border is a fact. It’s there, and we live with it,” said Anita Geldbach, a tailor in a small shop along a cobbled street in Göttingen. Near the Czech border, to the south, a tank road cut through the forest on the East German side of the border, ending just feet from the parking lot of a local supermarket in the West. No one gave it a thought. All along the frontier, kids played soccer and adults went camping in the shadow of the watch-towers of the East. Few saw much of a threat.

  Looking through my notebooks from the trip, so many years later, I am struck by the difference in reactions between Americans and those Germans living in the immediate shadow of the Cold War. “War? You mean like an invasion?” asked Gisela Sieland, a housewife in the little town of Altenburschla, surprised that I would ask whether she worried about a Soviet invasion. She seemed baffled at my suggestion that NATO and the Warsaw Pact could come into conflict, even though she resided at ground zero. “We don’t feel the least fear,” said Ulle Winter, a student at Göttingen University working part-time at a student pub, as she served a beer. “We have the utmost confidence in Gorbachev. The Americans might as well pack up their stuff and leave.” I encountered this virtually everywhere: the sense that the border had become something almost natural, that the Wall would, and perhaps should, endure. “After all,” Ulle added, wiping the counter clear, “we created the two Germanys. We Germans made the war.”

  It is almost impossible to comprehend the full dimension and consequence of the Cold War. For future generations, it will define the twentieth century. It dwarfs any other event, from the First and Second World Wars to the invention of the computer, modern telecommunications and the democratization of Wall Street. Since 1945, writes the author Martin Walker, “the history of the Cold War has been the history of the world.”

  It was the first truly global conflict, sucking in geographies and drawing battle lines between allies and adversaries that even World War II did not. It pitted two utterly alien political and economic systems, do or die, one against the other. There were few genuinely neutral parties, save Swiss bankers and some neolithic tribes in the remnants of the Amazon forest. Almost every nation and people were drawn in or touched by it. Americans fought in Vietnam and Korea, Laos and Cambodia. So did Turks, Algerians and Chinese. Cubans fought in Angola; Saudis battled Russians in Afghanistan. Proxy wars raged in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. We raced to close imagined “missile gaps,”
beat the Russians to the moon. Weapons manufactured for World War III in Europe were sold across the world, spawning regional arms races, wars and political upheavals. Ethnic and nationalist conflicts assumed geostrategic significance: India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Ethiopia and Somalia. Geographies became blocs, tinted blue or red, free and unfree. A bizarre constellation of places resonated fearsomely with even the youngest schoolchildren, Russian and American, Asian as well as European: Saigon. Hanoi. Seoul. Pyongyang. Kabul. Katanga. Tehran. Phnom Penh. Budapest. Prague. Warsaw. Salvador. Santiago. Honduras. Guatemala. Berlin.

  The Cold War was a uniquely total war, not in movements of armies but in its social and economic effects. Dwight Eisenhower warned against a “military-industrial complex,” with its vast army, intelligence apparatus and defense industries mobilized for a war that would wipe out human civilization. For the better part of five decades it absorbed anywhere from a quarter to a half of all U.S. government spending and 10 percent of the nation’s GNP. The Cold War shaped America, in ways not always obvious. The interstate highway system was originally built to speed military logistics from one part of the country to the other. Today’s Internet, with all its transformative effect on commerce and daily life, began as a military communications network designed to withstand a Soviet nuclear strike. The federal loans that generations of young Americans have relied upon for college began with the National Defense Education Act of 1958, a crash program launched after Sputnik to win the “brain race” against the Soviets. The California dream rode the tides of defense spending pouring into the state, swelling its population from 5 million before the Cold War began to more than 30 million by the time it ended. A whole new economic order evolved within the Cold War’s shadow: Bretton Woods. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The United Nations. The U.S. Agency for International Development. The Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild postwar Europe. Postwar investment in Japan and the network of international trade and security organizations that spanned the globe, from SEATO to NATO to the Warsaw Pact, Cominterm and the Common Market cum European Union. All were creatures of the Cold War.