The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  I walked back to the hotel through a neighborhood near the foreign embassies, the wealthiest part of town. Houses were decaying, some overgrown with vines. Doves rustled in their broken eaves—a scene from Piranesi, life amid the ruins. Along another empty boulevard, the American ambassador’s gleaming black limousine glided silently and majestically by, Stars and Stripes aflutter. Near the Square of National Unity, a woman neatly dressed in office clothes carefully scraped the contents of a broken egg off the sidewalk and put it into her purse. At the front desk of the Intercontinental, the manager greeted me with a knowing smile. “Did you enjoy your walk in the park, Mr. Meyer?”

  The day before I was to fly back to Germany, word came that Ceausescu had consented to an interview. The next morning, Newsweek’s editor and I drove out to the summer residence at Snagov, an hour from the capital along empty country roads, beautiful and green in the bright sun. The house Ceausescu used was a modest Romanian wood cottage; the nearby villa where we were received was a monstrous extravaganza of gilt vanity and pomp.

  With full ceremony, we were directed to a reception room—two thrones on a dais for Ceausescu and Newsweek’s editor, a small stool for me off to the side. I replaced it with a decent chair—on the dais. Then we waited, nearly an hour, for the Great Leader to finish his nap. A dozen or so royal retainers arranged themselves into a semicircle in front of the door through which he would come. It was as if tiny x’s, chalked on the floor, marked our assigned spots. When all was ready, the official crier, in stentorian tones, cried out, “Comes Ceausescu!” The assembly stiffened. The deputy foreign minister, a swarthy man whose bristly, short-cropped hair made him look like a boar, sidled up to me with a sidelong conniving glance and whispered, “Mr. Meyer, are you trembling?” The Great Conductor, the Beloved Leader, the Genius of the Carpathians, the Danube of Thought—the Last Stalinist of Europe—entered the audience chamber.

  President Nicolae Ceausescu was a short, bent little man with deranged eyes and bushy eyebrows who spittled as he talked. He shuffled in wearing woven plastic shoes and a baggy gray suit and offered a moist, weak palm. His people feared this man as Satan. They referred to him simply as He—He whose likeness weathered on billboards along every highway, He whose collected works yellowed in the windows of every bookstore. While Hungary and Poland experimented with democracy and free markets, while the Soviet Union opened to the world, Romania turned ever inward, wrapped in old-fashioned Marxist conviction and one-man rule. For nearly a quarter of a century, it had been driven by Ceausescu’s singular vision of a Romania dependent upon nothing but itself and him. To free Romania of foreign debt, he launched an all-out export drive that stripped shops bare and caused near famine in the countryside. Commerce with the West was largely reduced to barter. State control of the economy was complete. Romania, in the summer of 1989, was one of the last temples of the dwindling communist faith, an international pariah as isolated as North Korea.

  We were the first American journalists to interview Ceausescu in a decade, and the last to see him alive. For more than two hours he ranted about the glories of Romanian communism and the perfidy and corruption of the West. Occasionally he seized up, like a broken doll, and spluttered in an almost epileptic grimace, his lips twisting, spitting, his face and body contorting in tics and sudden spasms, before breaking out again into speech. Chaplin’s parody of the Great Dictator could not rival this alarming reality.

  How could we claim his people are starving? Ceausescu demanded. “We have a bumper harvest!”

  Why are the stores bare, we asked, with next to nothing on the shelves? Because food is kept out of sight in “storage,” he replied.

  What of Poland’s and Hungary’s experiments with democracy? “Disasters. They should be stopped!”

  Does it bother you that people talk of a Ceausescu cult of personality? “If this is a cult of personality, I would like all the poorly developed countries to enjoy such personalities.” Does it bother you to be likened to Stalin? “He made mistakes, but he did everything a person should do in his job!”

  I asked, perhaps too casually, if he thought Romanians might one day rise against him. Ceausescu looked at me with the contemplativeness of a man who could have me killed with a word, and would, if I were Romanian. His eyes were at once immensely intelligent and totally dead: fish eyes, if fish could think. That was the look I saw again six months later, when he lay dead on the ground, executed by firing squad.

  For now, he merely paused, then resumed his monologue. He waved his fist in the air, banged the armrest on his throne. The translator, a sensitive and learned man, knelt at his feet, a footman struggling to keep pace with the broken, angry tirade. The interview had by now degenerated into the sort of speech Ceausescu might make at a communist party congress. All pretense of give-and-take disappeared. We were expected to listen and take notes. So I did, though probably not what he might imagine.

  “Balls,” I wrote, not as editorial commentary but as literal observation. Ceausescu’s were huge. They sagged grotesquely in one trouser leg, squatting on his seat like misshapen tomatoes. Them so big, him so small.

  A more serious notation: we spoke of his “cult of personality,” but it was hard to discern any personality here. He gestured, talked, shouted, waved his arms. But who or what was he, beyond a hollow vessel for power? The man seemed utterly without presence, charisma, aura. If Erich Honecker was an impenetrability, Ceausescu seemed a cipher. I have never met a man more lacking in human qualities. He appeared to be utterly cut off from ordinary life, from ordinary sentiment and emotions, from reality, from empathy, from understanding. He lived in a weird world of will and fantasy that was at once his strength and, ultimately, his fatal flaw.

  Afterward we went out to the garden for photographs, a time-honored ritual with such men. Peter Turnley, Newsweek’s photographer, posed him in front of his personal cornfield. The corn was as high as the dictator’s eye. Was it planted there as proof of Romania’s bounty? Along the road leading to his villa, the first four or five rows of corn towered impressively. Behind, they were scrawny and wasted. In Romania, there was no fertilizer for ordinary farmers, except those who fed the emperor’s ego.

  Aides followed us around, grinning and sweating furiously as Peter led Ceausescu to and fro across the lawn, gently touching his shoulder to position him in the sunlight… actually touching this man, the aides couldn’t help but notice, who was so concerned about microbes and poisons that he never wore the same suit twice and required even close advisers to take saliva tests and be strip-searched before entering his presence. Peter nudged him onto a little wooden dock jutting out amidst reeds into the lake. Again, Peter touched his shoulder to position him in the light, and for an instant Ceausescu lost his balance. He tottered on one foot. His little arms spun little circles in the air. From the phalanx of aides behind us, from all those peeping out from the behind the curtains of the villa, you could almost hear the collective intake of a hundred breaths. Would the Danube of Thought topple into the drink?

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Great Escape

  By the end of the first week in September, the conspirators’ preparations were complete. West German authorities set up a sprawling immigration center in Passau, hard on the Austrian border, capable of accommodating tens of thousands of people. An agreement was quietly struck with Vienna to grant the East Germans visa-free passage, negotiated by German diplomats who shuttled secretly between Vienna and Budapest. Fleets of buses waited at the crossing points for travel through to the Federal Republic.

  And so the Hungarians shed their camouflage. On August 31, Gyula Horn flew to East Berlin to confront his counterpart, foreign minister Oskar Fischer. More than 150,000 East Germans were encamped around Lake Balaton, Horn told him. They weren’t going home. Hungary did not want to damage its relations with the German Democratic Republic. Yet neither could it stand idle in a situation that he described as “inhumane.” Yes, there was the treaty with Berlin to consider.
But Hungary was also a signatory to European human rights conventions—and those dictated a change of policy. Then Horn informed Fischer of what Budapest intended to do: open its border with Austria, without hindrance.

  Fischer was outraged. “That is treason! Are you aware that you are leaving the GDR in the lurch and joining the other side? This will have grave consequences for you!” Nemeth shrugged off the threat, knowing it was empty. Days before, Mikhail Gorbachev had told Chancellor Helmut Kohl that under no circumstances would Moscow intervene. Even without that assurance, Nemeth had decided: the time was ripe to deliver the final blow against Erich Honecker and his Wall.

  The decision was made in great secrecy and held close until the final moment. Nemeth’s own interior minister, Istvan Horvath, charged with managing what would turn into a mass exodus, was informed only days before, according to Nemeth. “He asked, ‘Miklos, do you realize that by doing this we are siding with the West Germans?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

  All along, Nemeth saw the immigration crisis as a way of establishing Hungary’s bona fides as a member of Europe. His strategy was to be the first East bloc nation to rejoin the West, and he hoped to reap the rewards. “Yes, I foresaw that opening the border could lead to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, and of the Czech regime as well,” he told me. “But I did not forecast it so soon.” Flying home from that August 25 rendezvous in Bonn, he and his aides had discussed the likely consequences—over a presumed time frame of the next two to four years! That events moved so much faster was unfortunate, from his perspective. “I aimed to keep maximum advantage for Hungary,” he would later confess. Had the bloc’s implosion not come so quickly, Hungary would have been the leading reformer, the most progressive nation of Eastern Europe. It would have been the gateway for Western investment, tourism, cultural exchange. A grateful Germany would have lavished aid and attention upon it, partly to inspire imitation by Hungary’s slower-moving neighbors. “I specifically asked Kohl for his help in rejoining Europe, and the chancellor agreed,” said Nemeth. But because the other regimes collapsed so quickly, thanks in large measure to the events Hungary set in motion, “we lost our advantage. The other countries of the East could catch up. As they did.”

  Ordinary East Germans knew nothing of these grand strategies. They had only one concern: to escape. Over the preceding weeks, the pressures had built. The Stasi in their midst started rumors that they would be sent home. More recently came conflicting reports that they would soon be let go. The presence in the camps of so many West German and Hungarian officials lent credence to this hope. Yet nothing was sure. Tens of thousands of people—whole families and their children—lived anxiously from day to day in an increasingly tense and nerve-racking limbo.

  Then, in the early evening of September 10, the sun still warm in the sky, the waiting abruptly ended. A West German diplomat named Michael Jansen climbed on top of a table set up in the middle of a playing field at a camp in the hills outside Budapest. One of Germany’s most senior career diplomats, he had been sent to the Hungarian capital in mid-July at the personal behest of Hans-Dietrich Genscher. “My friend, go and do whatever is needed,” Jansen was instructed. He had done so, setting up the camps that fed and sheltered so many thousands of East Germans. Now he had one last task. Picking up a megaphone, he paused for a moment to think about what to say, then addressed the expectant crowd of three to four thousand people who quickly gathered. You may have heard the reports, he told them, for at just that moment Prime Minister Nemeth had gone on national television to make his own dramatic announcement. Those reports were true. “You are free to go!”

  The effect was electric—and immediate. The borders were to be opened at midnight, sharp, and the citizens of Erich Honecker’s workers’ paradise couldn’t clear out fast enough. Jansen watched as people literally ran to their cars, threw in their belongings and raced away, at least insofar as the rattling lawn mower that was East Germany’s national car could race. Others clambered aboard buses Jansen chartered to take them to the border and beyond, to Germany. “Why the rush?” he asked one. “You have until midnight.” The memorable reply: “Under communism, when someone says yes, we know that nyet could soon follow.”

  To Jansen, the moment lives as if it were yesterday. “It was very emotional—the most emotional moment of my professional life,” he told me twenty years later, after his retirement from the German foreign office. By the next morning, his camps were all but empty. Long lines quickly built at every checkpoint on the eastern side of the Austrian frontier, stretching for miles. The autobahn toward Vienna became a parking lot. Families with small children dozed in their cars, fitfully awaiting midnight; others simply partied, singing and dancing and popping off bottles of champagne.

  At 12:01 a.m., September 11, the gates lifted and the mad rush to the West was on. Austrian and Hungarian police stood to the side as a steady stream of vehicles, bearing license plates of the GDR, swept past in an unbroken tide. More than eight thousand people left that first day. By the third day, the figure was close to forty thousand. Television crews and reporters from around the globe flocked to the scene, reporting this astonishing development that came, by all outward appearances, out of the blue. CNN ran live coverage throughout the following days. So did Sky News and the BBC. The event dominated the news in every country of the world, save China and the police states of Eastern Europe. Newsweek’s cover that week gave the exodus the name that would endure: “The Great Escape.” And it was only the beginning.

  The gravity of the situation was not missed in Berlin. At the September 5 meeting of the Politburo, following Horn’s visit, the leadership inveighed against Hungary’s perfidy. They did so again at the September 12 meeting. Gunter Schabowski, the Berlin communist party chief who would figure so prominently in the events to come, recalled the debate with mixed contempt and incredulity. As the entire edifice of the GDR shook with the blow the Hungarians had just delivered, the assembled grandees of communism dithered and pointed fingers.

  On and on they went. “It was a general attack on socialism, and we are the first target,” one top official groused. “The Hungarians are in cahoots with the West Germans,” said another. “They were bribed by Bonn.” Said yet a third, “It is the doing of that Western reactionary Otto von Habsburg.” It was all sound and fury, impotent querulousness. Nor were there any “grave consequences” for Hungary, and not only because Moscow showed no signs of interfering. Erich Honecker himself was in no position even to govern, let alone retaliate. The reason: he had just gone into the hospital. Officially, it was for gallbladder surgery. But according to West German intelligence, Honecker had intestinal cancer. That left a vacuum of power, into which no one dared step.

  Thus the internal crisis of surreal detachment enveloping the GDR became deeper as the external crisis grew. It was clear, even before the Pan-European Picnic and the September 11 border opening, that East Germany’s survival was at stake. Yet within the leadership there was no discussion of what to do, how to react. “We were silent,” Schabowski would tell me. “The situation of our people leaving was not even discussed.” Or rather, it was discussed precisely once, and then only elliptically.

  At the September 5 Politburo meeting, Heinz Kessler, a reactionary, suggested that the leadership should at least make a statement, if only to indicate that it understood why its citizens were leaving, according to Schabowski. “I asked, ‘What should we say? Would you say people are leaving because they can’t travel or can’t get modern computers or decent goods?’ Many were against this, others were for it.” After a time, Kurt Hager, the party ideologist, chairing the meeting in Honecker’s absence, cut off the discussion. “‘It is better to table this matter until Erich returns,’ he said. And we accepted this.”

  That was a mistake, Schabowski believed in retrospect. “We should have spoken up. We should have said, ‘We must do this at once.’ We should have removed Erich Honecker then and there. He would have learned of it at the
hospital. Would anything have come of it? No, probably not. The GDR by this time was finished. Kismet. So long. It was only a question of sooner or later. But it would have been a fight. Maybe other leaders would have emerged, younger people who could have changed the system and been partners with Bonn. Perhaps a confederation would have resulted, with the GDR lasting another few years before reunification, leading to different conditions of unification and its results. But this was the Time of Silence, as we called it. We were like a rabbit, struck motionless before the snake.”

  Meanwhile, the exodus went on, watched each day via West German television throughout the GDR. The exception was Dresden, where reception was poor. East Germans watched as thousands of their countrymen poured across the frontier from Hungary, seeking new lives in the West. They cheered and cried as they arrived in the Federal Republic. They hugged relatives and families they thought they would never see again. I interviewed many and spoke also with ordinary West Germans as well as senior government officials. As the weeks went by, I was struck by the growing ambiguity of the public mood. Here was the German Democratic Republic, in certain trouble. The U.S. ambassador described it as a “silent crisis.” By rights, West Germans ought to have welcomed these events as a herald of the Cold War’s imminent end. And yet, they did not. Emotions were weirdly mixed, on both sides of the German divide.

  Once the initial blush of euphoria began to fade, concerns of everyday practicality entered in. Many West Germans wondered how the Federal Republic could absorb all the people who wanted to come. Two years ago, some 100,000 Aussiedler—East Europeans of German descent constitutionally entitled to citizenship—immigrated to West Germany. This year, the figure was expected to be closer to half a million, even before the East German exodus began. “What we have seen so far from Hungary is only the tip of the iceberg,” one senior official told me in early September, adding that by some estimates as many as 650,000 of East Germany’s 17 million citizens had applied for official exit visas. At the United Nations in late September, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze was asked how many GDR citizens he thought would flee, if given the chance. His answer, given almost offhandedly: 1 to 2 million.