The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  The government in Bonn was haunted by the specter of this human tide. Publicly, there was no choice but to profess jubilation over the escape of so many East Germans; privately, serious reservations existed at the highest levels.

  “If the East Germans tore down the Wall today,” said one of the Federal Republic’s ranking diplomats to the GDR, “we would have to build another tomorrow.”

  “We don’t want to depopulate East Germany; we want to see living conditions improve, so that they will stay home,” a top immigration officer told me.

  “We might say we want reunification and the Wall to come down,” a former deputy mayor of Berlin confided bluntly, “but not really.”

  Ordinary West Germans took to grousing about banalities. Housing was scarce, especially in Berlin. Competition for jobs could be fierce. Those Ossies (the pejorative that colors intra-German relations to this day first cropped up that September) were already getting too many preferences: subsidized apartments, immediate unemployment benefits, help in finding work. A poll released in late September, at the height of the exodus, showed that a quarter of West Germans feared their countrymen would come and take their jobs. “Distrust was above all evident among young workers who saw the equally young and mostly well-educated East Germans as competitors,” the study found. It also reported that, while most West Germans worked an average thirty-seven-hour week, East German émigrés were already putting in sixty to seventy hours, often at lower pay, just to get ahead. That old-fashioned immigrant zeal, the report concluded, was destined to become a “social irritant.” This new sentiment was so unsettling that Helmut Schmidt felt compelled to protest in Die Zeit. “We took in millions of new citizens after the war,” the former chancellor wrote. “I am ashamed of West Germans who are envious of the help we are giving these new members of our society. I am ashamed of politicians who say they should stay where they are.”

  Those staying behind were no less ambivalent. “Do you see these houses?” a young East German asked me one evening in East Berlin, pointing out three town houses. We were walking down a battered street; the plaster facades of the buildings were falling off in great clumps. Most still bore the scars of World War II—pockmarks from shrapnel, bullets and artillery. “They are empty. All the people left last week. They had everything—houses, cars, money, a dacha in the country. They left all this behind, just to get more.” He said this angrily, indignant at the greed that he believed drove his countrymen to flee. For all the problems they faced—shortages of many basic goods, declining living standards, political repression—most East Germans had no desire to leave their country, contrary to the impression fostered in the West. Many if not most were perfectly comfortable with the socialist system that guaranteed them work, low-cost housing and free lifelong health care and schooling. Their main worry was that the mass exodus of their countrymen would worsen the lives of those who stayed behind.

  One night, I visited a favorite haunt, the Café Papillon, where one had a fair chance of talking without being watched by police. A pair of stylishly dressed young women spoke of those they called “stayers” and “leavers.” One ran a small boutique, the other was an assistant in an art gallery. Ensconced at a table in the corner, they looked as though they would be at home in any Western capital. “I am an East German, and I will not go,” one woman told me fiercely. The other nodded. Shops, offices and even whole factories had been forced to close or cut back because their staffs were so depleted by emigration. “Patients have died in hospitals because their doctors disappeared. Buses and trains don’t run because drivers have gone. They are not leaving for political reasons,” she said. “They want only the money to buy ‘things.’ They don’t realize that what they are giving up is worth much more—family, community, friends. They will regret their choice.” I wondered if they would feel the same once they had tasted life along West Berlin’s glamorous Kurfurstendamm, let alone New York. But what they said was a fact nonetheless: it was the youngest, the best-educated and the most ambitious East Germans who were leaving, not the deadwood of an older generation, and their loss was acutely felt.

  Kurt Hager, the conservative ideologist standing in for Honecker on the Politburo, geared up the party’s propaganda machine. Clumsily, the leadership tried to play on the people’s mixed emotions. Newspapers accused the Hungarian and West German governments of plotting the escapes in order to “discredit forty years of socialist construction.” Lurid tales of an illicit “trade in humans” were concocted. One “firsthand” account featured a railway worker who was given cigarettes that “tasted funny” by a woman in Budapest. He fell unconscious, awoke to find himself aboard a bus to Austria and only just managed to escape. “I consider myself the victim of kidnappers and criminals,” the man told Neues Deutschland, the official voice of the communist party, which Schabowski used to run. East German television “disclosed” that West German “spies” were offering money to those who left, interlacing these absurdities with reports of refugees failing to find jobs, of homesickness, of feelings of insecurity and depression in West Germany’s uncaring “elbow society.”

  With each passing day, the crisis grew deeper. How much better (and smarter) it would have been to acknowledge the problems honestly and accompany that with a pledge to address the people’s grievances, said Schabowski, looking back. The regime would not have seemed so isolated. He and a few others had wanted to do just that. But, again, it was the Time of Silence. Despite all that was happening around them, instead of changing their approach to suit changing times, the leadership hesitated. Honecker’s continued absence only accentuated their sense of paralysis. Unable to decide on a course of action, divided among themselves, unsure of everything that they had hitherto taken for granted, whether it was the system that governed their lives or the sense of their own power, they opted for the tried and true, a Stalinist stonewall. As much as anything, perhaps, this foretold the bankruptcy of the regime and sealed its demise.

  Klaus Bölling, a retired diplomat who had once been head of West Germany’s mission to East Berlin, was one of the few Germans I met who saw all this clearly. The regime’s response to the crisis, he said over dinner one evening, showed the extraordinary divide between the GDR’s rulers and its people: “The old strong Honecker is gone.” Age had taken its toll; so had illness. “He and his regime are utterly cut off from everyday life. They still see themselves as the defenders of the true faith, battling the evils of uncaring capitalism. Yet they move through the streets in Volvo limousines, blinds drawn. They spend weekends at isolated dachas in the country. They live well on party perquisites and have no conception of the shortages that beset their countrymen. They shun all contact with the real.” Bölling told me a story of one of his East German counterparts who took a trip with Honecker some years ago. At a factory in Mecklenburg, Honecker stepped out of his limo to greet what he thought was a crowd of workers. In fact, all the real workers had been shooed out to make way for the communist chief. The crowd that remained was composed almost completely of party officials and secret police. Honecker stepped forward and began waving and shaking hands, delighted with his popular reception, thoroughly unaware that the public, as such, was not even there.

  That distance, that almost unhinged detachment from reality, was profoundly alienating. Ask East Germans why they left, and it was always the same. It was the “sticky air,” the unremitting interference in people’s daily lives. Their wish to travel freely, now become the lodestone of unrest, was an expression of this more profound malaise. The regime’s imperviousness to any reality, to any point of view other than the socialist orthodoxy propounded by the country’s founders, robbed East Germany’s younger generation of hope. One refugee put it poignantly some weeks after he arrived in West Berlin, perhaps only a mile from his old house in the East—but a point he had traveled a thousand miles, and forty years, to reach. “It is as if you were a child,” he had said, “and your father were mad. He cannot see the world, and you cannot make you
rself understood.”

  Blindness among the many—clarity from a few—was the common thread woven through the events of 1989.

  Did blindness cause Erich Honecker to misstep at the critical moment? Just as Poland’s communists agreed to an election they thought they could win, just as Hungary’s Karoly Grosz and his conservatives chose Miklos Nemeth to form a government, thinking they could control him, so now did Honecker trip himself up by self-delusion.

  It was late September. He had just left the hospital. The exodus was at its peak. Several thousand East Germans were leaving the country daily. Though frail, Honecker thought himself in command. Clearly, he had to act. The tens of thousands of East Germans in Hungary were beyond his power. He did not dare to bar those who remained in the GDR from traveling. That would only inflame the situation and potentially spark active unrest. Honecker seized on what, to him, was an obvious solution. Acting on his own, without informing his cabinet, he called a friend and hard-line ally, Milos Jakes, the communist party boss of neighboring Czechoslovakia. He needed a favor, Honecker said. Could Jakes close the southern Czech border to Hungary, blocking East Germans from passing through to Hungary and on to the West. Without demurral—or apparent thought for the consequences—Jakes did so.

  Honecker thought himself clever. But the move backfired badly. Thousands of East Germans en route to Hungary were suddenly trapped in Czechoslovakia. Some returned home. Many others descended on the West German embassy in Prague, the ornately baroque Lobkowitz Palace. Perhaps they had heard that, in July, the West German government had secretly flown 120 GDR citizens who had taken refuge in the embassy in Budapest to safety in the Federal Republic. Perhaps they expected the Czech government to buckle under international pressure as they imagined the Hungarians had just done, not knowing the underlying reality of the Great Escape. In any event, the trickle of East Germans arriving in Prague soon became a flood.

  Czech police cordoned off the street in front of the embassy to keep East Germans away. Instead, they merely swept into the alleys around back and hopped over a shoulder-high, metal fence into the safety of the legation’s gardens. Thousands were already encamped there: men, women, children, living in hastily erected tents without running water or sanitation. Dysentery and disease threatened. World TV networks descended. East Germany’s problem became Czechoslovakia’s. It was an international embarrassment and, worse, an inspiration to the country’s own restive population. On September 25, thinking better of his precipitous decision, Jakes informed Honecker that he had to find a different solution. And he did.

  He announced it, grotesquely enough, during a reception at the State Opera House for a delegation from Beijing, arriving to show its appreciation for Honecker’s support for Tiananmen Square. He invited the entire Politburo to the fete and, there, gathered them in a private salon to relate what he described as “a little surprise.”

  “Dear comrades,” Schabowski remembers him saying. “I have just spoken with Comrade Jakes and I have a solution to our problem in Prague.” As before, there was no discussion. Honecker was announcing his decision. He had called the East German embassy in Czechoslovakia, he told them, and instructed them to arrange the details, in coordination with the West German foreign ministry.

  The men of the Politburo listened, at first in disbelief and then with appalled dread. For Honecker’s “solution” was to get rid of the refugees holed up in the Czech embassy by giving them precisely what they wanted—free passage to the Federal Republic. Special trains would be ordered, express from Prague to West Germany. Their doors and windows would be sealed to keep any malcontents from getting on or off the trains, he said. The particular genius of the idea was that those aboard this Freedom Train would be transported through the territory of the German Democratic Republic. That way, Honecker explained with satisfaction, they would have to… acknowledge East German sovereignty.

  It is impossible not to wonder what sort of mind could dream up such a bizarre scheme. Forget the eerie historical echo: locked trains as in locked cattle cars, loaded with social undesirables shipped off to where they wouldn’t be heard from again. The bigger question is what to make of the sheer illogic of his logic. Because the trains would pass through East German territory, this was somehow not a crushing defeat for the regime, a symbol of its impotence and a summons to resist? As Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher said at the time, rushing to Prague from the annual opening of the UN General Assembly in New York to supervise the operation, “This was more than the opening of the gates of the West German embassy.”

  In this season of surreal spectacles, it is hard to decide which was the most surreal. Was it the almost farcical pantomime of the Pan-European Picnic? Was it the dark comedy of the Polish elections, with pens wielded as sabers, or the monumental botch that opened the Wall? Among all the lunacies, Honecker’s on this occasion must be a contender. On September 30, as the first of his sealed trains hurtled their way west, thousands of East Germans pressed into railway stations along the route. In Dresden, they tried to fight their way into the station, to be beaten back by police. Others lined the tracks outside Leipzig and other cities, waving to their compatriots headed for a new life. This was the beginning of the end for Honecker, the start of something entirely different. Until then, the German Democratic Republic had largely been inert. Its people sought merely to escape. But “Erich’s Big Idea,” as Schabowski sardonically called it, changed all that. He closed the safety valve, the exit through Hungary that those who would resist could use to flee the country. Then he confronted them with police and pushed them against his Wall.

  In Hungary, change came from within, led by a few reform-minded communists around Miklos Nemeth and Imre Pozsgay. In Poland, revolution came via the ballot box and democratic elections—a model of peaceful compromise and accommodation. In East Germany, for the first time, the people themselves rose up. Erich’s Big Idea set the stage for a wave of ever-larger mass demonstrations that within weeks would sweep the country. The police violently turning East Germans away from the trains passing westward was the spark. On September 25, eight thousand people marched in Leipzig, singing the “Internationale.” The next Monday, October 2, Leipzigers marched again—this time close to one hundred thousand, in what would become a weekly rite. Protests erupted in other major cities, including East Berlin. “Wir bleiben hier,” the demonstrators chanted, defying row on row of police. “We are staying.”

  For the East German regime, there could hardly have been a more chilling answer to Erich Honecker’s final solution.

  George H. W. Bush returned from Europe in July, deeply moved by what he had seen and heard. More, he saw how much was at stake for the East Europeans, how delicate the situation was and how fast events were moving. For an administration that took office expecting the big game to be Asia, the focus for the next two years would be almost entirely on Europe. Bush’s interest had become personal. He followed events closely and telephoned the region’s leaders almost daily. Quietly and with characteristic circumspection, he decided on a plan of action. It could be summed up as restraint. He decided that in a fast-moving, fluid environment such as this, more could be accomplished by doing less.

  With the Great Escape, America awoke in earnest to the reality of what was happening in Eastern Europe. It dominated the news, became topic A around Washington’s political dinner tables. Columnists, lawmakers and the public clamored for action, anything to help the poor but plucky Peoples of the East to throw off the yoke of communism. In his journal that fall, Bush wrote, “I keep hearing critics saying we’re not doing enough on Eastern Europe. Here these changes are dramatically coming our way—Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic—and you’ve got a bunch of critics jumping around saying we ought to do more.” Congress, he went on, wanted to “just send money,” no matter for what. Conservative and human rights groups alike called for louder rhetoric, more chest-thumping and more finger-pointing at the Soviets. The hubbub worried the cautious Bush
. “If we mishandle it,” he wrote, “if we get way out making this look like an American project,” the whole thing could backfire, perhaps even “invite a crackdown that could result in bloodshed,” if not from Moscow then from some other hard-line East European regime.

  Less publicly, bigger issues were being debated. On September 11, one of Chancellor Kohl’s coalition partners, the Christian Democratic Union Party, held a party conference in Bremen, where delegates called for the restoration of Germany within its 1937 borders. This in itself was nothing new. But in the current climate it raised questions, especially in Moscow, which complained that Kohl had done nothing to repudiate such talk. Eduard Shevardnadze raised the matter with James Baker at their retreat in Jackson Hole in the third week of September, then brought it up more pointedly a few days later in a speech at the opening of the UN General Assembly.

  Shevardnadze did so for good reason. For the Bush administration, so late in recognizing what was happening in the East, had now moved far ahead of the Europeans in assessing the likely consequences. In May, François Mitterrand visited the president at his summer home in Maine. Bush asked flat out about the prospects of German unification. “Unthinkable,” exclaimed the French leader in dismay—at least, he added, “not in our lifetimes.” Margaret Thatcher would be no less dismissive. Bush himself, though, thought differently. And he knew that Helmut Kohl and his chief national security adviser, Horst Teltschik, thought differently, as well. As summer gave way to fall, and the magnitude of the crisis in the GDR became ever more apparent, Bush pushed his staff to think through U.S. policy. As for himself, when asked by reporters in late September where he stood on German unification, he replied simply, “I don’t fear it.”