The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  I had planned to spend the night in Nuremberg, the nearest large town to Schirndling and fly back to Bonn in the morning. My gut told me not to. This cannot go on. Sensing that I had to move, fast, I got in my rented BMW and made my way down the mountain, threading through the smoking Trabants. I accelerated to something exceeding 140 miles per hour, once I hit the autobahn, toward midnight, tendrils of fog coiled over the road in the cold dampness, interspersed far ahead in my headlights with faint, flickering red dots. What could they be? It was too cold for fireflies… Almost too late, I realized they were the dim taillights of the little Trabbis, wandering down the center of the autobahn at about thirty miles an hour. They shook as I swerved and blew by.

  Some I stopped to help. They parked by the side of the highway, sometimes in the highway. Which way is Hamburg? Cologne? Dortmund? It was so cold and windy that my map shattered, like glass. Did I have a phone book for Germany? They had relatives in the West and wanted to call. I asked in what city. They were not sure. “You mean, there are many phone books?” I arrived at my bureau in Bonn about six hours later, just before dawn, and wrote frantically through the morning about all that I had seen. It would become Newsweek’s next cover story. Then I caught a midafternoon flight for Berlin. A few minutes after I crossed into the eastern sector later that evening, GDR police closed the border. To this day, I still feel queasy at how close I came to missing all that would happen next.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Fall

  Thursday, November 9, 1989. Egon Krenz began his day early. He arrived at the office well before first light, having left it only hours earlier. By 9 a.m. he was presiding over an emergency summit of the Central Committee. His fledgling government was in meltdown. The communist rank and file were screaming. Like the ordinary citizens marching in a dozen cities, they too had lost faith—in their party, in the regime, in one another. The old policies obviously had to be scrapped. New policies were required. The generation of hard-line apparatchiks clearly had to go, for the times demanded new faces. But who, how, what, when?

  Krenz had been in full crisis-management mode from the moment he took office. In a tumultuous session the day before, five holdovers from the old regime were brusquely tossed out. Among them, the titular prime minister, Willi Stoph, who had been the first to confront Honecker. Erich Mielke, the minister of state security, and a pungent bouquet of other retrogrades were also gone. In their place, Krenz appointed the popular, reform-minded mayor of Dresden, Hans Modrow, who had played a key role in preventing violence during the Leipzig marches, as well as an opposition writer named Christa Wolf. But even that was not enough. The communist party was consumed in a fury of self-criticism and mutual denunciation.

  The historian Charles Maier captured the mood in his dramatic account of the GDR’s final days, Dissolution. Delegates pointed fingers. You should resign! No, you should! The regime’s handling of the demonstrations came under biting attack, with acrimonious calls for investigations. Specifics were deleted from the official minutes, for fear of pouring oil on the fire. “The working class is so angry that they are going to the barricades,” one enraged delegate declared. “They’re howling, ‘Get the party out of the factories.’ They want to cut the unions, get rid of the party secretaries.”

  The party faithful listened, aghast, as Gerhard Schurer, the country’s economics czar, outlined the depths of East Germany’s problems. No one knew, ever even dreamed, that the country was in such straits—near bankrupt, verging on collapse, dependent almost entirely for its survival on under-the-table handouts from the Federal Republic worth several billion dollars a year. To the rank and file, this was a revelation. In the popular mind, even among senior officials who might be expected to know better, the GDR was the industrial powerhouse of the East bloc.

  Listening to Schurer relentlessly walk through the numbers, their confusion and dismay grew. Erich Honecker sought to make East Germany the model of successful socialism: a consumer society as well as a caring welfare state. But the dirty little secret was that a hidebound, centrally planned state-owned economy could not deliver. To assure the people’s support, the government subsidized everything: housing, food and fuel costs, education, medical care, vacations and pensions. Investment in industrial productivity came a distant second. State revenue long ago began to fall short of needs. To fill the gap, East Berlin began borrowing—ever more heavily—from the West. As early as 1973, according to Maier, one courageous senior adviser tried to tell Honecker that his policies were a recipe for bankruptcy and showed him exact projections of how the country’s debt would soon begin eating up larger and larger percentages of national income. Honecker brusquely ordered him to stop his work and destroy the data. It was not what he wanted to hear.

  By the fall of 1989, the sky was dark with pigeons coming home to roost. According to Schurer, East Germany’s foreign debt that October exceeded $26 billion. Interest payments alone cost $4.5 billion, nearly two-thirds of yearly national income and one and a half times export earnings. Putting the country’s fiscal house in order would entail cuts in living standards of 30 percent, he estimated, if not far more. Everyone listening knew that such austerity was politically impossible. Labor strikes had already broken out in some cities where subsidies were cut. There were runs on banks in Dresden and Schwerin. The more the assembled delegates heard, the more panicked they became. Clearly, the country could not go on this way. The GDR was doomed, as they saw it, not because of the inherent flaws of communism, but because of bad leadership. Erich, they brayed. You have betrayed us! You and your cronies! Fear, loathing, hatred, blame, recrimination took over. There was a frenzied biting, the rage of the mob devouring its ideals, one another, history, the future. As Schabowski mordantly put it, “Those who thought the party still mattered fought over who would lead it.”

  Amid this maelstrom, Krenz struggled with a second crisis: the continuing exodus and the right to travel. Above all else, East Germans wanted passports and the right to use them when and how they saw fit, without restriction. Krenz knew that to stay in power he must meet their demands. Yet everything he had tried so far was too little, too late, too communist. On November 7, even the once tame parliament shot down his latest plan—to allow citizens to travel up to one month a year, provided they applied for a visa and did not take their families along. Too timid, the lawmakers told him, and sent him back to the drawing board.

  By the afternoon of November 9, Krenz was ready to try again. According to Schabowski, now the acknowledged number two on the Politburo, his hopes were high. The two men imagined the new measure as a beautiful “Christmas present.” In their minds, they saw relatives in East and West Germany crossing the border, joyfully celebrating their reunion. As Schabowski put it, “We would be the patron saints of German unification!” Working through the preceding night and all that morning, officials of the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of State Security produced what they considered a revolutionary document. It declared that all East Germans who possessed a passport would be entitled to an exit visa allowing them to pass through any border crossing, anywhere and at any time, including Berlin. People lacking a passport could have their identity cards marked with a special Stempel, a stamp granting them an exit right. All the logistics were ready. Stamps. Visas. Pertinent rules and regulations. “This was our message to the people,” said Schabowski. “‘You are free to go, without restriction. We hear you, we are changing, here is what you seek. Send us your hosannas.’ ”

  Of course, it was not to be. Anything involving the Wall was dangerous. It was a high-wire act, with no room for mistakes. Krenz proceeded carefully, despite his haste. In midafternoon, he took his resolution to the Central Committee. Stopping their acrimonious debate as to who would have power and who would not, he bade them pause to reflect. Here was a solution, he told them. Krenz read out his proposal. He read it sentence by sentence, he wrote in his biography, Das Politburo, and later told me. He read it slowly, emphatically, so that no on
e could claim not to understand. The policy would take effect “henceforth,” meaning the next day. Tomorrow, November 10, he would open the border. At 4 p.m. or so, after desultory discussion, the Central Committee approved the plan—and went back to their intramural bickering.

  And so it was. Around 5 p.m., Gunter Schabowski stopped by Krenz’s offices. He was off to his daily press conference, a public hearing they had begun the week before as another sign of the regime’s new openness. “Anything to announce,” he asked so innocently. Krenz told him the good news. The new travel law had just been approved. Schabowski gave him a thumbs-up and turned to go. “Wait,” Krenz said, as if deciding something on the spot, almost impulsively. Then he handed Schabowski that two-page document, the paper he had just read out so carefully to the Central Committee, along with the press release meant for tomorrow. “Take this. It will do us a power of good.”

  Krenz had placed all his hopes on that document. Everything hinged upon it. Krenz was a cool man under fire. He would not have gotten where he was otherwise. But at the decisive moment, he made a fatal misstep.

  It was so small, a scarcely noticed misunderstanding of ab sofort—“henceforth,” immediately. That was the word used in the document he handed Schabowski. As Krenz had so scrupulously explained to the Central Committee, “henceforth” meant tomorrow, November 10. Orders to that effect would soon be issued to all the relevant ministries and authorities—border guards, passport officials, all those administering the new regulations. But he explained none of this to Schabowski, who was even now scanning the memo in his limo on the drive to the press conference.

  Did Krenz simply forget? Did he assume that Schabowski knew all this, forgetting that only he had sat through those endless discussions at the Central Committee, not Schabowski? Or was Krenz simply tired? The pressure of the last few months had been unrelenting. There had been no room for error, either in pushing Honecker out or in trying to hold the country together. Now he sensed a victory. He was doing something right, something that might work. Perhaps at that moment he let down his guard, relaxed just a bit, neglected that last crucial detail. Whatever the case, the mistake would change the world.

  A few minutes after six o’clock, Gunter Schabowski stepped before the cameras. Among the various items to announce, he put the decree on travel close to last. “I read it out,” he told me, reliving the decisive moment. “Then came that question: when does it take effect?”

  No matter how many times you watch the video, the moment never ceases to amaze. There he was, confused. He propped his glasses on the end of his nose, shuffled through his papers. There was nothing about a release date, no mention of November 10. Only that cryptic sofort. So what did he say? “Sofort,” of course. Immediately, right now.

  “What was I to do?” he would explain later, almost plaintively. “I couldn’t exactly say, ‘Oh, never mind.’ ”

  Ab sofort. Those words, broadcast live, flashed across the country. I had crossed into East Berlin, through Checkpoint Charlie, scarcely half an hour before East German police closed the border. I was lucky. For Western correspondents, you were either already there or you watched what happened next on television.

  It was too late to make Schabowski’s briefing, so along with a Newsweek colleague, Karen Breslau, I headed for the Hotel Metropole on Friedrichstrasse. It was an haut communiste concrete wreck with only two telephone lines to the West. In the dirty-marbled lobby, plainclothes policemen, in their East European uniforms of leather jackets and cheap blue jeans, slumped smoking on shabby sofas and grease-stained chairs. Checking in, Karen overheard startling news. A young receptionist whispered incredulously to the hotel operator, “You mean we can just go?”

  We dumped our bags and jumped in our rented car. It quickly became obvious something was happening. East Berlin’s gritty streets, lit here and there by yellow arc lights, were usually dark and abandoned. Tonight, people were out, calling to one another. Some waved at our car, noticing the West Berlin license plates. Three young men in their early twenties frantically thumbed for a ride, an infringement of the rules that not so long ago could get you arrested. “Take us to West Berlin,” one shouted out, telling us the news. “We’re free to go. Schabowski said so.”

  Sven, Matthias and Sasha wanted to leave now, instantly. They clambered into the back of our Volkswagen. More people were on the streets now, flagging rides or walking in groups toward the Wall. We felt their excitement, even in the darkness. We stopped by Sasha’s apartment so he could pick up some money and say good-bye to his parents; he feared it might be forever. Pools of water and mud collected on the broken pavement outside the sooty and decayed concrete edifice. Within five minutes, he was back. I remember being impressed less by his daring than by his nonchalance. For the new life that lay before him, he carried only a book bag and a change of clothes.

  We drove to Checkpoint Charlie. A few dozen people stood about, keeping out of the floodlights and away from the guards and the dogs. “You must obtain an exit visa. You must have a Stempel,” the police told people who approached them about the news, politely but firmly turning them away. But that in itself fanned the excitement. So, it was true, they thought to themselves. There had been an announcement.

  We hopped in the car to see other checkpoints. People were gathering at all of them, confused but exhilarated, shouting to one another and, increasingly, to the guards whom only moments before they’d feared. “Sofort,” some of them began shouting, echoing Schabowski. “Open up!”

  We went back to Checkpoint Charlie. The border police were obviously growing worried. There weren’t just dozens or hundreds of people anymore, but thousands, milling and churning and threatening to get out of control. More kept arriving every minute, channeled toward the checkpoint along three streets that converged upon the gates to the West.

  By 9 o’clock, people were becoming more brazen. “Open up! Open up!” Emboldened by their numbers, they pushed within a few meters of the barricades. Guards stood nervously with their weapons. If things got out of hand, I wondered, would they shoot? Inside his lighted, glass-walled command post, the beefy Doberman of a post commander stood dialing and redialing his telephone. Calls flew from checkpoints up and down the Wall to the Interior Ministry, to no avail. Top officials tried to reach the members of the Politburo, but the leaders of the regime seemed to have disappeared. Schabowski had gone home. He received the first alert from a fellow Politburo member around 9:30 p.m. What had he done? What to do now? No one had a clue, least of all Schabowski. Nor could Krenz be found. The minister of interior wasn’t about to issue orders contrary to his instructions. The head of the state visa office, who’d drafted the new law and was responsible for enforcing it, was at the theater. When he returned around 10:30 p.m., the checkpoints were mobbed. He, too, telephoned futilely for instructions. “I couldn’t find anyone to talk to,” he later told TV reporters. “What a mess,” he thought to himself.

  Soon it was too late. On the Western side of Checkpoint Charlie, tens of thousands of West Berliners gathered. “Come over! Come over,” they shouted. “We are trying,” the East Berliners shouted back, shoving to within a few feet from the guards, their steaming breath commingling in the frosty air. Something, somebody, had to give.

  The commander of the checkpoint surveyed the scene. Who knows what passed through his mind. Perhaps he heard that the larger Bornholmerstrasse checkpoint, to the north, had just opened its barriers. Perhaps he made his own choice, deciding: “Enough of this farce.” Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m., precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, just as Schabowski had done, as if to say, Why not?

  “Alles auf!” he ordered, and the gates swung open. A great roar went up, the crowds surged forward. Among the first to cross to the West, to realize the dream of millions of her countrymen, and millions more East Europeans for more than four decades, was a woman in hair curlers, a coat thrown hastily over her baby blue bathrobe. I had watched her for hours, bobbing up and down on her toes, trying to
keep warm amid the throngs but also too excited to much notice the cold. There she was one moment, and the next, history literally swept her up. Like a flood suddenly unleashed, a wave of people arose and carried her away. Half riding the tide, she turned her head and shouted to a friend standing to the side, “I’ll be back in ten minutes! I just want to see if it’s real!”

  With that, the Berlin Wall was no more. “Die Mauer ist Weck,” the people cried, punching their fists in the air as they danced atop it before the cameras at the Brandenburg Gate in the scene that played over and over and over around the world. “The Wall is gone!”

  Egon Krenz called it “a botch.” He blamed Schabowski, who blamed Krenz. He had not intended to just throw open the gates. He certainly did not intend to bring down the Wall, at least not in this way. The whole thing shouldn’t have happened. Yet it did, with all the logic of human messiness.

  Schabowski thought the Wall would have fallen regardless of the accident. But let’s assume, for a moment, that Schabowski hadn’t messed up and Krenz’s travel laws had taken effect in an orderly, undramatic and efficiently German way. Strictly speaking, the Wall would not have “fallen.” It would have been opened, not breached. The communists would have done it, not the people. Change might have come by evolution, not revolution. The bureaucrats would have gained time. Might they even have contained or channeled popular unrest, defused it, convinced people that reformed communism could work, possibly even kept themselves in power? Without the drama of the Fall, and all its inspiring visuals, would the Velvet Revolution in Prague have come one week later? Would Romanians have found the courage to rise against Ceausescu a month later? The dominoes of Eastern Europe might have toppled differently. A few might not have toppled at all.

  Forty-eight hours after the first Germans clambered atop the Wall, I stood through a freezing night with several thousand West Berliners in the muddy no-man’s-land that was Potsdamer Platz. An East German construction crew was knocking a new passageway through the Wall, and it was tough going. A giant crane strained to lift a twelve-foot-high slab, but it wouldn’t budge. The crowd shouted encouragement: “Heave ho. Heave ho.” A helmeted worker repeatedly hoisted himself up on the Wall and applied a blowtorch to the steel rods holding it in place. He became something of a favorite, and whenever he appeared the crowd burst into the German equivalent of “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” From time to time, he tipped his cap or waved. Sparks flew as the blowtorch did its work. The crane jerked the slab back and forth, twisting it like a broken tooth. Finally it gave way and hung suspended above the crowd, twisting slowly, as if from a gibbet. Television floodlights illuminated its broken surface, scrawled with grafitti. All the unresolved conflicts of Europe were on that chunk of painted concrete: a neo-Nazi swastika, surrealistic faces of … who, Europe’s dead? Most notable was a word. Freiheit, it read. Freedom.