by Tony Judt
The GDR’s most enthusiastic admirers were to be found in the Federal Republic. The apparent success of Ostpolitik in defusing tensions and facilitating human and economic communications between the two halves of Germany had led virtually the entire political class to invest their hopes in its indefinite prolongation. West German public figures not only encouraged illusions among the nomenklatura of the GDR, they deluded themselves. Simply by repeating that Ostpolitik was having the effect of easing tensions to the east, they came to believe it.
Preoccupied with ‘peace,’ ‘stability,’ and ‘order,’ many West Germans thus ended up sharing the point of view of the Eastern politicians with whom they were doing business. Egon Bahr, a prominent Social Democrat, explained in January 1982 (immediately following the declaration of martial law in Poland) that Germans had renounced their claim to national unity for the sake of peace and the Poles would just have to renounce their claim to freedom in the name of the same ‘highest priority.’ Five years later the influential writer Peter Bender, speaking at a Social Democratic Party symposium on ‘Mitteleuropa’, proudly insisted that ‘in the desire for détente we have more in common with Belgrade and Stockholm, also with Warsaw and East Berlin [emphasis added], than we do with Paris and London.’
In later years it would emerge that on more than one occasion national leaders of the SPD made confidential and decidedly compromising statements to high-ranking East Germans visiting the West. In 1987 Björn Engholm praised the domestic policies of the GDR as ‘historic’, while the following year his colleague Oskar Lafontaine promised to do everything in his power to make sure that West German support for East German dissidents remained muted. ‘The Social Democrats,’ he assured his interlocutors, ‘must avoid everything that would mean a strengthening of those forces.’ As a Soviet report to the GDR Politburo noted in October 1984, ‘Many arguments that had previously been presented by us to the representatives of the SPD have now been taken over by them’.288
The illusions of West German Social Democrats are perhaps understandable. But they were shared with almost equal fervour by many Christian Democrats too. Helmut Kohl, the West German Chancellor since 1982, was just as keen as his opponentsto cultivate good relations with the GDR. At the Moscow funeral of Yuri Andropov in February 1984 he met and spoke with Erich Honecker—and did so again at the burial of Chernenko the following year. Agreements were reached between the two sides over cultural exchange and the removal of mines on the inter-German border. In September 1987 Honecker became the first East German leader to visit the Federal Republic. Meanwhile West German subsidies for the GDR continued apace (but no support was ever forthcoming for East Germany’s internal opposition).
Flush with West German sponsorship, confident of Moscow’s backing and at liberty to export to the West its more troublesome dissidents, the East German regime might have survived indefinitely. It certainly appeared immune to change: in June 1987 demonstrators in East Berlin opposed to the Wall and chanting praise for the distant Gorbachev were summarily dispersed. In January 1988 the government did not hesitate to imprison and expel well over a hundred demonstrators who were commemorating the 1919 murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht with signs quoting Luxemburg herself: ‘Freedom is also the freedom of those who think differently’. In September 1988 Honecker, on a visit to Moscow, publicly praised Gorbachev’s perestroika—only to make a point of studiously avoiding its implementation upon his return home.289
Notwithstanding the unprecedented developments then unfolding in Moscow, Warsaw and Budapest, the East German Communists were still rigging votes in a manner familiar from the 1950s. In May 1989 the official outcome of the GDR municipal elections—98.85 percent for government candidates—was so egregiously fabricated that it aroused nationwide protests from priests, environmental groups and even critics within the ruling party. The Politburo studiously ignored them. But now, for the first time, East Germans had a choice. They no longer had to accept the status quo, risk arrest or else essay a hazardous escape to the West. On May 2nd 1989, in the course of relaxing the control of movement and expression within Hungary itself, the authorities in Budapest had removed the electrified fence along the country’s western frontier, although the border itself remained formally closed.
East Germans began to swarm into Hungary. By July 1st 1989 some 25,000 of them had made their way to ‘vacation’ there. Thousands more followed, many of them seeking temporary refuge in West German embassies in Prague and Budapest. A few made their way across the still-closed Austro-Hungarian frontier without being stopped by border guards, but most just stayed in Hungary. By early September there were 60,000 GDR citizens in Hungary, waiting. Asked on a Hungarian television news program on September 10th what his government’s response would be if some of these people started walking west, the Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn replied: ‘We will allow them through without any further ado and I assume that the Austrians will let them in.’ The door to the West was officially open: within seventy-two hours some 22,000 East Germans had rushed through it.
The East German authorities protested furiously—the Hungarian move implied a breach of the longstanding agreement between Communist governments not to allow their countries to be used as escape routes from fraternal neighbors. But the authorities in Budapest merely insisted that they were bound by their signature to the Helsinki Final Act. The people took them at their word. In the course of the next three weeks the GDR authorities confronted a public-relations disaster as tens of thousands of their fellow citizens tried to get out through the new exit route.
In an attempt to take control of events the GDR rulers offered East German refugees in the embassies in Prague and Warsaw safe passage back through their own country and on to West Germany in a sealed train. This, however, merely exacerbated the regime’s mounting humiliation: as the train passed through the GDR it was greeted by tens of thousands of cheering, envious locals. An estimated five thousand people tried to clamber aboard when the refugee train stopped briefly in Dresden; when the police beat them back a riot ensued—all under the eyes of the world’s media.
The regime’s travails emboldened its critics. The day after Hungary opened its borders a group of East German dissenters in East Berlin founded Neues Forum (‘New Forum’), followed a few days later by another citizens’ movement, ‘Democracy Now’, both groups pressing for a democratic ‘restructuring’ of the GDR. On Monday October 2nd, in Leipzig, a crowd of 10,000 demonstrated in frustration at the Honecker regime’s refusal to reform itself—the largest public gathering in East Germany since the ill-fated Berlin uprising of 1953. The 77-year old Honecker remained impervious. East Germans seeking to emigrate, he declared in September, had been ‘blackmailed through enticements, promises and threats to renounce the basic principles and fundamental values of socialism.’ To the increasing anxiety of younger colleagues—who could no longer ignore the scale of the challenge facing them—the leadership appeared helpless: frozen in place. On October 7th, to honor the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR, Mikhail Gorbachev came and spoke, memorably advising his stone-faced host that ‘life punishes those who delay.’ To no avail: Honecker pronounced himself satisfied with things the way they were.
Encouraged by the Soviet leader’s visit—not to speak of developments abroad—demonstrators in Leipzig and other cities began holding regular demonstrations and ‘vigils’ for change. The Monday gatherings in Leipzig, now a regular fixture, had grown to 90,000 by the week following Gorbachev’s speech, the assembled crowds all proclaiming ‘We are the people!’ and calling upon ‘Gorby’ to help them. The following week the numbers had grown again; an increasingly agitated Honecker was now proposing to use force to put down any further show of opposition.
The prospect of outright confrontation appears finally to have concentrated the mind of Honecker’s Party critics. On October 18th some of his colleagues, led by Egon Krenze, staged a coup and removed the old man from power, after 18 years.290 Kre
nze’s first act was to fly to Moscow, endorse (and seek the endorsement of) Mikhail Gorbachev and return to Berlin to prepare a cautious East German perestroika. But it was too late. At the most recent Leipzig demonstration, an estimated 300,000 people had come together to press for change; on November 4th half a million East Germans gathered in Berlin to demand immediate reforms. Meanwhile, on that same day, Czechoslovakia opened its border; in the next forty-eight hours 30,000 people left through it.
By now the authorities were truly panicked. On November 5th, the GDR government hesitantly proposed a mildly liberalized travel law, only to have it dismissed by critics as pitifully inadequate. The East German cabinet then dramatically resigned, followed by the Politburo. The following evening—November 9th, anniversary of both the Kaiser’s abdication and Kristallnacht—Krenze and his colleagues proposed yet another travel law to head off the stampede. At a news conference carried live on German television and radio, Günter Schabowski explained that the new provisions, in immediate effect, authorized foreign travel without advance notice and permitted transit through the border crossings into West Germany. The Wall, in other words, was now open.
Before the broadcast was even finished people were in the streets of East Berlin and heading for the border. Within hours, fifty thousand people had poured into West Berlin: some forever, others just going to look. By the following morning the world had changed. As anyone could see, the Wall had been breached for good and there could be no return. Four weeks later the Brandenburg Gate, straddling the East-West border, was reopened; over the Christmas holidays of 1989, 2.4 million East Germans (1 in 6 of the total population) visited the West. This had most decidedly not been the intention of the GDR rulers. As Schabowski himself later explained, the authorities had ‘no clue’ that opening the Wall might bring about the downfall of the GDR—quite the contrary: they saw it as the beginning of ‘stabilization’.
In taking the hesitant decision to open the border the GDR leaders had hoped merely to release a safety valve, perhaps secure a little popularity, and above all buy enough time to propose a program of ‘reforms’. The Wall, after all, was opened for much the same reason that it had been erected and closed a generation earlier: to staunch a demographic hemorrhage. In 1961 this desperate ploy had succeeded; in 1989, too, it worked after a fashion—surprisingly few East Germans remained permanently in West Berlin or emigrated to West Germany once they were reassured that if they returned they would not find themselves imprisoned again. But the price of that reassurance was the fall of more than just the regime.
In the aftermath of the fall of the Wall, the SED went through the—by now familiar—last rites of a dying Communist Party. On December 1st the Volkskamme r (GDR Parliament) voted 420-0 (with five abstentions) to delete from the GDR constitution the clause declaring that the state is ‘led by the working class and its Marxist-Leninist party’. Four days later the Politburo resigned once again; a new leader—Gregor Gysi—was chosen; and the party’s name duly changed, to the Party of Democratic Socialism. The old Communist leadership (including both Honecker and Krenze) was expelled from the party; round table (again) discussions were begun with representatives of Neues Forum (by general consent the most visible of the opposition groups), and free elections were scheduled.
But even before the latest (and last) GDR government under Dresden Party boss Hans Modrow had started drafting a ‘Party action program’, its actions and intentions were all but irrelevant. East Germans, after all, had an option that was not available to other subject-peoples—there was no ‘West Czechoslovakia’, or ‘West Poland’—and they were not about to forego it. The goalposts were shifting: in October 1989 the Leipzig demonstrators had chanted ‘Wir sind das Volk’—‘We are the people’. By January 1990 the same crowds were proclaiming a subtly different demand: ‘Wir sind ein Volk’—‘We are one people’.
Because the death of German Communism would thus entail, as we shall see in the next chapter, the death of a German state—by January 1990 the point had become not just to get out of Socialism (much less ‘reform’ it) but to get into West Germany—it is not clear in retrospect how to interpret the hopes of the crowds who brought down the GDR in the autumn of 1989. What is clear, however, is that neither the Party (as in Hungary), nor the opposition (as in Poland) can claim much credit for the course of events. We have seen how slow the Party was to grasp its predicament; but its intellectual critics were not much quicker.
On November 28th Stefan Heym, Christa Wolf and other East German intellectuals issued an appeal ‘For Our Land’, to save socialism and the GDR and stand firm against what Heym described as the ‘glittering rubbish’ of the West. Bärbel Bohley, the leading figure in Neues Forum, even described the opening of the Berlin Wall as ‘unfortunate’, because it forestalled ‘reform’ and precipitated elections before the parties or the voters were ‘ready’. Like many of East Germany’s ‘dissenting’ intellectuals (not to speak of their West German admirers) Bohley and her colleagues still envisaged a reformed Socialism, shorn of secret policemen and a ruling party but keeping a safe distance from its predatory capitalist doppelganger to the west. As events were to show, this was at least as unrealistic as Erich Honecker’s fantasy of a return to neo-Stalinist obedience. Neues Forum thus condemned itself to political irrelevance, its leaders reduced to carping resentfully at the improvidence of the masses.291
The German uprising of 1989, then, was perhaps the only truly popular—i.e. mass—revolution of that year (and indeed the only successful popular revolt in German history).292 The fall of Communism in neighboring Czechoslovakia, although coming at the same time as the transformation in East Germany, followed a significantly different path. In both countries the Party leadership was rigid and repressive, and the rise of Gorbachev was at least as unwelcome to the regime in Prague as it was in Pankow. But there the similarities end.
As in Hungary, so in Czechoslovakia, Communist rule rested uneasily upon the silent memory of a stolen past. But whereas in the Hungarian case Kádár had semi-successfully distanced himself and his party from their Stalinist inheritance, the leaders of Czechoslovakia had managed no such transition. Nor had they sought it. The Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 and the subsequent ‘normalization’ lived on in Gustav Husák, in power since 1969. Even when Husák, now 75, resigned as General Secretary of the Party in 1987 (while remaining state President), he was replaced by Miloš Jakeš—younger, to be sure, but best known for his prominent role in the mass purges of the early Seventies.
The Czechoslovak Communists were actually rather successful at maintaining total control to the very end. Neither the Catholic Church (always a minor player in Czech, if not Slovak affairs) nor the intellectual opposition gained significant support in society at large. Thanks to the brutally efficient management of the purges, most of the country’s intelligentsia, from playwrights to historians to Sixties-era reform Communists, had been expunged not just from their jobs put from public visibility. Until 1989 some of Czechoslovakia’s most outspoken domestic critics of Communism, beginning with Václav Havel himself, were better-known abroad than in their own country. As we saw in the last chapter, Havel’s own civic organization, Charter 77, managed fewer than two thousand signatories in a population of 15 million.
Of course, people were afraid to take the risk of openly criticizing the regime; but it has to be said that most Czechs and Slovaks were not actively unhappy with their lot. The Czechoslovak economy, like most other Eastern European economies since the early Seventies, had been deliberately geared to supplying basic consumer goods, and in the Czech case something more. Indeed, Communist Czechoslovakia consciously mimicked aspects of Western consumer society—notably television programming and popular leisure pursuits—albeit in a mediocre key. Life in Czechoslovakia was dull, the environment was deteriorating and younger people especially chafed at the omnipresent and censorious authorities. But in return for avoiding confrontation with the regime and paying lip service to its turgid rhetoric
, people were left to their own devices.
The regime kept a tight and even brutal lid on any signs of dissent. Demonstrators in Prague and elsewhere who came out to mark the twentieth anniversary of the invasion in August 1988 were arrested; unofficial efforts to hold an ‘East-West’ seminar in Prague were quashed. In January 1989, on the twentieth anniversary of Jan Palach’s suicide in Wenceslas Square, Havel and thirteen other Charter 77 activists were arrested and once again imprisoned (though in contrast with the harsh treatment meted out to him in earlier years, Havel—now an international figure whose mistreatment might embarrass his jailers—was released in May).
In the course of the spring and summer of 1989 informal networks and groups sprang up around the country, in hopeful imitation of developments in neighboring lands: following the ‘John Lennon Peace Club’ formed in December 1988 there came the ‘Prague Mothers’ protest of May 1989, followed by environmentalist demonstrations in Bratislava the following month. None of these tiny and easily-contained bubbles of civic initiative posed any threat to the police or the regime. But in August, just as Mazowiecki was finalizing plans for his government in Warsaw and shortly before the Hungarian borders were flung open, demonstrators filled the streets of the Czech capital to commemorate, once again, the overthrow of the Prague Spring.
On this occasion, however, the Czech police were decidedly more restrained. The Jakeš regime had decided to trim a little, offering at least the appearance of acknowledging the change of mood in Moscow, while altering nothing of substance in its rule. The same calculation doubtless explains the authorities’ hands-off approach to the next major public demonstration on October 28th, the anniversary of the foundation of the Czechoslovak state in 1918 (officially ignored since 1948). But there was still no great public pressure upon the Communist leadership—even the announcement on November 15th that exit visas would no longer be required for travel to the West was less a concession to demand than a strategic imitation of changes elsewhere.