1989

by Peter Millar

  I could not resist the opportunity to go and see the grave – if only for closure on the longest ‘death watch’ I had ever undertaken, the next time I was in the area. As it turned out the chance presented itself quite soon with a protest by small farmers in Germany against new EU agricultural rules. Always keen to have a poke at ‘Europe’ (a little Britain enthusiasm I hardly shared) Worsthorne sent me to cover the story. As fate had it one of the groups of protesters, whose action involved lighting bonfires on high ground in their fields at night, were farmers near the Bavarian town of Marktredwitz, not far from Wunsiedel. The Hess grave was as unremarkable as I might have expected, but the visit to Marktredwitz gave me a new insight into the aftermath of the Second World War, of which the Cold War was in all but name an indirect and less bloody continuation.

  Just down the hill from where the farmers lit their bonfire we could see the outline of an old medieval town. ‘That’s Eger,’ said one of them. ‘We used to farm a lot of land round there.’ ‘Used to?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he turned to me as if I was an idiot. That’s the Sudeten. They threw everybody out in 1945, millions of us. They call that town Cheb now, but it’s still Eger. Always will be.’ I kept quiet. I knew that the 1945 universal expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland they had always lived in had been cruel. But they might have reflected on that in 1938 before so enthusiastically rejoicing at being ‘reunited’ with the Reich they had never belonged to. Even so, I could see the wicked logic of the Iron Curtain when they pointed out that the main road north ran straight through ‘Eger’, not that it would have done them any good: when it returned to what was now German soil a few kilometres further on, it was East German soil. These people, these simple farmers with all their old gripes and prejudices had gone from living in the centre of the continent to living at the edge of the world.

  It was inevitably – as things would turn out – Gorbachev who took me back to East Berlin, in May 1987, when he chaired a meeting of the Warsaw Pact leaders there, held in honour of the city’s 750th anniversary. It was an anniversary that the East decided belonged solely to them because nothing now in the West had been part of tiny thirteenth-century Berlin. The East Germans rounded up the usual crowds of impressed citizens to line the route, but for once they need not have bothered: large numbers turned out unprompted. East Berliners, glued to West German news on their televisions, were curious to see the man from the hated empire to the East in whom Westerners were all of a sudden placing such hopes. A few wondered if they dared entrust him with their own, though most decided that on balance they would not.

  If several thousand East Berliners had genuinely turned out to watch the motorcades flash by, they were still outnumbered by the plainclothes Stasi goons who fronted the lines, pumping their fists into the air and shouting ‘Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!’, the traditional, militarised old Prussian version of ‘Hip, Hip, Hooray!’ The East German and Soviet leaders still greeted each other on arrival and departure with the old comrades’ kiss – just as they had done in Brezhnev’s day – even if those of us who considered Soviet kisses another branch of Kremlinology couldn’t help but notice that Gorbachev puckered up as if kissing a lemon.

  Only a week later US President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin and delivered a challenge to the Soviet leader that would, more than two years later, seem like a prophetic demand: ‘General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ Reagan’s speech has since been hailed as a decisive factor, if only because Gorbachev’s actions – or rather inaction – were key to the events of 1989. At the time, it just seemed Reagan was trying to compete with the ghost of John F. Kennedy. There were many in the White House who advised him to leave it out, rather than embarrass a relatively new Soviet leader with whom he was getting on remarkably well.

  West German President Richard von Weizsäcker visited Moscow a month later and raised the ‘German Question’ more as a traditional tease than with any real hope of an encouraging answer. Gorbachev’s reply was slightly more encouraging than that of any of his predecessors, but only slightly. History would decide, he said, ‘what will happen in the next 100 years’. Back in Berlin Honecker was smiling: centuries were the sort of time frame he had in mind for the Wall he boasted as his own.

  After all he had only just cemented his position, hadn’t he? In September Honecker made the first ever visit by an East German leader to West Germany. To many West Germans it was an uncomfortably alien sight to see the flag of the German Democratic Republic – which many still felt stood for a part of their country under alien occupation – flying over the Bonn chancellery: the way a naturally conservative Englishman might react to seeing a version of the Union Jack with a hammer and sickle on it flying over Westminster. (Or emblazoned with a swastika for an earlier generation.)

  Honecker, who had been born in West Germany’s Saarland, strutted and preened on the Bonn stage like a diminutive monochrome peacock alongside the overlarge Humpty Dumpty figure of West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. For Kohl it was a chance to parade as a statesman, to show that he was ready to match Gorbachev’s expressions of goodwill with a show of at least superficial cordiality towards the Kremlin’s puppet state on German soil. There was a bit of stage-managed humble pie for Honecker too. For several years the West German rock star Udo Lindenberg had been on a blacklist of performers not allowed to cross the Wall and perform in the East. In revenge he had penned a bestselling hit, a rock ballad to the tune of Chatanooga Choo Choo, which included the lines: ‘Honi, ich weiss… bist du heimlich auch ein Rocker, du ziehst dir ganz heimlich auch gerne mal die Lederjacke an, schliesst dich ein auf das Kloh und hörst Westradio.’(‘Honi, I know…/That you are secretly a rocker./At home on your own, you quietly put your leather jacket on,/ lock yourself in the loo and listen to West radio.’)

  Now at a contrived ‘spontaneous’ meeting, Lindenberg ‘surprised’ Honecker by seemingly emerging from the crowd – there was too much security on the trip for any genuinely unexpected event – to give him a signed guitar as a present. It was nothing more than a piece of theatre for the television cameras that would play well on both sides of the Wall. It was nonetheless a sign of the times that it happened at all. At the end of Lindenberg’s ‘choo choo’ ballad, a sonorous voice was to be heard intoning in Russian: ‘Myezhdu prochim, tovarishch Erich, Vyerkhovniy Soviet nye imyehet nichevo protiv gastroli gospodina Lindenberga v GDR’ (‘As it happens, comrade Erich, the Supreme Soviet has no objections to Mr Lindenberg doing a concert in the GDR’). The concert duly took place, a few months afterwards, even if the audience was stuffed with the teenage children of loyal party members.

  Of course, nobody knew what the Supreme Soviet really thought, least of all its members, who were accustomed to having their thinking done for them by the man at the head of the politburo. And he was proving an enigma inside a riddle all of his own. Gorbachev brought me back to East Berlin again that December when he stopped off on his way back from his first summit with Reagan in Washington. By now the number of East Berliners who had begun to see in him perhaps a real chance of at least some reform – a lessening of East Germany’s draconian political repression was all even the boldest dared hope for – and some twenty of the old Swords to Ploughshares dared to mark Human Rights’ Day by handing a petition to the Pact leaders asking if they could have some. They were summarily arrested on the street.

  A burly uniformed policeman, overweight and puffing in his Soviet-style imitation fur hat, grabbed me by the collar as I watched the demonstrators being hustled away and demanded identification. I put my hand in my pocket and on a whim, took out my old, out-of-date Soviet press pass. He looked at it in near shock for a few seconds, then stood back and handed it over to me with a snappy salute. East German police were taught to recognise and respect Russian, very few of them could read or understand it.

&n
bsp; I washed the politics down, as usual, with a few beers around the Stammtisch in Metzer Eck, seeing old faces, picking up on local gossip as much as anything else. But Gorbachev was becoming gossip. ‘What do you think of him?’ Alex asked me. I shrugged. Mrs Thatcher might have decided she could do business with him, but he wasn’t going to affect life in Britain. ‘I think he’s genuinely different, but how different, I don’t know,’ I replied. There was a general nodding around the table, and Alex lifted his glass and proposed one of his favourite old toasts, which roughly translated ran: ‘Who else can get so much pleasure from drink, than those of us who fear the Russian clink!’ And we lifted our glasses and drank. To the ethics of survival in a world that could never change.

  We were wrong. In just about every imaginable way. For a start back in Fleet Street, which like post-war Poland had been literally lifted up and moved, in this case East: to Wapping and Docklands, there was also a whiff of counter-revolution in the air. The Telegraph Group’s chief executive Andrew Knight had for one of those reasons that remain forever obscure to those most affected by them – almost certainly as the result of an accountant-inspired ‘cost-saving rationalisation’ – announced that from now on the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph would be run as a single seven-day operation. This is one of those accountants-versus-journalists conflicts that keeps on recurring over the years: it has the obvious bean-counting merit of needing, in theory, just one set of executives: one home news editor, one foreign editor, one features editor, one picture editor and so on. But it totally misses the essential point about British Sunday Journalism which is that the ‘Sundays’ had a different agenda, were more geared to scoop-breaking, to literary writing and in-depth analysis than the papers that appeared every day. The ‘Sunday Papers’, as the format-leading The Sunday Times never ceased to remind us, were a concept all of their own. This has changed to some extent with the development of the ‘Saturdays’ as a Sunday-paper-challenging ‘weekend package’, but in the eighties the old differentiation still held true.

  The Sunday Telegraph in particular had, under Worsthorne and the ‘crazy gang’ evolved from a drab, dull old Tory seventh day seat-warmer into an eccentric, vivacious and often controversial newspaper with its own identity. Knight’s bean-counter-inspired announcement sounded to those of us who heard it very much like a death knell. Several of us began to look elsewhere. My fellow foreign reporter David Blundy had been offered a job on the new Sunday Correspondent, a start-up that flew directly in the face of the Telegraph’s new seven-day concept. He had been unsure about moving to a new paper with an uncertain future. Now he took it.*

  In the meantime I had also received a phone call from an old Reuters chum, John Witherow, the one who had in his interview for the job cited ‘ratlike cunning’ as the key attribute for a journalist. He had since moved to The Times and then The Sunday Times, where he was now deputy foreign editor. I knew there was no danger of a seven-day operation being introduced there: The Sunday Times had originally not even had the same owners as The Times (bizarrely it had been founded by the Telegraph Group but subsequently sold on). Both were now owned by Rupert Murdoch, but I was well aware that The Sunday Times was a major brand in its own right (that advert ‘The Sunday Times is the Sunday papers’ was simply an expression of how most of the middle classes thought) and highly profitable, which its ‘sister paper’ was not.

  John suggested I have lunch with him and his then boss (John has since gone on to become The Sunday Times’s most successful editor) Bob Tyrer, the foreign editor, in a restaurant off Stamford Street near Waterloo. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, that I should come and do for them what I had done for the Sunday ‘Tel’. If the ‘crazy gang’ had not been disintegrating I might have hesitated, but The Sunday Times was the market leader, the ‘big beast’ of British journalism. Bob said, ‘Come on board. You’ll be in the right place at the right time.’

  He wasn’t wrong.

  * Sadly the ‘Corrie’ did not last long, but even more sadly it outlived David. A week after the Berlin Wall came down he was in El Salvador covering the guerrilla conflict, cursing himself and the world because he was not in Berlin, when he was hit by a ricochet sniper bullet and died on the operating table.

  9

  The Unhappy Birthday Party

  While I was sitting in a restaurant in Stamford Street trying to make a decision about my future, there were men and women across Eastern Europe making far more important ones about theirs. This was particularly true in Poland, where martial law had been lifted and Solidarity’s leaders released from jail, but widespread popular discontent still smouldered. The communist government was increasingly frustrated that social and economic conditions continued to decline, fuelled by runaway inflation, while popular resentment at the imposition of martial law – lifted in 1983 – and the continued ban on the free trade union lingered. It was as if the population had stubbornly decided to let the country go to the dogs rather than obey a government most of them detested. By late 1988 the interior minister had begun putting out clandestine feelers to Lech Walesa to see if the old shipyard militant might be willing to come on board and bring some of his big hitters with him.

  The communists’ real hope was that by giving token jobs in government to some of the old rebels they could bring them on board and create an illusion of greater democracy. Formal discussions, known as the Round Table Talks had begun in February 1989 and continued until April, by which time the communists would have discovered that what the old rebels wanted was not an illusion, but the real thing. Or at least as close an approximation as anyone thought possible. The compromise that was finally hammered out legalised Solidarity again and allowed for free elections to the Sejm (parliament), although initially at least to just one third of the seats. There would also be a new upper house of parliament, the senate, with no restrictions on candidates for election, and a new post of president. The presidency was the clever bit. Solidarity was satisfied because having an elected executive president would end the tradition that the country was effectively ruled by the general secretary of the Communist Party. The communists were satisfied because it was agreed that in the first instance at least, the only candidate on the ballot paper would be the general secretary of the Communist Party.

  But nothing went quite as planned. When the elections were held on June 4th, Solidarity won every single seat up for election to the Sejm and nearly all the seats in the new upper house. To rub in the lesson, when all the members of parliament voted to elect the president, Jaruzelski, despite being the only candidate, won by only a single vote, helped by a few Solidarity members who felt obliged to honour the Round Table agreement. The rest of the summer would be spent in trying to settle the composition of a new government which would be led for the first time since 1945 by a non-communist.

  Almost simultaneously things were moving equally fast in Hungary where ‘goulash communism’ had been taking the hard edges off the system for years. The old hardliner Janos Kadar had been replaced as Communist Party leader by the more reformminded Imre Poszgay. As in Poland, trade unions had been legalised, while the ghosts of the bloody anti-Soviet uprising of 1956 had literally been buried – the body of Imre Nagy, executed in 1958, was removed from an obscure corner of the city cemetery and given a formal burial which attracted a crowd of 100,000.

  There had also been a steady rapprochement with neutral Austria with which it had for so long prior to 1918 been united. On June 27th, barely three weeks after the elections in Poland turned old assumptions about the settled order in Eastern Europe on their head, the foreign ministers of the two neighbouring little countries together took the cutters to a section of barbed wire on the border. It was the first serious crack in the Iron Curtain. From now on, the Hungarians had declared they would no longer maintain a manned surveillance network along the frontier. It was a signal of how far things had already moved in Budapest that the Communist Party no longer feared its citizens would flee en masse. But
then Hungarians did not have a wealthy big brother who spoke the same language waiting to embrace them.

  On August 19th, at the instigation of several of the smaller new political parties being set up, and Otto von Habsburg, the then already septuagenarian son of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, a ‘pan-European picnic’ was organised on the frontier between the two countries near the town of Sopron. The event was eventually given the blessing even of the communists. Although the frontier could theoretically be crossed only with valid passports at recognised border points, the rules were suspended for the day. The intention was for a joint Austrian and Hungarian celebration of the new warmth in their relationship with speeches by invited dignitaries, including Habsburg, talking warmly about a new vision of Europe’s future.

  But one group had a vision of Europe’s present, and saw it in the open frontier: several hundred East Germans who had been on holiday in Hungary. Even as the first invited Austrian guests – local dignitaries, journalists and college students – were crossing the border, a large group of East Germans appeared in the background, walking determinedly towards the frontier. They only stopped walking when they got within metres of it; they started running instead. Within minutes several hundred of them were on Austrian soil, outside the Warsaw Pact, and there was no way – particularly in the current climate – that the Hungarians were going to bring them back. Or, as it turned out, stop any more. Although in theory they were obliged to check the passports of any non-Hungarian or non-Austrian crossing the border, it simply became impracticable for them to do so. As the day progressed more and more East Germans turned up, some singly, some in families, some in larger groups. The Hungarians, busy with their pre-arranged event, found the East Germans simply pushing past them. By the end of the day the little wine-growing village of St Margarethen on the Austrian side of the frontier was swamped by fellow German-speakers with the long unheard accents of Saxony and Brandenburg.