by Peter Millar
The quick-thinking mayor organised accommodation and phoned the West German Embassy in Vienna, and within hours the West German Embassy in Budapest had sent passports by bus for the new citizens. The Berlin Wall was still standing and according to Erich Honecker, would ‘stand for a hundred years’, but all of a sudden the rusty Iron Curtain had started to crack. By September any semblance of communist solidarity disappeared when the Hungarians simply announced that as far as they were concerned, the border to Austria was open to anyone who cared to cross. East Germans did so in their thousands. Honecker put pressure on Prague to prevent East Germans crossing into Hungary and then, as the West German Embassy there filled to overflowing with would-be refugees, he closed the border to Czechoslovakia. East Germany was now truly the world’s largest prison camp for its own citizens. But it was too much, much too late. West German estimates were that nearly 40,000 inhabitants of the GDR had opted for a one-way ticket to the West. And those that were left could only fume at their rulers.
The hectic pace of events during that summer had taken its toll on foreign correspondents too. Over the course of four months I spent only the occasional weekend with my wife and young family, as I flitted from one Eastern European country to another. Events on the other side of the world weighed heavily on my mind. After the bloody crackdown on dissident protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, how long could it be before the Soviet Army did what it had done every previous time – East Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968 and surely Warsaw 1981 had the Poles not jumped in first and done it for them? Except instead of the old men in the Forbidden Palace, we had the new man in the Kremlin. But was that really cause enough for hope? And would the knives come out in the politburo first?
June saw me in Warsaw and Moscow, then on Gorbachev’s tail for his tour of West Germany – where he was treated like a film star rather than the leader of a supposedly hostile nation. In July I was back in Warsaw for the aftermath of the elections, then in Yugoslavia where an upstart politician called Slobodan Milosevic was threatening the country’s fragile racial mix by inciting hatred of the majority Albanians in the Serb province of Kosovo. Then back to Poland, to Warsaw and Gdansk, and on to Hungary with US President George Bush (the first) promising US dollars in return for reform that would undermine communism terminally, in the setting of Budapest’s Karl Marx University.
In a summer that was an endless succession of filing deadlines, airport departure lounges and improbable events on the ground, I had frequent reason to bless a minor Western revolution: in computers. Instead of a portable typewriter – which were never that portable – or scribbled longhand notes that had then to be read to copytakers back in London, which could lead to the sort of error that once saw the Warsaw Pact become the Walsall Pact – there was the Tandy 200. A clunky but functional ‘portable computer’ that was effectively little more than an electronic typewriter with an LCD black-on-green display, the Tandy was the journalist’s lifesaver. It had a full-sized QWERTY keyboard and was powered by four AA batteries, the sort you could buy just about anywhere in the world, even behind the Iron Curtain. There was also the benefit of being able to send your copy directly into the newspaper’s own computer systems.
The miracle of written words transformed into electronic signals and transmitted over the ether is so common now that it seems antique to remember that just twenty years ago, the most successful way to do it was to affix two ‘crocodile clips’ from the Tandy’s output directly to telephone wires. This occasioned many a travelling correspondent being banned from the world’s top hotels after being found taking a hammer to gain access to the telephone sockets in his (or her) room. The less destructive way was to attach something known as acoustic couplers – two foam pads with elastic tape and Velcro fasteners – to the telephone handset. This had the advantage that it could even be used from a public call box. But it had the disadvantage that the aural transmission was more liable to corrupt, resulting in garbled text. There was also the fact that to the general public it looked pretty stupid. I vividly remember standing with my finger to my lips in a West Berlin phone box on a wet night while frustrated and angry would-be callers rapped on the glass, wondering why the man inside was not using the phone but instead had a grey box with wires coming from it attached to the receiver clamped in his armpit.
By the beginning of October my trusty Tandy and I had taken up residence in the ancient university city of Leipzig where a liberal nexus of students and the arts community had begun regular marches around the Nikolaikirche, once again the Protestant churches acting as not so much the provocateur of dissent as an alternative focal point for those who dared to differ from the party line. These had graduated into weekly events attracting ever larger numbers, unprecedented outpourings of public dissent, carrying banners with what was for the regime – if only they had recognised it – a message that should have been even more threatening than those conveyed by the people who had voted with their feet: ‘We are the people,’ they declared, in pointed contrast to the ‘People’s Police’ and other organs of state which had the attribute stuck on them as if the word alone somehow exempted them from democratic scrutiny. And more pertinently still: ‘We’re staying here.’ When they chanted that on the doorsteps of the local Stasi headquarters there were those inside who for the first time began to wonder what it meant for them.
The marches were peaceful but brooding and watched by massed numbers of policemen in uniform and out of it. Afterwards I drove uneasily but deliberately past Soviet bases on the outskirts of the city, a weather eye watching – while pretending not to – for any signs of imminent mobilisation. If the tanks rolled, surely they would start here. But the tanks stayed where they were.
By the end of September things had gone so far that I wrote a double-page spread for The Sunday Times which now seems remarkably prophetic, but which then, I freely admit even I thought, was literally pushing the boundaries of the possible. Headed, ‘One People. One Germany?’ I declared: ‘The scenario for reunification is complicated but not unimaginable.’ My scenario was not followed to the letter, but then I had committed the mistake of assuming politics and logic would fuel the progress of history, instead of more potent human factors: emotion and accident.
It was an unnaturally balmy evening when I drove my rented BMW round the familiar corner from Schönhauser Allee into Metzer Strasse, parked and strolled over to the pub, only to see Bärbel leaning out of the window as if it were a summer’s night. The weather was mild, but hardly warm. She looked flushed. I waved up and asked it there was something the matter. She dabbed at her eye and tried to answer but her voice was all choked up and she just shook her head.
Inside, Horst, who had long since finished his military service, was working behind the bar with his young wife Sylvia. He dried his hands, wet from wiping tables, shook mine and gave a cautionary glance around the pub. He motioned to Sylvia to pour me a beer as he took me to one side and said the words which explained everything: ‘Kerstin’s done a runner, gone West.’ As I swallowed the bombshell, he dropped another: ‘Mother’s upstairs. She’s a bit upset, in a mixed-up sort of way. We’ve just seen them on television.’
Bärbel’s first indication that her eldest daughter was about to vanish from her life had come on Tuesday. The news was just beginning to sink in that East Germany’s communist rulers had closed the border to Czechoslovakia. Kerstin called her mother and said in meaningful tones that she and her common-law husband, Andreas, had decided they would, after all, take that holiday in Poland. She would leave the keys to the flat with her father-in-law. And then the fateful phrase: ‘He’ll know what to do with the furniture.’
The exodus of young East Germans to the West had touched the lives of everyone who remained, leaving empty spaces at dinner tables and silent toasts to absent friends in corner bars. I still found it a shock to experience it first-hand. I had seen Kerstin grow from a chubby schoolgirl to a sophisticated woman of twenty-two who took a coquettish pride in
her resemblance to the young Shirley MacLaine. She had everything to stay for. Kerstin had begun living with Andreas, eight years older and divorced, the previous year. She worked as a waitress in a bowling alley while Andreas was manager of a state-run bar in the relatively pleasant East Berlin suburb of Köpenick. They got a flat near his work and friends and family showered gifts on them, as if they had got married. By East German standards, they had everything: a colour television, new furniture, crystal glassware and even – this was one advantage of Andreas’s age – straight from the production works at Eisenach, the Wartburg car that he had applied to buy thirteen years earlier. It had cost 33,000 Marks, a small fortune. But it seemed this relative affluence had only made them envy all the more the consumerist paradise of the West, suddenly – so unexpectedly – so near. And yet maybe about to become once again as far away as ever.
On Tuesday afternoon they packed only as many clothes as they could reasonably be expected to need for a two-week holiday and headed out on the last sure route to the West: East. They were taking the risk of a lifetime, saying farewell to family and friends in the full expectation that they might never see them again. The Poles had made it clear that East Germans were being allowed to leave the country for the West only if they had entered legally in the first place. And that was not as easy as people in the West assumed. Citizens of the countries behind the Iron Curtain needed not just passports but visas even to visit another communist state. And visas required an invitation. By chance Andreas and Kerstin had a Polish friend who had invited them months ago to visit for a holiday, but they had had a busy summer and Andreas’s visa had expired. He was entitled in theory to an automatic extension, but it had required a visit to a police station, at tense experience in the current climate. But it had been granted.
I went upstairs to the flat and found Bärbel sprawled back on the sofa next to Alex, her eyes brimming. She had feared they would be found out or turned back at the border on some technicality. She had feared even more that they would not be, and then who knew when or if she would ever see them again? And then that evening, less than an hour before I had turned up as she and Alex had sat around their little black-and-white television watching the news on the West German channel ARD, they suddenly caught sight of Kerstin and Andreas grinning happily in the crowd in the grounds of the West German Embassy. Bärbel had burst into tears immediately.
Then as we sat there, still trying to take in what was happening, and what it all meant, the phone rang. It was Andreas, calling from Warsaw. He couldn’t talk long – international phone lines were hard to get hold of – just to say they were registered at the embassy and had been given bed and breakfast privately until their fate was decided. But the main thing was they had been given assurances that they would not be sent back.
Bärbel fell back onto the sofa and lit up a cigarette in relief, tears welling again in her eyes. Alex had a quick word before putting the phone down and then turned to us with an expression of angry exasperation on his face: ‘You won’t believe it? That thickhead has sold the car to a Polish policeman. What did he get for it? A lousy one hundred American dollars. It won’t be enough to buy him breakfast in West Berlin!’ But he was grinning broadly. Seconds later the phone rang again. It was Renate calling from West Berlin; she had seen the TV, too, and thought she recognised Kerstin. ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it? But I know, awful for you. I must go shopping to cook them a big meal when they get here. They can stay with me as long as they like.’ It was one of those conversations that highlighted the surreal situation: Renate lived barely three kilometres away as the crow flies. But in Berlin crows had a freedom Bärbel couldn’t imagine.
‘But Renate, they’re still in Warsaw. We don’t know how long it will be before they’re allowed out.’ Barely a few weeks earlier, people had been careful what they said on the phone to the West, worried about who was listening. Now it didn’t seem to matter any more. In fact, it was barely twenty-four hours before Andreas and Kerstin were on their way west.
The previous week an agreement had been reached between the East and West German governments which must have had Erich Honecker gritting his teeth as he signed it, to transport west several thousand East Germans crammed into the embassy in Prague in increasingly intolerable conditions. It was a deal substantially brokered by Bonn’s foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (who had been born in the East but fled West in 1952). The calendar helped: Honecker wanted the whole embarrassing episode closed before October 7th, when he would be hosting his fellow Warsaw Pact leaders, including Gorbachev, for a giant jamboree to mark East Germany’s fortieth birthday. The East German official media described it as a humanitarian gesture towards deluded ungrateful wretches who were no longer worthy of their citizenship. The refugees would be ‘expelled’ from East Germany. It turned into a fiasco that should have been an omen for what would happen at the upcoming ‘birthday party’.
The asylum seekers – or ‘illegal occupiers’ in East German government parlance – were to board East German trains, a significant concession to East Berlin’s nominal sovereignty (they could have simply travelled West across the Czech-West German frontier), and travel across East German territory. This allowed Honecker to claim that rather than his citizens fleeing, he was expelling them. A gesture that was as pathetic as it was legalistic, and one that also backfired. Spectacularly.
In Dresden, the main East German city on the route the trains had to take, thousands of people stormed the tracks and the station, hoping to ‘hitch’ a lift. Police had to use dogs and water cannon to disperse them, under a hail of cobblestones and railway ballast. The trains were held in Prague and it was the dead of night before they finally rumbled through a Dresden station ringed off by armed police.
Now, for what Honecker hoped would be the end of the embarrassment – and to avoid a repetition of the chaos caused by the trains from Prague – the stations would be evacuated and sealed off well before the trains from Warsaw to the West passed through. Ironically the route they had to take skirted Berlin itself before reaching the border crossing point at Helmstedt, some ninety miles west of West Berlin. Even at a moment like this the old ‘Berlin equation’ still came into play: the deal had been done with West Germany, and West Berlin was not legally part of West Germany. The train was sealed and didn’t stop from the moment it crossed the Polish border until it reached West German soil.
We all sat late into the night at the Stammtisch over beer, the last of the Hungarian wine and token Czech apricot schnapps, drinking the health of the fraternal republics who had turned out to be brothers after all. Between the tears, they hoped against hope and joked. ‘Why is the socialist hell better than the capitalist hell? Because they keep running out of boiling oil and hot coals.’ The next night Alex and Bärbel slept fitfully, aware that somewhere out there in the dark, Kerstin and Andreas were passing through a darkened, policeringed Köpenick station, just a few hundred yards from the home they had so recently abandoned.
I promised to see Kerstin next time I was in West Berlin. ‘Give her my love and tell her to send a photo.’ Bärbel had no idea when she would see her daughter again. Least of all did she – or any of us – imagine it would be in a mere couple of weeks, in circumstances none of us – and nobody anywhere else in Washington, Bonn, London or even Moscow imagined.
Yet the signs were there for all to see. Gorbachev’s urbane, intelligent and highly fluent chief spokesman Gennady Gerasimov appeared on the US talk show Good Morning America – in itself something not long before totally unimaginable. Faced with the practical fait accompli of a new order in Eastern Europe, he was asked about the future of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which had laid down that the satellite states did what Moscow told them. With a smile he replied: ‘What we have now is the Sinatra Doctrine. He has a song: “I Did it My Way”.’ The world gasped.
Barely four days later the weather had turned and I was stomping my feet to keep out the cold as I stood opposite the tribune erected on Unter den
Linden waiting for the display of military might to mark the East German state’s fortieth birthday. From my position on the steps of the State Opera I had a good view of the stony-faced troopers at the old Prussian royal guard-house – since 1945 renamed as the Monument to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism – performing their military ballet, stamping and pirouetting in their jackboots. The troops of the honour guard of the National People’s Army paraded as usual in their ceremonial uniforms of grey with white braid, their jodhpur-clad legs kicking high in the rigid march invented by the Prussian General Yorck to strengthen soldiers’ legs. In German it is called the Yorckmarsch after him; everywhere else it is known as the goose step. Tongues of orange flame licked into the night air, as they carried their torches high, as deliberately blind as ever to their parody of the immense spectacles organised by Hitler against this same backdrop of neoclassical Prussian palaces.
After them came the organised display of the FDJ, the Free German Youth, regiments of young people dragooned into this political version of Boy Scouts or Girl Guides and officially referred to as the ‘Vanguard of the party’. They wore their uniform blue shirts over black jumpers to keep warm and waved their own, smaller, firebrands with the jovial enthusiasm of any group of provincial adolescents on a night out in the capital, even if it had been organised by their elders. Most had been brought in buses from Cottbus or Rostock, bleak industrial cities whose inhabitants’ view of the world was even then still shaped by an awareness of being on the edge of communism rather than in the middle of Europe. Yet the authorities were tense. Almost every East German in the preceding months had seen a brother or sister, friend or neighbour leave forever. In Leipzig particularly, there had been problems; in the classrooms, indoctrination had been replaced by argument; some of those chosen to join the great birthday parade refused. In Berlin, Alex and Bärbel told their daughter Alexandra, fifteen, not to go even though she was a member of the FDJ. Their prohibition was issued more out of parental care than politics. They knew the organs of repression that had been ever-present throughout their adult lives were flexing their muscles, waiting for the slightest sign of domestic dissent on this of all evenings. Given the chance, they intended to crush it once and for all.