1989

by Peter Millar

  Their smart clothes were bought with money scraped together by Andreas’s father before they left East Berlin. Kerstin had already found herself a job as a waitress at the Argentinian Steak House on the Ku’damm at twice the salary she earned at the bowling alley in the East. In D-Marks too! Andreas was toying between taking up an offer of a waiter’s job in the Wienerwald fast-food chain or a trial as a maitre d’ at the Old Nuremberg Bavarian sausage restaurant in the basement of the Europa Centre, directly beneath the skyscraper with the symbol of capitalism: the Mercedes star itself. ‘They have only offered me a three-month contract to see how I do, but that sounds fair enough,’ he said. Their biggest problem was finding a flat. Andreas was hopeful. ‘It all works through strings, you know,’ he confided with a grin, ‘just like drüben, over there,’ he laughed, jerking his thumb in the manner East Berliners always used to indicate the West, but now meaning the East. They had settled into a new world with disconcerting speed, almost as if they had only moved a few miles across town. Which was, of course, precisely what they had done. But could the East German system’s imprint on its citizens really be so fragile? It seemed it could.

  In fact West Berlin had seen fewer of the new refugees settle there than most of the rest of West Germany. Many of those who had fled came from the East German provinces with no real roots in Berlin, while even some of the East Berliners who had got out felt that to move to the enclave of West Berlin was moving back into the bear’s den. On the other hand there were some who, like Kerstin and Andreas, couldn’t properly feel at home in West Germany, which they regarded as too provincial and where people spoke with funny, unfamiliar accents. At one of the welcome centres set up over the previous weeks I had met Petra, a twenty-two-year-old dentist who had fled via Prague, Budapest and finally Bavaria. She was friendless and jobless but still could live nowhere but Berlin: ‘I had to come back to Berlin, at least to understand the mentality, the accent, the sense of humour. Bavaria was beautiful but more foreign than I’d imagined. It would be very hard to fit in there. The only problem here is that I love the landscape but access to it is still restricted by the bloody Wall. It’s hard to see the rest of one’s past so near, yet so far.’ She had been warned by the West Berlin authorities not to use transit routes through East Germany, nor the few U-Bahn underground railway lines which, run by the West, passed under East Berlin streets and therefore were for a few miles nominally under communist jurisdiction.

  I introduced her to Günter, my old opera-singing beer-drinking actor chum from the East Berlin Volksbühne. He had been in the West for over three years, and was working at several theatres. Life as an actor in the West was a lot less certain than in the state-sponsored East German arts world, but he had little good to say about the regime on the other side. He had asked on several occasions for permission to visit West Berlin for the birthday of his ageing mother and been refused without reason. When she died, they let him out for the funeral. He did not go back: ‘Their stupidity is matched only by their thoughtlessness. But it’s the friends I still miss most. Last month I became a granddad (he was only forty-four) but I cannot visit my grandchildren. They would let me move back permanently, which I don’t want to do, but not for a visit. It’s funny, you know; there I felt locked in, unable even to go to Poland without a visa. Now I can travel wherever I want in the world, but the one thing I’d really like to do is get on a train and nip up to Alex’s place for a drink.’ He had no idea how soon his wish would be fulfilled.

  Only the day before, Kerstin had been on her way to work at the steakhouse when she noticed the dramatic news on the electronic billboard at the Ku’damm Eck crossroads. It displayed a giant electronic picture of an elderly man in glasses. The picture was familiar, the disrespectful text that ran underneath it was not: ‘Bye bye, Honey.’ Erich the red had gone, pushed out by his own crown prince. Giggling with malice, she told me that by some delicious mischance the announcement of his appointment as the new leader of East Germany had interrupted a television programme on state-run television called Everyone Dreams of a Horse.

  With swept-back iron-grey hair and curling lips that revealed a mouthful of sharp teeth, Krenz at fifty-two had the sort of ‘kindly uncle’ leering smile that makes adults cringe and grab their children tightly by the hand. Back in my hotel, I watched a rerun of his first televised address as ruler of East Germany: he sat hunched over his script, reading slowly, his head moving from left to right as he followed the words, looking into the camera with sunken but penetrating eyes at the end of each paragraph. His assumption of power reassured nobody. Wolf Biermann, the satirical singer-songwriter expelled from East Germany in 1976, described Krenz as the ‘nastiest possible candidate’. Several thousand East Berliners had already shocked the new regime by briefly forming a human chain across Alexanderplatz to express their scepticism about the promise of a more human face.

  That news in itself was enough to set me hurrying in my hire car along the old familiar rat run that went along side streets, across main thoroughfares blocked by the Wall and ended up, as always, at the one checkpoint where ‘non-German foreigners’ (a nice expression which in itself expressed East Germany’s hard-to-shake schizophrenia) could cross into the East. Although I had not been formally told when I was expelled that I was henceforward persona non grata, I was aware that I was still by no means sure that I would be allowed across. But I had a card to play I thought just might come up trumps: I had two passports. Amongst journalists it was a not uncommon phenomenon, for many reasons. To cite but one: the Israelis insisted on stamping those of all visitors, and anyone with an Israeli stamp in their passport was then automatically barred from most Arab countries.

  But I had an additional advantage: being born in Northern Ireland, I was entitled to both a British and an Irish passport. Most people back home chose one or another, depending on their religion and/ or attitude towards the sectarian divide. As a journalist, I thought I was obliged to see both sides of every question so I opted for one of each. There was also the fact that we were not long past the days of airline hijacks – usually by pro-Palestinian groups – who would take hostages and threaten to shoot them. They routinely started with the Israelis, but then soon went on to the Americans, and because of the sort of poodle politics Britain had played over recent decades, eventually moved onto the Brits. I hoped we Irish ‘sons of the revolution, begorrah’ were a sight further down the firing line.

  I had been travelling on my British passport two weeks earlier when I had been arrested – even if bizarrely it had been my Irish passport I pulled out of my pocket to separate me from the crowd of other detainees at the interrogation centre. But on balance I decided that if they had banned me it was more likely to be the British passport that had gone on the blacklist, and therefore the Irish card was the one to play now. As it happened the border guard on duty was my burly old acquaintance I had nicknamed the Bear. He said simply, ‘Not surprised to see you back,’ which was as close to a political comment I ever heard him make, and stamped my visa. I was in. First stop, obviously: Metzer Eck. Where better to take the pulse? Alex and Bärbel were delighted by my news from Kerstin and Andreas and my first-hand impressions of how well they were doing in their new lives. But most of the discussion in the pub centred on what was happening on their side of the Wall. Michy, a new Metzer Eck regular who was a cabaret artiste from the Reiz’zwecken (Tin Tacks) cabaret troupe lamented that popular wit was outstripping their scriptwriters. They had just rehearsed a new sketch with Krenz as the wolf in a version of Little Red Riding Hood when he saw a banner on the street showing the new leader’s face with pointed ears and the caption: ‘My, grandma, what big teeth you have.’ ‘They don’t laugh any more,’ Michy despaired. ‘We used to have to fight the censor for every bloody comma. Now we can’t even keep up with the jokes on the streets.’ Alex laughed and poured him another beer.

  The feeling of change in the air was palpable. Although nobody seemed very sure what form it might take. Reforms
that only a few weeks earlier were deemed unnecessary were suddenly declared ripe for discussion. Krenz acknowledged that the tide of emigration was an ‘open wound’. Busch told me, behind his hand, that rumours emerging from the communist ranks said Krenz had been given only until the party congress – May at the latest. Talk was already of Hans Modrow, the Dresden party boss, a self-billed Gorbachev fan, taking over, despite the violence which had occurred in his city when the refugee trains passed through. There was a new ‘citizens’’ body called Neues Forum (New Forum) largely made up of people who had been active in the old Swords to Ploughshares movement. One of its guiding lights was a woman called Bärbel Bohley, yet another disillusioned former communist. She lived just around the corner so I went to see her and took copies of her ‘charter’, a document she said they were asking people to sign to petition the government for a ‘new dialogue’, though she was adamant they were not trying to organise themselves as a formal political party: ‘We’re thinking of getting people together to have a march, or something, just a show of numbers really.’ I nodded. It was much the same as had been happening in Leipzig where we had at one stage feared the Soviet tanks would roll, but now seemed the beginnings of a push for some sort of social and economic reform as had already happened in Poland and Hungary. We all knew that the big problem was the border. But to question that was to question the integrity of the country itself. And that was not on the cards.

  I filed my copy, a report of the interview with Bohley, her hopes and aspirations, a sense of the ‘deadline’ hanging over the Krenz regime and – as everyone was saying – a feeling that there was more to come. But maybe not until the spring. I flew back to London, spent the weekend with my family, and got on the plane to Namibia. It didn’t seem anywhere near as daft as it sounds. Honestly.

  It certainly seemed daft by the time I got back. 1989 was to be the annus mirabilis in the history of the post-Second World War world, with the democratisation of much of Southern Africa no less a cause for celebration than the demise of the Iron Curtain. It was a big story. It just wasn’t my story.

  I was frustrated that while I had been away, there had been the biggest demonstration ever seen in the centre of East Berlin. Bärbel Bohley and her New Forum people had managed to enthuse not just thousands but hundreds of thousands, almost half a million in total, to converge on the Red City Hall carrying banners similar to those up until now seen only in Leipzig: ‘We are the people’. And this time there were a hell of a lot of them. Even Alex and Bärbel, who had been content to leave the ‘revolution’ to the kids, had joined in.

  ‘Why not,’ said Bärbel over a ciggy and a schnapps in Metzer Eck. ‘At least we can show them we’re not afraid.’ And there was the rub: the fear had faded. The assumption that brutal force would be deployed had faded with the assumption that it would work. It was as if a sinister spell that had for decades held a population in thrall had suddenly been revealed as a piece of bogus hocus pocus. Almost a Sleeping Beauty moment. But if the long sleep was over nobody knew exactly what the world would look like when they finally rubbed the dust from their eyes.

  As far as I was concerned, looking for a focus on a Wednesday afternoon for a story that I would write on Friday for that week’s Sunday paper, it seemed the best chance would be another demonstration, this time up in Rostock, on the Baltic coast. It was unlikely to be a big demonstration on the scale of Leipzig or the previous week’s huge gathering in Berlin, but it would be a further sign of unrest spreading across the country, and Rostock, an old and once pretty Hanseatic trading city going slowly to the dogs under the moribund Comecon economic grouping, would provide a little more unusual background colour.

  It was on my way back, with little more than that colour under my belt and still wondering what was going to be the ‘intro’ on my story for the week, that I turned on the car radio. And almost fainted. I felt for a surreal moment as if I had crossed into an alternative universe. It was RIA S Berlin (Radio im Amerikanischen Sektor), usually a reliable mix of music and news. They had abandoned the music. In a gabbling chatter rather than the usual sober tones, the news anchor was saying, ‘It appears now that a second crossing point on the Wall has opened. As I speak thousands of East Berliners are pouring into the West.’

  Stunned and horrified – I was still more than an hour and a half away – I did the only thing I could: put my foot to the floor. And discovered, to my exquisite anguish, that Mercedes had already joined the green lobby and my rented shiny black metallic M-190 for all its boasts about low fuel consumption and low emissions (this was back in 1989, remember!) had the acceleration of a donkey cart. For the best part of ninety minutes I tried to push my foot through the chassis as I willed the car back to East Berlin, accelerating to over 170 kph, my ear glued to the radio all the way. What had happened was less than clear-cut: at an unheralded news conference in East Berlin, politburo member Günter Schabowski had said that it was the government’s intention to ‘normalise’ the frontier with West Germany and West Berlin and in general relax travel restrictions. He was obviously not completely up to speed with what had actually been decided, but he had been heard to say it would be possible for ‘every citizen of the German Democratic Republic to leave the GDR through any of the border crossings’. Asked when this would come into effect, he had fumbled through his papers and said, uncertainly, ‘Immediately, from now’. The press conference had been broadcast live on East German television too and within half an hour there were crowds at the checkpoints demanding to be let through and eventually some – and then more and more – were. Exactly what the formalities were, and how long this would last, nobody knew.

  Once within the city limits I headed straight for the Wall. At the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint there were already thousands. I spoke to the border guard on charge who would give no details about the apparent dramatic change in attitude other than to confirm that they were letting GDR citizens through. But he would not let me through. As a foreigner, I would have to go to Checkpoint Charlie. Cursing Prussian pedantry to the last, I ran back to the car and drove the kilometre or so distance, taking with me, piled into the Merc, a group of East Berliners who had despaired of the Invalidenstrasse queue.

  There it was every bit as chaotic. I drove into the middle of the wide expanse of the East German control area. I was delighted to see that one of the obviously harassed border guards on duty was the Bear. He grimaced at me, gave an approving look at the car – surprised when I told him it had rubbish acceleration – and said: ‘It’s chaos over there’. He and his colleagues did their best to complete my formalities in a few minutes, but would not let the East Germans come with me in the car. They had to go on foot. ‘There’s no point in trying to drive that through tonight. It’s a madhouse,’ said the Bear.

  I could see what he meant about the ‘madhouse’. Some twenty metres away on the other side of the checkpoint’s customs sheds, was a vast and obviously drunk throng of West Berliners. From the Eastern side it genuinely looked like an angry drunken mob. The other side of the checkpoint here was Kreuzberg, home of West Berlin’s disaffected squatters and anarchists, and some in the crowd were hurling abusive insults and beer cans at the border troops, seen close up for the first time, suddenly transformed from sinister armed silhouettes behind searchlights into a close-up human enemy (any uniform was a target for some Kreuzberg characters). The control area between the barriers had meanwhile filled with cars. One party of Third World diplomats, completely uncaring about the history unfolding before them and more concerned about getting to their favourite West Berlin nightclub, fumed at the helpless troops for not opening the gates which, although pedestrians were passing through, remained closed against the teeming throng.

  Frenetic, confused, at last the East German guards opened the gates. My car was first in the line. ‘Go on then if you want to tackle that lot,’ shouted one, now angry, lieutenant. I didn’t. I was not sure if the crowds dancing in the gap ahead of me were angry or happy, but I knew o
ne thing: I did not want to be responsible for the first casualty of the night by running over someone. It would be much later that night, when the mood of celebration had been firmly established, before the first fibreglass Trabants began to trundle through and the curious welcome custom of ‘Trabby-bouncing’ – lifting the little cars up and down as if giving them ‘the bumps’ could be created. At that moment, I made my own decision; I turned the car round and drove East, leaving the diplomats fuming as the troops closed the gates again to stop an influx of partying drunks set on invading East Berlin.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said the Bear. ‘Stick the motor over there,’ pointing at a normally out of bounds patch of land just to the left of the Checkpoint Charlie barrier. ‘We’ll look after it. That is, if you’re serious about going through.’

  ‘It’s my job,’ I told him. And he shrugged. He understood. After all, he was just doing his.

  Right up at the Western barrier, East German guards with megaphones ran to and fro, shouting preposterously at photographers to stop taking pictures as families streaming tears kissed and hugged and Western revellers climbed onto the electrically-controlled metal barriers. I didn’t know it at the time but the same uncontrollable mob only half a mile away were already clambering onto the Western section of the Wall before the Brandenburg Gate and, egged on by Western media snappers, tearing at it with pickaxes in front of totally confused and conflicted border guards who only a few weeks earlier would have shot them.