1989

by Peter Millar

  Going through the pedestrian gate I had used a thousand times before was a strange and unforgettable experience. I had my hair ruffled by a forest of outstretched hands, was kissed at random by unseen lips and found a can of beer thrust into my hand with the emotional cry ‘Herzlich Wilkommen in die Freiheit’ (Welcome to freedom!). Dazed, and probably looking as emotional as if I had indeed set foot for the first time in West Berlin, I muttered ‘Danke’ and stumbled on through the crowd who were already embracing the next arrival.

  I went to the Adler Bar, recently opened in a building just a few yards beyond Checkpoint Charlie. For years the building in a road to nowhere had lain derelict and empty. Now it was heaving, the bar at the centre of the turning world. I found their call box and phoned Alex in Metzer Eck. To my astonishment, he told me he was not going to come over: ‘Guess who has just turned up? Günter. He says it was only the other week he was telling you his one wish was to be able to drink in Metzer Eck. Well, now he can. There’s progress for you.’ For Alex, it was every bit as important that his friend could come back as that he could leave.

  He said he did not know about Bärbel, but Horst and Sylvia had gone and would probably, he guessed, turn up at Renate’s. For the next hour or so I hung around Checkpoint Charlie, drinking in a scene I had thought impossible and cursing the fact that it was a Thursday night – too late to get much in the Friday editions but the Saturdays would hoover it up. Hoover what up? Nobody was still exactly sure what was happening, how or why and how long it would last. I talked at random to some of those who had just come over. Most had their hearts in their mouths. Petra Lorenz, a dumpy, middle-aged mother-of-two, had travelled two hours by bus and tram from her flat in Marzahn, leaving her husband to look after their children. ‘Don’t be daft, it’s a lie,’ he had said. She wandered in a trance for twenty minutes on the Western side of Checkpoint Charlie but was scared to go further in case they slammed the door and she would be cut off from her family forever. Nothing seemed impossible. She took back a newspaper as a souvenir from a dream.

  The burning question in everyone’s mind was answered by a bus driver from the East, smiling with a crisp certainty as he downed the beer from the can pressed into his hand as he pushed through the crowds and into the West: ‘Can they take back their decision? Close the wall again? Never. We’ll see them sink in ashes first.’ I scribbled his words down in my notebook. In my head I was already preparing the big double-page spread I knew I would be required to produce for Sunday, whether it was ‘Flash in a Pan’ or ‘End of an Era’. The analysis could come later, tomorrow, in the cold light of day and in the wake of whatever happened over the next few hours. Right now what I wanted was colour. And raw emotion. And there was no shortage of either.

  It was time to go to the Ku’damm, the centre of West Berlin nightlife, where it seemed likely most of the more adventurous would head. But it made sense to take some East Berliners with me. The obvious candidates soon presented themselves. Running through a cheering gauntlet of beery West Berliners dancing on the Wall came a ready-made party. These three young waitresses from the Hotel Stadt Berlin, who came whooping through the Wall, spraying Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood), the fizzy party plonk of the East, at grinning policemen, were ready-made feel-good copy. I grabbed a taxi and offered them a lift to the Ku’damm in exchange for the story of their evening.

  In the taxi as we rushed through streets full of drunk pedestrians and cars honking their horns, Christiane, Janna and Andrea told me how it had been a routine boring evening serving the usual unappetising East German institutional food to sour-faced Russian tourists. When the news came through that the Wall was open they had bitten their lips and looked at each other. But deutsche Gründlichkeit (German thoroughness) was in their genes: there might have been a revolution going on all around them, but they could hardly join in until they had finished their shift. It had gone midnight before Andrea turned to the others, giggling, and suggested: ‘Anyone for the Ku’damm?’ And now we were there. When we piled out of the taxi in the middle of the carnival that had spread across the centre of West Berlin, Andrea looked longingly at a telephone box that would work only with the Western cash she did not have. I handed her a few D-Marks and she woke her parents in the East: ‘Mutti, I’m on the Ku’damm. It’s mad. It’s marvellous. Oh, don’t be cross. I’m coming back.’ Then they gave another delirious whoop of delight. And were off into the melee.

  I let them go. They had given me the ‘human element’ my copy needed. Now it was time to fill in the rest. Despite trying to keep a clear head for detail, I was as intoxicated as any Berliner on the pure champagne atmosphere of a city that couldn’t quite believe what was happening to it. Watching the little apple-green and baby-blue fibreglass Trabbies with their two-stroke engines tootle by amidst the Mercs and Beamers on the Ku’damm – giggling lunatics waving from the windows – was like watching one of those Hollywood films where cartoon characters merge with real life: think Roger Rabbit in a Cold War context. The sky was ablaze with fireworks, total strangers embraced in the streets. Bars spilled out onto the streets and the streets flooded into the bars.

  For a while I just stood there watching in stunned amazement only to be startled when I was suddenly grabbed round the neck by a tall man in a leather jacket with cropped hair. It was Andreas, an improbable deus ex machina, but profoundly welcome. He had just met Kerstin after work and they were still reeling from the news. We dived into a phone box and called Renate to find out if she had heard from Horst and Sylvia. They were with her. We arranged to meet them as soon as they could manage it on the Ku’damm Eck, probably the most confused spot in Europe at that moment. But we managed it. ‘We’ve … uh, just popped over for a drink,’ said Horst, looking exaggeratedly nonchalant before he whooped with joy and swung his sister into his arms.

  By five thirty a.m. we were sitting over tall beers in a bar down Kantstrasse while Kerstin wept quietly with happiness. Horst was teasing the bar staff and West Berlin customers, touting for custom for Metzer Eck: ‘Better pig’s knuckles than any you get here,’ he shouted. As we left, he asked the waitress if he could perhaps buy two of the tall, elegant Warsteiner beer glasses, just as a souvenir. She laughed and told him to take them and not ask silly questions. As an unimaginable dawn broke on the first day of a new Germany, we staggered off to bed, the East Berliners to Renate’s West Berlin flat. Whatever happened, they were not missing the chance to spend a night in the West. Meanwhile I, the Westerner, wandered in a daze back East, to my hotel on Marx-Engels-Platz. The sun was coming up as I kicked my way through the broken bottles on the roadway next to Checkpoint Charlie and presented my passport to stunned-looking border guards. How long would I still need to do so, was the question neither asked nor answered.

  The night the Berlin Wall came down was the ultimate vindication of the ‘cock-up theory’ of history. Over the years since, Krenz, Schabowski, even Gorbachev who more than anyone perhaps bears the indirect responsibility – or right to claim the credit – have told their own, differing stories about what happened and what was intended. The facts that emerged piecemeal in the days that followed, and subsequently in an endless series of interviews, many of them conducted under the aegis of my fellow Metzer Eck regular, film producer Axel Grote, allow the real jigsaw of that night to be pieced together.

  Schabowski’s ill-organised and incompetent press conference was merely the result of a Communist Party still reeling at its own boldness in sacking its leader. They were also under immense pressure from Prague where the sight of thousands of East Germans camped in the overflowing grounds of the West German Embassy was causing social and political unrest in a communist regime that, despite the changes in Poland and Hungary, was still only slightly less Stalinist than that in East Berlin. The Czechoslovaks were furious and had made clear to their comrades that something had to be done. At the same time the grey men in East Berlin realised they were sitting on a pressure cooker. They thought that by making concessions
on travel to the West they would ease the pressure by letting off steam. What they didn’t realise was that it was actually a bottle of champagne, and the cork, once out, would not go back in.

  Schabowski’s statements that night were worse than shambolic. Transcripts show that what he actually said revealed that the politburo had been working on new regulations for travel to the West but was worried about it: ‘We are naturally concerned at the possibilities of this travel regulation – it’s still not in effect, it’s still only a draft’. He then immediately followed this up by saying that pressure from Prague had forced them to accelerate their thinking: ‘This movement is taking place (um) across the territory of an allied state (um), which is not an easy burden for that state to bear.’ As a result they were bringing forward ‘a passage’ from the planned new rules.

  He then quickly read out the rules from a piece of paper: ‘Applications for travel abroad by private individuals can now be made without the previously existing requirements (of demonstrating a need to travel or proving familial relationships). The travel authorisations will be issued within a short time. Grounds for denial will only be applied in particular exceptional cases. The responsible departments of passport and registration control in the People’s Police district offices in the GDR are instructed to issue visas for permanent exit without delays and without presentation of the existing requirements for permanent exit.’

  What was clearly intended was that East Germans, from the Friday morning, would have the right to go to their local police station and request a passport, which would be granted them automatically, within a few days at most, and that with this they would be able to travel to the West. The hope was that the refugee flood would stop immediately. They realised there would be a large number of visitors to the West in the coming weeks, but in numbers controlled through the bureaucracy needed to issue passports; of these, many would not come back. Most of the rest would taste the West but still come back; the scenario would then be open for a series of internal reforms in much the same way as had happened in Hungary. It would not be easy for the communists to cope with but at least it would not create difficulties on the international level. It was a stopgap policy.

  All they were proposing to do was cut the red tape, not throw open the Berlin Wall. But all that remained in the minds of anyone listening was that one sentence: ‘We have decided today (um) to implement a regulation that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic (um) to (um) leave the GDR through any of the border crossings,’ and when it was to come into effect: ‘Immediately, without delay.’ In the background the foreign trade minister Gerhard Beil could be heard muttering: ‘to be decided by the council of ministers.’ But nobody was listening to him.

  East Berliners living nearest the Wall were first to react. The commandant of the contingent of border guards at the Bornholmer Strasse crossing in Prenzlauer Berg was Manfred Sens. He was later to complain that he and his fellow guards felt betrayed: for years they had done a thankless, even despised task, only to have it made a mockery overnight for no clear reason and without proper explanation or clear orders. He had heard no instructions about any proposed change in border regulations other than that which came over the public radio, by which time he was facing several hundred East Berliners clamouring to be allowed to cross.

  Sens had a veritable arsenal in his stores, allowing for every degree of retaliation to any attempt to force a passage: rubber bullets, gas grenades, water cannon and, of course, live ammunition. But he was reluctant to start an incident without orders from above, especially when everyone was telling him that to prevent them crossing would be against the orders he would shortly receive. But he hadn’t had them yet. Sens sat on the telephone trying in vain to get a clear response, not least because Schabowski’s fumbled presentation had confused everybody. Eventually he got through to the very top man Fritz Streletz, a former Second World War Wehrmacht soldier who was now chief of the National People’s Army General Staff and the man in charge of all border fortifications. But Streletz couldn’t give him a definitive answer either. All he did was to remind Sens that he had been chosen for his experience and must be aware of the importance of avoiding serious incidents at the country’s frontiers, especially in these critical times.

  Sens was not at all sure what his senior officer was suggesting. But time wore on and eventually he lifted the barrier and let the first of his whooping fellow citizens, on production only of their national identity card, cross into the West, a street away. They had no idea if they were letting people out for the night or for ever; at one stage the instruction came through to put the exit stamp across the photograph in the identity card – for identification purposes. But within twenty-four hours, tipsy teenagers coming back from West Berlin simply waved identity cards at bemused border guards who only weeks earlier might have shot them.

  When the barrier first went up there was a rush for the door in the bar just a hundred yards away from the checkpoint. By coincidence, it happened to be run by Dieter Kanitz, Alex’s former waiter in Metzer Eck. He and his wife Hannelore had set up on their own managing a state-run pub in the middle of a Laubenkolonie. These were basically allotments equipped with elaborate wooden sheds that keen gardeners fitted with curtains and beds and often spent the weekend in. The allotments abutted the railway tracks on one side and the Wall on the other. As his customers headed west, Dieter would have loved to go with them; but he had lost his identity card, and Hannelore sat with him. It turned out to be one of the best night’s business they ever had as they poured beer into the early morning hours to those returning home for a drink at prices they could afford after the adventure of a lifetime. Just one street away.

  At nine a.m. on Friday, November 10th, when KaDeWe, the Harrods of West Berlin, opened its doors, the East Berliners flooded in to stare at the electronic miracles on offer, at the mountainous meat and fruit display on the ‘Gourmet Floor’. But with Western D-Marks like rare gold, most only window-shopped. Those who did buy something to take home made their purchases at the cheaper supermarkets and discount electrical stores.

  Alex and Bärbel came over in the afternoon and we all met at Renate’s flat and went out for a celebratory Chinese meal. Bärbel had spent hours wandering the Ku’damm which she had last seen as a little girl, and caused laughter when she returned, still daydreaming with the single comment: ‘The streets don’t seem as wide as I remember.’ On the wall, the East German police and border guards had abandoned trying to understand what was really intended by the new border regulations. Their confusion only reflected that in the minds of their masters. But their masters were by now no more in control of the human tide washing across the frontier than King Canute on his throne on the beach. A media circus had flocked to Berlin from around the world, in most cases with little or no idea about what was happening other than the obvious delirious scenes against which well-groomed anchor men and women posed and talked twaddle. But the twaddle declared the Berlin Wall history, and millions of East Germans on the march – believing what they saw on television – had made it so.

  On Friday, under fresh instruction from whatever still constituted ‘above’, East German border guards were once again insisting on stamping documents and issuing visas, but of random validity from three days to six months. Manfred Sens would later testify that on November 14th, five days after the Wall ‘came down’, he received the order again to ‘secure the frontier’. ‘That was a joke,’ he snorted. ‘By that stage it was all we could do to ensure an orderly flow of traffic.’ The stream of honking Eastern cars continued to flow down the Ku’damm, over the border and along Unter den Linden. The wall before the Brandenburg Gate looked more redundant than ever. Within weeks it would be breached in dozens of places, with souvenir hunters fighting over chunks – ideally with the best graffiti, and within seven months it would be consigned to historical archaeology.

  Back at The Sunday Times, Bob the foreign editor had agreed that to keep me in position and my mar
riage together, he would do a deal on paying for my wife and two tiny sons to come out to Berlin for a few days. For Jackie it was a cathartic experience, coming back to the place where we had begun married life to see the impossible come true. For my two children – a five-year old and a toddler – it was ‘a funny holiday’. But the pictures I have of them, one in a knitted jumper with pictures of penguins, the other in a down coat two sizes too big, both pushing their little hands into a crack in the Wall, remains a family treasure. As does the chunk of it in my desk drawer. It was our Wall too. And we were glad to see the end of it.

  The significance of what had happened began to sink in fast. The Berlin Wall was the Iron Curtain, far more than any other Eastern European frontier. But the East German communists had played their last card, gambling on a scorched earth policy, yielding every demand in the hope of exhausting the enemy. It was one of the founding fathers of communism, a high deity in the crumbled East German pantheon, Friedrich Engels, who, a century earlier, had summed up how it happened: ‘Everyone strives for his own interests, but in the end what emerges is something no one intended.’

  * The Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service)

  11

  The Domino Effect

  It was, by a long chalk, the most off-the-wall overlong sentence ever to appear in a Sunday Times news story, let alone near the top of it. Twice it had been cut into easier-to-digest bite-sized nuggets by the sub-editors, and twice it had been restored, mostly at the hands of Bob Tyrer, foreign editor and literary connoisseur who recognised the vain (in every sense) attempts of his correspondents in the field to do more than just tell the news. On a freezing cold night in the Czech capital I had sat and tried to do almost literally poetic justice to the most exhilarating two days in my life since the fall of the Berlin Wall, though as that was only three weeks earlier, things were getting hard to keep track of.