1989

by Peter Millar

  It was a cruel, nasty, but probably necessary codicil to a year of miraculous and largely peaceful revolutions. On New Year’s Eve – I had managed almost a whole week with my family – we held a party at home that became a celebration of the end of the Cold War. It was a party already full of journalists when at five minutes to midnight – the mythical hour that the doom-mongers had warned us the Cold War had brought the human race to – the bell rang and in came a horde of revellers straight from the front line. ITV had chartered a plane to get their crew out of Romania in time for a New Year’s celebration, and onto it had piled virtually every British correspondent who could fit. The all now tried to squeeze inside our kitchen, champagne mingling with vodka and tuiça, fiery Romanian plum brandy. Amongst the decorations strung across our living room that heady night was a string of bunting, bought in East Germany eight years earlier on the occasion of a Warsaw Pact summit, in the form of the flags of all the countries of the communist military alliance. Now, as the revolutions on the ground had done, I took a pair of scissors and cut out the communist symbols from each: last but not least, the ‘Hammer and Compasses’ from the flag of the German Democratic Republic. So modified, it alone became identical to the flag of one other country: the Federal Republic of Germany. That the two would become one now seemed inevitable. The only questions were how and when?

  But before I could turn my attention back to the ‘wrapping-up’ of what had to be Germany’s march to reunification, I needed – and the paper needed – a visit to the scene of the year of miracles’ bloody ending. January 3rd, 1990, therefore found me sitting once again in the departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, waiting for the Tarom Romanian airlines flight to Bucharest. I would have preferred to travel by another airline – any other airline – but with the situation on the ground still uncertain, nobody else at all was flying into Romania. When, four hours late, the few of us foolish enough to want do so went out on the tarmac we were not exactly reassured. I had flown in many a Boeing 707 before, although by then the enduring workhorse of air transport was considered a relative antique. But never before had I flown in one streaked with mud. We were only allowed to get on board after they had unloaded stretchers bearing the injured. The flight was delayed because it had been diverted via Timisoara to pick up several seriously wounded civilians who needed urgent medical treatment only available in London.

  As we tried to settle down in our threadbare seats I noticed one young couple almost in tears who had been on the flight and not disembarked. Gently I tried to coax them into conversation, only to find they spoke little English. They did, however, speak French, which was not unusual for Romanians, whose own language was Latin-derived. It turned out, however, that they were not Romanian at all, but Belgian, and on their way home from their honeymoon. Not in Timisoara – or even Bucharest – needless to say. They had got married in early December and booked a honeymoon in Thailand. Their only mistake had been to go for the absolute cheapest flights they could find, offered, unsurprisingly, by Tarom, itinerary Brussels-Bucharest-Bangkok. Lazing on the beaches of Koh Samui, they had heard nothing about the revolution in Romania and were horrified to land in the middle of a capital in chaos, then be diverted to Timisoara where they had picked up moaning bloodied bodies which were laid in stretchers in the aisles. They had been in the air already for more than twenty-four hours.

  I wondered how they were going to get home, until the obvious truth dawned on me, a few moments after take-off. Take-off in itself was a hair-raising experience, not least because I was seated across the aisle from a British Airways ground agent I had known in Moscow. He was now on his way to Bucharest in the hope of discussing a better deal on routes and landing fees with the new regime (I had to admire the capitalist nerve). I made a few remarks on the state of the plane, but he laughed it off as ‘mere cosmetics’; he had lived in Somalia for several years with experience of their national airline, never mind our mutual grim tales of Aeroflot. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said with a laugh. Which was why, when we lurched along the runway, heaved up into the air and then suddenly seemed to drop, and then maybe a few thousand feet above West London, did it again, that I looked across to him for moral support. Only to see that his face was every bit as white as mine, and his knuckles were if anything whiter as we both clutched our armrests as if they contained the controls to ejector seats. Barely an hour later we landed, as I had reluctantly come to anticipate, in Brussels. Though I could not help feeling relieved on behalf of our poor honeymooners who literally ran off the plane as if they feared it might at any moment take off again with them still on board.

  I could all too easily understand their terror. It was not as if our aircrew exactly inspired confidence. Ever since our upsy-daisy take-off from Heathrow I had been waiting for them to bring round the booze to calm my nerves. In vain. Now, as we repeated the same antics to get airbound in Brussels – think of a small child playing with a model airliner, going ‘Vrooom, vrooooom’ – I was beginning to seriously look forward to a stiff gin and tonic. When the alcohol finally did emerge, however, it turned out all they apparently had was tuiça, that Romanian plum brandy which had spiced up our New Year’s Eve cocktails. There was a bigger problem, however: the aircrew weren’t offering it around. They were drinking it. For the next several hours we watched two lumpen air stewardesses standing in the aisle, leaning over the backs of empty seats – there were by now only a dozen passengers on board – and getting solidly pissed out of their minds, while puffing on endless cigarettes. Kent, of course. Not once were we even offered a drop – of anything – and when I made an attempt to ask, they waved a finger at me, as if I were a naughty schoolboy asking if I could leave the room during lessons.

  This was bad enough but it seemed to be taking an unconscionably long time to get to Bucharest. I had expected the flight to take between three and a half and four hours. From London. Brussels was already part – admittedly a small part – of the way there. But after nearly five hours on board, I was beginning to wonder what the hell was going on, with vague visions of having become trapped in an episode of The Twilight Zone, possibly entitled ‘Flight into Infinity’, when the less than totally slurred voice of a male attendant (the captain?) asked us to fasten our seat belts, as we would be landing in ten minutes, ‘in Constanta’. The BA man and I turned to one another, our mouths simultaneously making the expression, where? Not that we didn’t know where: Constanta was Romania’s biggest city on the Black Sea, and had for years been fighting a – relatively doomed – battle to make it into the catalogues of British packet tour operators.

  ‘Why not Bucharest?’ I tried getting something, in elementary English, out of the tuiça-sodden stewardess. She did that finger-wagging thing again, and said, ‘Not possible.’

  ‘Why?’ I tried, more in hope than expectation.

  ‘Tanki,’ she said, ‘tanks. On the runway.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, because it was, after all, not a bad explanation.

  We piled off the aircraft, relieved at least to be back on terra firma, to find ourselves in an unheated waiting room with temperatures hovering around minus five degrees Centigrade. For half an hour we stood there, our teeth chattering, while they roused a customs and immigration man to stamp our visas. ‘Tonight,’ a bleary-eyed Tarom ground agent told us, ‘you will stay in motel. Here. Then tomorrow, when we get clearance from Bucharest, we get back on plane. Okay?’ The BA man and I looked at one another and thought the same thing: no, not okay. Not okay at all. Not only would we have to spend the night in some undoubtedly freezing, flea-ridden motel room, but the next day we would have to get on that damn plane again. We weren’t doing it. Not if they threatened us with a firing squad, though under the circumstances we decided not to raise that option. ‘No thanks,’ we said together, firmly. ‘We’ll take a taxi.’

  They looked at us as if we were mad, which was a bit rich coming from this shower, and shrugged. It was of course, fairly mad. It wasn’t as if Bucharest was just down the ro
ad. It was almost 150 miles away, in a country with nothing that resembled motorways. Nonetheless, for an extortionate – in Romanian terms – couple of hundred US dollars we found a local driver willing to take us, and did our best to grab a few hours sleep – it was gone two a.m. – as we rattled across the Danube floodplain. We crawled into Bucharest in the last hour before dawn, as if entering the lowest level of Dante’s inferno: a spectral city with belching, steaming industrial plants on its outskirts, shrunken, huddled figures trudging through the slush along the unlit roadside to begin their ten-hour shifts labouring for the Victory of Socialism. Even now, with military vehicles on every street corner and tanks at every intersection, people still had to earn a crust. And in Romania, a crust meant a crust.

  I spent five days there, putting together an ‘aftermath’ and ‘what next’ piece, soaking up colour in a monochrome city where it seemed life itself, like the politics and the people, only came in shades of grey. Or occasionally black. Had this city once really been described as the ‘Paris of the East?’ I watched tramps sleeping rough in Ceausescu’s still unfinished great folly, the House of the People, now given over to the people, who were lighting camp fires on its marble floors. I gingerly climbed four floors up a stairwell pockmarked with bullet holes to reach the television studios where the rebels had announced to the nation that the ‘great leader’ had fled, and from where they had broadcast the footage of his execution. And then I went home.

  Over the next few months, markedly less hectic than those that had gone before, I returned repeatedly to East Germany, watching in wonder as the Wall vanished almost as rapidly as it was erected. Bulldozers dealt with most of it, though whole slabs – particularly those with the ‘prettiest’ graffiti on the Western side went for high prices at auction. Elsewhere people simply chipped away at it. East Germany’s frontiers remained, but in little more than theory as all but the most rudimentary controls were removed. Driving south to Bavaria, through what had once been a rigorously controlled frontier with a single crossing point, watchtowers, automatic machine guns and series after series of high barbed wire fences, I decided – just to see what would happen – to try to take a back road, the sort that would have been regularly used by farm tractors or villagers going to market in the days before the country was divided. I fully expected to come across a ‘road closed’ sign at least, or maybe even still the barbed wire and tank traps. Instead I found the road open and in use, the frontier marked only by the presence of a little caravan, the sort English pensioners might drag behind their Austin Princesses for a weekend at the seaside, inhabited by a cheery-faced East German border guard who stamped my passport (not necessary for Germans) and leaned out smiling to be photographed, the now redundant watchtower looming in the background like an abandoned beach umbrella.

  As the two Germanys moved inexorably towards union, my old friends Alex and Bärbel moved inexorably apart. The new situation brought new challenges as well as new opportunities, but above all it turned their old world upside down. Alex embraced capitalism wholeheartedly and wanted to set up a new bar, maybe more than one. Bärbel was just happy that her children were happy and that she was reunited with them and wanted nothing more than to keep Metzer Eck up and running, to see it flourish in a world where it would begin to face previously unimagined competition. Those were her prime goals, plus a holiday in Florida.

  The mechanics of the process of German unification are too detailed, lengthy and cumbersome to be dealt with here. East Germany’s first free elections, held in March 1990, produced a pro-unification coalition government headed by Christian Democrats led by Lothar de Maizière, a soft-spoken reluctant politician of distant French Huguenot origins (the French protestants had fled persecution in Catholic France for tolerant Prussia in the seventeenth century), whose prime job would be to see his country into oblivion.

  The first big step was a monetary union between one of the strongest currencies in the world, the West German D-Mark, and one which had almost no value at all, the East German Mark. Eventually after a lot of hand-wringing and calculator button-pressing, a solution was reached that was a fusion of economic and political reality: East Germans up to the age of twenty-five would be able to exchange up to 2,000 Marks at 1:1. The figure for those between twenty-six and sixty would be 4,000 Marks, and 6,000 for those over sixty. Cash or assets above that level would be translated at 2:1. It was both generous and risky. Few East Germans had large savings from their paltry wages and the state had nationalised most businesses and a substantial amount of property. Bärbel for example ran Metzer Eck as a private business, inherited from her father, but the property itself was owned by the state, as was the flat upstairs in which she lived.

  Rents were another matter that reunification had to deal with, as were repossessions. There were many people living in West Berlin and West Germany with claims on property nationalised by the communists in the East. Their claims would have to be examined, and where valid, the property either returned or compensation issued. But it was hardly practicable for private landlords to move in and overnight start charging ordinary East Berliners what they might consider to be a ‘market rate’. As a result rents were fixed, with a long-term sliding scale for them to move to market levels. The same applied to prices of necessities. But salaries and benefits in the East were also put on a rising scale, a decision that inevitably sparked many people, particularly the young, to give up their guaranteed cheap rent for the chance to move west and make ‘real money’, even if they faced much higher living costs. It was a risk that not everyone was prepared to take but it would lead to substantial depopulation in some areas nonetheless. As did the inevitable collapse of some of East Germany’s rust belt industries, particularly in the mining, chemical and heavy industrial sectors. A government agency, the Treuhandanstalt (roughly: transition trust), was set up to find buyers or backers for viable industries, but its work over the succeeding years was marred with allegations of corruption and dodgy deals. In the midst of all this was born the Ossie and Wessie syndrome of mutual suspicion that Lothar de Maizière famously said would not vanish, ‘until the last person to be born under communism has died’.

  But as June 1990 came to an end and the death of the East German Mark approached, there was only a mood of celebration in Metzer Eck. On the morning of July 1st people queued outside banks and specially opened exchange offices to hand in their old notes for new. Alex had by then moved out and opened his new bar with some ‘business colleagues’ (who would later turn out to be dodgy characters looking for ways to launder Stasi slush funds), but he still came back for the party. The date for the final act of union itself was no longer far away. At Potsdamer Platz, prior to 1939 the bustling heart of Berlin but since 1961 a wasteland between the walls under which lay the buried ruins of Hitler’s Führerbunker, I bought from a kiosk set up by the West Berlin municipal government one of the multilingual hardboard signs that had been part of the Cold War landscape: ‘Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt den Amerkanischen Sektor. Attention, you are now leaving the American sector.’ It cost me DM5 (£2). I wish I had bought a dozen.

  By the beginning of October, the last bits of the legalistic jigsaw puzzle finally fell into place. In effect the German Democratic Republic was ceasing to exist, and its component states – Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern – were joining the Federal Republic of Germany, as was Berlin, reunified and a city-state in its own right. The word officially used was not ‘reunification’ but ‘unification’, to avoid any worries in Warsaw that there might be some hidden agenda that would eventually include restoring to Germany the lands ceded to Poland in 1945. To emphasise the point, a law had been passed in the parliament in Bonn – which only now were politicians beginning to realise would inevitably have to move ‘back’ to Berlin – formally acknowledging the ‘new’ eastern border of the Federal Republic as definitive and permanent.

  On October 2nd, the eve of formal unification, I met up with Alex on Un
ter den Linden and did a pub crawl that brought us at midnight to the Brandenburg Gate. On the steps of the Reichstag, a museum building since 1945 but which it was now clear would one day once again be the country’s parliament, stood every dignitary in Germany. Chief among them were Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose remit would now run over a country fifty per cent larger, and East Germany’s last leader Lothar de Maizière. They presided over the midnight raising of the ‘black-red-gold’ flag – without hammers or compasses – that had formerly represented West Germany and now represented all of it. Unsurprisingly Kohl, who would go down in history as the ‘unity chancellor’ despite a less than dignified departure from office several years later, described it as ‘the happiest day of my life’. The relatively nondescript De Maizière made the more memorable speech. He said: ‘We are one people, we are become one state. It is an hour of great joy. It is the end of some illusions. It is a farewell without tears.’

  In reality there were tears aplenty as the fireworks erupted in the night sky. Tears of happiness mostly, but not only: nobody believed unification would be a panacea for all ills, especially the now soaring unemployment rate in the East. Alex and I however embraced and drank a toast to the future, whatever it might bring. And then we continued the pub crawl. Our first stop was the Adler on Friedrichstrasse, the bar just on the Western side of Checkpoint Charlie where I had watched the crowd pour through on the night the Wall came down. To my surprise – and great delight – one of the men at the bar, still in uniform, was Yogi Bear, the East German border guard who had been a familiar face at the frontier for so many years. I bought him a beer, and we toasted one another. He told me his name was Uwe. Obviously he already knew mine: he had stamped my passport often enough. Putting a name for the first time to a face I had known for years was an odd and strangely poignant experience. I asked him what he was planning to do now. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, gesturing towards the empty control posts and the red-and-white striped vehicle barrier, now raised permanently, pointing upwards into the sky like an old-fashioned barber’s pole: ‘I guess I’m unemployed.’