by Geert Mak
Hans Krijt in Prague: ‘You could see the old system crumbling, in that last year, but we were simply expecting it to transform itself into capitalism with a human face. In early October 1989 the West German embassy in Prague was suddenly stormed by thousands of East Germans seeking asylum in its grounds. The Iron Curtain there was no higher than a garden wall with a fence on top, and rumour had it that you could reach the West via that escape route. In the end, it turned out to be true. We lived quite close to the embassy, and when we went for a walk in the evening we would see the streets full of abandoned Wartburgs and Trabants, prams, even suitcases that had turned out to be too big to drag along. I looked into one of those abandoned cars: there was a teddy bear on the back seat, forgotten in the rush. I thought about the panic that child must have felt.’
Richard von Weizsäcker: ‘And then, in autumn 1989, things started going very fast. On 9 October, after a church service, 300,000 people took part in a silent demonstration in Leipzig. The Russian soldiers remained in their barracks. One month later, on 4 November, at least 600,000 demonstrators gathered on Alexanderplatz. It was an incredible mix of political and other figures, from the writer Christa Wolf to the top officials of the SED. But even at that point I still had absolutely no idea that the wall would fall within five days, and without bloodshed.
‘The day after it collapsed, on Friday, 10 November, the mayor of Berlin and I were the first to make a ritual crossing of the Glienicke Bridge. But after that I couldn't stop, I walked all over town, everyone was flabbergasted. Finally I ended up at Potsdamer Platz. Today it's been completely built up, but back then it was still a vacant lot with the border running through it. There was a little group of people standing on the western side, they were wondering whether you could cross, and I said: “I want to see for myself!” So I walked across the open ground until I got to the barracks of the DDR border guards. A lieutenant from the Volkspolizei came out, recognised me, saluted and said calmly: “Mr President, I would like to report that there is nothing special to report.”’
1989 was one of those moments when everything seems to happen at once, an annus mirabilis. Within two years, nine communist dictatorships collapsed, including that of the Soviet Union itself. In January 1989 the Polish independent trade union Solidarity was granted official status: for the first time, legal opposition became possible in the Eastern Bloc. Lech Walşesa, the great trade union leader, signed the agreement with a pen bearing the portrait of Karol Wojtyla, a tribute to the Polish Pope John Paul II who played a seminal role in dismantling communism in Central and Eastern Europe.
Elections were held in Hungary in March, with non-communists candidates permitted to stand for the first time in forty years. The regime received a solid trouncing. In May, Czechoslovakian dissidents demanded free elections as well. Václav Havel was released from prison. On 27 June, in a symbolic ceremony at Sopron, the new Hungarian foreign minister and his Austrian counterpart jointly cut the cords of the Iron Curtain. The guard towers and barricades blocking the border were swiftly taken down.
In the same month, Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl signed an agreement in Bonn, ratifying the right of all European states to determine ‘their own political system’. It came as no surprise to the leaders of the communist countries: as far back as November 1986, Gorbachev had stressed at a closed meeting of the Comecon that the Soviet Union could no longer fend for them. In the years to come they would have to learn to stand on their own feet. And in summer 1988 he repeated that message in Moscow: as far as he was concerned, the era of Soviet interventions was past.
In August, a chain of two million people joined hands to link together the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; a little later, hundreds of demonstrators broke through the Austro-Hungarian border at Sopronpuszta. Before long, at least 120,000 East Germans had crossed Hungary to the West. A few thousand more refugees escaped via the West German embassy in Prague: they were finally allowed to travel in sealed trains to the West by way of Dresden.
Meanwhile, Rumanian leader Nicolae Ceauşsescu was feverishly calling his communist colleagues: wasn't it about time the Warsaw Pact intervened in Poland? Erich Honecker in particular liked the idea, but Gorbachev vetoed the plan right away. In September a non-communist government was installed in Poland, the first in Eastern Europe since 1945. A moderate manifesto, calling for open dialogue on political reforms and signed by thirty church leaders and intellectuals, was published in the DDR by a group calling itself the New Forum. Later in September, the Slovenian parliament decided to change the constitution to allow for the country's secession: that was the start of the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation.
On 7 October, the fortieth anniversary of the creation of East Germany was celebrated solemnly in Berlin. For the last time, the army goose-stepped past the ailing, seventy-year-old Honecker. That evening a huge torchlight parade moved down Unter den Linden. The honorary guest, Gorbachev, described the scene in his memoirs: ‘Bands played, drums rattled, searchlights. When the torches were lit one saw – probably the most impressive thing of all – thousands and thousands of young faces. The participants in the march, I heard later, had been carefully selected.’ That latter fact made it all the more amazing when, from within the ranks of this party youth marching past the leaders in time-honoured fashion with portraits and red flags, slogans and chants were suddenly heard:‘Perestroika! Gorbachev! Help us!’ Polish party secretary Mieczyslaw Rakowski turned to Gorbachev in excitement: ‘Mikhail Sergeyevich, do you hear what they are shouting? “Gorbachev, save us!” And these are the activists of the party itself! This is the end!’ The same thing happened later at the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, where thousands of young people had gathered to see the Soviet leader: ‘Gorbachev, help us!’ When the demonstrations were over, he warned his DDR colleagues that their rigid stance could prove fatal: ‘In politics, he who arrives too late will be punished by life itself.’
In the same week, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party voted to disband itself: the new leaders had no desire to be associated with the ‘crimes, mistakes and incorrect ideas and messages’ of the last forty years. The party organ Népszabadság (People's Freedom) appeared for the first time without the slogan ‘Workers of the world, unite’. Meanwhile, Poland opened its borders to East German refugees in transit. In Moscow a government spokesman told foreign journalists that the Brezhnev doctrine of military interventions had been replaced by ‘the Sinatra doctrine: “My Way”.’
Honecker stepped down on 18 October, eleven days after the celebration of East Germany's fortieth anniversary. His successor, Egon Krenz, was horrified when he encountered the financial shambles of the DDR. According to a report from the central planning agency, the country subsisted almost entirely on loans from the West. Stopping them would mean ‘the immediate lowering of the standard of living by twenty-five to thirty per cent, and would make the DDR ungovernable’.
In his public appearances, Krenz used an entirely new jargon, peppered with terms such as ‘openness’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘change’. But the popular movement could no longer be stopped. Citizens’ forums were being set up all over the country. The demonstrations grew with each passing week, from 120,000 demonstrators in Leipzig on 16 October to half a million Berliners on 4 November. ‘Gorby!’ they shouted, and ‘Wir sind das Volk!’ and sometimes even ‘Deutschland, einig Vaterland!’ The demonstration in Berlin was broadcast live on East German television. The writer Stefan Heym said: ‘It is as though a window has been thrown open!’
On 7 November, the East German government was trying desperately to contact Moscow: the pressure at the borders had become too great, the relaxation of travel restrictions to West Germany could no longer be avoided. But the Soviet leaders were unreachable; they were too busy with the festivities surrounding the anniversary of the October Revolution. That day the East German council of ministers stepped down, followed the next day by the Politburo of the SED.
On Thursday e
vening, 9 November, the DDR regime decided to expand the possibilities for its citizens to go abroad, although border documents were still required and travellers had to meet certain criteria. Afterwards, the general secretary of the central committee of the SED, Günter Schabowski, held a chaotic press conference that was broadcast live. Without having thoroughly read the minutes of the meeting, he announced that East German citizens were now allowed to travel abroad without prior permission.‘Starting when?’ a journalist asked. Schabowski:‘Starting immediately, I think.’ It took a moment to register, but then everyone realised what this meant: the wall had fallen.
East Berlin clergyman and opposition leader Werner Krätschell, along with his twenty-year-old daughter Konstanze and her girlfriend Astrid, were among the first to drive across the border at Bornholmer Strasse. The notes he made that day read: ‘Dream and reality become confused. The border guards let us through. The girls cry. They huddle together on the back seat, as though expecting an air raid. We drive across the strip which, for the last twenty-eight years, has been a death zone. And suddenly we see West Berliners. They wave, cheer, shout. I drive down Osloer Strasse to my old school, where I received my diploma in 1960. Out of the blue, Astrid asks me to stop the car at the next junction. All she wants is to put her foot down on the street. To touch the ground. Armstrong stepping onto the moon. She had never been in the West before.’
The dramatic images of that night were seen around the world. But the next day, if only for a moment, the Kremlin seriously considered restoring the old situation by force. Four of Gorbachev's closest advisers urged him to have the Soviet army intervene. In their eyes, an open border posed an unallowable risk. But Gorbachev understood that any attempt to turn back the hands of time would lead only to a head-on conflict with the United States and West Germany. That was a conflict he dearly wished to avoid. He was still optimistic about the inner resiliency of the system: the transition to greater freedom and openness, he believed, would strengthen communism rather than weaken it.
And the communist regimes fell like dominoes. The dissident movement in Prague grew each day; in late November Václav Havel and Alexander Dubžcek stood before a cheering crowd of a quarter of a million people. Stasi offices all over East Germany were attacked and rifled. In Sofia, 50,000 Bulgarians demonstrated against the Communist Party's hegemony. In Bucharest, Ceauşsescu and his wife Elena were booed by the crowd, riots broke out, and the Rumanian Army stopped following orders.
Meanwhile, an unknown KGB agent in Dresden, Vladimir Putin, had tried to pile so many documents into a burning stove that the thing exploded.
Chapter FIFTY-NINE
Niesky
IN THE FAR EASTERN CORNER OF THE FORMER DDR, CLOSE TO THE Polish border, lies the town of Niesky. Everything here looks brand new: the houses are freshly plastered, the streets have a new layer of asphalt, the big town square is dotted with hanging baskets. I'm here to visit my old friends, Eckart and Inge Winkler, good acquaintances from the turbulent years after the Wende of 1989. They still live in the same flat on the edge of town, on Plittstrasse, and from their living room you can see the edge of the forest that stretches out for more than fifty kilometres, far into Poland. ‘Das Tal der Ahnungslosen’, the valley of the unsuspecting, is what East German intellectuals called this corner of the country where no Western television station could penetrate.
Eckart is a construction engineer. He has his own design agency these days, his youngest employees barely remember the DDR. In his free time he is the pastor of the local New Apostolic Congregation. The members of his church are as active and lively as ever, but the number of young people is decreasing: they are all leaving for the West. This year he even lost his organist, a wonderful boy; he found a job in the West and he was gone.
During the last decade, Eckart and Inge's flat has been completely revamped. Today, in 1999, Inge no longer does the laundry by hand. Central heating has been installed, a dishwasher is humming away in the kitchen and Eckart no longer has to get up at 5.30 to stoke the boiler with lignite. But they still don't have a television: they don't like trash coming into their home.
This was the same attitude that kept them going throughout the DDR era: sitting in their flat with a good book, they could shut out the rest of the world. Now the big yellow tile stove has disappeared, but I can still see that corner of the living room in my mind's eye: the stove radiating its gentle heat, their daughter Gudrun – home from school for a brief vacation – sitting against it and studying, their granddaughter Elisabeth playing on the floor, their son Burckhard tinkering in his room, their other daughter Alund making a doll from an old handkerchief and a tennis ball. Alund's husband, Jens, was a conscript in the army.
Ingrid worked in a paediatrics clinic, Eckart worked for the Christoph Unmack construction firm. They did not have a lot of money, but the rent was low, the company saw to a warm meal every day, and the state guaranteed a secure existence.
It was late February 1990 when I first stayed with them. The border with the West had been thrown open barely three months earlier, the DDR was still intact; it was right before the first free elections for the Volkskammer, and a colleague and I were putting together a radio portrait of the Wende in this forgotten corner of Germany. Around 5.30 a.m., at first light, the streets were blue with the smoke from hundreds of stoves and furnaces. A little procession of greyish-green Trabants put-putted across the big Zinzendorfplatz, the same square where the SA had marched in the 1930s, where the Soviet soldiers were buried after 1945, and whence – long, long ago, people said – the aroma of lime blossom could be smelled ‘all the way to Berlin’.
The city had about 12,000 inhabitants in those days, and most things revolved around the big Christoph Unmack works, which manufactured railway cars, prefab wooden houses and more. The few shops in the square sold carrots, cabbage and grey writing paper.
The town itself was founded in 1724 by Moravian Brothers, led by Ludwig von Zinzendorf. Those pious refugees from Bohemia and Moravia also gave it its name: Niesky, meaning ‘humble’ – and that is how life there remained; quiet, sober, modest. Yet the collapse of the wall precipitated a great many changes: enthusiasts set up a branch of the New Forum opposition movement, a few hundred people held a candlelight march on Zinzendorfplatz, and in early December the fifty local Stasi agents were almost literally chased out of town by an angry crowd.
After that, things happened quite quickly. The price of a new Trabant dropped by fifty per cent in three months. The neighbours purchased a satellite dish and began watching only West German television. Eckart, who had been required until recently to ask permission from his bosses for every international telephone call he made, could suddenly cross the border whenever he pleased. Gudrun already had plans to visit family in Canada that summer. ‘It was as though we'd been living in a scary fairy tale all that time,’ she said later. ‘We were as happy as rabbits that had been let out of their cage for the first time in years. But after we had danced in the field for a day, something else suddenly occurred to us: what happens if a fox shows up?’
They were exciting times, and our unexpected arrival was yet another sign that major changes were on their way. We had brought wine with us, and coffee and tea, and fresh fruit and Dutch chocolate, and Eckart talked about days gone by and his countless skirmishes with the Apparatus. Before the Wende, he had been required to report every rehearsal of the church choir. The second-hand plastic paint buckets from Christoph Unmack, extremely popular among the locals for use in their kitchen gardens, first had to be dipped in grey paint to cover up the gaudy Western labels. When Eckart heard about that, he stormed into the office of his technical manager – a well known Stasi agent – and shouted: ‘You people are no longer a party of workers, you're a party of bucket-dippers!’
He never heard anything more about it, but Gudrun – who was one of the best pupils at her school – ran into difficulties when she wanted to go to university. Eckart: ‘As long as you don't forget that: it
wasn't Erich Honecker who did that, it was the work of thousands of little people together, all making each other's lives miserable.’
The revolution in Niesky in spring 1990 was subtly visible in the mast-head of the Sächsische Zeitung. For as long as anyone could remember, the local paper had been falling on the Winkler's mat under the title Organ der Berzirksleitung Dresden der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschland, but from early December 1989 it was simply a Sozialistische Tageszeitung, and from January 1990 the paper called itself the Tageszeitung für Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur. In that same month appeared the first advertisements for trips to Paris: ‘No need to eat at expensive restaurants. Simple meals will be served on the bus, and can even be paid for with DDR marks.’
Niesky lived breathlessly, as though a fairy godmother had promised all the town's inhabitants three wishes: free travel, a solid Opel, and all party nabobs thrown overboard. In the final weeks before the first free elections, however, a certain bitterness crept into the flat on Plittstrasse. Eckart had a good memory, and it was now working to his disadvantage. His managers, who had begun calling themselves ‘entrepreneurs’, were the same men who had recently insisted that all colourful plastic buckets be painted grey. For years many of the neophyte CDU candidates had toed Honecker's party line, enthusiastically and without question. They were Wendehälse, weathervanes. Eckart considered this the ‘selling out’ of everything for which they had all worked so hard. Inge: ‘During the demonstrations in November there was a pride in our own country unlike anything we had felt for years. We dreamed of something between capitalism and socialism, the best of both worlds. But when the West German politicians began interfering in our elections, it was all over. They're much better talkers, those Wessis.’