Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  Jokes about him quickly began to appear in Berlin: ‘Q: What’s the difference between Krenz and Honecker ? A: Krenz has a gall bladder.’ Crude caricatures of him were carried on protest marches, many showing him as the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, with the caption ‘Why, Grandmother, what big teeth you have.’ The satirist Wolf Biermann, as usual, summed him up pithily as ‘a walking invitation to flee the Republic’. Igor Maximichev, the Soviet Union’s Deputy Ambassador to the GDR, had dealt with him frequently. ‘Egon Krenz was . . . devoid of any charismatic qualities. He wasn’t accepted by the people. He wasn’t attractive. He couldn’t find the words to speak to the people because he only spoke in Party jargon.’1 He showed what he was made of in his first address as the leader. ‘We . . . have no other interest than that of the people . . . Our historical optimism results from the knowledge of the ineluctability of the victory of socialism founded by Marx, Engels, Lenin.’ East Germans’ response was to take to the streets in even greater numbers, to call for Krenz to go; for the right to travel and for the Berlin Wall to come down. During the week after he succeeded Honecker more than a million people took part in a series of demonstrations in towns and cities throughout East Germany.

  This was the first day Krenz heard the full truth about the catastrophic financial position in which Honecker had left the country. The facts had been hidden from all but the regime’s economics tsar, Günter Mittag, the freebooting financier Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, Stasi chief Erich Mielke and the State Planning chief Gerhard Schürer. Now the rest of the leadership were told. They were left in a state of shock. Bankruptcy was staring them in the face within a few days. East Germany did not possess enough cash to pay interest payments due on foreign loans and was likely to default. A top secret ‘Report on the Economic Situation of the GDR, With Consequences’ was presented to Party chieftains by Schürer, who now revealed the unvarnished figures of the national accounts. The previous May Schürer had tried to persuade Honecker to think seriously about the debt crisis - ‘or we will become insolvent’ soon. But the leader refused to confront it, saying the time was not right. Both he and Mielke told him ‘to make sure you shut up about this’. Schürer remained silent, as he was ordered to do, but now he spoke up and declared that in truth the country was insolvent already.2

  All the propaganda about the GDR’s success was based on lies, the report said. The stark reality was that under ‘actually existing socialism’, nearly 60 per cent of East Germany’s entire industrial base could be written off as scrap and productivity in factories and mines was nearly 50 per cent behind the West’s. Most damning of all, debt had increased twelvefold in the last fifteen years to DM 123 billion and was rising at around DM 10 billion a year - ‘extraordinarily high for a country like the GDR’, said Schürer. He pointed out the illegal decep tions that were required to hide the facts from Western governments and banks, the short-term loans taken out to pay interest on long-term credits. If the financial markets realised how brazenly the GDR was lying about its assets, loans from the West would cease instantly. It was probably too late for the country to stop borrowing. Schürer said that if some radical action to reduce debt had been taken five years earlier, that might have helped. But now things had gone too far. ‘Just to avoid further indebtedness would mean a lowering next year of living standards by 25 per cent to 30 per cent, and make the GDR ungovernable. ’3

  Krenz and the others looked aghast at this. Their chances of political survival were slim at best. That would reduce to zero if one of their first actions was to announce painful austerity measures. But the immediate problem was critical: how to raise the money to meet the next interest payment? ‘It is absolutely necessary to negotiate with the FRG government financial assistance of two to three billion Marks as a short-term loan beyond the current limits,’ they were told. If they could not raise it within two weeks there ‘could be a damaging confrontation with the International Monetary Fund’. Once that happened, the GDR’s reputation as a creditworthy nation would disappear. Schürer and his team of economists came up with a bold and desperate idea: in effect, they proposed to ‘sell’ the Berlin Wall and use it as a bargaining chip for more loans. ‘We should put the currently existing form of the border on the table,’ the report said. It was an extension of the sale of people to the West, which the regime had been doing for years. The West Germans may be prepared to go along with it, Krenz was told. Reunification would be ruled out in any negotiations, or even a confederation, but there could be promises of much more co-operation on a range of issues. ‘In order to make the Federal Republic conscious of the GDR’s serious intentions, it must be declared that such conditions could be created, as early as this century, that will make the border that exists between the two German states superfluous.’4

  Krenz and the others embraced the idea enthusiastically and wanted to approach the West Germans immediately. Who better to handle such a sensitive political and financial transaction than the regime’s colourful but utterly discreet wheeler-dealer Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, who had so often before done delicate business with the West Germans? He was ordered to head for Bonn, with the utmost secrecy, to sound out the FRG’s government about the deal. Initially, the West Germans were not wildly enthusiastic. Schalck-Golodkowski talked to Rudolf Seiters, head of Helmut Kohl’s Chancellery, who laid out strict terms for any agreement. Neither he nor Kohl believed the East Germans were serious so he told Schalck-Golodkowski that, even before detailed discussions could begin, the Communist Party had to relinquish its monopoly on power, allow independent political parties and hold guaranteed free elections. ‘Then Chancellor Kohl would be prepared to talk about a completely new dimension to our economic assistance.’ Schalck-Golodkowski said he doubted business could be done on that basis, but he would return to Berlin and see what the Party bosses would say.5

  The next day, 1 November, Krenz went to the Kremlin to pledge fealty to Mikhail Gorbachev. It was an awkward meeting. The Soviets had wanted a different figure to succeed Honecker. Gorbachev neither liked nor respected Krenz, who was far too closely associated with his predecessor and had a reputation as too obsequious and untrustworthy. The Soviet leader, and the KGB, would have preferred the Dresden Party chief, Hans Modrow, to take over in East Germany. By GDR standards the silver-haired, witty and subtle fifty-one-year-old Modrow was a reformer and an able administrator. He was one of a few Communist officials openly to disagree with Honecker, who subsequently sidelined him to posts in the provinces. He had excellent contacts in the Soviet Union, though, which is why Gorbachev had come to hear of such a relatively obscure East German Party apparatchik. The news Krenz brought to Moscow troubled Gorbachev greatly. The German told Gorbachev about the GDR’s financial crisis, in the hope of touching him for a loan. The Soviet leader was silent for a moment and then declared, ‘I’m astonished. We had no idea here. Are these figures secret? We had never imagined things had become so precarious. How could they have got so bad?’

  Krenz said he had not known the details, nor had most of his colleagues. All the figures were a closely guarded secret of Honecker and Mittag, who ran the GDR economy themselves, he told Gorbachev. ‘There’s no mistake about the figures. Just to pay the interest will require US$ 4.5 billion, around two-thirds of our foreign currency earnings.’ He then made a direct plea for financial help. ‘After all, the GDR is in a sense the child of the Soviet Union and one must acknowledge paternity of one’s children.’ Gorbachev looked pained. He said: ‘We are in no position to offer assistance, not in the USSR’s present condition.’ Then he told Krenz that his only choice was to be more open with his own people - ‘who we can see are leaving in their thousands’ - and tell them that they cannot continue to live in the manner they had become used to, above their means. Krenz again asked for financial support, or the regime might not survive. Gorbachev said he should not rely on the Soviets for help.

  Krenz warned that there could be trouble if mass demonstrations on the Leipzig scale began in
Berlin. He said: ‘Measures must be taken to prevent any attempt at a mass breakthrough across the Wall. That would be awful, because then the police would have to intervene and certain elements of a state of emergency would have to be introduced.’ Gorbachev took that as an attempt at political blackmail and told Krenz plainly that he and his colleagues could not expect to be bailed out militarily by the Soviets. ‘You will have to solve the problem of what to do about mass emigration of your people and about the Wall. But if you don’t do it soon there will be big problems for you, from your own people.’ When Krenz left, Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser, Anatoli Chernyaev, quipped, ‘There goes the Committee for the Dissolution of the GDR.’ But Gorbachev was in a serious mood. Soon afterwards he issued a reminder to his generals that Soviet troops must not, under any circumstances, become involved in conflicts between the regime in Berlin and East German citizens. ‘This is an absolute priority,’ he told aides. ‘I don’t want anything to start there by accident involving our soldiers.’6

  Krenz returned from Moscow empty-handed, but with no intention of resigning, or of dissolving the GDR. On the day he was in the USSR, the government reopened the East German border with Czechoslovakia, which Honecker had closed three weeks earlier in an attempt to stem the flow of the Exodus. Predictably, huge numbers headed in their Trabis towards the Czech border. The regime in Prague did not want another refugee crisis on their soil so it simply let them go straight on their way west through Czechoslovakia’s frontier with the FRG. More than 50,000 people left East Germany along that route in three days. There were now two breaches through the Iron Curtain, through Hungary, and, for East German citizens, through Czechoslovakia. Yet Krenz was determined that the Wall would stay. ‘I can see no circumstances under which the Wall will be removed,’ he declared at the beginning of November. ‘It is a bulwark against Western subversion.’ Nor was he willing to concede free elections or to give up the Party’s monopoly on power.7

  In Poland there had been a Solidarity-led government for more than two months. In Hungary, the Communist Party had ceased to be at the end of September. Members had meekly voted it out of existence and formed a new Socialist Party. Its monopoly power was removed, most of its money and property was sequestered and it was banned from organising in the workplace, where much of the Communists’ power had existed. Under an agreement with the opposition in Budapest reached six weeks earlier, there would be democratic elections held next March, which a right-wing party was heavily tipped to win comfortably. On 23 October, Hungary had officially ceased to be a People’s Republic. It was renamed, simply, a Republic, and there was no mention in a new constitution of the Communist Party retaining a ‘leading role’ in the political life of the nation. Yet in East Germany the regime was still offering the people elections on the basis of one-party rule, a poll which a Party resolution stated ‘can be democratic but must not entail opening the door to bourgeois party pluralism’.

  Even some of the leaders of the regime felt a sense of unreality as they met now. Vast demonstrations were taking place in most towns almost every day and it had become clear they would not be suppressed by violence. The Party leaders had lost the will to fight for power, and the strength to govern, but they still spoke like Communists, especially Egon Krenz. In a cynical resolution on 4 November, some leading Party figures were deputed to meet the opposition and were ‘instructed to appear to differ from the official Party line in order to gain the trust and confidence of the population . . . Comrades must be prepared not to proclaim the words of the Party, but rather to give the appearance of being thoughtful and realistic in order to win back our credibility.’8

  The Party ‘is not prepared to be dictated to by the Street’, the leaders resolved on the morning of Saturday 4 November. Yet later that afternoon in Alexanderplatz, around 700,000 Berliners tested that resolve. A huge placard in the middle of the square was painted with the slogan ‘Wir Sind Das Volk’ (‘We are the People’). The atmosphere in the country had changed, suddenly, over the last few days. It was more optimistic and good-humoured, still angry but less resentful. ‘As for the opposition,’ said Ulrike Poppe, one of the organisers of the demonstration, ‘we had changed. We were no longer prepared to look for a dialogue. Now it was confrontation, not with violence . . . but we were questioning their authority. Now we were posing the question of who shall have power.’9

  This was the most extraordinary of all the big rallies of die Wende, ‘the Turn’. For the first time prominent figures in the regime appeared on the platform along with founders of opposition groups and dissidents. When Stefan Heym, whose books had been banned in East Germany for the last decade, appeared and declared ‘Dear friends and citizens. It is as if someone has opened a window after all these years of spiritual . . . stagnation’, he received rapturous applause. Soon afterwards, Günter Schabowski, the Berlin Party chief, tried calmly to assure the crowd that new liberal measures were on the way. He was a cheerful, ebullient figure, attractive in many ways, with a reputation as a reformer. But he was not the acceptable face of communism. He was loudly booed off the stage. One of the regime’s best-known apologists, the officially approved writer Christa Wolf, was heard politely, but with little warmth.

  At this time, throughout the Soviet bloc, many Communists with dubious past records, but with high ambitions, were hastily repackaging themselves as secret reformers who had always worked behind the scenes from within to change the system. The most bizarre of the born-again democrats was the spy chief Markus Wolf, who until the previous year had been head of the Stasi’s foreign intelligence service, where he had scored many famous coups and was admired as a master of the espionage black arts. A man of impressive chutzpah, he imagined he could use the crowd for his political advantage and emerge clean and unharmed from the wreckage that he realised would engulf his country. When he stood up to speak, the crowd saw through him, as his own unintentionally comic account of his performance makes clear. ‘I tried to persuade . . . the rally and the millions more watching on television not to resort to violence, but as I spoke, protesting the atmosphere of incrimination that made every member of the state security organisations scapegoats of the policies of the former leadership, I was dimly aware that parts of the crowd were hissing at me. They were in no mood to be lectured on reasonable behaviour by a former General of the Ministry for State Security.’10

  Mielke had kept his position - as a reward for his part in the conspiracy against Honecker. But now, he thought, it was not so much a question of saving the state as saving himself. Anger against the Stasi was openly shown for the first time. Mielke had given up trying to persuade his colleagues to fight back against their opponents, but he warned the other Party leaders that big demonstrations were forming outside Stasi buildings, and some of them were looking ominous. He told them: ‘People are shouting things like “Burn the building down”, “Out with the Stasi swine”, “Kill them” and “The knives are sharpened, the nooses are prepared”.’ On 7 November Mielke sent secret orders to provincial Stasi chiefs to destroy as many sensitive documents as they could, especially information that might identify informers. But it would require a Herculean effort. Thanks mainly to Mielke and his mania for keeping everything on paper, the volume of files was immense. Many heads of districts and departments burned a few files about agents in sensitive positions, but ignored Mielke’s instruction, thinking it was now ‘every man for himself’. Many officers held on to files, thinking they could be of advantage to them later.

  Krenz replaced his entire government on the same day Mielke’s order to burn the files was issued. Modrow was made Prime Minister. All the principal leadership figures in the Party, apart from Krenz, resigned the following day. Yet none of these measures relieved the pressure on the regime. As always in East Germany, emigration was the key issue. Krenz had promised a new travel law, but when it was published on 6 November it was treated with public derision. It allowed people to travel for thirty days a year, as long as they had permissi
on from the Interior Ministry. But the process would take a month, and people were allowed to take with them only DM 15 once a year, about enough for a beer and a sandwich in West Berlin. So hundreds of thousands of people in the German Demonstrating Republic went out on the streets again, in Leipzig, Berlin and Dresden, chanting ‘Around the World in Thirty Days - but how to pay?’ Krenz knew he must devise something better. He ordered four officials from the Interior Ministry, including two Stasi colonels, to work on more plausible new visa regulations to deal with the immediate crisis. And he demanded urgent haste. He gave them less than two days.

  FORTY-FIVE

  THE WALL COMES TUMBLING DOWN

  East Berlin, Thursday 9 November 1989

  THE HELPLESS EAST GERMAN GOVERNMENT opened the Berlin Wall by mistake. It was not meant to happen - at least not today, and not in the way that it did. ‘In one of the most colossal administrative errors in . . . history,’ as one leading diplomat put it, the East German state effectively ceased to exist at around 10.45 p.m. It seemed a fairly normal late autumn morning in Berlin, grey, a little misty, around 10°C, with a slight smell of sulphur in the air from the pollution that often overwhelmed the city when an easterly wind was blowing. There had been an atmosphere of crisis in East Germany for many weeks now, but nothing seemed to suggest that this would be the critical moment. The regime was limping along, improvising day by day. The people were in permanent revolt - but in an orderly fashion. They did their eight hours’ work first, and made revolution later, in the evenings. Not a single day’s production was lost during die Wende.