Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  The country was haemorrhaging people. They were leaving through Czechoslovakia, which, unable to cope with the volume, was now threatening to close its side of the border with the GDR. The exodus of East Germans was inspiring unrest among Czechs against their own Stalinist leaders. People in Prague and Bratislava were watching events in Berlin with eager anticipation.

  Opposition figures in the GDR were worried about the number of their compatriots who were leaving. There were the usual jokes - ‘Will the last one left, please turn off the light’ - but now basic services were becoming severely stretched. In Berlin some schools had closed because so many teachers and children had gone. Hospitals were short of doctors. This morning Neues Deutschland carried an urgent appeal by moderate, dissident voices - usually castigated in the paper’s pages as dangerous counter-revolutionaries - asking people to remain in East Germany because they were needed: ‘We are deeply uneasy. We see the thousands who are daily leaving the country. We know that failed policies have fuelled mistrust in our community. We are aware of how helpless words are against mass movements, but we have no other means but our words. Those who leave diminish our hope. We beg you, stay in your homeland, stay with us.’1

  Officials - including the two Stasi men - had worked overnight to prepare a new travel law, which the regime hoped would be a release valve. It had to be rewritten at the last minute because originally it covered only people who were seeking permanent emigration, not those who wanted to cross the border temporarily to see their relatives in West Germany, or take brief holidays. The final draft did not declare the Wall open. It stated that anybody with a passport and visa could leave permanently or for a short visit via any border crossing point between East Germany and either West Berlin or the Federal Republic. East Germans would still have to apply for an exit permit at a pass office, so it was designed to ensure some measure of state control. It said clearly that the new law would come into effect on Friday 10 November.

  Krenz saw the wording for the first time late on Thursday morning. He gave it a cursory read and seemed content. He saw nothing in it that could possibly mean any East German citizen could go to a checkpoint at the Berlin Wall and be allowed through. People still had to apply to a bureaucrat for permission to go. He was not ecstatic about the proposal. But he thought that it would buy time, defuse the emigration issue, and that next day there would be orderly queues at the pass offices grateful to Egon Krenz for permitting them to travel to the West. He discussed the proposed new law with the top Party chiefs at around 4 p.m. at the Communist Party headquarters in Werderscher Markt. He told them that the Russians would go along with it - though he had not informed them about any of the details - and he thought that it was the best they could produce under the time pressure. ‘No matter what we do in this situation, we’ll be making the wrong move,’ he said. Then, as he recalled later: ‘I read it out sentence by sentence, read it slowly, read it emphatically so that nobody could say they didn’t understand it.’ It was accepted unanimously.2

  At around 5.40 p.m. Günter Schabowski walked into Krenz’s office. For the past two and a half weeks since Honecker was removed, Schabowski had been holding daily press conferences, as part of the GDR Communists’ new-found glasnost policy. He was usually a reliable performer, safe, fluent and relatively quick-witted. He had not been at any of the meetings earlier in the day that approved the new travel regulations, though he was aware they were being discussed. He told Krenz he was shortly heading off to the press conference and asked whether there was anything he thought should be raised. Krenz handed him the full text of the decree and a press release about it. He recalled: ‘Krenz showed me these papers and said “Here, friend, this is something that will do us a power of good” . . . I took it along, skimmed through it again during the drive to the press conference and put it away amidst my other papers.’3

  He arrived at Berlin’s International Press Centre on Mohrenstrasse just before six, exhausted. He was beginning to feel the tension of the last few weeks during which he was surviving on little sleep, little food and lots of adrenaline. Although he had now appeared at a dozen of these press conferences, he was still a little nervous about performing before so many Western journalists and television cameras. Proceedings started punctually at six and most of it was concerned with dull, mundane matters about administrative reforms and ministerial changes in the government. It was nearly an hour before Schabowski got around to the travel regulations and he began to read out the text of the decree, which he explained ‘would make it possible for every citizen of the GDR to leave the country using border crossing points of the GDR’. At this point, he had no idea of the storm that was about to break. He was asked to clarify and he put his half-moon spectacles back on his nose and began reading the press release: ‘So, private travel to foreign countries can be applied for without presentation of existing visa requirements, or proving the need to travel or familial relationships. The travel authorisations will be issued within a short period of time . . . The responsible departments for passport and registration control of the People’s Police district authorities . . . are instructed to issue visas for permanent exit without delay’.

  This was still unclear. Many journalists have subsequently claimed that they were the one who asked the crucial question that breached the Berlin Wall. But by general consent now it was the American NBC network’s Tom Brokaw who, amidst a gaggle of noise, inquired “When will this new regulation come into effect?’. Schabowski was sweating profusely at this point and was uncertain. He checked the papers in front of him and then scrambled around in the other sheaves of documents he was holding. After a few seconds’ pause he replied: ‘As far as I know, that is, uh . . . Immediately, without delay.’ He had not seen that the regulation came into effect next day - or that the news was supposed to have been embargoed until the next afternoon.4 Various colourful and intriguing conspiracy theories have been suggested to explain Schabowski’s misstatement: he was paid by the CIA, paid by West German media corporations, paid by rogue elements in the Kremlin. ‘No one within the upper reaches of the Communist Party could believe it was a simple cock-up,’ one SED official in charge of drawing up the travel law said. Yet that is what it was.

  Immediately the press conference finished just after 7 p.m., Schabowski agreed to a live interview with Brokaw. He was still bemused and uncertain about the new regulations and during the interview he asked his assistant to show him the text once more. But he made the same announcement, that it came into force ‘immediately’. Brokaw asked specifically: ‘Is it possible for people to go through the Wall?’ Schabowski said: ‘It is possible for them to go through the border.’5 Quickly, Schabowski’s hesitations and evident confusion were edited out. By 7.30 p.m., news agencies throughout the world carried a line about the border opening in Berlin but West German TV was strangely hesitant for the first few minutes. ZDF’s Today carried an item about new travel arrangements in East Germany as its sixth item. Then, at 8 p.m., West Germany’s ARD, watched by millions in the East, announced that ‘this is a historic day’. News anchor Hans Joachim Friedrichs, widely trusted on both sides of the frontier, declared: ‘The GDR is opening its borders . . . The gates in the Berlin Wall stand open.’

  By the time the broadcast was finished scores of East Germans had arrived at the main border posts to see if the reports were true. The biggest crowd was at the Bornholmer Strasse, in the north of the city, which was within walking distance of a large residential area. Some apartment buildings overlooked the checkpoint into the French sector of Berlin. The border guard commander at the checkpoint, Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger, had not seen the press conference and had heard only fleeting snatches of the news. When people turned up at the gate and demanded the right to travel ‘as Schabowski said we can’, he rang his superiors for advice. ‘I told them that it was not possible because according to our regulations they needed a passport and a visa, without which they couldn’t go. I told them to come back the following day and a
few went away.’ But most stayed and waited, shouting ‘Open the gate, open the gate. The Wall must go.’6

  These were not people with thoughts of emigration. ‘We just wanted to see whether we could go through, what life was like on the other side,’ said Rüdigger Rosendahl, a chemical researcher, who lived near the checkpoint. ‘People were saying to the guards, “It’s OK, we won’t go for long, we just want to see the Ku’damm, then we’ll be back.” The important thing was that we were not scared. Things had changed here in the last few weeks. For the first time our habitual fear of people in a uniform was gone. It was extraordinary, to see people arguing with soldiers and Stasi officers, demanding to be given the rights that we were told we now possessed.’7

  After about half an hour Jäger was given orders which showed that the harsh, deceitful and arrogant face of East German officialdom had not yet disappeared. He was told to seek out the ‘more aggressive’ people at the checkpoint, note down their names and let them through with a special stamp on the photograph. This would mean that they could not return home to East Germany. The state was, in effect, withdrawing their citizenship. Jäger obeyed, and took the precaution of ‘allowing a few “non aggressive” people to leave too’. At around 9.20 p.m. between 250 and 300 people were let through, but thousands more behind them were pressing at the gate, becoming angrier as they waited.

  Three kilometres away, at Checkpoint Charlie, one of the great symbols of the Cold War, recognisable from a myriad of spy movies, the mood was equally tense. This was in the centre of the commercial part of Berlin, but there was a U-Bahn metro station just a few metres from the checkpoint where throngs of people were arriving. When they left the metro station, they were funnelled along a narrow lane. It was the checkpoint into the American-controlled sector of Berlin, one of the few places where soldiers of the US army and an East bloc army, still trained to see each other as mortal enemies, could stare into each others’ eyes. Colonel Günter Möll, the border guard commander at Checkpoint Charlie, was frantically calling around army command for orders, but was continually told to wait. All he had been told was that some reinforcements would be sent and he was to maintain order. By 9.30 there was a crowd of about 2,000 people in a narrow street. ‘I deployed the reinforcements in a line to hold the people back,’ said Möll. The American commander looking at them from the other side, Major Bernie Godek, was ‘very tense’. He said: ‘They were acting as they normally would. They stood back from the white line - separating both sides - in typical formation, with cold faces. They seemed almost to be not bothered about what was going on in front of them. We had seen . . . that before, but we were concerned about potential developments because we didn’t know what they were going to do.’8

  Nor, at first, did Egon Krenz and the other Party leaders. They were taken entirely by surprise. They had not thought that anything they decided earlier that day should start a stampede of people to the border. Krenz retreated, alone, into his office at Communist Party headquarters and waited. Reports came in that all the six border checkpoints in the city were besieged. He could see that trying to hold back the tide was impossible, but he gave no instructions of any kind. East German TV was making regular desperate announcements: ‘At the request of many citizens, we inform you again of the new travel regulations . . . trips have to be applied for.’ The announcement was ignored. East Berliners understood instinctively that something extraordinary and wonderful was going to happen. ‘We had been told on the Western TV that the wall was down,’ said Rosendahl, standing at the Bornholmer Strasse gates. ‘We could see that in reality it wasn’t, but I knew the momentum was unstoppable, that we wouldn’t have to wait for long.’9

  By 10.30 p.m. at least 20,000 people were crammed behind the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint. Many had brought their cars, which they had simply abandoned on the street, blocking an exit route. Lieutenant Colonel Jäger decided that things ‘were impossible and we could not go on as we had’. Every time he asked for orders, he was told to wait. But things were too urgent. ‘All I was thinking about now was to avoid bloodshed. There were so many people and they didn’t have space to move. If a panic started, people would have been crushed. We had pistols. I had given instructions not to use them, but what if one of the men had lost his nerve? Even a shot in the air . . . I cannot imagine what reaction that would have provoked. I told my superiors that I couldn’t hold the checkpoint any longer.’ He ordered two of his men to lift the red and white gate - and waved the crowds through, to rapturous applause. At Checkpoint Charlie, an hour later, Günter Möll made the same decision - independently, as none of his superiors were giving orders. It was when a flashbulb went off - one of thousands - and he could see a young soldier twitch nervously that he told his men to withdraw behind the Wall. ‘We were totally surprised,’ said the American commander Major Godek. ‘The guards did not look aggressive, but they did not have a clue what was going on. You could see that quite clearly. They did not withdraw in formation, first a few at a time, then a wave.’ A few minutes later Möll opened the Checkpoint Charlie gates, wondering what he had been doing standing there for the last two decades.

  Vast crowds had been forming on the Western side of the Wall, waiting joyously with open arms, flowers and champagne to greet the arrivals from the East. At the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint the first crowds from the East met cheering Westerners surging in the other direction in what had minutes earlier been No Man’s Land. A few dozen West Berliners climbed on to the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, originally built in the late eighteenth century as a symbol of German unity, and began to taunt the Eastern border guards. That morning they could have been shot if they had attempted to get so close to the Wall. Now they were ignored. By midnight all the six checkpoints were open and the 12,000 border guards had been ordered to return to barracks. The people had seized power and they repossessed their city. A group of East German youngsters joined the ‘Wessis’ at the Brandenburg Gate at around 12.15 a.m. They danced together on the Wall. When East German police turned a hosepipe on them to force them down, one of the revellers nonchalantly unfurled an umbrella. It was an astonishingly powerful image, beamed live around the world on television - the medium that had contributed so much to the revolutionary moment in Berlin. ‘We Germans are now the happiest people in the world,’ the usually uninspiring Mayor of Berlin declared. He captured the mood exactly right.

  ‘Most of us, I think, did pretty much the same thing,’ Rosendahl said at the time. ‘As soon as we got across the border that night, when we stepped over the white line, we would look up at the heavens and take a deep breath. The air didn’t smell much different. But we knew everything was different. Then we’d forget the sentimentality, took the offer of free champagne from the Westerners . . . and went a bit wild.’

  It was the biggest street party in the world, but not for everybody. Most of the Party chieftains were holed up in their Wandlitz compound and in bed by midnight. Schabowski’s Russian-born wife, Irina, noticed that there was barely a light on in any of the thirty or so houses. She would have liked to have talked with her husband about how he had triggered the fall of the Wall by a chance remark, but he was one of the few top Party men in the city. The others were asleep. Her elderly mother woke at one point and asked her what all the fuss was about on the television.

  ‘They’ve opened the border,’ she was told.

  ‘Does that mean we’ll have capitalism now?’

  ‘Yes, it probably does.’

  ‘Well, in that case I’ll hang around for a few more years and see what it’s like.’10

  For four decades the Soviet Union had regarded Berlin as the most prized possession in its empire. It had cost the most blood to win, in the Second World War, and it stood as a supposedly solid symbol of Soviet power. It was thought central to the Soviets’ strategic interests. Nothing of importance was supposed to happen in East Berlin without the Soviet Union knowing about it beforehand - and approving it. Yet Berlin was not uppermost in the minds of any
of the top leaders in Moscow on the day East Germany slipped peacefully out of the Soviet orbit. Mikhail Gorbachev did not know the Berlin Wall had fallen until he woke up the next day. Amazingly, no one in the Kremlin had thought to tell him earlier. The KGB had one of its biggest stations in Berlin, but nobody there warned Moscow Central that by the end of the day Moscow would lose control of Berlin. In the afternoon, the most senior Soviet Communists met in the walnut-panelled room for a routine session of the Party leadership. East Germany was not even discussed. They talked about possible changes to the Soviet constitution, moves towards separatism in Lithuania and a series of minor items that were soon to be debated at the Congress of People’s Deputies. But Moscow had not anticipated a crisis in Berlin. Rather, East Germany was always in crisis these days; they had not anticipated an imminent threat, within hours, to the existence of the state.

  Krenz’s aides told the Soviet Ambassador, Vyacheslav Kochemasov, about the plan to let East Germans head to the FRG directly, rather than go through Hungary or Czechoslovakia. The Ambassador told the Soviet Foreign Ministry, which had no objections. But the Embassy knew nothing about the plan to let East Germans go back and forth across the Wall. That was so sensitive, Kochemasov thought, that the Soviet government was bound to be aware that it had been proposed. It affected the four-power status of Berlin, under which, in theory at least, Berlin was still divided between the Soviet Union and the three Western Allies. Kochemasov assumed that the issue had been discussed by Krenz and Gorbachev when they had met the previous week, without the Embassy knowing about it, or between the two leaders on the direct phone link between Berlin Party headquarters and the Kremlin. Nevertheless, he wanted to check.