Down with Big Brother (48 page)

After a sleepless night, pacing up and down his sitting room, the fifty-seven-year-old foreign minister made up his mind. He decided to abrogate the treaty with East Berlin and let the refugees go. Hungarian leaders had earlier taken the precaution of informally testing the waters with Moscow. The Soviets appeared to have no objection.

“There was no other way,” Horn recalled later. “We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise. It was quite obvious to me that this would be the first step in a landslide-like series of events.”
⁶³

BERLIN
November 9, 1989

T
HERE WAS NO MORE
enduring symbol of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall. For more than a generation the wall exemplified the confrontation between communism and capitalism, East and West, dictatorship and democracy. Its images became ingrained in the popular imagination: Soviet and American tanks barrel to barrel at Checkpoint Charlie; John Kennedy declaring, “
Ich bin ein Berliner,
” at the Brandenburg Gate; the spy swaps on the Glienicke Bridge; a series of dramatic escapes; Ronald Reagan shouting, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The wall was the quintessential dividing line, not merely between two parts of a single city but between two rival ideologies and two contrasting ways of life. This was not just
a
wall. It was
the
wall. On one side of the wall were the bright lights of the Ku’damm, with its luxurious department stores and garish sex shows. On the other side were the ubiquitous hallmarks of socialism: dimly lit streets, crumbling apartment blocks, and ugly statues to worthy proletarians. One side of the wall was a monotonous white; the other, a riot of cheeky, multicolored graffiti. On one side of the wall people drove Mercedes and BMWs. On the other they drove the Trabant, a car variously described as “a sardine-can on wheels” and a “plastic tank.” On one side of the wall was a society that permitted its citizens to travel freely; on the other side, a society that needed a wall to prevent them from fleeing.

The East German authorities had erected the wall in the course of a single day—on August 13, 1961—in order to stem the flood of refugees to the West. Before the wall was built, half a million people crossed the city every day, and hundreds never returned. Since the end of World War II some three million East Germans had left their homeland, one of the largest mass migrations in European history. Most of the refugees were professionals, such as doctors and engineers, who believed that there was no future for them under communism. Fifty percent were under the age of twenty-five. The German Democratic Republic was threatened with demographic extinction.

At first the wall consisted of rolls of barbed wire, demarcating the Soviet and Western sectors of Berlin. Streets were arbitrarily cut into two. In some places the line went through the middle of a house. Friends, neighbors, even members of the same family ended up in different worlds. Thousands of East German soldiers ensured that the Western sector of the city was sealed tight as swiftly as possible. Tanks and armored cars were deployed beneath the Brandenburg Gate. Subway stops were barricaded; houses were boarded up; bridges were destroyed. Frightened of unleashing a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, Western leaders were forced to sit back and watch.

“We’re going to close Berlin,” Nikita Khrushchev had boasted to his generals. “We’ll just put up serpentine barbed wire, and the West will stand there like dumb sheep. And while they’re standing there, we’ll finish a wall.”
⁶⁴

Events turned out precisely as Khrushchev predicted. By the end of the year the barbed wire had been replaced by a concrete wall, twelve feet high, encircling the Western enclave of Berlin. Over the next quarter century the East German authorities worked on perfecting what was officially described as the “anti-Fascist defense barrier,” until every conceivable hole was plugged. In its completed form the wall was 104 miles long, including 66 miles of reinforced concrete slabs. Built of the hardest concrete, to withstand ramming, each slab was six inches thick and weighed two and a half tons. The slabs were cemented together and topped with asbestos piping. Extra protection was provided by 302 observation towers, 65 miles of trenches, 259 dog runs, and 20 massive concrete bunkers.
⁶⁵
Next to the wall was a death strip of constantly raked sand, at least a hundred yards wide, equipped with hundreds of mines and automatic firing devices.

Despite these precautions, thousands still managed to escape the “socialist paradise” in all manner of brave and ingenious ways. They flew over
the wall in hot-air balloons and homemade flying machines, burrowed under it in tunnels, and rammed it with steel-plated trucks. In order to attain their freedom, one group of refugees dressed themselves up as Soviet army officers and walked through the border unchallenged. Others crawled through stinking sewers and slid down homemade chair lifts. One family sailed across the Baltic in a homemade submarine. The escapees included several hundred East German border guards. Later human rights organizations compiled a list of 825 people who had lost their lives trying to flee to the West.
⁶⁶

For many people, in both East and West Germany, the wall seemed a permanent feature of their lives. It was so solidly built that it was difficult to imagine its ever coming down. Erich Honecker, the man who had supervised its construction, boasted in early 1989 that the wall would still be around in “fifty or one hundred years’ time.”
⁶⁷
The West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, did not believe that the fall of the wall was imminent. On a visit to Poland on November 8, 1989, he reacted with incredulity when Lech Wałęsa predicted that the wall would be down in a matter of “weeks.”

“You are a young man,” Kohl scoffed. “This is something that is going to take many years.”
⁶⁸

Twenty-four hours later the chancellor was obliged to interrupt his trip to Warsaw and return home because of extraordinary developments from Berlin.

I
T HAD BEEN
a generally soporific news conference, dedicated to the political and economic reforms under way in East Germany. The regime’s propaganda chief, Günter Schabowski, was exhausted. The last few weeks had seen a whirlwind of political changes, including the overthrow of Honecker and the collective resignation of the Politburo. The refugee crisis had reached a climax. Almost a million East German citizens had applied to emigrate. Tens of thousands were leaving every day without waiting for permission, via the circuitous routes that had opened up in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Pro-democracy demonstrations were getting larger by the day. The previous weekend, on November 4, an estimated half million people had paraded through the streets of Berlin to demand free elections and free travel. Schabowski himself had attempted to speak at this rally and had been roundly jeered.

“
Wir sind das Volk,
” the demonstrators had chanted. “We are the people.”

The East German people were reclaiming their sovereignty, just as their Polish neighbors had done in August 1980 and June 1989. Never again would they permit their self-appointed representatives to speak in their name; never again would they participate in the pretense that they had surrendered power voluntarily to a Soviet-sponsored “people’s democracy” on German soil. Like other East German reformers, Schabowski sensed that the days of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” were numbered. But he had no idea of the historical upheaval that he was about to unleash.

The propaganda chief peered at the throng of journalists above his half-moon glasses and announced that he would take one more question. Someone at the back of the room wanted to know about the new travel regulations under consideration by the East German leadership. Schabowski shuffled through his papers to find a government statement that the new party leader, Egon Krenz, had shoved into his hand moments before the press conference with the comment “This will do us a power of good.”
⁶⁹
It was couched in the usual bureaucratese, a deliberately woolly style of language that permitted the authorities to make grand-sounding concessions that could be retracted as soon as officials started examining the fine print.

From now on, Schabowski announced, East German citizens could “apply for” private trips abroad “without preconditions.” Furthermore, the authorities would issue visas for “permanent departures”—i.e., emigration—without delay. Such departures could be made through all border crossings, including the checkpoints leading into West Berlin. The spokesman did not notice a sentence on the other side of the paper embargoing the news until 8:00 a.m. the following day.

There was nothing specifically in the communiqué about the Berlin Wall, and the procedure for approving tourist trips to the West was still unclear. What the apparatchiks had in mind was an orderly line that could still be controlled. The spectacle of tens of thousands of East German refugees camping out in West German embassies in Czechoslovakia and Hungary had been deeply embarrassing to them. If this pressure could be relieved, senior Politburo members believed, then the German Democratic Republic could still be saved.

Schabowski felt a twinge of panic as he read out the reference to “West Berlin.” As the Politburo member responsible for Berlin he knew that any decision concerning the city’s status had to be agreed with the four “occupying powers”—the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and France. “I hope the Soviets know about this,” he thought. “This thing affects the four-power status.”
⁷⁰

Among the reporters who attended the news conference, both German and foreign, there was confusion over what the government announcement really meant.
⁷¹
On the face of it, the propaganda chief seemed to be saying that travel through the wall was now permissible for East German citizens. On the other hand, anyone with experience of Communist bureaucrats knew that their words did not always mean what they appeared to mean. Everything depended on implementation.

By the time Schabowski finished speaking, it was already 7:00 p.m. The East German television news show
Aktuelle Kamera
went on the air half an hour later. Reporters had no time to clarify matters, so they decided to broadcast the statement verbatim without explanation.

What happened next was extraordinary, something that went against the habits of subservience carefully nurtured by the Communist authorities. Instead of waiting for official clarification, thousands of East Berliners simply took matters into their own hands and headed for the Western sector of the city. It was as if they really did believe that they, not the Communist government, were the true representatives of “the people.” When they reached the six crossing points leading to West Berlin, they were given the usual runaround. The border guards claimed to know nothing about the new regulations. “It’s all nonsense, go home,” said some. “We have no instructions,” said others.

As the crowds built up behind them, and Western television news crews arrived to film the scene, people began to argue with the border guards about the meaning of Schabowski’s statement. “Open the gate! Open the gate!” they chanted. “The wall must fall.” The vast majority of those clamoring to get out had no intention of leaving East Germany permanently. They merely wanted to taste life on the other side of the wall. “Let us go and see the Ku’damm and we’ll come right back,” they shouted. “We’ll come back.”

By this stage the border guards were beginning to panic. They had been trained as an elite force, ready to protect the frontiers of the socialist state with their lives. Up until a few days ago these hard-faced young men had orders to shoot would-be escapees on sight. In the past their word had been law. They possessed overwhelming force and the will to use it. Ordinary citizens had no choice but to obey their arbitrary commands. But now, even though they retained their weapons, the guards found themselves besieged and outnumbered by crowds of angry citizens, who refused to take no for an answer. At around 9:00 p.m. commanders on duty at the border posts began flooding their superiors in the Stasi, the German secret police, with anxious telephone calls. They were told to “hang on” for clarification.

At the Bornholmer Strasse crossing point, in the northern suburbs of the city, the pressure of the crowd was becoming uncontrollable. There were chants of “Open up, open up.” Shortly before 11:00 p.m. the dam finally broke when the crowd pushed back the red and white frontier post. Soon the border guards were enveloped in a sea of humanity. “It made me wonder why we had been standing in that place for the past twenty years,” Captain Helmut Stoss told reporters later.
⁷²
When Security Ministry officials finally found out what was happening, they reluctantly issued orders to let the people pass.

At Checkpoint Charlie, the gateway to the American sector of the city, the crowds had to wait until midnight before the border was opened. A great roar went up from the Western side of the wall as the first East Berliners pushed through the eerie, real-life set of countless espionage movies, flashing victory signs and waving their blue identity cards in the air. People poured out of a nearby bar to greet the new arrivals with bottles of champagne and gifts of West German money.

“I just can’t believe it!” exclaimed thirty-four-year-old Angelika Wache as she emerged blinking into a hundred flashguns.