Authors: Frederick Taylor
But the real drama was not happening in East Germany, or not as yet. In January 1989, after years of uneasy manoeuvring, the non-Communist Polish trade-union movement, Solidarity, entered into negotiations with the Soviet-supported government in Warsaw. The subject of these discussions was the sharing of power, but their effect was to reawaken the ghosts of Stalinism. During the negotiations, the Soviets finally admitted responsibility for the wartime massacre of Polish officers at Katyn—which they had previously always blamed on the Germans. It was a hugely important admission.
Meanwhile, in the Baltic states, which had been carved up between Hitler and Stalin exactly fifty years ago, in 1939, a human chain of a million Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians linked hands to protest against the infamous pact that had robbed them of their independence and led to death, oppression and deportation for many of their parents’ generation.
Then came the act of physical liberation that would prove the ultimate doom of the Wall. On 2 May, the Hungarian government, now in the hands of pluralistically minded reform Communists, astonished the world by beginning to dismantle their hitherto fortified border with Austria. President George H.W. Bush, on a visit to West Germany, was presented with piece of barbed wire from Hungary’s demolished border fence. ‘Let Berlin be next,’ Ronald Reagan’s successor proclaimed.
The results of the Hungarians’ action were sensational. It took a while for the significance of the change to sink in, but by 1 July more than 25,000 East Germans who had decided to ‘vacation’ in Hungary, somehow ended up in Austria. Erich Honecker’s subjects had found a way around his Maginot Line.
Meanwhile, even in East Germany itself, the dissidents and the opposition were gaining confidence. A couple of weeks after the Hungarian border was demilitarised, local elections were held in the GDR.
As usual, government candidates received almost 99 per cent of the vote. But this time, church observers such as Pastor Eppelmann had been present when the votes were counted. They protested. The figures for ‘no’ votes published by the government were only a third of those actually declared in the presence of the church observers. The church openly announced that ‘no’ votes had made up at least 7 per cent of the poll,
implicitly accusing the government of fraud. It was a breach of the ‘concordat’ with the regime that had kept an uneasy peace between God and Caesar for the past decade.
There were small demonstrations against the election results. Arrests were made, but they had little effect. In Leipzig, now becoming the largest opposition stronghold, special prayer meetings, held on Monday evenings, were attracting over 2,000 participants a week by the end of May 1989.
But the regime gave little or no ground. Although in practice more exit visas were being granted, the law was not changed. The government introduced an appeals process for refused exit visas, but the ability to leave East Germany remained a privilege, not a right.
In June, with discontent about the rigged local elections still simmering, Honecker made favourable remarks about the Chinese Communist government’s violent suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The East German parliament passed a resolution applauding the ‘suppression of a counter-revolution’ in China. There was a continuing trickle of arrests. Many dissidents were immediately shunted off to West Germany, as had become the regime’s habit over the past few years. However, plans had also been put in place by Mielke’s State Security Ministry for the opening of secret concentration camps capable of holding up to 200,000 dissidents, should the regime decide it was necessary to bring the people to heel by force.
19
The pressures from outside were becoming stronger. For the first time since 1945, semi-free elections were held in neighbouring Poland. In crass contrast to the shameless rigging of the May elections in East Germany, the non-Communist Solidarity movement won every seat it was permitted to contest in the
Sjem
(house of deputies), and 99 out of 100 seats in the Senate, where it could contest all.
Meanwhile, as summer approached, thousands still stood in line to meet the beady stare of the
Stasi
-trained border officials at Checkpoint Charlie or the underground cattle-pen of the ‘Palace of Tears’ in Friedrichstrasse. The action was not in Berlin. East Berlin was stifled under a blanket of security, and preoccupied with the grand celebrations planned for the fortieth anniversary of the GDR in October.
The signs of weakness behind the facade were all there, and easily spotted later with hindsight’s wisdom. The prickly relationship between East
Berlin and Moscow was becoming all too apparent. When Gorbachev visited West Germany in June-and was ecstatically received by a nation weary of Cold War anxiety and nuclear confrontation-the reformist Soviet leader made no rejoinder to Chancellor Kohl’s critical remarks about the Wall and the continuing lack of freedom in East Germany.
Gorbachev’s reticence was viewed in East Berlin, quite correctly, as a change of tack and-in traditional Communist terms-a betrayal. Whatever their private feelings about the GDR, Khrushchev or Brezhnev would have felt duty-bound to strike back hard on their German satellite’s behalf. Gorbachev said nothing.
In mid-July, Gorbachev went even further, publicly repudiating the so-called ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’. This principle, formalised following the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, permitted the Soviet Union to intervene against any country within the Warsaw Pact that attempted to change its political or social system. Addressing the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Gorbachev declared that all European countries were now free to choose their own social and political order and excluded the use of military force between East and West or ‘within alliances’. One of his aides referred to this jokily as the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’, with a play on the singer’s great hit ‘My Way’-countries could now do things ‘their way’.
The bizarre contrast between East Germany’s continuing espousal of ‘dinosaur’ Marxism-Leninism and the new spirit of openness and risk in Moscow was shown by the Honecker regime’s unheard-of decision, in 1989, to forbid the distribution of certain Soviet publications in East Germany. Especially singled out for a ban was the monthly German-language magazine
Sputnik
, which supplied a digest of the Soviet press. Such English-language delights as
Moscow News
and the newspaper of the British Communist Party, the
Daily Worker
-for many years the only British newspaper available in East Berlin-were also taken off the newsstands. Gorbachev’s radical speeches were reported only partially, or not at all. However, criticisms of the Gorbachev reforms, by his internal opponents and by Mao’s anxious heirs in Beijing, found their way into East German newspapers.
It was a feverish summer. And, in defiance of the natural order, as autumn approached the temperature rose even higher.
FIRST TENS, THEN HUNDREDS
of thousands of East Germans were on the move through July, August, and then September of 1989, in their Trabants and Wartburgs. They headed, by some tribal instinct, for Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia, like the GDR, was still run by hardliners, but the trip to Prague was a short one for most East Germans. Hungary was further, but its reform-Communist government had declared itself ready to share power. And Budapest too had a West German embassy.
For East Germans reluctant to risk even the Hungarian-Austrian border, there was another solution. They packed their bags and took themselves to the capitals of neighbouring, still technically ‘socialist’ countries and headed for the West German embassy. There they sought asylum. Many were so eager that they simply abandoned their cars in nearby streets, often with keys still in the ignition. By mid-August, West German diplomats were in a desperate situation. On 13 August 1989, the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Wall, the West German embassy in Budapest was forced to close. Six days later, 600 East Germans forced their way through the border between Hungary and Austria. The Hungarian border guards simply watched.
Erich Honecker repeated in automatic fashion that the Wall would ‘last one hundred years.’ For the next six weeks, however, he was removed from the centre of power by an operation for a serious gall-bladder complaint, fully returning to his post only on 25 September. The 77-year-old leader had to be operated on twice, since at the first attempt he suffered from a circulatory collapse. During the second operation, they found not just an inflamed gall-bladder but a malignant tumour on the colon, which they removed. What the surgeons at East Berlin’s famous
Charité Hospital did not know was that they had missed a second tumour in his right kidney, which would eventually kill him four years later. But meanwhile, it seemed, Honecker had been saved and made fit to take the helm for the fortieth anniversary.
The fact that the Politburo was more or less rudderless for that period may have contributed to the deterioration in the situation. Honecker had passed over Egon Krenz and appointed the compliant 63-year-old planning boss Günter Mittag as his caretaker. This he had done in a deliberately humiliating way. Told that Krenz had cancelled his vacation so as to be in East Berlin during the leader’s health crisis, Honecker coldly instructed him to ‘take a break’ and said, ‘Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re not indispensable around here.’
1
After obediently joining his family on the Baltic coast, Krenz received a visit from Eberhard Aurich, a friend and ally who now held the post of First Secretary of the party youth organisation, the FDJ. Aurich told Krenz the Politburo was floundering in the face of the refugee problem, and the old men were looking for scapegoats—especially anyone involved in the youth movement, who were blamed for failing to raise a new generation loyal to the regime. Aurich pleaded with Krenz to move against Honecker, but he refused. To undermine a sick man, and just before his big day at the fortieth anniversary…Aurich returned to East Berlin empty-handed.
2
The problem of youth’s growing disaffection was, it is true, especially serious. According to government polls, in 1985, 51 per cent of apprentices had identified ‘strongly’ with the GDR and 43 per cent ‘with reservations’, while 6 per cent ‘hardly or not at all’; at the end of 1988 the figures had changed, catastrophically from the regime’s point of view, to only 18 per cent ‘strongly identifying’, 54 per cent having reservations, and 28 per cent supporting the regime hardly or not at all. The figures for young workers were similar. Since ‘unreliable’ young people were not permitted to go into higher education, college students were in many ways the darlings of the regime, but even there support had deteriorated. Compared with impressive 1985 figures—70 per cent of students strongly identifying, 28 per cent with reservations, and a mere 2 per cent withholding support-in less than four years the numbers had tumbled to 34 per cent, 51 per cent and 15 per cent respectively. Support
had halved, reservations doubled, and outright opposition increased by a factor of seven.
The refugees in Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, and on the Hungarian/Austrian border were overwhelmingly young, children of the Wall
par excellence
. They were those statistics expressed in mobile, resentful human form. And time was on their side.
On 10 September, Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn was asked on television what his border officials would do if, say, 60,000 East Germans arrived at the border between Hungary and Austria.
‘They will,’ said Horn matter-of-factly, ‘allow them though without any further ado and I assume the Austrians will let them in.’
Twenty-two thousand East Germans promptly fled across that same border over just three days.
3
At the same time, the West German embassy in Prague was full to overflowing. Many hundreds of East Germans, often entire families, had sought asylum there. A tent city mushroomed in the gardens of the historic Lobkovic Palace. Attempts to keep out newcomers failed. They simply clambered over the railings into the embassy grounds. By the end of September, the gardens housed 4,000 people. There was a real danger of disease in the overcrowded, unsanitary refuge, but the embassy’s house guests refused to leave. They would not return to East Germany.
Throughout the month, the East German Politburo (average age sixty-seven) had tried to ignore the problem. Now, spurred by Honecker’s recovery from his operation, it finally began to react. With America acting as broker, a deal was done between the Czechs, the Hungarians, and the GDR. On 30 September, the West German Foreign Minister flew to Prague. He announced to the masses waiting stubbornly in the grounds of the embassy that they would be allowed to leave.
Honecker had announced this decision to his Politburo colleagues after they had attended a gala performance at the State Opera in East Berlin in honour of the fortieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. In fact, the Politburo meeting took place immediately afterwards, in the Apollo Room, the magnificent chamber-music and reception room of the Opera House. The very important comrades sat down at hastily supplied tables, by the light of glittering chandeliers, and Honecker regaled them with ‘information regarding a matter of the highest urgency’.
4
Honecker told them that he had agreed the refugees could go to West Germany via the GDR. They were to be placed in sealed trains for the journey through their homeland, and during the trip would have their East German identity documents confiscated and their citizenship withdrawn. This was intended to humiliate them and brand them as traitors. In an article in the SED organ
Neues Deutschland
, a bilious attack on the refugees declared that ‘by their behaviour they have trampled on all moral values and excluded themselves from our society. Therefore no one should shed any tears for them’. The piece is said to have been dictated by Honecker personally.