Authors: Frederick Taylor
At the end, they voted to get rid of Mittag too, as well as the chief press censor, Joachim Herrmann.
Honecker warned them, stiffly but calmly, that his resignation would not solve the GDR’s problems. But if that was his colleagues’ decision, then he must obey. The Politburo’s vote to sack Honecker was unanimous. In accordance with ‘democratic centralist’ tradition, the General Secretary dutifully voted for his own dismissal.
Without another word, Honecker withdrew to his office. He dictated a letter, summoning the Central Committee for a meeting the next day at which his dismissal would be confirmed. Then he picked up the telephone and called his wife, Margot.
‘It has happened,’ is all Erich Honecker said to her.
Then he put down the receiver and started slowly and methodically to gather together his personal effects.
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The conspirators had succeded in the first stage of the coup, but they still had concerns. First, they had to ensure that Honecker didn’t manage some kind of counter-attack at the Central Committee meeting the next day, as Khrushchev had famously done in 1957. Khrushchev had found himself outvoted by the so-called ‘anti-party group’ in the Politburo, but had turned the tables on them at the subsequent plenum meeting, allowing him to reign in Moscow for seven more years. Second, they had to justify Honecker’s dismissal—on grounds of, say, economic incom
petence—without implicating themselves as co-decision-makers and therefore co-responsible individuals.
In the event, Honecker went without a fight. Vague health reasons were given. At the next day’s Central Committee meeting, out of 216 delegates, only 16 voted against, including Honecker’s own wife, who would immediately lose her job as Minister of Education, and Hanna Wolf, the octogenarian retired head of the SED Party School, a former wartime exile in Russia and stubborn opponent of all reform.
A tearful Honecker was given a standing ovation by the assembled comrades. Whether the tears were of sadness or impotent fury—Krenz in his memoirs plumps for the latter—we shall never know. Then the deposed First Secretary left the building, never to cross its threshold again. While Krenz was being acclaimed as new party leader, Honecker ordered his chauffeur to take him for one last woodland drive.
Krenz would rule for forty-six days. He immediately announced his intention to reform East Germany, and was astonished when the public jeered rather than cheered. Playing on his long features and prominent teeth, they called him ‘horse face’. Posters carried at the ever-burgeoning demonstrations showed him wrapped up in a bonnet like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, with the caption: ‘Why grandmother, what big teeth you have!’ The public simply did not believe his sudden conversion to reform. A joke went: ‘What is the difference between Egon Krenz and Erich Honecker? Answer: Krenz still has a gall-bladder.’
On 23 October 1989, 300,000 marched in Leipzig to call for Krenz’s resignation. The following week there were demonstrations all over the GDR. On 30 October 20,000 gathered at the ‘Red Town Hall’ in East Berlin, where the chief spokesman of the new government, the articulate, in many ways likeable Berliner Günter Schabowski, attempted to explain its policies. The crowd heard him out, but still called for more than he was prepared to give.
11
In any case, the movement towards reform came too late.
On that same day, 30 October, a highly secret ‘Report on the Economic Situation of the GDR with Consequences’ was submitted to the new Politburo. It made clear what had been hidden all those years, even from many members of the party leadership. The country was a wreck, and approaching bankruptcy like a horse galloping towards a cliff.
More than half of all industrial facilities were effectively classifiable as scrap. 53.8 per cent of all machines were write-offs, only reparable at a cost that could simply not be justified. Half the transport infrastructure was in a state of decay. Productivity was around 40 per cent behind the West’s. State indebtedness had risen from 12 billion marks in 1970 to 123 billion in 1988. Direct debts to capitalist states and banks had increased during that period from 2 billion to 49 billion West marks.
The five-person team of planners who put together the report was led by Gerhard Schürer, Chairman of the State Planning Commission. Schürer had suggested relatively modest reforms to Honecker the previous year but had been knocked back. Now elected to the Politburo, he finally got someone to listen to him, but it was too late. As he admitted, a severe and thoroughgoing reform problem adopted in, say, 1985, might have relieved the situation, but now it had gone too far. The document declared grimly: ‘Just to avoid further indebtedness would mean a lowering in 1990 of the standard of living by around 25%-30% and make the GDR ungovernable.’
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The GDR at the end of the Honecker era was, in effect, bankrupt.
Nor did all twenty-six members of the Politburo get to learn the full, awful truth. An even more searing three-page analysis (Geheime Kommandosache b5-1156/89) had also been prepared by Schürer, for the eyes only of General Secretary Krenz and veteran Premier Willi Stoph. It spelled out the bad news even more starkly, admitting that the GDR was already largely dependent on capitalist credit institutions, and that annual borrowing was running at 8-10 billion West marks. This was ‘extraordinarily high for a country like the GDR’.
The country had embarked on an increasingly frantic game of financial manipulation, moving cash around the international money markets at speed, inflating the extent of its claimed assets and understating its true indebtedness in order to raise more credit, because if the international finance community knew the facts it would pull the plug. The GDR, like any over-indebted individual who knows there’s a problem but can’t stop the spending habit that’s causing it, was covertly taking out short-term loans to make interest payments on long-term credit, and using this apparently creditworthy status to assume yet more debt. This was criminal deception, fraud on a vast scale.
What to do? Even the ‘transit’ payments due from the West to assure access to and from Berlin, guaranteed until 1995, had already been mortgaged and spent. To ensure solvency in 1991, it would be ‘imperative’ to start negotiations with the West German government for further credits amounting to 23 billion West marks, on top of existing credit sources. But what could the GDR offer in return?
Schürer’s group had a quite simple but hair-raising proposal. They would put up the ‘State Border West’ as a bargaining counter. Or, as the report put it:
In order to make the Federal Republic conscious of the GDR’s serious intention, 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.
Bluntly: you come up with the money and we’ll bring down the Wall.
This was a logical if desperate conclusion to a thirty-year policy of making the West Germans pay for every tiny travel concession, every released political prisoner, every iota of access to and from the East by road, rail or air.
The trouble was, in order to perform this last trick, in order to save itself, the regime would have to saw away the branch on which it sat. And for that it was not yet ready.
On 1 November, Krenz flew to Moscow. There he held out the begging bowl one last time. Krenz, exaggerating his reformist credentials, engaged with Gorbachev in a wide-ranging discussion of the situation. Krenz knew that another big day of demonstrations was planned for Saturday 4 November. Venues would include Berlin, where until now there had been few problems compared with Leipzig and Dresden.
He shared his concern with the Soviet leader:
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.
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Gorbachev had his own preference for a new East German leader-the genuinely reformist Dresden Party Secretary, Hans Modrow-but was nevertheless prepared to hear Krenz out and offer him a little useful advice. He promised to ask his friends in the West not to destabilise the GDR. However, that was about all Krenz got. Gorbachev was no Khrushchev, who would always ultimately pay up to save the GDR. The Soviets refused to bail out the SED regime, either financially or militarily. The message was clear.
Sauve qui peut
. Every Communist for himself.
Egon Krenz returned to East Berlin empty-handed. The countdown to the end had begun.
The opposition had grown that autumn with bewildering speed. It had started out from relatively small collections of religious and pacifist-ecological groups, overtly non-political though clearly critical of the regime. By October, the SPD had unofficially re-formed in the East, and the various other citizens’ action groups had developed into embryonic political movements.
Most prominent among the groups was ‘New Forum’. New Forum had been founded in September after a call to action signed by a group of thirty oppositional intellectuals, scientists and religious figures. This declaration rapidly gathered hundreds and then thousands of further supporters. The aim of New Forum was to ‘open up a democratic dialogue’ between rulers and ruled in East Germany.
Despite being officially declared hostile to the state and ‘unnecessary’, New Forum grew quickly. Its aims were reformist within the existing framework of the GDR. It did not propose the reintroduction of capitalism or the reunification of Germany. All the more dangerous, so far as the state was concerned.
On 4 October, various organisations, including New Forum and the re-formed Social Democrats, combined to demand the release of political prisoners, abandonment of all political investigations, and free elections by secret ballot. They made reference to the United Nations Charter and the Helsinki Agreement, to both of which the GDR was officially a signatory. There was a new, confident tone to the dissidents’ demands, though their support was still relatively small.
By the end of the month, it was obvious that something much bigger was happening. Tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of ordinary East Germans were turning out all over the country to demand democratic change.
The big demonstration in East Berlin on Saturday 4 November was the most threatening yet, because it would take place perilously close to the regime’s seats of power. None the less, the leadership decided to allow it-in fact, it went even further.
Members of the SED leadership, most prominently the extrovert Schabowski, appeared on the podium alongside the dissidents. The Berlin Party Secretary defended the system and promised reform. He was greeted with boos and whistles. Others included the New Forum leaders and the writers Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, the former a critical supporter of the regime, the latter an idealistic maverick who had spent the Nazi era in America and returned to Germany in a US army uniform, only to settle in the GDR of his own free will. Heym’s works were banned in the East because of his support for Wolf Biermann, but the veteran writer refused to leave.
Another former exile who spoke at the rally was even odder case: Markus Wolf, raised in exile in Stalin’s Russia, who had retired in 1986 as head of the
Stasi
’s foreign-intelligence department, the HVA, and Deputy Minister of State Security. The ever-plausible chameleon of the secret world had now transformed himself into a democrat. There were and are many who suspect the
Stasi
’s involvement in the entire transition process. Secret policemen are notoriously skilful survivors.
Wolf came from an artistic family-his father had been a well-known writer, his brother a film director. He always claimed to have favoured a more liberal line, but his own spectacularly disingenuous account of his participation on 4 November speaks for itself:
I tried to persuade the half million at 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 of State Security.
So I learned painfully in those moments that I could not escape my past…
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As Schabowski’s (and perhaps Wolf’s) presence at the demonstration showed, the establishment was still hoping somehow to manage the changes, to ride the tiger of reform. It was putting forward its most ‘people-friendly’ faces. Two days later, the SED’s propaganda department reported on the 4 November demonstrations and said that concessions should indeed be made, but only superficial ones:
The demand for free elections can in principle be supported, since it corresponds to the basic principles of our socialist constitution, nevertheless this must not entail opening the door to bourgeois party pluralism…Demands for abolition of the leading role of the SED are totally unacceptable.
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In other words, free elections were perfectly OK if they were not actually free.
Precisely how they were to persuade the population with such bizarre authoritarian sophistries was not apparent. If half the population of East Berlin was prepared to attend a meeting calling for free elections and democracy, who was going to accept the ‘leading role of the party’, knowing this was merely a euphemism for its monopoly on power? The new ruling clique understood something of this. In the first week of November, seeing the need to impress the increasingly mutinous masses, Krenz carried out a purge of the old guard.