Authors: Frederick Taylor
Some time after ten, Krenz received a phone call that would change everything. On the line was
Stasi
Minister Erich Mielke, who described the latest developments. Half an hour earlier, the crowd at the Bornholmer Strasse border checkpoint, between the north-central part of East Berlin and the French sector, had grown to between 500 and 1,000, all pressing to cross. On their own initiative, senior
Stasi
officers decided to let the most pushy through into West Berlin-though when they did, they stamped their passports ‘no right of return’, as they would an expellee. This so-called ‘pressure-release solution’ had little effect. The crowds continued to push forward, and more kept arriving by the minute.
Krenz quickly realised that attempts to hold back the tide were futile. He faced a stark choice. ‘Either we shut the border so completely that it would impossible to storm it,’ Krenz admitted later. ‘That would have meant bringing up tanks. Or we let things run their course. There was no other decision possible.’
19
In the event, no order was issued.
Just before 10.30, the late bulletin of the East German state TV news,
Aktuelle Kamera
(‘Topical Camera’), had made a final desperate attempt to halt the stampede.
At the request of many citizens {the announcer declared}, we inform you once again about the new travel regulations from the ministerial council. First: Private trips can be applied for without having to first provide evidence of need to travel or familial relationships. So: Trips are subject to an application process!
Passport and registration offices would be open tomorrow at the usual time, the announcer added brightly, and, of course, permanent exit travel would also be possible
only
after application had been made and then granted by the appropriate authorities.
On that night in particular, most of the population of East Berlin was not, of course, tuned into the regime’s stations to hear what time the passport and registration offices were opening, but was riveted to Western newscasts, eager to see what was actually going on in the real world. At around 10.40 p.m., ARD’s late-night news discussion programme ‘Themes of the Day’ (
Tagesthemen
) began with the announcement: ‘This ninth of November is a historic day: the GDR has announced that its borders are open to everyone, with immediate effect, and the gates of the Wall stand wide open.’
The strange thing was that when the programme went live to the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint to illustrate its claim, the border was clearly not open at all. The contradiction made no difference. It was at this point, largely in response to the ARD programme’s sensational assertion, that the mass storming of the checkpoints began.
Within half an hour, the border situation was all but out of control. The ‘pressure-release solution’ had backfired spectacularly. At the Bornholmer Strasse, the huge crowds waiting behind a screen fence to go through the exit process were starting to push forward, and to threaten the handful of border guards trying to keep them in order. At around 11.30, a group of East Berliners pushed aside the screen fence in front of the border crossing and everyone swarmed into the checkpoint area
en masse
. Checkpoint commander Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger decided that he was not prepared to risk the lives of himself and his soldiers. He ordered his men to stop checking passports, open up fully, and just let the crowd do what it wanted.
And the crowd knew what it wanted. Within moments, thousands began to pour through the checkpoint. They simply walked or, in most cases ran, into West Berlin. The sensation of running freely over the bridge, of crossing a border where such an action, just days or even hours before, would have courted near-certain death, brought a surge of exhilaration that, if we are to believe those who were there, all but changed the chemical composition of the air and turned it into champagne.
Large crowds had already gathered on the Western side. They greeted the Easterners with cries of joy and open arms. Many improvised toasts were drunk. By midnight, all the border checkpoints had been forced to open. At the Invalidenstrasse, masses ‘invaded’ from the West and met the approaching Easterners in the middle.
It was now twenty past midnight, and the entire East German army had been placed on a state of heightened alert. However, in the absence of orders from the leadership, the 12,000 men of the Berlin border regiments remained confined to barracks. The night passed, and the orders never arrived.
Between one and two a.m., human swarms from East and West push their way through the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate. Some are still in their sleepwear, ignoring the November cold. Thousands luxuriate in the sensation of walking around the nearby Pariser Platz-embassy row-an elegant city landmark closed for thirty years by barbed wire, concrete blocks and tank traps, turned by state decree into a deadly no man’s land. People are clambering on top of the Wall to caper and dance and yell their hearts out in liberation and release and delight.
A mix of hype and hope has defeated bureaucratic obfuscation. A little over six hours after a fumbled press conference and a Western press campaign that took the fumbled ball of the temporary exit-visa regulation and ran with it, a revolution has occurred. One of the swiftest and least bloody in history. A revolution that has, whatever Gil Scott-Heron may have predicted to the contrary fifteen years before, most certainly been televised.
It will be followed by the biggest, wildest street party the world has ever seen.
And, perhaps inevitably, by one of the biggest hangovers, too. But that is another story.
THE FALL OF THE
Berlin Wall, like its construction, took place in a single night. Just as on 13 August 1961, a city and a people awoke to find themselves divided, so on the morning of 10 November 1989 that division was no more. Although how many people actually woke up to this revelation is debatable, since during that night in Berlin many had not slept a wink.
Joachim Trenkner, for instance. By then head of Current Affairs for the Berlin branch of the state-supported ARD television network Sender Freies Berlin (the Free Berlin Station), Trenker was in Warsaw, covering the West German Chancellor’s historic visit, when he heard the news from the Wall. There were no flights to Berlin until the morning, and no trains. The whole press pack was in an agony of frustration, Trenkner included. Until it occurred to him, sometime around midnight, to call up the Polish taxi driver who had been chauffeuring him and his production people around Warsaw for the past two days while they organised the live coverage. He rang the man, asked him if he had a valid passport and was willing to drive to Berlin. The answer was, yes, and yes-in fact, he would be thrilled.
At one in the morning, they set off in a little Toyota and headed westwards through the night. For Trenkner, a man who might be considered a little jaded with travel, it was the most exciting trip of his life. Everyone struggled to stay awake, the driver included, but they crossed the GDR border at Frankfurt on the Oder around dawn. It was astonishing how easy and even friendly the usually curt East German
Grepos
had suddenly become. They drove on along the old Berlin autobahn. Everywhere, there were East Germans out in their Trabants and Wartburgs, honking and waving and smiling. Trenkner thought as they finally approached the city: ‘This is German reunification’.
1
The little Polish taxi rolled up outside the SFB studios at nine a.m. Once they reached Berlin itself, the sights and sensations had been even more amazing. The mood in the city was,
the Wall is gone, Berlin is once again Berlin
. By the time they arrived, Trenkner didn’t just think he was seeing German unity, he
knew
it.
He was, of course, absolutely correct. For all the pussyfooting over the next year, there is little doubt that the moment the crowd had surged across the Bornholmer Strasse bridge, the end of the ‘two Germanys’ was just a matter of time.
There were a number of problems to be dealt with first. The idealists who had dared to oppose the regime during its last years were not, on the whole, full-blooded capitalists. They were of the Left, and Green, and aimed to build a collaborative rather than a competitive society; to transform the neo-Stalinist experiment that was the GDR into a laboratory for a ‘third way’ between capitalism and Communism.
The East German idealists were joined by leftists from West Germany, such as the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Günter Grass. And the most powerful among the Social Democrats’ leaders, Oskar Lafontaine, who just two years earlier had welcomed Erich Honecker home to the Saar. They opposed reunification for their own reasons, Grass because of concern that the sudden explosion into Europe of a united Germany might waken old, malevolent nationalist ghosts, and Lafontaine because of his fears for the generous social-welfare system of the West. Within days of the Wall’s fall, Lafontaine was warning Easterners against coming West and proposing that they not be allowed to enjoy the same welfare benefits as their Western cousins. Even Walter Momper, SPD Mayor of West Berlin, swept up amid the celebrations of 9 November, had cautiously declared that this was not a question of ‘reunification’ (
Wiedervereinigung
) but of ‘reunion’ (
Wiedersehen
).
All these attempts to slow the process down met with utter failure. Willy Brandt, at seventy-five now the elder statesman and conscience of the SPD, had already seen the future. He said on the Friday that followed the dramatic night of 9/10 November: ‘Now what belongs together will grow together.’
Brandt was right. But the growth did not prove to be slow or organic. It was more like a speeded-up nature film. By the end of that month, the
momentum had become unstoppable. The call in October had been: ‘We are the people!’ By December it was, ‘We are one people!’ After decades of isolation, the people of the East had seen what the West enjoyed, and they wanted it too. But to pay for it they knew they must have hard currency. ‘If the Deutsche Mark won’t come to us,’ the reawakened masses cried, ‘we’ll go to it!’ They began to flood westward for a variety of reasons, some sentimental and some hard-headedly practical.
The GDR leadership had just about held on to its authority until 9 November. Almost immediately, its power began to dissolve. However, as usual, it was a somewhat more gradual and conflicted process than historical memory allows.
Even on Friday/Saturday 10/11 November, there were attempts at a quasi-reinstatement of the border. The dinosaurs were, after all, still in charge of the border troops and the
Stasi
. Generals Kessler and Hoffman, who had dedicated their lives to the Wall, could still issue orders, and during these next forty-eight hours they and their senior colleagues were in near-constant session. How to admit that the game was up?
Those who tried to leap over and enter the East that Friday night were politely but firmly sent back by border guards on their superiors’ orders. None the less, alcohol consumption was considerable, and the boldness of would be Wall-jumpers increased in proportion. Eastern officials protested to the Western police to keep ‘their’ people under control. At one point, around midnight, dogs and water cannon were introduced at the Brandenburg Gate. A few intruders got a soaking, though the
Vopos
didn’t turn on the power-jets. Someone rammed a jeep into the Wall from the Western side and took out a section several metres square. The Eastern guards carefully put it back.
The army and the
Stasi
remained on alert through most of the weekend. There were anxious consultations between the forces of order in East and West. Not until the afternoon of 11 November was all danger of bloodshed considered past. The East German army in the neighbourhood of Berlin was stood down, as were the
Stasi
’s forces. On the morning of Sunday 12 November, the mayors of West and East Berlin presided over the opening of a new crossing point on the Potsdamer Platz, 500 yards south of the Brandenburg Gate. The pressure now diminished.
Visitors could pass through with the mere wave of an identity card or passport, and a permission stamp was automatic.
2
On 13 November there was another major reshuffle of the Politburo and the government in East Berlin. The former bosses of the GDR were rapidly being revealed as so many Wizards of Oz, cranking pathetic little wheels to maintain their huge, rumbling façade of power. And the most Oz-like of all was the
Stasi
Minister, 81-year-old Erich Mielke.
Appearing to give an account of himself before a newly emboldened East German parliament, the state’s foremost secret policeman tried to present himself and the
Stasi
as diligent and humane guardians of the East German people. When heckled and booed by hitherto obedient parliamentary deputies, the old man seemed genuinely upset. ‘But I love you all!’ Mielke declared, on the verge of tears. ‘I love all human beings!’ Then he left the podium and never returned. If there was any truth in Mielke’s bizarre outburst, it reflected an affection for humanity of the unhealthy variety, the kind so accurately expressed by the aptly named rock band, the Police, in their song about obsessive love: ‘Every breath you take/Every move you make/I’ll be watching you’.
On 3 December, Krenz announced his resignation as SED First Secretary. The party’s members were now themselves leaving in their hundreds of thousands. In a vain attempt to show the the party’s ‘democratic’ credentials, many of the old leadership, including Schabowski and Krenz, would soon be expelled.
Hans Modrow, Gorbachev’s original candidate to succeed Honecker, had been made prime minister on 13 November. He stayed in office until the new year, when free elections were held. Although Modrow was respected as a genuine reformer, it was too late even for a respected SED leader to stay in control. To the vast majority of East Germans, the party was tainted goods. Even before the elections, Modrow was forced to accept non-Communist representatives into the government.