Post Wall, Post Square

Next day, 9 November, the party struggled to think up responses to people’s demands in the streets. In late afternoon the Central Committee came back to the problematic travel regulations. A short memo was drawn up and passed to the secretary of the Central Committee, Günter Schabowski, who had been appointed that morning as the SED’s media spokesman but did not attend that part of the discussions. At 6 p.m. Schabowski briefed the world media on the day’s deliberations, in a press conference broadcast live on GDR TV.[49]

It was a long and boring meeting. Near the end Schabowski was asked by one journalist about the alterations in the GDR travel law. He offered a rather incoherent summary and then, under pressure, hastily read out parts of the press statement he had been given earlier. Distracted by further questions he omitted the passages regarding the grounds for denying applications both for private travel and permanent exit applications. His omissions, however, only added to the confusion. Had the Central Committee radically changed its course? A now panicky Schabowski talked of a decision to allow citizens to emigrate permanently. The press room grew restless. The media started to get their teeth into the issue.

What about holidays? Short trips to the West? Visits to West Berlin? Which border crossings? When would the new arrangements come into effect? A seriously rattled Schabowski simply muttered ‘According to my knowledge … immediately, right away.’ Because they had not been given any formal written statement, the incredulous press corps hung on Schabowski’s every word, squeezing all they could out of them.[50]

Finally someone asked the fatal question: ‘Mr Schabowski, what is going to happen to the Berlin Wall now?’

Schabowski: It has been brought to my attention that it is 7 p.m. That has to be the last question. Thank you for your understanding.

Um … What will happen to the Berlin Wall? Information has already been provided in connection with travel activities. Um, the issue of travel, um, the ability to cross the Wall from our side … hasn’t been answered yet and exclusively the question in the sense … so this, I’ll put it this way, fortified state border of the GDR … um, we have always said that there have to be several other factors, um, taken into consideration. And they deal with the complex of questions that Comrade Krenz, in his talk in the – addressed in view of the relations between the GDR and the FRG, in ditto light of the, um, necessity of continuing the process of assuring peace with new initiatives.

And, um, surely the debate about these questions, um, will be positively influenced if the FRG and NATO also agree to and implement disarmament measures in a similar manner to that of the GDR and other socialist countries. Thank you very much.

The media was left to make what they wanted of his incoherence. The press room emptied within seconds. The news went viral on the wire services and soon made its way via TV and radio into living rooms and streets of Berlin. ‘Leaving via all GDR checkpoints immediately possible’ Reuters reported at 7.02 p.m., ‘GDR opens its borders’, echoed Associated Press three minutes later. At 8 p.m. on West German TV, the evening news Tagesschau – which millions of East Germans could watch – led with the same message. Correct in substance, these headlines were, of course, in formulation much balder, bolder and far-reaching than the small print of the actual East German Reiseregelung, or the reality on the ground.[51]

But during the course of this damp and very cold November evening, reality soon caught up – and with a vengeance.

Over the next few hours, thousands of East Berliners converged on the various checkpoints at the Wall, especially in the centre of the city – to see for themselves if and when they could cross. They were not put off by East German state television or the police telling them to come back next morning at eight o’clock when the bureaucracy would be all ready. Instead they kept shouting: ‘Tor auf!’ (‘Open the gate!’). At Bornholmer Strasse, some sixty armed border guards – commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger, who had been doing the job since 1964 – sat in their tiny checkpoint huts, totally outnumbered, and without any instructions from on high. Both the Central Committee and the military top brass, locked away in meetings, were unreachable. So the men on the front line had to make their own decisions. At around 9 p.m. they began to let people through: first as a trickle, one by one, meticulously stamping each person’s identity card – the idea being these exiters would not later be let back in. Then, at around 10.30 p.m., they lifted the barriers in both directions and gave up trying to check credentials. It was as if the floodgates had been opened. People poured across into West Berlin. No East or West German politicians were present, nor any representatives of the four occupying powers. There were just a few baffled East German men in uniform, soon reduced to tears as they were overcome by the emotion of this historic moment.[52]

Within thirty minutes, several thousand people had squeezed their way to the other side. Somewhere in the chaos a young East German quantum chemist called Angela Merkel was swept along by the crowd. After a quiet sauna evening with her friends, she just wanted to experience for herself German history in the making. Once on the western side of the Wall, she phoned her aunt in Hamburg and joined the celebrations before heading back home – wondering what 9 November would mean for her.[53]

By midnight – after twenty-eight years of sealed borders – all the crossings in Berlin were open; likewise, as news spread, any other transit point along the border between the two Germanies. Neither the GDR security forces nor the Red Army did anything to prevent this. Not a single shot was fired, and no Soviet soldier left his barracks. Now, thousands of East Berliners – of all ages, from every walk of life – were making their way on foot, bike or car into the western half of the city – a forbidden place hitherto only glimpsed from afar. At Checkpoint Charlie, where Allied and Soviet tanks had been locked in a tense face-off in August 1961 as the Berlin Wall went up, the jubilant horde of visitors was greeted by cheering, flag-waving West Germans, plying them with flowers and sparkling wine.

‘I don’t know what we’re going to do, just drive around and see what’s going on,’ said one thirty-four-year-old East Berliner as he sat at the wheel of his orange Trabant chugging down the glittering Kurfürstendamm. ‘We’re here for the first time. I’ll go home in a few hours. My wife and kids are waiting for me. But I wasn’t going to miss this.’[54]

At the Brandenburg Gate, the most prominent landmark of the city’s division, hundreds of people chanted on the western side ‘The Wall must go!’ Then some climbed on top of the Wall and danced on it; others clambered over and headed right through the historic arch that for so long had been inaccessible to Berliners from either side. These were utterly unbelievable pictures – captured gleefully by American TV film crews for their prime-time news bulletins back home.[55]

All through the night and over the next few days, East Berliners continued to flood into West Berlin in vast numbers – 3 million in three days, most of whom came back.

The open Wall: Potsdamer Platz, 12 November 1989

They saw the promised land – and were being bribed to savour it. While in the East, banks and travel agents lacked sufficient foreign (DM) currency reserves to exchange for every traveller even the permitted maximum of fifteen Ostmarks, in the West long lines of East Berliners formed in front of the West Berlin banks to pick up the DM 100 ‘Welcome Money’ – about $55 – that the FRG had always given East Germans on their first time in the West. Spending their own, free DMs in the shiny emporia of the consumer society, they filled up their plastic bags with precious goods – often as simple as bananas, oranges or children’s toys – and carried them back into the grey streets of the socialist utopia.[56]

It was in those days that all the talk about revolution and renewal in the GDR totally evaporated as a credible political project.[57] Not for opposition intellectuals, of course – for the idealist alternative left and the earnest socialist reformers such as Bohley and Wolf – or even for the new echelon of younger SED functionaries. They denounced all talk of reunification as reactionary Heim ins Reich patriotism, derided capitalist culture as materialist trash and condemned consumption and foreign travel as the new opium of the masses.[58] But most of the ‘masses’ took no notice. For them, the idea of reforming the GDR and of pursuing a ‘third way’[59] between SED-state socialism and Western capitalism was now dead. That was the true revolution: popular rejection of the old regime and no affirmation of any new socialist-democratic vision of society. Why stay in a broken communist state when you could start a new life amid the temples of capitalism? Or even demand the merger of East Germany with the West?

*

How was it that the GDR experience turned out so differently from that of Poland and Hungary? In part because in the GDR the transition from communism began much later and developed much faster. Poland and Hungary had entered the process of political transformation in earnest in the summer of 1988; in the GDR the first rumblings of protest did not occur till May 1989 and street demonstrations only began in September. In part, too, because the Polish and Hungarian economies were in a far worse state than East Germany’s, so their tortuous navigation out of a command economy towards the market offered little attraction in the GDR. Indeed, the politico-economic transition produced more shortages and hardship than the people had bargained for. But it was also because the East German party state had failed, despite forty years of assiduous effort, to inculcate a sense of GDR patriotism. In Hungary and Poland the changes were rooted in national unity; this was not so in the GDR, where unity became all-German, not East German.

The GDR regime was also much more hard-line and unreconstructed for much longer. Only in East Berlin was a ‘Chinese solution’ seriously considered – and not just because Tiananmen happened after Polish and Hungarian reforms had got into their stride. Honecker was locked in the past, totally wedded to his state and his version of real socialism. Yet while the GDR might have been the technologically most advanced country in the Eastern bloc, it was also more dependent on the USSR than its neighbours because of the size of the Red Army presence and because the GDR was an artificial polity, created and sustained by Moscow. As Brezhnev had told Honecker back in 1970, ‘Erich, I tell you frankly, don’t ever forget this: the GDR cannot exist without us, without the Soviet Union, its power and strength. Without us there is no GDR.’ Honecker’s problem in 1989 was that Gorbachev was definitely not Brezhnev. He wanted radical reforms and, furthermore, had renounced the use of force. For Honecker, that would spell the end of his rule – and indeed of the SED itself.

Out of this face-off between East Berlin and the Kremlin came domestic political paralysis. There was no Chinese-style crackdown in Leipzig on 9 October to crush the protests, no transfer of the Tiananmen ‘contagion’ to Europe. This indicated a fundamental divide between the Asian and European transitions from the Cold War – between the use of repression and a consensus on non-violence. And the GDR’s policy paralysis did not go away even after Honecker was toppled, because Krenz refused to allow any breach in the SED’s monopoly on power until after the ‘fall of the Wall’.

In fact, the reforms in Poland and Hungary had little effect on developments in the GDR. Where Hungary did matter was as an exit rather than an exemplar. It was the opening of the Hungarian border with Austria and the ensuing exodus of East Germans that proved the real catalyst for change within the GDR. The impact was intensified by the opening of Czechoslovakia’s frontier with West Germany, and ultimately by the collapse of the inner German border as well. Once East Germans started to move en masse, the ‘German question’ was back in people’s minds. That’s why the moment of political convergence with Poland and Hungary was so brief – a matter of three weeks or so before the fall of the Wall and then Kohl’s policy offensive undermined the aspirations of Neues Forum and its allies for a reformed socialism. It also made nonsense of the efforts of Hans Modrow – hailed by many in the GDR as the ‘German Gorbachev’ – to form a new and stable government and to negotiate in a Polish-style round-table process with the opposition. Before round-table talks even began, the SED disintegrated at all levels, amid corruption scandals and a string of resignations, and in early December it was renamed the PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus) and its monopoly deleted from the constitution. The brief ‘Krenz era’ was history.

Similarly, Neues Forum and other opposition groups such as Demokratischer Aufbruch were undermined by the ‘post-Wall’ divergence between political activists and the general mass of GDR citizens. Just when the opposition’s dream of realising a democratic and reformed socialist GDR seemed finally within reach – as commentator Timothy Garton Ash wrote, putting the ‘D for Democratic’ into the GDR – the whole idea was stillborn. The round-table talks were set for 7 December, but over the previous four weeks 130,000 more people emigrated to the FRG. In the Leipzig Monday demonstrations the slogan ‘Deutschland einig Vaterland’ (‘Germany the united fatherland’) was heard for the first time as early as 13 November; a week later ‘Wir sind das Volk’ had transmuted into ‘Wir sind ein Volk’ (‘We are one people’). In contrast to Hungary and Poland, it was the GDR’s opening to the West and the prospect of unification that made the crucial difference. Hungarians and Poles had to imagine an alternative future for themselves at home; East Germans could look to the reality of an existing alternative on their own doorstep: a prosperous, functioning West German state, run by compatriots. And they did. As Garton Ash also observed, it was at once a chance and a tragedy for East Germany that ‘the boundaries of social self-determination and national self-determination were not the same’.[60]

Significantly, Germany’s national story had wider repercussions. When we talk today about the fall of the Wall, what comes into our minds is the image of the Brandenburg Gate and people dancing on the Wall. But in fact the Gate was in no man’s land; it was not a crossing point and, after the extraordinary night of 9 November, it would remain closed for another six weeks. Not until 22 December was the Wall opened at the Gate. This is a reminder that the media was at once a catalyst, a shaper and a multiplier of events. Even in one day, the headlines shifted from ‘The GDR Opens its Borders to the Federal Republic’ (10 November) to ‘Wall and Barbed Wire Do Not Divide Anymore’ (11 November). A local moment full of contingency was quickly transformed into an event of universal significance. As an experience of liberty through the overcoming of physical separation, the end of the Wall had a meaning and resonance which spread fast and far beyond Berlin.

In the process, the focus of the story rapidly shifted away from the politicians (especially Schabowski and his botched press conference) making history through blunders and happenstance to a narrative of ordinary people bringing about revolutionary change. And then, even more abstractly, as GDR politicians and Western journalists who drove events that night were edited out of the story, ‘the fall of the Wall’ became a magical and highly symbolic moment in history. The dancers on the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate became the ultimate symbol of freedom for 1989 – rather like the way, at the other end of the spectrum, the man in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square became the year’s ultimate symbol of repression.[61]

*

The fall of the Wall had certainly not been Kohl’s moment. And he was struggling to catch up for the next three weeks. But then he would seize the initiative with a vengeance.

Most of November was spent responding to the demands of others, rather than working out his own agenda. On the 9th, that momentous night for Germany, he had not even been in the country. When he finally escaped from Poland and got to Berlin next day, he had been shouted down by the crowds. Soon he had to rush back again to Warsaw to wrap up the interrupted visit. But the Poles were harder to placate – because it was no longer just a matter of burying the past but alleviating fears about the future. After the three culture-focused days of reconciliation – at Auschwitz and in Silesia – the trip was rounded off by a carefully calibrated finale. Kohl announced an aid package amounting to $2.2 billion – the largest by far from any Western government (Bush had offered $100 million when he was in Poland in early July). And the chancellor wrote off $400 million in West German loans since the 1970s. With these measures he wanted to forestall any fresh talk about a peace treaty for the Second World War, which would raise the unhappy issues of reparations and the Oder–Neisse border with Poland. So in the press conference, when finally asked about the elephant in the room – ‘reunification’ – the chancellor replied ‘We do not speak about reunification but about self-determination.’[62]

Moment of penitence: Kohl at Auschwitz

Kohl was clearly careful how he spoke publicly about unity, preferring to argue his case around the strict legal principles of the East Germans’ right to self-determination and the provision in the FRG’s Basic Law that unity should be attained through the exercise of the Germans’ free will. Kohl, of course, assumed that when East Germans had the opportunity to choose, they would opt for unification. He had made this point in his state-of-the-nation address on 8 November, before the Wall was breached, and reiterated it at greater length, again in the Bundestag, on 16 November.

‘Our compatriots in the GDR must be able to decide for themselves which way they want to go in the future,’ the chancellor declared. ‘Of course we will respect every decision that is being made by the people of the GDR in free self-determination.’ On the question of economic assistance, he added that this would be useless ‘unless there is an irreversible reform of the economic system, an end to a bureaucratic planned economy and the introduction of a market economy’. In other words, self-determination was in principle entirely free but was also susceptible to a little bribery.

In his speech Kohl made a deliberate nod towards Bonn’s Western allies and their suppressed concerns about a resurgence of German nationalism. ‘We are and remain a part of the Western system of values,’ he insisted, adding that it would be a ‘fatal error’ to slow the process of European integration.[63]

His cryptic statement about ‘Europe’ was, however, insufficient to allay all fears. This became evident when Kohl travelled to Paris for a special dinner of European Community heads of government on 18 November. Mitterrand, then holding the rotating position of president of the EC, had invited his colleagues to the Elysée Palace at very short notice – keen to ensure that the EC 12 would be an active partner for the reforming states of Central and Eastern Europe but without allowing the Community to be deflected from the already ongoing processes of deeper economic and political integration. In particular, the French president worried that, after the drama in Berlin, plans for economic and monetary union (EMU) might no longer take centre stage at the upcoming EC Council meeting in Strasbourg on 8–9 December. He believed that those plans were all the more urgent precisely because of the great transformation sweeping across the Soviet bloc. And he wanted the EC to make this position public well before the Bush–Gorbachev summit talks in Malta on 2–3 December.[64]

Mitterrand therefore had a clear agenda when speaking for ‘Europe’. But, as the leader of France, he was acutely nervous about where Germany was now going. He and Kohl had not met since that epoch-making night of 9 November and he wanted to use the gathering in Paris to talk face-to-face with his German counterpart. They did so, according to Kohl’s memoirs, in a short tête-à-tête before the dinner. Mitterrand avoided mentioning the issue of reunification but Kohl – conscious of what was in the air – raised it himself. ‘I talk to you as a German and as chancellor,’ he said, and then solemnly pledged his active commitment to building Europe. More reflectively, he added: ‘I see two causes for the developments in the East: that the alliance [i.e. NATO] stayed firm thanks to the dual-track decision[65] and the fact that the European Community has evolved in such dynamic fashion.’ Thus, succinctly, he underlined Bonn’s intertwined loyalty to the Western alliance and the European project.[66]

Having put his own cards on the table, Kohl joined Mitterrand for dinner with the other EC leaders. The meal, in one of the opulent salons of the Elysée, went smoothly. Not even a word was ‘whispered’ about unification, Kohl would later recall. Instead Mitterrand went on about the need to support the democratisation processes in the East at large. He argued for constant prudence and against anything that might destabilise Gorbachev. Yet the German question was clearly hanging there, unspoken.

Finally Margaret Thatcher could contain herself no longer. Over dessert she exploded to Kohl: There could be ‘no question of changing Europe’s borders’, which had been confirmed in the Helsinki Final Act. ‘Any attempt to raise this or the issue of German reunification would risk undermining Mr Gorbachev’s position,’ she warned, and would ‘open the Pandora’s box of border claims right through Central Europe’. Kohl was visibly taken aback at her outburst, which upset the whole mood of the dinner. Struggling to respond, he cited a 1970 NATO summit declaration, in which the allies had expressed their continued support on the issue of German unity. Thatcher retorted that this endorsement happened at a time when nobody seriously believed that reunification would ever take place. But Kohl dug in. Be that as may, he said coldly, NATO agreed on this declaration and the decision still stood. Even Thatcher would not be able to stop the German people in their tracks: they now held their fate in their own hands. Sitting back, his ample girth filling the chair, he looked the British prime minister in the eye. Angrily, she stamped her feet several times and shouted: ‘That’s the way you see it, you see it!’[67]

To Kohl it was quite clear that the Iron Lady was determined to uphold the status quo. For her, borders were immutable; even their peaceful change was simply not on the agenda. This also applied to the inner German frontier, which he – like most Germans – did not consider as an international border, never mind the Oder–Neisse frontier with Poland.

Although shaken by Thatcher’s diatribe, Kohl was conscious that her rooted antipathy to the European project meant that she was an outsider in the EC’s decision-making. And she could not play the American card because Kohl was already certain that Bush supported the principle of German unification. What worried Kohl much more was that Mitterrand just sat there quietly, seeming to approve of Thatcher’s words. Had he egged her on? Was this an Anglo-French axis in the making? The chancellor began to wonder whether the French leader was playing a double game.[68]

Only two weeks earlier, Mitterrand had told Kohl in Bonn that he did not fear German reunification. On the other hand, at the end the French president entered the caveat that he would have to consider what in practice worked best in the interests of France and of Europe. There was, in other words, an ambiguity in the French position: Mitterrand thought plenty of time should be allowed for German unification (‘la nécessaire durée du processus’), while, simultaneously, the process of creating an ever-closer European union should be speeded up. This double dynamic of largo and accelerando was evidently something that mattered to the Frenchman. And it made the chancellor just a little bit uneasy. But he placed his trust in their history of partnership and cooperation going back to 1982.[69]