Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989

On 23 August, the day before Mazowiecki was confirmed as Poland’s premier, an estimated 2 million people formed a human chain some 400 miles right across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939 that assigned these three Baltic States, independent since 1918, to the Soviet Union. The ‘Baltic Chain’ or ‘Chain of Freedom’ was a graphic reminder that the USSR and the Soviet empire had been held together by force. Both the Polish Assembly and the Polish Communist Party publicly condemned the Pact, as had Gorbachev himself just a few days before. But none of them was, as yet, willing to grapple with the logical implication of their words. The Pact had pulled not only the Baltic States within the USSR but also much of eastern Poland. Denouncing Stalinist policies was therefore not simply a political act; it was another sign that the Soviet bloc’s burgeoning revolution was also opening up buried questions about European geopolitics – questions that affected basic relations between the superpowers.[117]

And so Poland served almost as the icebreaker of the Cold War in the summer of 1989. Hungary followed in its wake, pursuing its own round-table talks for the reform of the electoral process and the governmental structure. In this case, though, the table was not round but triangular – as befitted the more pointed configuration of Hungarian politics in which the key players were the communists, the opposition parties and the non-party organisations. Having started on 13 June, the three groupings reached agreement on 18 September on the transition to a multiparty parliamentary democracy via fully-free national elections. The plan was that, before the elections, a president would be elected by the old, existing parliament – indeed, there was a certain understanding that Imre Pozsgay was the most likely candidate. Yet, as soon as that idea was aired, the Free Democrats, Young Democrats and Independent Trade Unions broke the consensus, refusing to sign the agreement. Quickly Hungary’s triangular politics began to fragment. The opposition parties started to feud among themselves, while on 7 October the Communist Party (in other words, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party) voted to dissolve and then rebrand itself as the Hungarian Socialist Party led by Rezső Nyers. This proved a fatal move, because the public saw through the cosmetic change. Over the following months, in the run-up to the elections, the ‘new-old party’ would fail to grow in membership, unlike its opposition rivals. Meanwhile some communists around Grósz formed, under the old name, their own ‘new-old’ splinter party which was to become even more marginal in Hungarian political life.[118]

These dramatic shifts left Hungarian politics totally up for grabs. On 18 October the parliament went ahead and passed the constitutional amendments agreed by the national round table, not least renaming the country the ‘Hungarian Republic’ – dropping the word ‘People’s’. Free elections were scheduled for 25 March 1990 and the presidential election for the summer. So Hungary had moved to multiparty politics before becoming a democracy. And for longer than in Poland an old – albeit now reform-oriented – government led by the renamed communists would continue to run political affairs. Whereas in Poland, the 4 June elections were the decisive turning point in the exit from communism, the emotional and symbolic roots of Hungary’s renewal as a nation were dramatised on 16 June, with the reburial of Nagy and the renunciation of 1956.

So the Poles were in the vanguard of democratisation. But this was a process that took place within the boundaries of a single state, just as in the Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It was in Hungary that Europe’s Iron Curtain would be lifted.

*

August was the continent’s main holiday month. Paris almost closed down. Italians cooled off in the coastal resorts of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. West Germans disappeared to the mountains of Bavaria or to the North Sea coast. In the communist East, sunseekers headed to Bulgaria’s Black Sea beaches or relaxed by the Baltic Sea, while large numbers of East Germans piled into their little, candy-coloured Trabants and drove off to Hungary. The shores of Lake Balaton were a particularly popular destination for those who loved camping. But this year, many campers were planning a one-way trip, having read or seen news reports about the end of Hungary’s barbed-wire border. They glimpsed the chance of slipping into the West. As historian Mary Sarotte has pointed out, the East German secret police, the Stasi, wrote up a ‘surprisingly honest internal summary’ of their citizens’ motives for wanting out of the GDR: lack of consumer goods, inadequate services, poor medical care, limited opportunities for travel, bad workplace conditions, the relentlessly bureaucratic attitude of the state, and the lack of a free media.[119]

Material reasons aside, there was another more political cause for flight. Inspired by the amazing political transformations in Poland and Hungary – countries they knew well and had visited in their hundreds of thousands – many East Germans saw Honecker, by contrast, as an immovable obstacle to progress in their own country. He was ‘giving yesterday’s answers to today’s questions’. Resentment first broke into the open in May when local elections, which many East Germans hoped would be held in the spirit of the USSR’s democratisation, had in fact been as tightly controlled as ever by the party. At the polling station everyone was merely expected to approve the list of candidates put forward by the ruling party. There was no opposition and no choice – other than rejecting candidates, which many did. Those who ‘forgot’ to vote were promptly visited with a helpful reminder from the Stasi. When on election night, 7 May 1989, the results were announced, 98.85% had voted for the official lists. Everything was ‘in order’: that’s at least what state election director Egon Krenz proclaimed.[120]

The election was a travesty and the result obviously bore no relation to the real mood of GDR citizens. They felt conned by this charade of democracy. One of the few protest posters read sarcastically ‘Always on board for election fraud’ (Nie genug vom Wahlbetrug). It was as if East Germans were being treated as children in a playpen, whereas the Poles and Hungarians were allowed to behave like adults – free to voice independent political views and help shape political change for themselves. ‘Many people can no longer tolerate the kindergarten atmosphere, or being constantly led by the nose on all fronts,’ said Reinhard Schult, a leading East German activist. ‘People are leaving East Germany because they have lost all hope of change.’[121] In 1988 a total of 29,000 people from the GDR had legally exited west. In just the first six months of 1989, 37,000 had been granted permission to do so.[122]

Economic prospects and political despair were the ‘push’ factors. On the ‘pull’ side, Hungary’s increasingly porous border with Austria was obviously significant. Yet that in itself was not sufficient because, if people got caught ‘preparing’ or ‘trying’ to run away illegally, the Hungarian authorities were obliged to send them back to the GDR under a secret protocol to a 1969 bilateral treaty. But on 12 June 1989 there was a new legal twist when the Hungarian government started to adhere to the 1951 UN Geneva Convention on Refugees – honouring a commitment it had made in March. This striking substitution of political principles suggested that Hungary might no longer force East Germans back to the GDR: to borrow Gorbachev’s language, the government now placed allegiance to universal values above any obligations to fellow communist states. Rather than being illegal defectors, East German escapees could now hope to obtain the status of ‘political refugee’ in international law and thereby give legitimacy to their flight.[123]

The situation on the ground, however, was still somewhat opaque. The Hungarian bureaucracy had so far not decided on the status of GDR citizens: they argued that those desiring to leave (ausreisewillige DDR-Bürger) were not in the same category as those deemed to be politically persecuted (politisch Verfolgte) under the UN convention. But even if Hungarian border officials were still hindering escape attempts by East Germans, sometimes with firearms as happened on 21 August, the number of those being returned to the GDR security forces or even just notified by name to East Berlin as attempted escapees was dwindling. Clearly close cooperation between the Stasi and the Hungarian security forces (and also those in Poland) was a thing of the past; this was another sign that the bloc was beginning to crumble.[124]

By late August an estimated 150,000–200,000 East Germans were vacationing in Hungary, mostly near Lake Balaton. Campsites were full and roads were jammed. Many GDR visitors had overstayed their originally planned and officially approved two- or three-week holidays. Some were simply hanging around in the hope of dramatic new political developments; others were watching for the right moment to slip through the increasing number of open stretches of border fences through quiet fields or secluded woodland. Hundreds more tried a different route to freedom, squatting in the grounds of the West German embassy in Budapest where they hoped to claim their automatic right to citizenship in the Federal Republic. Whatever their route, the East Germans were becoming a serious refugee problem for Hungary.[125]

The 19th of August would prove a pivotal moment. The MEP Otto von Habsburg – eldest son of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor – together with human-rights activists and the opposition Hungarian Democratic Forum, had planned a party to say ‘farewell to the Iron Curtain’. What became known as the ‘Pan-European Picnic’ was intended as a jolly gathering of Austrians and Hungarians to celebrate freedom on a sunny summer afternoon in meadows near a border crossing on the road from Sopron (Hungary) to Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland (Austria). This was where, several weeks earlier, foreign ministers Horn and Mock had cut open the barbed-wire fence between East and West.[126]

But these modest, local festivities turned into something much more political when, at the last minute, Imre Pozsgay got in on the act as the party’s co-sponsor. He arranged with his old friend István Horváth, the reformist interior minister, as well as Prime Minister Németh, that as a symbolic gesture the border gate would be open for three hours that afternoon. Border guards were instructed to carry no weapons and not to take any action. While the picnic posed no particular legal issues for Hungarian and Austrian citizens, who had permission to travel between their countries, the situation was different for East Germans. Leaflets publicising the event were printed in German and distributed beforehand; these included maps guiding people to the picnic spot and to where they could ‘clip off part of the Iron Curtain’. As a result the little border town of Sopron filled up with some 9,000 people camping or staying in B&Bs, and the West German Foreign Ministry had even dispatched extra consular staff there to ‘assist fellow Germans’. All this added to the pressure on the Hungarian border guards who were now, in effect, being observed by Western diplomats.[127]

Nevertheless most of the East Germans who toyed with escaping were really scared. They did not know about the orders given to the Hungarian soldiers. But then the picnic began. A brass band played, the beer flowed and folk dancers in traditional Hungarian and Burgenlandish attire mingled with the crowd. Some 660 East Germans who attended the picnic took heart that day. As soon as the wooden gate was opened, there was a stampede. They rushed through and, unhindered by the border guards, they entered Austria – surprised and elated. It was the largest mass escape of East Germans since the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. Another 320 managed to cross to freedom elsewhere that weekend.[128]

Such numbers were not in themselves spectacular. Thousands more East Germans stayed behind, hesitating. Over the next few days the Hungarian government increased the number of guards patrolling its western border, which resulted in far fewer refugees reaching the West. Nevertheless, every day more East Germans poured into Hungary. Behind the scenes the FRG government kept pressing the Hungarian authorities to clarify the UN refugee status of the East Germans. But Bonn’s aim was not to turn the flow into a flood – far from it: the FRG was desperate to avoid disorder and instability. Frantic efforts were made to prevent the media getting their hands on an escapee crossing the border or an embassy-occupier (Festsetzer) lest such publicity would fan East German hopes of an easy exit at a time when the FRG had agreed nothing formally with either Hungary or the GDR. And the historic shadow of the Red Army also still loomed in the background. What if the situation suddenly got out of hand? What if a crowd of refugees rioted or some soldiers or secret police panicked and started shooting? Would the Soviets suddenly get drawn in? It was in this edgy atmosphere that the transnational migration crisis gathered momentum. Alarmingly, there was still no international solution.[129]

In the end, however, what forced matters to a head was not the toing and froing on Hungary’s borders but the humanitarian crisis in Budapest. The Németh government realised that it could no longer sit on its hands and watch events unfold: before its eyes the crowd of GDR refugees outside the German embassy was growing every day. Some 800 were now camped out near the building. There were also 181 in the embassy grounds and the mission itself had been forced to close to the public on 13 August. Several emergency reception camps were then created in the vicinity by the Red Cross, the Order of Malta and other aid agencies: in the Budapest suburbs of Zugliget (capacity 600 people) and Csillebérc (2,200 people) and later around Lake Balaton for another 2,000 or so. In all the camps food and water were desperately short. There were not enough toilets and showers, let alone sleeping bags, pillows, clothing and toiletries.[130]

In the intense glare of the world media, Bonn was desperate to alleviate the distress of the East Germans and contain the international crisis. But the two German governments were deadlocked about how to deal with these people. The Honecker regime was obsessed with holding on to communist orthodoxy and not letting the GDR drift into ‘the bourgeois camp’. It took no fewer than six conversations between 11 and 31 August 1989 before East Berlin grudgingly promised Bonn that it would not ‘persecute’ embassy-occupiers and would process applications for exit – but without any commitment to give a positive response for immediate permanent emigration. Meanwhile in East Berlin the pressure for such permits was mounting almost exponentially day by day, because of the GDR’s bureaucracy’s restrictive practices and its citizenry’s alienation in the light of Poland and Hungary’s liberalisation.[131]

To resolve the crisis, the West German leadership took the initiative to deal with matters at the highest level, both with East Berlin and Budapest.[132] Normally East German leavers or escapees – being a German–German matter rather than an issue of ‘foreign’ relations – came under the aegis of the Chancellery. But most refugees were in third countries, moreover in or around FRG embassies, so the Foreign Ministry had to be involved. It was run by the forceful Hans-Dietrich Genscher – a man with his own agenda. Born in 1927 in Halle – a town that became East German after 1945 – Genscher felt he had a personal interest, almost a mission, to sort out this issue, going far beyond the call of duty. What’s more, Kohl headed a coalition government, formed by his own Christian Democrats and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), whose party leader was Genscher. This made the foreign minister also the political ‘kingmaker’ on whom the chancellor depended for his working majority in the Bundestag. So Kohl had to tolerate a certain amount of independence by Genscher in the handling of this deeply national and highly emotional problem, and their relationship was certainly not devoid of rivalry. The result was something like a dual-track policy as the FRG responded to the refugee crisis in the summer and autumn of 1989. The Foreign Ministry handled Budapest and Gyula Horn (as well as Warsaw and Prague), while the Chancellery dealt with East Berlin and Erich Honecker.[133]

But the German–German track was not much use that summer. The West German mission (or ‘permanent representation’) in East Berlin had also been obliged to close, in part because of the crush of would-be escapees. What’s more, Honecker himself was seriously ill with what proved to be cancer and was largely out of active politics for three months from July to late September, as party underlings began to jockey for power.[134]

So the onus fell on the Hungarian government, amid all the other political and economic problems on its plate, to try to square the diplomatic circle as a human drama unfolded in the muddy, squalid camps. It was obliged now to deal in totally novel ways with the FRG in order to address the crisis at the heart of Budapest. Yet, at the same time, the government had no desire to break entirely and openly with the GDR: Horn did not want to repudiate Hungary’s bilateral secret treaty of 1969 about how to deal with ‘criminal offenders’ who got caught planning or attempting ‘desertion from the Republic’. And he also kept resisting West German pressure to recognise the East Germans officially as ‘refugees’ under international law and to call in the UNHCR to deal with them. In short, his government was in a kind of no man’s land between one international order and another. At the end of his tether, Horn told one of Genscher’s staff: ‘Hungary is in a precarious situation.’[135]

Whatever the protocols of Bonn’s informal dual track, it would take the intervention of Chancellor Kohl to force matters to a head – engaging directly with his counterpart in Budapest, Prime Minister Németh. On 25 August Németh and Horn travelled secretly to Bonn to meet with Kohl and Genscher at Schloss Gymnich, a restored castle and government guest house. In a two-and-a-half-hour meeting followed by lunch, Hungarians and West Germans sought to resolve the matter irrespective of what the East Germans wanted.[136]

Kohl and Genscher convinced their Hungarian visitors that the most sensible way forward was to cooperate wholeheartedly with the West on the issue of East German refugees. It was an emotional moment. Németh assured Kohl that ‘deportations’ back to the GDR were ‘out of the question’ and added ‘we will open the border’ by mid-September. ‘If no military or political force from the outside compels us to act differently, we will keep the border open for East German citizens’ as an exit route. Taking in these words, Kohl had difficulty in containing his emotions. Indeed he was moved to tears.[137]

Németh then went on to agree with Kohl that, such was the severity of Hungary’s economic crisis, he would need the help of the West to get on top of it. By contrast, the GDR could do nothing for Hungary; nor could Gorbachev because of his ‘difficult position’ at home, though Németh said it was important to do everything possible to ‘ensure the success of Gorbachev’s policies’ because that was the only way to keep peace in the bloc. In short, by doing as Bonn wanted with regard to the touchstone issue of the East Germans, Németh seems to have hoped to encourage both Bonn and also Washington to offer Hungary financial support and to develop more extensive trade relations. Kohl did not make any commitments then, but promised to speak to West German bankers (and to Bush). A substantive DM 1 billion financial support package duly followed for Hungary’s democratisation and market reforms – comprising a 500 million credit guarantee by Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg and 500 million from the Federal German government. By the end of the visit Németh had made a fateful decision: Hungary would fully open its border to the West for GDR citizens in return for Kohl’s DM to help his country emerge from the bloc into the Western world.[138]

It was a sign of the times that this deal was struck before Budapest officially informed the Kremlin of its border decision. An intense few days of ‘travel diplomacy’ ensued. But once Horn spoke to Shevardnadze, it was clear that the Soviets were willing to grant the Hungarians a free hand in their actions.[139] And Kohl’s telephone conversation with Gorbachev himself also produced a green light, with the Soviet leader’s laconic, even banal, observation ‘the Hungarians are good people’.[140]

The Hungarians were, however, much less successful in sorting out arrangements with the GDR. In East Berlin on 31 August Horn told Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer he was willing to send the East Germans home if the GDR pledged it would grant the escapees immunity from prosecution and guaranteed their right to emigrate legally. Yet Fischer offered only immunity and kept insisting that upon their return these East Germans would have to ‘pursue their individual exit visas’ with legal assistance but with no promise that permanent exit permits would be automatically granted. He also demanded that Hungary close its borders for East Germans, which Horn rejected. East Berlin also tried to convene a meeting of Warsaw Pact foreign ministers to put pressure on Budapest – but Soviet, Polish and Hungarian officials all objected, arguing that the Pact was not an appropriate forum to deal with the matter. So by 5 September the SED Politburo was reduced to old-fashioned communist bluster, accusing Hungary of ‘doing the bidding of Bonn’ and ‘betraying socialism’.[141]

On 10 September Horn made his public announcement that the Hungarian government would allow East Germans to cross freely into Austria, from where they could continue to the Federal Republic. Hungary, Horn declared, did not want to become ‘a country of refugee camps’ and was determined to ‘resolve the situation on humanitarian gounds’. His deputy Ferenc Somogyi told the international press – carefully choosing his words, delivered in English. ‘We want to open up and diversify relations with Western Europe and the West in general.’ In this vein, Somogyi said, Hungary had accepted a general European attitude and thereby moved ‘closer to the West’, placing ‘absolute primacy on universal humanitarian values’. What’s more, he added approvingly, ‘similar considerations’ now also characterised Soviet policy.[142]

The drama then unfolded on TV screens across the world. From the early hours of 11 September a mass exodus ensued. The East Germans, many of them young people in their twenties and thirties (mainly craftsmen such as bricklayers and masons, plumbers and electricians), poured across the Austrian border in cars, buses and trains. Austrian Interior Ministry officials said that by late that evening 8,100 East Germans had entered Austria en route to West Germany and that the flow was increasing steadily. And with this stream of people, Craig Whitney of the New York Times remarked that the ‘German question’, that ‘dream, or fear, of German reunification, also came alive with them’. He quoted a senior US diplomat: ‘It’s still not going to happen any time soon, but there’s beginning to be serious thought about it. It’s not just a pious platitude any more.’[143]

On 12 September Kohl sent Németh a telegram thanking him for this ‘generous act of humanity’. The same day, the chancellor exploited the euphoric mood in West Germany to full effect at his party convention in Bremen where some Christian Democrats were trying to overthrow him. He declared that it could never be the policy of responsible West German officials to urge East Germans to flee. But ‘it is a matter of course that everyone who comes to us from East Germany will be greeted by us as a German among Germans’. Appealing to national sentiments and presenting himself as a true patriot chancellor, Kohl managed to fend off the leadership challenge and secure reconfirmation as party leader. Not for the first or last time in these turbulent years, international politics reverberated in domestic affairs.[144]

By the end of September, between 30,000 and 40,000 people – far more than even informed circles had ever anticipated – had gone West via this route.[145] The Honecker regime was furious but East Germany was now diplomatically isolated in the Warsaw Pact. Crucially, Moscow hardly protested at all. On the contrary, Gennady Gerasimov, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, merely said that the border opening was ‘a very unusual and unexpected step’ but that it did not affect the USSR directly. That the Soviet Union went along with the Hungarian decision, thereby distancing the Kremlin even further from East Berlin, was a serious blow to the Honecker regime’s morale. There were even question marks over Gorbachev’s much-anticipated attendance at the upcoming fortieth-anniversary celebrations of the GDR’s foundation on 7 October. It was no secret that Gorbachev deeply disliked the ‘scumbag’ (mudak) Honecker, as he told Chernyaev. And the Soviet leader certainly did not want to be seen as supporting Honecker’s hard-line position against more reform-minded East German communists. Indeed, after his triumphant trip to Bonn, he had explained to Honecker in no uncertain terms that the USSR was changing. ‘This is the destiny of the Soviet Union,’ he declared, ‘but not only its destiny; it is also our common destiny.’ Nor was he keen to jeopardise his budding political friendship with Kohl: like Németh, Gorbachev’s policy towards the GDR was now being framed against hopes of West German financial injections, which the chancellor had promised during the Soviet leader’s June visit in Bonn.[146]