Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989

Unable to mobilise the Warsaw Pact in its support, the East German government used its own powers to the utmost. During September it imposed severe restrictions on GDR citizens travelling to Hungary. Although many still managed to get through, this policy simply had the effect of diverting the human traffic towards the West German embassies in Warsaw and Prague. By 27 September there were 500 East Germans seeking refuge at the Warsaw embassy and 1,300 in the Prague mission.[147]

Camp out for freedom – East Germans besiege the FRG Embassy in Prague

Prague was particularly hard hit because Czechoslovakia was in any case the transit route for East Germans hoping to head West via Hungary. And the moment East Berlin denied permission to travel to Hungary, GDR emigrants simply stayed in Czechoslovakia rather than returning home. These were people who had so far neither applied for a permanent exit visa to West Germany nor did they have adequate papers to enter Hungary. For fear of being picked up by the Czechoslovak authorities and then deported to the GDR, they hoped to achieve their goal of getting to the West by sitting it out in the grounds of the West German embassy – an eighteenth-century palace in the centre of Prague, whose beautiful park became a squalid and unsanitary refugee camp.

By the end of the month, more than 3,000 people lived in and around the main embassy building, 800 of whom were children. They had four toilets between them. The women and children bedded down at night on foam-rubber pads, while the men slept in shifts in tents spread out incongruously under black baroque statues of goddesses in the once-elegant gardens. Food was at best simple: coffee, tea, bread and jam for breakfast, and a thick soup that the Germans call ‘one-pot’ (Eintopf) for the other meals – served from field kitchens that steamed and smoked behind the wrought-iron garden gates. ‘There’s an occasional orange for every two or three children, for vitamins,’ a young mother said bleakly.[148]

Bonn was desperate to negotiate a deal to release these GDR squatters to the West, and the UN General Assembly on 27–9 September in New York offered Genscher the perfect opportunity. On the margins of the conference he was able to discuss the matter quietly with his Soviet, Czechoslovak and East German counterparts.[149] As a result of Genscher’s pleas, it appears, Shevardnadze pressed East Berlin to ‘do something’ and Honecker, with approval of the Politburo on the 29th, offered Bonn a one-off deal: the embassy-occupiers’ could go West as long as their ‘exit’ to the FRG would be presented as their ‘expulsion’ from East Germany. Honecker would thereby be able to demonstrate that he remained in control by seeming to oust these traitors from his state. To further show that he was orchestrating the whole business, the East German leader insisted that the refugees travel on sealed trains from Prague back to the GDR before being transported to West Germany. Honecker wanted to use the train journey to record the identities of the escapees, so that GDR authorities could confiscate their property. Sealed trains had, of course, a dark historical connotation, summoning up images of Nazi Germany’s transports to the concentration camps. There were also fears that the trains could be stopped in the GDR. Still, the Kohl government agreed to Honecker’s offer because this was at least an arrangement under which the East German escapees were being treated as legal emigrants rather than illegal fugitives – part of the general effort to bring the crisis within the domain of international law and universal humanitarian values.[150]

As soon as Genscher got back to Bonn from New York at dawn on 30 September, he found himself on a mission to implement the plan. With a small team of officials he headed for Prague. Other FRG diplomats set out on a similar mission to Warsaw. Both groups had the daunting task of overseeing an orderly exodus and ensuring that the GDR honoured its grudging concessions. Genscher landed in the Czechoslovak capital in the afternoon, only to learn that – contrary to earlier understandings – he would not be allowed to accompany the refugees on their freedom train. Honecker had now decided that only lower-level West German officials could travel: he did not want the added publicity from the foreign minister’s presence with the freedom riders.[151]

Undeterred, Genscher hurried to the West German embassy. There, an air of excitement had been building up over the course of the day. Suddenly, just after dusk and without any fanfare, Genscher stepped onto the baroque balcony and looked out at the huge crowd beneath him. Visibly moved, he announced ‘Dear fellow Germans, we have come to you to inform you that today your departure to West Germany has been approved.’ That magic word ‘departure’ was enough: the rest of his sentence was drowned in cries of jubilation.[152]

‘It was unbelievable,’ exclaimed a man from Leipzig. ‘Genscher was there like the incarnation of freedom.’ The people at the Prague embassy, some of whom had been there for eleven weeks, began hastily packing. It’s ‘like Christmas and Easter in one shot’, a young man told a journalist before he hurriedly boarded a bus to the train station with his wife and infant child in tow.[153]

For Hans-Dietrich Genscher, this was a hugely emotional moment. The fate of Germans in the GDR was a gut issue for him, in a way it could never have been for Kohl, a man from the Franco-German borderlands of the Rhineland-Palatinate, because Genscher had once literally been an East German refugee himself – he had fled to West Germany in 1952. Genscher had never lost his distinctive Saxon accent. Having started his legal studies in the GDR, he completed them in Hamburg before moving into West German politics.[154] These personal roots explain Genscher’s profound commitment to German unification and also his belief that this should be done through legal agreements as a peaceful embrace of the Soviet bloc. Hence his passion for West Germany’s Ostpolitik, and for the principles outlined in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which were enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, affirming both the borders of Cold War Europe and also the shared values of universal human rights. His grand ambition was to transcend the Cold War and German division not by unilateral Western actions but by consensual pan-European solutions. Therefore it was an added bonus that he was the one who commanded the show at the Prague embassy, not his ally-rival Chancellor Kohl. Little wonder that Genscher a few days later described that moment on the balcony as ‘the most moving hour in my political career’. The wheel was coming full circle for him, as he encountered the escapees of a younger generation who wanted to take the same path. ‘You can see what people will go through so that they can live like we do,’ he added, ‘not in the material sense, but to have the right to decide for themselves what to do with their lives.’[155]

And so on that night of 30 September, Prague police rerouted normal traffic to allow more than a dozen buses to evacuate the West German embassy. At Prague-Liben train station, just out of town, the throng of exuberant East Germans waiting for their trains grew ever larger. Applause rippled through the crowd at the arrival of West Germany’s ambassador to Czecholsovakia, Hermann Huber. Faces glowed with excitement, they pressed close, hugging and kissing him, even handing their children for a kind of benediction. A knot of Czechoslovak police officers stood at a distance, observing but not interfering. After many delays, six trains finally rolled out of Prague, in the company of a few token West German officials, who hoped to keep people calm.[156]

The trains had to travel for seven hours along the circuitous route from Prague through Schönau, Reichenbach, Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz), Plauen, Zwickau and Gutenfürst. The tensest moments occurred inside the GDR when East German security officials got on the trains. No one could be sure that they wouldn’t try to force the passengers to disembark and end their journey to freedom. But nothing worse happened than recording the names of those leaving and collecting their official identity cards. These moments passed without incident. The train stopped in Dresden and Karl-Marx-Stadt, where more émigrés managed to clamber aboard – without impediment or punishment. Other East Germans gathered along the track to wave as the special trains of the Deutsche Bahn sped past.[157]

When the trains reached FRG territory at Hof in north-eastern Bavaria, hundreds of West Germans packed the station, cheering and waving as each train pulled in. They had stacked up mounds of used clothing, shoes, toys and prams for the newcomers. Some pressed cash into the hands of exhausted parents or gave their children candy bars. For others, it was all too much: they stood silent, weighed down by emotions they could not put into words. In the minds of many older bystanders in this border town, the scene evoked memories of the time they – like Genscher – had gathered up their few belongings after the war to begin new lives in the West.

Although not allowed to participate in the exodus itself, Genscher sensed history in the making and relished his personal role in it. That moment on the embassy balcony in Prague had got him into the limelight of the unfolding unification drama ahead of Kohl, who also coveted a place in history. ‘What has happened shows that we are in a historical period of change which cannot be reversed and will continue,’ Genscher told the press. ‘I hope that the East German leadership realises this and will not isolate itself by refusing to change. Gorbachev is coming and I hope he will convince East Germany that reform lies in its best interests, that reform means more, not less stability.’[158]

But the very opposite happened: Honecker, ill and out of his depth, chose to box himself in. Just days before East Germany’s grand fortieth-birthday celebrations, he felt humiliated, even threatened. The stark images now flickering incessantly across TV screens of innumerable East Germans clambering over fences, besieging trains, overrunning embassies and finally clenching their fists in triumph on West German soil were a glaring indictment of his government.[159]

On 3 October Honecker sealed off all of East Germany from the outside world, even the rest of the Warsaw Pact. This was an unprecedented act. Now, for the first time, the crossing of any of the GDR’s borders required both a passport, possessed by only a minority of citizens, and a specific permit for each trip – documentation that in the current circumstances was highly unlikely to be issued.[160] East Germans were really angry. With the autumn school holidays just around the corner, thousands of East Germans had booked trips either to or through Czechoslovakia. Now with passport- and visa-free travel suspended, they were stuck at the GDR–Czechoslovak border in Saxony. Consequently it was here that demonstrations became the largest anywhere in the GDR. And as the last vents closed, the East German state was turning into a pressure cooker.[161]

Ironically, between 1 and 3 October, yet another 6,000 East Germans had poured into the West German Prague embassy. In all, some 10,000 to 11,000 would-be escapees were in limbo in and around Prague. On a smaller scale similar scenes occurred in Warsaw. And so another series of sealed trains was hastily arranged – whose departure was followed avidly by a multitude of local and foreign TV companies as well as the international press. It took eight trains from Prague to Hof to clear the backlog in Czechoslovakia; two more, carrying 1,445 people, left Warsaw for Hanover.[162] During this latest transit operation, thousands of East Germans – now feeling like prisoners in their own state – flocked to the tracks and stations to watch what became known as ‘the last trains to freedom’. Many hoped to sneak aboard. The situation in Dresden became so fraught that police had use force to clear the station and tracks – overrun by some 2,500 people – and the doors of trains were sealed from the outside. It took until the early hours of 5 October to get three of the trains through Dresden Hauptbahnhof. The rest had to be rerouted through other cities.[163]

Meanwhile, a mob of some 20,000 angry people were left milling around outside on Dresden’s Lenin-Platz (now Wiener Platz) and in the adjoining streets. Police and troops went in hard with rubber truncheons and water cannons to disperse the crowd; the demonstrators fought back, hurling paving stones at the police, in what observers called the worst outbreak of civil disobedience since 1953.[164]

The East German security forces did their rough stuff under the watchful eye of officials from Dresden’s outpost of the Soviet KGB. It may well be that one of them was a young special officer by the name of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. As a KGB man, Putin sympathised with Honecker and his crackdown on state-traitors. What most disturbed him – as we know from later statements – was the deafening silence from his political superiors in Moscow. The call from the Kremlin never came: not one soldier of the Red Army was deployed to help the East German comrades reimpose order. The truth was that Gorbachev despised the ailing Honecker and his Stalinist henchmen; totally committed to his mission as a reformer, the Soviet leader abandoned this atrophied country that had no intention of renewing itself. His aide Anatoly Chernyaev lamented in his diary the ‘terrible scenes’ of violence damaging the East German and Soviet regimes alike. The brutal scenes in Dresden, played out in the media, only worsened the split between Honecker and Gorbachev, between East Berlin and its Soviet patron.[165]

By contrast, Honecker – fed up with the man in the Kremlin – turned to another communist ally: the People’s Republic of China. In June his regime expressed effusive support for Beijing’s use of force. The way Deng Xiaoping’s China had simply crushed the ‘counter-revolutionary unrest’ in Tiananmen Square was in Honecker’s mind an example to the whole bloc and a ray of hope for the future of real socialism, given Gorbachev’s failure to slap down protest and subversion.[166] The summer had shown how, as a direct result of the USSR stepping back, the Polish and Hungarian contagion of liberalisation was spreading across Eastern Europe. It had infected the GDR itself, causing first a haemorrhage of people and now, as Dresden demonstrated, unrest on the streets in the once-secure police state. Amid this domestic upheaval, the GDR was determined to shore up the international image of communism. That’s why Honecker sent Egon Krenz, his number two, on a high-profile week-long visit to Beijing, to celebrate the PRC’s fortieth anniversary on 1 October 1989, just days before the GDR’s own fortieth-birthday party. This was definitely a time for solidarity among true communists.

Throughout his trip, Krenz was eager to learn from the Chinese communist leadership about how to deal with protestors and reinforce the status quo.[167] Talking with party secretary Jiang Zemin on 26 September, Krenz expressed his pleasure in visiting an ‘impenetrable bastion of socialism in Asia’ where ‘under the leadership of the Communist Party, the most populous country in the world was freed from its half-colonial chains’. Jiang and Krenz agreed that the events of June 1989 had revealed the true hostile intent behind the Western strategy of ‘so-called peaceful evolution’ in relations with China, exposing it as ‘an aggressive programme of undermining socialism’.[168] Qiao Shi, another top CCP Politburo member and a key figure in implementing martial law, impressed on Krenz how closely he and his colleagues were following events in Europe, especially ‘developments in Poland and Hungary’. While these were a source of alarm, Qiao voiced great satisfaction at the East German refusal to take the same path and his resolve to ‘hold on to socialism’. After all, ‘we are all communists, our life consists of struggle’ – in ‘politics, ideology and the economy’.[169] The Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping told Krenz emphatically ‘We defend socialism together – you in the GDR, we in the People’s Republic of China.’[170] Krenz in turn declared: ‘In the struggles of our time, the GDR and China stand side by side.’[171] They saw themselves as two beacons of socialism, shining out in a darkening and hostile world.

Krenz was one of very few VIPs on the strikingly meagre official list of foreigners to grace the PRC’s fortieth-anniversary festivities. The rest were minor figures from relatively marginal countries – a Czechoslovak Politburo member, a Cuban Communist Party official and Cabinet ministers from Ecuador and Mongolia. The Soviet Union was represented by the deputy chairman of the Soviet–Chinese Friendship Society. Largely because of international outrage about the 4 June events, no heads of government had come to take part. Even many ambassadors – from the United States, Canada, Western Europe and Japan – stayed away. Krenz, as deputy to the head of a major communist state in Europe, together with his North Korean counterpart Vice President Li Jong-ok, was the most senior foreign friend to sit with the ageing Chinese elite on the rostrum as they looked out over the restored tranquillity of Tiananmen Square. As Deng told Li, ‘When you go home, please tell President Kim Il-sung that China’s social order has returned to normal … What happened in Beijing not long ago was bad, but in the final analysis it is beneficial to us, because it made us more sober-minded.’ Li replied, ‘I am sure President Kim will be very happy about this.’[172]

The foreign dignitaries were treated to a massive fireworks display and a performance of colourful dances by 100,000 flowers of communist youth. Their mood, however, seemed more ‘languid’ than ‘joyous’. And instead of a huge military parade as five years earlier, only a token group of forty-five soldiers goose-stepped in front of the stage to symbolise the power of the state. Given the stiff security, ordinary Chinese could not get within a mile of the birthday party for their ‘People’s Republic’. What’s more, martial law remained in force in Beijing, almost three months since it was imposed at the height of student demonstrations. And so soldiers armed with machine guns continued to patrol the city centre. The tone of the PRC at forty was not, then, one of jubilation; indeed until recently the plans had been for something very low-key and even austere. Yet by October the party, with regained inner confidence, wanted to show and celebrate the fact that it was fully in control. ‘National Day this year is of unusual significance,’ stated Li Ruihuan, a senior politburo member in charge of propaganda. Because, he added, ‘we have just won a victory in curbing the turmoil and quelling the counter-revolutionary rebellion’.[173]

*

Whereas communist China marked its fortieth birthday with what might be called a muted certainty, still shaken by 4 June but discerning a clear path ahead, its German comrades had been planning a grand jamboree for months, only to be faced at the last moment with mounting social upheaval that threatened their political control. The intention was that 6–7 October in East Berlin would be a huge media extravaganza, with parades of the military and party youth, lavish banquets in the glittering Palace of the Republic and endless self-congratulatory speeches. In further contrast to Beijing, most of the leading figures of global communism would be in attendance, above all China’s vice premier Yao Yilin and Gorbachev himself. For Honecker this was to be a huge event, the pinnacle of almost two decades at the top and further recognition of the GDR’s status in the communist world. To ensure that everything went to plan, visits from West Berliners were curtailed for the period of the celebrations while a precisely ‘organised and coordinated’ operation of intelligence sharing and security enforcement was launched to ensure that any attempt at protest was put down immediately. His model, in short, was Beijing not Moscow.[174]

At first all seemed to go according to plan. When Gorbachev arrived at Berlin’s Schönefeld airport on 6 October, he and Honecker put on a public diplay of socialist brotherhood for the cameras. They embraced sweetly before driving into a city ‘festooned with banners and glowing under crisscrossing beams of light’ where they stood shoulder to shoulder late into the night reviewing the massive torchlight parade of 100,000 members of the German communist youth organisation (FDJ). All evening GDR television showed the two leaders smiling and waving at the youthful throng as it flowed down Unter den Linden holding high their flags and torches. Occasionally the Soviet leader drew cheers and chants of ‘Gorby, Gorby!’ from some admiring young Germans. Then to Gorbachev’s astonishment some 300 FDJ members started chanting ‘Gorby help us! Gorby save us!’ – almost as a code word for the reforms they were demanding from their unyielding government. Honecker must have been infuriated at this turn of events, but it was still a minor aberration from an otherwise perfectly orchestrated event in which the two leaders showed themselves in total harmony.[175]

Next morning, however, the atmosphere was very different. Gorbachev again stood beside Honecker, this time on the VIP stand on Karl-Marx-Allee as they watched a military parade – an annual affair which on this occasion was considerably smaller, to demonstrate the Warsaw Pact’s commitment to disarmament. But the Soviet leader now appeared ‘distracted and impatient’ as line upon line of troops marched past: the contrived festivities seemed to be taking their toll on him.[176]

Happy birthday or last rites? East Berlin, 7 October 1989

After the parade, ‘Gorby’ and ‘Honni’ met for almost three hours alone and then with the whole SED Politburo. Little went to plan; in fact Honecker and Gorbachev were simply not on the same page. They ended up talking past each other. Gorbachev, in a typical big-picture performance, enthused about his new thinking and the current ‘revolution within a revolution’ (in other words, not negating October 1917) while also underlining communism’s ongoing historical competition with capitalism, albeit in a changing world. Honecker, on the other hand, heaped praise on the GDR as one of the world’s great economies. Fifteen billion Ostmark had been invested in the microchip industry, including the great state conglomerates Mikroelektronik Erfurt, Carl Zeiss Jena and Robotron Dresden. Systems had been automated and production raised by 300–700%. He left nobody in doubt that he was determined to stick to the old form of state socialism. ‘We will solve our problems ourselves with socialist means,’ he insisted.

Their speeches to the Politburo followed similarly divergent courses. But by now Gorbachev had heard enough. He told his East German audience a story about miners in Donetsk who ‘taught a good lesson’ to the secretary of the regional party: ‘we often see that some leaders cannot pull the cart any more, but we don’t replace them, we are afraid to offend them’. As he looked knowingly around the SED Politburo members, no one could be under any illusions that here was a direct reference to the seventy-seven-year-old hardliner Honecker. ‘If we lag behind, life will punish us straight away,’ he concluded pithily. Later, before the world media, his press spokesman Gerassimov condensed this into what became a celebrated aphorism: ‘Life punishes those who come too late!’[177]

The clock is ticking, Erich! Gorbachev with Honecker

It had been twenty-four hours of mixed messages. Having eventually decided to attend the GDR’s festivities, Gorbachev clearly intended to offer the Soviet Union’s most prized Cold War ally a measured show of solidarity. After the extraordinary images of the recent exodus and escalating popular demands for reform and democracy across the cities of East Germany, Gorbachev’s primary mission was to soothe the frazzled nerves in East Berlin and to help prevent a combination of social frustration and political paralysis from increasing to the point where it could destabilise the East German state. At the same time, however, Gorbachev made clear that Moscow would not interfere in East Germany’s problems – problems, as he put it, that were not merely about ‘sausage and bread’ but about the need for ‘more oxygen in society’ which demanded a totally new approach by the GDR. Ultimately Honecker himself would have to have the courage to undertake political reform. Gorbachev was no longer prepared to prop him up.[178]