Post Wall, Post Square

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]

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.