Post Wall, Post Square

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]

As regards the international situation, however, standing on the Cold War front line in the heart of Europe, the Soviet leader was defiant. In his speech during the gala dinner on the 6th, he rebutted accusations that Moscow bore sole responsibility for the continent’s post-war division and he took issue with West Germany for seizing on his reforms to ‘reanimate’ dreams of a German Reich ‘within the boundaries of 1937’. He also specifically rejected demands that Moscow dismantle the Berlin Wall – a call made by Reagan in 1987 and again by Bush in 1989. ‘We are constantly called on to liquidate this or that division,’ Gorbachev complained. ‘We often have to hear, “Let the USSR get rid of the Berlin Wall, then we’ll believe in its peaceful intentions.”’ He was adamant that ‘we don’t idealise the order that has settled on Europe. But the fact is that until now the recognition of the post-war reality has insured peace on the continent. Every time the West has tried to reshape the post-war map of Europe it has meant a worsening of the international situation.’ Gorbachev wanted his socialist comrades to embrace renewal, but he had no intention of dismantling the Warsaw Pact or abruptly dissolving the Cold War borders that had given stability to the continent for the last forty years.[179]

And so, each in his own way, these two communist leaders were hanging on to the past. Gorbachev adhered to existing geopolitical realities, despite the cracks opening up in the Iron Curtain. Honecker clung to the illusion that East Germany remained a socialist nation, united by adherence to the doctrines of the party.

The intransigence of the GDR regime during the celebrations, and the growing social unrest of recent weeks, made for a potentially explosive mix. Within less than two weeks Honecker had been ousted. And only a month after the GDR’s fortieth-birthday party, on 9 November, the Berlin Wall fell without a fight. The Wall had been the prime symbol of the Cold War, the barrier that contained the East German population and the structure that held the whole bloc together. The party of 7 October proved to be a theatre of illusions. Yet there was nothing inevitable about what came next.

Chapter 3

Reuniting Germany, Dissolving Eastern Europe

The 9th of November 1989. Helmut Kohl was beside himself. Here he was, sitting at a grand banquet in the Radziwill Palace in Warsaw with the new leaders of Poland – Mazowiecki, Jaruzelski and Wałęsa – in a wonderfully festive atmosphere, together with a delegation of seventy, including Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and six other ministers of his Cabinet. But all around him people were murmuring ‘Die Mauer ist gefallen!’ (‘The Wall has fallen!’). Throughout that Thursday evening, as the chancellor tried to make polite chit-chat with his hosts, he kept being interrupted – receiving updates on little slips of paper and being called out to take phone calls from Bonn. All the while Kohl was desperately trying to think.[1] He was in the wrong place at the right time – the most dramatic moment of his chancellorship, perhaps of his whole life. What should he do?

Moment of reconciliation: Kohl, Mazowiecki and Genscher in Warsaw

Kohl’s mood had been very different when the dinner started. His five-day visit, in the planning for months, was intended as a milestone in West Germany’s relations with one of its most sensitive neighbours. History hung heavy in 1989. This was fifty years after Hitler’s brutal invasion of Poland, beginning a war that led to the extermination of 6 million Polish citizens (half of them Jewish), the obliteration of the city of Warsaw after the abortive rising of 1944, and the absorption of Poland into the Soviet bloc in 1945. Germany had a lot to answer for, and the process of reconciliation by Bonn had been long and painful. It had been an SPD chancellor, Willy Brandt, who made the first and more dramatic move in December 1970, dropping to his knees in silent remorse at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. Kohl’s trip was the first time a Christian Democrat chancellor had visited Poland. But he was not simply catching up with his political rivals and trying to redress the past; he also wanted to make a statement about the future, about the Federal Republic’s commitment to Poland’s resurrection as a free country in its post-communist incarnation. So the German chancellor had been delighted to sit down at the banquet that evening. Delighted, that is, until he got the news from Berlin.[2]

As soon as the dinner was over, the Germans held a crisis meeting over coffee. The situation was extremely delicate. The Polish leadership wanted to stop Kohl from going to Berlin, warning that this would be taken as a blatant snub. Horst Teltschik, the chancellor’s top foreign-policy adviser, was also hesitant. ‘Too much has been invested in this trip to Warsaw,’ he warned, ‘too much hangs on it for the future of German–Polish relations.’ Among the events on Kohl’s itinerary were a visit to Auschwitz – as an act of penitence for the Holocaust, preceded only once, by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (also SPD) in 1977 – and a bilingual Catholic Mass in Lower Silesia shared with Mazowiecki, set up as an act of reconciliation with the Poles. The mass was to be held in a place – the Kreisau estate of Graf von Moltke, one of the July 1944 Christian conservative plotters against Hitler – that symbolised a ‘better Germany in the darkest part of our history’, as the chancellor later put it. Kohl giving the kiss of peace to Mazowiecki linked up with his other iconic act of reconciliation: holding hands with Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984. But this gesture in Silesia was also intended to speak, at home, to the Vertriebene – the ever-prickly members on the right of his own party who had been expelled from the eastern German territories when these were absorbed into the new Poland (and the Soviet Union) after 1945.[3]

Upon leaving the Radziwill Palace, Kohl rushed to the city’s Marriott Hotel, where the West German press corps was staying, to answer their questions. And he remained for several hours because only in a Western hotel was it possible to see the news on German TV and to access a sufficient number of international phone lines. At midnight, when he spoke once more to the Chancellery, staff there confirmed that the crossing points in Berlin were opened. They also conveyed a sense of the massive flows of people and the joyous atmosphere in the once-divided city. Putting down the phone, the chancellor – pumped up with adrenalin – told the journalists that ‘world history is being written … the wheel of history is spinning faster’.[4]

Kohl decided to return to Bonn as soon as diplomatically feasible. ‘We cannot abort the trip,’ he observed, ‘but an interruption is possible.’ Next morning, 10 November, he placated his Polish hosts with a Brandt-style visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and a promise that he would be back within twenty-four hours. By the time he left Poland together with Genscher and a handful of journalists at 2.30 p.m., his destination had changed. While at the Ghetto Memorial, Kohl had received more disturbing news. Walter Momper, the SPD mayor of West Berlin, was organising a major press event, featuring his fellow socialist and former chancellor Willy Brandt, on the steps of the city hall (Schöneberger Rathaus) at 4.30 p.m. that very day. Brandt – the mayor of West Berlin when the Wall went up in August 1961 and then the celebrated chancellor of Ostpolitik – was now going to hog the limelight as the Wall came down. With barely a year to go before the next Federal elections, Kohl could not afford to be upstaged – especially when an earlier CDU chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had been conspicuously absent from Berlin during those fateful days in 1961 when the eastern half of the city was walled in.

It was all very well to want to go to Berlin. But getting there in November 1989 was no simple business. West German aircraft were not permitted to fly across GDR territory or land in West Berlin because of the Allied four-power rights – another legacy of Hitler’s war. So Kohl and Genscher flew circuitously through Swedish and Danish airspace to Hamburg before boarding a plane specially provided by the US Air Force for the flight to Berlin. Both men used the journey to frantically scribble their speeches. As much as they were partners, they were in the end also political rivals jockeying for position. After this humiliating diversion, they landed at Tempelhof, right in the centre of the city, just as the celebration at the Schöneberger Rathaus was about to begin. Sharing the spotlight with Brandt, they addressed a crowd of 20,000 and world media on the very steps from which, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy had declared ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’[5]

That evening, three key figures of FRG politics each put his own spin on the momentous events of the last twenty-four hours. Brandt, in keeping with his Ostpolitik strategy of ‘small steps’, talked of the ‘moving together of the German states’, emphasising that ‘no one should act as if he knows in which concrete form the people in these two states will find a new relationship’. Genscher opened his address by emotionally recalling his roots in East Germany, from which he fled after the war: ‘My most hearty greetings go to the people of my homeland.’ He was much more emphatic than Brandt about the underlying fact of national unity. ‘What we are witnessing in the streets of Berlin in these hours is that forty years of division have not created two nations out of one. There is no capitalist and there is no socialist Germany, but only one German nation in unity and peace.’ But, as foreign minister, he was anxious to reassure Germany’s neighbours, not least the Poles. ‘No people on this earth, no people in Europe have to fear if the gates are opened now between East and West.’[6]

Chancellor Kohl spoke last. While the sea of Berlin lefties had cheered Brandt and Genscher, they had no patience with the bulky conservative Catholic politico from the Rhineland. Here party enmity, regional pride and explosive emotions combined; the spectators tried to drown out every word of Kohl’s speech with boos, catcalls and whistling. The chancellor felt his anger rise at the behaviour of what he called contemptuously the ‘leftist plebs’ (linker Pöbel). Suppressing his fury, he ploughed on doggedly. Mindful of the upcoming election, Brandt’s iconic place in the history of Deutschlandpolitik and the way that Genscher had grabbed his moment on the balcony in Prague, Kohl ignored the crowd in front of him and spoke to millions of TV viewers, especially in the GDR. He sought to present himself as the man who was really in control, the true leader and statesman. He urged East Germans to stay put and to stay calm. He reassured them: ‘We’re on your side, we are and remain one nation. We belong together.’ And the chancellor made a particular point of thanking ‘our friends’ the Western allies for their enduring support and ended by playing the European card: ‘Long live a free German fatherland! Long live a united Europe!’[7]

For many – at home and abroad – Kohl’s expression of nationalism went too far. An ominous phone message from Gorbachev was received during the rally. He warned that the Bonn government’s declarations could fan ‘emotions and passions’ and went on to stress the existence of two sovereign German states. Whoever denied these realities had only one aim – that of destabilising the GDR. He had also heard rumours that a furious German mob had plans to storm Soviet military facilities. ‘Is this true?’ he asked. Gorbachev urged Kohl to avoid any measures that ‘could create a chaotic situation with unpredictable consequences’.[8]

Gorbachev’s message summed up the turmoil of the past couple of days, and it also did not appear to bode well for the future. Kohl sent a reply assuring the Soviet leader that he need not worry: the atmosphere in Berlin was like a family feast and nobody was about to start a revolt against the USSR.[9] But, with a profound sense of risk in the air, these were fraught and uncertain times for the chancellor. Would his three Western allies react as negatively as Gorbachev? As soon as he got back to his Bonn office later that evening, despite his exhaustion, he tried to arrange phone calls with Thatcher, Bush and Mitterrand.

He rang Thatcher first, at 10 p.m., because he thought that conversation would be ‘the most difficult’.[10] On the face of it, however, it went well. The prime minister, who had been watching events on television, said that the scenes in Berlin were ‘some of the most historic which she had ever seen’. She stressed the need to build a true democracy in East Germany and the two of them agreed to keep in close touch: Thatcher even suggested coming over for a half-day meeting before the upcoming European Council in Strasbourg early in December. Throughout the conversation, there was no mention of the word ‘unity’, but the chancellor clearly sensed that she felt ‘unease’ at the implications of the situation.[11]

He was able to extricate himself in less than half an hour, ready for what promised to be a more agreeable chat at 10.30 p.m. with George Bush. Kohl started with a survey of his trip to Warsaw and the economic predicament of Poland, but the president wasn’t interested. Cutting in, Bush said he wanted to hear all about the GDR. Kohl admitted the scale of the refugee problem and expressed scepticism about Krenz as a reformer. He also let off steam about those ‘leftist plebs’ who had tried to spoil his speech. But his assessment, overall, was very positive: the general mood in Berlin was ‘incredible’ and ‘optimistic’ – like ‘witnessing an enormous fair’ – and he told Bush that ‘without the US this day would not have been possible’. The chancellor could not stress enough: ‘This is a dramatic thing; an historic hour.’ At the end Bush was extremely enthusiastic: ‘Take care, good luck,’ he told Kohl. ‘I’m proud of the way you’re handling an extraordinarily difficult problem.’ But he also remarked ‘my meeting with Gorbachev in early December has become even more important’. Bush was right, the long-awaited tête-à-tête between him and the Soviet leader – only recently scheduled to take place in Malta on 2–3 December – could now not come soon enough.[12]

It was not possible to talk with Mitterrand that night. When they did speak at 9.15 the next morning Kohl took the same line but with an appropriately different spin. Not forgetting that 1989 was the bicentenary of the start of the French Revolution, the chancellor likened the mood on the Kurfürstendamm (West Berlin’s main shopping street) to the Champs-Elysées on Bastille Day. But, he added, the process in Germany was ‘not revolutionary but evolutionary’. Responding in similar vein, the French president hailed events in Berlin as ‘a great historical moment … the hour of the people’. And, he continued, ‘we now have the chance that this movement would flow into the development of Europe’. All very positive, of course, but perhaps also a reminder of traditional French concerns to see a strong Germany firmly anchored in the European integration project. Kohl had no problem with this and he was happy that both of them emphasised the strength of the Franco-German friendship.[13]

After talking to Mitterrand, Kohl took a call from Krenz – who had been pressing for a conversation. The two spoke for nine minutes – politely but insistently on both sides. Krenz was emphatic that ‘currently reunification was not on the political agenda’. Kohl said that their views were fundamentally different because his position was rooted in the FRG’s Basic Law of 1949, which affirmed the principle of German unity. But, he added, this was not the topic that should concern them both at the moment. Rather, he was interested in ‘getting to decent relations between ourselves’. He looked forward to coming to East Germany for an early personal meeting with the new leadership. Yet, he wanted to do so ‘outside East Berlin’ – the familiar FRG concern to avoid any hint of recognition of the GDR’s putative capital.[14]