Postwar

German dissenters in East Berlin founded Neues Forum (‘New Forum’), followed a few days later by another citizens’ movement, ‘Democracy Now’, both groups pressing for a democratic ‘restructuring’ of the GDR. On Monday October 2nd, in Leipzig, a crowd of 10,000 demonstrated in frustration at the Honecker regime’s refusal to reform itself—the largest public gathering in East Germany since the ill-fated Berlin uprising of 1953. The 77-year old Honecker remained impervious. East Germans seeking to emigrate, he declared in September, had been ‘blackmailed through enticements, promises and threats to renounce the basic principles and fundamental values of socialism.’ To the increasing anxiety of younger colleagues—who could no longer ignore the scale of the challenge facing them—the leadership appeared helpless: frozen in place. On October 7th, to honor the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR, Mikhail Gorbachev came and spoke, memorably advising his stone-faced host that ‘life punishes those who delay.’ To no avail: Honecker pronounced himself satisfied with things the way they were.

Encouraged by the Soviet leader’s visit—not to speak of developments abroad—demonstrators in Leipzig and other cities began holding regular demonstrations and ‘vigils’ for change. The Monday gatherings in Leipzig, now a regular fixture, had grown to 90,000 by the week following Gorbachev’s speech, the assembled crowds all proclaiming ‘We are the people!’ and calling upon ‘Gorby’ to help them. The following week the numbers had grown again; an increasingly agitated Honecker was now proposing to use force to put down any further show of opposition.

The prospect of outright confrontation appears finally to have concentrated the mind of Honecker’s Party critics. On October 18th some of his colleagues, led by Egon Krenze, staged a coup and removed the old man from power, after 18 years.[300] Krenze’s first act was to fly to Moscow, endorse (and seek the endorsement of) Mikhail Gorbachev and return to Berlin to prepare a cautious East German perestroika. But it was too late. At the most recent Leipzig demonstration, an estimated 300,000 people had come together to press for change; on November 4th half a million East Germans gathered in Berlin to demand immediate reforms. Meanwhile, on that same day, Czechoslovakia opened its border; in the next forty-eight hours 30,000 people left through it.

By now the authorities were truly panicked. On November 5th, the GDR government hesitantly proposed a mildly liberalized travel law, only to have it dismissed by critics as pitifully inadequate. The East German cabinet then dramatically resigned, followed by the Politburo. The following evening—November 9th, anniversary of both the Kaiser’s abdication and Kristallnacht—Krenze and his colleagues proposed yet another travel law to head off the stampede. At a news conference carried live on German television and radio, Gunter Schabowski explained that the new provisions, in immediate effect, authorized foreign travel without advance notice and permitted transit through the border crossings into West Germany. The Wall, in other words, was now open.

Before the broadcast was even finished people were in the streets of East Berlin and heading for the border. Within hours, fifty thousand people had poured into West Berlin: some forever, others just going to look. By the following morning the world had changed. As anyone could see, the Wall had been breached for good and there could be no return. Four weeks later the Brandenburg Gate, straddling the East-West border, was reopened; over the Christmas holidays of 1989, 2.4 million East Germans (1 in 6 of the total population) visited the West. This had most decidedly not been the intention of the GDR rulers. As Schabowski himself later explained, the authorities had ‘no clue’ that opening the Wall might bring about the downfall of the GDR—quite the contrary: they saw it as the beginning of ‘stabilization’.

In taking the hesitant decision to open the border the GDR leaders had hoped merely to release a safety valve, perhaps secure a little popularity, and above all buy enough time to propose a program of ‘reforms’. The Wall, after all, was opened for much the same reason that it had been erected and closed a generation earlier: to staunch a demographic hemorrhage. In 1961 this desperate ploy had succeeded; in 1989, too, it worked after a fashion—surprisingly few East Germans remained permanently in West Berlin or emigrated to West Germany once they were reassured that if they returned they would not find themselves imprisoned again. But the price of that reassurance was the fall of more than just the regime.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Wall, the SED went through the—by now familiar—last rites of a dying Communist Party. On December 1st the Volkskamme r (GDR Parliament) voted 420-0 (with five abstentions) to delete from the GDR constitution the clause declaring that the state is ‘led by the working class and its Marxist-Leninist party’. Four days later the Politburo resigned once again; a new leader—Gregor Gysi—was chosen; and the party’s name duly changed, to the Party of Democratic Socialism. The old Communist leadership (including both Honecker and Krenze) was expelled from the party; round table (again) discussions were begun with representatives of Neues Forum (by general consent the most visible of the opposition groups), and free elections were scheduled.

But even before the latest (and last) GDR government under Dresden Party boss Hans Modrow had started drafting a ‘Party action program’, its actions and intentions were all but irrelevant. East Germans, after all, had an option that was not available to other subject-peoples—there was no ‘West Czechoslovakia’, or ‘West Poland’—and they were not about to forego it. The goalposts were shifting: in October 1989 the Leipzig demonstrators had chanted ‘Wir sind das Volk’—‘We are the people’. By January 1990 the same crowds were proclaiming a subtly different demand: ‘Wir sind ein Volk’—‘We are one people’.

Because the death of German Communism would thus entail, as we shall see in the next chapter, the death of a German state—by January 1990 the point had become not just to get out of Socialism (much less ‘reform’ it) but to get into West Germany—it is not clear in retrospect how to interpret the hopes of the crowds who brought down the GDR in the autumn of 1989. What is clear, however, is that neither the Party (as in Hungary), nor the opposition (as in Poland) can claim much credit for the course of events. We have seen how slow the Party was to grasp its predicament; but its intellectual critics were not much quicker.

On November 28th Stefan Heym, Christa Wolf and other East German intellectuals issued an appeal ‘For Our Land’, to save socialism and the GDR and stand firm against what Heym described as the ‘glittering rubbish’ of the West. Barbel Bohley, the leading figure in Neues Forum, even described the opening of the Berlin Wall as ‘unfortunate’, because it forestalled ‘reform’ and precipitated elections before the parties or the voters were ‘ready’. Like many of East Germany’s ‘dissenting’ intellectuals (not to speak of their West German admirers) Bohley and her colleagues still envisaged a reformed Socialism, shorn of secret policemen and a ruling party but keeping a safe distance from its predatory capitalist doppelganger to the west. As events were to show, this was at least as unrealistic as Erich Honecker’s fantasy of a return to neo-Stalinist obedience. Neues Forum thus condemned itself to political irrelevance, its leaders reduced to carping resentfully at the improvidence of the masses.[301]

The German uprising of 1989, then, was perhaps the only truly popular—i.e. mass—revolution of that year (and indeed the only successful popular revolt in German history).[302] The fall of Communism in neighboring Czechoslovakia, although coming at the same time as the transformation in East Germany, followed a significantly different path. In both countries the Party leadership was rigid and repressive, and the rise of Gorbachev was at least as unwelcome to the regime in Prague as it was in Pankow. But there the similarities end.

As in Hungary, so in Czechoslovakia, Communist rule rested uneasily upon the silent memory of a stolen past. But whereas in the Hungarian case Kadar had semi-successfully distanced himself and his party from their Stalinist inheritance, the leaders of Czechoslovakia had managed no such transition. Nor had they sought it. The Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 and the subsequent ‘normalization’ lived on in Gustav Husak, in power since 1969. Even when Husak, now 75, resigned as General Secretary of the Party in 1987 (while remaining state President), he was replaced by Milos Jakes—younger, to be sure, but best known for his prominent role in the mass purges of the early Seventies.

The Czechoslovak Communists were actually rather successful at maintaining total control to the very end. Neither the Catholic Church (always a minor player in Czech, if not Slovak affairs) nor the intellectual opposition gained significant support in society at large. Thanks to the brutally efficient management of the purges, most of the country’s intelligentsia, from playwrights to historians to Sixties-era reform Communists, had been expunged not just from their jobs put from public visibility. Until 1989 some of Czechoslovakia’s most outspoken domestic critics of Communism, beginning with Vaclav Havel himself, were better-known abroad than in their own country.