The Year that Changed the World (19 page)

The gravity of the situation was not missed in Berlin. At the September 5 meeting of the Politburo, following Horn's visit, the leadership inveighed against Hungary's perfidy. They did so again at the September 12 meeting. Gunter Schabowski, the Berlin communist party chief who would figure so prominently in the events to come, recalled the debate with mixed contempt and incredulity. As the entire edifice of the GDR shook with the blow the Hungarians had just delivered, the assembled grandees of communism dithered and pointed fingers.

On and on they went. “It was a general attack on socialism, and we are the first target,” one top official groused. “The Hungarians are in cahoots with the West Germans,” said another. “They were bribed by Bonn.” Said yet a third, “It is the doing of that Western reactionary Otto von Habsburg.” It was all sound and fury, impotent querulousness. Nor were there any “grave consequences” for Hungary, and not only because Moscow showed no signs of interfering. Erich Honecker himself was in no position even to govern, let alone retaliate. The reason: he had just gone into the hospital. Officially, it was for gallbladder surgery. But according to West German intelligence, Honecker had intestinal cancer. That left a vacuum of power, into which no one dared step.

Thus the internal crisis of surreal detachment enveloping the GDR became deeper as the external crisis grew. It was clear, even before the Pan-European Picnic and the September 11 border opening, that East Germany's survival was at stake. Yet within the leadership there was no discussion of what to do, how to react. “We were silent,” Schabowski would tell me. “The situation of our people leaving
was not even discussed.” Or rather, it was discussed precisely once, and then only elliptically.

At the September 5 Politburo meeting, Heinz Kessler, a reactionary, suggested that the leadership should at least make a statement, if only to indicate that it understood why its citizens were leaving, according to Schabowski. “I asked, ‘What should we say? Would you say people are leaving because they can't travel or can't get modern computers or decent goods?' Many were against this, others were for it.” After a time, Kurt Hager, the party ideologist, chairing the meeting in Honecker's absence, cut off the discussion. “‘It is better to table this matter until Erich returns,' he said. And we accepted this.”

That was a mistake, Schabowski believed in retrospect. “We should have spoken up. We should have said, ‘We must do this at once.' We should have removed Erich Honecker then and there. He would have learned of it at the hospital. Would anything have come of it? No, probably not. The GDR by this time was finished. Kismet. So long. It was only a question of sooner or later. But it would have been a fight. Maybe other leaders would have emerged, younger people who could have changed the system and been partners with Bonn. Perhaps a confederation would have resulted, with the GDR lasting another few years before reunification, leading to different conditions of unification and its results. But this was the Time of Silence, as we called it. We were like a rabbit, struck motionless before the snake.”

Meanwhile, the exodus went on, watched each day via West German television throughout the GDR. The exception was Dresden, where reception was poor. East Germans watched as thousands of their countrymen poured across the frontier from Hungary, seeking new lives in the West. They cheered and cried as they arrived in the Federal Republic. They hugged relatives and families they thought they would never see again. I interviewed many and spoke also with ordinary West Germans as well as senior government officials. As the weeks went by, I was struck by the growing ambiguity of the public mood. Here was the German Democratic Republic, in certain trouble. The U.S. ambassador described it as a “silent crisis.” By rights, West Germans ought to have welcomed these events as a herald of the Cold War's imminent end. And yet, they did not. Emotions were weirdly mixed, on both sides of the German divide.

Once the initial blush of euphoria began to fade, concerns of everyday practicality entered in. Many West Germans wondered how the Federal Republic could absorb all the people who wanted to come. Two years ago, some 100,000
Aussiedler
—East Europeans of German descent constitutionally entitled to citizenship—immigrated to West Germany. This year, the figure was expected to be closer to half a million, even before the East German exodus began. “What we have seen so far from Hungary is only the tip of the iceberg,” one senior official told me in early September, adding that by some estimates as many as 650,000 of East Germany's 17 million citizens had applied for official exit visas. At the United Nations in late September, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze was asked how many GDR citizens he thought would flee, if given the chance. His answer, given almost offhandedly: 1 to 2 million.

The government in Bonn was haunted by the specter of this human tide. Publicly, there was no choice but to profess jubilation over the escape of so many East Germans; privately, serious reservations existed at the highest levels.

“If the East Germans tore down the Wall today,” said one of the Federal Republic's ranking diplomats to the GDR, “we would have to build another tomorrow.”

“We don't want to depopulate East Germany; we want to see living conditions improve, so that they will stay home,” a top immigration officer told me.

“We might say we want reunification and the Wall to come down,” a former deputy mayor of Berlin confided bluntly, “but not really.”

Ordinary West Germans took to grousing about banalities. Housing was scarce, especially in Berlin. Competition for jobs could be fierce. Those
Ossies
(the pejorative that colors intra-German relations to this day first cropped up that September) were already getting too many preferences: subsidized apartments, immediate unemployment benefits, help in finding work. A poll released in late September, at the height of the exodus, showed that a quarter of West Germans feared their countrymen would come and take their jobs. “Distrust was above all evident among young workers who saw the equally young and mostly well-educated East Germans as competitors,” the study found. It also reported that, while most West Germans worked
an average thirty-seven-hour week, East German émigrés were already putting in sixty to seventy hours, often at lower pay, just to get ahead. That old-fashioned immigrant zeal, the report concluded, was destined to become a “social irritant.” This new sentiment was so unsettling that Helmut Schmidt felt compelled to protest in
Die Zeit.
“We took in millions of new citizens after the war,” the former chancellor wrote. “I am ashamed of West Germans who are envious of the help we are giving these new members of our society. I am ashamed of politicians who say they should stay where they are.”

Those staying behind were no less ambivalent. “Do you see these houses?” a young East German asked me one evening in East Berlin, pointing out three town houses. We were walking down a battered street; the plaster facades of the buildings were falling off in great clumps. Most still bore the scars of World War II—pockmarks from shrapnel, bullets and artillery. “They are empty. All the people left last week. They had everything—houses, cars, money, a dacha in the country. They left all this behind, just to get more.” He said this angrily, indignant at the greed that he believed drove his countrymen to flee. For all the problems they faced—shortages of many basic goods, declining living standards, political repression—most East Germans had no desire to leave their country, contrary to the impression fostered in the West. Many if not most were perfectly comfortable with the socialist system that guaranteed them work, low-cost housing and free lifelong health care and schooling. Their main worry was that the mass exodus of their countrymen would worsen the lives of those who stayed behind.

One night, I visited a favorite haunt, the Café Papillon, where one had a fair chance of talking without being watched by police. A pair of stylishly dressed young women spoke of those they called “stayers” and “leavers.” One ran a small boutique, the other was an assistant in an art gallery. Ensconced at a table in the corner, they looked as though they would be at home in any Western capital. “I am an East German, and I will not go,” one woman told me fiercely. The other nodded. Shops, offices and even whole factories had been forced to close or cut back because their staffs were so depleted by emigration. “Patients have died in hospitals because their doctors disappeared. Buses and trains don't run because drivers have gone. They are not
leaving for political reasons,” she said. “They want only the money to buy ‘things.' They don't realize that what they are giving up is worth much more—family, community, friends. They will regret their choice.” I wondered if they would feel the same once they had tasted life along West Berlin's glamorous Kurfurstendamm, let alone New York. But what they said was a fact nonetheless: it was the youngest, the best-educated and the most ambitious East Germans who were leaving, not the deadwood of an older generation, and their loss was acutely felt.

Kurt Hager, the conservative ideologist standing in for Honecker on the Politburo, geared up the party's propaganda machine. Clumsily, the leadership tried to play on the people's mixed emotions. Newspapers accused the Hungarian and West German governments of plotting the escapes in order to “discredit forty years of socialist construction.” Lurid tales of an illicit “trade in humans” were concocted. One “firsthand” account featured a railway worker who was given cigarettes that “tasted funny” by a woman in Budapest. He fell unconscious, awoke to find himself aboard a bus to Austria and only just managed to escape. “I consider myself the victim of kidnappers and criminals,” the man told
Neues Deutschland,
the official voice of the communist party, which Schabowski used to run. East German television “disclosed” that West German “spies” were offering money to those who left, interlacing these absurdities with reports of refugees failing to find jobs, of homesickness, of feelings of insecurity and depression in West Germany's uncaring “elbow society.”

With each passing day, the crisis grew deeper. How much better (and smarter) it would have been to acknowledge the problems honestly and accompany that with a pledge to address the people's grievances, said Schabowski, looking back. The regime would not have seemed so isolated. He and a few others had wanted to do just that. But, again, it was the Time of Silence. Despite all that was happening around them, instead of changing their approach to suit changing times, the leadership hesitated. Honecker's continued absence only accentuated their sense of paralysis. Unable to decide on a course of action, divided among themselves, unsure of everything that they had hitherto taken for granted, whether it was the system that governed their lives or the sense of their own power, they opted for the
tried and true, a Stalinist stonewall. As much as anything, perhaps, this foretold the bankruptcy of the regime and sealed its demise.

Klaus Bölling, a retired diplomat who had once been head of West Germany's mission to East Berlin, was one of the few Germans I met who saw all this clearly. The regime's response to the crisis, he said over dinner one evening, showed the extraordinary divide between the GDR's rulers and its people: “The old strong Honecker is gone.” Age had taken its toll; so had illness. “He and his regime are utterly cut off from everyday life. They still see themselves as the defenders of the true faith, battling the evils of uncaring capitalism. Yet they move through the streets in Volvo limousines, blinds drawn. They spend weekends at isolated dachas in the country. They live well on party perquisites and have no conception of the shortages that beset their countrymen. They shun all contact with the real.” Bölling told me a story of one of his East German counterparts who took a trip with Honecker some years ago. At a factory in Mecklenburg, Honecker stepped out of his limo to greet what he thought was a crowd of workers. In fact, all the real workers had been shooed out to make way for the communist chief. The crowd that remained was composed almost completely of party officials and secret police. Honecker stepped forward and began waving and shaking hands, delighted with his popular reception, thoroughly unaware that the public, as such, was not even there.

That distance, that almost unhinged detachment from reality, was profoundly alienating. Ask East Germans why they left, and it was always the same. It was the “sticky air,” the unremitting interference in people's daily lives. Their wish to travel freely, now become the lodestone of unrest, was an expression of this more profound malaise. The regime's imperviousness to any reality, to any point of view other than the socialist orthodoxy propounded by the country's founders, robbed East Germany's younger generation of hope. One refugee put it poignantly some weeks after he arrived in West Berlin, perhaps only a mile from his old house in the East—but a point he had traveled a thousand miles, and forty years, to reach. “It is as if you were a child,” he had said, “and your father were mad. He cannot see the world, and you cannot make yourself understood.”

Blindness among the many—clarity from a few—was the common thread woven through the events of 1989.

Did blindness cause Erich Honecker to misstep at the critical moment? Just as Poland's communists agreed to an election they thought they could win, just as Hungary's Karoly Grosz and his conservatives chose Miklos Nemeth to form a government, thinking they could control him, so now did Honecker trip himself up by self-delusion.

It was late September. He had just left the hospital. The exodus was at its peak. Several thousand East Germans were leaving the country daily. Though frail, Honecker thought himself in command. Clearly, he had to act. The tens of thousands of East Germans in Hungary were beyond his power. He did not dare to bar those who remained in the GDR from traveling. That would only inflame the situation and potentially spark active unrest. Honecker seized on what, to him, was an obvious solution. Acting on his own, without informing his cabinet, he called a friend and hard-line ally, Milos Jakes, the communist party boss of neighboring Czechoslovakia. He needed a favor, Honecker said. Could Jakes close the southern Czech border to Hungary, blocking East Germans from passing through to Hungary and on to the West. Without demurral—or apparent thought for the consequences—Jakes did so.