The Year that Changed the World (20 page)

Honecker thought himself clever. But the move backfired badly. Thousands of East Germans en route to Hungary were suddenly trapped in Czechoslovakia. Some returned home. Many others descended on the West German embassy in Prague, the ornately baroque Lobkowitz Palace. Perhaps they had heard that, in July, the West German government had secretly flown 120 GDR citizens who had taken refuge in the embassy in Budapest to safety in the Federal Republic. Perhaps they expected the Czech government to buckle under international pressure as they imagined the Hungarians had just done, not knowing the underlying reality of the Great Escape. In any event, the trickle of East Germans arriving in Prague soon became a flood.

Czech police cordoned off the street in front of the embassy to keep East Germans away. Instead, they merely swept into the alleys around back and hopped over a shoulder-high, metal fence into the safety of the legation's gardens. Thousands were already encamped
there: men, women, children, living in hastily erected tents without running water or sanitation. Dysentery and disease threatened. World TV networks descended. East Germany's problem became Czechoslovakia's. It was an international embarrassment and, worse, an inspiration to the country's own restive population. On September 25, thinking better of his precipitous decision, Jakes informed Honecker that he had to find a different solution. And he did.

He announced it, grotesquely enough, during a reception at the State Opera House for a delegation from Beijing, arriving to show its appreciation for Honecker's support for Tiananmen Square. He invited the entire Politburo to the fete and, there, gathered them in a private salon to relate what he described as “a little surprise.”

“Dear comrades,” Schabowski remembers him saying. “I have just spoken with Comrade Jakes and I have a solution to our problem in Prague.” As before, there was no discussion. Honecker was announcing his decision. He had called the East German embassy in Czechoslovakia, he told them, and instructed them to arrange the details, in coordination with the West German foreign ministry.

The men of the Politburo listened, at first in disbelief and then with appalled dread. For Honecker's “solution” was to get rid of the refugees holed up in the Czech embassy by giving them precisely what they wanted—free passage to the Federal Republic. Special trains would be ordered, express from Prague to West Germany. Their doors and windows would be sealed to keep any malcontents from getting on or off the trains, he said. The particular genius of the idea was that those aboard this Freedom Train would be transported through the territory of the German Democratic Republic. That way, Honecker explained with satisfaction, they would have to… acknowledge East German sovereignty.

It is impossible not to wonder what sort of mind could dream up such a bizarre scheme. Forget the eerie historical echo: locked trains as in locked cattle cars, loaded with social undesirables shipped off to where they wouldn't be heard from again. The bigger question is what to make of the sheer illogic of his logic. Because the trains would pass through East German territory, this was somehow not a crushing defeat for the regime, a symbol of its impotence and a summons to resist? As Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher said at the time,
rushing to Prague from the annual opening of the UN General Assembly in New York to supervise the operation, “This was more than the opening of the gates of the West German embassy.”

In this season of surreal spectacles, it is hard to decide which was the most surreal. Was it the almost farcical pantomime of the Pan-European Picnic? Was it the dark comedy of the Polish elections, with pens wielded as sabers, or the monumental botch that opened the Wall? Among all the lunacies, Honecker's on this occasion must be a contender. On September 30, as the first of his sealed trains hurtled their way west, thousands of East Germans pressed into railway stations along the route. In Dresden, they tried to fight their way into the station, to be beaten back by police. Others lined the tracks outside Leipzig and other cities, waving to their compatriots headed for a new life. This was the beginning of the end for Honecker, the start of something entirely different. Until then, the German Democratic Republic had largely been inert. Its people sought merely to escape. But “Erich's Big Idea,” as Schabowski sardonically called it, changed all that. He closed the safety valve, the exit through Hungary that those who would resist could use to flee the country. Then he confronted them with police and pushed them against his Wall.

In Hungary, change came from within, led by a few reform-minded communists around Miklos Nemeth and Imre Pozsgay. In Poland, revolution came via the ballot box and democratic elections—a model of peaceful compromise and accommodation. In East Germany, for the first time, the people themselves rose up. Erich's Big Idea set the stage for a wave of ever-larger mass demonstrations that within weeks would sweep the country. The police violently turning East Germans away from the trains passing westward was the spark. On September 25, eight thousand people marched in Leipzig, singing the “Internationale.” The next Monday, October 2, Leipzigers marched again—this time close to one hundred thousand, in what would become a weekly rite. Protests erupted in other major cities, including East Berlin.
“Wir bleiben hier,”
the demonstrators chanted, defying row on row of police. “We are staying.”

For the East German regime, there could hardly have been a more chilling answer to Erich Honecker's final solution.

George H. W. Bush returned from Europe in July, deeply moved by what he had seen and heard. More, he saw how much was at stake for the East Europeans, how delicate the situation was and how fast events were moving. For an administration that took office expecting the big game to be Asia, the focus for the next two years would be almost entirely on Europe. Bush's interest had become personal. He followed events closely and telephoned the region's leaders almost daily. Quietly and with characteristic circumspection, he decided on a plan of action. It could be summed up as restraint. He decided that in a fast-moving, fluid environment such as this, more could be accomplished by doing less.

With the Great Escape, America awoke in earnest to the reality of what was happening in Eastern Europe. It dominated the news, became topic A around Washington's political dinner tables. Columnists, lawmakers and the public clamored for action, anything to help the poor but plucky Peoples of the East to throw off the yoke of communism. In his journal that fall, Bush wrote, “I keep hearing critics saying we're not doing enough on Eastern Europe. Here these changes are dramatically coming our way—Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic—and you've got a bunch of critics jumping around saying we ought to do more.” Congress, he went on, wanted to “just send money,” no matter for what. Conservative and human rights groups alike called for louder rhetoric, more chest-thumping and more finger-pointing at the Soviets. The hubbub worried the cautious Bush. “If we mishandle it,” he wrote, “if we get way out making this look like an American project,” the whole thing could backfire, perhaps even “invite a crackdown that could result in bloodshed,” if not from Moscow then from some other hard-line East European regime.

Less publicly, bigger issues were being debated. On September 11, one of Chancellor Kohl's coalition partners, the Christian Democratic Union Party, held a party conference in Bremen, where delegates called for the restoration of Germany within its 1937 borders. This in itself was nothing new. But in the current climate it raised questions, especially in Moscow, which complained that Kohl had done nothing to repudiate such talk. Eduard Shevardnadze raised the matter with James Baker at their retreat in Jackson Hole in the third week of September,
then brought it up more pointedly a few days later in a speech at the opening of the UN General Assembly.

Shevardnadze did so for good reason. For the Bush administration, so late in recognizing what was happening in the East, had now moved far ahead of the Europeans in assessing the likely consequences. In May, François Mitterrand visited the president at his summer home in Maine. Bush asked flat out about the prospects of German unification. “Unthinkable,” exclaimed the French leader in dismay—at least, he added, “not in our lifetimes.” Margaret Thatcher would be no less dismissive. Bush himself, though, thought differently. And he knew that Helmut Kohl and his chief national security adviser, Horst Teltschik, thought differently, as well. As summer gave way to fall, and the magnitude of the crisis in the GDR became ever more apparent, Bush pushed his staff to think through U.S. policy. As for himself, when asked by reporters in late September where he stood on German unification, he replied simply, “I don't fear it.”

By this point, Washington realized it had little to say about developments on the ground in Eastern Europe, and even less influence. As one national security aide somewhat ruefully put it, “Events proceeded with such bewildering speed that U.S. and other Western policies could not hope to keep pace. We in Washington often found ourselves in the role of thrilled, if not to say astonished, onlookers.”

Each year, every year, the herds of East Africa's Serengeti Plain begin a vast migration. They gather by the millions: wildebeests, giraffes, zebras, antelope, lions and hyenas. It is impossible to predict precisely when it will begin, but there are unmistakable signs. The animals grow impatient. They mill about, clashing with one another, pawing the ground in rising uncertainty and irritation. The atmosphere, the very air, becomes heavy with their heat. This may go on for weeks. Then one day, seemingly for no particular reason, they bolt—abruptly, all at once, a pell-mell, headlong run in this or that direction. They move as one, an irresistible force. Nothing could stop it, nothing can guide it.

By autumn, this was the mood in Eastern Europe. The air was heavy with a brooding, unpredictable inevitability. From afar, the prospects were exciting. A Warsaw Pact without Poland or Hungary was easily imaginable. So was another Prague Spring, even the fall of the Wall. Privately, Helmut Kohl began to talk about an end of communism and hinted at a reunified Germany. Yet those living the events were fearful. Where there are herds, there are also predators. Where there is change, there is danger. Who knew what abrupt ugliness the times might bring? Hope was checked by caution, bred of the bitter experience of 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1980.

Traveling through the region in late September and early October was to run with the herds. By then, the sheer velocity of change had, in itself, become the most powerful force for change. Events in one country immediately spilled over to others. Overnight, Eastern Europe became less a geography than a volatile physics: plasma in
motion, a blinding and bewildering kaleidoscopic whirl. Everyone seemed to be going at different speeds, in different directions, toward destinations unknown. In Poland, only months before, Solidarity had sought at most a restoration of its legal standing; now, it was grappling with the ambiguous spoils of victory. Hungary stood on the very threshold of success in its drive to bring down communism. By contrast, Czechoslovakia had scarcely begun to move. Tantalizing glimpses of what might be possible were obscured by dust, commotion, frenzy and fear.

My editors in New York suggested I take a sweep through the region, to look at it as one story rather than several, to watch it as a process and try to figure out where it might all lead. Stephen Smith, the executive editor of
Newsweek,
came along. We dubbed ourselves the Marx Brothers, lost in the unrecognizable terrain of Absurdistan. Down was up, and up was down. Sometimes it was hard to tell the heroes from the villains. No fantasy could match the bizarre realities and jarring contrasts that we encountered. Certainly, no fantasy could match its pregnant drama.

We began in Poland. Once again, Solidarity was fighting for its life, only this time as a government rather than a broken opposition. What a curious evolution! In early July, after its tumultuous election win, the once-banned union found itself to be the dominant political force in the country. When the new Polish parliament convened for the first time, a smiling and joking Lech Walesa found himself seated next to a dour Jaruzelski, the man who had imprisoned him eight years before. Indeed, the general's very presence was an eloquent symbol of the communist party's comeuppance. For the new parliament to elect him president—as both sides had planned—Solidarity's leaders found themselves in the bizarre position of voting with the communists to thrust their former nemesis into power. On July 19, they got him into office by a margin of one vote. At the swearing-in ceremony, his entire cabinet watched from the visitors' gallery. Not one had won a seat of his own.

After that, events took on a life of their own. When Jaruzelski and his communists proved unable to create a government, Solidarity negotiated a power-sharing arrangement: “Your president, our prime minister,” one of its leaders, Adam Michnik, famously quipped. At
the time, Michnik's compromise was laughed off. “Oh, come on, Adam,” replied Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who had guided that winter's Round Table talks. “We have to go slow. It will be years before we enter the government.” Yet just a few weeks later, on August 24, Mazowiecki became
the
government—Poland's new prime minister, the first noncommunist since the Soviet army swept across his country in 1944. On his first day of work, he skipped the official limo waiting outside his humble apartment and rode his bike to work. Exploring his new office, he pressed a hidden button. An armed guard leaped out from behind a partition. Mazowiecki was aghast.

The problems he faced. Inflation of 50 to 100 percent a month. Shortages of food and medical supplies. Panic buying that emptied stores. Endemic corruption. Economic incentives so skewed that barter threatened to displace currency. The specter of strikes if not social implosion. No wonder the communists had wanted to share power. How long would it be before they sighed with relief to be removed from responsibility altogether? Meeting for a late-evening interview, Mazowiecki inhaled hard on his cigarette. Fatigue was etched into his face. Perhaps, he joked, Solidarity should not have won the election, after all. For Solidarity's new ministers, it was the revenge of Oscar Wilde: “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”