The Year that Changed the World (27 page)

Egon Krenz called it “a botch.” He blamed Schabowski, who blamed Krenz. He had not intended to just throw open the gates. He certainly did not intend to bring down the Wall, at least not in this way. The whole thing shouldn't have happened. Yet it did, with all the logic of human messiness.

Schabowski thought the Wall would have fallen regardless of the accident. But let's assume, for a moment, that Schabowski hadn't messed up and Krenz's travel laws had taken effect in an orderly, undramatic and efficiently German way. Strictly speaking, the Wall would not have “fallen.” It would have been opened, not breached. The communists would have done it, not the people. Change might have come by evolution, not revolution. The bureaucrats would have gained time. Might they even have contained or channeled popular unrest, defused it, convinced people that reformed communism could work, possibly even kept themselves in power? Without the drama of the Fall, and all its inspiring visuals, would the Velvet Revolution in Prague have come one week later? Would Romanians have found the courage to rise against Ceausescu a month later? The dominoes of Eastern Europe might have toppled differently. A few might not have toppled at all.

Forty-eight hours after the first Germans clambered atop the Wall, I stood through a freezing night with several thousand West Berliners in the muddy no-man's-land that was Potsdamer Platz. An East German construction crew was knocking a new passageway through the Wall, and it was tough going. A giant crane strained to lift a twelve-foot-high slab, but it wouldn't budge. The crowd
shouted encouragement: “Heave ho. Heave ho.” A helmeted worker repeatedly hoisted himself up on the Wall and applied a blowtorch to the steel rods holding it in place. He became something of a favorite, and whenever he appeared the crowd burst into the German equivalent of “For he's a jolly good fellow.” From time to time, he tipped his cap or waved. Sparks flew as the blowtorch did its work. The crane jerked the slab back and forth, twisting it like a broken tooth. Finally it gave way and hung suspended above the crowd, twisting slowly, as if from a gibbet. Television floodlights illuminated its broken surface, scrawled with grafitti. All the unresolved conflicts of Europe were on that chunk of painted concrete: a neo-Nazi swastika, surrealistic faces of … who, Europe's dead? Most notable was a word.
Freiheit,
it read. Freedom.

How odd that it should be that word, on this particular slab, the first to be torn from the Wall in the heart of old Berlin. That evening, as the sun settled in the west, a huge and perfect orange ball burning into the earth, the moon had risen to the east, as perfectly full and round as the sun, cool and bluish white. It was as though they were in balance, moving on an invisible axis, with Berlin poised between them equidistant, at once suspended and a fulcrum.
Freiheit.
It was almost enough to make one believe in destiny, here in this haunted land of ghosts. The word felt ambiguous then, more so now. Freedom to do … what?

Most immediately, it was the freedom to go shopping. East German noses pressed up against the storefronts of the West. My journals are full of images: traffic jams up to thirty miles long at border crossings. A new Berlin airlift—to get goods into stores, all the things Easterners could not for so long buy: stockings, decent electronics, sex magazines. An East Berliner riding around West Berlin on his battered old bike with big balloon tires, a map taped to his handlebars and a plump stalk of bananas on his back—all for him, who probably never had one. A farmer driving his smoke-belching pre–World War II tractor down the Ku'damm, Berlin's fanciest shopping drag, shouting, “Freedom for all” and shaking marimba gourds.

Intellectuals gazed loftily upon the scene. Freedom as travel and window-shopping? Yet what could be more human, after all these years? Of course, freedom meant freedom to think. East Germans
had that. Lacking was the right to speak, which they began to do, cautiously at first and in small ways, but then all at once and as loud as possible, trumpeting, “Berlin is one again!”

Egon Krenz had been thinking, too. He had made his calculations to oust Honecker, to intervene in Leipzig, to free East Germans to travel. Go for it, his instincts told him now. The day after the Wall came down, he held a rally on the steps of the old State Museum on Unter den Linden. Ten thousand people came, chanting, “Keep going, Egon!” “We are the communists!” Half of them wore Stasistyle leather jackets and waved posters proclaiming such exhilarating sentiments as
WE ARE FOR ACTION WITH A PROGRAM
! Obviously, most of the people there were friendly plants. Krenz waded into their midst like a Boston pol, glad-handing everyone in sight and later talking for half an hour with reporters. He was convinced he could get out in front and lead the new changes. But other people were thinking. Toward the end of the rally, a man shouted out, “I wonder whether we really need a communist party in this country. I'm not even sure we need you.” Party elders quickly beckoned the man with crooked fingers, among them Gunter Schabowski, as if to say, “You need a good talking-to.”

Here was a face in the crowd. Everyone saw, everyone heard. Just as they would in Leipzig, the next week, at yet another of the city's huge rallies. Would the communists lose power after the Fall? Now that the Wall was gone, what would the people be marching for?

It was a freezing-cold night. Outside the Nikolaikirche, where the demonstrators gathered, a new mood was in the air. People were chanting the usual slogans:
Wir sind das Volk,
“We are the people.” But they also sang a hymn to the German fatherland. Then, as if from nowhere, came the call, as immediately clear and commanding as a clarion. Not
Wir sind das Volk
but
Wir sind
ein
Volk.
“We are one people.” Instantly it was taken up, and the rest was writ. Here, too, was a face in the crowd.

Jens Reich, the opposition leader who emerged from quiescence in the autumn of 1989 to help found the New Forum and went on to become a member of the German parliament, talked about the phenomenon of the individual within crowds. He told of addressing half a million people in Alexanderplatz on November 4, the largest protest
in German history. “It was an almost mystical experience. You do not see just a black crowd. You see individual faces. It is impossible to say how such a crowd will react. That day, I feared it might march en masse to the Wall, where military force would have been applied to stop them. Why did they not? Why do some things happen one way, and not another?”

Within the crowd, within what he called the “exhilarating, uplifting mass of people moving and acting,” said Reich, there is choice, oddly and persistently individualistic. The man who called out, “We are one people!” The one who asked Krenz whether he was needed—publicly posing the unwanted question, forcing the answer, desecrating the symbol. These were people making choices. This was not the crowd but the faces in the crowd, voices that moved it. Perhaps this is so obvious as to verge on banality. Yet so often we write and think of history as somehow inevitable, a culmination of great grinding forces and structures that can only lead to where they end up. Not so. The reality of 1989, said Reich, is that “it was possible at any point, at any time, for events to take a different course.” Why this, not that? The answer seems to be those countless individual choices at key moments, the accidents of human messiness, such as Schabowski's “botch,” so small and so understandable yet so earthshaking. Among them, too, were Reich's own choices: not to stay quiet anymore, to risk a beating and speak out, so as to not have to answer to the next generation, “We sat and waited.”

It is immensely heartening, this view of history. So intimate, so uplifting, so human. Yes, the revolutions in Eastern Europe owed much to the power of the people. They also owed much to the power of some people, to what a few did or failed to do, to individuals fumbling about in the face of tottering totalitarianism, to courageous dissidents writing and smoking and plotting, to inspired reformers, to frightened conspirators, and later to powerful thugs manufacturing wars.

After the French revolution came the Glory. After the Glory came the Terror. So it was in Eastern Europe. Prague's Velvet Revolution was a party, a glorious exultation in almost effortlessly bringing down another communist regime. Romania was a troubling interlude, part people's uprising, part artfully concealed coup, with no happy denouement
except for those who plotted Nicolae Ceausescu's overthrow. Then came the war, the slaughterhouse of Yugoslavia. As Robespierre followed upon Danton, Milosevic followed upon Nemeth and Havel. We celebrated the happier expressions of the power of the people, so wildly and enthusiastically, that we tended to forget the power of some people, for evil as well as good.

On the morning of November 10, Helmut Kohl flew from Warsaw to Berlin. That evening, returning to his residence in Bonn, he telephoned George Bush.

“I have just arrived from Berlin,” he told the president. “It has the atmosphere of a carnival! The frontiers are absolutely open. At certain points they are literally tearing down the Wall. At Checkpoint Charlie, thousands of people are crossing both ways!”

Everything depended on the new government of Egon Krenz. “If the people see a light at the end of the tunnel,” Kohl said, they will stay home. Otherwise East Germans will leave en masse—“a catastrophe for the GDR. They are doctors, lawyers, specialists, who cannot be replaced.” The country would implode.

The situation required delicate handling, both men agreed. Above all there should be no triumphant geopolitical crowing, no premature talk of a brave new world. “I want to see our people continue to avoid hot rhetoric that might by mistake cause a problem,” Bush said.

“Excellent,” replied Kohl. “Give my best to Barbara.”

Bush knew as well as Kohl that this was the endgame. From then on, they would work together for calm. The goal, as they would soon begin to discuss explicitly, was unification. Focused on Germany, they did not foresee how quickly the other dominoes of Eastern Europe would topple.

“Mike, I think you should be here.”

My Czech translator, Zdenka Gabalova, was calling from Prague.
A “little gathering” would take place that evening in the old Vysehrad Cemetery, up in the hills overlooking the city. Fifty years ago, on November 17, 1939, nine Czech students were executed after demonstrations against the Nazi occupation. History, yes. But in the subtext of Czech dissidence, the commemoration would protest a more contemporary oppression. “It might be interesting for you,” Zdenka ventured.

But I was in Berlin, I protested. The Wall had just come down. Who knew what might happen next? I couldn't leave now.

The “little gathering” grew into a demonstration of twenty thousand people, most of them students. They lit candles amid the terraced gardens and rising church spires of Vysehrad, the burial grounds of Smetana and Dvorak. They sang the national anthem, “Where Is My Homeland?” Poland, Hungary and now even East Germany had sloughed off bankrupt communist regimes. “We don't want to be last!” shouted the young people again and again.

Down from the hills they came, their candles glimmering in the darkness along the embankment of the river Vltava. “Down with communism!” “Jakes out!” At the National Theater, lit up in gilt Hohenzollern splendor, they turned into the street whose name would within hours become known to the world, Narodni. Riot police blocked their way, three rows deep, white-helmeted with plastic shields and truncheons. Another phalanx closed in behind, trapping the vanguard of marchers. The crowds halted a few feet from the wall of police. Those in the front tried to hand them flowers, placed candles of peace on the pavement before them, raised their hands in a gesture of youthful innocence. Then, from behind, the security forces advanced, using armored bulldozers to squeeze the people—perhaps three thousand in all—more tightly into their trap. Police with megaphones ordered, “Disperse!” Yet they would not let anyone escape the ring of steel.

Martin Mejstrik, a twenty-three-year-old theater student, worked for a year to organize the rally. Faced with a potential Tiananmen, he telephoned the police commander who had authorized the gathering and promised not to interfere. “You assured us there would be no violence,” said Mejstrik.

“Don't be afraid,” the man replied. “Nothing will happen.”

Shortly after 9 p.m., Martin returned to Narodni Street, just in time to see the police hurl themselves upon the crowds.

Ten years later, we walked the street where it happened. “People were pressed so closely together that they could hardly breathe, let alone run,” Martin recounted. “The police just beat them and beat them, swinging their clubs with all their force.” Here, in front of the chic new Café Louvre, the police stopped the march. Down there, not far from a recently opened outlet for Just Jeans, they sprang their trap. Just here, down this narrow side street, no wider than an alley, was the only way out. It became a gauntlet. Special antiterrorist units in distinctive red berets lined either side, separated by about six feet. People were clubbed and pummeled as they ran between them—men, women and children. Those who fell were hit and kicked where they lay.

One young girl, a drama student, told me at the time how a policeman kicked out her candles, then slapped her. “Do you really need to do this?” she asked him. At that, he grabbed her by the hair and banged her head several times against a building, knocking her unconscious. A bland official announcement on state television later declared that order had been restored and that thirty-eight people had been treated for “light injuries.”

Havel had predicted it. “Sooner or later,” he had said in June, “they will make a mistake, perhaps by beating up some people. Then forty thousand people will fill Wenceslas Square.” Black Friday, as the night of November 17 came to be known, was the spark that set Czechoslovakia alight. The challenge for Havel and his small band of dissident revolutionaries would be to fan that spark, stoke the fire and guide it.