1989 (11 page)

Martin took the system to its logical if somewhat exaggerated conclusion suggesting that the autobahn filling stations also had ‘Interloos’: ‘Not for the likes of you and me: we’re not good enough to have an Interpee.’ And that Interhotels also operated
Interbrothels
, ‘If you have D-Marks you’re in luck, you can get a first class Interfuck.’ Every time he sang it he was risking a jail term.

Conversation at these late night ‘speakeasy’ gatherings never ever turned to how to change the East German system, however. That, it was assumed, was impossible. There was always one huge,
insurmountable
obstacle to even the slightest protest or campaign for reform: the Red Army. Some 380,000 Soviet soldiers (twice the size of East Germany’s own conscripted National People’s Army) and 6,000 tanks were based permanently in East Germany. In theory they were the front line protecting good socialist citizens against a Nato invasion. In reality they were the army of occupation that had rolled in in 1945 and apart from the now much regretted
withdrawal
from the Western sectors of Berlin, had simply never gone
home. They had, of course, occasionally gone on excursions – into Hungary in 1956 and into Czechoslovakia in 1968. On both
occasions
, the forces stationed in East Germany had, as the most convenient, been in the forefront of the invasions. And they had, of course, taken their East German colleagues with them.

It was with little short of wonder, therefore, that Volker and his mates all sat around and watched on West German television as lots of denim-clad, bearded, long-haired students and dropouts – people who looked almost identical to them except in scruffier jeans because they didn’t have to worry about when they might get a new pair – marched through the streets of Frankfurt, Bonn and
Düsseldorf
complaining about the stationing of new American short- and medium-range Cruise and Pershing missiles on German soil. They had not the slightest doubt that if they made the same sort of protest about the Soviet SS-20 missiles that they knew – only from Western television – were currently being based all over their own country, they would end up behind bars. Sharpish.

The official East German line – when it was forced to refer to the topic at all, which was only in reply to questions from Western journalists like me at rare press conferences – was that only Western missiles were evil. Soviet missiles by contrast were friendly
missiles
, based on East German soil simply to deter attack by the nasty Western missiles. The state was happy enough to organise the
occasional
peace protest, usually for the benefit of West German camera crews, it was always directed at the West: their placards in fact were identical to those carried by the West German protesters.

The wild card suddenly dropped in the midst of this game of double entendre hypocrisy turned out to come, of all places, from the unlikely quarter of the Protestant Lutheran and Evangelical Church. Quietly, unassumingly, they had come up with not so much a slogan as a biblical quote which they would argue was in no way out of line with the government’s theoretical enthusiasm for
disarmament
. It was a line from the book of Isaiah, chapter 2, verse 4, referring to ‘God’s universal reign’ due to follow the Day of
Judgement
. In full it read: ‘They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation. And never again will they learn war.’

The full quote was on posters put up on the walls of churches, to accompany sermons on the need for global peace. But the stroke of brilliance came when it was turned into a visual symbol, a badge that people could wear; more specifically an embroidered badge that East Germany’s unrecognised ‘army’ of disaffected youth – Volker and his mates – could sew on their jeans. The symbol chosen was a stroke of pure genius: an image of a man bending a sword with a hammer. But what made it genius was the fact that the original image was a statue which stood in the garden of the United Nations building in New York: not only a work in the tradition of Socialist Realism, but a gift from the Soviet Union. The result was a symbol – effectively of passive opposition – which could not be banned, because it was, after all, an image ‘borrowed from Big Brother’.

Just how far the churches in the GDR were actively agitating against the communist government was – and is – a moot point. There were some pastors who had all along been happy to cohabit with the regime in a climate of mutual tolerance. Their wages were paid by the church itself which remained in full communion with – and financially supported by – the churches in the West. But the collaboration – a word it is still hard to use without the suggestion of a taint – had allowed certain important works to restore church buildings which had lain damaged or even in ruins since the end of the war in 1945. Notable amongst them were the (botched)
restoration
of the bomb-damaged Berlin Cathedral on the Spree island in the city centre, and of the gutted medieval Nikolaikirche. Church and state in the latter case worked together on a mammoth task which included building a new tall double spire which was lifted by giant cranes onto the restored towers like popping two upturned ice cream cones on a child’s sand castle. Around it a new development of housing and even shops and restaurants were thrown up,
admittedly
of less than top quality construction, all as part of the
forthcoming
750th anniversary of Berlin which was itself intended to celebrate the ‘normalisation’ of the GDR as an established, ‘proper’ country in its own right.

On the other hand, for every pastor who was content in his or her accommodation with the communist regime, there were others who secretly rejected it, despising the regime’s repression of free
expression and its hypocrisy on matters of conscience, not least
concerning
arms control. These included a vivacious bearded balding cleric called Rainer Eppelmann who was frequently in trouble with the authorities for his outspoken sermons, and was happy to let himself and his large rambling house on the outskirts of the city become a focus for disenchanted youth. Headquarters of the Swords to Ploughshares movement – though the word is too strong for what was at most a nexus of like-minded individuals – was a little information office operated by the churches in common located on Oranienburger Strasse, just a few yards from the shell of the great Berlin synagogue, which had been targeted and largely destroyed in the November 1938
Kristallnacht
pogrom. From there a dumpy little blonde-haired woman who was effectively the PR person for the Protestant churches in East Germany disseminated information about ‘church activities’. She tried hard to imply their main focus was ‘pastoral work’, but showed little surprise when most of the enquiries directed to her had an ill-concealed political angle.

I am sure that she and others in the church believed that Swords to Ploughshares was at least in part a way to bring young people to God, even if it had other aspects. In much the same way English churches will run youth clubs, even if they know that the young people who attend often drink a bottle of cider first. It certainly had the effect of moving the perception of the church amongst youth from the marginal and irrelevant to a central element of society, and caused churches themselves to be seen almost as they were in the Middle Ages, as potential places of asylum. That would become
particularly
the case eight years later as events accelerated – in a
development
not remotely foreseen by anyone back in 1981 – towards the socio-political revolution which brought the Wall down.

In the meantime, however, it looked as if the real country in which the church was on a collision course with the communist state was further east: Poland. The overwhelmingly dominant church in Poland was the Catholic church and it too for years had lived in a state of uneasy cohabitation with an officially atheist government. There was an old joke I heard in late 1981 on my first visit there about the average Polish worker going to church every Sunday because it annoyed the Communist Party leader, and to strip clubs every
Saturday night because it annoyed the bishop. The Poles, having been invaded by the Germans and then the Russians in quick
succession
in 1939, had subsequently seen their entire country forcibly move 100 miles westwards and then had a communist government imposed on them by their so-called ‘liberators’, could be forgiven for having a deliberately cynical and obstreperous cast of mind. But in 1979 an event had happened that had picked Poland up by its
bootstraps
and set the whole country on perceived higher moral ground and with a huge, self-confident smile on its face: the election of the first non-Italian pope in centuries: a Pole.

Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, wartime resistance fighter, rugged
outdoorsman
, and inspired multilingual orator, was no sooner installed as Pope John Paul II than he did something else no one expected: he embarked on a series of global pilgrimages, starting with his
homeland
. Overnight Stalin’s old jape about ‘how many divisions does the Pope have?’ took on another dimension as millions of Poles turned out to welcome a local hero of global status who would not have attracted more devotees if he had been the messiah himself.

The pope did not actively spark revolt or opposition to the status quo in any way, but the mere fact of his existence and the massive crowd-pulling power of his presence, gave an entire nation a boost to its sense of identity and its belief that with faith and a bit of effort nothing was impossible. In the wake of his visit strikes at the big shipyard in Gdansk (which under its old German name Danzig, had seen the first shots of the Second World War) gave birth to the communist world’s first trades union not controlled by the
Communist
Party. It was called Solidarity and in the best tradition of trades unions anywhere it had brought the hard-currency-earning shipbuilding business to its knees with the result that the
government
reluctantly, and with one eye over its shoulder at what it knew would be disapproval in Moscow, had recognised it. Chief among its spokesmen was a chippy little electrician called Lech Walesa, a devout Catholic who always wore on his lapel a badge of the ‘Black Madonna of Czestochowa’, an icon which had allegedly saved the city of Czestochowa from Tatar invasion. It was also one of the new pope’s designated holiest sites.

In the autumn of 1981, then, with Jackie having just about found
her feet in East Berlin, I was obliged to abandon her there for several weeks at a time on two occasions as I was drafted in to the one-man Warsaw office to help correspondent Brian Mooney cope with an ever increasing news flood. Solidarity was expanding, spreading like wildfire across the country, far beyond its original base in the shipbuilding industry at Gdansk. By midsummer there was hardly a factory or office in Poland that wasn’t setting up its own branch of the free trades union. And in the same way as the trade union
movement
in Britain had given birth to the Labour Party, so Solidarity’s local and national leaders were beginning to make demands that went far beyond conditions in the workplace. It wasn’t long before it would quite clearly be a fully-fledged opposition party, something which no state in the Soviet bloc had ever tolerated. And most of us were certain that none ever would. We had Budapest and Prague to remind us.

The Polish story in the autumn of 1981 was an experience both frustrating and exhilarating. Working with someone else from a cramped office in a backstreet of central Warsaw was not easy, or convivial, but being out on the streets among people who were increasingly not scared to say aloud and in public what they thought of the government, in a state where you could still disappear into a cell for an indefinite time at the whim of some party official, was both exciting and moving. Nightly vigils had begun outside a church in central Warsaw in memory of a priest who had died under dubious circumstances in police custody. People held candles aloft in the cold night air and faced down hostile police surrounding them to sing the national anthem as an act of defiance in a way you can only do when you live in a country that has frequently been wiped off the map of Europe by its neighbours and your national anthem includes the line: ‘Poland isn’t lost yet’. This use of songs officially approved but sung with different intent was something else I would
experience
again – and join in with – in East Berlin in 1989. But right now I was too stunned especially as the Poles went one step further with a song designed deliberately to taunt the leader of the Communist Party – and therefore their president – the Soviet-trained General Wojciech Jaruzelski. ‘There will be a Poland, there will be a Poland,’ they belted out over the heads of the watching police, ‘without a
Russian general.’ I had a passing grasp of Polish from my knowledge of Russian, but I had to doublecheck with Wiktor, our office
translator
, to be sure I was hearing right.

It was during my second two-week spell in Warsaw that I made my own single biggest contribution to the Polish economy. It was early December, 1981, and by now the crisis in the Polish economy was coming to a peak with the result that petrol supplies were severely limited. An empty tank meant a wait of several hours in a queue that could stretch for over a kilometre to get to the pumps. People took it in turns to stay by the car, usually having to push it along a few yards at a time: fuel was too precious to waste starting and stopping the engine in the queue. Petrol could be paid for in zlotys, but the national currency was plummeting so fast with rampant inflation that almost everything worth having that wasn’t an absolute necessity had to be paid for in hard currency. While in East Germany this meant D-Marks, in Poland it meant US dollars, not least because whereas most East Germans had relatives who sent them money from West Germany, most Poles’ relations abroad lived in the United States, mostly in Chicago.