Revolution 1989 (22 page)

 

One writer described the Stasi as a state of mind. It is a powerful idea to describe the condition of life in a police state. But Berliners had no need for metaphor. They had the Wall. It was the concrete symbol that East Germans - East Europeans - were imprisoned in an arbitrarily divided country. The Wall separated families, destroyed dreams and almost extinguished hopes. The Wall turned Berlin into an unreal city where major through routes suddenly became dead ends, solely because of politics. If you tried to leave the wrong way you could die - 119 people were killed trying to jump it, climb it, tunnel under it or fly over it. The first obstacle was a three-metre-high concrete wall - the ‘hinterland fence’. Then a two-metre-high ‘signal fence’ of barbed wire and steel mesh which triggered an alarm if touched and, along some stretches, activated floodlights. Anyone who made it through those defences had to cover ground full of hidden devices such as steel bars in the earth covered with metal spikes. Escapees by now would almost certainly have been spotted by guards from observation towers positioned - at the Berlin section of the border - every two hundred metres or so. The next barrier was the so-called ‘death strip’, a six-metre area covered with sand (along which footprints could easily be seen) and patrolled by Stasi-trained dogs. Finally came the three-and-a-half-metre-high Grenzwall 76 (named after the year it was fortified) which was topped by razor wire and a sewer pipe designed to stop anyone trying to climb from getting a good grip. There was no sense of logic to it. The Wall did not divide districts, but often sections of streets. It was the result, simply, of where Russian troops had reached on the day fighting ceased on 6 May 1945. At night on one side the streets were lit by eerie searchlights. It was a physical manifestation of a few people’s fear and paranoia.

There had been, in effect, an open border in Germany after the two sides were officially divided in October 1949, when the GDR came into being. In Berlin, people could come and go as they pleased. Many lived on one side and worked on the other, using the U-Bahn metro system and S-Bahn overground rail network to travel around the city. They had to negotiate various checkpoints, where Eastern border guards would check travellers’ papers. But they were allowed to pass unhindered. Over time increasing numbers were leaving the East as they saw what was happening. The regime was becoming more authoritarian, particularly after June 1953 when a strike in a few factories turned into anti-government riots that were suppressed by Soviet tanks. The East was fast becoming relatively poorer, more regimented, greyer, duller, less free compared to West Germany. As the Cold War became icier, people voted with their feet - the only way they were allowed to vote. By 1961 the exodus was reaching crisis proportions. From 1955 around 20,000 people a month were leaving and heading to West Germany, where they were granted instant citizenship. The Federal Republic did not recognise the existence of the GDR. Now about 30,000 people a week were trying to emigrate and the austere Stalinist in charge of the East German regime, Walter Ulbricht, decided something had to be done. At first the Soviets were firmly against the idea of sealing the borders, and particularly opposed to the plan to build a Wall. They were worried about how the West would react. But Ulbricht finally convinced his masters in Moscow that it was necessary for the very existence of the state - and he was almost certainly right. More than three million people had fled the GDR over the last dozen years, over a sixth of the population. Half were under twenty-five, well educated, the brightest and best in the nation.

When Khrushchev assured himself that the US would do no more than complain about the construction of a Wall, he reluctantly gave his approval. Ulbricht put his protégé and right-hand man, Erich Honecker, in charge of the highly secret Operation Rose. It was the younger man who coined the phrase ‘Anti-fascist protection barrier’ to describe the Wall and from then on, in public at least, he never called it anything else. It was planned with the utmost secrecy - even half the East German leadership was not told the details. Building began, suddenly, overnight, on the weekend of 12-13 August 1961 and proceeded with supreme efficiency. In central Berlin, for several hundred metres around Checkpoint Charlie, the barrier which divided the Soviet and American sectors of the city, workers toiled around the clock and the job was finished within three days. The logic of Communist rule had been established with a powerful and ugly symbol - and the career of Erich Honecker was inextricably linked to its concrete foundations.

 

Erich Honecker, said a one-time comrade and former colleague in the East German leadership, Wolfgang Leonhard,

The central fact of Honecker’s life was the ten years he spent in a Nazi prison. That formed him as much as his childhood in the Saarland, the border area with France, where, the fourth child of six, he had a hard upbringing. His coal-miner father, Wilhelm - himself a militant leftist - was out of work much of the time and the family was often near to starvation. He was saved by the Young Spartacists, the youth wing of the Communist Party, which took him under its wing, gave him a cause to believe in and in 1930, when Honecker was eighteen, sent him to Moscow for further education at the Lenin School. Five years later he was ordered back to Germany undercover to set up an office in Berlin and act as an aide to the head of the Young Communists, Bruno Baum. His first mission ended in lamentable failure and Honecker was shown up as anything but a hero. Though he stated later as a Party chieftain after the war that these ‘were days of fortitude’ and he never flinched from his Communist ideals, the facts tell a different story. He was arrested in a farcical manner. Soon after he arrived in Berlin he arranged to meet a courier from Moscow who was to hand over some money and confidential documents. He realised after the meeting that he was being followed, panicked, and ran away leaving the documents and incriminating evidence behind. He was picked up by the police the next day. Under interrogation, he gave them detailed information about the Communist underground in Berlin, including the names of leaders like Baum, who was jailed, later went to Auschwitz, but survived to play a leading part in the Ulbricht regime in East Germany. The Russian courier, Sarah Fodorova, suffered ghastly torture but gave nothing away.

The decade in Brandenburg Prison turned an already hard man into granite. After the war his record was forgiven by the Soviets - many activists had done far worse things. He made himself useful to Ulbricht, whom Stalin installed as the satrap in his German fiefdom. Ulbricht liked Honecker’s energy and he was groomed by the leader as his eventual successor. He was head of the Communist Youth wing until he was into his forties, then rose through the Party machine. When Ulbricht was removed - partly with the help of Honecker and other officials wielding an axe - he slithered into the leader’s chair, with the approval of Moscow.

A stern, unsmiling and unbending man with a cold, stand-offish demeanour, he liked the company of women. In matters of sex Honecker was not the pillar of Bolshevik rectitude expected of a high-ranking and high-flying Party apparatchik. He was married three times, though his official biography is curiously vague about his wives. His first marriage, to Lottie Grunel immediately after the war, was never mentioned in the Party CV at all - possibly because she was politically suspect as the daughter of a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She had a mental breakdown and died in 1946. He was coy about the dates of his second marriage, to Edith Baumann, which he remarked once happened ‘around 1948, as far as I remember’. He did not say when he was divorced. His third wife was the politically ambitious, shrill Margot Feist, who became a top Party functionary in her own right. The Education Minister for many years, she was as stern as he was and known throughout the country, even by those who worked for her, as The Witch or The Lilac Dragon.
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Several senior Party chiefs knew of Honecker’s philanderings. ‘He had quite a taste for blonde girls in blue uniforms,’ the long-serving Berlin Party chief, Günter Schabowski, revealed. The uniforms were those of the Communist Youth movement. The spy chief Markus Wolf, who ran East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, said that not long before Honecker became supreme leader ‘I once received a report from a puzzled employee . . . who had seen Erich Honecker . . . slipping surreptitiously through the back streets of Berlin after dismissing his driver at dusk. It was clear to me that Honecker must have been visiting a secret girlfriend . . . Once I joked to this effect with Erich Mielke [his boss] saying “well, we hardly have to keep that on the files” and I made to throw away the report. “No, no,” came the reply. “Let me have it. You never know.” It joined other unflattering details of Honecker’s life in [Mielke’s] red boxes.’
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East Germany seemed like the success story of the socialist bloc. There were no food queues and almost no absolute poverty in the mid-1980s. It was an ordered society of reliable workers, living in dreary but functional box-like apartment blocks. Its cradle-to-grave welfare provisions were the envy of the rest of the Soviet empire. There seemed to be little open dissent. The Stasi had eradicated it. From an early age it was instilled into East Germans that they must conform and not stand out in any way that might attract attention. The country seemed to be riding high - especially in sport. The regime spent vast sums on glory at the athletics track, skating rink, ski-jumping slope and swimming pool. In the 1980 Olympic Games the GDR won forty-seven gold medals compared to Britain’s five and France’s six. In the 1984 Winter Olympics, East Germany won nine golds, more than any other nation, beating both the USA and the USSR. Honecker regarded these victories as highly significant. The regime was satisfied that this sporting prowess gave the Communist state legitimacy it might otherwise have lacked. There were other important achievements. The standard of education was as high as anywhere in Europe. If anything, the workforce was over-qualified for the menial tasks most people were expected to perform. In 1984 the World Bank reported that the GDR was the world’s twelfth most successful economy and the following year the CIA declared in a top-secret memorandum to President Reagan that East Germany’s GNP was fast approaching the Federal Republic’s.

But it was all a mirage based on a series of elaborate lies. The country was in a terminal crisis forced by foreign debt. Honecker and a few of the very top leadership knew, but continued borrowing and spending regardless, in a state of absolute denial. They wanted to keep the public content with consumer goods and social benefits; they spent twice as much as most of their East European allies on defence and ‘security’ - including the Stasi - and they seemed oblivious of the consequences. One of the Party’s top finance experts, Günter Ehrensperger, was looking at the growing debt problem and went to Honecker to warn of a potentially serious crisis. At that point foreign debt was increasing tenfold in six years. ‘I was summoned to him again that same evening,’ he said. ‘Honecker told me I was immediately to cease working on such calculations and studies. I was to receive no further material . . . and I was to have all the statistical bases in the department destroyed.’ Manfred Uschner, former chief aide to Hermann Axen, a member of the top leadership, said that figures were kept highly confidential, only seen by a few of the elite. When some numbers did come ‘they were presented in an almost unreadable format . . . on purpose’. Quickly all the documents were gathered up and shredded. ‘We had to strain ourselves, and in great haste, to see the magnitude of our indebtedness. Then it became clear to us: the GDR was totally bankrupt and there was no way it could get out of the . . . fatal circle of indebtedness, renewed indebtedness, new credits and the growing burden of interest payments.’
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In 1983, the country reached a point when it could barely meet the payments. It was bailed out through the good offices of an unlikely figure: the right-wing Minister-President of Bavaria, Franz Josef Strauss, who had been West Germany’s aggressive Defence Minister when the Berlin Wall was built. For decades Strauss had been vilified by the GDR regime as an ultra-reactionary warmonger who was trying to obtain a West German nuclear bomb. Honecker himself described him as ‘a militarist who would not stop at marching through the Brandenburg Gate to recapture Berlin’. Now Strauss acted as a go-between to help arrange a US$ 1 billion credit from a consortium of West German banks so that the GDR could make ends meet. On this occasion Honecker agreed to pay a political as well as a financial price. Part of the deal, which the FRG undertook to keep confidential, was an agreement by the GDR to let 35,000 East Germans emigrate to the West. Strauss was presented as an honoured guest at Honecker’s beloved hunting lodge in Thuringia, Werbellinsee.

The negotiator on the Eastern side was one of the most curious figures to emerge from Soviet-style communism. Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski was a spiv on an epic scale who ran an alternative and highly secret ‘other’ economy on behalf of the East Berlin regime for which it did not have to account. Golodkowski, born in 1932 to Russian immigrants in Berlin, was adopted when he was eight by a German family called Schalck - hence his double-barrelled name. He started work for the Ministry of Trade in a low-grade post. But he was spotted early as a creative accounting talent and also as a discreet, politically reliable and highly sophisticated young man. He was the brains behind the Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung (Bureau of Commercial Co-ordination), known as Ko-Ko. It was charged with earning foreign currency outside the normal planning system, and Schalck-Golodkowski was given extraordinary freedom of manoeuvre. It started as a way for the East German elite to fund their elaborate lifestyles and buy Western goods unavailable to all but a few of their compatriots. It soon became the method by which the GDR tried to plug the gaps in the myriad failures in its economy. Towards the mid- 1980s, East Germany entirely depended on Ko-Ko to raise enough convertible currency to remain solvent from week to week. As Manfred Seidel, one of the men who signed Ko-Ko’s cheques, said, it was the organisation’s task ‘to employ all available means to create foreign currency for the GDR. To that end, no legal restrictions were to be taken into account. That was the case at home and abroad.’
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