Revolution 1989 (34 page)

Honecker remained in the best of humours throughout his five-day tour. Even when Helmut Kohl, an immense man who towered over him, raised the supposedly taboo subject of German reunification in a speech widely broadcast in the East, Honecker kept his cheerful countenance. He said nothing in public about the Berlin Wall, or the borders question, and simply adopted the formula he invariably used when asked: ‘The two systems, socialism and capitalism, are like fire and water.’ In private, he categorically denied that he had issued East German border guards orders to ‘shoot to kill’ people who tried to escape to the West. He smiled as he told Kohl that this ‘simply is not so. We enforce the regulations on the border . . . as you do.’
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He made an emotional visit to his birthplace in the Saarland, and to the nearby town of Trier, where Karl Marx was born and raised. His hosts were less delighted with the trip. As Dorothee Wilms, the Minister in charge of relations between the two Germanies, said: ‘It was bitter for us . . . Kohl said it was one of the most galling points of his political life. But we had to do it - to achieve further improvements for our fellow Germans.’ The historic tour had nearly not taken place. For many years, despite numerous requests from Honecker, the Soviets would not allow him to go because East/West relations were so poor. Honecker, it appeared, shared at least one discomfort with his people: he could not travel to West Germany. But Gorbachev finally relented, as one of his principal aims was to forge close ties with the West. His new favourite soundbite in Western capitals was to speak of ‘our common European home’.
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When Honecker returned to Berlin, he might have rested on his laurels and enjoyed his triumph. Instead, he set to work with renewed confidence, convinced that his cause was right and that age had not diminished his abilities physically or mentally. He had always been a fitness fanatic. He had built a gym which he used every day at his mansion in Wandlitz, the suburb twenty-five kilometres north of Berlin reserved entirely for the top two dozen or so Party oligarchs. The leader would not listen to talk of economic or liberal reforms. Quite the reverse. He retreated into Stalinist certainties. He had spent a lifetime subservient to Moscow and the Soviet Communist Party. Now, for the first time in his life, he began to be critical of the Kremlin leadership and he grew contemptuous of Gorbachev. He told confidants: ‘If Gorbachev goes on like this, socialism will be dead in two years.’ Though he was one of the few people who knew the parlous state of the GDR’s economy, he behaved as though the country was the success story of the Soviet bloc. Soon after his West German visit, Honecker was in the Soviet Union and accompanied Gorbachev on a trip to the industrial town of Sverdlovsk (now, as before the 1917 Revolution, Yekaterinburg, where the last Tsar and his family had been executed). He lectured the Russian leader about where the perestroika project was heading: ‘Look, here in the shops people have nothing to buy, not even toilet paper,’ he told Gorbachev. ‘That is the result of the reforms. We don’t need them in the GDR.’ He told the East German counter-intelligence chief Markus Wolf clearly, ‘I will never allow here what is happening in the Soviet Union. Never.’
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There were a few younger voices within the Berlin leadership who favoured some modest measures to liberalise control of the media. Their views were ignored. Honecker and his fellow oligarchs - whose average age at the time was sixty-nine - decided to stamp hard on dissent. Censorship was tightened. One of Honecker’s chief henchmen, Joachim Hermann, was in charge of propaganda, an important role in the People’s Democracies. He had formerly been editor of the main Party organ,
Neues Deutschland
. He had a phone on his desk linked directly to red telephones by the editors of every newspaper, radio station andTVnewsroom in the country. Hermann’s office would be in touch at least once a day with each of these media. Their instructions would follow a daily meeting between Hermann and Honecker, who would frequently pass the proofs of the first two pages in the main papers such as
Neues Deutschland
, change layouts he did not like and even crop pictures. It did not appear strange to any of the regime’s functionaries or to the GDR’s journalists that the leader of the country would find time to proof-read the morning newspaper. As Schabowski, himself a one-time
ND
editor, explained about journalists under ‘actually existing socialism’: ‘Their role was [to be] apologists for the authorities. Their overriding function was not the provision of information, but propaganda and indoctrination. There was much direct falsification of facts, but that was not the case at all times and in all situations. The socialist media’s most devastating effect was the way it . . . ignored reality.’
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Just because glasnost was prevailing in Moscow did not mean it would apply in Berlin. Chief Party ideologist Kurt Hager made that plain: ‘Just because your neighbour changes the wallpaper in his home does not mean you have to redecorate yours,’ he said. Some Soviet newspapers and periodicals were banned in East Germany - for example, the magazine
Sputnik
- because Honecker reckoned their support for Gorbachev-style reforms was subversive. He would not allow Party spokesmen in public speeches to utter the words perestroika or glasnost. In January 1988 Honecker laid on a large shoot at his hunting lodge in Thuringia for the diplomatic circuit. It was an annual event and usually a formal occasion. At one point he took the Soviet Ambassador, Vyacheslav Kochemasov, aside for a word in private. According to the Ambassador he said:

Censorship of books became more heavy-handed and suspect writers and artists were kept under increasingly tight surveillance. The Stasi doubled the number of agents watching the novelist Stefan Heym, who had fled to the US in the Nazi years and who out of conviction chose to return to the East rather than West after the war. Occasionally, on cold days, he would take cups of coffee out to them on a tray. His concern for their welfare ceased after he discovered that his cleaner was an agent paid to inform on him and was stealing his manuscripts so that the Stasi could photocopy them. Writers had been used to an elaborate system of censorship in East Germany. Like elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, nothing could be published without the regime’s permission. The state owned the country’s seventy-eight publishing houses. But in the GDR literature became part of the Plan. Some writers could do fabulously well, as their royalties depended on how many copies of a work were produced, not on the numbers sold. Favoured authors would be awarded enormous print runs for their often turgid works. Bizarrely, writers whose works were banned in the East were often permitted to publish them in the West - as long as they paid three-quarters of the royalties and advances to the state. The government decided how many books would be published years ahead, and which ones. This did not improve the topicality of the books produced. But worse, the East German system under which each writer before publication was assigned a ‘helper’, something between an editor and a mentor - and often a Stasi agent - who would ‘assist’ the work through to the printing press. The structure encouraged an insidious form of self-censorship described by the poet and novelist Günter Kunert:

Amongst the words the censors now found problematic were ‘Soviet’, ‘glasnost’, ‘reform’ and ‘environment’.
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Honecker made an agreement with the West Germans when he was in Bonn which had far-reaching implications. Soon his aides and the Stasi began to realise it was a mistake. Since the Berlin Wall was built, almost nobody except the people most highly vetted by the security forces, or the prisoners sold to the Federal Republic for profit, was allowed to travel to the West, even on short visits. Now, for the first time, Honecker relaxed the rules and allowed older people who had close relatives in West Germany to see their families. It was a slow and laborious process getting the visas authorised, but it was possible and soon it caused the regime serious problems. Now there were two classes of East Germans: those who could leave, even temporarily, and those who could not. Talk of travelling ‘over there’ became the subject of most East German dinner tables and the dreams of millions of people were focused on leaving their country.

 

Early in the morning of 8 December 1987, the Czech police and officers from the StB security service began ringing Kampa Park, the charming little open space in central Prague directly below Charles Bridge. For the last five years on this date there had been rallies attended by thousands of young people to commemorate the death of John Lennon. Apart from football matches, they had been the largest public gatherings in Czechoslovakia since the Prague Spring. They had attracted more than five thousand people. The last two of the events, organised by the John Lennon Peace Club, had begun as festivals where the late musician’s songs were played. They turned rowdy later, though, and were broken up by riot police who had beaten some of the fans and made scores of arrests. This year the regime had considered banning the rally. But the Lennonists, as they called themselves, had become well known in the West, so the government let it go ahead, ordering the group to ensure that it would not become a political demonstration. The Communists reckoned they knew how to counter groups of young people whom they regarded as hippies, malcontents and assorted pacifists with a devotion to a dead pop star.

By early in the afternoon about 1,500 people had gathered in Kampa Park and Beatles music was being played on the loudspeaker system, as well as a few forbidden songs by the Czech composer Karel Kryl. Some people were dancing, despite the bitterly chill wind. The police took no action. A few were even seen singing along with the Lennon tunes. Then one of the organisers of the rally, Ota Veverka, a writer, musician and an original signatory of the 1977 Charter, stood on a platform to speak. He read out, as he put it, ‘a petition against nuclear weapons, against the “fraternal army” temporarily stationed in our country (though temporary . . . doesn’t seem to end), and against other measures that I don’t like. And I guess the rest of us don’t like them either.’ He was quickly surrounded by knots of people eager to see the petition. The police took this as their cue. They arrested Veverka and about a dozen other activists, beat up a few more and declared the rally over.
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It was not strange that the most vocal protest in Czechoslovakia came from disaffected youth and was expressed through rock music. A decade earlier The Plastic People of the Universe had been the catalyst for disaffection. Samizdat literature was read by a handful of intellectuals in Prague and Bratislava. In ten years of underground activity, and with relatively wide coverage in the Western media, Charter 77 had gained small numbers of new supporters. By the end of 1988 only around a thousand people were brave enough to attach their names to the document and attract the attention of the StB. The Chartists held a demonstration in Wenceslas Square two days after the John Lennon rally in Kampa Park. It was attended by around 200 people. Compared with Poland, where the Church had become almost an independent state within the State, or even East Germany, where a few Lutheran pastors had begun in halting fashion to voice opposition, Czechoslovakia was an irreligious society. This was partly historic. Church attendance had been falling off since the Enlightenment. Partly it was because the Czech regime since the war had been successful at suppressing, harassing and corrupting established religion.

The majority Catholic Church was viciously persecuted in the 1950s. Parishes simply ceased to exist. More than 10,000 priests and monks were thrown into labour camps and many were never seen again. The Catholics allowed the Party to dictate who could be a priest. Those who preached sermons which the authorities disliked were sacked. The Vatican in the late 1970s named Father Miloslav Vlk as Bishop of Hradec Králové, a traditionally important centre of pilgrimage eighty kilometres east of Prague. The regime vetoed him because in his parish he had attracted too many young people to the Church. For good measure they withdrew his licence to preach and he was reduced to finding work as a milkman. The clergy in the Protestant churches were riddled with police collaborators and agents. Religion played little part in life in the Czech lands, though slightly more in overwhelmingly Catholic Slovakia. But even there the Church seemed crushed. With neither a political nor a religious voice, young people especially found a way to express their discontent through music.

After twenty years of ‘normalisation’, Czechs learned to be afraid. There was plenty to be scared about. The human rights activist Jií Wolf served three and a half years in jail for Charter 77 activities. Almost immediately after he was released he wrote a letter to the Austrian Embassy in Prague about poor prison conditions in Czechoslovakia. He was arrested again, charged with subversion and sentenced to a further six years. Typically, Czechs resorted to black humour in response. Protests against the harsh jail term recalled a joke in
The Good Soldier Švejk
: ‘I never imagined they’d sentence an innocent man to ten years . . . sentencing an innocent man to five years, that I’ve heard of, but
ten
? That’s a bit much.’
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