1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 14

  Three components of Havemann’s legacy were particularly crucial in early 1990, after the initial jubilation at the fall of the wall. The first was a firm belief in socialism, if not in existing socialist regimes. As he wrote in 1970, “I believe, now as ever, that the socialist states, including the GDR, have not yet definitively missed their connection to the future.” He therefore represented an ambivalent hero to the West, because he condemned Western countries as fascist and militaristic in no uncertain terms. He deplored what he called the imperialistic U.S. actions in Vietnam, the racist treatment of African Americans, and the unjust power of West German business. In 1982, together with the Protestant minister Rainer Eppelmann, he authored the “Berlin Appeal,” which called for both the Warsaw Pact and NATO to remove their forces from East and West Germany. A corresponding second component was his commitment to staying put in a socialist state, rather than becoming one of those unfortunate souls—so devastatingly denounced by poet Anna Akhmatova in an earlier era—who left their land to the mercy of enemies, both internal and external. One had to stay and fight at home. The third and final component was his bravery and refusal to be cowed by the agents of repression, whether they were Nazi or Stasi. These three beliefs would inform the dissidents of 1989 as they sought to formulate their visions for the future. They now had the chance that he was denied—namely, to remake East Germany—and the question was how to live up to his legacy of heroism.

  Fig. 3.1. Robert Havemann, East German dissident, in 1979. © dpa/Corbis.

  As admirable as it was, that heroic legacy carried within it its own problems. Obviously, “heroism” means having courage, vision, and bravery. But, as mentioned in the introduction, there are less favorable connotations as well. A heroic skyscraper, an awesome feat of engineering, inspires little love from the people evicted from their homes in well-established older neighborhoods to make room for it. The effort of reaching for the sky can be awe-inspiring, but also foolhardy.

  Both the positive and negative connotations of heroism would define two models proposed in 1990. The first was an extremely detailed version, in the form of a new constitution, drafted largely by former East German dissidents as part of the round table. The second was an extremely vague version, sketched by Gorbachev and his aides after their realization that the restoration model would not work. Both would begin with great hopes yet ultimately fail to gain sufficient support for their models.

  The authors of the first—the East German dissident movement—would in fact lose their popularity with the broad mass of East Germans precisely because of their quixotic quest to create an autonomous East Germany with its own constitution. Dissident leaders and huge popular crowds had joined together in fall 1989, despite the fact that the long-term protest movement was led by intellectuals hoping to reform socialism, while the newer wave of protest in 1989 looked toward a capitalist future.6 As a result, there was always a certain amount of disconnect between the long-term dissidents and the newer adherents. In 1990, the heroic ambitions of the dissidents and a brush with internal violence would lead to a final split between the two. Meanwhile, the authors of the second plan—Gorbachev and his advisers—would face challenges from both external and internal opponents. Unlike the East Germans, they would never think their ideas through fully, and their plans would remain vague until the end.

  THE ROUND TABLE

  As indicated already, leading protest organizations and East German church elders had called for a round table in the GDR. The “contact group” that issued this call consisted of the movement founded in Havemann’s living room—namely, the New Forum—as well as IFM, Democracy Now, the SPD of East Germany (newly refounded by the pastor Markus Meckel), and the Democratic Awakening group including Eppelmann and a new political activist, the physicist and future chancellor, Merkel.7 Originally the contact group worked in secret, but events moved so quickly that it was possible to issue invitations to the first meeting publicly. By December 7, dissidents and religious leaders were sitting down across a table from the leaders of the ruling regime.8

  It was a surreal scenario for protesters like Gerd and Ulrike Poppe, who had undergone years of persecution at the hands of the Stasi. Both great admirers of Havemann, they had irritated the SED for years in every possible way. As a result, Gerd, a trained physicist, had been barred from work in that field and instead given manual labor; Ulrike also faced restrictions. Such measures proved to be unwise, as the couple channeled their extensive energies into protest instead. They organized clandestine meetings in their apartment with everyone from censored authors to West German politicians. They opened a day care center meant to counter the indoctrination of their own and other children by the state; the authorities closed it in 1983. Ulrike also challenged mandatory military training for children in school and was arrested for it. They formed the protest group IFM in winter 1985–86 with their fellow enemy of the state Bohley. They published the provocatively named samizdat newspaper Grenzfall; one meaning of its name was “border collapse.” 9 They worked across state lines; Ulrike was one of the people whom Jahn met when he smuggled himself back into the GDR, and Gerd maintained strong contacts to Czechoslovakian and Hungarian dissidents.10 In short, the idea that they would now sit at a table together with the SED and the members of the CDU and the liberals in the East, who had long since been turned into cheerleaders for the SED, was simply remarkable.11

  The round table’s first pressing task was to define itself and its role. Much discussion was devoted to this at the first meeting.12 Their most basic function, the members decided, was to serve as a source of proposals for remaking the GDR, to be voted on in free elections. The existing government had been “elected” by blatantly fraudulent proceedings, and no real vote was yet scheduled. The round table called for a free national election in May 1990 (to ensure that it was not too close to West German elections due by January 1991).13 In the meantime, the round table would serve as a kind of check on arbitrary acts by the government; it would dissolve once the elections occurred.14

  Fig. 3.2. Ulrike Poppe, East German dissident, in October 1989. © Alain Nogues/Corbis Sygma.

  And as a further check on the power of the ruling regime, it called for the dissolution of the Stasi.15 If anything was going to cause the peaceful 1989 revolution to enter a stage of terror, the continued existence of the Stasi would be it. Rather than moving decisively to dismantle the secret police, as many had hoped, Modrow had instead appointed a new director and misguidedly renamed it the Office for National Security. This yielded the unfortunate German acronym of Nasi and the more unfortunate result that the Stasi continued to exist.16

  By the day of the first round table meeting, there had been scattered attacks on Stasi/Nasi buildings around the country. Some agents had been held captive in their own office blocks for extended periods. In Dresden, KGB agent Putin took advantage of such events to carry out reconnaissance. By this point he had already started straining the office furnace by burning documents, and thinking even further ahead, he wanted to plan for a possible attack. During one sack of a Stasi/Nasi branch, he melted into the masses, “stood in the crowd and watched it happen,” so that he would know what to expect for himself and his colleagues in the future. He was determined not to let a mob enter the KGB offices. “We were prepared to defend ourselves against the crowd, and we would have been within our rights to do so,” he remembered later. Crowds did indeed show up at the doorstep of the KGB in Dresden. “We were forced to demonstrate our readiness to defend our building. And that determination certainly made an impression on them,” Putin recollected, until the Soviet troops they had called arrived and the crowds backed down.17

  Because of her fears about such events, the mother of the revolution, Bohley, contacted the head of the West German mission in East Berlin, Bertele, on the day of the first round table meeting. She told him of her “enormous fear that individual acts of violence could lead to an explosion that would consume the entire GDR.” Bohley asked him to pa
ss a message to Bonn, which he did: Please appeal for calm, and do not exacerbate the situation by suggesting that reunification (and presumably absolution from violent crimes against the old GDR regime) will be coming soon.18 Internal Stasi/Nasi reports show that it shared Bohley’s worries. One local branch feared that agents would be punished as scapegoats, when in fact they had just been “carrying out orders.” 19 Word that dissident leaders, of all people, were helping to protect Stasi employees from physical harm leaked out to the press. The newsmagazine Der Spiegel pointed out how ironic it was that the secret police, “in its hour of need,” sought help from those whom it had long persecuted.20

  In the meantime, the round table took far-reaching steps of its own. Its members, divided into the so-called old forces (mainly the SED) and new forces (mainly dissidents), agreed on a core principle. They shared a mutual worry about the “independence and long-term development” of their country, as stated in a unanimously adopted resolution at the first meeting.21 A West German observer invited to all of the sessions, Uwe Thaysen, remembered this phrase in hindsight as a major mistake. Thaysen was not at all sure that the broader population of the GDR was interested in the “independence and long-term development” of East Germany, unlike Havemann’s heirs and the SED. This statement seemed to Thaysen to be a fundamental decision, and one that would have been better left to an elected parliament.

  The round table also decided on a further role for itself: that of a constitutional convention. Like a more famous convention in the United States in 1787, the table assigned to itself the task of writing the basic law of the land.22 Kohl had already announced his Ten-Point-Program and confederative structures. The round table members decided that they had to come up with an indigenous East German model of their own (despite Gerd Poppe’s accurate objection that they did not have the “democratic legitimation from the population” necessary to do so). They felt that if they did not, other states would do it for them; the authors of the U.S. Constitution had worried about precisely the same phenomenon.23

  The SED representatives agreed with the dream of a new constitution for the GDR, since they had no desire to merge with West Germany either.24 The party unfortunately had lost its best bargaining chip, the Berlin Wall, for nothing; had it retained control over the situation, it could have earned quite a profit from West Germany in exchange for opening it.25 Now the SED had to make do with the dissidents at the round table and its representative there, Gregor Gysi, knew that.

  COUNTERREVOLUTION?

  A fissure between the long-term dissidents and the large number of new 1989 demonstrators, who had made common cause despite differences over the desirability of unification, quickly became apparent after the wall opened.26 This split worsened as a result of events around the turn of the year. The first was Kohl’s visit to Dresden on December 19, following hard on the heels of the second round table meeting. At that session, former dissidents had expressed their intense dismay at Kohl’s impending appearance. They had warned Kohl not to regard the GDR as “the land of low salaries” for West German business.27 The massive Dresden crowds that assembled to hear him, however, did not seem to share the round table’s dismay. Instead, they sent a clear signal that they were hungry for immediate change.

  Kohl had realized that his confederation concept would not work, but had not yet moved on to a new model. He sensed the need for speed, but if he were going to move a lot more quickly, then he would have to make sure that he had covered his back. In January and February he would thus travel to the three countries that mattered most: France, Russia, and the United States.

  The first visit took place on January 4, when Mitterrand received Kohl at his private house in Latché. The two talked for hours. Mitterrand had recently spoken in his public New Year’s address about the need for Europe to be less dependent on the superpowers, that is, to “come home” to its own history and geography, and was plainly searching for a Eurocentric vision of the future. Both he and Kohl felt that Gorbachev had provided them with a rare opportunity; if Gorbachev fell, hard-liners would follow and matters would become more difficult. Mitterrand told Kohl that “Gorbachev’s fate depends more on you” than on the hard-liners. Kohl agreed and said “Gorbachev knows this too.” The conversation was an extremely open and far-ranging one. It seems to have done a great deal to incline Mitterrand toward the belief that the best way forward was with Kohl and the EC, suppressing the inevitable discomfort that the specter of a unified Germany created.28

  The most significant event in shaping the plans of both Kohl and the round table, however, was Modrow’s decision not just to tolerate the continued existence of the Stasi/Nasi but also to relaunch and revitalize it.29 This ill-starred idea became public after vandals defaced the Soviet war memorials in Treptow, on the outskirts of Berlin, by painting neo-Nazi slogans on them.30 It is likely that Stasi agents themselves were responsible for this, because it gave the SED and Modrow precisely the justification they needed.31 The January 3 issue of the party newspaper Neues Deutschland denounced the vandalism, and called it a sign that right-wing West Germans were planning “to enter the GDR by the thousands and establish operations here.” 32

  Five days later, the round table learned about planning for a coup. The Gera branch of the Stasi/Nasi had issued an appeal that had just come to light. Addressed to “Comrades, Citizens, and Patriots of the Invisible Front, Both at Home and Abroad,” it called on them to rise up and “restore the rule of law.” In a thinly veiled threat to the round table, the appeal sneered that “whoever plays with power can also have it taken away from them, especially during a revolution.” 33

  The opposition groups demanded to know if this call to carry out a coup had in fact been sent to its intended recipients. Angered by the Gera “invisible front,” the round table denounced the unwillingness of the Modrow government to answer the questions about the Stasi that it had been posing since its first meeting: Where are its weapons? When will it be dissolved? Even the SED, now having changed its own name to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), agreed that the government response had been inadequate. The groups that had come up with the idea for the round table in the first place issued an ultimatum to the Modrow government: Answer all of our questions in a week, by January 15, or else.34

  What was the “or else”? What leverage did the round table have over the government? The answer was the same as in November 1989: public opinion. At first, Modrow foolishly tried to ignore the round table. He told Nikolai Ryzhkov, the Soviet prime minister, that the vandalism would be his excuse for transforming the old Stasi into “a stabilizing force in society.” Modrow’s hope was to “prevent the sell-out of the GDR’s economy to West Germany.” 35 The next day, at a parliamentary session, he unveiled his plan: a beefed-up Stasi/Nasi, renamed yet again as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. As Modrow ominously proclaimed, “surveillance and disruption of plans to disturb the peace … will remain an important goal and task.” This announcement sounded like a counterrevolution from above, a response to the revolution from below. The reaction was immediate: massive strikes and protests on the same night and the next day.36

  In response, the New Forum called for a demonstration at the Stasi/Nasi headquarters on Normannen Street in Berlin on January 15. Unbelievably, more than two months into the revolution, the main office remained intact and open, scaring off those who would challenge it.37 Like Putin in Dresden, those inside were using the time to destroy documents. Now, posters and leaflets called on East Germans to face their fear, and advertised the showdown in big block letters: “NORMANNEN ST., Monday, Jan. 15, 5:00 p.m.” A New Forum leaflet proclaimed its demands: “Immediate closure of all Stasi offices. … The start of trials against the Stasi. … No special privileges and payments to former Stasi agents. … No creation of new secret services.” 38 To make sure that the Stasi got the point, the leaflet said, “We are going to shut the doors of the Stasi! Bring stones and mortar for constructing a wall!” The last point
was not rhetorical. It was a signal to attend and to build a wall—a powerful symbol in East Germany.

  More anxious observers wondered if this was the beginning of a stage of terror in Central Europe. A U.S. State Department memo from December had speculated that if the public sought violent revenge, Stasi agents might seek the protection of Soviet troops, thereby enmeshing them in the conflict and requiring action by Moscow. The author of the document, Policy Planning adviser Harvey Sicherman, concluded that if Moscow authorized the use of force, “I have no doubt the Russians will obey an order to fire upon the Germans.” On top of this, it was not entirely clear whether Soviet troops would obey the opposite order—to stay in their barracks—if one came from Gorbachev.39

  Because of the potential for disaster, January 15 represents one of the most significant single days in the competition to shape the future after 1989. Too late to stop the Normannen Street protest, Modrow backed down, announcing that he would put off any discussion of an Office for Constitutional Protection until after the elections. He turned up in person at the round table meeting that day to grovel and invited members of the round table to join him in representing the GDR on an upcoming visit to Bonn to see Kohl. It was the first in a series of steps that would lead to the creation of an interim “Government of National Responsibility” that would include former dissidents.

  Even as he was doing so, word began arriving that things were going badly wrong at Normannen Street. Instead of the peaceful protest out front, the crowds had gotten inside and started destroying the building. Police officers burst into the round table meeting and pleaded with dissident leaders to come with them to the Stasi headquarters in the hopes that they could restore order. In a season of surreal events, this one must have been the most bizarre: a convoy of police cars driving through the dark streets, carrying protesters to the very building where some of them had been persecuted for the purpose of protecting it.40