1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 6
Despite these forceful words, however, the issue remained unresolved even by the time of the formal dinner for the May 1989 NATO summit. Working past midnight, NATO foreign ministers essentially agreed to disagree, concluding that the Lance modernization question should be delayed to a later date.69 The divergence over the desirability of the status quo—desired by the Americans but not the West Germans—was simply too great to overcome.
A fondness for the status quo was not limited to the United States. Thatcher felt it as well. The British memory of the first half of the twentieth century was a painful one; the second half looked much better in comparison, so she was understandably loath to make any changes. Since she had a good working relationship with Gorbachev, she decided during one conversation in September 1989 to make these sentiments clear to him.70 According to notes taken by Gorbachev’s close aide, Chernyaev, she explained to Gorbachev that he should pay no attention to any polite public comments made by NATO leaders calling for a united Germany. “Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the NATO communiqué may sound different, but disregard them. We do not want the unification of Germany.” The reason was that “it would lead to changes in the post-war borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the entire international situation.” She assured him that the United States shared this view; “I can tell you that this is also the position of the US President.” 71
The Polish head of state, Jaruzelski, heard much the same from the British prime minister. As Jaruzelski informed his East German counterparts, Thatcher had told him in a one-on-one conversation what she really thought but could not say publicly—“that unification was absolutely unacceptable. One could not allow this ‘Anschluss,’ otherwise West Germany would swallow up Austria too, and then there would be a real danger of war.” 72 Gorbachev even told Willy Brandt, the former West German chancellor, that Thatcher was worried (and added that Mitterrand was as well). Gorbachev himself added that he was not happy with the nationalistic and irredentist tone of discussions within Kohl’s party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
To summarize, the United States was showing great interest in the status quo, which was new after all of the dramatic announcements of the Reagan era. It was not alone in doing so; Thatcher evinced much the same attitude. Yet the momentum for change that Reagan and Gorbachev had produced remained strong despite U.S. desires to slow it down. West Germans of all political parties disliked SNF. And the notion of an end to dramatic changes was particularly unacceptable to East Europeans. With the threat of violent repression definitively gone, the status quo had ceased to convince them of its own necessity. They realized that they would have to make change happen by themselves, and increasingly gained the confidence to do so.
EAST GERMAN SELF-CONFIDENCE RISES
The fourth development was a new self-confidence on the part of East Europeans and an unwillingness to accept previously tolerated strictures. In 1989, this unwillingness was particularly pronounced among East Germans, who had seemed quiescent in contrast with Solidarity in Poland and reformers in Hungary. The rise of East German assertiveness would be extremely important; the Berlin Wall would not just be opened, it would be breached.73
Several factors contributed to give East Germans the courage they needed to change their future. The rulers of the GDR had long exhibited uncompromising rigidity in all matters, with little tolerance for large-scale protest; but the regime’s loss of nerve in Leipzig on October 9 revealed fatal weaknesses. Gorbachev’s numerous hints to East German leaders and citizens that nonviolent reform was the order of the day removed the fear that the Soviets would act where the East German leadership had not.74 Economic grievances contributed as well: enough was enough, ran the general sentiment. The sixteen-year wait for a car and the twenty-five-year wait for a telephone were no longer tolerable. Although the deprivation was not as bad as that experienced in Poland and Romania, it was still painful. In 1986–87, roughly a hundred thousand people living in thirty-five thousand houses had no heat in the depths of winter. In 1988 and 1989, consumers discovered that it was increasingly difficult to find meat (except on the black market). The comparison with the success of West Germany’s economy exacerbated the resentment.75 And repeated missteps by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) intensified anxieties.76
East Germans decided that in order to improve their lives, they must either leave the country, confront their ruling regime, or accept what would come. In other words, they faced a choice between exiting, voicing their discontent, or staying quiet.77 At first, Hungary’s September 1989 announcement that it would allow East Germans to travel through Hungary to Austria made the exit option the most attractive.
This announcement was the result of Hungarian Minister President Miklós Németh’s decision to change sides at the end of the Cold War. In spring 1989, he and Gorbachev had seemed to be like-minded souls, agreeing in a March conversation that there was “no difference between pluralism in a single-party system and in a multi-party system.” 78 Political liberalization in Hungary over the summer, however, had an unexpected consequence. Not only Hungarians but also East Germans sought to take advantage of the May 1989 cutting of the fence on the Hungarian border to Austria. Due to treaty obligations, Hungary was not supposed to let East Germans utilize this new gap in the iron curtain; but East Germans came and camped at the border anyway.79 At first a holiday atmosphere prevailed, but the crowds grew restless as conditions became wet and swampy in the waning days of a Central European summer.80 Nervous Hungarian border guards even shot one East German after an altercation on August 21.81 It was clear that something had to give.
In a hastily arranged secret meeting on August 25, 1989, outside of Bonn, Németh and his foreign minister, Gyula Horn, informed Kohl and Genscher that they would no longer prevent East Germans from crossing the “green border” into Austria and then going onward to the FRG. The Hungarian leaders were wisely seeking to make a virtue out of the necessity of resolving the unstable situation. Németh promised Kohl and Genscher that as long as no “military or political force from outside compels us to act differently, we will keep the border open for East Germans.” The statement brought tears to Kohl’s eyes. He asked Németh what the West Germans could do in response. Németh, at first protesting that Hungary did not want to exchange the border opening for money, went on to achieve exactly that. The chancellor agreed to encourage both the Deutsche and Dresdner Banks to consider requests from Hungary positively. A substantial amount of credit resulted.82
Map 1.2. Cold W ar Europe
Németh kept his word and opened the border to East Germans in September. Dramatic scenes filled television screens worldwide as a mass exodus ensued. By the end of the month, roughly forty thousand had exited—far more than the Hungarian leadership or indeed anyone else had anticipated.83 This opening was one of the single most important events leading to the breakdown of the old Cold War order. Genscher would later award Horn the Stresemann Medal for it, saying “everything that followed was a consequence of this decision.” 84
In response, the furious East German Politburo choked off travel to Hungary. But that only relocated the problem to Warsaw and particularly Prague. East Germans began filling the West German embassies there in the hopes of emigrating. Prague was especially hard hit because, as the Czech Interior Ministry noted in a report on events in fall 1989, Czechoslovakia had already emerged as a “transit stop” for East Germans heading to Hungary and subsequently crossing the border.85 When denied the opportunity to go to Hungary, East Germans simply stayed there rather than go home.
Kohl and Genscher hoped they could solve this crisis by negotiating a special one-time release of East Germans from the Prague and Warsaw embassies. The East Berlin Politburo agreed, but there was a catch. The Politburo insisted that refugees had to travel on sealed trains that would cross back through the GDR before delivering their human cargo in West
Germany. The risk of running through the GDR cast a pall over the agreement, since it meant that the Politburo had countless ways to stop the trains, and the image of sealed trains in Germany had frightening historical connotations. Still, there did not seem to be a better alternative. In a dramatic gesture, Genscher personally went to Prague to tell the crowd in the embassy of the deal. He was received with a mixture of joy and fear, as the East Germans scrambled to prepare for immediate departure.86
Sleep-deprived embassy officials in Prague and Warsaw rushed to get the refugees under way, to accomplish their transit to West Germany before the terms of the deal could change. In Prague, this meant jamming an estimated four to six thousand people on to six trains.87 Pulling out in haste, hours later than expected in the middle of the night, massively outnumbered West German official escorts did their best to control the train passengers. The escorts also had to manage various state security teams that insisted on inspections of the trains at numerous stops. The atmosphere would grow tense whenever special police officers would demand that passengers show their ID cards. Some refugees threw their cards at the feet of the agents in response. The embassy officials were not sure what they could do if the confrontation turned violent, had no means of communication with the West whatsoever, and had no idea how it would all end.88
One of the West German escorts out of Prague, Frank Elbe, recalled the experience as follows: “Our train rolls out after one in the morning.” He remembered that the mood was “anxious and fearful.” The nighttime journeys were made even more surreal when families with children appeared by the tracks. The trains were only supposed to carry the original crowd; but others, among them East Germans who had arrived in Czechoslovakia too late to make it to the embassy, figured out where the trains would have to slow or stop for technical reasons. They rushed to the tracks with whatever they could carry, in the hopes of boarding. Richard Kiessler, a West German journalist on another of the Prague trains, remembered that few succeeded.89
Confrontation loomed yet again when Elbe’s train reached the final station in Czechoslovakia. As it rolled to a stop, passengers saw a line of police on the platform. A handful of forlorn East German families faced the security forces. The sound of a loudspeaker ordering them not to board echoed through the station. No one knew how long the train would be stopped or what would happen.
Suddenly, Elbe remembered, “a family finds the heart to begin walking, carrying its suitcases, toward the train.” It was a moment to make the heart stop: parents, clutching children and belongings, moving into a row of armed guards. They had no idea what would result, only the belief that whatever it was, it could not be worse than staying behind the iron curtain one day longer. The sight of the lone family advancing in the predawn light inspired other waiting families; they began to follow. From inside the train, Elbe recalled that “hands that want to help stretch out to them, and pull them in.” The Czech police chose to do nothing. The train moved on, slightly fuller than before.
Such success helped the confidence of the passengers to grow with every mile they moved closer to the West. At their final stop in the GDR, a teenager threw all of his East German currency out the window. Hesitatingly at first, but then en masse, the rest of the train followed suit, divulging itself of the essentials of an everyday life that had ended: cash, ID cards, and apartment keys.90 A train station employee reacted to the shower of coins and keys by tipping his hat to the jubilant passengers. And the next stop was the West. Elbe remembered that moment as a time when “a joy that you cannot imagine breaks out.”
When Elbe and others reported to their superiors that more passengers had gotten on to the ostensibly sealed trains under way, Bonn decided to provide cover to such people. Instructions went out saying “the fact that further people got on the train during the transit should not be explicitly acknowledged” if questions arose.91 On the whole, Elbe found the entire experience to be a sign that more than just a refugee issue was unfolding. West Germany had taken in fleeing easterners before, but this was different. He began wondering if East Germany itself could survive. (Later, he would become one of the key diplomats in the unification process, working closely with Zoellick in the U.S. State Department.)92 Like Elbe, the Politburo of East Germany clearly saw the flow to Prague as a potentially fatal threat, because it tried to stave off further such scenes through the act of closing the GDR’s borders to Czechoslovakia on October 3. It thereby hermetically sealed its own country into an island of discontent, but not before media accounts and images of the refugees leaving Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia had flooded television screens worldwide.93
Chernyaev confided to his diary that the Prague trains in particular had produced “awful scenes” that West German television had filmed “and is broadcasting everywhere in the GDR. All of the Western media is full of articles about German reunification.” 94 He tried to put a positive spin on events, saying it was fortunate that Gorbachev had set this process in motion.95 Kohl felt compelled to call Gorbachev and reassure him that the FRG was not trying to destabilize East Germany.96
Such coverage influenced the lives of the so-called “stay-at-homes” in the GDR and pushed them toward the option of voicing their unhappiness. “You’re still here?” quickly replaced “good day” as a greeting. During daylight hours, the stay-at-homes saw how many people were missing from the workplace. During the evening, West German television brought pictures of their cheering, exuberant neighbors now in the FRG back into their living rooms.97 As a result, a new pressure added itself to the already-extensive frustration: now an easterner had to justify staying as opposed to leaving. This pressure increased the willingness of GDR citizens to use confrontation with the government as the needed justification for staying home, which greatly benefited hitherto small opposition groups and sympathetic churches.98 Artist and dissident Bärbel Bohley, who had also been expelled to the West but returned, spoke for many in October 1989 when she defended this tactic. “Confrontation arises naturally today when the truth is spoken. A person who wants to avoid this confrontation is a person who wants to avoid the truth.” 99
Fig. 1.3. Bärbel Bohley, former East German dissident leader, in 2004. Courtesy of Michael Urban/AFP/Getty Images.
Previously, the staff of the West German permanent mission in the GDR had been dismissive about local dissidents. Franz Bertele, the senior West German figure in the mission, had reported throughout the summer and fall that the East German opposition was too hapless to seize the opportunity. “The reports in our press about an ‘opposition’ are exaggerated,” he concluded. “Bärbel Bohley … makes an amateurish impression and has real problems … carrying out her goals.” The followers of dissident groups were only “intellectuals, with no political talent whatsoever visible among them.” 100
Whatever organizational shortcomings Bohley and other prominent dissidents may have had previously, in fall 1989 she and others overcame them and served as important catalysts, and that was what mattered. Participation in protest events organized by opposition groups and churches grew by orders of magnitude throughout October and November 1989, and climaxed in the half-million-strong demonstrations of November 4 in Berlin and November 6 in Leipzig.101 Every march or protest that took place successfully inspired more people to join the next one as self-confidence began to snowball. Even loyal party members wrote to Krenz demanding change.102 Dissent, expressed throughout most of the summer and fall in the form of mass exit, had been forced by the border sealing into voicing itself in mass demonstrations. These two forms of expression—equally devastating to the workers’ and peasants’ state—had an important qualitative difference. While the two groups were not entirely mutually exclusive, by and large the emigrants wanted to escape the GDR while the demonstrators wanted to change it. The main chant of earlier demonstrations had been “we want out!” Now the chants became “we are the people” and “we’re staying here!”
The SED tried new travel and emigration regulations to appease the cr
owds, but they were too similar to existing rules. Local party offices were flooded with complaints. In numerous demonstrations, GDR protesters let the SED know what they really wanted.103 Signs carried at an East Berlin protest illustrated sentiments felt across the country: “Here’s for putting graffiti on both sides of the wall,” “All the way to Hawaii without any visa,” and “Passports for everyone—marching orders for the SED,” they proclaimed.104
The consequences of failing to meet those expectations were not hard to guess: even more flight to the West and increased domestic instability.105 The country could hardly take more of either. Belatedly, East German leaders had realized that their month-old sealing of all GDR borders had caused an intolerable escalation of tension and frustration within the country, as shown in the increasing number of participants in street demonstrations.106 The Politburo hoped that a new safety valve to Czechoslovakia might defuse the anger and thus allowed travel there to resume. Czech leaders, fearful of the spectacle of East Germans again roaming Prague’s streets, immediately announced that GDR citizens would be permitted to exit from Czechoslovakia directly into the West. Between November 1 and 7, over thirty-seven thousand East Germans left by this route; the rate sometimes reached three hundred per hour.107 And despite this new escape route, the protests in the GDR continued to increase in number.