1989 (24 page)

The feeling of change in the air was palpable. Although nobody seemed very sure what form it might take. Reforms that only a few weeks earlier were deemed unnecessary were suddenly declared ripe for discussion. Krenz acknowledged that the tide of emigration was an ‘open wound’. Busch told me, behind his hand, that rumours emerging from the communist ranks said Krenz had been given only until the party congress – May at the latest. Talk was already of Hans Modrow, the Dresden party boss, a self-billed Gorbachev fan, taking over, despite the violence which had occurred in his city when the refugee trains passed through. There was a new ‘citizens’’ body called
Neues Forum
(New Forum) largely made up of people who had been active in the old Swords to Ploughshares movement. One of its guiding lights was a woman called Bärbel Bohley, yet another disillusioned former communist. She lived just around the corner so I went to see her and took copies of her ‘charter’, a document she said they were asking people to sign to petition the government for a ‘new dialogue’, though she was adamant they were not trying to organise themselves as a formal political party: ‘We’re thinking of getting people together to have a march, or something, just a show of numbers really.’ I nodded. It was much the same as had been
happening
in Leipzig where we had at one stage feared the Soviet tanks would roll, but now seemed the beginnings of a push for some sort of social and economic reform as had already happened in Poland and Hungary. We all knew that the big problem was the border. But to question that was to question the integrity of the country itself. And that was not on the cards.

I filed my copy, a report of the interview with Bohley, her hopes and aspirations, a sense of the ‘deadline’ hanging over the Krenz regime and – as everyone was saying – a feeling that there was more
to come. But maybe not until the spring. I flew back to London, spent the weekend with my family, and got on the plane to Namibia. It didn’t seem anywhere near as daft as it sounds. Honestly.

It certainly seemed daft by the time I got back. 1989 was to be the
annus mirabilis
in the history of the post-Second World War world, with the democratisation of much of Southern Africa no less a cause for celebration than the demise of the Iron Curtain. It was a big story. It just wasn’t my story.

I was frustrated that while I had been away, there had been the biggest demonstration ever seen in the centre of East Berlin. Bärbel Bohley and her New Forum people had managed to enthuse not just thousands but hundreds of thousands, almost half a million in total, to converge on the Red City Hall carrying banners similar to those up until now seen only in Leipzig: ‘We are the people’. And this time there were a hell of a lot of them. Even Alex and Bärbel, who had been content to leave the ‘revolution’ to the kids, had joined in.

‘Why not,’ said Bärbel over a ciggy and a schnapps in Metzer Eck. ‘At least we can show them we’re not afraid.’ And there was the rub: the fear had faded. The assumption that brutal force would be deployed had faded with the assumption that it would work. It was as if a sinister spell that had for decades held a population in thrall had suddenly been revealed as a piece of bogus hocus pocus. Almost a Sleeping Beauty moment. But if the long sleep was over nobody knew exactly what the world would look like when they finally rubbed the dust from their eyes.

As far as I was concerned, looking for a focus on a Wednesday afternoon for a story that I would write on Friday for that week’s Sunday paper, it seemed the best chance would be another
demonstration
, this time up in Rostock, on the Baltic coast. It was unlikely to be a big demonstration on the scale of Leipzig or the previous week’s huge gathering in Berlin, but it would be a further sign of unrest spreading across the country, and Rostock, an old and once pretty Hanseatic trading city going slowly to the dogs under the moribund Comecon economic grouping, would provide a little more unusual background colour.

It was on my way back, with little more than that colour under my
belt and still wondering what was going to be the ‘intro’ on my story for the week, that I turned on the car radio. And almost fainted. I felt for a surreal moment as if I had crossed into an alternative universe. It was RIA S Berlin (
Radio im Amerikanischen Sektor
), usually a
reliable
mix of music and news. They had abandoned the music. In a gabbling chatter rather than the usual sober tones, the news anchor was saying, ‘It appears now that a second crossing point on the Wall has opened. As I speak thousands of East Berliners are pouring into the West.’

Stunned and horrified – I was still more than an hour and a half away – I did the only thing I could: put my foot to the floor. And
discovered
, to my exquisite anguish, that Mercedes had already joined the green lobby and my rented shiny black metallic M-190 for all its boasts about low fuel consumption and low emissions (this was back in 1989, remember!) had the acceleration of a donkey cart. For the best part of ninety minutes I tried to push my foot through the chassis as I willed the car back to East Berlin, accelerating to over 170 kph, my ear glued to the radio all the way. What had happened was less than clear-cut: at an unheralded news conference in East Berlin, politburo member Günter Schabowski had said that it was the government’s intention to ‘normalise’ the frontier with West Germany and West Berlin and in general relax travel restrictions. He was obviously not completely up to speed with what had actually been decided, but he had been heard to say it would be possible for ‘every citizen of the German Democratic Republic to leave the GDR through any of the border crossings’. Asked when this would come into effect, he had fumbled through his papers and said, uncertainly, ‘Immediately, from now’. The press conference had been broadcast live on East German television too and within half an hour there were crowds at the checkpoints demanding to be let through and eventually some – and then more and more – were. Exactly what the formalities were, and how long this would last, nobody knew.

Once within the city limits I headed straight for the Wall. At the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint there were already thousands. I spoke to the border guard on charge who would give no details about the apparent dramatic change in attitude other than to confirm that they were letting GDR citizens through. But he would not let me
through. As a foreigner, I would have to go to Checkpoint Charlie. Cursing Prussian pedantry to the last, I ran back to the car and drove the kilometre or so distance, taking with me, piled into the Merc, a group of East Berliners who had despaired of the
Invalidenstrasse
queue.

There it was every bit as chaotic. I drove into the middle of the wide expanse of the East German control area. I was delighted to see that one of the obviously harassed border guards on duty was the Bear. He grimaced at me, gave an approving look at the car –
surprised
when I told him it had rubbish acceleration – and said: ‘It’s chaos over there’. He and his colleagues did their best to complete my formalities in a few minutes, but would not let the East Germans come with me in the car. They had to go on foot. ‘There’s no point in trying to drive that through tonight. It’s a madhouse,’ said the Bear.

I could see what he meant about the ‘madhouse’. Some twenty metres away on the other side of the checkpoint’s customs sheds, was a vast and obviously drunk throng of West Berliners. From the Eastern side it genuinely looked like an angry drunken mob. The other side of the checkpoint here was Kreuzberg, home of West Berlin’s disaffected squatters and anarchists, and some in the crowd were hurling abusive insults and beer cans at the border troops, seen close up for the first time, suddenly transformed from sinister armed silhouettes behind searchlights into a close-up human enemy (any uniform was a target for some Kreuzberg characters). The control area between the barriers had meanwhile filled with cars. One party of Third World diplomats, completely uncaring about the history unfolding before them and more concerned about getting to their favourite West Berlin nightclub, fumed at the helpless troops for not opening the gates which, although pedestrians were passing through, remained closed against the teeming throng.

Frenetic, confused, at last the East German guards opened the gates. My car was first in the line. ‘Go on then if you want to tackle that lot,’ shouted one, now angry, lieutenant. I didn’t. I was not sure if the crowds dancing in the gap ahead of me were angry or happy, but I knew one thing: I did not want to be responsible for the first casualty of the night by running over someone. It would be much later that night, when the mood of celebration had been firmly
established, before the first fibreglass Trabants began to trundle through and the curious welcome custom of ‘Trabby-bouncing’ – lifting the little cars up and down as if giving them ‘the bumps’ could be created. At that moment, I made my own decision; I turned the car round and drove East, leaving the diplomats fuming as the troops closed the gates again to stop an influx of partying drunks set on invading East Berlin.

‘Tell you what,’ said the Bear. ‘Stick the motor over there,’ pointing at a normally out of bounds patch of land just to the left of the Checkpoint Charlie barrier. ‘We’ll look after it. That is, if you’re serious about going through.’

‘It’s my job,’ I told him. And he shrugged. He understood. After all, he was just doing his.

Right up at the Western barrier, East German guards with
megaphones
ran to and fro, shouting preposterously at photographers to stop taking pictures as families streaming tears kissed and hugged and Western revellers climbed onto the electrically-controlled metal barriers. I didn’t know it at the time but the same
uncontrollable
mob only half a mile away were already clambering onto the Western section of the Wall before the Brandenburg Gate and, egged on by Western media snappers, tearing at it with pickaxes in front of totally confused and conflicted border guards who only a few weeks earlier would have shot them.

Going through the pedestrian gate I had used a thousand times before was a strange and unforgettable experience. I had my hair ruffled by a forest of outstretched hands, was kissed at random by unseen lips and found a can of beer thrust into my hand with the emotional cry ‘
Herzlich Wilkommen in die Freiheit
’ (Welcome to freedom!). Dazed, and probably looking as emotional as if I had indeed set foot for the first time in West Berlin, I muttered ‘
Danke
’ and stumbled on through the crowd who were already embracing the next arrival.

I went to the Adler Bar, recently opened in a building just a few yards beyond Checkpoint Charlie. For years the building in a road to nowhere had lain derelict and empty. Now it was heaving, the bar at the centre of the turning world. I found their call box and phoned Alex in Metzer Eck. To my astonishment, he told me he was
not going to come over: ‘Guess who has just turned up? Günter. He says it was only the other week he was telling you his one wish was to be able to drink in Metzer Eck. Well, now he can. There’s progress for you.’ For Alex, it was every bit as important that his friend could come back as that he could leave.

He said he did not know about Bärbel, but Horst and Sylvia had gone and would probably, he guessed, turn up at Renate’s. For the next hour or so I hung around Checkpoint Charlie, drinking in a scene I had thought impossible and cursing the fact that it was a Thursday night – too late to get much in the Friday editions but the Saturdays would hoover it up. Hoover what up? Nobody was still exactly sure what was happening, how or why and how long it would last. I talked at random to some of those who had just come over. Most had their hearts in their mouths. Petra Lorenz, a dumpy, middle-aged mother-of-two, had travelled two hours by bus and tram from her flat in Marzahn, leaving her husband to look after their children. ‘Don’t be daft, it’s a lie,’ he had said. She wandered in a trance for twenty minutes on the Western side of Checkpoint Charlie but was scared to go further in case they slammed the door and she would be cut off from her family forever. Nothing seemed impossible. She took back a newspaper as a souvenir from a dream.

The burning question in everyone’s mind was answered by a bus driver from the East, smiling with a crisp certainty as he downed the beer from the can pressed into his hand as he pushed through the crowds and into the West: ‘Can they take back their decision? Close the wall again? Never. We’ll see them sink in ashes first.’ I
scribbled
his words down in my notebook. In my head I was already preparing the big double-page spread I knew I would be required to produce for Sunday, whether it was ‘Flash in a Pan’ or ‘End of an Era’. The analysis could come later, tomorrow, in the cold light of day and in the wake of whatever happened over the next few hours. Right now what I wanted was colour. And raw emotion. And there was no shortage of either.

It was time to go to the Ku’damm, the centre of West Berlin
nightlife
, where it seemed likely most of the more adventurous would head. But it made sense to take some East Berliners with me. The obvious candidates soon presented themselves. Running through
a cheering gauntlet of beery West Berliners dancing on the Wall came a ready-made party. These three young waitresses from the Hotel Stadt Berlin, who came whooping through the Wall,
spraying
Rotkäppchen
(Little Red Riding Hood), the fizzy party plonk of the East, at grinning policemen, were ready-made feel-good copy. I grabbed a taxi and offered them a lift to the Ku’damm in exchange for the story of their evening.

In the taxi as we rushed through streets full of drunk pedestrians and cars honking their horns, Christiane, Janna and Andrea told me how it had been a routine boring evening serving the usual
unappetising
East German institutional food to sour-faced Russian tourists. When the news came through that the Wall was open they had bitten their lips and looked at each other. But
deutsche Gründlichkeit
(German thoroughness) was in their genes: there might have been a revolution going on all around them, but they could hardly join in until they had finished their shift. It had gone midnight before Andrea turned to the others, giggling, and suggested: ‘Anyone for the Ku’damm?’ And now we were there. When we piled out of the taxi in the middle of the carnival that had spread across the centre of West Berlin, Andrea looked longingly at a telephone box that would work only with the Western cash she did not have. I handed her a few D-Marks and she woke her parents in the East: ‘
Mutti
, I’m on the Ku’damm. It’s mad. It’s marvellous. Oh, don’t be cross. I’m coming back.’ Then they gave another delirious whoop of delight. And were off into the melee.