1989 (25 page)

I let them go. They had given me the ‘human element’ my copy needed. Now it was time to fill in the rest. Despite trying to keep a clear head for detail, I was as intoxicated as any Berliner on the pure champagne atmosphere of a city that couldn’t quite believe what was happening to it. Watching the little apple-green and baby-blue fibreglass Trabbies with their two-stroke engines tootle by amidst the Mercs and Beamers on the Ku’damm – giggling lunatics waving from the windows – was like watching one of those Hollywood films where cartoon characters merge with real life: think Roger Rabbit in a Cold War context. The sky was ablaze with fireworks, total
strangers
embraced in the streets. Bars spilled out onto the streets and the streets flooded into the bars.

For a while I just stood there watching in stunned amazement only to be startled when I was suddenly grabbed round the neck by a tall man in a leather jacket with cropped hair. It was Andreas, an improbable
deus ex machina
, but profoundly welcome. He had just met Kerstin after work and they were still reeling from the news. We dived into a phone box and called Renate to find out if she had heard from Horst and Sylvia. They were with her. We arranged to meet them as soon as they could manage it on the Ku’damm Eck, probably the most confused spot in Europe at that moment. But we managed it. ‘We’ve … uh, just popped over for a drink,’ said Horst, looking exaggeratedly nonchalant before he whooped with joy and swung his sister into his arms.

By five thirty a.m. we were sitting over tall beers in a bar down Kantstrasse while Kerstin wept quietly with happiness. Horst was teasing the bar staff and West Berlin customers, touting for custom for Metzer Eck: ‘Better pig’s knuckles than any you get here,’ he shouted. As we left, he asked the waitress if he could perhaps buy two of the tall, elegant Warsteiner beer glasses, just as a souvenir. She laughed and told him to take them and not ask silly questions. As an unimaginable dawn broke on the first day of a new Germany, we staggered off to bed, the East Berliners to Renate’s West Berlin flat. Whatever happened, they were not missing the chance to spend a night in the West. Meanwhile I, the Westerner, wandered in a daze back East, to my hotel on Marx-Engels-Platz. The sun was coming up as I kicked my way through the broken bottles on the roadway next to Checkpoint Charlie and presented my passport to
stunned-looking
border guards. How long would I still need to do so, was the question neither asked nor answered.

The night the Berlin Wall came down was the ultimate vindication of the ‘cock-up theory’ of history. Over the years since, Krenz, Schabowski, even Gorbachev who more than anyone perhaps bears the indirect responsibility – or right to claim the credit – have told their own, differing stories about what happened and what was intended. The facts that emerged piecemeal in the days that followed, and subsequently in an endless series of interviews, many of them conducted under the aegis of my fellow Metzer Eck regular,
film producer Axel Grote, allow the real jigsaw of that night to be pieced together.

Schabowski’s ill-organised and incompetent press conference was merely the result of a Communist Party still reeling at its own boldness in sacking its leader. They were also under immense
pressure
from Prague where the sight of thousands of East Germans camped in the overflowing grounds of the West German Embassy was causing social and political unrest in a communist regime that, despite the changes in Poland and Hungary, was still only slightly less Stalinist than that in East Berlin. The Czechoslovaks were furious and had made clear to their comrades that something had to be done. At the same time the grey men in East Berlin realised they were sitting on a pressure cooker. They thought that by making concessions on travel to the West they would ease the pressure by letting off steam. What they didn’t realise was that it was actually a bottle of champagne, and the cork, once out, would not go back in.

Schabowski’s statements that night were worse than shambolic. Transcripts show that what he actually said revealed that the
politburo
had been working on new regulations for travel to the West but was worried about it: ‘We are naturally concerned at the possibilities of this travel regulation – it’s still not in effect, it’s still only a draft’. He then immediately followed this up by saying that pressure from Prague had forced them to accelerate their thinking: ‘This
movement
is taking place (um) across the territory of an allied state (um), which is not an easy burden for that state to bear.’ As a result they were bringing forward ‘a passage’ from the planned new rules.

He then quickly read out the rules from a piece of paper: ‘
Applications
for travel abroad by private individuals can now be made without the previously existing requirements (of demonstrating a need to travel or proving familial relationships). The travel
authorisations
will be issued within a short time. Grounds for denial will only be applied in particular exceptional cases. The responsible departments of passport and registration control in the People’s Police district offices in the GDR are instructed to issue visas for permanent exit without delays and without presentation of the existing requirements for permanent exit.’

What was clearly intended was that East Germans, from the Friday
morning, would have the right to go to their local police station and request a passport, which would be granted them automatically, within a few days at most, and that with this they would be able to travel to the West. The hope was that the refugee flood would stop immediately. They realised there would be a large number of visitors to the West in the coming weeks, but in numbers controlled through the bureaucracy needed to issue passports; of these, many would not come back. Most of the rest would taste the West but still come back; the scenario would then be open for a series of internal reforms in much the same way as had happened in Hungary. It would not be easy for the communists to cope with but at least it would not create difficulties on the international level. It was a stopgap policy.

All they were proposing to do was cut the red tape, not throw open the Berlin Wall. But all that remained in the minds of anyone listening was that one sentence: ‘We have decided today (um) to implement a regulation that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic (um) to (um) leave the GDR through any of the border crossings,’ and when it was to come into effect: ‘
Immediately
, without delay.’ In the background the foreign trade
minister
Gerhard Beil could be heard muttering: ‘to be decided by the council of ministers.’ But nobody was listening to him.

East Berliners living nearest the Wall were first to react. The
commandant
of the contingent of border guards at the Bornholmer Strasse crossing in Prenzlauer Berg was Manfred Sens. He was later to complain that he and his fellow guards felt betrayed: for years they had done a thankless, even despised task, only to have it made a mockery overnight for no clear reason and without proper
explanation
or clear orders. He had heard no instructions about any
proposed
change in border regulations other than that which came over the public radio, by which time he was facing several hundred East Berliners clamouring to be allowed to cross.

Sens had a veritable arsenal in his stores, allowing for every degree of retaliation to any attempt to force a passage: rubber bullets, gas grenades, water cannon and, of course, live ammunition. But he was reluctant to start an incident without orders from above,
especially
when everyone was telling him that to prevent them crossing would be against the orders he would shortly receive. But he hadn’t
had them yet. Sens sat on the telephone trying in vain to get a clear response, not least because Schabowski’s fumbled presentation had confused everybody. Eventually he got through to the very top man Fritz Streletz, a former Second World War
Wehrmacht
soldier who was now chief of the National People’s Army General Staff and the man in charge of all border fortifications. But Streletz couldn’t give him a definitive answer either. All he did was to remind Sens that he had been chosen for his experience and must be aware of the importance of avoiding serious incidents at the country’s frontiers, especially in these critical times.

Sens was not at all sure what his senior officer was suggesting. But time wore on and eventually he lifted the barrier and let the first of his whooping fellow citizens, on production only of their national identity card, cross into the West, a street away. They had no idea if they were letting people out for the night or for ever; at one stage the instruction came through to put the exit stamp across the
photograph
in the identity card – for identification purposes. But within twenty-four hours, tipsy teenagers coming back from West Berlin simply waved identity cards at bemused border guards who only weeks earlier might have shot them.

When the barrier first went up there was a rush for the door in the bar just a hundred yards away from the checkpoint. By
coincidence
, it happened to be run by Dieter Kanitz, Alex’s former waiter in Metzer Eck. He and his wife Hannelore had set up on their own managing a state-run pub in the middle of a
Laubenkolonie
. These were basically allotments equipped with elaborate wooden sheds that keen gardeners fitted with curtains and beds and often spent the weekend in. The allotments abutted the railway tracks on one side and the Wall on the other. As his customers headed west, Dieter would have loved to go with them; but he had lost his identity card, and Hannelore sat with him. It turned out to be one of the best night’s business they ever had as they poured beer into the early morning hours to those returning home for a drink at prices they could afford after the adventure of a lifetime. Just one street away.

At nine a.m. on Friday, November 10th, when KaDeWe, the Harrods of West Berlin, opened its doors, the East Berliners flooded in to
stare at the electronic miracles on offer, at the mountainous meat and fruit display on the ‘Gourmet Floor’. But with Western D-Marks like rare gold, most only window-shopped. Those who did buy something to take home made their purchases at the cheaper
supermarkets
and discount electrical stores.

Alex and Bärbel came over in the afternoon and we all met at Renate’s flat and went out for a celebratory Chinese meal. Bärbel had spent hours wandering the Ku’damm which she had last seen as a little girl, and caused laughter when she returned, still
daydreaming
with the single comment: ‘The streets don’t seem as wide as I remember.’ On the wall, the East German police and border guards had abandoned trying to understand what was really intended by the new border regulations. Their confusion only reflected that in the minds of their masters. But their masters were by now no more in control of the human tide washing across the frontier than King Canute on his throne on the beach. A media circus had flocked to Berlin from around the world, in most cases with little or no idea about what was happening other than the obvious delirious scenes against which well-groomed anchor men and women posed and talked twaddle. But the twaddle declared the Berlin Wall history, and millions of East Germans on the march – believing what they saw on television – had made it so.

On Friday, under fresh instruction from whatever still
constituted
‘above’, East German border guards were once again insisting on stamping documents and issuing visas, but of random validity from three days to six months. Manfred Sens would later testify that on November 14th, five days after the Wall ‘came down’, he received the order again to ‘secure the frontier’. ‘That was a joke,’ he snorted. ‘By that stage it was all we could do to ensure an orderly flow of traffic.’ The stream of honking Eastern cars continued to flow down the Ku’damm, over the border and along Unter den Linden. The wall before the Brandenburg Gate looked more redundant than ever. Within weeks it would be breached in dozens of places, with souvenir hunters fighting over chunks – ideally with the best
graffiti
, and within seven months it would be consigned to historical archaeology.

Back at
The Sunday Times
, Bob the foreign editor had agreed that
to keep me in position and my marriage together, he would do a deal on paying for my wife and two tiny sons to come out to Berlin for a few days. For Jackie it was a cathartic experience, coming back to the place where we had begun married life to see the impossible come true. For my two children – a five-year old and a toddler – it was ‘a funny holiday’. But the pictures I have of them, one in a knitted jumper with pictures of penguins, the other in a down coat two sizes too big, both pushing their little hands into a crack in the Wall, remains a family treasure. As does the chunk of it in my desk drawer. It was our Wall too. And we were glad to see the end of it.

The significance of what had happened began to sink in fast. The Berlin Wall
was
the Iron Curtain, far more than any other Eastern European frontier. But the East German communists had played their last card, gambling on a scorched earth policy, yielding every demand in the hope of exhausting the enemy. It was one of the founding fathers of communism, a high deity in the crumbled East German pantheon, Friedrich Engels, who, a century earlier, had summed up how it happened: ‘Everyone strives for his own
interests
, but in the end what emerges is something no one intended.’

It was, by a long chalk, the most off-the-wall overlong sentence ever to appear in a
Sunday Times
news story, let alone near the top of it. Twice it had been cut into easier-to-digest bite-sized nuggets by the sub-editors, and twice it had been restored, mostly at the hands of Bob Tyrer, foreign editor and literary connoisseur who recognised the vain (in every sense) attempts of his correspondents in the field to do more than just tell the news. On a freezing cold night in the Czech capital I had sat and tried to do almost literally poetic justice to the most exhilarating two days in my life since the fall of the Berlin Wall, though as that was only three weeks earlier, things were getting hard to keep track of.

I wrote it as I had experienced it, trying to give form in the limited vocabulary of journalism to a popular movement in the truest sense of the term, the cadences of the sentence matching the extraordinary celebration performed by the people of the Czechoslovak capital as communism crumbled:

‘A hands-across-Prague protest designed as a human chain became instead a merry dance, a living tableau from a Brueghel painting, as laughing, skipping people in warm mufflers and long scarves formed an endless twisting snake around the trees, through the snowy park, up to the floodlit spires, the castle itself and the archbishop’s palace, then helter-skelter slithered giggling down steep, slippery, narrow cobbled streets and, holding hands with exaggerated formality, like a pastiche mazurka, passed across the fifteenth-century Charles Bridge, watched by all the statues of all the saints, and on to Wenceslas Square.’

Over the top? Maybe. But as we stood in the square looking up at the magnificent old statue of Good King Wenceslas on his horse, we all felt it was going to be a truly magical Christmas across the whole of Eastern Europe. Even if it would be black magic in one
particular godforsaken corner. True to my family-work ratio in this extraordinary, chaotic year, I managed two days back in Britain with my wife and children before returning to Berlin (already we were no longer saying ‘East’ and ‘West’). Egon Krenz, the stopgap successor to Honecker had already gone, in his place Hans Modrow, the mayor of Dresden, tried to lead a ‘reform coalition’ but on the streets it was slowly becoming clear that the whole communist-led system had lost not only the credibility it never had, but the power to enforce its position. The open frontier was an open door to an increasingly – almost unbelievably – inevitable German unification. As long as there wasn’t a Soviet veto. And that veto, for so long assumed to be automatic, did not seem to be forthcoming.

A Soviet spokesman billed the superpower summit about to take place in warships on the choppy seas off Valletta in early December as the progress of history ‘from Yalta to Malta’. In effect Gorbachev was making it clear that Moscow no longer claimed the advantage Stalin had wrestled from Churchill and Roosevelt as they partitioned the world in the elegant drawing room of Livadia Palace in the Crimea in February 1945. But not in Washington, not in London, not in Paris, nor even Bonn – and least of all Brussels – was there a
blueprint
for Europe to replace the strategic certainties of the Cold War. Wolf Biermann was right: ‘We had already half-swallowed the lie that the sun could never rise again in the East’. In Bonn, Chancellor Kohl prepared his ‘ten-point-plan’, a steady, long-term timetable for progress towards German unity. But in Washington, George Bush paid little more than lip service to the idea. US Secretary of State James Baker told reporters that talk about German reunification was premature. In London Margaret Thatcher was all but openly hostile, implying even consideration of such a topic was ‘
destabilising
’. She had clearly not heard what Gorbachev had told Honecker that he (or she) ‘who is too late will be punished by history.’

History on the ground was not about to wait for the men on the boats to tell it what to do. And it was not just happening in Berlin. After my by now customary one weekend in three at home, events in Prague summoned me back to the middle of a rapidly unfolding new map of Europe. In the wake of the euphoria in Berlin, Prague, which had until then been merely a backdrop for the East German
drama, had been swept up in demonstrations in which one young man had died. Václav Havel, the playwright, who for two decades had been a thorn in the communist regime’s side was a guiding light in the overnight foundation of Civic Forum, a citizens’ group that was trying to assume the role of Poland’s Solidarity union and the East German grass-roots protest movement in one go. It succeeded faster than they could have imagined. The Berlin Wall
was
the Iron Curtain, and its collapse was the crucial event that meant the domino effect would go all the way to the end. Even with a resounding thud that only came a year later, to the fall of the ‘Evil Empire’ itself.

Civic Forum was founded on November 19th, ten days after the Wall came down, and over the next three days it filled the streets of Prague with tens then hundreds of thousands of protesters. On November 23rd, in a wholly surreal moment, Havel appeared on a balcony on Wenceslas Square before a crowd of half a million, and by his side, Alexander Dubcek, the man who had led the ill-fated Prague Spring of 1968. The following night we were sitting in the
Laterna Magika
(Magic Lantern) theatre that had become the
would-be
revolutionaries’ headquarters (where else for a rebellion led by a playwright) wondering what would happen next. We watched Havel sit on stage that Friday night, his legs crossed on a stool, for all the world like contemporary comedian Dave Allen about to tell a few yarns, when a student came rushing in with a tall tale that at first even Havel could not believe: the top members of the communist government had resigned en masse.

‘I think it is time for champagne,’ Havel said with a strange,
disbelieving
smile. ‘I think it is time to be cautious and wait and see what tomorrow brings,’ said the venerable Dubcek at his side. Tomorrow brought confirmation. But it was Sunday night before it dawned on all of Czechoslovakia that their ‘Velvet Revolution’ had worked and they had taken their celebration to that extraordinary gavotte around their beautiful medieval and baroque city that once again had escaped intact without a fight. The rumours of Soviet tanks massing on the outskirts had proved to be a canard. Gorbachev had not done it in East Germany, he would not do it here. The Sinatra Doctrine was for real. And
The Sunday Times
foreign editor’s efforts to retrieve his wordy correspondent’s literary artifice were to be
rewarded too when historian Martin Gilbert, compiling his
History of the Twentieth Century
a decade later, included that preposterous piece of prose intact. I had achieved one ambition: I had genuinely become a footnote in history.

Within days the Czechoslovak Communist Party had removed the reference in the constitution to its own ‘leading role’ and
committed
the ultimate political sin of revisionism, declaring that the Soviet invasion of 1968 had after all been ‘unjustified’. All over Europe, history was not just being written; it was being rewritten. The border to Austria was opened before the end of the week and a few days later travel restrictions to all other countries were
abolished
, the fortifications along the frontier with West Germany, from where I had looked over at the old Sudeten town of Eger, now Cheb, dismantled. Nobody in Prague feared their citizens all clamouring for union with another country; though nor had anyone yet realised that before long they would be clamouring for their own country to be split in two. By the end of the year Havel, the shy self-deprecating dramatist, was president. Democracy, installed overnight, would decide the rest.

I had my own eyes set on a family Christmas back in Britain, but not before at least one more trip back to East Berlin, where Erich Honecker, only two months earlier supreme dictator in his country and master of his party, was an ailing private pensioner about to be expelled by his former comrades. Yet even his going had something sinister about it, as if the communists were now fighting for their very existence as a political party. They had renounced their past, as though the Wall and forty years of repression behind it had never happened, and renamed themselves the Party of Democratic
Socialism
. They had done with Stalinism, yet they still forced their former leader to undergo a humiliation uncannily akin to a Stalinist show trial. From his sickbed – he was now revealed to have long been suffering from cancer – he was forced to recant his own mistakes, including losing touch with reality.

My friend Axel, the television producer from Metzer Eck, had already joined a new party called Demokratischer Aufbruch (
Democratic
Breakthrough) and was talking as its representative to West Berlin politicians about launching a full-scale campaign for German
unification. But in Bonn the physically larger-than-life but
personally
underwhelming chancellor Helmut Kohl was about to seize the appealing nettle offered to him: achieving German unity would be a painful exercise, but it would give him a place in history beyond anything he had ever dared imagine. But was the door to a brave new world just waiting to be pushed? And if it was, could he be sure what lay on the other side. The labels ‘West’ and ‘East’ Germany were geographical tags not actual state entities. The men in Bonn, with a pragmatism born of the years, had eventually recognised the ‘other Germany’ as a state in its own right, but if the people of the German Democratic Republic effectively voted their own state out of existence, then the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany required that they be accepted within it. So far, so easy, but East Germany was an economic basket case, home to
seventeen
million people whose currency was virtually valueless. Could the West German economic miracle survive under the pressure of taking in so many impoverished cousins?

But while the future of Germany looked like dominating my New Year agenda, there was a bigger threat to my family Christmas looming. The wind of change had suddenly struck another domino, the Soviet Union’s most maverick satellite and the most cruel and repressive of all the communist dictatorships in what had once been civilised Europe: Romania. Under their diminutive
megalomaniac
leader Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania was a country
notoriously
hard to report on, relentlessly hostile to foreign journalists. I had been there only once before, several years previously, to write features about life in a society that tried to keep its doors closed to the outside world. Travelling as a tourist on my Irish passport which at that stage gave my profession as a ‘translator’, I had gone in by train from Budapest, on a rationale I hold still that long train journeys offer a peek at a nation’s underbelly.
*
Amongst those I met there were the German-speaking farmers of Transylvania,
descendants
of those warrior-peasants brought in by Wallachian princes five hundred years earlier to help defend their lands against the
Turks. They told me heart-rending stories of medieval villages razed because they were in the way of Ceausescu’s insane plans to build vast agro-industrial collective farms, of families split up arbitrarily and members taken away for interrogation who never returned.

Now in this last most barbaric bastion of totalitarianism, the wind of change had turned into a hurricane. Only a couple of weeks earlier, as even Honecker was being ousted and the Czechoslovak communists were shaking in their boots, Ceausescu had been
delivering
a five-hour eulogy on the achievements of his own squalid rule to an audience of party placemen. During his endless peroration they had risen to their feet no fewer than sixty-seven times to
interrupt
him with applause. If Honecker had been ‘losing touch with reality’, Ceausescu was on a whole other planet. Most of the time he spent going over the plans for his vast
folies de grandeur
, notably his great House of the People, a vast marble palace at the end of a grandiose Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism, which he had
bulldozed
several whole districts of historic Bucharest to construct. He termed himself the
Conducator
, the leader – a direct throwback to the days when Franco styled himself
El Caudillo
, Mussolini
Il Duce
, Hitler
Der Führer
and Stalin
Vozhd
. The man who terrorised the peasant farmers of Transylvania was perceived by his entire
population
as a bloodsucker.

His wife Elena was a fitting Bride of Dracula. In a bid to increase the population of workers and peasants, in a state with chronic housing shortages made worse by their mad master’s penchant for arbitrarily ripping down parts of the capital to create pleasure palaces, Elena posed as ‘mother of the nation’ and banned birth control. Romanians, many of whom lived in tiny one-bedroom flats or bedsits, were encouraged to have four children per couple. Their eldest son, Nicu, was a provincial Communist Party leader being groomed for the succession. But Elena used the dreaded Securitate – Romania’s Stasi – to spy on her other two children. Their daughter Zoia’s bedroom was bugged and fitted with hidden cameras so her mother could check up on her sexual activity. She and her husband disapproved of the marriage of their son Valentin, a nuclear
physicist
, to the daughter of a political rival and expelled her and their own grandchild to Canada.

Considering how they treated their own flesh and blood their attitude towards the rest of the population – patronisingly called ‘our children’ – was unsurprising. A strike in the city of Brasov in 1987 was brutally suppressed by the army, allegedly with several hundred dead. The ringleaders were treated to five-minute chest X-rays that gave them cancer. The national currency, the
lei
, was all but valueless; the consumer economy – such as it was – functioned as a black market in which goods were paid for in cigarettes, the ‘gold standard’ being curiously the American brand, Kent, which were worth twice as much as any other. In May 1988, the ‘leader’s’ determination to ratchet up agricultural production to industrial levels led him to announce that up to 8,000 traditional villages would be wiped off the map, an announcement that even drew protest from HRH, the Prince of Wales. That was not quite so laughable an intervention as it might sound; Ceausescu frequently boasted of his experiences in 1978 when thanks to an invitation from the Labour government of Jim Callaghan, this odious dictator was the guest of the Queen at Buckingham Palace.