1989 (27 page)

They looked at us as if we were mad, which was a bit rich coming from this shower, and shrugged. It was of course, fairly mad. It wasn’t as if Bucharest was just down the road. It was almost 150 miles away, in a country with nothing that resembled motorways. Nonetheless, for an extortionate – in Romanian terms – couple of hundred US dollars we found a local driver willing to take us, and did our best to grab a few hours sleep – it was gone two a.m. – as we rattled across the Danube floodplain. We crawled into Bucharest in the last hour before dawn, as if entering the lowest level of Dante’s inferno: a spectral city with belching, steaming industrial plants on its outskirts, shrunken, huddled figures trudging through the slush along the unlit roadside to begin their ten-hour shifts labouring for the Victory of Socialism. Even now, with military vehicles on every street corner and tanks at every intersection, people still had to earn a crust. And in Romania, a crust meant a crust.

I spent five days there, putting together an ‘aftermath’ and ‘what next’ piece, soaking up colour in a monochrome city where it seemed life itself, like the politics and the people, only came in
shades of grey. Or occasionally black. Had this city once really been described as the ‘Paris of the East?’ I watched tramps sleeping rough in Ceausescu’s still unfinished great folly, the House of the People, now given over to the people, who were lighting camp fires on its marble floors. I gingerly climbed four floors up a stairwell
pockmarked
with bullet holes to reach the television studios where the rebels had announced to the nation that the ‘great leader’ had fled, and from where they had broadcast the footage of his execution. And then I went home.

Over the next few months, markedly less hectic than those that had gone before, I returned repeatedly to East Germany, watching in wonder as the Wall vanished almost as rapidly as it was erected. Bulldozers dealt with most of it, though whole slabs – particularly those with the ‘prettiest’ graffiti on the Western side went for high prices at auction. Elsewhere people simply chipped away at it. East Germany’s frontiers remained, but in little more than theory as all but the most rudimentary controls were removed. Driving south to Bavaria, through what had once been a rigorously controlled
frontier
with a single crossing point, watchtowers, automatic machine guns and series after series of high barbed wire fences, I decided – just to see what would happen – to try to take a back road, the sort that would have been regularly used by farm tractors or
villagers
going to market in the days before the country was divided. I fully expected to come across a ‘road closed’ sign at least, or maybe even still the barbed wire and tank traps. Instead I found the road open and in use, the frontier marked only by the presence of a little caravan, the sort English pensioners might drag behind their Austin Princesses for a weekend at the seaside, inhabited by a cheery-faced East German border guard who stamped my passport (not
necessary
for Germans) and leaned out smiling to be photographed, the now redundant watchtower looming in the background like an abandoned beach umbrella.

As the two Germanys moved inexorably towards union, my old friends Alex and Bärbel moved inexorably apart. The new situation brought new challenges as well as new opportunities, but above all it turned their old world upside down. Alex embraced capitalism
wholeheartedly and wanted to set up a new bar, maybe more than one. Bärbel was just happy that her children were happy and that she was reunited with them and wanted nothing more than to keep Metzer Eck up and running, to see it flourish in a world where it would begin to face previously unimagined competition. Those were her prime goals, plus a holiday in Florida.

The mechanics of the process of German unification are too detailed, lengthy and cumbersome to be dealt with here. East
Germany’s
first free elections, held in March 1990, produced a pro-unification coalition government headed by Christian Democrats led by Lothar de Maizière, a soft-spoken reluctant politician of distant French Huguenot origins (the French protestants had fled
persecution
in Catholic France for tolerant Prussia in the seventeenth century), whose prime job would be to see his country into oblivion.

The first big step was a monetary union between one of the strongest currencies in the world, the West German D-Mark, and one which had almost no value at all, the East German Mark.
Eventually
after a lot of hand-wringing and calculator button-pressing, a solution was reached that was a fusion of economic and political reality: East Germans up to the age of twenty-five would be able to exchange up to 2,000 Marks at 1:1. The figure for those between twenty-six and sixty would be 4,000 Marks, and 6,000 for those over sixty. Cash or assets above that level would be translated at 2:1. It was both generous and risky. Few East Germans had large savings from their paltry wages and the state had nationalised most
businesses
and a substantial amount of property. Bärbel for example ran Metzer Eck as a private business, inherited from her father, but the property itself was owned by the state, as was the flat upstairs in which she lived.

Rents were another matter that reunification had to deal with, as were repossessions. There were many people living in West Berlin and West Germany with claims on property nationalised by the
communists
in the East. Their claims would have to be examined, and where valid, the property either returned or compensation issued. But it was hardly practicable for private landlords to move in and overnight start charging ordinary East Berliners what they might consider to be a ‘market rate’. As a result rents were fixed, with a long-term sliding
scale for them to move to market levels. The same applied to prices of necessities. But salaries and benefits in the East were also put on a rising scale, a decision that inevitably sparked many people,
particularly
the young, to give up their guaranteed cheap rent for the chance to move west and make ‘real money’, even if they faced much higher living costs. It was a risk that not everyone was prepared to take but it would lead to substantial depopulation in some areas nonetheless. As did the inevitable collapse of some of East Germany’s rust belt industries, particularly in the mining, chemical and heavy industrial sectors. A government agency, the
Treuhandanstalt
(roughly:
transition
trust), was set up to find buyers or backers for viable industries, but its work over the succeeding years was marred with allegations of corruption and dodgy deals. In the midst of all this was born the
Ossie
and
Wessie
syndrome of mutual suspicion that Lothar de
Maizière
famously said would not vanish, ‘until the last person to be born under communism has died’.

But as June 1990 came to an end and the death of the East German Mark approached, there was only a mood of celebration in Metzer Eck. On the morning of July 1st people queued outside banks and specially opened exchange offices to hand in their old notes for new. Alex had by then moved out and opened his new bar with some ‘business colleagues’ (who would later turn out to be dodgy
characters
looking for ways to launder Stasi slush funds), but he still came back for the party. The date for the final act of union itself was no longer far away. At Potsdamer Platz, prior to 1939 the bustling heart of Berlin but since 1961 a wasteland between the walls under which lay the buried ruins of Hitler’s Führerbunker, I bought from a kiosk set up by the West Berlin municipal government one of the
multilingual
hardboard signs that had been part of the Cold War landscape: ‘
Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt den Amerkanischen Sektor
. Attention, you are now leaving the American sector.’ It cost me DM5 (£2). I wish I had bought a dozen.

By the beginning of October, the last bits of the legalistic jigsaw puzzle finally fell into place. In effect the German Democratic Republic was ceasing to exist, and its component states –
Brandenburg
, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
– were joining the Federal Republic of Germany, as
was Berlin, reunified and a city-state in its own right. The word officially used was not ‘reunification’ but ‘unification’, to avoid any worries in Warsaw that there might be some hidden agenda that would eventually include restoring to Germany the lands ceded to Poland in 1945. To emphasise the point, a law had been passed in the parliament in Bonn – which only now were politicians beginning to realise would inevitably have to move ‘back’ to Berlin – formally acknowledging the ‘new’ eastern border of the Federal Republic as definitive and permanent.

On October 2nd, the eve of formal unification, I met up with Alex on Unter den Linden and did a pub crawl that brought us at midnight to the Brandenburg Gate. On the steps of the Reichstag, a museum building since 1945 but which it was now clear would one day once again be the country’s parliament, stood every dignitary in Germany. Chief among them were Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose remit would now run over a country fifty per cent larger, and East Germany’s last leader Lothar de Maizière. They presided over the midnight raising of the ‘black-red-gold’ flag – without hammers or compasses – that had formerly represented West Germany and now represented all of it. Unsurprisingly Kohl, who would go down in history as the ‘unity chancellor’ despite a less than dignified
departure
from office several years later, described it as ‘the happiest day of my life’. The relatively nondescript De Maizière made the more memorable speech. He said: ‘We are one people, we are become one state. It is an hour of great joy. It is the end of some illusions. It is a farewell without tears.’

In reality there were tears aplenty as the fireworks erupted in the night sky. Tears of happiness mostly, but not only: nobody believed unification would be a panacea for all ills, especially the now soaring unemployment rate in the East. Alex and I however embraced and drank a toast to the future, whatever it might bring. And then we continued the pub crawl. Our first stop was the Adler on
Friedrichstrasse
, the bar just on the Western side of Checkpoint Charlie where I had watched the crowd pour through on the night the Wall came down. To my surprise – and great delight – one of the men at the bar, still in uniform, was Yogi Bear, the East German border guard who had been a familiar face at the frontier for so many years. I bought
him a beer, and we toasted one another. He told me his name was Uwe. Obviously he already knew mine: he had stamped my passport often enough. Putting a name for the first time to a face I had known for years was an odd and strangely poignant experience. I asked him what he was planning to do now. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, gesturing towards the empty control posts and the red-and-white striped vehicle barrier, now raised permanently, pointing upwards into the sky like an old-fashioned barber’s pole: ‘I guess I’m unemployed.’

A month later, on the first anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, I came back to Checkpoint Charlie with a couple of other journalists writing ‘one year on’ pieces. We had driven from Hamburg taking in the creeping signs of Westernisation spreading across the former ‘East’. On the outskirts of Berlin we had detoured around the
perimeter
of the old West Berlin boundary, tracing the route of the ‘rural Wall’. I had climbed up an abandoned concrete watchtower and tried to imagine myself a guard looking out so see if I could spot one of my fellow countrymen trying to cross from one bit of countryside to another, knowing it was my duty to shoot to kill if I did. Now at Checkpoint Charlie, empty and abandoned and awaiting
demolition
, we wandered among the old customs sheds, passport control cabins and the ‘holding rooms’ where anyone detained for incorrect documentation might be sequestered. And we committed wanton vandalism: kicking in a few doors, smashing the occasional window. It was stupid, childish, futile and meaningless. But it didn’t half feel good.

And with that, history came to an end.

I wish.

American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated 1992 book,
The End of History and the Last Man
, arguing that the collapse of communism spelled the global triumph of Western liberal democracy could not have been more wrong. In early 1990, I described the tumultuous events of the previous year as a wave of revolutions that had finally ended a seventy-five-year European civil war. Round One, 1914–1918, had been a furious slugfest, with the heavyweight empires of the old world battling it out, ending with them all battered but one lot more bloodied than the rest. Round Two had been twenty years of dancing around one another, landing glancing blows here and there – Italy’s grab for Ethiopia, Spain’s internecine conflict, the rise of the dictators, Stalin’s famine in Ukraine, and Hitler’s clawing back of the Saarland, the aftermath of the punitive, self-defeating 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty. Round Three, 1939–45, was another no-holds-barred bloodbath, an orgy of unprecedented atrocity that blended almost seamlessly into: Round Four, the ‘Cold War’s’ long slow potentially deadly dance of attrition, that had ended only when one side collapsed of exhaustion.

By the end of course, it was no longer a European war – the hands on the levers of power were in Washington and Moscow (and Russia has forever been a continent unto itself). When the counterweights that held the fragile balance slipped, rather than the world
exploding
, old Europe imploded, fell back into itself and reconstituted its constituent parts. Countries that, in a world divided into West and East, had been written off the mental as well as geographical map, rediscovered themselves and their place in history.

At the same time, one of the major players wrote itself out of history. Gorbachev’s humane, logical and fundamentally decent
liberalisation policies, famously summed up by his spokesman Gennady Gerasimov as the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’, were inevitably a step too far for some of the more recidivist hardliners in the Kremlin. With Moscow’s Eastern European empire largely liberated, the
pressure
within the Soviet Union itself, and its fifteen nominally confederated constituent republics, began to build towards boiling point. In August 1991, while Gorbachev was on holiday at a government
dacha
outside Yalta in the Crimea, a ‘gang of eight’ back in Moscow used the opportunity to seize power. Gorbachev was placed under house arrest and a national state of emergency declared. Their plot ran aground on one man, a contrary, ambitious, hard-drinking rock of a man called Boris Yeltsin, who had himself been angling for power by becoming president of the Russian Federation, nominally just one of the fifteen republics under control of the Soviet president, but the one that constituted by far the greatest bulk of the country.

Yeltsin declared the ‘state of emergency’ to be an illegal coup and with his supporters barricaded himself inside the Russian
Federation
parliament building on the banks of the Moscow River. A huge building architecturally similar to the Shell Centre on the banks of the Thames in London, it was known to most Muscovites by its nickname, ‘The White House’. The putschists sent the tanks in but the level of popular anger and the small army of volunteers, many of them armed, whom Yeltsin had gathered around him, determined to turn the White House into a fortress, convinced them that they could be facing a pitched battle with potentially major loss of life. They backed down, and Gorbachev came back. But it was the last straw for the Soviet Union as he resigned his role as general
secretary
of the Communist Party, and one by one the constituent
republics
, having seen that Moscow would not or could not restrain them, declared some degree of independence.

At the time of the coup, I was stuck in London with no
possibility
of getting into Moscow after all entry to and exit from the Soviet Union had been suspended under the state of emergency. With the quality of the copy we were getting out of Moscow less than up to the drama of the situation and the standards readers expected from the country’s leading Sunday paper, I was called upon to do what Dave Goddard had taught me all those years previously on the night shift at
Reuters World Desk; re-imagine it. Wholly familiar with the
dramatis personae
, as well as the physical stage on which the tragedy was being played out, I sat down late on a Friday night – with a bottle of
champagne
in front of me supplied by the editor – to turn a series of dry, factual news reports into a gripping narrative of the events that led to the collapse of the world’s second superpower. It was published as a pull-out tabloid insert in the main newspaper, entitled ‘Red Sunset’.

The copy we received from Moscow said things like: ‘Top Soviet leaders gathered for emergency talks in the Kremlin last night’. Not wrong, but I could hear old Dave’s Dorset tones in my ear as I
translated
it: ‘Convoys of Zil limousines … (
that’s it boy, they didn’t get there on foot, did they? You know what they drive, and never in ones or twos either
!) … sped over the glistening cobbles of Red Square … (
that’s it, it was raining out there last night, weren’t it, and that’s not tarmac, is it? What do cobbles do in the rain? Load of old cobblers, mate, smashing stuff
) … and armed guards stood stiffly to attention … (
not got
pea-shooters
in their pockets and they’d hardly be slouching, would they
?) … while they passed through the Great Saviour’s Gate … (
not the sort of lads to use the tradesmen’s entrance, are they, and that name’s good too, got resonance, that has – see, you just have to use what you know
) … into the medieval fortress at the heart of the world’s second
superpower
. (
There you go, lad, you’ll be getting the hang of this soon
.)

In fact, the disintegration of the Soviet Union happened more quickly than even we imagined that night. In Moscow statues of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, and other luminaries of the
communist
era were pulled to the ground. Those few republics that did not declare outright independence loosened their bonds to Moscow in a new ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’. On December 25th, Christmas Day – although not in the Russian church, which observes the Orthodox calendar – exactly two years after Ceausescu was shot, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union. Two days later Yeltsin moved into his office as president of Russia. On New Year’s Eve, two years after our party celebrating the collapse of the Wall and the end of the ‘evil empire’s’ dominance in Eastern Europe, we held a smaller, black-tie dinner party at home, the highlight of which was the playing of the Soviet national anthem at midnight and lowering of the red flag. Tongue in cheek symbolism. And a bit of a laugh.

I for one was not celebrating Gorbachev’s removal from power. More than anyone else he had been the sane force that had made 1989 a year of miracles rather than of bloodbaths. He was – and is – both a great and a tragic figure in world history. He tried to reform an empire and ended up overseeing its disintegration. At any stage he could have stepped in and halted that disintegration, though he would probably only have postponed it, and at incalculable cost in human life. The most remarkable thing I heard him say was several years after his resignation when he was asked who figured largest amongst his role models. His answer was not any icon from the
pantheon
of communist, or even historical Russian leaders. Instead he named a much more unlikely individual: King Juan Carlos of Spain. Asked why, he answered simply: ‘Because he too inherited absolute power and chose to give it away.’

The end of the Soviet Union also opened the final chapter in the history of East Germany’s long-time dictator. The ailing Erich Honecker and his wife Margot had taken refuge in a Soviet military hospital in East Berlin after the Wall came down. Fearing that he might be put on trial they subsequently fled to Moscow, claiming asylum. But with the Soviet Union no more, Russia’s new master, Boris Yeltsin, sent him back to the now unified Germany. As he feared he was put under arrest and charged with responsibility for the deaths of a token 192 people shot trying to cross the Wall. But by the time his trial finally began in 1993, he was judged too ill and released on compassionate grounds. He moved to Chile where his daughter lived and died there of cancer a year later.

The former Soviet ‘constituent republics’ now suddenly
reappeared
on the stage of a world that had forgotten them. My children’s school in south London set up a twinning programme with a school in Tallinn, capital of Estonia, a country that just ten years before would hardly have been mentioned even in geography lessons. The other Baltic republics, swallowed up by Stalin in his devil’s pact with Hitler – Latvia and Lithuania – reappeared, complete with cultures and languages most Britons, perhaps the most insular of Europeans, barely knew existed. Today all of these countries are members of the European Union, which they see not as a bureaucracy imposing silly rules about the shape of bananas (tales mostly invented, exaggerated
or misrepresented by London’s sensation-seeking xenophobic tabloid press), but as a community of nations that for all its
institutional
flaws, is a guarantor of their freedom and independence. Nobody thinks the EU is perfect but there are many new members who have less than warm memories of the potential alternatives.

The events of 1989 changed not just the future but also perceptions of the past. In London the aged remnants of the Polish ‘
government
-in-exile’ which had fled to its ally in 1939, had for decades been snubbed and ignored by a ‘pragmatic’ Foreign Office that had reached a
Realpolitik
accommodation with the communist regime in Warsaw. Now all of a sudden here was Lech Walesa, the shipyard electrician become president of his country on a state visit at the invitation of the Queen, going down on his knees before these old men to accept from them the seal of legitimate government they had preserved since the Nazi invasion, and condemning the years between 1945 and 1989 as ‘foreign occupation’.

Berlin today is a city reborn. The scar that for twenty-eight years ran through its heart has been removed with such a fervid haste that there is almost no trace of it left for history. It is not hard to understand: Berliners sometimes feel their city has over the past century had more than enough history, from Nazi capital of most of Europe to bombed and burnt-out rubble, then schizophrenic divided anomaly. They are more than happy for it to be ‘normal’ for a change. Yet history cannot be escaped. In the city centre they have now marked lines on the roads and pavements to indicate where the wall once ran and preserved a tiny section on Bernauer Strasse as a ‘Wall Park’. Perhaps most telling however, is the section on Niederkirchnerstrasse, formerly
Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse
, where beneath the surviving fragments of the Wall lie the excavated traces of an older monstrosity: the basement cells of the long-gone Gestapo headquarters. A permanent exhibition there is justly entitled ‘Topography of Terror’.

Just a few hundred yards north the Reichstag building, burnt out as Hitler’s pretext for abolishing democracy, stands restored by British architect Norman Foster as the new home of one of the most flourishing democracies in Europe. Between the two lies the
monolithic
monument to those who died in the Holocaust.

If the rip through the heart of Berlin has been healed, the
stitching in many places is all too evident: the rash of vast
modernist
skyscrapers around long abandoned Potsdamer Platz: now home to such temples of capitalism as the Sony Centre and Grand Hyatt hotels. Oranienburger Strasse where the Lutheran church ran its information office for the Swords to Ploughshares movement now also boasts one of the most splendid and ornate synagogues in Europe, while there is another in Prenzlauer Berg. Trabants, if they are to be found, are now lovingly preserved collectors’ items, or, more often, turned into novelty seats in trendy nightclubs. The speedy abandonment of everything ‘DDR’ was regretted in the
midnineties
and replaced by a wave of ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia for the East). But that too has now receded as history melds memory and reality, and a new generation emerges.

For too many people in Britain particularly, an offshore island on the literal and psychological fringes of Europe, still belatedly, and not always coherently coming to terms over the lifetime of a
generation
with the fact that it is no longer a global power, the miracles of 1989 became all too quickly just last year’s entertainment on
television
. A country that prides itself on not having been successfully invaded by a foreign power since 1066 too readily forgets on how many occasions that has been a close-run thing, prevented only by the existence of a twenty-one-mile strip of water. As a result we have far too little empathy for countries that have for decades lived under alien occupation. We glibly pretend that an upsurge in Polish plumbers is much the same thing. Believe me, it isn’t.

In reunited Germany the sour taste of the years of partition not only failed to disappear overnight but continued to come back over the years like reflux after an indigestible meal. As hundreds and thousands of people did what I did and asked to see their Stasi files, one after another prominent figure from the worlds of politics, sport and culture had their reputation tainted as having been an IM, an ‘informal collaborator’. If the Stasi, with its tens of thousands of operatives, and tens of thousands more ‘fellow travellers’ had a long arm in its prime, it also cast a long shadow in its passing.

I have never sought out Lieutenant Weichelt or Colonel Lehmann or any other of the Stasi officers’ names in my file. There was no point. What would we say? In 1997, however, I did go back to Berlin to meet
a much bigger fish from the Stasi rock pool. Markus Wolf was born in south-west Germany in 1923 into a communist-voting family of Jewish origin which unsurprisingly decided in 1933 when Hitler came to power that they would be better off in Russia. He grew up bilingual and returned to Germany only in 1945 with a group of other exiled German communists to take command of the Soviet sector. He became a founding member of the Stasi’s foreign intelligence service which he headed until his retirement in 1986. When the Wall fell he tried to claim political asylum in the Soviet Union, only to be turned down. By 1997 he had been convicted of treason by a
Düsseldorf
court. He appealed on the grounds that he had loyally served the German Democratic Republic, the country of which he was then a citizen, and therefore could not have committed treason against the Federal Republic, as he was, by default, not its citizen. He won.