The Berlin Wall (62 page)

The regime responded by setting up special units of the
Stasi
whose purpose was to discourage citizens from applying to leave. Pressure was put on individuals at their places of work or study. Persistent appliers were pulled in for interrogation and on occasion charged with treasonable acts, which in East Germany were extremely broadly defined. Faced with more subtle forms of protest such as silent vigils, symbolic white ribbons on cars, and so on, the regime responded with subtle strategies of its own. The
Stasi
infiltrated dissident groups with agents whose job was to spread division and act as
provocateurs
, urging protesters into extreme actions that would give the state an excuse to intervene and inflict exemplary punishments.

This penetration exercise was particularly vigorous in the case of the churches in East Germany. Christian organisations had suffered con
siderably under Ulbricht, a lifelong anti-religious militant, but Honecker realised that the predominantly Protestant churches were becoming a refuge for dissidents, from punks to pacifists.

Something had to be done. Unwilling to crush the evangelical movement in the old, ruthless Stalinist style—Helsinki lingered uncomfortably in the background of the decision-making process—in March 1978 Honecker called a meeting with church leaders. He praised the churches’ contribution to peace and their role as a ‘positive social factor’, and offered what amounted to a concordat. The state would tolerate free expression of religion in print and broadcast as well as in churches, and grant state aid to institutions such as senior citizens’ homes and religious cemeteries. Priests would be permitted to make visits to prisoners in state jails. In return, the church leaders would be expected to exercise control over their flocks.

For a while, this seemed to succeed. But many young East Germans—the generation born since 1940, who were far more ‘Ulbricht’s children’ than Hitler’s—were attracted to the Protestant churches. Most had pleaded pacifism when called up for the NVA and been assigned as noncombatant ‘construction soldiers’ (
Bausoldaten
). This classification excused them from armed service but at the same time showed that they were not ‘loyal’, excluding them from careers in medicine, the law, or the universities once they returned to civilian life. To these young people, the church was a free, protected place, where modest careers could be made without kowtowing to the Communist state.

Rainer Eppelmann, a leading dissident, spoke for many who had grown up in the shadow of the Wall when he admitted that he joined the church from practical rather than merely religious considerations:

I asked myself, what can you become, for a contented or even a happy life in this country? The only answer which occurred to me was: pastor…It was clear to me that only the study of theology was able to offer me a little mental freedom.
²

A parallel ‘alternative scene’ arose in East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. Intelligent, critically minded young people could not engage with society through the conventional channels, and so they founded
their own subcultures and settled into niches within these groups. They made the best of things.

Matthias Neutzner, born in Saxony the year before the Wall was built, wanted to study aeronautical engineering, but because his elder brother had escaped to the West he was marked out as politically unreliable. This meant that Matthias was banned from working in the aeronautics industry—this would have given him access to aircraft, and aircraft can be flown over borders. As a consequence, he went into the fledgeling East German computer industry, which was being energetically promoted in the late 1970s and early 1980s as part of attempts to broaden the country’s industrial base. Neutzner learned to program and to handle databases.

By the 1980s, Matthias he and his friends were in-demand experts, called on by hard-pressed state managers to solve logistical and supply problems by the magic of screen and keyboard. Their special niche was the GDR’s cut-flower distribution network, a large part of which relied on their computer programming. This earned them decent money, made them largely independent of the state, and enabled them to take part in dissident activity. A strong pacifist, Neutzner could also find time to pursue his interest in recording the oral history of the Allied bombing of German cities through interviews with survivors. In the system of ‘favours’, of virtual barter, that pertained towards the end of the regime’s life, his contacts often supplied him with, say, the use of a van or truck in exchange for computer work. East Germans made life a little more bearable through this unofficial ‘black’ economy. It enabled the exchange of goods and services away from the state’s rigid, grasping hand. The fact was, even the government did the same. Think of KoKo.

Although Neutzner never applied to leave, there was a growing wave of exit-visa applications in the early 1980s. This motivated the regime’s mass-issue of permits in the first months of 1984, a gesture supposed to please its Western political and banker friends while at the same time taking some of the pressure off the exit-visa movement. It may have succeeded in the former aim, but not the latter. The demand just kept growing. The
Stasi
could keep the dissident movement divided, and it could decapitate its leadership, but the exit-visa movement was something else, something close to a force of nature—a monster that the
Helsinki agreement had summoned from the depths of the East German people’s unconsciousness.

And just a little more than two years after the
Stasi
had spotted him and his wife posing for the cameras in front of Checkpoint Charlie, on 20 January 1981 Ronald Wilson Reagan was sworn in as fortieth president of the United States.

President Reagan’s incoming Republican administration offered little direct threat to the East German regime as such.

What it did represent was a kind of ruthless counter-revolutionary conviction that shocked and shook the Communist world. Backing the right-wing Contras against Marxist Sandanistas in Central America and the mujahidin against the Soviets and their client regime in Afghanistan, the Americans dared to mimic the kind of support for ‘national liberation’ movements that the Soviets had aggressively promoted since the 1950s. Twenty years before, the urbane Harold Macmillan saw himself as moderating America’s alleged tendency towards extremes—Britain’s classically educated Prime Minister liked to see his nation as wise, educated ‘Greeks’ to the primitive, power-orientated ‘Romans’ of the USA. Twenty years later, Reagan was backed to the hilt, and beyond, by his British counterpart, the no less uncompromisingly anti-Communist and pro-capitalist Margaret Thatcher.

If the Helsinki Accord amounted to the ‘soft cop’ working on the Eastern Bloc’s contradictions—talking democracy while walking dictatorship was always a latent problem for Communist regimes—then the Reagan administration was the ‘hard cop’, confronting the Communist world on the most direct of levels.

In the late 1970s, the Russians introduced the SS-20 intermediate nuclear missile, with a range of about 2,700 miles. Though stationed on Soviet soil, it gave them the ability to hit targets as far away as Portugal in the west and Japan in the east. The Americans responded with the Pershing II missile, which had less than half the range but was much more accurate. Towards the end of his time in office, the Democratic President Carter had made preparations to bring Pershing into service, but at the same time, in the hope of keeping détente alive, he signed the complex and problematic SALT II arms-reduction treaty.

Then, on Christmas Day 1979, came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Carter, who had begun his presidency as an apostle of détente, now put the SALT treaty on ice, asked for an expansion in the military budget, and introduced sanctions against the Eastern Bloc, involving curbs on grain and technology exports. America would also boycott the Moscow Olympic Games, due in the summer of 1980.

Reagan therefore became president in January 1981 at a time when the Cold War temperature had already dipped considerably. He continued Carter’s plan to station a new generation of intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe, planned even bigger military-budget increases, and—last but not least-introduced a level of anti-Communist rhetoric not heard since the early 1960s. This gave his decisions (which may not have differed much from the ones that Carter would have made if re-elected) an extra ‘bite’ that was surprisingly significant on a world-historical scale.

Reagan told an audience at Notre Dame University, Indiana, on 17 May 1981, in a speech delivered with a president’s gravity and an actor’s flair: ‘The West won’t contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. It won’t bother to dismiss or denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.’

The echo, conscious or otherwise, was of Khrushchev’s notorious ‘we shall bury you’ speech from 1956. Khruschev’s remarks, though not so aggresively meant as some thought at the time, did indicate a new sense of self-confidence. A quarter of a century later, Reagan’s words were intended to convey the same.

There followed a period of nervous stand-off. The Pershings and ‘cruise’ missiles were introduced into Western Europe, despite protests throughout the continent. Then in 1983 Reagan pulled what many still regard as a stroke of genius. He announced his intention to break the stalemate of ‘mutually assured destruction’ by developing a futuristic anti-missile system capable of preventing Soviet warheads from reaching American soil. This idea seemed to come straight from a Hollywood sci-fi epic (much talk of laser beams) and became known as the ‘Star Wars’ project.

In Moscow, Reagan’s announcement caused something approaching panic and, as the conviction strengthened that perhaps the Americans could carry out their threat, a steady sense of demoralisation. Soviet air
defences were placed on full alert. The atmosphere grew so jittery that when, in September, a South Korean civilian airliner strayed into Soviet airspace over the Far East region, it was shot down-on direct orders from Moscow.
³

Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor as Soviet leader, died a few weeks short of his seventy-sixth birthday in November 1982, after eighteen years in power. He was succeeded by KGB boss Yuri Andropov. Andropov lasted only sixteen months in office before succumbing to a kidney disease, aged sixty-nine, in February 1984, giving way to an older man in the shape of 72-year-old Konstantin Chernenko. Chernenko, a conservative figure already in poor health, lasted a mere thirteen months.

During his first term, Reagan-himself moving into his seventies—faced weak and ailing Soviet leaders. In 1982 his aggressive international stance was boosted by the collapse of the ‘social-liberal’ coalition in West Germany and the replacement of Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt with Helmut Kohl. Throughout the 1980s, three of the four major powers in NATO were ruled by right-wingers. And a conservative theologian from the Eastern Bloc, the Pole Andrei Karol Józef Wojtyla, was elected leader of the Roman Catholic Church as Pope John Paul II.

The strange thing was that during this period, when the hesitant détente of the late 1970s was abandoned and the Soviet Union and the USA reverted to a confrontational stance, relations between the two German states were not seriously affected. Rather the contrary.

True, the stationing of Pershing missiles on West German soil gave occasion for a vicious little propaganda skirmish. None the less, even after the conservative Kohl’s election as chancellor in the West, Honecker enjoyed a standing invitation to visit Bonn. Only a Soviet veto prevented him from doing so in the autumn of 1984. The Moscow leadership summoned Honecker to the Kremlin in August and forced him to cancel his planned trip.
⁴
There was clear concern on the Soviets’ part that East Germany was becoming too dependent on West German credits and payments. And what is more, in their unease the Soviets were absolutely right.

One younger member of the Soviet Politburo who had voted against allowing Honecker to visit West Germany was 54-year-old Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, Second Secretary of the CPSU. In 1985, after Chernenko died, he was elected First Secretary and
de facto
leader of the
USSR by colleagues tired of gerontocracy as a system of government. The first leader of Communist Russia to be born after the 1917 revolution, Gorbachev preached reform expressed through the principles of
glasnost
or ‘openness’,
perestroika
(‘restructuring’) and
uskoreniye
(‘acceleration’).

This amounted to an overdue admission in the heartland of Communism that something was very wrong with the system-and had been for a long time. In East Germany, however, the old men were still firmly in command. Despite the scramble for Western credits and the steady pressure from the exit-visa movement, the pretence remained that the GDR was the best of all Germanys in the best of all possible worlds.

In reality, East Germany was by now frighteningly uncompetitive outside the Soviet Bloc. Thuringia and Saxony especially had always been in the forefront of the industrial and technological revolution, from the early nineteenth century until the time of the Third Reich. Bomb damage, sequestering of plant and machinery by the Soviets for reparations, heavy-handed socialisation of industry, and the subsequent loss of expert management, capital, patents and skilled workers to the West, had weakened the country’s economic fundamentals.

Before the First World War, Saxony, along with neighbouring Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), enjoyed the highest real net output in Europe. Chemnitz, with a population of 400,000, was known as the ‘Manchester of Germany’. Until the collapse of the Third Reich, Dresden, with its camera and typewriter factories and electronics workshops, was the second-fastest-growing city after Berlin. Leipzig, Magdeburg, Halle and Jena were booming manufacturing centres