The Berlin Wall (70 page)

The first free vote in East Germany for almost sixty years was held on 18 March 1990. The SED received 16 per cent. This respectable outcome probably reflected its true support—time-serving
apparatchiks
combined with inveterate idealists—even throughout the long years of dictatorship. The CDU, whose Western leader Helmut Kohl had become a hero to the
East German masses for his promotion of reunification and promises of rapid prosperity, got 40 per cent. The SPD paid for its ambivalence on both these issues with a disappointing haul of around 22 per cent. Support for the ‘third way’ dissidents of ‘New Forum’, ‘Democratic Awakening’ and so on, who just months previously had seemed so influential, had dwindled quickly. Their votes amounted to no more than 6-7 per cent of the total. In April, a CDU-dominated government, led by Eastern CDU chairman Lothar de Mazière, took power. Reunification was inevitable. Only the terms remained a matter of speculation.

The wider world watched in surprise and some apprehension. 1989 brought the ‘German problem’ full circle. Just as in the summer of 1961, the building of the Wall had been greeted with covert relief by other Western powers, especially France and Britain, so its sudden demise in the autumn of 1989 brought into view all the hidden anxieties and rivalries that seethed behind the polite façade of Western Cold-War unity. For decades, the NATO powers had regularly protested at the undoubted brutality and ugliness of the German/German border. Now the full extent of the hypocrisy involved was mercilessly revealed.

After the Second World War, the Germans had been permitted, even encouraged, to revive their economy and military power, but their ‘punishment’ was, in fact, programmed to continue. As the most populous and efficient country in Europe, blamed for two bloody wars (three if you were French and remembered 1870/1), to many of its former enemies Germany looked altogether better divided than united. The deep-freeze of the Cold War had kept it in that condition quite effectively. Douglas Hurd, Mrs Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary, remarked in December 1989 that the Cold War was ‘a system…under which we’ve lived quite happily for forty years’.
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Hurd’s boss, Mrs Thatcher, showed her feelings surprisingly openly. While anything that showed the weakness of Communism was manna from heaven to her, and the great night of the Wall’s end contained undoubted delights, in the longer run she faced a dilemma. Thatcher had been and remained sceptical of the European project, and was frankly disturbed by the sudden collapse of the two-state Germany and its potential consequences, domestic and international. As someone who had been a teenage girl during the Second World War, she could not help but
have (as her aide Sir Charles Powell recalled) ‘memories that are very difficult to erase about what happens when Germany becomes too big and too powerful’. Furthermore there were concerns about how a sudden and dramatic, possibly even violent, collapse of Soviet control in East Germany might undermine Gorbachev rather as the Cuban failure in 1962 had fatally wounded Khrushchev, thus halting the progress towards a ‘moderate, reforming Soviet Union’.

The situation for France was even more complex. President Mitterand was on intimate terms with Chancellor Kohl, and unlike Mrs Thatcher he felt no qualms about accelerating European integration. But instinctual French distrust of a powerful Germany, based on grim experience, came flooding back as the pictures from Berlin filled the television screen at the Elysée Palace in Paris, just as it did in tens of millions of other homes, humble and grand, throughout the world.

Thatcher recalled in her inimitable style a hasty meeting with Mitterand:

I produced from my handbag a map showing the various configurations of Germany in the past, which were not entirely reassuring about the future…[Mitterand] said that at moments of great danger in the past France had always established special relations with Britain and he felt such a time had come again…

The Americans, especially President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James H. Baker, provided the heavyweight international support for German reunification. Washington saw great advantage in a strong, democratic and capitalist Germany, and virtually no down side.

It was Helmut Kohl, of course, who pushed it through with verve, determination and an invincible—some would say finally disastrous—capacity to suppress economic and social misgivings in the cause of the final political goal.

In the end, Mitterand decided against entering into a classic wartime-style alliance with Mrs Thatcher’s dangerously Eurosceptic Britain. After thinking things over, the old fox in the Elysée seized the only other option, which also provided the chance of a permanent solution to the problem of overwheening German power. Mitterand’s strategy involved
drawing the newly enlarged Germany (and its physically no less considerable chancellor) into such a binding, permanent hug that the country’s ability to divert that power into destructive channels would be severely limited. Mitterand promised Kohl his support for a reunited Germany, but at a high price. The price was closer European integration. In particular, it would mean the sacrifice of the mighty D-Mark and the introduction of a single European currency.

East Germany, with its inexperienced cabinet and parliament, plus a continuing and expanding financial deficit, was already beginning to fold over into its big brother, the Federal Republic. In Berlin, some controls remained in place until the spring, but public movement was largely unimpeded.

Already, official and unofficial demolition teams were at work on the Wall. The border-marker wall on the Western side, covered over the years in colourful graffiti, had become a tourist attraction and—for those who could lay their hands on hammers and chisels—an instant takeaway memento. In the central city areas, substantial stretches began to disappear. The financially embarrassed East German government was already debating what to do with the de-fortified but still largely intact structure. It decided, since the Wall seemed to be such an interesting commodity, to sell it as one might any other artefact: at auction.

The sale of the century—or least thirty years of it—took place at the Hotel Parc Pallas in Monte Carlo, Monaco, on 23 June 1990. The official who organised the transport of the Wall sections to the sale was, curiously, the same man who had first drawn up a map of what became the Wall and who, on Tuesday 15 August 1961, had painted the famous white line to show the border at Checkpoint Charlie: Hagen Koch.

There was an odd but compelling logic to it all. A private at the time of his first brush with fame, Koch had progressed to captain in the Dzerzhinsky Regiment before leaving the service of the
Stasi
in 1985, just before his forty-fifth birthday.
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Never seen as a warrior type, and considered
schwatzhaft
(a loose talker), which was a distinct disadvantage for a
Stasi
man, his progress through the ranks had been slow. For fifteen years, he had pursued, if we are to believe his memoirs, a harmless existence as a ‘cultural officer’, bringing music and the arts to the troops—naturally, within the right ideological context. Not the area to be in if
you wanted a high-flying career, and organising a ‘talent show’ without sufficient ideological content (but plenty of dirty jokes) did not help either. The job Koch got after his release was with the Department of Cultural Monuments, organising the transporting and setting-up of art and museum exhibitions. It was thus that, in the spring of 1990, he was instructed to organise the shipping of the Wall segments down to the Côte d’Azur.

Eighty-one sections, all certified as genuine, were put on the block, and all of them were sold, realising an average of DM 20,000 (£6,500) each, to international clients who wanted substantial chunks of the Wall in their businesses or homes. It was a quiet triumph for Koch. However, a West German television team was covering the auction, and they had done their homework. Koch kept out of the way while his department head gave the main interview, but when the report was aired, the camera zeroed in and froze on the hapless ex-
Stasi
captain. A stern voice-over identified him as a ‘
Stasi
operative’ who had ‘found a hiding place’ at the innocent-sounding Department of Cultural Monuments. After all, was this not the fanatical creature who had drawn the notorious white line at Checkpoint Charlie so many years ago?

This marked the beginning of a fifteen-year battle for Koch, who found himself turned into a symbol of the Wall and its evils, a media scapegoat. He was soon fired from Cultural Monuments, and then hounded from a similar job working for a West German art-transportation firm. But Koch, overcoming considerable adversity, has since transformed himself into a respected Wall expert, writing and lecturing to anyone who will listen to or read what he has to say. That is how he now lives and finds his self-justification.

After 1989, the expiation of the Communist past and its simultaneous erasure became a curious twin-track process. At first, amnesia seemed the easy way out.

On 1 July 1990, the West mark became the official currency of both East and West Germany, as the two states remained for another few months yet. For the first 2,000-6,000 East marks, depending on various factors such as the age of the individual in possession of the money, the exchange rate was fixed at one West mark to one East. For all other sums held, it was 1:2. This was an astoundingly generous ‘gift’ to the East,
since the open-market rate at that point from East into West marks stood at between 10:1 and 20:1.

The first of July was also the day that border controls between the two Germany were abolished. On 23 June, the final structures at Checkpoint Charlie were removed in the presence of the Foreign Ministers of France, Britain, the USA, the USSR and of the two German states. The presence of the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, was a tacit admission by Moscow that unification was inevitable. Shevardnadze took the opportunity to make a surprising offer: that all foreign troops be withdrawn from German soil within six months of reunification. The timetable turned out longer-the last would leave in 1994-but the principle proved true.

On 3 October 1990, German was formally reunited. All-German elections were set for 2 December.

Buoyed by a continuing wave of support from the East, Chancellor Kohl’s Christian Democrats triumphed with 43.8 per cent, the SPD got 33.5 per cent, the FDP (‘Liberal Party’) 11 per cent. As in other post-Communist countries, the former ruling party had transformed itself into a democratic legacy outfit. The SED had changed its name to the ‘Party of Democratic Socialism’ (PDS) and proclaimed that it represented a reformed and reforming version of its former self. The PDS got only 2.6 per cent of the vote throughout Germany. Because of the so-called ‘5 per cent hurdle’, this would normally have meant it was allocated no seats in the parliament. However, during the reunification negotiations it had been agreed that the East would not be subject to this rule. As a result, for the 1.1 million votes the PDS won in the East (10 per cent or so of the total), it was awarded seventeen seats in the first reunited Bundestag.

This was the Communists’ low point and the high-water mark of the East German masses’ enthusiasm for capitalism and its political representatives. For a while, due to the favourable transfer of savings and investments into West marks, the recently liberated population had hard currency burning a hole in its collective pocket. Trabis and Wartburgs were dumped in favour of Volkswagens and Toyotas. The ‘new provinces’ became a favoured dumping ground for old Western cars, many of which would have had trouble finding a buyer in the Federal Republic. Families from Saxony, Thuringia and East Berlin-so long trapped in Ulbricht’s
and Honecker’s walled-in republic of virtue-launched themselves on to the European motorway network or jetted on bargain holidays to Majorca and Mykonos.

The backlash set in within a couple of years. The industries in which most of the citizens of the former GDR had worked and which, however their work-forces grumbled and chafed, had formed the social framework and economic basis of tightly knit community-based lives, were taken over and disposed of by an overwhelmingly West German public body known as the
Treuhandanstalt
(Trust Agency). Money from the West flooded into the so-called ‘new provinces’ of the former GDR, but much was spent by and on consultants and ‘experts’ who were seen, not unfairly, by the bewildered and increasingly angry East Germans as greedy carpet-baggers. The merciless ‘Yuppie’ culture of the 1980s West collided bruisingly with a society in the East that, behind the grisly but prophylactic barrier of the Wall, had kept many of those old-fashioned social values that had once been accepted all over the industrialised world but were now dismissed as wilfully eccentric, even contemptible.

There was an old joke about the social pact that made the Communist system half-way tolerable. It went: ‘We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.’ By the mid-1990s, the joke was no longer funny. The polluting, rusted, often staggeringly inefficient industries of East Germany were deemed unviable and closed down. For wide swathes of the newly reunited population, especially the older people and the burghers of the smaller, more remote East German towns, and of uncompetitive heavy-industry centres such as Bitterfeld, the-admittedly relatively generous-welfare system taken over from West Germany became their only source of income. There was little realistic hope of long-term re-employment for such redundant workers. Perhaps a new motto might now have been more suitable: ‘We pretend to look for work and they pretend to pay us.’

Many of the young and energetic went to the West. Ironically, after the Wall came down, a new wave of emigration soon rivalled in scale and socially undermining effect the exodus of 1949-61. For all its ideological and intellectual narrowness, East Germany had offered an efficient system of education and training to its young people. With severely limited opportunities in the East, there was only one direction for many of them to take their skills.