Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989. Kristina Spohr
he emphasised the need above all for ‘stability’. Kohl firmly agreed and, according to Teltschik, ended the conversation looking visibly relieved. ‘De Bärn is g’schält’ (‘The pear has been peeled’) he told his aide in a thick Palatinate accent with a broad smile: it was clear that Gorbachev would not meddle in internal East German affairs, as the Kremlin had done in June 1953.[15]
Kohl could now feel reassured about his allies and the Russians, yet these were not his only worries. As he got off the phone he must have reflected on his own Deutschlandpolitik – its future direction and the responsibilities that now weighed heavily on him. All the more so, given what he had learned in Cabinet that morning about just how unstable the situation really was.
So far that year, according to the Interior Ministry, 243,000 East Germans had arrived in West Germany, as well as 300,000 ethnic Germans (Aussiedler) who could claim FRG citizenship: in other words, well over half a million immigrants in ten months. And this was before the fall of the Wall. The economic costs were also escalating. According to the Finance Ministry, DM 500 million had to be added to the budget in 1990 just to provide emergency shelters for the recent influx of GDR refugees. And an additional DM 10 billion a year for the next ten years might be required to build permanent housing and provide social benefits and unemployment payments. Moreover, the FRG was already subsidising the GDR economy to the tune of several billion a year. And far more would clearly be needed if the GDR were to be propped up sufficiently to stem the haemorrhage of people. But for how long could it be sustained? And what would happen if Germany unified? Revolution was certainly turning the East upside down, but life for West Germans was evidently changing as well – and not all those changes were welcome.[16]
Even if, in the short term, such spending on the GDR and on the migrants was economically feasible, any talk of raising taxes to cover the costs was politically impossible for Kohl and his coalition partners in an election year. The recent rise in the FRG of the Republikaner (the radical right’s new party) reflected growing resentment at the immigrant crisis and dismay at the financial burden to be carried by West German citizens.[17]
Although Kohl had talked about ‘stability’ to Gorbachev and to his Western allies, as he flew back to Warsaw on the afternoon of 11 November to pick up the threads of his Polish visit, he must have seen how difficult it would be to keep the GDR functioning. But, of course, he had no real desire to do so in the longer run. The ‘stability’ he was now beginning to contemplate was how to facilitate a peaceful and consensual transition to a unified German state – a project that had been inconceivable just two days before.[18]
*
How had this Rubicon been reached, only five weeks after the grand celebrations to mark the fortieth anniversary of the East German state?
In reality the big party on 7 October was a facade, to paper over the huge and growing cracks in the communist state. As soon as Gorbachev left East Berlin for Moscow, demonstrations erupted across the city and elsewhere in the GDR and the authorities now cracked down hard. The 7th was the day of what had become a monthly protest against the May election fraud. Nevertheless, while those who had fled the country amounted to tens of thousands, the number of dissidents and those openly antagonistic to the regime was still relatively small, especially outside the big cities of Dresden, Leipzig and East Berlin. Protests and demonstrations were quite contained, involving no more than several hundred people. Formal opposition groups had only just been created since the opening of the Austro-Hungarian border: by the beginning of October some 10,000 people belonged to Neues Forum as well as Demokratie Jetzt, Demokratischer Aufbruch, SDP (SozialDemokratische Partei in der DDR) and Vereinigte Linke. These smaller groupings were mostly associated with Neues Forum. Millions of GDR citizens remained passive and hundreds of thousands were still willing to defend the state.[19]
The atmosphere in those days was tense and uncertain – the rumour mill was in overdrive about what might happen next. At the top, Erich Honecker envisaged a ‘Chinese solution’ to counter the mounting protests over the anniversary weekend (6–9 October),[20] prefigured in East Berlin when Stasi boss Erich Mielke jumped out of his bulletproof limo on the evening of 7 October screaming to police ‘Haut sie doch zusammen, die Schweine!’ (‘Club those pigs into submission!’).[21] That night in and around Prenzlauer Berg near the Gethsemane church, police officers, plain-clothes security forces and volunteer militia attacked some 6,000 demonstrators who shouted ‘Freedom’, ‘No violence’ and ‘We want to stay’, as well as bystanders, with dogs and water cannons – beating and kicking peaceful citizens and throwing hundreds into jail. Women and girls were stripped naked; people were not allowed to use the toilets and told to piss or shit in their pants. Those who asked where they would be taken were told: ‘Auf eine Müllkippe’ (‘To the landfill’).[22]
Unlike similar scenes in other East German cities, where foreign journalists were banned, the images from East Berlin that weekend soon went around the world. And when those arrested were released and talked to the press, what they told the cameras about merciless brutality by the riot police and abuse at the hands of the Stasi interrogators was both really shocking and also entirely believable. Because many of them were simply ordinary citizens, some even SED members, not militant protestors or hardcore dissidents.[23]
Matters came to a head on Monday 9 October in Leipzig, which had been the epicentre of people-protest for the past few weeks. In fact the Monday night demo there had become a weekly feature since the first gathering by a few hundred in early September, spilling out spontaneously – as numbers grew exponentially – from the evening prayers for peace (Friedensgebet) in the Nikolaikirche in the city centre to a big rally along the inner ring road. On the night of 25 September, the fourth such occasion, 5,000 people had come together; a week later there were already 15,000, calling for ‘Demokratie – jetzt oder nie’ (‘Democracy – now or never’), and ‘Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit’ (‘Freedom, equality, fraternity’). On the march, they chanted defiantly ‘Wir bleiben hier’ (‘We stay here’), as opposed to the earlier ‘Wir wollen raus’ (‘We want out’), while demanding ‘Erich laß die Faxen sein, laß die Perestroika rein’ (‘Erich [Honecker] stop fooling around, let the perestroika in’). Each week, Leipzigers became more daring in their activities and more vehement in their demands.[24]
The 9th of October was expected to be the largest ever protest – facing off against the regime’s full display of force. With this in mind, the Leipzig opposition groups and churches had disseminated appeals for prudence and non-violence. The world-renowned conductor Kurt Masur of the Gewandhaus orchestra, together with two other local celebrities, enlisted the support of three leading SED functionaries of the city government, and issued a public call for peaceful action: ‘We all need free dialogue and exchanges of views about further development of socialism in our country.’ What’s more, they argued, dialogue should not only be conducted in Leipzig but also with the government in East Berlin. This so-called ‘Appeal of the Six’ was read aloud, as well as being broadcast via loudspeakers across the city during the evening church vigils.[25]
Honecker, for his part, was determined to make an example of Leipzig. The state media replayed footage of Tiananmen and endlessly repeated the government’s solidarity with their comrades in Beijing.[26] When Honecker met Yao Yilin, China’s deputy premier, on the morning of the 9th, the two men announced that there was ‘evidence of a particularly anti-socialist action by imperialist class opponents with the aim of reversing socialist development. In this respect there is a fundamental lesson to be learned from the counter-revolutionary unrest in Beijing and