Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989. Kristina Spohr
to reinstate its authority, the regime showed itself bewildered and helpless in the face of the GDR’s deteriorating economic situation. Discussions in the Politburo revolved around how to get consumers more tyres, more children’s anoraks, more furniture, cheaper Walkmen and how to mass-produce PCs and 1 MB chips – not the structural flaws of the economy.[39]
Only on 31 October were the stark realities finally laid bare in an official report to the Politburo by the chief planner, Gerhard Schürer, on the economic state of the GDR. The country’s productivity was 40% lower than that of the Federal Republic. The system of state planning had proved totally unfit for purpose. And the GDR was close to national insolvency. Indebtedness to the West had risen from 2 billion Valutamarks in 1970 to 49 billion in 1989.[fn1] Merely halting further indebtedness would entail a lowering of the East Germans’ living standards by 25–30% in order to service the existing debt. And any default on debt repayments would risk opening the country to an IMF diktat for a market economy under conditions of acute austerity. For the SED, this was ideologically untenable. In May, Krenz had declared that economic policy and social policy were an entwined unit, and had to be continued as such because this was the essence of socialism in the GDR. So the regime was trapped in a vicious circle: socialism depended on the Plan, and the survival of the planned economy required external credits on a scale that now made East Germany totally dependent on the capitalist West, especially the FRG.[40]
Straight after this fateful Politburo meeting, Krenz flew to Moscow for his first visit to the Kremlin as the GDR’s secretary general. There on 1 November he admitted the economic home truths to Gorbachev himself. The Soviet leader was unsympathetic. He coldly informed Krenz that the USSR had been aware of East Berlin’s predicament all along; that was why he had kept pressing Honecker for reforms. Even so, when Gorbachev heard the precise figures – Krenz said the GDR needed $4.5 billion in credits simply to pay off the interest on its debts – the Soviet leader was, for a moment, speechless – a rare occurrence. The Kremlin was in no position to help, so Gorbachev could only advise Krenz to tell his people the truth. And, for a country that had already haemorrhaged over 200,000 alienated citizens since the start of 1989, this was not a happy prospect.[41]
Afterwards, Krenz tried to put the best face on things in a seventy-minute meeting with the foreign press, presenting himself as an ‘intimate friend’ of Gorbachev and no hardliner. But the media were not convinced. When Krenz talked policy, he sounded just like Honecker, his political mentor, and he flatly rejected any talk of reunification with West Germany or the removal of the Berlin Wall. ‘This question is not on the table,’ Krenz insisted. ‘There is nothing to reunify because socialism and capitalism have never stood together on German soil.’ Krenz also put a positive spin on the mass protests. ‘Many people are out on the streets to show that they want better socialism and the renovation of society,’ he said. ‘This is a good sign, an indication that we are at a turning point.’ He added that the SED would seriously consider the demands of the protestors. The first steps, he said, would be taken at a party meeting the following week.[42]
In truth, the SED had its back to the wall. Desperate, it decided to give ground to the protestors on the question of travel restrictions – to allow an appearance of freedom. So on 1 November the GDR reopened its borders with Czechoslovakia. The result was no surprise, except perhaps to the Politburo itself. Once again the people voted with their feet: some 8,000 left their Heimat on the first day. On 3 November, Miloš Jakeš, leader of the Czech communists in Prague – having secured Krenz’s approval – formally opened Czechoslovakia’s borders to the FRG, thereby granting East Germans a legal transit route to the West. But instead of this halting the frenzied flight, the exodus only continued to grow: 23,000 East Germans arrived in the Federal Republic on the weekend of 4–5 November, and by the 8th the total number of émigrés had reached 50,000.[43]
On his return home Krenz pleaded with East Germans in a televised address. To those who thought of emigrating, he said: ‘Put trust in our policy of renewal. Your place is here. We need you.’[44] That last sentence was true: the mass flight that autumn had already caused a serious labour shortage in the economy, especially in the health sector. Hospitals and clinics had reported losing as many as 30% of their staff as doctors and nurses had succumbed to the lure of freedom, much better pay and a more high-tech work environment in the West.[45]
By this stage, few were listening to the SED leader. On 4 November half a million attended a ‘rally for change’ in East Berlin, organised by the official Union of Actors. For the first time since the fortieth-anniversary weekend, there was no police interference in the capital. Indeed, the rally – which included party officials, actors, opposition leaders, clergy, writers and various prominent figures – was broadcast live on GDR media. Speakers from the government were shouted down, with chants of ‘Krenz Xiaoping, no thanks’. Others, such as the novelist Christa Wolf, drew cheers as she announced her dislike for the party’s language of ‘change of course’. She said she preferred to talk of a ‘revolution from below’ and ‘revolutionary renewal’.
Wolf was one of thousands of opposition activists who desired a better, genuinely democratic and independent GDR. Quite definitely they did not see the Federal Republic as the ideal. They did not want their country to be gobbled up by the dominant, larger western half of Germany – in a cheap sell-out to capitalism. People like Wolf and Bärbel Bohley, the artist founder of Neues Forum, had stuck with the GDR despite all its frustrations; in their minds, running away was the soft option. So they now wanted to reap the fruit of their hard work as dissidents. They were idealists who aspired to a democratic socialism, and saw the autumn of 1989 as their chance to turn dreams into reality.
But Ingrid Stahmer, the deputy mayor of West Berlin, had a different perspective. With GDR citizens now freely flooding out of the country through its Warsaw Pact neighbours, she remarked that the Wall was soon going to become history. ‘It’s just going to be superfluous.’[46]
On Monday 6 November, close to a million people in eight cities across the GDR –some 400,000 in Leipzig and 300,000 in Dresden – marched to demand free elections and free travel. They denounced as totally inadequate the latest loosening of the travel law, published that morning in the state daily Neues Deutschland, because it limited foreign travel to thirty days. And there was a further question: how much currency would East Germans be allowed to change into Western money at home? The Ostmark was not freely convertible, and up to now East Germans had been allowed once a year to exchange just fifteen Ostmarks into DMs – about $8 at the official exchange rate – hardly enough for a meal, let alone an extended trip.[47]
So the pressure was intense when the SED Central Committee gathered on 8 November for its three-day meeting. Right at the start, the entire Politburo resigned and a new one – reduced in size from twenty-one members to eleven – was elected, to create the appearance of change. In the event, six members retained their seats, while five new ones were named. Three of Krenz’s preferred new Politburo candidates were rejected and the party gave the position of prime minister to Hans Modrow, the SED chief in Dresden – a genuine reformer. As a result, the party elite was now visibly split. What’s more, on the outside of the party headquarters, 5,000 SED members protested openly against their leaders.[48]
Next day, 9 November, the party struggled to think up responses to people’s demands in the streets. In late afternoon the Central Committee came back to the problematic travel regulations. A short memo was drawn up and passed to the secretary of the Central Committee, Günter Schabowski, who had been appointed that morning as the SED’s media spokesman but did not attend that part of the discussions. At 6 p.m. Schabowski briefed the world media on the day’s deliberations, in a press conference broadcast live on GDR TV.