Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989. Kristina Spohr
SED-state socialism and Western capitalism was now dead. That was the true revolution: popular rejection of the old regime and no affirmation of any new socialist-democratic vision of society. Why stay in a broken communist state when you could start a new life amid the temples of capitalism? Or even demand the merger of East Germany with the West?
*
How was it that the GDR experience turned out so differently from that of Poland and Hungary? In part because in the GDR the transition from communism began much later and developed much faster. Poland and Hungary had entered the process of political transformation in earnest in the summer of 1988; in the GDR the first rumblings of protest did not occur till May 1989 and street demonstrations only began in September. In part, too, because the Polish and Hungarian economies were in a far worse state than East Germany’s, so their tortuous navigation out of a command economy towards the market offered little attraction in the GDR. Indeed, the politico-economic transition produced more shortages and hardship than the people had bargained for. But it was also because the East German party state had failed, despite forty years of assiduous effort, to inculcate a sense of GDR patriotism. In Hungary and Poland the changes were rooted in national unity; this was not so in the GDR, where unity became all-German, not East German.
The GDR regime was also much more hard-line and unreconstructed for much longer. Only in East Berlin was a ‘Chinese solution’ seriously considered – and not just because Tiananmen happened after Polish and Hungarian reforms had got into their stride. Honecker was locked in the past, totally wedded to his state and his version of real socialism. Yet while the GDR might have been the technologically most advanced country in the Eastern bloc, it was also more dependent on the USSR than its neighbours because of the size of the Red Army presence and because the GDR was an artificial polity, created and sustained by Moscow. As Brezhnev had told Honecker back in 1970, ‘Erich, I tell you frankly, don’t ever forget this: the GDR cannot exist without us, without the Soviet Union, its power and strength. Without us there is no GDR.’ Honecker’s problem in 1989 was that Gorbachev was definitely not Brezhnev. He wanted radical reforms and, furthermore, had renounced the use of force. For Honecker, that would spell the end of his rule – and indeed of the SED itself.
Out of this face-off between East Berlin and the Kremlin came domestic political paralysis. There was no Chinese-style crackdown in Leipzig on 9 October to crush the protests, no transfer of the Tiananmen ‘contagion’ to Europe. This indicated a fundamental divide between the Asian and European transitions from the Cold War – between the use of repression and a consensus on non-violence. And the GDR’s policy paralysis did not go away even after Honecker was toppled, because Krenz refused to allow any breach in the SED’s monopoly on power until after the ‘fall of the Wall’.
In fact, the reforms in Poland and Hungary had little effect on developments in the GDR. Where Hungary did matter was as an exit rather than an exemplar. It was the opening of the Hungarian border with Austria and the ensuing exodus of East Germans that proved the real catalyst for change within the GDR. The impact was intensified by the opening of Czechoslovakia’s frontier with West Germany, and ultimately by the collapse of the inner German border as well. Once East Germans started to move en masse, the ‘German question’ was back in people’s minds. That’s why the moment of political convergence with Poland and Hungary was so brief – a matter of three weeks or so before the fall of the Wall and then Kohl’s policy offensive undermined the aspirations of Neues Forum and its allies for a reformed socialism. It also made nonsense of the efforts of Hans Modrow – hailed by many in the GDR as the ‘German Gorbachev’ – to form a new and stable government and to negotiate in a Polish-style round-table process with the opposition. Before round-table talks even began, the SED disintegrated at all levels, amid corruption scandals and a string of resignations, and in early December it was renamed the PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus) and its monopoly deleted from the constitution. The brief ‘Krenz era’ was history.
Similarly, Neues Forum and other opposition groups such as Demokratischer Aufbruch were undermined by the ‘post-Wall’ divergence between political activists and the general mass of GDR citizens. Just when the opposition’s dream of realising a democratic and reformed socialist GDR seemed finally within reach – as commentator Timothy Garton Ash wrote, putting the ‘D for Democratic’ into the GDR – the whole idea was stillborn. The round-table talks were set for 7 December, but over the previous four weeks 130,000 more people emigrated to the FRG. In the Leipzig Monday demonstrations the slogan ‘Deutschland einig Vaterland’ (‘Germany the united fatherland’) was heard for the first time as early as 13 November; a week later ‘Wir sind das Volk’ had transmuted into ‘Wir sind ein Volk’ (‘We are one people’). In contrast to Hungary and Poland, it was the GDR’s opening to the West and the prospect of unification that made the crucial difference. Hungarians and Poles had to imagine an alternative future for themselves at home; East Germans could look to the reality of an existing alternative on their own doorstep: a prosperous, functioning West German state, run by compatriots. And they did. As Garton Ash also observed, it was at once a chance and a tragedy for East Germany that ‘the boundaries of social self-determination and national self-determination were not the same’.[60]
Significantly, Germany’s national story had wider repercussions. When we talk today about the fall of the Wall, what comes into our minds is the image of the Brandenburg Gate and people dancing on the Wall. But in fact the Gate was in no man’s land; it was not a crossing point and, after the extraordinary night of 9 November, it would remain closed for another six weeks. Not until 22 December was the Wall opened at the Gate. This is a reminder that the media was at once a catalyst, a shaper and a multiplier of events. Even in one day, the headlines shifted from ‘The GDR Opens its Borders to the Federal Republic’ (10 November) to ‘Wall and Barbed Wire Do Not Divide Anymore’ (11 November). A local moment full of contingency was quickly transformed into an event of universal significance. As an experience of liberty through the overcoming of physical separation, the end of the Wall had a meaning and resonance which spread fast and far beyond Berlin.
In the process, the focus of the story rapidly shifted away from the politicians (especially Schabowski and his botched press conference) making history through blunders and happenstance to a narrative of ordinary people bringing about revolutionary change. And then, even more abstractly, as GDR politicians and Western journalists who drove events that night were edited out of the story, ‘the fall of the Wall’ became a magical and highly symbolic moment in history. The dancers on the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate became the ultimate symbol of freedom for 1989 – rather like the way, at the other end of the spectrum, the man in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square became the year’s ultimate symbol of repression.[61]
*
The fall of the Wall had certainly not been Kohl’s moment. And he was struggling to catch up for the next three weeks. But then he would seize the initiative with a vengeance.
Most of November was spent responding to the demands of others, rather than working out his own agenda. On the 9th, that momentous night for Germany, he had not even been in the country. When he finally escaped from Poland and got to Berlin next day, he had been shouted down by the crowds. Soon he had to rush back again to Warsaw to wrap up the interrupted visit. But the Poles were harder to placate – because it was no longer just a matter of burying the past but alleviating fears about the future. After the three culture-focused days of reconciliation – at Auschwitz and in Silesia – the trip was rounded off by a carefully calibrated finale. Kohl announced an aid package amounting to $2.2 billion – the largest by far from any Western government (Bush had offered $100 million when he was in Poland in early July). And the chancellor wrote off $400 million in West German loans since the 1970s. With these measures he wanted to forestall any fresh talk about a peace treaty for the Second World War, which would raise the unhappy issues of reparations and the Oder–Neisse border with Poland. So in the press conference, when finally asked about the elephant in the room – ‘reunification’ – the chancellor replied ‘We do not speak about reunification but about self-determination.’[62]