The Year that Changed the World Read online

  The events in Dresden were merely a curtain-raiser. A far more dramatic confrontation came the next day—October 9, a Monday—in Leipzig, the country’s second-largest city. In a weekly rite beginning that spring, Leipzigers had been gathering at the Nikolaikirche in the center of the old city for a 5 p.m. prayer meeting. At the appointed hour, every Monday, they grouped together to inveigh against the regime’s emigration policies and decry its inability to change. Only rarely were they more than several hundred people; with the September exodus from Hungary and the refugee crisis in Prague, however, their numbers swelled into the thousands. On September 25, they spilled out of the church, singing the American spiritual “We Shall Overcome,” and onto Karl Marx Platz, where they were joined by some ten thousand others in a peaceful march around the city’s central thoroughfare known as the Ring. The following Monday, October 2, the crowds were even larger. “Wir bleiben hier,” they shouted. We are staying!

  Honecker saw the danger. Even before his embarrassment in Berlin, with protesters calling, “Gorbi, help us,” he issued his orders: that Monday’s demo would not be allowed. Three days before, on October 6, the party newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung delivered a blunt warning. The state security police would no longer tolerate what the Leipzig Stasi chief Hans Geiffert described as “illegal and unauthorized” gatherings. “Um diese konterrevolutionaren Aktionen endultig und wirksam zu unterbinden. Wenn es sein muss mit der [sic] Waffe in der Hand.” “We must be ready to suppress this counterrevolutionary action if need be with a weapon in our hand.”

  By early afternoon on that Monday, October 9, the Nikolaikirche was full. Those who could not get inside stood on the steps and surrounding streets. By 5 p.m., they numbered some seventy thousand. The stage was set for a bloodbath. The night before, Minister of State Security Erich Mielke ordered a full mobilization. Factory militias were reinforced with police reservists, called up on emergency footing. All through the preceding night, thousands of extra troops were trucked into the city. The Ring and the neighborhoods around the Nikolaikirche were thick with armed riot police. One commander told how he began distributing weapons and ammunition from the local armory. “I started with the lower ranks, giving out rubber truncheons, shields and helmets,” Jens Illing told the BBC in a documentary reconstruction of the evening. “Then I gave the officers personal handguns—Makarova pistols, nine millimeter, with rounds. Each officer had at least two magazines. Then the company chief gave the order to ready a large number of Kalashnikov automatic rifles. These were loaded onto trucks and driven off.”

  The preparations worried many of the police, particularly local men such as Illing. He knew his mother and stepfather would be among the marchers and telephoned beforehand to warn them away. Another police commander, Silvio Rosler, told the BBC how officers tried to screen out “unreliables.” “They interviewed us. You were unreliable if you weren’t prepared to shoot at the demonstrators. It would be just like Tiananmen Square. ‘It’s them or us,’ we were told. They were winding us up for a fight.” Hospitals had been told to expect casualties. Doctors and nurses were on alert. Extra blood supplies had been stocked. Ambulances stood ready in streets along the Ring.

  But if the hard-liners in the Politburo were prepared for violence, others were not. Egon Krenz would later claim that at the last moment he telephoned the commander of state security in Dresden and countermanded Honecker’s orders. In truth, it was messier (and more typically communist) than that. Krenz clearly did not want blood on his hands. After all, he and others would soon move against Honecker, and authorizing violence against the people at this juncture would have doomed his own political future. But having been ordered by Honecker to personally “take charge in Dresden,” what was he to do?

  Krenz opted for a strategy of delay. In time-honored custom, he telephoned Soviet ambassador Vyacheslav Kochemasov late that afternoon, who according to some accounts disobeyed Gorbachev’s orders to “listen but not advise” and argued forcefully against a “Chinese solution,” especially one that might involve the use of the East German army. (Some suggest Krenz went out of his way to solicit Moscow’s advice to proceed cautiously, should he later be called to account by Honecker.) He then told local commanders that it was best to avoid violence as they considered how to execute their orders from Mielke—and that they should act at their own discretion.

  Krenz ducked, in other words. He knew that local communist leaders were divided, like the Politburo in Berlin. He apparently also calculated that, in the absence of direct orders from Berlin, they would avoid bloodshed. All that it took to tip the balance was the intervention of a modest outside force. It came in the form of art, as it seemed so often to do in Eastern Europe in 1989: a plea for “dialogue” from the director of the Leipzig orchestra, Kurt Masur, supported by local communist authorities and broadcast over the radio.

  That was enough. Shortly after 6 p.m., the local party chief, Helmut Hackenberg, called Krenz—choosing, after careful deliberation, not to call Mielke or Honecker himself. The protest showed no sign of degenerating into violence, Hackenberg told Krenz. In his judgment, it was best to allow it to proceed. Krenz told him he would get back to him. He did so forty-five minutes later. “I have consulted with several ministers and members of the Politburo,” said Krenz, “and we have concluded that your decision was correct.”

  And so the citizens of Leipzig marched. October 9 was to be the decisive victory of raw “people power” in all of 1989. Yet the danger was not over. At the weekly Tuesday morning Politburo meeting the next day, October 10, Honecker blamed the preceding night’s unrest on NATO and Western provocateurs. As he stood up to leave, according to Schabowski, he once again asked, “What should we do about the demonstrators?” Perhaps, he suggested, it would be necessary to use force after all.

  The conspirators were alarmed. The next march in Leipzig would take place the following Monday, October 16. They had chosen that following Tuesday meeting to stage their putsch. “This was a great crisis,” Schabowski said. “What were we to do? It would utterly discredit our new government.” Their solution was to do as they did the last week: ask Leipzig’s leaders to restrain the demonstrators and nothing else. As the protesters filled the streets that night, Krenz waited until the last moment before issuing explicit instructions to the police not to interfere. “He waited until six p.m. to fax his orders,” according to Schabowski. They feared Honecker would otherwise be alerted and personally direct the police to intervene.

  That next day, on that fateful Tuesday, Honecker arrived at the Politburo at 10 a.m. He bid everyone good morning and shook hands with all. Then he opened the meeting. “I felt very bad, like Brutus,” Schabowski recalled. Willi Stoph, the longest-serving party leader, was the first to plunge in the dagger. “Erich, I would like to propose a change in the agenda.”

  Honecker looked puzzled. He was not accustomed to interruptions. Stoph continued in bland apparatchikese: “I would like to propose the removal of the general secretary.”

  There followed a moment of “grotesque silence,” Schabowski remembered. “Honecker’s face went icy. Then he started again as if he hadn’t heard, picking up where he left off.”

  “Erich,” Stoph interjected, almost gently. “We must discuss this point.”

  Honecker appeared to recover his presence of mind. “All right. Let us have a discussion.”

  Incredibly, he then proceeded to lead it, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He did not recognize even then how decisively events had turned. He asked who wanted to speak. As hands went up, he recognized those who would, he thought, support him. None did. Not even Erich Mielke, the hard-line head of the secret police.

  Finally there came the vote, and with it Honecker’s moment of truth. Gazing around the table at those who raised their hands against him, the dictator sat back in his chair and blinked. Then abruptly, he did what no one expected. Humbly, mutely, said Schabowski, “Erich raised his hand with the rest of them,” a true commu
nist to the end.

  Poor Egon Krenz. The revolutions in Eastern Europe began as a subtle interplay of signs and symbols, but lately the message had become quite plain. Had he heeded the placards brandished by the crowds outside his offices, he could easily have foretold his future.

  Among the more vivid was one composed of the word Alt (old) repeated dozens more times in small black print to create the letters of two larger words—Neu? (New?) Nein. Another featured a caricature of “Egon the Krenzman,” with his toothy smile and bristly hair, nestled in bed and dressed in the bonnet and nightgown of Little Red Riding Hood. “Grandmother, what big teeth you have!”

  To say that East Germans greeted their new leader with skepticism would be an understatement. “Grinning Egon”—another appellation—stepped into Erich Honecker’s shoes only three weeks after visiting China, where he praised Beijing’s bloody repression of the democratic protests in Tiananmen Square. After ousting Honecker, he immediately set about casting himself as a reformer, promising Wende—a dramatic change of direction, new openness and discussion, “dialogue.” Welcome, glasnost and perestroika, GDR-style. He spoke of free elections, an end to censorship, a new constitution. Most important, he promised to rewrite the country’s travel laws, offering East Germans what they wanted above all else.

  No one believed him. He was, after all, a creature of the system—Honecker’s protégé who rose through party ranks on his coattails. Like his mentor, he once headed the Free German Youth. As a member of the Politburo, he exercised ultimate authority over Mielke’s hated Stasi. What he promised with one breath, he took back with the next. His first speech to the people whose hearts and minds he hoped to woo was a pastiche of contradictions and false starts. After proposing elections, he reaffirmed the “leading role” of his communist party. Though talking dialogue, he made no concessions to the country’s newly emboldened opposition and instead spoke ominously of maintaining “law and order.” As for material prosperity, he proposed to close the gap between East and West with something he called a “market-oriented socialist planned economy.” Not even his own party bought that one. When it came time to approve him as head of state, twenty-six members of the normally rubber-stamp parliament voted against him and another twenty-six abstained. Such a display of independence had never before been seen.

  Krenz could not comprehend that he was cursed, that his world had changed elementally. It mattered little that he came with good intentions. People sensed that he was an opportunist, that he was Honecker’s man. His predecessor made sure of that, at least. As a last cruel gesture, in a brilliant act of sabotage, Honecker in resigning proposed a successor: not a “younger man,” in keeping with the official fig leaf of his leaving for “reasons of health,” but Krenz. Schabowski called it “the revenge of the pharaoh.” Honecker knew who brought him down, just as he knew his blessing would do Krenz in. And so it was. Krenz was damaged goods, hamstrung from the get-go. His “reforms” would be seen as impotent holding actions, the cynical manipulations of one who wished only to hold power.

  As the days passed, Krenz grew increasingly desperate. In an interview five months later, he would liken it to “riding a whirlwind.” Everything was chaos, he told me. Nothing worked. In his book Wenn Mauer Fallen, he described how impossible it was to keep pace with events. “We decided something in the morning,” he wrote, “and had to change it by evening.” Meanwhile, the pressure mounted. On October 20, the day Krenz took office, fifty thousand people marched in Dresden demanding free elections. The next day, thirty-five thousand marched in Plauen and eighty thousand workers struck in Karl-Marx-Stadt. The weekly demonstration in Leipzig that Monday evening drew more than three hundred thousand. On November 4, half a million Berliners gathered on the Alexanderplatz in the city center to demand the right to travel freely.

  If there was any moment when Krenz might have played the hero, salvaged some legitimacy for his rule, it was then. All he had to do was give people what they asked for: the right to come and go unhindered. But he could not break with the past. The very existence of the GDR was premised on social control, as was his own rule. So he moved by cautious shuffles and half steps, giving up as little as possible at every point, which turned out to be never quite enough.

  He began in late October by promising “liberalizations” of the country’s travel laws and assigned a “task force” to study the matter. Could there have been a more classically bureaucratic response than that? On November 1, as protests escalated, he reopened the border to Czechoslovakia and proposed to allow East Germans to visit the West from there. When that sparked even more unrest, he offered yet another timid compromise: travel abroad for up to a month a year, as approved by duly designated authorities. That very night—Monday, November 6—brought another huge demonstration in Leipzig, close to a million strong. This time the people demanded not only free travel but, for the first time, an end to communism itself.

  Meanwhile, more East Germans than ever were fleeing the country. Krenz’s decision to reopen the border to Czechoslovakia sparked a second massive exodus. Those who had not made a dash for freedom in September, and regretted it, now seized their moment. Once again, the West German embassy in Prague was overwhelmed with asylum seekers. This time, however, the Czech government played no games with trains. It quickly announced that East Germans would be free to cross its borders to the Federal Republic without condition. Over the weekend of November 4–5 alone, some twenty-five thousand East Germans did so. In a telephone call with President Bush on October 23, Helmut Kohl mentioned a conversation he had recently had with Gorbachev. The Russian leader told how he had pushed Honecker hard to reform during his recent visit. But neither man had much confidence in the leadership, including Egon Krenz. “The changes in the GDR are quite dramatic,” Kohl told Bush. “Our estimates are that by Christmas we will have reached a total of 150,000 refugees, with an average age under thirty.” (The actual number would exceed 250,000 by November 9.) It was the Great Escape all over again, only much, much bigger.

  Late one afternoon on a wet and blustery day in early November—November 8, to be precise—I drove into the Bavarian mountains that range along the Czech frontier, just where East and West Germany and Czechoslovakia met. A long, narrow winding road ends at the town of Schirndling, hardly more than a few houses and a gas station clinging to the saddle of a piney ridge marking the border. On the way up, I passed caravans of Trabants trundling down in the opposite direction, their lights blinking feebly every time they hit a bump.

  None of that prepared me for the scene at the border. Stretching into the distance, as far as I could see into the valley falling away below, was a double line of cars. Nearly every one was full. Beleaguered West German guards checked the East Germans’ papers as Red Cross workers passed out tea and coffee. Volunteers from the West German automobile association worked around the clock to repair spluttering cars that were on the verge of giving out. The chief of the checkpoint looked as if he had not slept in days. “We are seeing more than ten thousand refugees every day,” he said wearily. “They keep coming, all day and all night. We do not expect a letup.” He figured one hundred thousand people had crossed over since the border opened roughly a week ago.

  This was psychosis, a mass migration feeding on itself. “Twenty of my friends have gone to the West this year,” said a twenty-three-year-old waiter from Jena. A young man, leaving with his girlfriend, told me how it had grown “lonely” back home. “We have as many friends in Frankfurt now as we do in Erfurt.” A woman who hitchhiked through Czechoslovakia with her husband and young child said that the sight of so many people leaving made her pick up and go, too. “We didn’t want to be the last ones to leave and turn out the lights.”

  At Schirndling, I realized with sudden and perfect clarity that this could not go on. The German Democratic Republic was hollowing out. In Leipzig, one refugee told me, half of the city’s bus drivers had left. Retirees were coming back on the job; army soldiers were being assigned
to fill in. A young East German from a village on the Baltic, sailboard strapped to the top of his car, told how his parents were having trouble finding the sugar, almonds and flour they needed to run their bakery. Food and other scarce goods were piling up in warehouses because so many truck drivers had disappeared. Buildings were without heat and water because the superintendents had left. Trains ran late because the brakeman or the switchboard operator or the engineer was gone. People would go home one day, as usual, never to be seen again. The manager of a factory sports team in Dresden crossed the border, a soccer ball in the backseat of his car. His team had recently gone on holiday in Czechoslovakia. Only half came back, he said with a rueful laugh. “How can you run a factory when you do not know how many of your employees will show up each morning?” Highly trained professionals were leaving in particularly large numbers. A third of the doctors at Magdeburg’s prestigious medical academy failed to return from vacation over the summer; forty-one nurses and doctors had left East Berlin’s Hedwig Hospital in recent months. Wittenberg’s hospital for the disabled faced closure because of staff losses. So did its nursing home. “If you pull enough bricks out of a wall, it will fall down,” a British diplomat had told me in East Berlin a few weeks earlier. He was right. The German Democratic Republic was close to collapse.