Within thirty minutes, several thousand people had squeezed their way to the other side. Somewhere in the chaos a young East German quantum chemist called Angela Merkel was swept along by the crowd. After a quiet sauna evening with her friends, she just wanted to experience for herself German history in the making. Once on the western side of the Wall, she phoned her aunt in Hamburg and joined the celebrations before heading back home – wondering what 9 November would mean for her.[53]
By midnight – after twenty-eight years of sealed borders – all the crossings in Berlin were open; likewise, as news spread, any other transit point along the border between the two Germanies. Neither the GDR security forces nor the Red Army did anything to prevent this. Not a single shot was fired, and no Soviet soldier left his barracks. Now, thousands of East Berliners – of all ages, from every walk of life – were making their way on foot, bike or car into the western half of the city – a forbidden place hitherto only glimpsed from afar. At Checkpoint Charlie, where Allied and Soviet tanks had been locked in a tense face-off in August 1961 as the Berlin Wall went up, the jubilant horde of visitors was greeted by cheering, flag-waving West Germans, plying them with flowers and sparkling wine.
‘I don’t know what we’re going to do, just drive around and see what’s going on,’ said one thirty-four-year-old East Berliner as he sat at the wheel of his orange Trabant chugging down the glittering Kurfürstendamm. ‘We’re here for the first time. I’ll go home in a few hours. My wife and kids are waiting for me. But I wasn’t going to miss this.’[54]
At the Brandenburg Gate, the most prominent landmark of the city’s division, hundreds of people chanted on the western side ‘The Wall must go!’ Then some climbed on top of the Wall and danced on it; others clambered over and headed right through the historic arch that for so long had been inaccessible to Berliners from either side. These were utterly unbelievable pictures – captured gleefully by American TV film crews for their prime-time news bulletins back home.[55]
All through the night and over the next few days, East Berliners continued to flood into West Berlin in vast numbers – 3 million in three days, most of whom came back.
The open Wall: Potsdamer Platz, 12 November 1989
They saw the promised land – and were being bribed to savour it. While in the East, banks and travel agents lacked sufficient foreign (DM) currency reserves to exchange for every traveller even the permitted maximum of fifteen Ostmarks, in the West long lines of East Berliners formed in front of the West Berlin banks to pick up the DM 100 ‘Welcome Money’ – about $55 – that the FRG had always given East Germans on their first time in the West. Spending their own, free DMs in the shiny emporia of the consumer society, they filled up their plastic bags with precious goods – often as simple as bananas, oranges or children’s toys – and carried them back into the grey streets of the socialist utopia.[56]
It was in those days that all the talk about revolution and renewal in the GDR totally evaporated as a credible political project.[57] Not for opposition intellectuals, of course – for the idealist alternative left and the earnest socialist reformers such as Bohley and Wolf – or even for the new echelon of younger SED functionaries. They denounced all talk of reunification as reactionary Heim ins Reich patriotism, derided capitalist culture as materialist trash and condemned consumption and foreign travel as the new opium of the masses.[58] But most of the ‘masses’ took no notice. For them, the idea of reforming the GDR and of pursuing a ‘third way’[59] between 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