History of the Present Read online

  11 JANUARY. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev visits Lithuania, attempting to stop the movement for independence.

  12-13 JANUARY. Oxford. At a Franco-German-British conference to discuss what the West should do about the great changes in the former East, senior politicians, officials, and diplomats express blank horror at the suggestion that Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia should join NATO.

  20-22 JANUARY. The Fourteenth Special Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia ends with the virtual dissolution of the party that held Yugoslavia together.

  27-30 JANUARY. The Polish communist party is succeeded by two “social democratic” parties. Youthful former Central Committee member Aleksander Kwasniewski is elected leader of one of them.

  JANUARY—FEBRUARY Albanians in Kosovo protest against their province being stripped of its autonomy by Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević.

  1 FEBRUARY East German prime minister Hans Modrow announces a plan for “Germany, United Fatherland.”

  6-7 FEBRUARY. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union accepts Mikhail Gorbachev’s proposal to abandon the “leading role” of the Communist Party and move toward political pluralism.

  10-11 FEBRUARY. West German chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher visit Moscow. President Gorbachev gives the green light for unification of Germany.

  12-14 FEBRUARY. A formula for negotiations on the external aspects of German unification is agreed at an Ottawa “open skies” meeting between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, with the participation of the two German states and the four postwar occupation powers: the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The occupying powers call this formula “4 + 2”; the Germans call it “2 + 4.”

  17-21 FEBRUARY. Berlin. “You can’t come through here,” says the East German frontier officer at the Brandenburg Gate. Why not? “Haven’t you heard of the four-power status?” And then, rather wittily, “It’s your government which prevents you crossing here!” When an East German frontier officer starts appealing to the four-power status of Berlin, I think the end of the East German state is in sight. When he finally lets me through—saying, with a shrug of his shoulders, “Anyway, it’s the British sector”—I know the end is near. Further on, an East German guard stands on top of the Wall, while under his very feet people chip away pieces to sell as souvenirs. High up on the Brandenburg Gate itself, I spy a large, white graffito. It says, “Vive l’Anarchie.”

  I visit Egon Krenz, the last communist leader of East Germany, in the pleasant East Berlin villa to which he has moved from the politburo compound at Wandlitz. In real life, his white teeth are every bit as distractingly large as on the photographs. (“Granny, what large teeth you have!” said the posters at last autumn’s demonstrations.) He has time on his hands and tells me his life story. The illegitimate son of a Pomeranian peasant woman, he knew poverty in his childhood. What did socialism mean to him as a young man? “A better life!” Then he hastily adds, “I mean—also for other people.” Krenz is working on his memoirs and has published advanced tidbits in the Bild-Zeitung. So, just weeks after being deposed as communist leader, he has sold himself to a right-wing West German tabloid that stands for everything he has denounced for forty years.

  One thing he wants to tell me. He much admires Margaret Thatcher’s stalwart and farsighted opposition to German unification. A great woman, that Mrs. Thatcher.

  24 FEBRUARY. Lithuanian elections are won by the independence movement Sajudis.

  26 FEBRUARY. Social Democrat Ingvar Carlsson is reappointed prime minister of Sweden.

  26-27 FEBRUARY. The Soviet Union agrees to withdraw its troops from Czechoslovakia by July 1991.

  23-27 FEBRUARY. Prague. I find Václav Havel installed in the magnificent Castle, traditional home of rulers of the Czech lands. The presidential office still contains some of the old communist furniture: square brown armchairs of superhuman size, set yards apart, silently eloquent of endless fraternal nonconversations between totalitarian rulers. The ghastly pictures have mostly been removed from the walls, to be replaced by large nudes and a prayer rug from the Dalai Lama. Unlike Egon Krenz, Havel now has no spare time at all. But, dashing along the long back corridors to a press conference, he pauses for a moment to show me a room with a huge, ancient metal door. This is the starvation chamber traditional in Central European castles. “We shall use it for talks.”

  Walking down Wenceslas Square, I bump into an old friend, the Hungarian writer Árpád Göncz. We go for a coffee in the marvelous Jugendstil café of the Hotel Evropa. “It seems we have reached a compromise on the matter of the new president of Hungary,” he tells me. Oh yes, and who will it be? “It seems it will be me.”

  4 MARCH. Democratic elections to republican parliaments and local councils in the Soviet Union.

  10 MARCH. The Soviet Union agrees to withdraw its troops from Hungary by July 1991.

  11 MARCH. The Lithuanian parliament votes to “reestablish” the independence of Lithuania.

  15 MARCH. Gorbachev is given the powers of an executive president in the Soviet Union.

  17 MARCH. Warsaw Pact foreign ministers, meeting in Prague, agree that both the Warsaw Pact and NATO should continue to exist.

  18 MARCH. Free elections to the “People’s Chamber” in East Germany.

  THE SOLUTION

  THE SOLUTION

  After the rising of the 17th June

  The secretary of the Writers’ Union

  Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee

  In which one could read that the people

  Had forfeited the confidence of the government

  And could only recover it through

  Redoubled work. Would it not then

  Be simpler, if the government

  Dissolved the people and

  Elected another?

  THUS BERTOLT BRECHT—BUT ONLY PRIVATELY—AFTER THE EAST German workers’ rising in the summer of 1953.

  In the summer of 1989, on 31 August to be precise, Erich Mielke, the eighty-one-year-old minister for state security of the German Democratic Republic, held a conference with his regional commanders to discuss growing discontent in the state. Extracts from the transcript of that meeting are among the first documents from the now dissolved Ministry for State Security to have been published, in a remarkable book commissioned by the East German “Round Table” of government and opposition groups.1 At one point in this meeting, Mielke interrupts the report of Comrade Colonel Dangriess from Gera to ask, “Is [the situation] such that tomorrow the 17th June will break out?”

  All along one had guessed that the old men at the top were haunted by that memory. But it is still extraordinary to find the fear so plainly expressed, black on white. “That is [sic] not tomorrow,” replies the Comrade Colonel, “that will not happen, that’s why we exist.” A little later it is the turn of the Comrade Lieutenant General from Leipzig. “The atmosphere is wretched,” he says. But, “so far as the question of power is concerned, Comrade Minister, we have things firmly in hand.”

  How wrong they were, how the protests grew, how Leipzig in particular became the center of enormous but peaceful popular protests—these events I have described elsewhere.2 The documents reinforce the impression that the GDR came close to bloodshed. Here, for example, is the text of Erich Honecker’s telex message to regional party secretaries on 8 October, the day after the GDR’s fortieth anniversary, ordering that further disturbances are “to be prevented from the outset.” And here is the matching order from the minister for state security, including the following: “Members [of the State Security Service] who are regular weapon-carriers should carry their service weapons with them, appropriately to the given challenges.” In a long conversation, Egon Krenz, Erich Honecker’s successor as party leader for just forty-four days, told me that in his view the country did come to the verge of bloodshed, for in such a tense situation one spark—one shot fired in panic—could have set the country alight.r />
  The turning point was probably 9 October, when a large peaceful demonstration in Leipzig was not dispersed by force. While local initiatives, rather than Krenz, were responsible for averting violence at that critical moment, these documents give some credence to Krenz’s claim to have maintained the line of nonviolence. Thus, his otherwise combative message to regional and local party secretaries on 24 October contains the crucial phrase, “We assume that all problems will be solved by political means.”

  By 4 November, the day of a huge opposition demonstration in Berlin, Mielke is sending a pathos-laden telex to his deputies and regional leaders. He offers thanks to all his “dear Comradesses and Comrades” for their “staunch behavior and responsible fulfillment of their duty.” “I know,” he writes, “how difficult it is [not to be provoked or unsettled] especially in this tension-loaded atmosphere, how much self-restraint, staunchness, and courage that requires.” The crimes of the Stasi are truly not comparable with those of the SS, yet the language of this message recalls nothing so much as Himmler’s infamous Posen speech of 1943.

  The last document in the collection is a report from Erich Mielke to Krenz and other party leaders, dated 7 November. It records how church and opposition groups such as the New Forum have begun to defend State Security buildings against angry demonstrators. A few days later, this terrible, pathetic old man stood before the “People’s Chamber,” East Germany’s previously rubber-stamp parliament, and said, in words that provide the title for this first documentation and will surely become immortal, “Ich liebe doch alle”: “But I love everyone.”3

  That was the revolution, phase one: a peaceful popular uprising that grew slowly through the summer and early autumn and flowered from 9 October. A new “17 June.” Phase two of the revolution began a month later, on 9 November, with the opening of the Berlin Wall. Within a very few weeks, the tidal wave of popular demands turned decisively in the direction of unification. Instead of “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”) the crowd chanted, “Wir sind EIN Volk” (“We are ONE nation”).

  Meanwhile, thousands voted for unification with their feet, moving to West Germany and taking up their automatic rights of citizenship. First the power of the party and the Stasi, then the authority of the government collapsed. Even after taking opposition leaders into his cabinet, in a so-called Government of National Responsibility, Prime Minister Hans Modrow could not slow the internal collapse or the external hemorrage. So the promised free election was hastily brought forward, from 6 May to 18 March.

  By this time, West German politicians from all the major parties were already stumping the country, and it was clear that the main contestants in the election would be the East German partners or protégés of the main West German parties. The East German Social Democrats, who had originally called themselves the SDP (Sozialdemokratische Partei) precisely to distinguish themselves from the West German SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), changed their name to SPD. Although their leading candidate was called Ibrahim Böhme, their chief crowd-puller was the legendary former West German chancellor Willy Brandt. The West German Free Democrats helped put together a Federation of Free Democrats, whose chief crowd-puller was the West German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher. The West German Christian Democrats were instrumental in forging a so-called Alliance for Germany out of the formerly puppet CDU (East), under its new leader, Lothar de Maizière; the newly founded German Social Union (DSU), under the Leipzig pastor Hans-Wilhelm Eberling; and the smaller opposition group, Democratic Awakening (DA), which chose as its leading candidate a lawyer, Wolfgang Schnur, who had been active for several years in church-based opposition circles. But here, too, there was no doubt that Helmut Kohl was the key man. During the campaign, he spoke at six mass meetings across the land.

  In the case of these three parties or party groupings, the West German influence was overwhelming. It was not just that prominent West German politicians of the appropriate party came over to support them. It was not just the financial support, important though that was. Their very posters looked the same: those of the SPD (East) in the distinctive colors and orthography of the SPD (West). So, too, for the CDU and the Free Democrats, while the DSU, based in Saxony and Thuringia, took its symbolic cue from its Bavarian neighbor, the Christian Social Union (CSU). Their language was increasingly the same: so many little Genschers, Kohls, and Brandts springing fully armed out of the television screen. Indeed, most of them had learned the language of democratic politics while watching West German television. Moreover, the actual content of their campaigns was inseparable from the impression and promises made by their West German patrons.

  The only major contestant with substantial resources of its own was the former ruling communist party (SED), now renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and fiercely insisting that it was a completely different outfit. “We are the new,” said one of its posters, showing Hans Modrow ogling a baby in a studiedly informal group of mostly young and casually dressed people on a Berlin street. Besides the two former puppet, or “block,” parties, the Democratic Farmers’ Party and the National Democratic Party, the other parties or party groupings on the ballot paper—twenty-four in all—included such exotic flowers as the Spartacist Workers’ Party, the Carnations, and the German Beer-Drinkers Union. Seriously notable was the Alliance ’90, a coalition of three opposition groups—New Forum, Democracy Now, and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights—which, as the Stasi documents amply confirm, had been instrumental in preparing and leading the country’s “October revolution.”

  The election campaign, fought at mass meetings, on posters and fly sheets, and on both East and West German radio and television, was quite bitter, with two basic themes. The first theme was the past. Charges of collaboration with the former communist dictatorship flew to and fro like custard pies in a bad comedy. Thus, for example, the western CDU, desperately conscious that the eastern CDU was compromised by having been a puppet party, whereas the eastern SPD was a wholly new organization, tried to make up for it by reminding voters of the awful way in which the western SPD had previously chummed up with the ruling communists in the east. One poster showed the western SPD’s candidate for chancellor, Oskar Lafontaine, waving brightly next to the former East German leader Erich Honecker, a fellow Saarlander. Underneath it said, “Now what belongs together is growing together”—the already famous words with which Willy Brandt greeted the opening of the Berlin Wall. (Yet the Social Democrats would have had little difficulty finding photographs of leading Christian Democrats grinning broadly while shaking hands with Honecker, starting with Franz Josef Strauss.) When accusations about the lawyer Wolfgang Schnur’s past collaboration with the Stasi began to be made, leading Christian Democrat politicians dismissed them as outrageous electoral mudslinging—until, just a few days before the election, they turned out to be true.

  Yet the results suggest that the issue of the past was not decisive. If it had been, the group with much the strongest claim to be uncompromised, the Alliance ’90, would have gotten more votes than it did. What decided the issue were the contrasting proposals for the immediate future, which boiled down to one essential question: How far, how fast, and by what means should East Germany be united with West Germany? The differences between the SPD and Kohl’s Alliance for Germany on this issue were not fundamental. Both said unity should come, and both said they would protect the people of East Germany against the economic and social costs. But there was a significant difference of emphasis. The Alliance for Germany and, above all, Chancellor Kohl himself, made a clear, simple case for the fastest possible integration into the existing structures of the Federal Republic. There should be a rapid currency union. “We,” the Alliance said in effect, “will give you the deutsche mark.” Then, following intergovernmental negotiations and the reconstitution of the historic states (Länder) in East Germany, they should join the West under Article 23 of the Federal Republic’s constitution, which is called the Basic Law. Thi
s, after listing the Länder of West Germany in which the Basic Law applies, says simply, “In other parts of Germany it [i.e., the Basic Law] is to come into force after their entry.” Basta!

  The SPD, by contrast, argued for a somewhat slower and more considered process in which East Germany would bring more of its own “identity” into the new Germany. Although it did not absolutely preclude unification by Article 23, the SPD inclined more to the path envisaged in the final article of the Basic Law, Article 146, which says, “This Basic Law loses its validity on the day on which a constitution comes into force which has been resolved upon by the German people in a free decision.” In other words, there would be some sort of constituent assembly that would write a new constitution, perhaps formally incorporating some of the different property rights or so-called social rights established in the GDR. Altogether, the SPD offered more ifs and buts about the process of unification.

  The renewed communist party, the PDS, put the ifs and buts before the “yes” to unification, although the practical difference between the “confederation” or “treaty community” for which it originally argued and de facto unification became increasingly thin. One of its two leading candidates, Hans Modrow, had, after all, as prime minister, himself put forward at the beginning of February a plan for what he called, echoing a slogan from the streets, which in turn took up a line from East Germany’s national anthem, “Germany, United Fatherland.” The other leading candidate of the PDS, a clever lawyer named Gregor Gysi, said, “We want a new Germany, better than the GDR but also better than the Federal Republic.”

  Curiously enough, the party closest to the postcommunists in its reservations about what was described as an Anschluss by the Federal Republic was the grouping of those whom the communist party had previously considered its worst enemies, the Alliance ’90. When a telephone number is unavailable in Germany, you hear a message saying, “No Anschluss [i.e., connection] on this number.” The Alliance ’90 had an election poster saying, “Article 23—no Anschluss on this number!”