1989 (19 page)

Now at a contrived ‘spontaneous’ meeting, Lindenberg ‘
surprised
’ Honecker by seemingly emerging from the crowd – there was too much security on the trip for any genuinely unexpected event – to give him a signed guitar as a present. It was nothing more than a piece of theatre for the television cameras that would play well on both sides of the Wall. It was nonetheless a sign of the times that it happened at all. At the end of Lindenberg’s ‘choo choo’ ballad, a sonorous voice was to be heard intoning in Russian: ‘
Myezhdu prochim, tovarishch Erich, Vyerkhovniy Soviet nye imyehet nichevo protiv gastroli gospodina Lindenberga v GDR
’ (‘As it happens, comrade Erich, the Supreme Soviet has no objections to Mr
Lindenberg
doing a concert in the GDR’). The concert duly took place, a few months afterwards, even if the audience was stuffed with the teenage children of loyal party members.

Of course, nobody knew what the Supreme Soviet really thought, least of all its members, who were accustomed to having their
thinking
done for them by the man at the head of the politburo. And he was proving an enigma inside a riddle all of his own. Gorbachev brought me back to East Berlin again that December when he stopped off on his way back from his first summit with Reagan in Washington. By now the number of East Berliners who had begun to see in him perhaps a real chance of at least some reform – a
lessening
of East Germany’s draconian political repression was all even the boldest dared hope for – and some twenty of the old Swords to Ploughshares dared to mark Human Rights’ Day by handing a
petition to the Pact leaders asking if they could have some. They were summarily arrested on the street.

A burly uniformed policeman, overweight and puffing in his Soviet-style imitation fur hat, grabbed me by the collar as I watched the demonstrators being hustled away and demanded identification. I put my hand in my pocket and on a whim, took out my old,
out-of-date
Soviet press pass. He looked at it in near shock for a few seconds, then stood back and handed it over to me with a snappy salute. East German police were taught to recognise and respect Russian, very few of them could read or understand it.

I washed the politics down, as usual, with a few beers around the
Stammtisch
in Metzer Eck, seeing old faces, picking up on local gossip as much as anything else. But Gorbachev was becoming gossip. ‘What do you think of him?’ Alex asked me. I shrugged. Mrs Thatcher might have decided she could do business with him, but he wasn’t going to affect life in Britain. ‘I think he’s genuinely
different
, but how different, I don’t know,’ I replied. There was a general nodding around the table, and Alex lifted his glass and proposed one of his favourite old toasts, which roughly translated ran: ‘Who else can get so much pleasure from drink, than those of us who fear the Russian clink!’ And we lifted our glasses and drank. To the ethics of survival in a world that could never change.

We were wrong. In just about every imaginable way. For a start back in Fleet Street, which like post-war Poland had been literally lifted up and moved, in this case East: to Wapping and Docklands, there was also a whiff of counter-revolution in the air. The
Telegraph
Group’s chief executive Andrew Knight had for one of those reasons that remain forever obscure to those most affected by them – almost certainly as the result of an accountant-inspired ‘
cost-saving
rationalisation’ – announced that from now on the
Sunday Telegraph
and the
Daily Telegraph
would be run as a single
seven-day
operation. This is one of those accountants-versus-journalists conflicts that keeps on recurring over the years: it has the obvious bean-counting merit of needing, in theory, just one set of
executives
: one home news editor, one foreign editor, one features editor, one picture editor and so on. But it totally misses the essential point about British Sunday Journalism which is that the ‘Sundays’ had a
different agenda, were more geared to scoop-breaking, to literary writing and in-depth analysis than the papers that appeared every day. The ‘Sunday Papers’, as the format-leading
The Sunday
Times
never ceased to remind us, were a concept all of their own. This has changed to some extent with the development of the ‘Saturdays’ as a Sunday-paper-challenging ‘weekend package’, but in the eighties the old differentiation still held true.

The
Sunday Telegraph
in particular had, under Worsthorne and the ‘crazy gang’ evolved from a drab, dull old Tory seventh day seat-warmer into an eccentric, vivacious and often controversial newspaper with its own identity. Knight’s bean-counter-inspired announcement sounded to those of us who heard it very much like a death knell. Several of us began to look elsewhere. My fellow foreign reporter David Blundy had been offered a job on the new
Sunday Correspondent,
a start-up that flew directly in the face of the
Telegraph
’s new seven-day concept. He had been unsure about moving to a new paper with an uncertain future. Now he took it.
*

In the meantime I had also received a phone call from an old Reuters chum, John Witherow, the one who had in his interview for the job cited ‘ratlike cunning’ as the key attribute for a journalist. He had since moved to
The Times
and then
The Sunday Times
, where he was now deputy foreign editor. I knew there was no danger of a seven-day operation being introduced there:
The Sunday Times
had originally not even had the same owners as
The Times
(bizarrely it had been founded by the Telegraph Group but subsequently sold on). Both were now owned by Rupert Murdoch, but I was well aware that
The Sunday Times
was a major brand in its own right (that advert ‘
The Sunday Times
is
the Sunday papers’ was simply an expression of how most of the middle classes thought) and highly profitable, which its ‘sister paper’ was not.

John suggested I have lunch with him and his then boss (John has since gone on to become
The Sunday
Times’s most successful editor)
Bob Tyrer, the foreign editor, in a restaurant off Stamford Street near Waterloo. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, that I should come and do for them what I had done for the Sunday ‘Tel’. If the ‘crazy gang’ had not been disintegrating I might have hesitated, but
The Sunday Times
was the market leader, the ‘big beast’ of British journalism. Bob said, ‘Come on board. You’ll be in the right place at the right time.’

He wasn’t wrong.

While I was sitting in a restaurant in Stamford Street trying to make a decision about my future, there were men and women across Eastern Europe making far more important ones about theirs. This was particularly true in Poland, where martial law had been lifted and Solidarity’s leaders released from jail, but widespread popular discontent still smouldered. The communist government was increasingly frustrated that social and economic conditions continued to decline, fuelled by runaway inflation, while popular resentment at the imposition of martial law – lifted in 1983 – and the continued ban on the free trade union lingered. It was as if the population had stubbornly decided to let the country go to the dogs rather than obey a government most of them detested. By late 1988 the interior minister had begun putting out clandestine feelers to Lech Walesa to see if the old shipyard militant might be willing to come on board and bring some of his big hitters with him.

The communists’ real hope was that by giving token jobs in
government
to some of the old rebels they could bring them on board and create an illusion of greater democracy. Formal discussions, known as the Round Table Talks had begun in February 1989 and continued until April, by which time the communists would have discovered that what the old rebels wanted was not an illusion, but the real thing. Or at least as close an approximation as anyone thought possible. The compromise that was finally hammered out legalised Solidarity again and allowed for free elections to the Sejm (parliament), although initially at least to just one third of the seats. There would also be a new upper house of parliament, the senate, with no restrictions on candidates for election, and a new post of president. The presidency was the clever bit. Solidarity was satisfied because having an elected executive president would end the
tradition
that the country was effectively ruled by the general secretary of
the Communist Party. The communists were satisfied because it was agreed that in the first instance at least, the only candidate on the ballot paper would be the general secretary of the Communist Party.

But nothing went quite as planned. When the elections were held on June 4th, Solidarity won every single seat up for election to the Sejm and nearly all the seats in the new upper house. To rub in the lesson, when all the members of parliament voted to elect the
president
, Jaruzelski, despite being the only candidate, won by only a single vote, helped by a few Solidarity members who felt obliged to honour the Round Table agreement. The rest of the summer would be spent in trying to settle the composition of a new government which would be led for the first time since 1945 by a non-communist.

Almost simultaneously things were moving equally fast in Hungary where ‘goulash communism’ had been taking the hard edges off the system for years. The old hardliner Janos Kadar had been replaced as Communist Party leader by the more
reformminded
Imre Poszgay. As in Poland, trade unions had been legalised, while the ghosts of the bloody anti-Soviet uprising of 1956 had literally been buried – the body of Imre Nagy, executed in 1958, was removed from an obscure corner of the city cemetery and given a formal burial which attracted a crowd of 100,000.

There had also been a steady rapprochement with neutral Austria with which it had for so long prior to 1918 been united. On June 27th, barely three weeks after the elections in Poland turned old assumptions about the settled order in Eastern Europe on their head, the foreign ministers of the two neighbouring little countries together took the cutters to a section of barbed wire on the border. It was the first serious crack in the Iron Curtain. From now on, the Hungarians had declared they would no longer maintain a manned surveillance network along the frontier. It was a signal of how far things had already moved in Budapest that the Communist Party no longer feared its citizens would flee en masse. But then Hungarians did not have a wealthy big brother who spoke the same language waiting to embrace them.

On August 19th, at the instigation of several of the smaller new political parties being set up, and Otto von Habsburg, the then already septuagenarian son of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor,
a ‘pan-European picnic’ was organised on the frontier between the two countries near the town of Sopron. The event was eventually given the blessing even of the communists. Although the frontier could theoretically be crossed only with valid passports at
recognised
border points, the rules were suspended for the day. The intention was for a joint Austrian and Hungarian celebration of the new warmth in their relationship with speeches by invited
dignitaries
, including Habsburg, talking warmly about a new vision of Europe’s future.

But one group had a vision of Europe’s present, and saw it in the open frontier: several hundred East Germans who had been on holiday in Hungary. Even as the first invited Austrian guests – local dignitaries, journalists and college students – were crossing the border, a large group of East Germans appeared in the background, walking determinedly towards the frontier. They only stopped walking when they got within metres of it; they started running instead. Within minutes several hundred of them were on Austrian soil, outside the Warsaw Pact, and there was no way – particularly in the current climate – that the Hungarians were going to bring them back. Or, as it turned out, stop any more. Although in theory they were obliged to check the passports of any non-Hungarian or non-Austrian crossing the border, it simply became
impracticable
for them to do so. As the day progressed more and more East Germans turned up, some singly, some in families, some in larger groups. The Hungarians, busy with their pre-arranged event, found the East Germans simply pushing past them. By the end of the day the little wine-growing village of St Margarethen on the Austrian side of the frontier was swamped by fellow German-speakers with the long unheard accents of Saxony and Brandenburg.

The quick-thinking mayor organised accommodation and phoned the West German Embassy in Vienna, and within hours the West German Embassy in Budapest had sent passports by bus for the new citizens. The Berlin Wall was still standing and
according
to Erich Honecker, would ‘stand for a hundred years’, but all of a sudden the rusty Iron Curtain had started to crack. By
September
any semblance of communist solidarity disappeared when the Hungarians simply announced that as far as they were concerned,
the border to Austria was open to anyone who cared to cross. East Germans did so in their thousands. Honecker put pressure on Prague to prevent East Germans crossing into Hungary and then, as the West German Embassy there filled to overflowing with
would-be
refugees, he closed the border to Czechoslovakia. East Germany was now truly the world’s largest prison camp for its own citizens. But it was too much, much too late. West German estimates were that nearly 40,000 inhabitants of the GDR had opted for a one-way ticket to the West. And those that were left could only fume at their rulers.

The hectic pace of events during that summer had taken its toll on foreign correspondents too. Over the course of four months I spent only the occasional weekend with my wife and young family, as I flitted from one Eastern European country to another. Events on the other side of the world weighed heavily on my mind. After the bloody crackdown on dissident protesters in Beijing’s
Tiananmen
Square, how long could it be before the Soviet Army did what it had done every previous time – East Berlin 1953, Budapest 1956, Prague 1968 and surely Warsaw 1981 had the Poles not jumped in first and done it for them? Except instead of the old men in the
Forbidden
Palace, we had the new man in the Kremlin. But was that really cause enough for hope? And would the knives come out in the politburo first?

June saw me in Warsaw and Moscow, then on Gorbachev’s tail for his tour of West Germany – where he was treated like a film star rather than the leader of a supposedly hostile nation. In July I was back in Warsaw for the aftermath of the elections, then in Yugoslavia where an upstart politician called Slobodan Milosevic was
threatening
the country’s fragile racial mix by inciting hatred of the majority Albanians in the Serb province of Kosovo. Then back to Poland, to Warsaw and Gdansk, and on to Hungary with US President George Bush (the first) promising US dollars in return for reform that would undermine communism terminally, in the setting of Budapest’s Karl Marx University.

In a summer that was an endless succession of filing deadlines, airport departure lounges and improbable events on the ground, I had frequent reason to bless a minor Western revolution: in
computers. Instead of a portable typewriter – which were never that portable – or scribbled longhand notes that had then to be read to copytakers back in London, which could lead to the sort of error that once saw the Warsaw Pact become the Walsall Pact – there was the Tandy 200. A clunky but functional ‘portable computer’ that was effectively little more than an electronic typewriter with an LCD black-on-green display, the Tandy was the journalist’s lifesaver. It had a full-sized QWERTY keyboard and was powered by four AA batteries, the sort you could buy just about anywhere in the world, even behind the Iron Curtain. There was also the benefit of being able to send your copy directly into the newspaper’s own computer systems.

The miracle of written words transformed into electronic signals and transmitted over the ether is so common now that it seems antique to remember that just twenty years ago, the most successful way to do it was to affix two ‘crocodile clips’ from the Tandy’s output directly to telephone wires. This occasioned many a travelling
correspondent
being banned from the world’s top hotels after being found taking a hammer to gain access to the telephone sockets in his (or her) room. The less destructive way was to attach something known as acoustic couplers – two foam pads with elastic tape and Velcro fasteners – to the telephone handset. This had the advantage that it could even be used from a public call box. But it had the
disadvantage
that the aural transmission was more liable to corrupt, resulting in garbled text. There was also the fact that to the general public it looked pretty stupid. I vividly remember standing with my finger to my lips in a West Berlin phone box on a wet night while frustrated and angry would-be callers rapped on the glass,
wondering
why the man inside was not using the phone but instead had a grey box with wires coming from it attached to the receiver clamped in his armpit.

By the beginning of October my trusty Tandy and I had taken up residence in the ancient university city of Leipzig where a liberal nexus of students and the arts community had begun regular marches around the Nikolaikirche, once again the Protestant churches acting as not so much the provocateur of dissent as an alternative focal point for those who dared to differ from the party
line. These had graduated into weekly events attracting ever larger numbers, unprecedented outpourings of public dissent, carrying banners with what was for the regime – if only they had recognised it – a message that should have been even more threatening than those conveyed by the people who had voted with their feet: ‘
We
are the people,’ they declared, in pointed contrast to the ‘People’s Police’ and other organs of state which had the attribute stuck on them as if the word alone somehow exempted them from democratic scrutiny. And more pertinently still: ‘We’re staying here.’ When they chanted that on the doorsteps of the local Stasi headquarters there were those inside who for the first time began to wonder what it meant for them.

The marches were peaceful but brooding and watched by massed numbers of policemen in uniform and out of it. Afterwards I drove uneasily but deliberately past Soviet bases on the outskirts of the city, a weather eye watching – while pretending not to – for any signs of imminent mobilisation. If the tanks rolled, surely they would start here. But the tanks stayed where they were.

By the end of September things had gone so far that I wrote a
double-page
spread for
The Sunday Times
which now seems remarkably prophetic, but which then, I freely admit even I thought, was
literally
pushing the boundaries of the possible. Headed, ‘One People. One Germany?’ I declared: ‘The scenario for reunification is
complicated
but not unimaginable.’ My scenario was not followed to the letter, but then I had committed the mistake of assuming politics and logic would fuel the progress of history, instead of more potent human factors: emotion and accident.

It was an unnaturally balmy evening when I drove my rented BMW round the familiar corner from Schönhauser Allee into Metzer Strasse, parked and strolled over to the pub, only to see Bärbel leaning out of the window as if it were a summer’s night. The weather was mild, but hardly warm. She looked flushed. I waved up and asked it there was something the matter. She dabbed at her eye and tried to answer but her voice was all choked up and she just shook her head.

Inside, Horst, who had long since finished his military service, was working behind the bar with his young wife Sylvia. He dried his
hands, wet from wiping tables, shook mine and gave a cautionary glance around the pub. He motioned to Sylvia to pour me a beer as he took me to one side and said the words which explained
everything
: ‘Kerstin’s done a runner, gone West.’ As I swallowed the bombshell, he dropped another: ‘Mother’s upstairs. She’s a bit upset, in a mixed-up sort of way. We’ve just seen them on television.’

Bärbel’s first indication that her eldest daughter was about to vanish from her life had come on Tuesday. The news was just
beginning
to sink in that East Germany’s communist rulers had closed the border to Czechoslovakia. Kerstin called her mother and said in meaningful tones that she and her common-law husband, Andreas, had decided they would, after all, take that holiday in Poland. She would leave the keys to the flat with her father-in-law. And then the fateful phrase: ‘He’ll know what to do with the furniture.’