1989 (20 page)

The exodus of young East Germans to the West had touched the lives of everyone who remained, leaving empty spaces at dinner tables and silent toasts to absent friends in corner bars. I still found it a shock to experience it first-hand. I had seen Kerstin grow from a chubby schoolgirl to a sophisticated woman of twenty-two who took a coquettish pride in her resemblance to the young Shirley MacLaine. She had everything to stay for. Kerstin had begun living with Andreas, eight years older and divorced, the previous year. She worked as a waitress in a bowling alley while Andreas was manager of a state-run bar in the relatively pleasant East Berlin suburb of Köpenick. They got a flat near his work and friends and family showered gifts on them, as if they had got married. By East German standards, they had everything: a colour television, new furniture, crystal glassware and even – this was one advantage of Andreas’s age – straight from the production works at Eisenach, the Wartburg car that he had applied to buy thirteen years earlier. It had cost 33,000 Marks, a small fortune. But it seemed this relative affluence had only made them envy all the more the consumerist paradise of the West, suddenly – so unexpectedly – so near. And yet maybe about to become once again as far away as ever.

On Tuesday afternoon they packed only as many clothes as they could reasonably be expected to need for a two-week holiday and headed out on the last sure route to the West: East. They were
taking the risk of a lifetime, saying farewell to family and friends in the full expectation that they might never see them again. The Poles had made it clear that East Germans were being allowed to leave the country for the West only if they had entered legally in the first place. And that was not as easy as people in the West assumed. Citizens of the countries behind the Iron Curtain needed not just passports but visas even to visit another communist state. And visas required an invitation. By chance Andreas and Kerstin had a Polish friend who had invited them months ago to visit for a holiday, but they had had a busy summer and Andreas’s visa had expired. He was entitled in theory to an automatic extension, but it had required a visit to a police station, at tense experience in the current climate. But it had been granted.

I went upstairs to the flat and found Bärbel sprawled back on the sofa next to Alex, her eyes brimming. She had feared they would be found out or turned back at the border on some technicality. She had feared even more that they would not be, and then who knew when or if she would ever see them again? And then that evening, less than an hour before I had turned up as she and Alex had sat around their little black-and-white television watching the news on the West German channel ARD, they suddenly caught sight of Kerstin and Andreas grinning happily in the crowd in the grounds of the West German Embassy. Bärbel had burst into tears immediately.

Then as we sat there, still trying to take in what was happening, and what it all meant, the phone rang. It was Andreas, calling from Warsaw. He couldn’t talk long – international phone lines were hard to get hold of – just to say they were registered at the embassy and had been given bed and breakfast privately until their fate was decided. But the main thing was they had been given assurances that they would not be sent back.

Bärbel fell back onto the sofa and lit up a cigarette in relief, tears welling again in her eyes. Alex had a quick word before putting the phone down and then turned to us with an expression of angry
exasperation
on his face: ‘You won’t believe it? That thickhead has sold the car to a Polish policeman. What did he get for it? A lousy one hundred American dollars. It won’t be enough to buy him
breakfast
in West Berlin!’ But he was grinning broadly. Seconds later the
phone rang again. It was Renate calling from West Berlin; she had seen the TV, too, and thought she recognised Kerstin. ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it? But I know, awful for you. I must go shopping to cook them a big meal when they get here. They can stay with me as long as they like.’ It was one of those conversations that highlighted the surreal situation: Renate lived barely three kilometres away as the crow flies. But in Berlin crows had a freedom Bärbel couldn’t imagine.

‘But Renate, they’re still in Warsaw. We don’t know how long it will be before they’re allowed out.’ Barely a few weeks earlier, people had been careful what they said on the phone to the West, worried about who was listening. Now it didn’t seem to matter any more. In fact, it was barely twenty-four hours before Andreas and Kerstin were on their way west.

The previous week an agreement had been reached between the East and West German governments which must have had Erich Honecker gritting his teeth as he signed it, to transport west several thousand East Germans crammed into the embassy in Prague in increasingly intolerable conditions. It was a deal substantially
brokered
by Bonn’s foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (who had been born in the East but fled West in 1952). The calendar helped: Honecker wanted the whole embarrassing episode closed before October 7th, when he would be hosting his fellow Warsaw Pact leaders, including Gorbachev, for a giant jamboree to mark East Germany’s fortieth birthday. The East German official media described it as a humanitarian gesture towards deluded
ungrateful
wretches who were no longer worthy of their citizenship. The refugees would be ‘expelled’ from East Germany. It turned into a fiasco that should have been an omen for what would happen at the upcoming ‘birthday party’.

The asylum seekers – or ‘illegal occupiers’ in East German
government
parlance – were to board East German trains, a significant concession to East Berlin’s nominal sovereignty (they could have simply travelled West across the Czech-West German frontier), and travel across East German territory. This allowed Honecker to claim that rather than his citizens fleeing, he was expelling them. A gesture that was as pathetic as it was legalistic, and one that also backfired. Spectacularly.

In Dresden, the main East German city on the route the trains had to take, thousands of people stormed the tracks and the station, hoping to ‘hitch’ a lift. Police had to use dogs and water cannon to disperse them, under a hail of cobblestones and railway ballast. The trains were held in Prague and it was the dead of night before they finally rumbled through a Dresden station ringed off by armed police.

Now, for what Honecker hoped would be the end of the
embarrassment
– and to avoid a repetition of the chaos caused by the trains from Prague – the stations would be evacuated and sealed off well before the trains from Warsaw to the West passed through.
Ironically
the route they had to take skirted Berlin itself before reaching the border crossing point at Helmstedt, some ninety miles west of West Berlin. Even at a moment like this the old ‘Berlin equation’ still came into play: the deal had been done with West Germany, and West Berlin was not legally part of West Germany. The train was sealed and didn’t stop from the moment it crossed the Polish border until it reached West German soil.

We all sat late into the night at the
Stammtisch
over beer, the last of the Hungarian wine and token Czech apricot schnapps, drinking the health of the fraternal republics who had turned out to be
brothers
after all. Between the tears, they hoped against hope and joked. ‘Why is the socialist hell better than the capitalist hell? Because they keep running out of boiling oil and hot coals.’ The next night Alex and Bärbel slept fitfully, aware that somewhere out there in the dark, Kerstin and Andreas were passing through a darkened,
policeringed
Köpenick station, just a few hundred yards from the home they had so recently abandoned.

I promised to see Kerstin next time I was in West Berlin. ‘Give her my love and tell her to send a photo.’ Bärbel had no idea when she would see her daughter again. Least of all did she – or any of us – imagine it would be in a mere couple of weeks, in circumstances none of us – and nobody anywhere else in Washington, Bonn, London or even Moscow imagined.

Yet the signs were there for all to see. Gorbachev’s urbane,
intelligent
and highly fluent chief spokesman Gennady Gerasimov appeared on the US talk show
Good Morning America
– in itself
something not long before totally unimaginable. Faced with the practical fait accompli of a new order in Eastern Europe, he was asked about the future of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which had laid down that the satellite states did what Moscow told them. With a smile he replied: ‘What we have now is the Sinatra Doctrine. He has a song: “I Did it My Way”.’ The world gasped.

Barely four days later the weather had turned and I was stomping my feet to keep out the cold as I stood opposite the tribune erected on Unter den Linden waiting for the display of military might to mark the East German state’s fortieth birthday. From my position on the steps of the State Opera I had a good view of the stony-faced troopers at the old Prussian royal guard-house – since 1945 renamed as the Monument to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism –
performing
their military ballet, stamping and pirouetting in their jackboots. The troops of the honour guard of the National People’s Army paraded as usual in their ceremonial uniforms of grey with white braid, their jodhpur-clad legs kicking high in the rigid march invented by the Prussian General Yorck to strengthen soldiers’ legs. In German it is called the Yorckmarsch after him; everywhere else it is known as the goose step. Tongues of orange flame licked into the night air, as they carried their torches high, as deliberately blind as ever to their parody of the immense spectacles organised by Hitler against this same backdrop of neoclassical Prussian palaces.

After them came the organised display of the FDJ, the Free German Youth, regiments of young people dragooned into this political version of Boy Scouts or Girl Guides and officially referred to as the ‘Vanguard of the party’. They wore their uniform blue shirts over black jumpers to keep warm and waved their own, smaller,
firebrands
with the jovial enthusiasm of any group of provincial
adolescents
on a night out in the capital, even if it had been organised by their elders. Most had been brought in buses from Cottbus or Rostock, bleak industrial cities whose inhabitants’ view of the world was even then still shaped by an awareness of being on the edge of communism rather than in the middle of Europe. Yet the authorities were tense. Almost every East German in the preceding months had seen a brother or sister, friend or neighbour leave forever. In Leipzig
particularly, there had been problems; in the classrooms,
indoctrination
had been replaced by argument; some of those chosen to join the great birthday parade refused. In Berlin, Alex and Bärbel told their daughter Alexandra, fifteen, not to go even though she was a member of the FDJ. Their prohibition was issued more out of parental care than politics. They knew the organs of repression that had been ever-present throughout their adult lives were flexing their muscles, waiting for the slightest sign of domestic dissent on this of all evenings. Given the chance, they intended to crush it once and for all.

While Honecker feted his brother communists with a formal dinner on a scale none of their populations could ever enjoy, on the streets of East Berlin there were at first only flickering signs of resentment. Literally flickering: candles impaled on railings outside an old redbrick Lutheran church in Prenzlauer Berg, just a few streets from Metzer Eck. The Swords to Ploughshares campaign had faded from visibility but the loose bond between the church and
disaffected
youth had remained. The Gethsemane Church had opened its doors as a venue for peaceful demonstrations of solidarity for those imprisoned after the weekly marches in Leipzig.

The crowd inside was mostly the usual ragtag band of East Berlin’s disenchanted young people, the ones who had outgrown or
deliberately
rejected the conformity of the FDJ. Their uniforms were spiky punk hairdos and denims bought with saved-up D-Marks at the hard currency shops. Their politics were those of disaffection, not revolution. Many of them sat on the floor, hand-rolling cigarettes, dozens hung leaning over the upstairs balconies. This was a
congregation
born out of the church’s support for the dissident ‘peaceniks’. But among them there were a growing number of more respectable ‘middle class’ kids into whose lives the unrest of the summer had already blown a chill wind.

One by one eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds came up to the pulpit to give a personal ‘testimony’. One young girl with long dark hair looked teary-eyed at the crowd and said simply, ‘Pray for my boyfriend, in jail since July.’ After each testimony the church choir sang a brief, ‘Kyrie Eleison’: ‘Lord have mercy.’ They were not
expecting
much mercy from the state. That much was made clear by the
attitude of the watchers outside, tough men in plain clothes that were in themselves as good as a uniform: hooded anoraks and dark, neatly-pressed trousers.

To me, of course, it was all good ‘colour’. I made notes on the folded sheets of A4 paper that too often took the place of a proper notebook. In my head I had already composed the guts of my story for the next day’s paper: it was to be a neat counterpoint to the pompous official celebration set against these scenes of quiet angry repression rounded off with the curious codicil that these days it was the presence of a Soviet leader that gave a glimmer of hope to Germans on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. As it was a Saturday, time was running out fast for a Sunday newspaper man; I would have to get it across to the foreign desk by four p.m. at the latest to make the paper which would be running off the printing presses by six thirty p.m. I was hoping to get the lead story position on one of the foreign pages. If I was lucky, I might even get a line or two on the front, cross-referring to the inside piece, but with a big row brewing about MPs not having to pay the controversial poll tax on their second homes, and interest rates rising to fifteen per cent
threatening
to put the British economy into recession, frankly I doubted it.