The Year that Changed the World (24 page)

As the celebrants dined in the splendor of the Palace of the Republic, protesters gathered in the square outside. Even within the salon where Gorbachev and Honecker sat, their voices could be heard:
“Gorbi, hilf uns!
Gorbi, help us!” Police barricaded the street, so the demonstrators marched along the river Spree behind the palace. Krenz and Schabowski left the hall to see. They also compared notes. Soviet foreign ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov was at Schabowski's table. “I told him things would change soon.” Krenz spoke with one of Gorbachev's aides and made a similar allusion. Neither knew for sure whether the Soviet leader would know what they meant. Meanwhile, Schabowski noticed secret police chief Erich Mielke leaving the reception. The few hundred marchers outside the Palace of the Republic at the beginning of dinner had now been joined by thousands of others. Mielke had gone to tend to the messiness. How dare they, on this of all days? “He gave orders to beat them,” Schabowski said.

I had arrived from Budapest that afternoon, too late for the official celebrations. The center of Berlin, near Honecker's ministries, was empty of life. But some blocks to the north, in the gritty working-class neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, young people were gathering in the thousands. At Gethsemane Church in Schonhauser Allee, known as the “rebel church” because of its support for the suddenly growing East German protest movement, so many people had come to debate the political situation that I could hardly wedge inside. In the surrounding streets, in windows and along tramlines, people held lit candles.
“Keine Gewalt,”
they called out. “No violence.” They did not want to provoke the riot-clad security forces who in the darkness were erecting metal barriers and deploying around the neighborhood.

At one intersection, a crowd of several hundred protesters gathered to cheer themselves and jeer the regime. They waved to passing trams; the riders waved back or flashed victory signs. A double row of white-helmeted riot police, armed with clear-plastic shields and truncheons, faced off against them, closing the street. It was a close space and eerily intimate. Kids sat on the cobbled paving stones and sidewalks,
candles cupped in their hands, flickering with a gentle yellow glow. A young man started up a conversation with one of the policemen:

“If you are for law, why are you beating us up?”

“We don't have to be having this conversation,” the policeman replied.

“There's only one way to avoid violence. That's to talk.”

“Why don't you talk through the newspapers? Or wait to see what happens in 1990,” at the upcoming party congress.

The youth lit a cigarette for the cop, who lifted the Plexiglas visor shielding his face, saying, “We have to start now. That's why we are on the streets tonight.”

At precisely that instant, the commander of the guard barked an order through his megaphone. “This is the People's Police! Disperse!” Abruptly, the visors went down and the police charged into the line of protesters. With surprised shouts, the crowd turned and fled. Some went down and were manhandled into police vans. Police dogs strained at their leashes. I'd taken off, too, an Olympic sprinter going for the gold. In all my travels through Eastern Europe's turmoil, this was my first brush with violence. I did not shine.

The demonstrations that erupted that night and the next were the first in Berlin and, so far, the largest in the country. Similar protests broke out in Dresden, Leipzig, Plauen, Chemnitz, Jena and Potsdam. Mielke dispatched sixteen thousand police into the streets of Berlin alone that night, wielding truncheons and spraying demonstrators with tear gas and water cannon. Many came from special antiterrorist units; others were thugs from the so-called People's Militia, uniformed in jeans, white sneakers and leather bomber jackets. They were particularly vicious, swaggering and cocksure, picking fights and randomly grabbing people and kicking them to the ground. More than a thousand people were arrested, many spending more than a week in jail, where they were beaten and packed into densely crowded cells. Hundreds were injured. Foreign journalists were expelled from East Berlin. Phone lines to the West were cut. “Happy birthday, police state!” one protester shouted as he fled. Another described the scene as a “Stasi Oktoberfest.” Gorbachev was not impressed.

For years there was no opposition to speak of in East Germany. The ubiquitous Stasi, the largest and best-trained secret police in Eastern Europe, ruthlessly rooted out dissent in virtually every sphere of life. But the landscape had recently begun to change. A nascent opposition emerged and quickly gathered strength. As Havel put it of the Czechs, East Germans were finally “finding their courage.” The question was how far Erich Honecker would go in putting them down. The fear in all quarters was a German Tiananmen.

At first, these groups were not overtly political. That spring, a tiny group of eco-activists, Umwelt Bibliothek, called on the government to take sterner measures to combat pollution. A group of several dozen rock musicians wrote an open letter to a West Berlin newspaper complaining that they were “sick of being criminalized” by the regime. An association of several hundred union and party officials calling themselves the United Left emerged over the summer promoting “free democratic socialism.” Then, in mid-September, as East Germans began their sprint through the hole in the Iron Curtain cut by Hungary, four thousand people in Leipzig signed a petition supporting a new independent party known as Neues Forum, or New Forum. In a country where initialing a political manifesto could mean interrogation, loss of work and possibly jail, this was a dramatic development. Significantly, the signatories included a large number of young, reform-minded party officials, including a deputy chairman of Honecker's ruling State Council. Clearly, people were beginning to feel safety in numbers. The implications were not lost on East German authorities. When leaders of the New Forum applied to register their organization in twelve of the country's fifteen election districts, they were summarily rejected as “hostile to the state,” an accusation nearly tantamount to treason.

Honecker himself gave this fledgling opposition both a louder voice and a broadly populist cause. The deal he conceived with the Czech government, allowing East German refugees free transit to the West by rail through the GDR, was the proverbial spark that ignited a firestorm. If so many other East Germans were winning their freedom, via Hungary or Prague, why couldn't others be free to travel, as well? On October 4 in Dresden, where the trains were still passing through to the Federal Republic, a mob of demonstrators gathered
near the station, hurling paving stones and shouting epithets at police, who forcibly repelled them, beating many severely. The clashes became daily confrontations, featuring as many as thirty thousand citizens on October 7. The following day, with the security forces preparing more draconian measures, Dresden's mayor met with local churchmen and a citizens' committee to negotiate a “dialogue”—a sign of flexibility by the East German authorities that turned what otherwise promised to be a bloody riot into a delirious street party.

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.”