The Year that Changed the World (25 page)

Honecker looked puzzled. He was not accustomed to interruptions. Stoph continued in bland apparatchikese: “I would like to propose the removal of the general secretary.”

There followed a moment of “grotesque silence,” Schabowski remembered. “Honecker's face went icy. Then he started again as if he hadn't heard, picking up where he left off.”

“Erich,” Stoph interjected, almost gently. “We must discuss this point.”

Honecker appeared to recover his presence of mind. “All right. Let us have a discussion.”

Incredibly, he then proceeded to lead it, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He did not recognize even then how decisively events had turned. He asked who wanted to speak. As hands went up, he recognized those who would, he thought, support him. None did. Not even Erich Mielke, the hard-line head of the secret police.

Finally there came the vote, and with it Honecker's moment of truth. Gazing around the table at those who raised their hands against him, the dictator sat back in his chair and blinked. Then abruptly, he did what no one expected. Humbly, mutely, said Schabowski, “Erich raised his hand with the rest of them,” a true communist to the end.

Poor Egon Krenz. The revolutions in Eastern Europe began as a subtle interplay of signs and symbols, but lately the message had become quite plain. Had he heeded the placards brandished by the crowds outside his offices, he could easily have foretold his future.

Among the more vivid was one composed of the word
Alt
(old) repeated dozens more times in small black print to create the letters of two larger words—
Neu?
(New?)
Nein.
Another featured a caricature of “Egon the Krenzman,” with his toothy smile and bristly hair, nestled in bed and dressed in the bonnet and nightgown of Little Red Riding Hood. “Grandmother, what big teeth you have!”

To say that East Germans greeted their new leader with skepticism would be an understatement. “Grinning Egon”—another appellation—stepped into Erich Honecker's shoes only three weeks after visiting China, where he praised Beijing's bloody repression of the democratic protests in Tiananmen Square. After ousting Honecker, he immediately set about casting himself as a reformer, promising
Wende
—a dramatic change of direction, new openness and discussion, “dialogue.” Welcome, glasnost and perestroika, GDR-style. He spoke of free elections, an end to censorship, a new constitution. Most important, he promised to rewrite the country's travel laws, offering East Germans what they wanted above all else.

No one believed him. He was, after all, a creature of the system—Honecker's protégé who rose through party ranks on his coattails. Like his mentor, he once headed the Free German Youth. As a member of the Politburo, he exercised ultimate authority over Mielke's hated Stasi. What he promised with one breath, he took back with the next. His first speech to the people whose hearts and minds he hoped to woo was a pastiche of contradictions and false starts. After proposing elections, he reaffirmed the “leading role” of his communist party. Though talking dialogue, he made no concessions to the country's newly emboldened opposition and instead spoke ominously of maintaining “law and order.” As for material prosperity, he proposed to close the gap between East and West with something he called a “market-oriented socialist planned economy.” Not even his own party bought that one. When it came time to approve him as head of state, twenty-six members of the normally rubber-stamp parliament voted against him and another twenty-six abstained. Such a display of independence had never before been seen.

Krenz could not comprehend that he was cursed, that his world had changed elementally. It mattered little that he came with good intentions. People sensed that he was an opportunist, that he was
Honecker's man. His predecessor made sure of that, at least. As a last cruel gesture, in a brilliant act of sabotage, Honecker in resigning proposed a successor: not a “younger man,” in keeping with the official fig leaf of his leaving for “reasons of health,” but Krenz. Schabowski called it “the revenge of the pharaoh.” Honecker knew who brought him down, just as he knew his blessing would do Krenz in. And so it was. Krenz was damaged goods, hamstrung from the get-go. His “reforms” would be seen as impotent holding actions, the cynical manipulations of one who wished only to hold power.

As the days passed, Krenz grew increasingly desperate. In an interview five months later, he would liken it to “riding a whirlwind.” Everything was chaos, he told me. Nothing worked. In his book
Wenn Mauer Fallen,
he described how impossible it was to keep pace with events. “We decided something in the morning,” he wrote, “and had to change it by evening.” Meanwhile, the pressure mounted. On October 20, the day Krenz took office, fifty thousand people marched in Dresden demanding free elections. The next day, thirty-five thousand marched in Plauen and eighty thousand workers struck in Karl-Marx-Stadt. The weekly demonstration in Leipzig that Monday evening drew more than three hundred thousand. On November 4, half a million Berliners gathered on the Alexanderplatz in the city center to demand the right to travel freely.

If there was any moment when Krenz might have played the hero, salvaged some legitimacy for his rule, it was then. All he had to do was give people what they asked for: the right to come and go unhindered. But he could not break with the past. The very existence of the GDR was premised on social control, as was his own rule. So he moved by cautious shuffles and half steps, giving up as little as possible at every point, which turned out to be never quite enough.

He began in late October by promising “liberalizations” of the country's travel laws and assigned a “task force” to study the matter. Could there have been a more classically bureaucratic response than that? On November 1, as protests escalated, he reopened the border to Czechoslovakia and proposed to allow East Germans to visit the West from there. When that sparked even more unrest, he offered yet another timid compromise: travel abroad for up to a month a year, as approved by duly designated authorities. That very night—Monday,
November 6—brought another huge demonstration in Leipzig, close to a million strong. This time the people demanded not only free travel but, for the first time, an end to communism itself.

Meanwhile, more East Germans than ever were fleeing the country. Krenz's decision to reopen the border to Czechoslovakia sparked a second massive exodus. Those who had not made a dash for freedom in September, and regretted it, now seized their moment. Once again, the West German embassy in Prague was overwhelmed with asylum seekers. This time, however, the Czech government played no games with trains. It quickly announced that East Germans would be free to cross its borders to the Federal Republic without condition. Over the weekend of November 4–5 alone, some twenty-five thousand East Germans did so. In a telephone call with President Bush on October 23, Helmut Kohl mentioned a conversation he had recently had with Gorbachev. The Russian leader told how he had pushed Honecker hard to reform during his recent visit. But neither man had much confidence in the leadership, including Egon Krenz. “The changes in the GDR are quite dramatic,” Kohl told Bush. “Our estimates are that by Christmas we will have reached a total of 150,000 refugees, with an average age under thirty.” (The actual number would exceed 250,000 by November 9.) It was the Great Escape all over again, only much, much bigger.

Late one afternoon on a wet and blustery day in early November—November 8, to be precise—I drove into the Bavarian mountains that range along the Czech frontier, just where East and West Germany and Czechoslovakia met. A long, narrow winding road ends at the town of Schirndling, hardly more than a few houses and a gas station clinging to the saddle of a piney ridge marking the border. On the way up, I passed caravans of Trabants trundling down in the opposite direction, their lights blinking feebly every time they hit a bump.

None of that prepared me for the scene at the border. Stretching into the distance, as far as I could see into the valley falling away below, was a double line of cars. Nearly every one was full. Beleaguered West German guards checked the East Germans' papers as Red Cross workers passed out tea and coffee. Volunteers from the West German automobile association worked around the clock to repair spluttering
cars that were on the verge of giving out. The chief of the checkpoint looked as if he had not slept in days. “We are seeing more than ten thousand refugees every day,” he said wearily. “They keep coming, all day and all night. We do not expect a letup.” He figured one hundred thousand people had crossed over since the border opened roughly a week ago.

This was psychosis, a mass migration feeding on itself. “Twenty of my friends have gone to the West this year,” said a twenty-three-year-old waiter from Jena. A young man, leaving with his girlfriend, told me how it had grown “lonely” back home. “We have as many friends in Frankfurt now as we do in Erfurt.” A woman who hitchhiked through Czechoslovakia with her husband and young child said that the sight of so many people leaving made her pick up and go, too. “We didn't want to be the last ones to leave and turn out the lights.”

At Schirndling, I realized with sudden and perfect clarity that this could not go on. The German Democratic Republic was hollowing out. In Leipzig, one refugee told me, half of the city's bus drivers had left. Retirees were coming back on the job; army soldiers were being assigned to fill in. A young East German from a village on the Baltic, sailboard strapped to the top of his car, told how his parents were having trouble finding the sugar, almonds and flour they needed to run their bakery. Food and other scarce goods were piling up in warehouses because so many truck drivers had disappeared. Buildings were without heat and water because the superintendents had left. Trains ran late because the brakeman or the switchboard operator or the engineer was gone. People would go home one day, as usual, never to be seen again. The manager of a factory sports team in Dresden crossed the border, a soccer ball in the backseat of his car. His team had recently gone on holiday in Czechoslovakia. Only half came back, he said with a rueful laugh. “How can you run a factory when you do not know how many of your employees will show up each morning?” Highly trained professionals were leaving in particularly large numbers. A third of the doctors at Magdeburg's prestigious medical academy failed to return from vacation over the summer; forty-one nurses and doctors had left East Berlin's Hedwig Hospital in recent months. Wittenberg's hospital for the disabled faced closure because of staff losses. So did its nursing home. “If you pull enough bricks out of a
wall, it will fall down,” a British diplomat had told me in East Berlin a few weeks earlier. He was right. The German Democratic Republic was close to collapse.

I had planned to spend the night in Nuremberg, the nearest large town to Schirndling and fly back to Bonn in the morning. My gut told me not to.
This cannot go on.
Sensing that I had to move, fast, I got in my rented BMW and made my way down the mountain, threading through the smoking Trabants. I accelerated to something exceeding 140 miles per hour, once I hit the autobahn, toward midnight, tendrils of fog coiled over the road in the cold dampness, interspersed far ahead in my headlights with faint, flickering red dots. What could they be? It was too cold for fireflies… Almost too late, I realized they were the dim taillights of the little Trabbis, wandering down the center of the autobahn at about thirty miles an hour. They shook as I swerved and blew by.

Some I stopped to help. They parked by the side of the highway, sometimes in the highway. Which way is Hamburg? Cologne? Dortmund? It was so cold and windy that my map shattered, like glass. Did I have a phone book for Germany? They had relatives in the West and wanted to call. I asked in what city. They were not sure. “You mean, there are many phone books?” I arrived at my bureau in Bonn about six hours later, just before dawn, and wrote frantically through the morning about all that I had seen. It would become
Newsweek
's next cover story. Then I caught a midafternoon flight for Berlin. A few minutes after I crossed into the eastern sector later that evening, GDR police closed the border. To this day, I still feel queasy at how close I came to missing all that would happen next.

Thursday, November 9, 1989. Egon Krenz began his day early. He arrived at the office well before first light, having left it only hours earlier. By 9 a.m. he was presiding over an emergency summit of the Central Committee. His fledgling government was in meltdown. The communist rank and file were screaming. Like the ordinary citizens marching in a dozen cities, they too had lost faith—in their party, in the regime, in one another. The old policies obviously had to be scrapped. New policies were required. The generation of hard-line apparatchiks clearly had to go, for the times demanded new faces. But who, how, what, when?

Krenz had been in full crisis-management mode from the moment he took office. In a tumultuous session the day before, five holdovers from the old regime were brusquely tossed out. Among them, the titular prime minister, Willi Stoph, who had been the first to confront Honecker. Erich Mielke, the minister of state security, and a pungent bouquet of other retrogrades were also gone. In their place, Krenz appointed the popular, reform-minded mayor of Dresden, Hans Modrow, who had played a key role in preventing violence during the Leipzig marches, as well as an opposition writer named Christa Wolf. But even that was not enough. The communist party was consumed in a fury of self-criticism and mutual denunciation.

The historian Charles Maier captured the mood in his dramatic account of the GDR's final days,
Dissolution.
Delegates pointed fingers. You should resign! No, you should! The regime's handling of the demonstrations came under biting attack, with acrimonious calls for investigations. Specifics were deleted from the official minutes,
for fear of pouring oil on the fire. “The working class is so angry that they are going to the barricades,” one enraged delegate declared. “They're howling, ‘Get the party out of the factories.' They want to cut the unions, get rid of the party secretaries.”