On the evening of November 9th 1989 the first breach was made in the Berlin Wall, which had divided Germany – and the world – for a generation. In the first of a four-part series, DEREK SCALLY, in Berlin, retraces the chain of events leading up to that historic moment 20 years ago
ON A CHILLY, drizzly morning in a weed-choked field, a crooked line of three-metre-high concrete panels obscures the horizon.Behind a derelict train station, in a field that is both the centre of the city and the middle of nowhere, stands a crumbling, forgotten stretch of the Berlin Wall.
Stripped of its land-mines and razor-wire, the once infamous monument to ideological struggle is the modern-day equivalent of Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias, “a colossal wreck, boundless and bare”, surplus to requirements and unable any longer to inspire awe.
But for many Berliners, even 20 years on, the sight of this wall summons up pure hatred.
Watching from an old watchtower nearby is Jürgen Litfin. It was from this tower, now Litfin’s private museum, that an East German border guard once spotted Litfin’s brother, Günter, in the nearby canal, aimed his rifle and fired. The handsome 23-year-old easterner had found a new job and apartment in West Berlin just days before the border was sealed on August 13th 1961. He told his younger brother, Jürgen, he had found a safe crossing spot and made a break for it on August 24th.
Hours earlier, unknown to him and the rest of the world, the East German border guards had been issued secret shoot-to-kill orders.
West Berlin newspapers ran shocking pictures of Günter’s bloated, lifeless body being fished from the canal, the Berlin Wall’s first victim. At least another 135 deaths would follow, and Jürgen Litfin is still angry.
“The Stasi forbade us from telling anyone how Günter really died. They watched us round the clock until we left for the West in 1981,” he says. “I simply cannot understand people who say they miss that state. It wasn’t a state, it was a criminal clique.”
The retreating memory of the Berlin Wall hasn’t made dealing with its legacy any less complex. Berlin, once a rough-and-ready Cold War frontier town, is now Europe’s capital of cool. But after four decades defined by division, the city still struggles to redefine its reason for being, just as Germany is still searching for its place in the world.
Today Germans are debating what they have achieved in the past 20 years. But two decades of hindsight have helped them realise now that what happened on November 9th 1989 was simply the last link in a chain of extraordinary events.
“The peaceful revolution of 1989 was the first successful revolution in Germany history, but it was part of a more extensive revolution that began in 1980 in Poland with the foundation of Solidarity as the first independent trade union,” says Germany’s pre-eminent historian, Prof Heinrich August Winkler. “It wasn’t a linear transformation from there to the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were setbacks and repression along the way, but Gdansk was the key starting point.”
Led by the moustachioed electrician, Lech Walesa, the Polish shipyard workers challenged the socialist state’s claim that it was ruled by the people for the people, exposing the lie of its “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
In neighbouring East Germany, the burgeoning civil rights movement cheered on Walesa and, in 1985, welcomed the rise to power of the new reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. East Germany’s elderly leader, Erich Honecker was less than enamoured of these developments, but his attempts to ignore reforms by reinforcing his own authority would eventually undermine his ruling SED party.
The beginning of the end came with East German local elections in May 1989. The final results were, as usual, dictated from SED headquarters, but unknown to party leaders, members of an East Berlin church youth group had fanned out across the city to collate as much information as they could from public polling-centre counts. They found what they were looking for – huge contradictions between their results and the “official” numbers – and smuggled the proof to West German television, which, in turn, beamed it back into East German homes.
“Frustration with the system was so great that at some point there was going to be a straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Stephan Hilsberg, one of the May election-watchers. “This was it.”
Emboldened and enraged, ordinary people stepped out of the shadows to let off steam at Monday-night meetings within the relative safety of church walls.
“It was marvellous to see how people could finally talk and release years of pent-up frustrations,” says Pastor Christian Führer of St Nicholas’s Church in Leipzig, organiser of one of the first “peace prayer” evenings. “The people learned to speak again, to stand tall.”
On October 9th, 70,000 courageous Leipzigers overcame their fear of violence and, four months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, marched for free elections and freedom to travel. The police on standby didn’t intervene, and nothing would ever be same again.
THE SIGNAL from Leipzig – that marches would be tolerated – was picked up around the country and soon hundreds of thousands of citizens were on their feet. The higher the turnout, the lower the personal risk.
"The Leipzig march was the biggest since the East Berlin workers' revolt was put down violently in 1953," says veteran journalist Elizabeth Pond, who covered the Prague Spring, Poland's Solidarity movement and the fall of the wall. "In each of these places a word encapsulated the issue. In Prague it was 'decency', in Gdansk it was 'dignity'. In East Germany it was ' bevormündung' (bullying paternalism). People were tired of the nanny state, tired of being told what to do and what to think, of not being allowed to travel. Something just gave."
Those not marching were fleeing the country. Tens of thousands of East Germans fled through the open Hungary/Austria border, others took refuge in the West German embassy in Prague.
Even East Germany’s 40th anniversary celebrations on October 7th turned into a political protest. Columns of marching young people ignored Honecker, Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro and, as they passed the Soviet leader on the viewing stand, chanted: “Gorby, help us!” He did, by withdrawing his support for the East German leadership.
Days later, Erich Honecker was forcibly retired and a new politburo worked around the clock to find an antidote to the reform fever gripping the people – but nothing worked. With Moscow backing away and dizzying levels of national debt becoming more apparent, the game was up.
At a televised press conference on the evening of November 9th, politburo member Günter Schabowski read out the details of a cobbled-together travel law. East German citizens, he said, would be permitted to leave the country with immediate effect, provided they filled out the necessary paperwork. That final, decisive detail got lost in the excitement when the first news wire report – “East German Borders Open” – went out at 7.05pm.
Five kilometres north of that press conference, at the Bornholmer Bridge checkpoint, border guard and Stasi officer Harald Jäger was watching the press conference.
“When I heard ‘with immediate effect’, I almost choked on my lentil soup,” he says. “I shouted at the television, ‘What sort of shit is he talking?’.”
Within an hour, journalist Siegbert Schefke had arrived, demanding to cross (see panel, below left). Jäger refused. Three hours later, all the nervous border guard could see was a crowd of angry faces stretching down the Bornholmer Strasse. He called his superiors, told them he couldn’t hold the crowd any longer, and hung up before waiting for an answer.
“Lift the barrier!” he remembers calling, his words forming a cloud of steam into the freezing night air.
The red-and-white barrier rose and, with a triumphant “Ja!”, the crowd surged forward.
Around the city, one checkpoint after another was opened and a sea of Berliners washed through.
“Anyone who’s asleep tonight is dead!” laughed easterner Andreas Rudolph into a television camera as he crossed the Bornholmer Bridge into West Berlin.
Some 20 years on, the smile returns to his face when he remembers that night.
“It was just unbelievable,” he says. “People cried, waved, there was champagne everywhere. It was like we had all won the Grand Prix!”
After 28 years, Berlin was whole again. As mayor Walter Momper remarked the following morning: “Last night, the Germans were the happiest people on earth.”
The euphoria didn’t last long. With the ink barely dry on the October 1990 German unification agreement, the government introduced a “solidarity” income-tax surcharge to finance the east’s reconstruction. But instead of the “blossoming landscapes” promised by Chancellor Kohl, mass unemployment spread like a plague as one aged state factory after another was mothballed.
After pulling down the border and falling into each other’s arms, the two Germanys retreated, sulking, into their respective corners as the seemingly endless Kohl era trundled on.
His successor in 1998, Gerhard Schröder, brought change as promised, but not what anyone expected. The united Germany was older and poorer than West Germany, he argued, and could no longer afford the old welfare state.
His 2003 slash-and-burn of the social welfare system had a threefold effect: it buried the the last trace of the old federal republic; it ultimately cost Schröder his job; and it gave the kiss of life to the struggling rump of the SED party. Renamed the Left Party, it has transformed the old four-party Bonn system into a five-party Berlin republic.
This 20th anniversary has been a chance for reflection, particularly on the unprecedented eastern reconstruction programme that has cost €1.6 trillion and counting. And the mood?
"The facts of unification are far better than the mood," says Prof Klaus Schroeder, an East German expert at Berlin's Free University and author of a fascinating study into the reconstruction programme. He found that around 80 per cent of easterners now have a standard of living identical to that of their western cousins. They are even more likely to own a car. "The differences we still have in eastern and western Germany are more regional than historical, with some regions in the former East doing better than many western areas. Slowly people are coming to accept that."
Germany has spent the last year building up to this anniversary. By now, practically everyone who was anyone in 1989 has written their memoirs and polished their soundbites, while Berlin has got its marketing machinery in gear to sell the city to a worldwide audience.
There's only one thing missing: the wall. For 28 years, Berliners did their best to ignore the ugly structure, and as Hugo Hamilton points out in his 1990 novel, Surrogate City, only paid heed to it when visitors were in town. That Berlin Wall nonchalance vanished when the chance came to demolish it, first by so-called "wallpeckers" with hammers and chisels, then using diggers and cranes.
Hans Martin Fleischer, who owns the first panels of the wall removed at Potsdamer Platz in 1990, suggests that the hated structure vanished before Berliners could make their peace with it. "While the rest of the world has a positive association with the wall – its fall – Berlin still has a negative feeling towards it," he says. "This monstrosity divided families for 28 years. Putting aside its historical context, for many Berliners it is simply embarrassing that they treated their own own people so badly. That memory is still being airbrushed out."
That denial has been apparent in the preparations for the anniversary. When a competition to pick a design for a monument to German division and unity ended in disagreement earlier this year, the city government ended the public debate. Instead, in time for the anniversary, the longest stretch of inner-city wall, the East Side Gallery, has been given a nip, tuck and paint job and now looks more like Las Vegas than Berlin.
Meanwhile, at the Brandenburg Gate, organisers of the official anniversary ceremony on November 9th plan to knock over, domino-style, painted polystyrene panels of replica wall. For many Berliners, it's all too corporate, touristic and impersonal.
Instead, they will gather with family and friends to raise a glass to that freezing, searing night 20 years ago and the prescient words of Bertolt Brecht: "In time, soft, flowing water triumphs over stone."
'If we're not back in an hour, we're in the west'
Siegbert Schefke was the man who secretly filmed the first protests in Leipzig on October 9th and the first man to cross the Berlin border at Bornholmer Bridge on November 9th:
‘WE HEARD about the press conference saying the border was open and told the others at our local pub near the Bornholmer Bridge but they didn’t believe us.
“We headed off to have a look and said: ‘If we’re not back in an hour, we’re in the west. See you at the Cuckoo’s Nest bar in Kreuzberg at midnight.’
“We were the first on the Bornholmer Bridge and came face to face with the border guard, Jäger. I repeated to him Schabowski’s words that permission to cross the border had been granted immediately, and ordered Jäger to follow the order. ‘No, no, no,’ he kept repeating.
“After we argued for a while, and the crowd really began to build behind us, demanding to cross, I told him: ‘Well, just let the troublemakers over and then things will calm down.’ So he lifted the barrier, we crossed, and that was that. It was only later that I noticed he had stamped ‘invalid’ on my ID paper.
“The first person we met over the bridge was a taxi driver: his face fell when he saw us ‘Ossis’ coming his way, because he thought we would have no money to pay him. But I had some money and, as we drove off, I was struck for the first time by how big Berlin actually is. We got to the Cuckoo’s Nest and, by midnight, all our friends from the east were there.”
In Monday's paper:
Derek Scally finds out what happened to the East German citizen activists who led the revolution in 1989 and searches for traces of the Berlin Wall today.
Tuesday:
Derek Scally on the new Germany and its place in the world; Denis Staunton on the brief, strange life of West Berlin.
Wednesday:
Dan McLaughlin on the ripple effect of November 1989 throughout central and eastern Europe; Enda O'Doherty on how predictions about life after the Cold War have held up.
