Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  By 2.30 in the morning the party began to quieten down. A young subaltern fell asleep in an armchair, propping his head up on his hand. Before retiring, each officer carefully and silently placed another armchair around him until seven or eight chairs had been piled high to create a ‘basket’ which would no doubt disintegrate with an almighty crash once he woke up. When I returned a few hours later for breakfast, I was staggered to see this complicated arrangement intact. To the amusement but clearly not to the surprise of the mess orderlies, the hapless subaltern, fully attired in his mess kit, was still asleep in the armchair in the middle of his ‘crib’, his spurs poking out at the bottom and a flash of scarlet from his sleeve clearly visible. The mess staff moved efficiently around him, laying the tables for breakfast with the quiet industry of another normal day for the regiment.

  It would have been agreeable to recover from these excesses at leisure but, encouraged by East German demonstrations in Leipzig, events were beginning to ‘kick off in Prague’ as an excitable message from the Foreign Desk put it. With great reluctance, I bade farewell to my hosts and took an early-morning train for West Berlin from where I passed quickly into East Berlin and caught the last direct flight to Prague. Apart from the novelty of the plane being full of East German prostitutes, who clearly did a roaring trade in Prague, this journey was uneventful.

  Reaching the Alcron Hotel, then a faded art deco building with an excellent pianist who accompanied the diners with mournful renderings of ‘Night and Day’, I dined with the correspondent of El País, the resourceful Hermann Tertsch. The following day, 28 October, was a Czechoslovak national holiday and Tertsch believed that the military parade scheduled for the morning might provoke some demonstrations; but this struck me as out of the usual Czech character. It was the last Saturday in October and the parade, as suspected, turned out to be a half-hearted affair. On my leaving Wolfenbüttel, an officer of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards had given me a regimental pullover as a souvenir. I donned this in the cold Prague morning and walked to the parade on Wenceslaus Square where I was mistaken for some kind of foreign military personage. One of the Czech military policemen saluted smartly and pointed to a podium where the military attachés were gathered for a ringside view.

  In comparison with the one I had witnessed in Berlin a few weeks earlier, this parade was very unthreatening. It came to life only when the Regimentsmusik appeared playing the great Austrian marches of Fučík and Komzák – the Seyffertitz and Festetics marches, the Castaldo March and even ‘Unter dem Doppeladler’ (Under the Double Eagle) – which carried the troops past me. The Czechoslovak military bands played with vigour and a visible spring came into the soldiers’ step as the drum-rolls announced these parade-ground classics. Was the use of so many old Habsburg marches a subtle sign of defiance?

  No sooner had the parade ended, with the young conscripts disappearing on the arms of their mothers like so many schoolchildren after the first day of term, than the mood on Wenceslaus Square began to turn confrontational. By 2.00 p.m. water cannon were sweeping across it and the riot police, rather quicker off the mark than usual, began clearing the protesters, a motley and not very numerous group.

  Taking up a position between the art nouveau Hotel Europa and the Hotel Jalta, I was just in time to witness a baton charge fell a colleague from the BBC, a man who usually voiced strong left-wing views. Hastily withdrawing into the Hotel Jalta, I found myself with the British embassy’s urbane and musical Chargé d’Affaires, John Macgregor. He seemed to be sheltering an imperious-looking older woman with black hair. He introduced her to me, somewhat implausibly I thought at first, as Shirley Temple. But Mrs Temple-Black, the US Ambassador, was indeed the once world-famous child star of Hollywood in the 1930s. The former lead actress of Curly Top and The Little Colonel had lost none of her charisma or authority. She demanded that the hotel porters open the doors for any demonstrators seeking shelter from the riot police. Her role as a six-year-old prima donna, capable of stamping her foot when she did not get what she wanted, still appeared to colour her personality more than half a century later.

  In addition to these formidable personal qualities, Mrs Temple-Black was a political veteran. She had been in Prague in 1968 as part of a high-level US delegation and had been about to meet the Dubček government when the Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia. Very few diplomats in Prague in 1989 could boast such impressive credentials. As her presence in the hotel lobby became known, she found herself besieged by well-wishers asking for her autograph. By tea-time the demonstration had evaporated and we agreed it was about as unthreatening for the regime as the military parade might have been for NATO.

  At dinner that evening a Czech friend summed up the generally prevailing sentiment rather well. ‘The Western press think that a few thousand hippies in Wenceslaus Square can bring down a government.’ It reminded me of a comment made by the outgoing British Ambassador who insisted that ‘Change in Prague will be slower than anywhere else in the Eastern bloc.’

  The following day the autumn light painted the city in its warmest colours. Along the Malá Strana island there was a richness in the yellow leaves I had not noticed before. As evening fell in the late afternoon, a mist began to form, enveloping the turreted skyline around us in a grey embrace. The few cars in the old town of Prague belonged to the police or to diplomats. The silence of the city in the autumnal air was haunting. Western visitors who were privileged to see the city at this time always had to balance disdain for the regime against the staggering beauty of the environment in which they found themselves. With American friends from Radio Free Europe, I had often posed the question of what would happen to the atmosphere and beauty of Prague and Bohemia once the energy and dynamism of Western capitalism penetrated the city. The brightest of these predicted an ‘Austrianization’ of Bohemia. Prague would become like Salzburg, its architecture beautifully restored and its restaurants and cafés open for business with a friendly smile. This was tempting to believe. We comforted ourselves with the thought, somewhat naive as it turned out, that the unique architectural heritage of Prague could be effectively protected only by the values and mechanisms of the West.

  As darkness fell, I threaded my way through the deserted courtyards and passages leading to the Alcron Hotel. There was a poetry reading at the British embassy later that evening. I had met the new Ambassador, a novelist manqué, in Vienna where he had served as a junior diplomat. His handwritten note on chancery notepaper promised dinner and ‘some excellent Moravian wine’. It proved an entertaining affair. I was placed next to the granddaughter of the founder of modern Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk, a powerful woman with a shock of white hair which fell about her head like a sabre-cut. Thin and angular, she regarded me with some initial frost when I mentioned the infamous article in The Times in 1939 which had suggested, at the height of the Sudetenland crisis, that the Germans should be granted certain territorial concessions at the Czechoslovaks’ expense. Fifty years later, unsurprisingly perhaps, this article still rankled. When I asked her why so few Czechs had demonstrated the day before, she replied that Czechs were ‘not Germans, or indeed Poles or Hungarians. We always had difficulties with these peoples.’ It was clear from her words that revolutionary nationalism would not be as easy to ignite in Czechoslovakia as in Poland, East Germany or Hungary. The revival of such sentiments in those countries would create all kinds of difficulties for Prague, but Madame Masaryk had left me in no doubt that the fire of Czechoslovak nationalism still burned brightly within her soul at least. How many Czechoslovaks could be persuaded to think as she did, and to make a stand? The groups of brave demonstrators I had encountered the day before were not enough.

  As it did not seem that this situation would change over the coming week, the next day I boarded a train for Vienna, briefly stopping off at the Szaparys’ in the Waldviertel for a night. My immediate schedule was demanding: the following day I would fly from Vienna to Rome and from there to London for consultations and thenc
e, after the weekend, to Venice for two days to be a witness at an old friend’s wedding. From there, a direct flight would bring me to Munich and then back to Berlin. Those who wonder how such an exhausting itinerary was possible forget that fewer people flew in those days, aeroplanes were often half empty, airline staff were unfailingly courteous and solicitous, and airports were places of relaxing calm where there were pleasantly few shops. Above all, security checks were non-existent for passengers with hand-luggage. It also helped that it was still a foreign correspondent’s prerogative largely to dictate one’s own itinerary.

  The following Thursday, 9 November, having completed this five-country tour and reached Berlin, I set off for Leipzig by train. In the few days since my last visit, the internal pressure on the regime had grown noticeably. Each evening popular demonstrations took place in Leipzig, watched by the police who, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, made no move to prevent them. Several prominent figures of the DDR took part in these marches. The conductor Kurt Masur, a cultural trophy of the East German regime, could be seen striding hands in pockets among the crowds. His presence gave the demonstrators courage: the police, they reckoned, would surely never turn their water cannon on Maestro Masur. With characteristic German discipline, the throng carefully avoided any provocative behaviour. They followed a pre-planned route around the main town square watched silently by hundreds of East German police. Masur was aloof and nervous. When I approached him and asked in my best high German if he would be prepared to speak to a correspondent of a Western newspaper, he immediately veered off in another direction. Many years later, finding ourselves sitting next to each other on a plane, we recalled the incident. ‘At that stage I had nothing to say,’ he admitted apologetically.

  Returning to the railway station I fell in with some East Germans who had been marching in Leipzig but were now travelling on to Gera. They urged me to join them as I would see another demonstration. This one, they believed, would be more spontaneous than that in Leipzig. Sitting in the Mitropa restaurant carriage with these men, all computer programmers, I was confidently informed that great changes were ahead for East Germany’s government and that Communism was finished. On the topic of reunification with West Germany, my travelling companions were however more circumspect. ‘We will decide when and if that happens.’

  We arrived at Gera just in time to see a mass of candles seal off the police station while thousands of demonstrators marched past the building, leaving their candles fluttering in the cool November night. Some of the banners the marchers were carrying called for a ‘United Fatherland’. The houses around us all seemed deserted and unlit. Was the entire population of the city out on the street? ‘You will see: when we Germans do a revolution, we do it thoroughly,’ one of my new-found acquaintances insisted. We followed the demonstrators towards the magnificent Town Hall where we saw many candles being placed on different monuments commemorating Communism. As in Leipzig, the crowd was orderly and disciplined, although here there were no uniformed policemen to be seen. ‘SED, das tut weh’ (The Communist Party, that hurts) was chanted for a few minutes. My companion said, ‘You see, the party has nicht ein Pfennig kredit [not a penny of credit].’ A new cry, ‘Stasi in der Volkswirtschaft!’ (Secret police: work for the people!), was chanted even more enthusiastically.

  Eventually the crowds arrived at the Palace of Culture where a huge monument in the best Soviet-realist style had blazoned across it a phrase which now looked rather forlorn under the circumstances: ‘Communism begins here’. Whatever candles the demonstrators had left were relit, giving the concrete sculpture a menacing aspect. The old town centre seemed ablaze and wax dripped across all the symbols of Communist Party rule. Then, just as orderly as their arrival, the crowd suddenly and peacefully evaporated. My travelling friends invited me to a nearby 1930s hotel where they asked me to dine with some of their Truppen. The atmosphere in the restaurant was earnest and quiet. About a hundred men, mostly wearing check shirts, sat talking of politics in intense groups of five or six. It was well past 1.00 a.m. when my friend took me back to the small flat where his wife and family were fast asleep. He made up a bed for me on the sofa in his living room. For any Western correspondent to stay unannounced with an East German family would have been unheard of barely a week earlier: massive bureaucratic and other obstacles existed to prevent such unauthorized fraternization. This act of spontaneous kindness and hospitality was now lightly given. More than any other encounter I had experienced that week, it demonstrated to me that the regime had lost much of its capacity to terrorize the population. The most conformist and spied-upon population of the Warsaw Pact was now no longer petrified by the state.

  I rose at 5.00 on the morning of the 10th to leave for Berlin. The family was already awake: their fourteen-year-old son was off to do his weekly six-hour stint in a factory. Produktionsarbeit from 6.00 a.m. to midday cannot have been a schoolchild’s idea of fun, but here was this obedient young man quietly drinking his tea and eating some bread before heading off to his duties. Such mobilization of youth in the service of the state had a peculiarly old-fashioned feel to it, affording a glimpse of those traditional German qualities of self-discipline and austerity which continued to thrive, irrespective of the regime in power. The boy’s mother offered anxious glances, as if fearful of the consequences of her husband’s hospitality towards an English journalist. I offered to pay for the night’s accommodation but my suggestion was spurned.

  By 8.15 a.m., I was back in Berlin. The night before, my host in Gera and I had listened to a radio announcement by the Honecker government that all East Germans could now visit West Berlin through existing checkpoints if they wished. The regime was clearly panicking. My train was packed with East Germans heading west. When it passed Soviet military establishments, I could make out the soldiers standing in groups outside their barracks being briefed by their officers. Was the counter-revolution being prepared or were they to be confined to quarters, thus cutting the ground from beneath the East German government? One thing was certain: no crackdown on the population could take place without Soviet complicity. The military resources of the satellite Eastern European states were simply too weak to mount full-scale violent repression without Moscow’s help.

  In East Berlin, such was the volume of railway personnel who had abandoned their posts to catch a glimpse of the West that the S-Bahn had virtually ceased to work. As the afternoon wore on, new formal entry and exit offices along the Wall began to be opened up to make way for additional crossing points. At the Grand Hotel, where most of the correspondents were staying, the atmosphere was increasingly buoyant. One Sunday newspaper correspondent, a fluent German-speaker who had studied at Oxford, ordered two bottles of Dry Monopole and summed up the views of many of us when he said, ‘You know, if this really is the end of the Berlin Wall, I am happy just to be here, without even having to write a word about it.’ Another journalist quipped, ‘Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee,’ then another chinked glasses and continued the quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘stamm’ aus Litauen, echt Deutsch’ (I come from Lithuania. I am a real German). We laughed, a rare moment of solidarity among rivals. As night fell, the action moved to the Brandenburg Gate where thousands of young people had climbed on to the Wall and were chanting like Zulu warriors before battle, demanding the Wall be torn down. The strain on the East German border guards was visible, though some cheerfulness returned to their surly faces when the water cannon came into action and began knocking the protesters off the Wall. But this was to be the last act of violence by the authorities. Elsewhere along the Wall, they were permitting breaches to be made.

  As news of these developments filtered out in West Berlin, Helmut Kohl, the West German Chancellor, appeared in front of the Wall to ask the young crowd to sing the West German national anthem to the famous tune by Haydn. To their credit, his young audience spurned this appeal to nationalist sentiments and drowned him out in a sea of catcalls, boos and whistles. With tears streamin
g down his cheeks, Kohl became more and more desperate as he realized that on this historic day, with the Berlin Wall falling, young Germans, the future of his country, held him in contempt. Rarely have I seen a politician in greater discomfiture. While this image of Kohl in Berlin was soon forgotten in the euphoria of reunification a few months later, it remains one of the abiding memories of those days for anyone who witnessed it, proof that much of West German youth had not only been successfully demilitarized during the Cold War but successfully denationalized as well. For them, the openings along the Wall heralded the end of a system and they were clear they did not want it replaced with Kohl’s capitalist and conservative values.

  The following morning was calm. At the nearby Potsdamer Platz, pre-war Berlin’s answer to Piccadilly Circus, which the Wall had divided into two, there were rumours of a new opening. The small crowd that had gathered on the eastern side watched the rusty old tramlines being cleared to prepare for a new breach. An old man wheeling his bicycle looked on and recalled how the square, now a deserted wasteland, had been the glorious centre of the city’s commercial life before Hitler. ‘Large Jewish shops such as Herzog – wealth beyond all dreams,’ he whispered to me. It seemed that despite the new checkpoints established along other parts of the Wall during the night, the Potsdamer Platz would not be opened that day. Everywhere crowds milled around, expecting new breaches in the Wall. The tempo of life in both East Berlin and West Berlin was changing rapidly. In the West, a taxi driver of Middle Eastern origin asked me, ‘Can’t you British stop this? The racist East Berliners will come and change everything here.’

  The exodus to the West made it possible to get tickets for Hochzeit des Figaro, a new production, at the Komische Oper. Over the coming days, there were unforgettable performances of Freischütz as well as this memorable Figaro with a countess whose aria in Act II was sung with a haunting pianissimo. The Komische Oper is a small house, one of the gems originally designed by that nineteenth-century Austrian architectural duo Helmer and Fellner, whose buildings house opera from Vienna to Odessa. During the interval of Figaro, I wandered into the foyer. The public spaces here are grand but not extensive, so it was possible in twenty minutes to see everyone who was in the audience. While mounting the main staircase, I saw in front of me the newly appointed East German government spokesman, Wolfgang Meyer, standing with his wife in the foyer genially saying hello to various Party officials. These kinds of encounter always posed for me a momentary dilemma: should the correspondent exploit the coincidence, breezing up to the politician in hope of gleaning something of interest, or do good manners dictate that such unplanned interviews should always be avoided? That evening I decided that, in the middle of such sublime music, it would be a jolt to switch into investigative mode and ask another devotee of Mozart about politics. Act II beckoned; besides, it was doubtful whether Herr Meyer would have his job for very much longer, or have anything of value to say.