THE COLLAPSE OF THE GDR: SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE COLLAPSE OF CZECHOSLOVAK COMMUNISM
In the fall of 1989 the Hungarian government took the unprecedented step of allowing East German tourists to cross into Austria on their way home. In so doing, the Hungarian regime reneged on its treaty obligation to East Germany not to allow GDR citizens to leave Hungary for a Western country and thus opened the way for a demographic hemorrhage that would ruin the East German economy. With about 100,000 East German tourists on Hungarian territory, it was clear that the decision of the Nemeth government to remove the barbed-wire barriers at the crossing point with Austria was an extraordinary blow to the East German regime’s policy of denying its population the right to emigrate.
The situation turned even more complex when mostly young East German tourists flooded the West German Embassy in Prague. Because Czechoslovakia was one of the few countries where the East Germans could travel without passports, Prague became a magnet for the increasingly disaffected young East Germans, who saw no hope for reform in their own country. Unlike the Hungarians, the Jakes regime was sympathetic to the plight of the East German government but could do nothing to stop the massive wave of East Germans flocking to the West German Embassy in Prague. Special trains were organized to transport the East Germans through the GDR to the Federal Republic, which was faced with an unexpected flood of new settlers. According to the West German constitution, the newcomers were fellow Germans eligible for the benefits and privileges of West German citizenship.
Ironically, that crisis coincided with the the Honecker regime’s preparations to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. It was obvious that the regime was experiencing a deep crisis. The frictions with the Soviet Union and the reluctance to engage even in limited reforms had undermined the leadership’s power base. For Honecker and his associates, the changes in Moscow were more difficult to deal with than for any other communist leadership in Eastern Europe because of the GDR’s direct dependence on Soviet military and economic support. Perhaps the only comparable situation was that of the Husak—Jakes team in Czechoslovakia, whose coming to power had been the direct consequence of the Soviet invasion of that country in August 1968.
Once the Soviets changed their assessment of the Prague Spring, the Czechoslovak communists too found themselves politically isolated and deprived of both internal and external support. It then became possible for the deposed leaders of the reform movement to reemerge as champions of the strategy of socialism with a human face. For instance, after years of internal exile and refusal to join underground civil rights movements, Alexander Dubcek granted an interview in January 1988 to the Italian communist daily L’Unitá, in which he reaffirmed the basic principles of the Soviet-suppressed reform movement and openly endorsed Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost. He insisted on the similarity between the fundamental sources of inspiration between the two reform movements and contended that had a Gorbachevite leadership been in charge in 1968, the Soviet intervention would have been unthinkable.33 In April 1989 another symptomatic event took place, suggesting that a reconsideration of the 1968 invasion was imminent: The government-run Hungarian television broadcast an interview with Dubcek, officially a nonperson in his own country, who argued again that the origin of the 1968 crisis lay in the dogmatism of Brezhnev and of his associates in the other Warsaw Pact countries.
The significance of the Dubcek interview broadcast by Budapest Television lay in the fact that Hungary had participated in the military action against the legal Czechoslovak government in August 1968. Dubcek challenged the official line of the Husak—Jakes regime, which claimed that the foreign intervention had been made indispensable by the rise of counterrevolutionary forces protected by the lenient Dubcek leadership:
Not only were there no counterrevolutionary forces within the country, there were also no such forces that could endanger socialism whatsoever. If there were, then we know what it was only too well: the dogmatism of Brezhnev. This is what endangered socialism and weakened the party’s stands, the international communist movement, social democracy, and the left-wing socialist parties. And why? To serve a political line which is not in harmony with the interests of democracy, socialism, and the people.34
The reactivation of the Prague Spring reformers was considered ominous, and rightly so, by the beneficiaries of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Dubcek’s attempt at a political comeback was ridiculed in the official Czechoslovak media, where he was described as a bankrupt politician, an adventurer, and a political renegade.
Terrified at the prospect of a Soviet reconsideration of the 1968 decision to use military force against a reform movement essentially similar to the one launched by Gorbachev himself, the dogmatics in Prague attacked Dubcek with special ardor. For instance, Rude Pravo, the official party daily, chose to see Dubcek’s political resurrection as the megalomaniacal illusion of a failed politician rather than as a signal that times were changing and that the Soviets themselves had abandoned the internationalist mythology that justified the brutal end of the Prague Spring:
Dubcek obviously still thinks that he is indelibly written into the history books of our country as an enlightened reformer of socialism who was wrongfully expelled from the party. He expects that the time will come when this “wrong” will be righted. However, it is possible to falsely interpret history, but not to change it. His era in history will remain chronicled as a warning of where the policy of a man that denounces Marxist-Leninist maxims, who casts aside socialist principles, and who betrayed the interests of the people leads. He will forever remain simply the man who led our party and country to the brink of catastrophe.35
Despite the adamant tone of these warnings, the conservatives in Prague did not fail to realize that their time had passed. The consensus within the Czechoslovak top elite had evaporated as a result of the confusing signals coming from Moscow. Even the former Prime Minister, Lubomir Strougal, who had been one of the architects of the post-1968 politics of “normalization,” started to advocate reforms. His successor, Ladislav Adamec, hinted at the need to rejuvenate the party leadership and to recognize the faults of the past.
So in October 1989 the East German regime could count only on the wholehearted support of one like-minded communist leader: Romania’ Nicolae Ceausescu, who actually participated in the ceremonies organized in East Berlin to glorify the achievements of the Honecker regime. The Czechoslovak leaders were confronted with an increasingly vocal opposition. In Bulgaria Todor Zhivkov desperately tried to stay in power while his colleagues were already fomenting a Byzantine plot that was to remove him ingloriously one month later. As for Gorbachev himself, he went to East Berlin only to tell Honecker that those who lag behind in reforms would pay dearly for their conservatism.
Despite the carefully orchestrated marches and parades, it was clear that the SED was challenged by a growing movement of despair and discontent. Its driving force comprised the unofficial peace, ecological, and human rights groups, long persecuted by the government, who managed nevertheless to survive under the protective shield of the East German Lutheran Church. The regime could still use force against growing street protests. In June 1989 Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceausescu had been the only East European leaders to congratulate the Chinese communists for their crackdown on the Tienanmen Square demonstration. Knowing Honecker’s fierce intransigence, the risk of bloodshed loomed in the GDR. In East Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden, protesters clashed with police forces. The police used truncheons to beat up the demonstrators and menaced them with water cannons. Far from intimidated by the regime’s tough reaction, the demonstrators continued to voice their protest against the communist dictatorship. The crowds were spurred by Gorbachev’s presence in the official celebrations and often mingled their calls for freedom with chants of “Gorby, Gorby!” Enormous rallies were organized, and the police stood by surprisingly passive as the public anger mounted. The New Forum, a political movement headed by former dissidents, was cr
eated to express the people’s main demands. Since the Soviets discouraged the use of violence to quell the unrest, it was clear that the ruling party had no alternative but to sacrifice the hard-liners and to promise the immediate launching of sweeping reforms.
The public demands for human rights and the complete overhaul of the political system continued to gather momentum. An era came to an end on October 18, when the SED Central Committee ousted the Stalinist Erich Honecker and elected Egon Krenz, a fifty-two-year-old party bureaucrat and Honecker’s former right-hand man, to replace him. It was a clumsy and unconvincing choice, since many people knew that Krenz had been directly responsible for the antidissident campaigns of previous years. He was also associated with the fraud in the May 1989 local elections. Initially, Krenz tried to assuage public anger by placing the blame for the ongoing crisis on the previous leadership’s failure to engage in reforms. In his first public address as the new SED General Secretary, Krenz declared:
It is clear that we have not realistically appraised the social developments in our country in recent months, and we have not drawn the right conclusions quickly enough. We see the seriousness of the situation. But we also sense and recognize the major opportunity we have opened for ourselves to define the policies in dialogue with our citizens, policies that will bring us to the verge of the next century.36
But Krenz’s soothing remarks came too late and sounded utterly hypocritical. Society’s awakening proceeded much faster and more radically than any communist reformer could have expected. Dismayed and disoriented, the SED leaders could not cope with the lightning radicalization of the masses.
What was happening in the GDR was indeed spectacular. Only a few months earlier, it seemed that the country was politically paralyzed, with very few centers of opposition able to challenge the regime’s huge police apparatus. A Western journalist noted an August 1989, at the beginning of the exodus that inaugurated the ultimate crisis of the GDR:
In a curious way the existence of West Germany helps prop up the out-dated regime. It has always been easy for East Germans to bundle dissidents and troublemakers out to the West to eliminate protest at home. Thus there is virtually no active internal opposition in East Germany. The only public criticisms, albeit cautious, are voiced by the Protestant church, which also gives shelter to a handful of tiny groups in the bigger cities, but it would not dream of challenging the system.37
The country’s very existence indeed had been built upon an ideological fiction, and any endeavor to change that foundation would ruin its future. If Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia reformed themselves to the point of abandoning socialism completely, they would still be Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. For the GDR to embrace such reforms would result in the very end of its statehood. The country’s existence derived from the division of the world into two rival blocs.
Once the logic of the Cold War was recognized as obsolete, the GDR lost its reason to exist. That peculiar situation had been acknowledged in no uncertain terms by one of the regime’s top ideologues, Otto Reinhold. In August 1989 he granted an interview to an East German radio station in which he made clear that the issue of socialist identity was essential for the very existence of the GDR as a separate state in the heart of Europe. For him, as for the whole SED elite, the GDR was conceivable “only as an antifascist, socialist alternative to the Federal Republic.”38 Until the beginning of the October crisis, the SED elite appeared to be united in its defiance to Moscow’s injunctions to embark on a reformist path. In December 1988 Erich Honecker adamantly rejected suggestions that his party emulate the Soviet policy of glasnost and denied the need for any perestroika in the GDR. Speaking at a plenum of his party’s Central Committee, the increasingly embittered leader turned down the invitations “to deviate from our course and march into a anarchy.”39 In a widely publicized speech, the SED’s chief ideologue, Kurt Hager, had dismissed the Soviet reforms as a model: “Just because your neighbor puts up new wallpaper doesn’t mean that you have to also.”40 In April 1989 Hager, who had served for decades as the watchdog of Leninist orthodoxy, elaborated before a gathering of party historians and social scientists on the need to emphasize the peculiarities of the East German model of socialism.
Hager’s statement was an unmistakable criticism of the Soviet “new thinking” in foreign policy and a passionate plea for the preservation of the established East German system:
The history of socialism in the GDR confirms that the socialist social system is marked by significant advantages. If we speak of “socialism in GDR colors,” this means that we have pursued our own unique path, that we have applied Marxism-Leninism to our conditions, and that socialism in the GDR has developed characteristics that are in harmony with our traditions, preconditions, experiences and possibilities. Being a bastion of socialism at the dividing line of the imperialist system, and confronted with an imperialist state of German nationality, we are in a unique combat position.41
In the same vein, Margot Honecker, the General Secretary’s wife and Minister of Public Education, did not conceal her resentment of Gorbachev’s new course, which she saw as a direct threat to the future of socialism. For the SED elite it was vitally important to maintain a climate of national alarm against attempts by both the East and the West to destabilize the status quo. Giving voice to the growing anxiety among the higher strata of the GDR nomenklatura, in a highly inflammatory (and comminatory) speech at a pedagogical congress in East Berlin in June 1989, Margot Honecker stated:
The fact that all forces inimical to socialism have again turned up—and they will do so again and again—to stop socialism on its path and to damage it, can, should, and must be understood by the young people. We have to open their eyes to this so that they realize: It is not yet time to fold one’s arms; our time is a time full of struggle, it needs young people who can fight, who help to strengthen socialism, who work for it, who defend it with word and deed, and, if necessary, with weapons.42
Krenz himself had been directly involved in all the antireformist campaigns that preceded and had tried to preclude the rise of a mass movement for democracy. Now he postured as a born-again reformer and a sworn enemy of the corruption and conservatism of the former leadership. He promised immediate liberalization but emphatically declared that socialism was “not negotiable.”
For Krenz, and for the whole SED leadership, it was clear that fundamental concessions that would allow free elections would immediately result in the end of the established regime and of the GDR as as a separate state. Indeed, as a West German journalist wrote: “Only Prusso-socialism buttresses East Berlin’s claim to separate statehood. Let it go, and out goes East Germany’s reason for being. Allow for free elections today, and you might just as well celebrate anschluss with West Germany tomorrow.”43 Krenz was caught in a political maelstrom that he could not arrest. The forces set in motion by Gorbachev’s reforms, the changes in the Soviet international strategy and the renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, had left the East German leaders with only one alternative to pursue: surrender to the pressure of the masses and recognition of society’s right to participate in government. Thus the more the government accepted the demands of the protesters, the bolder and more radical the demonstrations became.
On October 23, 1989, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Leipzig calling for democratic changes, including the legalization of opposition movements and independent labor unions and the separation of powers between the communist party and the state. On November 4 a half-million East Berliners demonstrated peacefully demanding free speech, free elections, an end to the “leading role” of the communist party, and the disbandment of the Stasi, the hated security police. The march in East Berlin was organized by the official Union of Actors, who insisted on the need to maintain calm and order. Günther Schabowski, a Politburo member and the SED chief in East Berlin, was whistled and jeered at when he tried to address the demonstrators. What had started in October as a spontaneous
mass revolt against tyranny and injustice was turning into a political revolution. The movement was nonviolent, but its demands pointed clearly toward the complete destruction of the existing system.
East Germany’s outburst of anger and desperation could not be contained. On November 7 the whole Politburo resigned, and on November 9 an extraordinary event took place: The Berlin Wall was breached, and people were allowed to celebrate freely the end of an era of fear, suspicion, and terror. The mood was ecstatic at the moment Chancellor Helmut Kohl addressed an immense crowd of East and West Berliners gathered outside the West Berlin city hall in highly emotional terms: “I want to call out to all in the German Democratic Republic: We’re on your side, we were and we remain one nation. We belong together.”44 Following the opening of the border and the elimination of the SED old guard, Krenz tried to capitalize on his role in those sea-change decisions and announced major reforms. A Plenum of the Central Committee announced the party’s new program, which included free, democratic, and secret-ballot elections; the orientation of the economy toward market conditions; separation of party and state; parliamentary supervision of state security; freedom of assembly; and a new law for the media.45 New associations and groups had started to form, and East German political life entered a stage of tremendous ferment. The long-controlled Christian Democratic and Liberal Democratic token parties got rid of their collaborationist leaders and started to assert their independence from the SED. At the same time, the few reformers within the SED gathered around the Dresden party chief, Hans Modrow, and pushed for a reshuffling of both party and government leaderships.
On November 13 Modrow became the new Prime Minister in a desperate attempt by the SED to restore its credibility and to launch a comprehensive reform program. But the demonstrations continued, this time heightened by revelations about the luxurious living conditions of the Honecker team and the corruption of a political class that had long preached the virtues of socialist asceticism to the population. Extensive coverage was given in the suddenly liberated East German media to the opulent life-styles of Erich Honecker and the other former leaders. The shock experienced by the East Germans was all the greater because they had believed the self-serving propaganda of the old regime regarding its commitment to the values of collectivism and equality. True, it was widely known that the SED leaders were enemies of freedom, but the population was totally ignorant of the colossal privileges accumulated by the members of the SED nomenklatura. Disclosures were made about Wandlitz, the heavily guarded compound of twenty-three houses where the former leaders had enjoyed swimming pools, consumer goods unavailable to the general public, and other luxuries their subjects could only dream of. Information was published about the hunting lodge of the former trade union chief Harry Tisch and about the involvement of the former Politburo member Günther Mittag in murky financial arrangements that had milked hard currency earnings from East German companies that exported valuable antiquities to the West.46 The image of the communist leadership that had terrorized the East Germans for decades took on hues of cynicism and cruelty, which evoked hatred, horror, and disgust among the population.
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