by Geert Mak
The next morning Alexanderplatz reeks of old-fashioned DDR coal. The smoke is coming from the chimney of a wooden caravan. On the door is a sign: ‘SIND IM WESTEN’. In front of it are racks of cards on which all passers-by are invited to write down their thoughts and wishes concerning the 9 November celebrations. Dozens of people stop to read. ‘It went too fast,’ someone has written. ‘And the thinking is still going too fast.’ Someone else writes: ‘I wish for better education and less violence. Oh, if only we were back in the DDR!’ ‘I certainly wish YOU were!’ someone else has written angrily beside it.
Big words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘heroism’ are used at all the commemorative meetings, and famous names are dropped: Helmut Kohl, George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev. But the ones who actually razed the wall were the people of Berlin themselves, and ten years later their feelings are a good deal more complicated. Their thoughts hang in the rain on Alexanderplatz, on all those cards: ‘We must learn from each other, really learn. Not accuse, not exaggerate.’ And: ‘From the terror of the Stasi to the terror of consumption. Congratulations, Ossis!’ And: ‘The DDR took my youth, and it took other people's lives. Only after turning fifty am I allowed to see the world.’ And: ‘I want a dog and a house, and I want my parents to get back together, and a bicycle and an electric toothbrush, and I can't say much about when the wall fell, because I was only three then.’
What is left of the barrier that once divided this town? Along Bernauer Strasse, the last remains of the wall have been elevated to the status of monument. Aficionados can still hear the linguistic differences between West and East Berlin: forty years is apparently enough time to develop a separate dialect. The last Goldene Hausnummern – the DDR insignias for model tenants – are being unscrewed from the shabby doors. But the cheerful little DDR man on the traffic lights is allowed to stay, he walks straight ahead through red and green, nobody pays him any attention.
I spend an afternoon with Walter Nowojski, retired DDR journalist, radio and television programme maker, editor-in-chief of the Writers’ Union journal and editor of the diaries of Victor Klemperer. He got to know the old professor back in 1952, as a student in Berlin. Klemperer, he tells me, was a cult figure even then, the only one in the entire DDR who had something to say. ‘His lectures were real happenings. He was old and sick, he talked mostly about eighteenth century French literature, but the auditorium was always packed. His book about the language of the Nazis, LTI: Lingua Tertu Imperu (1947), made a deep impression in the DDR. Everything in our minds was contaminated, we knew that, it was all old Nazi garbage. What he carried in his mind, though, was an almost forgotten treasure: the German-Jewish intellectual tradition, of which he was one of the last great representatives. When he began talking we would cling to every word, in complete silence, for an hour and a half.’
It was not until 1978 that Nowojski first heard about the existence of Klemperer's diaries. Rumour had it that they were being kept in the municipal archives in Dresden. He took the train the very next day, and from that moment he spent almost all his free time on the project, in total fascination. It proved to be a Herculean task: the war diaries in particular turned out to be full of errata, misspelled names, all kinds of things. ‘Klemperer was in a special house for Jews, he barely went outside at all, he heard everything at second hand. But at the same time, in that closed house, he was often better informed than the general population. And he knew what to write down, which is another thing that makes his diaries so fascinating. He made notes about how people in the street greeted him, as a Jew, about what people ate, the rumours about the camps, everything. As a historian he had an unerring sense for the details that could be important later on. Some of the bathing resorts on the Baltic had signs saying ‘JUDENFREI’. Was that in 1938? No, it was in 1924! Everyone has forgotten that, we only know about it thanks to Klemperer. He did the same thing with the language, with all those buzzwords he documented: Weltjuden, volksnah, volksfremd, Staatsakt. For me, as a thirteen-year-old in 1938, the word fanatisch had a very positive connotation. Klemperer documented that. And the diaries show that he continued his collection during the DDR period. Kämpferisch, gigantisch, he was able to put together a whole dictionary again, just like that.’
How could an old man like Klemperer have such a productive life in claustrophobic East Germany? ‘It's very simple, really: he had a great sense of urgency. Between 1933–46, for thirteen of the most fertile years of his life, he had been unable to do a thing. In the West he would have been put out to pasture. In the DDR, though, they regarded him as a celebrity, they made him a professor at Humboldt University, just what he had always dreamed of.’
That feeling is one that Nowojski, a celebrated literary critic in the DDR, experienced for years himself. ‘I was at the centre of the system, but from 1978 I still worked each and every evening on Klemperer's diaries. I knew exactly how the DDR censors worked. I led a schizophrenic existence: propagating the official literature by day, working by night on Klemperer, a set of volumes which I knew would never be published here, for a host of political reasons. But I couldn't leave it alone, I couldn't stop, I was too enthusiastic.’
In essence, the choice he made was the same as Klemperer's. ‘I owed the DDR a great deal as well. My father was a miner, the DDR system was the only thing that made it possible for me to study. That ambiguity clouded my view of the regime for years. I could see the dark sides, but my gratitude kept me from drawing conclusions. That's the problem with our whole generation, especially the intellectuals. Many Westerners will never understand how we had to live in the DDR. The nagging, the red tape you had to go through just to get your bosses to do something, the fussing about, the waste of talent. Lots of political questions, therefore, were essentially matters of character: how do you keep going, how do you deal with your principles without destroying yourself? That same inner conflict also applied to Klemperer. I recognise myself in his diaries, including that feeling of urgency and wasted time.’
And now everyone had become a Stasi-hunter: ‘The last few years here have been dedicated to one huge parlour game: who was spying on whom? I came across my own name in Stasi reports, I was evaluated as a “revisionist” who was trying to achieve a central position in order to “further advance revisionism by means of legal machinations of power”. And, couched in their own terminology, that was a pretty accurate description of what I was in fact trying to do. Who was spying on us? No one I wouldn't have suspected of doing so, with the exception of one person: my best friend, my chosen substitute in our literature programme. We're still good friends. He came to me one evening to tell me about it, in 1994. He had a weak character, I knew that, and there must have been a blemish somewhere they could blackmail him with. But I remained the head of the programming department for eleven years, so he couldn't have said too many bad things about me. He also covered up for me a great deal, I'm sure of that. And that's what I told him: it's better to be spied on by a friend than by an enemy.
‘I've known two Klemperers in my life; the cheerful, inspiring Professor Klemperer with his openness and his remarkable sense of humour, and the Klemperer of the diaries, who was bitter and angry about everything the DDR dictatorship brought with it. The two Klemperers were one and the same: the outgoing Klemperer needed the Klemperer of the diaries in order to stand up the next morning in front of his students and be cheery. “We vomit out our souls to our friends,” he wrote at various points. All those nights working on his diaries had the same effect on me: I vomited out my soul with Klemperer.’
There is a remarkable anecdote about Joseph Roth, or rather about Berlin. Around 1970, when an American historian was researching Roth's Berlin years, he found himself constantly amazed by the distances between the places where Roth had lived, where he worked and where he frequented his favourite cafés. ‘Roth must have spent hours in the S-Bahn every day!’ Until finally a Berlin acquaintance showed him a detailed map of the city: in fact, all those places were quite close together. The dif
ference with Roth's day was that a wall had since been built between them.
The story says something about the way the wall was taken for granted, timeless and ineluctable as a river running through the city. But it also shows how the wall threaded its way through the very warp and woof of Berlin. On the East Berlin side alone, more than 120,000 people had lived close to where it was built. Most of them were finally forced to move. This allowed the DDR authorities to create a bare strip of land several hundred metres wide between the Hinterlandmauer, the actual barrier for the East Germans, and the wall itself. On the other side of that, in turn, lay a closely monitored border zone 2.5 kilometres wide.
Meanwhile, however, the S-Bahn remained the official property of the DDR until 1984, and during all those years the personnel trains shuttled blithely back and forth between East and West. Three West Berlin lines of the U-Bahn ran, in turn, beneath East Berlin, past fifteen bricked-up ghost stations. For years, telephone calls between the two parts of the city had to be routed by way of Sweden, or via the internal lines of the S-and UBahns. Mourning became a subject of deep mistrust: a special ‘grave card’ was needed to visit the Invalidenfriedhof and the Sophien-Friedhof, the two cemeteries along the border. At the same time, however, Werner Fricke, an employee of the East German Potsdammer water company, calmly walked past the guard posts each day, to tend to the pipes and valves that happened to lie on the western side of the wall.
Only once had I seen the wall from the wrong side. It was during a student-exchange visit, and our DDR guide invited us to come and take a look. We climbed onto a platform and suddenly found ourselves standing eye to eye with all those Westerners on the platform on the other side. We stared at each other and saw ourselves, it was insane.
Of the 19 million East Germans, 2.5 million left for the West, the great majority of them in the 1950s. Approximately a thousand people were killed while attempting to escape the country, most of them along the Berlin Wall. One particularly spectacular and successful escape was organised by Reichsbahn engineer Harry Deterling, who rammed his locomotive number 78079 (and a few carriages full of family members in the know) past the stunned border guards and into the West. The conductor, an East German policeman and five unwitting passengers walked back to the East in a huff, along the rails.
Very unusually, the East German songwriter Wolf Biermann – later ‘ausgebürgert’ – was allowed to give a concert in the West in 1965. For the occasion, he wrote ‘A Winter's Fairy Tale’:
In German December then flows the Spree
From East to West Berlin,
And there I swam with the railroad,
High over the wall again,
I threaded my way across a wire of steel,
High over the bloodhounds again …
The barrier over which crowds climbed in 1989 was the fourth-generation wall. Seized DDR documents showed that the technical staff of the border police were by then already working on plans for a fifth generation. This High-Tech-Mauer-2000 would be able to resist all attempts at escape, without a shot being fired. In the DDR policy paper, dated 8 May, 1988 and entitled Zur Entwicklung von Grenzsicherungstechnik für 1990 — 2000, the policymakers enthused about ‘micro-electronic sensor technology’, ‘microwave modules’ and ‘seismic alarm systems’ designed to detect intruders immediately. There was only one problem: the sensors could not distinguish between people and stray dogs. Such documents are clear proof that the wall, in one form or another, was intended to outlive us all.
On 26 May, 1987, nineteen-year-old amateur pilot Mathias Rust landed his little Cessna in Red Square, right in front of the Kremlin. Taking off from Helsinki and flying just above the trees, he had passed the Soviet lines of defence unchallenged. It was meant as a joke, but the Soviet leaders were thoroughly shocked. This was impossible, but it had happened anyway.
Looking back on it, Rust's escapade was historic. His landing in Red Square was an unignorable symbol, the writing on the wall, a sign that the all-powerful Soviet Union was no longer fully in control. At the time, however, no one recognised its significance.
Starting in the mid-1970s, Western intelligence services had begun to wonder about the Soviet Union's defence spending, especially after a political refugee reported that the Soviets were spending as much as twelve per cent of their gross national product on defence, double what the CIA had thought. One of the agency's Soviet experts, William Lee, then calculated that the actual figure was probably twice that, around twenty-five per cent. The only possible conclusion was that the Soviet economy was on the verge of collapse. His bosses, however, drew exactly the opposite conclusion: this level of defence spending was a clear indication that Moscow was still aiming for world domination. As late as October 1988, three months after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and announced his moderate revolution of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction), CIA Soviet specialist Robert Gates warned: ‘The dictatorship of the Communist Party remains unchallenged and unassailable … A long period of rivalry with the Soviet Union still lies before us.’
At that point, the military and nuclear spending of the Soviet Union was no less than five times higher than officially admitted, around thirty per cent of GNP. At the same time, almost no modernisation was taking place: while the digital revolution of the 1980s was in full swing in the West, the communist world had almost no computers. The heavy industry set up by Stalin continued to belch forth vast quantities of chemicals, steel, tanks, trucks and aircraft, while the country's production of common consumer goods lagged far behind. A considerable share of Russia's agricultural production came from the kitchen gardens of farmers and workers: half the country's food was being grown on three per cent of its arable soil.
In 1989, the spending deficit of the joint Eastern European states was four times what it had been in 1975. The Soviet Union was governed by the elderly: the average age of the members of the Politburo was seventy.
At first these problems were camouflaged by successes in foreign policy (new Soviet-oriented regimes in Vietnam and Angola) and an economic crisis in the West. In addition, the ailing Soviet economy was propped up for years by the billions it received in revenues from oil exports. But after 1979 oil prices began to drop and the Soviet Union entered into a hopeless war in Afghanistan. Almost all of the Russians I spoke to remembered a given moment, usually around 1983, when they realised that something was very wrong indeed with the Soviet economy: there were inexplicable problems with the electricity supply; butter suddenly became unavailable; queues for bread appeared one week and were still there the next, and one month later no one knew any better. The birth rate decreased drastically, as did the general health of the population: in 1988, the number of healthy conscripts was down twenty-five per cent from what it had been in the 1970s. Child mortality had risen by a third. Alcohol consumption was around twice the European average.
To make things worse, a new arms race began, this time at technologically advanced levels. In the late 1970s the Soviets had deployed seventy SS-20 missiles, medium-range nuclear weapons that suddenly posed a threat for all of Western Europe. NATO responded in 1979 with what was referred to as the ‘double decision’: if the Soviet Union was unwilling to dismantle its SS-20s, NATO would deploy nuclear weapons – the Pershing II and the cruise missile – all over Western Europe. The short distances involved meant that only minimal warnings would be given of an attack. In Western Europe, the fear of a nuclear war, and above all of an accidental nuclear war, was greater than it had been since the 1950s. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets. In the end, the INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) Agreement between Gorbachev and Reagan in December 1987 put an end to this potentially fatal competition. Two months later, under the watchful eye of the Americans, the first SS-20s were dismantled in Kazakhstan.
As the British historian Richard Vinen has observed, the Soviet Empire as a superpower was weaker and poorer than many of its colonies. Satellite countries such as Poland and Hungary st
ill had a strong tradition of small private companies capable of working with relative efficiency.
The DDR was seen as the showpiece of the Eastern Bloc. In reality, however, that country lived largely from the loans, at an estimated total of three billion Deutschmarks, that had been flowing eastward since 1973 as part of Willy Brandt's Ostverträge. With those loans, Chancellor Brandt and his successors were able to ‘purchase’ all kinds of concessions from the DDR regime: the relaxation of travel restrictions, the release of political prisoners, the reunification of families. These were, in effect, the first breaches in the wall.
In 1983 the DDR's debts had risen so far that the federal government of the West was forced to cough up an additional billion Deutschmarks. In 1988, Politburo member Günter Mittag warned his colleagues that the DDR's finances were on the point of ‘capsizing’.
This financial crisis was kept a deep secret, but the outside world was not blind to major problems facing the country. ‘There were too many things happening all around us that were quite simply impossible economically,’ said my old acquaintance Inge Winkler, who worked as a paediatrician in the east of the DDR at the time. ‘People who did nothing all day, factories that stopped working because there were no more raw materials. It was perfectly clear to all of us that things could not go on the way they had in the past.’
Wolf Jobst Siedler travelled regularly from West Berlin through the Eastern Bloc, and its problems were clear to him as well: ‘There were gigantic fleets being built, but the government was unable to repair the potholes in the streets. Helmut Schmidt once referred to the Soviet Union as “a developing country with a hydrogen bomb”, and of course he was right.’
His friend Richard von Weizsäcker: ‘Obviously, none of us knew that the wall would open up on Thursday, 9 November, 1989 at 9 p.m., no one knew that.’ Weizsäcker was president of West Germany at the time, and even at the highest levels of government there was no indication that matters would accelerate so quickly. As late as July 1987, Gorbachev had personally told Weizsäcker that German reunification could very well take another hundred years or more, and definitely no less than fifty. Weizsäcker himself was convinced that the wall was, by definition, a temporary matter. ‘My only doubt was whether I would be around to see it fall.’
