The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall
By Mary Elise Sarotte,
Basic Books, 320 pages, $27.99
Berlin Now: The Rise of the City and the Fall of the Wall
By Peter Schneider, translated by Sophie Schlondorff,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $27
Born in the GDR: Living in the Shadow of the Wall
By Hester Vaizey,
OUP, 240 pages, $34.95
From its construction in 1961 to its destruction in 1989, the Berlin Wall was the world’s most compelling symbol of the moral and material bankruptcy of communism. Other dictatorships, from Albania to North Korea, laid mines and put up barbed wire to stop their oppressed peoples from fleeing to freedom. But no monument to incarceration was more visible and damning of its creators than the Wall, a hideous 156km-long complex of watchtowers, searchlights, anti-tank obstacles, dog patrols and ditches that cut through the once bustling centre of the historic German capital.
East German border guards, with the support of their Soviet-backed masters, fired upon scores of people who tried to escape over the Wall. They were responsible, during its 28-year life, for 136 Wall-related shootings and other deaths. Hundreds more were killed on the inner German border that divided West Germany from East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). Right to the end, the East German communist party stuck to the brazen lies that there was no official policy of shooting would-be escapees, and that the Wall’s sole purpose was to repulse an attack from the “imperialist” west.
In the eastern half of Berlin, life possessed a quality of physical confinement, ideological rigidity and dreary deprivation that was utterly different from western half’s frantic embrace of unconventional politics, cultural adventure and material pleasure. To wander the busy, brightly lit streets of West Berlin at night in the 1980s was to experience one of Europe’s most exciting places. Across the Wall, just a few hundred metres away, to drive through the silent streets of East Berlin, pitch-black and virtually empty of traffic and pedestrians, was to wonder how this could be part of the same city.
All three books under review are being published to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Wall’s fall on November 9, 1989, and readers will enjoy and learn much from each of them. Mary Elise Sarotte, a visiting history professor at Harvard and expert on the late Cold War era, provides an authoritative and fast-moving account of the events that led up to the Wall’s demise. Peter Schneider, a novelist and essayist who knows and loves Berlin like few other living German writers, gives an intimate picture of the city’s transformation since Germany’s unification in 1990. Finally, Hester Vaizey, a lecturer in modern German history at the University of Cambridge, recounts the life stories of eight former GDR citizens and uses them to show, a quarter of a century after unification, that significant differences in behaviour and outlook still separate Germans raised on opposite sides of the pre-1989 border.
In The Collapse, Sarotte, author of the prize-winning 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (2009), sets out the historical context necessary to understand why East German communism was in deep crisis by autumn 1989. Threats to the Wall’s survival included the emergence of the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985, the examples of democratisation in Poland and Hungary, the GDR’s economic decline and rising hard-currency debt, the East German population’s disgust with the regime’s falsification of local election results in May 1989 and, crucially, the opening of Austria’s border with Hungary that summer.
By August, about 200,000 East Germans had taken advantage of their freedom of travel in the communist bloc to pour into Hungary, hoping to cross from there into the west. When the GDR authorities blocked passage into Hungary, thousands of would-be refugees massed in the grounds of the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. A deal was struck to let these refugees out on trains through the GDR to West Germany, but this caused mass protests in Dresden — where the young Vladimir Putin was stationed as a Soviet KGB agent — as thousands of East Germans stormed the railway station in a desperate bid to board the trains to liberty.
Sarotte blends her narrative with a meticulous reconstruction of the rise of the peaceful opposition movement that blossomed in Leipzig in the late 1980s, using the Protestant Church as shelter for its activities. By October 9, 1989, when at least 100,000 pro-democracy demonstrators gathered to march through Leipzig, there was a danger that the East German authorities would emulate their Chinese comrades four months earlier on Tiananmen Square and slaughter large numbers of unarmed protesters.
By delving into the East German archives, especially those of the Stasi secret police, and by interviewing dozens of participants in the events, Sarotte shows that a bloodbath was avoided largely thanks to a mid-ranking communist party functionary in Leipzig named Helmut Hackenberg, who happened to be in charge that night and was brave enough not to follow the usual practice of putting down the demonstration with violence. Contrary to the later claims of Egon Krenz, a Politburo member who was to replace the veteran GDR leader Erich Honecker in a coup on October 17-18, there is no hard evidence that Krenz or any other high-ranking leader in East Berlin ordered the troops to stand down, Sarotte says. Indeed, Friedrich Dickel, the thuggish interior minister, declared that he wanted to visit Leipzig and beat the protesters into such pulp that “no jacket would fit them any more”.
Much of this material is familiar to GDR scholars. Sarotte’s book adds value by demonstrating, beyond any doubt, that the Wall did not fall by the design of western, Soviet or East German political leaders, or because East Germany’s fast-growing opposition movement had some master plan to bring it down. Rather, the Wall fell because of “a remarkable constellation of actors and contingent events” on the evening of November 9 “that came together in a precise but entirely unplanned sequence”.
In particular, had it not been for the bumbling Gunter Schabowski, a Politburo member who mistakenly told a news conference that East Germany had decided to permit immediate free travel abroad, it is inconceivable that thousands of expectant GDR citizens would have massed at the Wall that night, obliging border guards at the Bornholm Street crossing to open the frontier.
What happened next is the subject of Berlin Now, Schneider’s tribute to a city that, as he says, gives the impression of being forever “a place of transit, a city with more of a past and a future than a present”. Author of Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper), a 1982 novel that brilliantly evoked the “wall in the mind” that shaped the mental outlooks of West as well as East Germans, Schneider shows that the capitalist-communist confrontation of the Wall’s heyday has given way to new forms of urban tension, many related to the poor integration into German life of immigrant Muslim communities and to rotten state schools in deprived neighbourhoods.
Today’s Berlin is a wildly popular destination with young travellers: it is cheap, tolerant of diverse lifestyles, generally safe and full of nationalities from all corners of the planet. It is also home to some of the world’s best nightclubs (so, at least, says Schneider, a sprightly septuagenarian who has dropped in at a few of them well after midnight).
Destroyed in the Second World War by Allied bombers, and then disfigured by bullheaded city planners on either side of the Wall, Berlin is not as beautiful as Paris or Rome — Schneider calls it “the Cinderella of European capitals”. It differs from London and New York in that it lacks a big financial district and the astronomical property prices that go with that. But Schneider suspects this will change one day. He makes the intriguing prediction that when Berlin becomes “as grand, expensive and boring as most capitals of the western world”, it will be replaced as Europe’s trendiest city by Bucharest or Sarajevo.
Berlin has a thriving arts scene, is a good place for internet start-ups and, after the horrors of the Nazi era and the GDR dictatorship, feels like a place that has, so to speak, recovered its future. But as Schneider reminds us, the touch of history is never far away — as expressed, for example, in the city’s memorials to its Jewish heritage and the Holocaust.
Berlin is also the site of one of Germany’s biggest management scandals of the post-unification era: the failure to prevent huge cost overruns and delays in the construction of the city’s new international airport. “It’s one of the paradoxes of Berlin that atmospheric and creative projects succeed seemingly all by themselves, while major plans for the world capital get tangled up in provincialism and dilettantism,” Schneider writes. He adds wryly that the airport, supposed to open in 2011 and still nowhere near ready, “remains in the state of incompletion that the city likes best”.
Though the Democratic Republic is gone, its scars run deep. In Born in the GDR Vaizey quotes Hans-Joachim Maaz, a psychologist, as saying: “We were as walled in emotionally as our country was blocked off physically from the outside by the Berlin Wall.” East Germans found it extremely difficult to trust anyone — sometimes, not even those closest to them, because the Stasi was capable of trapping family members and friends into informing on each other.
Vaizey tells the story of a man named Mario who, jailed and subjected to Stasi interrogation in the 1980s, takes a job after German unification at the cigar counter of KaDeWe, the West Berlin department store. There, in 1999, he serves a customer whom he recognises as one of his secret police tormentors. “You owe me an apology,” Mario tells him. “I owe you nothing. You were a criminal!” the ex-Stasi man retorts.
As Vaizey shows, not all former GDR citizens remember East Germany as a police state — though it was, in my experience, the worst in eastern Europe except for Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. About one in six people worked for the Stasi in one way or another, and more than 200,000 East Germans were imprisoned for political reasons between 1961 and 1989, mostly for Republikflucht — “fleeing the Republic”.
Some of Vaizey’s interviewees observe that, having been raised in the GDR, they resented the terms of German unification. To them, it seemed that the process defiled their identity by denigrating their GDR homeland as fit only for history’s dustbin. In a certain sense, many people still feel East German — they recognise each other across rooms and prefer one another’s company. “Walls may fall and governments may change, but habits and patterns of behaviour established over decades evidently take longer to shift,” Vaizey writes.
Yet very few former East Germans want the GDR back. Why should they? Most now enjoy living standards they could only have dreamt of in the old days. They breathe the air of democracy. Within financial limits, they are free to travel wherever they want. The GDR ranks among the least lamented states in European history — and it is hard to dispute that verdict.
–Financial Times
