Germany’s Revolution, Unification and America
A Twentieth Anniversary of the Night the Berlin Wall Fell, November 9, 1989
by Ambassador J. D. Bindenagel
Former U.S. Minister to the German Democratic Republic 1998-1990

George H.W. Bush took office in January 1989 when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s “New Thinking ” was beginning to take hold in Poland and Hungary. Politicians in the Federal Republic of Germany were debating whether the “German Question ” could be resolved and Germany united. No one expected German unification anytime soon. Chancellor Helmut Kohl had said in 1988 that he did not expect it within his lifetime. The revolution would take up the German Question and change history.

However, it was in East Berlin where the promise of a different course would begin. The first change sought was the replacement of Erich Honecker under the slogan for renewal of the German Democratic Republic. The 1990 Communist Party Congress seemed the most likely time for East Germany to join Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost policies of economic restructuring and openness. Events unfurled at a breathtakingly faster pace.

Change turned on the East German Travel Law. After twenty-eight years of captivity behind the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, East Germans had had enough. They wanted, as President John F. Kennedy said, to feel that “free men everywhere would be proud to call themselves Berliners. ” They simply wanted to be free themselves, and they wanted Gorbachev to heed President Ronald Reagan’s call to “tear down this wall. ”

On May 4th, the Hungarians cut the fence along the border that formed the Iron Curtain. That event spurred millions of East Germans to vote with their feet and seek to emigrate through Hungary to the West.
In East Germany the May 7th municipal elections were challenged as a fraud and demonstrations protesting them stirred opposition. On June 4 in Tienanmen Square in Beijing the Chinese crushed the “counterrevolutionaries “, and Honecker threatened to do the same in East Germany. Asylum-seeking East Germans stormed the West German embassies in Prague and Budapest; their release to the West fueled the revolution. By October 9 the protests in Leipzig remained non-violent only with the intervention of Gwandhaus Orchestra Conductor Kurt Masur and the tolerance of the local communists. Honecker failed to crush the counterrevolutionaries and was ousted himself on October 18.

Days later, on and through the night of November 9th, 1989, the world held its breath. Would or would not the Soviets intervene to crush the German revolutionaries?

At the American Embassy in East Berlin, we were well aware that the Red Army’s action or inaction, with a million soldiers stationed at the German-German border, would decide the future. Coupled with the all-seeing, all-knowing East German Secret Police, the Stasi, it was hard to see how freedom could trump military force. Yet history on this day would rewrite itself.

For us in East Berlin, November 9th began calmly. Though Gorbachev had long ago departed Berlin after celebrating East Germany’s 40 years, he left warning of the necessity for glasnost and perestroika, saying: “Those who come too late will be punished by history. ” [Wer zu spat kommt, den bestraft das Leben.] The saying became another act of providence.

As the day was ending, I attended an Aspen Institute Berlin reception hosted by Director David Anderson. Attendees also included the mayors of East and West Berlin, the Allied Military Commanders, East German spy-swapping and Honecker lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. At the end of the reception, Vogel asked me for a ride to his car parked in West Berlin. In giving him a lift, I was eager to gain his assessment of the East German reaction to the November 6th changes to the East German Travel Law; changes that had been rejected by thousands of demonstrators throughout the country.

In the interim, the wave of fleeing Germans was reaching tidal-wave proportions and the mark for Soviet intervention of one million, as discussed by Secretary James Baker and Eduard Shevardnadze in Jackson Hole in September.

In August, Ambassador Barkley and I had visited Vogel at his modest home on Lake Schwerinsee; he told us that the Hungarians would very soon allow several hundred East Germans in Hungary escape to the West. He also told us that in March the Hungarians had been the first East Bloc state to sign the UN Convention on Refugees. Consequently, they informed East Germany that its fleeing citizens would be treated as refugees and let them flee to the West. When on August 19th, at a pan-European picnic in Hungary some 600 East Germans fled into Austria, Moscow did not react.

The problem of fleeing East Germans still loomed large on November 9th. What would Vogel tell me now? As we drove towards West Berlin’s heart at the Ku’Damm, Vogel told me that the GDR attorney’s Kollegium had met November 7th €“ 8th and proposed additional changes to the GDR Travel Law to allow for freer travel. Vogel thought the new changes, not yet announced, would satisfy East Germans’ demand for more freedom of travel. I returned to the Embassy with this hot information.

Back at the American Embassy
When I arrived at the embassy at seven-thirty, I found a greatly excited political section. They were astonished by East German government spokesman Guenther Schabowski’s shocking statement on television. He had told the world that the Politburo had agreed to more changes in the Travel Law and East Germans could get visitor visas quickly for travel to the West from their local “People’s Police ” and that the GDR would open a new processing center to handle emigration cases immediately. The vagueness of the actual information about the process paved the path to wide interpretation €“ and inspired the revolution.

NBC anchorman, Tom Brokaw, who attended the Guenther Schabowski briefing, had apparently asked Schabowski if the ruling meant the Berlin Wall was open. Schabowski reportedly said; “Yes. ” East Germans heard: “Travel to the West is possible immediately. ”

Speaking on his oversized cellular phone, Tom Brokaw called Garrick Utley, editor at NBC in New York, and Utley approved the broadcast of the story. For the next hour and a half Brokaw told television viewers around that world that the Berlin Wall was open, though none of us on the ground had confirmed the story or knew how the East Germans planned to implement it.

The revolution was in full swing and spinning out of control. Embassy Political Counselor Jon Greenwald sent one embassy political officer, Heather Troutman, directly to Checkpoint Charlie and another, Imre Lipping, to the GDR press center to get the text of the statement. In the meantime, the first East Germans approached the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie and attempted to cross without visas. Guards sent them home to first get visas from their local police. It appeared that the guards could keep things under control, while the new procedures were being worked out.

Later, with Schabowski’s speech text in hand, we translated and cabled it to Washington. I spoke to the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center to ensure they had the report and to update them on the latest developments. Then I called the American Minister in West Berlin Harry Gilmore, and shared my view that the East Germans would first have to get their visas and then be able to head to West Berlin.

Relieved, I went home, arriving in the East Berlin suburb of Pankow around 10 p.m. To my surprise, as I drove up Schönhauserallee in East Berlin, I saw many East German, plasticized-pressed wood Trabant automobiles seemingly abandoned near the Bornholmerstrasse Checkpoint that crossed over the S-Bahn train into West Berlin.
At the end of the street near the checkpoint, I saw dozens of Germans standing at the barrier and shouting at the guards defending the crossing. The crossing consisted of barracks filled with armed border police. I saw fire hoses, like those used later at the Brandenburg Gate, carefully laid out in readiness to repel any wall jumpers. The guards had shoot-to-kill orders to defend the border.
Across from the checkpoint, safely in the West, a TV camera crew, with its light illuminating the bridge, stood ready to instantaneously transmit pictures of the seemingly inescapable confrontation on the bridge that divided the Cold War world.

Rushing through the last few blocks home, I turned on the television to see what the camera crew was filming. I called Ambassador Richard Barkley, Jon Greenwald, and Harry Gilmore.

The Berlin Wall Falls
And suddenly the guards gave way. A wave of East Berliners streamed through the Bornholmerstrasse checkpoint. As their pictures flashed around the world on television, they shouted, “freedom! ” The Berlin Wall was breached.
But I wondered with a sinking feeling: did they have visas? What of the requirement? Who was in charge?

In the morning following my third-grade daughter’s normally routine van trip to school in West Berlin, I stopped at the Bornholmerstrasse Checkpoint. By now masses had gathered at the gates, moving in both directions.

While I watched at the Bornholmerstrasse Checkpoint, Radio DDR Eins announced that visas would be required to travel from East to West starting at 8:00 a.m. that morning, November 10th. The crowd at Bornholmerstrasse grew steadily larger, and pressed against the gate as panic spread among those who had not left during the night. The fear of being shut in, of having missed the chance to see West Berlin before the GDR shut the gate was palpable.

Shortly before the 8:00 a.m. hour, the visa requirement deadline was extended until noon. The noon deadline then became Monday morning. At that point, the authority and legitimacy of German Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) passed from the Krenz government to the people, and to their demand for freedom.

Freedom won that night led to free elections in East Germany on March 18, 1990 and German unification on October 3, 1990.

Postscript

The End of East Germany
By November 9th, 1989, East Germany’s days were limited. Only the anticipated intervention by the Soviets would have prolonged its agony. Perhaps unintentionally, Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika positioned him in a catch-22: either he would risk his own reform policies – Glasnost and Perestroika — by intervening militarily in East Germany, or he would lose the German Democratic Republic to a unified Germany.

My counterpart, the deputy ambassador, at the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin, Minister Dr. Igor F. Maximytschew later shed light on this conflict. It was he who waited to inform Moscow of the events on the ground in Berlin, which were then presented as a fait accompli. His reasons were clear: Soviet Ambassador Kotschemassow went to sleep after the Schabowski press conference; the Soviet Embassy had no further inside information because all of their GDR contacts went silent; to alert lower level Soviet officials to a situation whose change of course depended upon military intervention was too risky; and intervention itself could have resulted in a Tienanmen Square solution. Maximytschew followed Gorbachev’s instruction not to dramatize the situation and decided to inform Moscow in the morning.

Great things can happen when good men take no action.
——————-

J.D. Bindenagel, is Vice President, DePaul University, Chicago

Our flat-roofed “Plattenabau” house in East Berlin leaked. An unwieldy, waxy plant sat on the wide inside windowsill in the living room to catch the drops.

On the terrace, tar squeezed between the concrete tiles oozed in the summer heat, snagging the high-heels of well-heeled guests.

The front door stood at the top of a zig-zag staircase with a wrought-iron railing: every morning I watched my father descend into his powder-blue armoured American car to “inconspicuously” make his way to the US Embassy. A few minutes after his departure I boarded a similarly powder-blue VW van – without seatbelts – to cross the Bornholmerstrasse checkpoint into West Berlin to attend school.

It took three months to get a 24-hour visa for a schoolmate to come to the East, where the milk always smelled sour, the chocolate tasted like dust; the cobble-stones were precariously large, tripping up and slowing down bike-riding; where our house was bugged and we knew it, sometimes wondering what the walls and light fixtures thought of what we were saying; and where I knew, by various kinds of osmosis, that friends’ parents were out protesting at candle-light vigils, that there were spies in the pews at church, that my friend Stev really should not have been allowed to enter our house, though the Stasi guard at the gate never did intervene, that he and others had never had a real Coke (Margon-Cola, the East German ‘equivalent’ my brother and I tried once, was, to us, undrinkable), seen a computer, worn real jeans, been free to think, to act, to be.

Until November 9th, 1989.

I woke that night to the sound of the TV, and went to watch the images of people – from East and West – dancing (despite the ‘ban’ from President Bush) on the Wall. Already my family assumed that Stev and his were crossing the border.

In the morning, like always, I boarded the VW, and headed for Bornholmerstrasse. I remember inching forward, wedged between jubulent East Berlins, who were pressing to cross – just in case the chance were taken from them, just to see, just to be in the West. As the crowd parted upon seeing our car’s diplomatic plates, I recall being somewhat embarassed: what these people wanted once, we had everyday.

We arrived at school late, and lo and behold, no one seemed to know, let alone fathom, why that was the case. My classroom teacher eventually – like all the others – turned on the TV, which effectively ended instruction. Then because the bus ferrying schedule back to the East (who wanted to go back!?) was in disarray, I spent the rest of the morning outside the principle’s office, before being taken home…

where Stev! was waiting for me, hammer and chisel in hand. Together we went down to the nearest section of the Wall, and hammered our hearts out to get a piece, and another, and another, until – with the help of others with power tools – we watched the first hole wrought in it: a hole, a peek at another world, a possibility, a whole reality.

Freedom, that’s all they ever wanted.