A witness to history as the Wall came crashing down
08 November 2009 By Tom McGurkIt was the day before the wall finally came down and, from the West German border police helicopter, the view was extraordinary. What looked like a river of vehicles was stretching as far as the eye could see across the Czech countryside, to somewhere beyond the horizon.
The police had taken up a group of journalists to see what was fast becoming the world’s longest traffic jam, as thousands of East Germans poured across the Czech countryside and into West Germany.
But this was no ordinary traffic jam, this was a country haemorrhaging its people.
From August on, as more and more East Germans began testing the resolve of their increasingly embattled authorities to stop them leaving across various frontiers, it became clear that the once-invincible DDR regime was utterly confounded by the speed of events and the mixture of signals coming from Moscow.
In the past, the arrival of Soviet tanks would have made up everyone’s minds - as in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968.But in these perestroika days of 1989, with Mikhail Gorbachev in charge in the Kremlin, everything had changed.
It now seemed that Gorbachev had decided that a Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe was no longer worth the candle. Unannounced, the Warsaw Pact was simply folding its tents and slipping away into history.
Weeks previously, on October 7, I had been in East Berlin for the DDR’s 40th anniversary celebrations. At the huge military parade, veteran leader Erich Honecker stood on the reviewing platform beside Gorbachev, as long lines of the uniformed Communist Party youth members marched past, carrying flaming torches. Ominously for Honecker the crowds began chanting ‘‘Gorby! Gorby! Gorby!"
Honecker and Gorbachev exchanged frozen smiles as the chanting grew louder, but nobody was fooled. Comrade Honecker’s birthday party had become something else.
It was an astonishing moment. At the high point of the state’s celebration of itself, dissent was breaking out in the huge parade, which was being broadcast live on state television.
By the hour, the aura of invincibility that this, the most totalitarian of Eastern European regimes, had so carefully generated around itself, was disappearing.
Here, in the frontline of the Cold War territories, the frenzy that had begun in Poland only a year previously was becoming manifest and irresistible. Beneath the DDR’s feet, the sands of history were running out.
All that week on the West GermanCzech border, the political zeitgeist was sweeping thousands into the West. With the infinite patience of lifetime totalitarian state dwellers, they had sat for days in their tiny Trabants, veteran Volkswagens or mangled Mercedes, waiting to cross the border, to collect their Red Cross parcels and then to go to the army barracks in Munich, where the tented villages and the world’s press waited.
The typical scene was father and mother up front in the car, the children, bedclothes and cooking utensils in the back, with dogs, cats, hens or the odd goat.
At times, these embarrassed but smiling and poorly-dressed people seemed more like crazy picnickers than refugees.
All looked like they had left in a hurry, and all seemed flushed with the adrenaline of the astonishing moment - and the realisation that, at last, they had escaped.
Despite the years of state indoctrination and propaganda, all the genius of Eastern European totalitarianism could not survive the most subversive of all influences - the ability of most in the East to view West German television channels. Here was the promised land of hamburgers and denims and endless episodes of Dallas, and there was nothing the ideologues or the comrades could do to diminish its allure.
The battle between communism and consumerism was long over in the DDR, particularly among the young, and it was only the authorities now who couldn’t tell the wood from the trees.
When the refugees finally crossed the border into West Germany, we in the press lined up like opinion pollsters to get their reactions. My memory is of old car windows rolled down, and unspeaking faces wet with tears.
(Some who had come across in battered but rare veteran and vintage VWs and Mercs were astonished to be stopped on the roadside by German car collectors looking to buy them on the spot. One dealer outside Munich was even offering to swap secondhand BMWs for them.)
Early in the afternoon of November 9, the Foreign Office in London was telling Fleet Street editors that the wall in Berlin was probably about to be opened, so it was a scramble for the cars and we headed for Berlin. As darkness fell I crossed into East Germany driving on the old autobahn that led to West Berlin.
It was physically impossible to leave the Hitler-built concrete highway running through East Germany until one reached the West Berlin frontier post.
On the radio at 7pm, one could hear the chaotic press conference that the politburo, led by the hapless Gunter Schabowski (Honecker’s replacement), was giving in East Berlin.
The detail of his promise that East German citizens with proper paperwork would be allowed to travel was lost in an immediate rush for the border crossings.
Confusion spread and the infamous DDR border guards, perhaps sensing a political reckoning to come, for once shouldered theirAK47s and turned their backs.
Some even stripped off their uniforms and ran across. One after another, the Berlin checkpoints began opening and thousands began rushing through.
It was one of the most remarkable political revolutions of all time. Not a shot was fired, not a bomb went off - one day, the people simply got up and walked away.
The Berlin Wall was failing on this mild Berlin evening; a seemingly impenetrable part of the Iron Curtain being pushed aside by crowds who literally just walked out of their houses and kept going.
As I reached the border crossing into Berlin, up on a concrete ceremonial plinth beside the road was one rusting survivor of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ - a legendary SovietT34 tank. Seeing it, I had an overwhelming sense of the historical moment breaking out just down the road.
These were the tanks that had rolled into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968,but it was also the tank that had smashed the Nazi armies at Stalingrad and Kursk.
Some 27 million Soviet soldiers and citizens had died in that war and, with few Allied troops on mainland Europe before June 1944, it was essentially the Red Army that had smashed the Nazi war machine. Those figures go some way to explaining why, subsequently, Stalin had divided Germany to ensure it would never again independently militarise. The surrounding countries his Red Army had liberated became a buffer zone so that another war could not be fought on Russian territory.
But now, on this night of November 9,1989, as the celebrations were breaking out just down the road in Berlin, the historical fault-line had closed. During that summer, from Poland to Hungary to Czechoslovakia, one by one, like dominos, the old Stalinist territorial protection ring collapsed.
Yet for all of the frenzy and excitement gripping the city that night, the West Berliners could not decide whether this was a mardi gras or an invasion. These strange visitors from a Germany past, with their white faces, their poor teeth and their terrible clothes were everywhere.
Their Trabant cars were parked everywhere, even on traffic islands and in front gardens, and they were walking around in groups like lost tourists.
Some seemed never to have seen escalators or automatic glass doors, and they were riding them and trying them in shopping malls, like overgrown children.
They formed long, patient, eastern bloc queues outside hamburger joints and sex shops, but few had money to buy anything.
The East German mark was not accepted. I still have some in a drawer somewhere. All that remains of Honecker’s great political experiment is his useless currency.
Down by the Brandenburg Gate, the television companies of the world were hastily erecting scaffolding for their presenters to climb on and broadcast live from the Berlin Wall.
The American networks came to blows as they jostled for the best positions.
As the arc lights came on and reporters went live, there was a sense that, in some ways, this was a television programme first and a political earthquake second. The medium that had turned the heads of East Germans was there to record its triumph.
At the wall itself, and conscious of the cameras, West Berlin political groups had arrived with stone axes or sledgehammers to begin their performance.
History was becoming reality television.
At one stage, as the crowds pelted the increasingly hapless East German border guards up on the wall with chocolate bars, their patience exploded and they brought out high powered water hoses and soaked all of us close by. We were nearly knocked down in a rush of cameramen anxious to get wet.
Very early next morning, I returned to the scene down at the Brandenburg Gate. Dawn was breaking across the city and the East Berliners had finally gone home. The vast square in front of the gate was ankle deep in used hamburger packaging and soft drink bottles.
With one huge surge of humanity, World War II was finally ending. The scene seemed so momentous, yet so easy. It was as if history had just eaten a burger and moved on.