End Game: The 1989 Revolution in East Germany 9781800736221

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE 2015 EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
Part 1 IMAGES OF A SOCIAL CRISIS
Introduction
Chapter 1 GENERAL CONDITIONS
Chapter 2 THE GDR IN ITS INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
Chapter 3 SYMPTOMS OF CRISIS
Chapter 4 NUANCES Regional Variations and Subcultures
Chapter 5 COUNTERMOVEMENTS The Pull of the West and the Churches
Chapter 6 OPPOSITION IN THE SED STATE
Chapter 7 GERMINATION TIME The Ossietzky Affair
Part 2 FROM THE SOCIAL CRISIS TO A CRISIS OF THE DICTATORSHIP
Chapter 8 THE SOCIAL CRISIS DEEPENS
Chapter 9 REGIME COLLAPSE AND HISTORIC DAYS
Part 3 THE FALL OF A DICTATORSHIP
Chapter 10 FROM DEMONSTRATIONS TO THE FALL OF THE WALL
Chapter 11 THE FALLOUT
Chapter 12 FORGING A NEW PATH Elections and Reunification
CONCLUSION Th e Revolution: Or Otto Schily as a Symbol
AFTERWORD TO THE 2022 EDITION From the Revolution in the GDR in 1989 to Eastern Germany in the Twenty-First Century
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

End Game

Studies in German History Published in Association with the German Historical Institute Washington General Editor: Simone Lässig, Director of the German Historical Institute Washington, with the assistance of Patricia C. Sutcliffe, Editor, German Historical Institute Washington Recent volumes: Volume 26 End Game: The 1989 Revolution in East Germany Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk Translated by Patricia C. Sutcliffe Volume 25 Germany on Their Minds: German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 Anne C. Schenderlein Volume 24 The World of Children: Foreign Cultures in Nineteenth-Century German Education and Entertainment Edited by Simone Lässig and Andreas Weiß Volume 23 Gustav Stresemann: The Crossover Artist Karl Heinrich Pohl Translated from the German by Christine Brocks, with the assistance of Patricia C. Sutcliffe Volume 22 Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I Edited by Hartmut Berghoff, Frank Biess, and Ulrike Strasser Volume 21 The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History Edited by Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann Volume 20 The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians Edited by Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, and James J. Sheehan Volume 19 Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany Frank Usbeck Volume 18 The Respectable Career of Fritz K.: The Making and Remaking of a Provincial Nazi Leader Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh Translated by Casey Butterfield Volume 17 Encounters with Modernity: The Catholic Church in West Germany, 1945–1975 Benjamin Ziemann Translated from the German by Andrew Evans For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/studies-in-german-history

END GAME The 1989 Revolution in East Germany

S Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk Translated from the German by Patricia C. Sutcliffe With a New Afterword to the 2022 Edition: From the Revolution in the GDR in 1989 to Eastern Germany in the Twenty-First Century

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com English-language edition © Berghahn Books Originally published in German as Endspiel: Die Revolution von 1989 in der DDR German-language edition © 2009, 2015 C. H. Beck All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha, 1967– author. | Sutcliffe, Patricia C., translator. Title: End game: The 1989 Revolution in East Germany / Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk; translated from the German by Patricia C. Sutcliffe. Other titles: Endspiel. English | 1989 Revolution in East Germany Description: [New York, New York]: Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Studies in German History; volume 26 | Translation of: Endspiel: Die revolution von 1989 in der DDR. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022028508 (print) | LCCN 2022028509 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800736214 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800736221 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Germany (East)—Politics and government—1989–1990. | Revolutions—Germany (East) | Germany (East)—Social conditions. Classification: LCC DD289 .K6913 2022 (print) | LCC DD289 (ebook) | DDC 943/.10879—dc23/eng/20220623 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028508 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028509 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-621-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-622-1 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736214

CONTENTS

Preface to the 2015 Edition Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

vii viii ix

Introduction

1 PART 1. Images of a Social Crisis

11

Chapter 1.

General Conditions

14

Chapter 2.

The GDR in Its International Context

48

Chapter 3.

Symptoms of Crisis

84

Chapter 4.

Nuances: Regional Variations and Subcultures

111

Chapter 5.

Countermovements: The Pull of the West and the Churches

144

Chapter 6.

Opposition in the SED State

190

Chapter 7.

Germination Time: The Ossietzky Affair

240

PART 2. From the Social Crisis to a Crisis of the Dictatorship

247

Chapter 8.

The Social Crisis Deepens

249

Chapter 9.

Regime Collapse and Historic Days

288

–v–

vi | Contents

PART 3. The Fall of a Dictatorship

339

Chapter 10.

From Demonstrations to the Fall of the Wall

341

Chapter 11.

The Fallout

386

Chapter 12.

Forging a New Path: Elections and Reunification

415

Conclusion.

The Revolution: Or Otto Schily as a Symbol

454

Afterword to the 2022 Edition. From the Revolution in the GDR in 1989 to Eastern Germany in the Twenty-First Century

465

Select Bibliography Index

493 501

PREFACE TO THE 2015 EDITION

This book was first published in February 2009 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the revolution of 1989; a second edition published only a few months later corrected some mistakes. The Federal Agency for Civic Education also published a special edition in 2009. Now I am pleased that the publisher C. H. Beck is publishing a new edition. This has been revised, corrected, and supplemented in a few places. I have made every effort to take up and consider criticism and suggestions from the very many reviews in Germany and abroad as well as from a gratifyingly large number of reader letters. On the whole, however, the original structure and substance of the book has been preserved. I have only taken into account scholarly debates that have taken place in the years since 2009, some of which have brought new insights and reflections, if they are of crucial importance to the narrative and explanatory structure as presented in this book. I have updated and expanded the bibliography and carefully added the annotations. March 18, 2015

– vii –

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am extremely grateful and happy that ten years after its first publication and several editions in Germany, this book is now available to an interested Englishspeaking audience. For this I am extremely grateful to Berghahn Books, the German Historical Institute Washington, and especially Patricia C. Sutcliffe, who was largely responsible for the translation and editing of this book. I dedicate this edition to my best friend, my wife Susan Arndt, who, as a professor of English literature, has published standard critical whiteness studies on racism and sexism, books that open up a global and universal historical horizon, unlike my small-scale regional studies that are “only” about freedom. Through many conversations with Susan, I learned that my apology for freedom and her approaches critical of racism and sexism had more in common than I originally realized. I am more grateful to her than any words could express for this broadening of my horizons, which has now lasted for over three decades. But, alas, I too seldom tell her so. Forgive me for being such a boring historian. But I try, I really do. Je t’aime, mon amour. Et merci pour tout! October 9, 2022 Thirty-three years after the day of decision in Leipzig

– viii –

ABBREVIATIONS

Note: Periodicals are in italics. ABL

Archiv Bürgerbewegung Leipzig / Archive of the Citizens’ Movement Leipzig

Abt.

Abteilung / Section

ADN

Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst / General German News Service

AfD

Alternative für Deutschland / Alternative for Germany

AfNS

Amt für Nationale Sicherheit / Office for National Security

AG

Arbeitsgruppe, Arbeitsgemeinschaft / Working Group

AGM

Arbeitsgruppe des Ministers (MfS) / Working Group of the Minister

AKG

Auswertungs- und Kontrollgruppe (MfS) / Evaluation and Control Group

AKSK

Arbeitskreis Solidarische Kirche / Working Group Solidarity Church

AOP

Archivierter Operativer Vorgang (MfS) / Archived Operative Procedure

Ast.

Außenstelle / field office

BA

Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive

BdL

Büro der Leitung/des Leiters (MfS) / Office of the Director

BDVP

Bezirksbehörde der Deutschen Volkspolizei / Regional Office of the German People’s Police

BEK

Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR / Federation of Evangelical Churches

BStU

Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR / Federal Commissioner for the – ix –

x | Abbreviations

Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic BV

Bezirksverwaltung (MfS) / Regional administration

BZ

Berliner Zeitung / Berlin Newspaper

CC

Central Committee / Zentralkomitee

CDU

Christlich-Demokratische Union / Christian Democratic Union

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

CSCE

Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe

ČSSR

Československá socialistická republika / Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic

CSU

Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern / Christian Social Union in Bavaria

DA

Deutschland Archiv / Germany Archive

DAX

Deutscher Aktien Index / German Stock Market Index

DBD

Demokratische Bauernpartei Deutschlands / Democratic Farmers’ Party of Germany

DDR

Deutsche Demokratische Republik / German Democratic Republic

DFD

Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands / Democratic Women’s League of Germany

DSU

Deutsche Soziale Union / German Social Union

EKD

Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland / Evangelical Church in Germany

epd

evangelischer Pressedienst / evangelical press service

FAS

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung / Frankfurt General Sunday Newspaper

FAZ

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung / Frankfurt General Newspaper

FDGB

Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund / Free German Trade Union Federation

FDJ

Freie Deutsche Jugend / Free German Youth

FDP

Freie Demokratische Partei / Free Democratic Party

FR

Frankfurter Rundschau / Frankfurt Review

HA

Hauptabteilung / main section

Abbreviations | xi

HV A

Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (MfS) / Central Reconnaissance Office

IFM

Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte / Initiative for Peace and Human Rights

IM

Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (MfS) / unofficial employee

JHK

Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung / Yearbook for Historical Communism Research

JW

Junge Welt / Young World

KD

Kreisdienststelle (MfS) / District Office

KGB

Komitet gosudarstvennoj bezopasnosti / Committee for State Security (Soviet)

KiS

Kirche im Sozialismus / Church in Socialism

KPD

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands / Communist Party of Germany

KvU

Kirche von Unten / Church from Below

LDPD

Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands / Liberal Democratic Party of Germany

MDR

Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk / Central German Radio and Television Broadcaster

MdI

Ministerium des Innern / Ministry of the Interior

MfS

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit / Ministry for State Security (Stasi)

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

ND

Neues Deutschland / New Germany

NF

Neues Forum / New Forum

NDPD

National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands / National Democratic Party of Germany

NSDAP

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei / National Socialist German Workers’ Party, Nazi Party

NVA

Nationale Volksarmee / National People’s Army

OibE

Offizier im besonderen Einsatz (MfS) / Officer on Special Deployment

OV

Operativer Vorgang (MfS) / operation (undercover)

xii | Abbreviations

PDS

Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus / Party of Democratic Socialism

P.E.N.

Poets, Essayists, Novelists

RAF

Rote Armee Fraktion / Red Army Faction

RGW

Rat für gegenseitige Wirtschaftshilfe / Comecon

RHG

Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft / Robert Havemann Society

RIAS

Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor (von Berlin) / Radio in the American Sector (of Berlin)

SAPMO B-Arch Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganizationen der DDR, Bundesarchiv / Foundation Archive of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR SdM

Sekretariat des Ministers (MfS) / Secretariat of the Minister (MfS)

SDP

Sozialdemokratische Partei in der DDR / Social Democratic Party in the GDR

SED

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / Socialist Unity Party of Germany

SFB

Sender Freies Berlin (Radio Free Berlin)

SPD

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands / Social Democratic Party of Germany

taz

die tageszeitung / the daily newspaper

UB

Umweltbibliothek / Environmental Library

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

UFV

Unabhängiger Frauenverband / Independent Women’s Association

UN

United Nations Organization

VPKA/VPKÄ

Volkspolizeikreisamt/ämter / People’s Police Office(s)

VW

Volkswagen

ZAIG

Zentrale Auswertungs- und Informationsgruppe (MfS) / Central Evaluation and Information Group (MfS)

ZK

Zentralkomitee / Central Committee

INTRODUCTION

S There were many walls in the GDR. Very few were visible. The most famous of these was erected by the SED leadership on August 13, 1961, between East and West Berlin, so that no one could move from one half of the city to the other unhindered and without express permission. The “green border” between East and West Germany had not been safe to cross since the early 1950s. The SED leadership had finally walled the population in. But it not only walled in the people; it had also barricaded itself behind mighty walls for fear of them. Until 1960, the regime’s most important representatives lived in the “little town” in Pankow, a northeastern district of Berlin, where the rulers had created an isolated residential park consisting of villas that had survived the war unscathed. The complex was surrounded by fences and screens, with soldiers patrolling the access roads. Since the 1950s, therefore, discussions of the GDR often referred to the “Pankow regime.” For example, Udo Lindenberg’s famous special train went to Pankow in 1983: “Excuse me, is that the special train to Pankow? / I have to go there for a moment, then to East Berlin. / I have to clear something up with your chief Indian.” He was sitting in Berlin-Mitte. Since 1960, however, his residence was located northeast of Berlin in a forest settlement called Wandlitz. Administratively, this “forest settlement” did not belong to the municipality of Wandlitz, but to Bernau. The settlement consisted of twenty-three single-family houses, a swimming pool, a cultural center, a sales outlet, and premises for the MfS guards. It was surrounded by tightly secured fences. The population has long speculated about the baroque extravagance of the mysterious settlement of the most powerful men—who were all men. It was suspected that everything existed in abundance there, especially coveted Western consumer goods that were not available in Notes from this chapter begin on page 8.

2 | End Game

everyday life or only with great difficulty. The leading SED functionaries were said to have a lifestyle that oscillated between aristocratic style and nouveau riche extravagance. On November 24, 1989, two weeks after the fall of the Wall, even this idea collapsed. Several GDR journalists and an official GDR television team had been allowed to take a look at the militarily protected area. Millions of television viewers could now see that the highest-ranking SED functionaries had spent their leisure time in a petty bourgeois, stuffy world that was not even comfortable to look at. In the sales shop there were Western goods—they had been hurriedly removed days before—and in the kitchens there were products from the “Miele” company standing around. But otherwise everything had a familiar stench to the people of the GDR. The little television play reached its dramaturgical climax through a chance encounter with Kurt Hager, who together with his wife took a walk behind the walls of “Wandlitz.” Hager, born in 1912, came from a working-class family, passed his school-leaving exams, and, from the late 1920s, belonged to the communist movement. In 1930 he joined the KPD. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he was initially imprisoned in a concentration camp and went into exile in 1934. He was interned several times during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 for his active involvement. He returned to Germany from exile in Britain in July 1946 and from then on held top positions without interruption—first in the Soviet Zone and then in the GDR. From 1949, the year of the founding of the GDR, he was part of the extended leadership circle in the SED apparatus: from 1955 he was secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, from 1958 a candidate, and, finally, from 1963 a full member of the SED Politburo, the actual center of GDR power. He was responsible for all matters pertaining to culture, art, sciences, and universities, as well as ideology. His unofficial epithet was “head of ideology” or “chief theoretician.” His impressive list of titles was further enhanced by an honorary doctorate in the natural sciences and a professorship at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Even “leading comrades” did not want to completely do without such bourgeois accessories. This man was not just a cog in the wheel but an important part of the system engine. In mid-November 1989, a television crew suddenly appeared in front of him; this unexpected situation would have been unthinkable in the GDR until that month. And what he said spontaneously helped to further delegitimize the SED and the GDR. Hager said that “Wandlitz” was only a better internment camp, even comparing it to a concentration camp. At that time, most people laughed about it—even as they were simultaneously outraged. Behind Hager’s admission was the unbroken belief that he was acting on behalf of a higher mission—what the Communists had called the “historical mission of the working class” since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And because

Introduction | 3

this “historical mission” had to be successfully completed, even against resistance, it was necessary that functionaries like Kurt Hager lived in isolation from the people. “Wandlitz” was created because, after the experiences of the failed revolutions of 1953 in the GDR and of 1956 in Hungary, the representatives needed to be particularly well protected in the event of further possible uprisings. In 1989 this was of no use. The singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, who had moved from Hamburg to East Berlin as a communist in 1953 and who had been denied reentry to the GDR in November 1976 after a concert in Cologne, gave expression to a widespread attitude with a new song he wrote at the end of 1989: “We wouldn’t ever think to bring you ruin / You’re ruined enough on your own / Not vengeance, no, pensions!/ In your Wandlitz Ghetto / And peace as your last breath is drawn.”1 When Biermann performed this song in Leipzig at the first GDR concert after his expatriation on December 1, 1989, it elicited fierce applause and laughter.2 The eighty-one-year-old actress Steffie Spira had already ended her speech on November 4, 1989, on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz with the request: “From Wandlitz we’ll make an old people’s home! Those over 60 and 65 can stay there now, if they do what I am doing now—Dismissed!”3 This speech also precipitated laughter and applause. Kurt Hager was a particularly hated SED functionary. Unlike SED general secretary Erich Honecker, MfS minister Erich Mielke, Education Minister Margot Honecker, or the chief commentator on television, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, Hager had drawn the fury of a broad spectrum of the GDR population with a single interview. Until the beginning of April 1987, most people perceived him as one of those SED Politburo members who embodied power in the state, but they did not know his competence or were simply not interested in it. This changed abruptly in spring 1987. On April 9, 1987, the stern published an interview with him that was reprinted in full in the SED central press organ Neues Deutschland the following day. In this interview, he recited everything that the SED propaganda machine proclaimed on a daily basis like he was rattling off his prayers: only in the socialist states was there real democracy, millions of people were actively involved in the GDR; only socialism could solve the world’s social and global problems; the East German economy was a success story; there was an independent socialist German nation in the GDR; the GDR media reported realistically about the GDR. The GDR people were used to all this. What was new was that Hager harshly rejected the reform efforts that had been started in the Soviet Union since 1985–86 under CPSU general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Up to this point, the slogan “Learning from the Soviet Union means learning to win” had applied. Moscow was the guarantor power of the SED regime. Now the party leaders saw, not unrealistically, that the reforms in the USSR could endanger their own rule.

4 | End Game

The stern interview was not oral but written. The Hamburg editorial staff had submitted questions that the SED leadership had answered. The SED Politburo had approved the answers on March 18, 1987. Hager later lied that the answers had come from the Foreign Ministry and that he had made the mistake of “sticking too closely to this draft and not using my own style.”4 But the answers corresponded exactly to the “style” that Hager and other SED functionaries had always used and which made them appear so colorless. The text was the one approved by the Politburo. Everyone knew this because an SED functionary published nothing in a Western magazine or in Neues Deutschland that was not considered an official party statement. Hager’s rejection of a reform of socialism in the sense of Gorbachev culminated in the sentence: “By the way, if your neighbor redecorates his apartment, would you feel obliged to redecorate your apartment as well?” From that point on, Hager had a new nickname: “Wallpaper Kutte.” The ensuing horror was great and reached far into the SED. For many people in the GDR, it was clear that things could not go on like this. At the same time, a rot continued to expand over the land. Hopelessness and resignation spread. Many tried to leave the country for good. Few were involved in opposition groups. The vast majority remained like the rabbit in front of the snake. Not even retreating into the private sphere was really successful anymore: if you wanted to continue working on your allotted garden plot, you had to line up for hours to get the urgently needed bag of cement, and the tile could only be obtained by exchange or other efforts. “Wallpaper Kutte’s” remarks had engendered such horror because it was quite clear that as long as “they” were in charge, nothing would change. Only two and a half years later, the reform of socialism was no longer about wallpapering. The foundation walls had been torn down, and soon the foundation was replaced. The pace of these changes left many contemporaries speechless. The phrase “madness”—often heard in November 1989 after the opening of the Wall on the evening of November 9, when millions of people traveled from East to West, drunk with joy—was based on the previously unimaginable experience that an apparently firmly cemented system could disappear from the political map within just a few weeks. This happened at a speed that seemed absolutely impossible even in the summer of 1989. Time took on a new significance in the thinking and lives of many East Germans. My book aims to explain this paradox: how the GDR remained apparently stable and supposedly calm until the fall of 1989 only to have the state and system collapse within a matter of weeks. At the heart of the account is the question of why the SED regime collapsed in such a short time. Precisely because GDR society was marked by many paradoxes and contradictions—albeit perhaps no more than there were and still are in other societies, but of its very own and in some respects unique kind—my portrayal itself is not free of paradoxes, contradictions, and a frequent “as well as.” This book is not a history of German

Introduction | 5

unity. It does not even represent the path to German unity. This is about the context that made German and European unification possible in the first place: the social awakening in the Eastern Bloc countries. Three temporal levels are at the center of the analysis: First, I draw a broad panorama of GDR society to illustrate how the crisis gradually worsened from the mid-1980s onward. In addition, because today quite a few people tend to trivialize the SED state and to gloss over everyday life in the GDR, this account tries to explain why the historical structure of the GDR had no alternative but to end in 1989, and why most people were simply fed up with life behind the Wall. The immediate prehistory of the European events of 1989–90 began in the decade before. In contrast to 1953, 1956, 1961, or 1968, the Polish crisis, despite the declaration of martial law in December 1981, remained an internal affair inasmuch as no armies of foreign states invaded in this case—and yet it was exemplary for the entire Eastern Bloc. When Mikhail S. Gorbachev took power in Moscow in 1985, it quickly became clear that the dynamics of his domestic and foreign policy could lead to results that he had not intended. His merit remains that he did not break off this process by military means, at least not outside the Soviet Union. In the end, the majority of the GDR population thanked the Soviet soldiers, and Gorbachev in particular, for not doing what they had been used to doing in Moscow for decades: bringing up tanks and shooting peaceful people. This homage shows how much dictatorships can turn the achievements of civilization upside down. Because Gorbachev’s policies had so many effects on the situation in the GDR, my account begins in the mid1980s—but one must always bear in mind that Gorbachev was the final answer to the social emancipation movement in the Eastern Bloc that started in Poland and to the deep crisis in the USSR and the entire empire. Although I choose this caesura as my starting point, I will not treat it dogmatically but will also refer back to what came before. In the second part, I then look at the events from the beginning of 1989 up to the mass demonstration in Leipzig on October 9, 1989, focusing primarily on how, in a deep social crisis that had long been in the offing, those in power were no longer able to do as they wanted, and society no longer wanted what the rulers had previously demanded of it. Within a few weeks, the system, which even international observers had promised would remain stable, collapsed like a house of cards. Finally, in the third part, I discuss the developments that rapidly intensified once again between Honecker’s resignation and the democratic elections of March 18, 1990. There is no question that the fall of the Wall on November 9 considerably increased the pace of these events. But unlike what is often depicted, one must examine this occurrence within the historical process. It was a caesura, but it presents itself somewhat differently from a sociohistorical perspective than if the fall of the Wall were to be regarded as a single event. In this case, one must

6 | End Game

present a democratization process with many facets that likewise aimed from the very beginning to achieve the first free democratic elections so that the associated social learning effect becomes more interesting than the result to historical observers. Finally, in the conclusion I discuss the character of the upheaval and why many find it difficult to call it a revolution. This book does not deal with the history of unification, the unification crisis, unification mistakes, the success of unification, and other such matters but focuses on three major shifts that took place on October 9, 1989, November 9, 1989, and March 18, 1990, each caesura representing new options. March 18, the day of the first free elections in the GDR, marked a special turning point, as democratically legitimized representatives of the people began to engage in politics. Society also drove them, but mostly according to different rules than before. On March 18, 1990, the SED dictatorship as an institution had irrevocably been relegated to history. Such an undertaking sets limits. My focus is directed toward social processes. I address the large-scale politics, the international interdependence, and not least the developments in Eastern Europe. But my main focus is on society and the various reactions to “large-scale politics.” Precisely because I understand the events of 1989 as a citizens’ movement on a whole, my presentation focuses on those who became citizens in the autumn of 1989 and those who tried to claim and exercise civil rights under the dictatorship even before 1989. This includes my mentioning of “the others” who tried to suppress civil rights in 1989 and before. I mostly write about “GDR people” and only write about “citizens” when they behaved like that because the absence of civil rights also predominantly implies the absence of “citizens” and makes them exceptional where they appear. This account is based on sources that I found in the Federal Archives, in the archives of the federal commissioner for the MfS files, in archives of the GDR opposition, such as the Robert Havemann Society Berlin and the Archive Citizens’ Movement Leipzig, and in many other archives. I would like to thank their employees for their cooperation. Among the sources I used are daily and weekly newspapers and various periodicals ranging from underground magazines to political, literary, sports, cultural, art, and music journals. I would particularly like to highlight the 125-volume press collection “Germany 1989” and “Germany 1990” published by the Press and Information Office of the federal government. For historians, it is a matter of course to try to take note of everything that has been published on their subject. However, I have also utilized only verified quotations. The concise bibliography indicates that the special literature is extensive. And because this is not made explicit enough in this book, I would like to mention here a few authors whose works I owe a great deal to for very different reasons: Timothy Garton Ash, Ralf Dahrendorf, Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Hans-Hermann Hertle, Armin Mitter, Patrik von zur Mühlen, Ehrhart Neubert,

Introduction | 7

Michael Richter, Gerhard A. Ritter, Richard Schröder, André Steiner, Karsten Timmer, and Stefan Wolle. First and foremost, however, are the thirty-three volumes of the two Enquete Commissions of the Bundestag, which met between 1992 and 1998 and dealt with the history and consequences of the SED dictatorship and the process of German unification. In many respects, the volumes represent a treasure trove that cannot be overestimated. Furthermore, I have interviewed many contemporary witnesses for facts and background information, both orally and in writing. I do not name anyone in my book who is not a relative or absolute figure of contemporary history without having consulted with them. I did not rely on others’ assessments but got the facts confirmed. Several times in this introduction I have emphasized my position as a historian. I do not count among the representatives of this guild who claim that there can be objectivity in historical representation. I am a child of my time; my questions are based on my interests. I have assumptions, viewpoints, experiences, ethical principles. I can name them, but I can’t hide them. Others may think they can. I don’t believe in their miracles. I even consider them to be particularly clever charlatans. History is reconstruction, the connecting link between past and future. Enlightenment and German idealism are linked to the idea that “history” can be shaped as a human process of self-realization. History is thus removed from the past. Milan Kundera vividly described this abstraction in the construction of the communist dictatorship from personal experience: “What had attracted me to the movement more than anything, dazzled me, was the feeling (real or apparent) of standing near the wheel of history . . . we were bewitched by history; we were drunk with the thought of jumping on its back and feeling it beneath us; admittedly, in most cases the result was an ugly lust for power, but (as all human affairs are ambiguous) there was still . . . an altogether idealistic illusion that we were inaugurating a human era in which man (all men) would be neither outside history, nor under the heel of history, but create and direct it.”5 Historians deal with past(s) and reconstruct history(ies) from them. They dissect myths and demythologize history that has come to be seen as nature.6 The myth fears nothing more than its historicization. Historians are interested in the dialectics of nonsimultaneity and simultaneity. They aim to counter the apparent senselessness of the past—“history has no meaning”7—to generate a historical sense. They often see themselves as scholarly enlighteners who seek to rationalize their current location-bound status. For the historian, “present” is the state constituted by the past. “Present” has “at best the width of a razor whose blade incessantly cuts off pieces of the future and assigns them to the past.”8 I research, write, think, and judge the facts presented here differently than someone who mourns the GDR, than someone who believes he can judge objectively, than someone who only knows the zone from files, books, films, fleeting visits, as someone who was born before me, after me, or somewhere different

8 | End Game

from me. I know almost none of the events I have described from my own experience: I was neither in the opposition nor in the SED; I was part of the uneven masses in between. I acknowledge the subjective limitations of historical knowledge. This is quite easy to understand: Put two historians in front of the same pile of files and give them the same task. The result will be two completely different books, which may be mutually exclusive—and both can nevertheless quite rightly claim to have worked in accordance with academic standards. That sounds more abstract than it is meant to be. But all those who presently research and write about 1989/90 and the history leading up to it are contemporary witnesses—regardless of the position they may be in.9 A West Berliner looks at events differently than an East Berliner, someone from Frankfurt/Oder differently than someone from Frankfurt/Main, someone from Warsaw differently than someone from Prague. And this is equally true of the differentiated views of memory in one historical location. Both the authors and readers are contemporary witnesses. Even today’s grammar school pupils, who were born years after 1989, are contemporary witnesses in that they are shaped by the stories told in their families, even if nothing is told. In other words, a book about “1989” can neither be conceived nor written without reflecting on the fact that anyone who takes it in hand already has a historical picture of the events. In this respect, my presentation aims to allow the reader to learn something about “1989” and to discuss it. I do not proclaim an objective truth here, but I do proclaim my own, which I would like to present in such a way that it is comprehensible and plausible, even if one does not share it with me. And precisely because I see it that way, I would like to apologize in advance to all those who do not appear in this book. Most of them do not come up, nor are most of the sites of action even mentioned. I know that the events in XYZ were important, that the person ABC played an almost paramount role. But I also know that I have never heard of many XYZs and ABCs, and yet they were all outstanding. But I never intended to write an encyclopedia either—just a simple account of why “1989” occurred and what happened up to the elections on March 18, 1990.

Notes 1. Wolf Biermann, Alle Lieder (Cologne, 1991), 412–13. The “Ballade von den verdorbenen Greisen” is recorded on the 1990 LP Gut Kirschenessen. I would like to thank my friend Wolf Biermann, who provided me with this authorized translation on August 26, 2021. 2. On this momentous concert, which took place in a freezing cold convention hall and was organized by two Leipzig civil rights activists, see Jay Rosellini, Wolf Biermann (Munich, 1992), 140–49. For background information, see Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Arno Polzin, eds., Fasse

Introduction | 9

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Dich kurz! Der grenzüberschreitende Telefonverkehr der Opposition in den 1980er Jahren und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Göttingen, 2014), 923–31, 938–39. Annegret Hahn, Gisela Pucher, Henning Schaller, and Lothar Scharsich, eds., 4. 11. 89 (Berlin, 1990), 206. The demonstration is documented on the 1999 two-CD edition: Berlin Alexanderplatz, 4. 11. ’89. Die Kundgebung am Vorabend des Mauerfalls. Kurt Hager, Erinnerungen (Leipzig, 1996), 384. Milan Kundera, The Joke (London, Boston, 1992), 71. “We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature”; Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York, 2012), 240. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, with a preface by Václav Havel (London, New York, 2011), 474. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Einleitung,” in Geschichte und Soziologie, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, 2nd ed. (Königstein/Ts., 1984), 15. However, this had considerable effects, as another example persuasively shows: Anna Karla, Revolution als Zeitgeschichte: Memoiren der Französischen Revolution in der Restaurationszeit (Göttingen, 2014).

Part 1

IMAGES OF A SOCIAL CRISIS

S September 30, 1987, is a day with which most people associate nothing special. This Wednesday the second-round matches of the three European soccer competitions took place. GDR endurance champion BFC Dynamo was eliminated in the European Cup of the national champions against Bordeaux. The same happened in the Cup of the Cup Winners’ Cup between 1 FC Lok Leipzig and Marseille. And also for Dynamo Dresden it was over after the first round—the eleven lost to Spartak Moscow. Only Wismut Aue survived the first round and advanced against Reykjavik. None of this was new to troubled soccer fans. What was unusual was the reporting about this bankruptcy in the daily newspaper Welt, the highest-circulation GDR daily newspaper published by the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ, Free German Youth) Central Council. On October 1, 1987, under the heading “Three eliminated—no need to comment,” the sports page published: nothing. The space intended for the article simply remained white. In a footnote, the editors wished the team from Aue all the best for the second round. Even though editor in chief Hans-Dieter Schütt was known as an ideological whip and the Junge Welt as a combat newspaper, this form of journalistic commentary made waves and was a daily topic of discussion in many places. A newspaper that reacts to a situation with a white box is like a radio commentary that is limited to silence. This is what the GDR radio commentator Wolfgang Hempel achieved in 1954 when he kept silent for forty seconds after Rahn’s goal in the World Cup final against Hungary—an almost infinitely long time in the radio age. No matter who you ask today, almost everyone who remembers this contribution in the Junge Welt believes that the entire site remained white. In fact, not even half of the page was white. The cheeky non-comment effectively made the other posts on the page fade away. This journalistic event is remarkable because the daily press in the GDR otherwise seemed to be boring, monotonous, and

12 | Part 1

humorless. The white space was tantamount to a surprising spot of color. In a figurative sense, this event impressively reflected the situation of the entire society. GDR soccer fans had a hard time with their own teams. Again and again they hoped, every year anew, and again and again they were disappointed. Magdeburg was the only GDR team to win a European Cup in 1974, Carl Zeiss Jena won in 1981, and Lok Leipzig made it to the final in 1987. The GDR representative team went to the World Cup only once—in 1974 to the Federal Republic of Germany with the famous victory against the eventual world champion host team; they never prevailed in the European Championship. Although the team won gold at the 1976 Olympic Games, even hardened fans regarded the Olympic soccer tournaments only as events that filled the summer slump, to some extent, due to the vague amateur rules of the game. And the highest division, the Oberliga, perpetually defeated the MfS club BFC Dynamo between 1979 and 1988. If the team was not good enough in soccer terms, it brought in means beyond the sport to help—hence the application of the popular phrase “master racketeer” to the teams’ management. Dynamo Dresden won the two championships in 1989 and 1990, which was not much better: Dresden was a police club. So the titles were firmly in the grip of the MfS and the People’s Police. The other teams ran like they were running against a bulwark. The BFC was hated across the country, a sentiment its members could hear at every away game. In the stadium one could vent one’s feelings against the team while really venting against the SED state. A popular expression made this clear: The southern East Berlin district of Köpenick was home to the 1 FC Union team. The joke went, not least with regard to the BFC: “Not everyone who is in favor of union is an enemy of the state. But any enemy of the state is a fan of the Union.” Soccer fans’ hopes regularly turned into sadness, anger, resignation, and disappointment. Many remained loyal to their clubs, but interest and enthusiasm for the GDR representative team decreased noticeably. The pickle squad failed too often. And even the international comparisons at club level gave little cause for joy. What looked like world-class play between Rostock and Suhl degenerated into a ragtag, regional crew compared to Bordeaux, Rome, Barcelona, London, and Uerdingen. Not that there weren’t respectable results every now and then. Everyone saw how the individual talents unfolded but then withered away in the collective again and again. The “sports wonderland GDR” took on the world’s greats in many disciplines, but in the largest and most popular national sport in Europe the GDR teams were mediocre. By 1987, even the Junge Welt editors had had enough and commented on their continually disappointed hopes with symptomatic speechlessness. What could they say? They propagated proud hope, a bright future, and scientifically proven certainty, yet dissatisfaction, helplessness, resignation, and hopelessness grew. The editors’ rare originality of expressing their own speechlessness literally speechlessly can be taken as a sign that not even loyal party cadres could

Part 1 | 13

understand why their hopes always went unfulfilled. The footnote wishing Wismut Aue well—a small association that received little attention outside the region in the 1980s and fought against the greats like a brave Gallic village against the Romans—can also be understood as suggesting that fans would have to rely on someone besides the greats in the future. The previous bearers of hope had lost that status, but they were still too powerful to attack head-on. Therefore, the paper commented on their failure in a way that everyone could see but that again remained ambiguous enough not to endanger the publishers. They were, in effect, saying that one could and should not openly invest in the BFC and Dynamo Dresden, but, at the same time, one had hopes that were directed at the club in Aue, more precisely at “Wismut Aue.” And it was history muse Clio’s intention that Wismut, the most important uranium ore producer for the Soviet Union, should operate as a Soviet-German joint stock company until the end of the GDR. In other words: whoever had hopes for Aue somehow hoped for a fresh wind. And this was expected in 1987 from the Soviet Union of all places, from the country that for many years had stood for stagnation, hopelessness, megalomania, crime, and mass terror. Within a few months the situation had changed so radically that everything literally turned into the opposite. The most intimate Muscovites swore off overnight. Self-proclaimed reform communists aimed at Moscow. Anticommunists bet on a communist. Apolitical people were interested in what was going on in the party apparatus. Christians sought dialogue with Communists. The list could be continued. MfS and police, BFC and Dynamo, might have everything under control. But many people had had enough, whether they were soccer enthusiasts or not. The search within the system was directed toward new bearers of hope. It was not a matter of snatching “Wismut” from the Soviets’ clutches but of loosening the chains symbolically laid by the “BFC” and “Dynamo”; some wished to break them. People’s own living conditions and experiences, not theoretical drafts or political concepts, had prompted this insight born of necessity. And the main keys to this were not in Bonn, Washington, Paris, or London but in Warsaw, Budapest, and Moscow. This is where the key concepts of the time came from: Polish Solidarność, Hungarian Kádárism (“Goulash Communism”), and Gorbachev’s involuntary final response, which was bundled into two key words: perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (transparency, publicity).

Chapter 1

GENERAL CONDITIONS

S Involuntary Gravedigger: The Gorbachev System The GDR was part of the Soviet empire, the largest in modern history, which existed from 1917 to 1991. The GDR was founded in 1949 under the direct guidance of the Soviets as the USSR was a victorious power following World War II. This dependency in principle remained in place until 1989: only the Soviet occupying power could guarantee the SED regime its continued existence. As long as Moscow was prepared to defend Communist rule by force of arms and military intervention, the East German Communists would be able to maintain the power they had not gained through free elections. Although there were always slight tensions between East Berlin and Moscow because both Walter Ulbricht in the second half of the 1960s and Erich Honecker from the late 1970s onward felt too restricted in their political radius of action to confidently explore greater scope for action, and this fundamental relationship of dependence remained untouched. Moscow needed the GDR as a strategic outpost. In the course of the global arms race at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s this became all the more apparent. The Soviet occupying soldiers stationed in the GDR—between four and five hundred thousand men in the 1980s, with their combat units geared for offense—were among the most modern units of the Soviet army and the Warsaw Pact. The “People’s Poland” located between the Soviet Union and the GDR was considered insecure in terms of alliance policy. Marked by constant unrest and a catastrophic economic and supply situation1 from the late 1970s, Poland had been considered a shaky candidate and the most likely to leave the Eastern Bloc. The election of the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in 1978 Notes from this chapter begin on page 46.

General Conditions | 15

gave Polish society, which is strongly Catholic in character, a symbolic figure in its struggle for national independence and for freedom and democracy. In the summer of 1980, the trade union movement Solidarność, with over ten million members, began to challenge the communist state, which only managed to save itself by imposing martial law on December 13, 1981. The Soviet Union was previously reluctant to intervene militarily. Its intervention in Afghanistan, which had begun at the turn of 1979–80, met with an unexpectedly strong international public reaction. The widespread boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow constituted a serious loss of prestige. Moreover, the situation in Afghanistan itself was extremely critical. The Islamic religious warriors were by no means willing to surrender to Soviet military power. The Soviet empire slid into a grueling guerrilla war with heavy losses, which revived religious fundamentalism and the striving for autonomy and independence in the Caucasian and Central Asian Soviet republics as well. Nothing could be less useful to the Soviet leadership than a new trouble spot. The Polish Communist Party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski tried to excuse martial law and the violent elimination of Solidarność by saying that this averted an impending Russian military invasion. But there are also indications that he himself would have preferred a Soviet invasion. Jaruzelski “was the servant of the military interest within the Soviet apparatus, the batman of the Soviet marshals.”2 The downfall of empires does not begin at the center but at the periphery. Emperors may not know this theory, but they do understand decay at the edges of their empires as existential. This is precisely why they react very sensitively and usually brutally when attempts at disengagement are made on the periphery. They are not interested in the unruly Gallic village itself, whose value may be insignificant, but they fear the pull of the wind. This explains Honecker’s presumption of pushing the Soviets to invade. The proclamation of martial law seemed to have smoothed the waves. There was great indignation in the West, but détente politicians such as Egon Bahr stabbed the Polish democracy movement in the back by certifying that it was endangering the stability of Europe and world peace.3 While events on the periphery could be significant, changes were always at the center of the seismographically perceptible system upheavals. The Communist ideology praised itself as internationalist but was essentially nationalist. The center was in Moscow, paradoxically even for those who had turned away from Moscow. There was nothing to suggest that this would change with the enthronement of Mikhail Gorbachev as head of the CPSU in March 1985. The Soviet Union was in a deep social crisis. At the end of the 1980s, almost 290 million people lived in this huge country, an estimated 40 to 60 million of them below the poverty line. Only the small ruling class, called the nomenklatura, lived in prosperity and wealth. Since 1964, Leonid Brezhnev had commanded the country as party leader. When he died on November 10, 1982, not quite at the age of seventy-six, the country also resembled his decrepit physical and

16 | End Game

psychological state. Despite huge agricultural areas, the USSR had to import grain and other agricultural products again and again to avert famine catastrophes. The shops were empty, and the people were crowded into the narrowest of living spaces. Statistically, everyone had an average of only about five square meters of living space. The economy was subject to the military-industrial complex. The country was practically in the hands of the secret police and the military, who drove the arms race forward and took all the resources that society urgently needed. The living conditions in the USSR were hardly known to most GDR people. Those who were allowed to travel to the Soviet Union were mostly deeply shocked. And since things didn’t look much better in most other socialist countries, many GDR citizens still felt lucky to be living in the GDR. The Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuściński vividly described the connection between the ultramodern Soviet army and arms research and the impoverishment of the masses: [The Soviet Union comprises a] huge area of the world. But then the surface of the Imperium measures more than twenty-two million square kilometres, and its continental borders are longer than the equator and stretch for forty-two thousand kilometres. Keeping in mind that wherever it is technically possible, these borders were and are marked with thick coils of barbed wire . . . and that this wire, because across hundreds, no, thousands, of kilometres, one can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire. For the matter does not end with the wiring of borders! How many thousands of kilometres of wire were used to fence in the gulag archipelago? Those hundreds of camps, staging points, and prisons scattered throughout the territory of the entire Imperium! How many thousands more kilometres were swallowed up for the wiring of artillery, tank, and atomic ranges? And the wiring barracks? And various warehouses? If one were to multiply all this by the number of years the Soviet government has been in existence, it would be easy to see why, in the shops of Smolensk or Omsk, one can buy neither a hoe nor a hammer, never mind a knife or a spoon: such things could simply not be produced, since the necessary raw materials were used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.4

If one takes Kapuściński’s observation as an example of the absurd state of society, it is easy to understand why this country rich in raw materials and with incredible research potential was hardly able to provide its population with the most basic necessities. Moreover, it becomes clear why such a state covered the entire society with a dense network of party and secret-police structures: any criticism against the conditions had to be nipped in the bud if the ruling classes did not want to run the risk of a few drops of criticism quickly turning into a flood or even a tsunami that would wash them away. And finally, it also becomes apparent that such a system is characterized to a high degree by corruption and patronage of office, in addition to mismanagement, secret police, poverty, and

General Conditions | 17

party rule. When Brezhnev died in 1982, the country was not only on the brink of the abyss in a figurative sense. It was only too fitting for this era that the porters lowering Brezhnev’s coffin into the pit by the Kremlin wall lost control of the carrying rope so that the coffin plunged into the pit with a thud. The noise could be heard worldwide during the television broadcast. It seemed as if a higher power wanted to set an example and shake up the country. Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, was sixty-eight years old. He had been head of the KGB since 1967 and knew the country’s problems well. The stagnation, it was said, could only be countered with drastic reforms. He endeavored to entrust younger party cadres in Moscow with high tasks in order to soften the gerontocratic structures. A number of cautious reform projects were on his agenda. But his state of health allowed him to hold office for only a few months— Andropov died on February 9, 1984. It got worse. His successor, Konstantin Chernenko, not only was the oldest newcomer to the office at the age of seventy-two but he already seemed terminally ill when he took office and could hardly stand on his own feet. He was a party technocrat who had no apparent special ability to lead the huge country. A popular joke from the 1970s finally became reality: “Question: What are the first three items on the agenda of each Politburo meeting? Answer: 1. Entry of the Politburo. 2. Pacemaker placement. 3. Sing the song: “We are the young guard of the proletariat.” Chernenko’s infirmity showed the world what the glorious Soviet Union was really like. March 10, 1985, was a normal day in real communism: at some point in the evening of that Sunday, Soviet radio stations switched to muted funeral music, but the Kremlin rulers let a few hours pass before announcing that Chernenko had gone for good. Hardly anyone felt real grief, like so many communists had shown upon Stalin’s death in 1953 and even upon Brezhnev’s death in 1982. Chernenko left essentially no traces—except perhaps in comedic ones. On the evening of March 11, 1985, it was proclaimed that the old men had chosen a new leader from their midst. It was announced that the “election” was “unanimous”—no big surprise from this body, which always rubber-stamped everything unanimously.5 The new man’s name was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, a rising star who had been a full member of the Politburo since 1980. He was a pupil of Andropov and had already been considered the number two in the power hierarchy under Chernenko. It would be inappropriate to claim that Gorbachev’s assumption of office was accompanied by real hopes of radical reform. However, Western observers generally expected that this shift would lead to modernization of the ailing economic system. To Soviet party leaders, however, two things were initially striking about Gorbachev’s appointment. First, at the age of fifty-four, he was virtually a junior employee. And second, those interested in politics had followed his visit to London in December 1984 attentively because Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had

18 | End Game

been quite openly taken with the young man—this was not quite an everyday occurrence, especially since Thatcher was not suspected of being particularly well disposed toward Communists. The public soon took note of Gorbachev’s initial reform efforts, which seemed more helpless than well conceived. One is reminded of his campaign against alcoholism, which he expected would increase overall production by 15 to 20 percent.6 At first this seemed to be just one of the usual campaigns blaming the ailing state of society on the society itself and, thus, an act of repression. At the same time, however, it was an implicit admission that things could no longer go on as they had and that the state, economy, and society were in need of urgent restructuring. Gorbachev literally let the genie out of the bottle, and then he was unable to contain it again, so it kept driving him on. The central motif from Goethe’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (“Der Zauberlehrling”) could be seen at work in this: “Ah, here comes the master! / I have need of Thee! / from the spirits that I called / Sir, deliver me!” Martin Malia made this point quite dramatically: “And so the last would-be ‘Lenin of today’ stumbled into a career of fin-de-régime sorcerer’s apprentice.”7 Gorbachev was guided in his disarmament efforts by the insight that the insane costs of armament should be minimized in order to save the economy of communism. Unlike others before him, he tried not only to follow developments but also to determine them. However, the problem was so complex that it could not be controlled. Glasnost and perestroika were, from the point of view of power politics, an unsuitable attempt to modernize the dictatorship.8 In October 1987 the Polish oppositionist Adam Michnik wrote: Gorbachev’s reforms have a counter-reformatory character. They are a response to the stagnation crisis, to the possibility of an anti-authoritarian reformist rebellion along the lines of the Polish model. They have the character of a self-defense of the system— by the attempt to carry out the domestic change in a controlled way so that the critical values and ideals that have arisen outside and against the system can be integrated. In this way the oppositional ideals lose their destructive, subversive effect and become an element of the intended modernization process.9

By the end of 1986, Gorbachev had come to be considered a beacon of hope in the Western community of states—above all because of his disarmament initiatives. However, some in the Western political elite long remained skeptical of him, as an interview Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave to Newsweek Magazine at the end of 1986 illustrates. In it, Kohl put Gorbachev and Goebbels on the same level. This provoked fierce indignation while at the same time meeting with widespread approval because many did not trust the Kremlin ruler. Above all, though, Western politicians who had direct access to Gorbachev now more and more frequently said that what Kohl had honestly meant was that Gorbachev embodied a new type of communist power politician.

General Conditions | 19

One of Gorbachev’s positive achievements was tackling the social crisis. At no cost did he want to leave reform to other forces but felt it should be done within the framework of the communist system and Marxist-Leninist theory. Gorbachev saw himself as the keeper and renewer of a true Leninism, whatever he understood that to be. That the Soviet Union needed to be reformed was a conviction his conservative opponents shared with him. However, the attempts at reform were only the work of a small ruling clique around Gorbachev. The party apparatus remained opposed to the reforms and tried to disrupt them wherever possible. The nomenklatura feared losing their privileges. And, as before, the party base continued to be excluded from all the decision-making processes. Whatever one may think of Gorbachev’s policies, one thing must not be forgotten: neither he nor any of his decisions were democratically legitimized. In this, Gorbachev was no different from Lenin, Stalin, or Brezhnev: he legally exercised the same arbitrary rule as his predecessors, only giving up the CPSU’s monopoly of power in February 1990. His constantly zigzagging course was determined by his desire to secure power—an undertaking that ultimately proved to be hopeless. Gorbachev, born in 1931, was the first party leader whose career had not begun in the Stalin era, so he was not stained by the blood of those victims. He knew exactly how to calculate and assess the effect of the spoken word. This is the only characteristic that differentiated him from Brezhnev or Chernenko. Critics railed against Gorbachev that perestroika was merely a battle of words without any noticeable success. Political action and economic restructuring actually lagged considerably behind the open debates. Since the beginning of 1986 the term perestroika had been used to describe the reform course. But Gorbachev also used terms like radical reform, profound renewal, or even revolution. That was over the top. He was not striving for a revolution since he did not touch the foundations of the Soviet system and did not intend to disturb any pillar of the Soviet system. Marxism-Leninism as a state ideology remained untouched, as did the one-party rule, the CPSU’s monopoly on power and violence, and the centralist economic structure with its monopoly on the means of production. Gorbachev wanted to strengthen inner-party democracy without introducing representative democratic elements into society. He wanted to allow market economy elements without giving up the socialist planned economy. He wanted to give dissident circles greater scope for action without restricting the KGB’s scope of action. Again and again he came up against limits that he himself considered immovable. He wanted to change everything, and at the same time everything was supposed to stay the same. Gorbachev failed because of this paradox, because he did not want to give up the foundations of communism. He achieved exactly what he had wished to prevent: he dismantled the old system without building a new one. It was not that Gorbachev proved incapable but that the system was not reformable because it was practiced as it had been conceived in theory. Lenin and Stalin’s persecution campaigns were just as rational as the suppression of reform

20 | End Game

efforts in satellite states. The fight against Gorbachev’s policies by the rulers in the ČSSR, the GDR, and Romania also aimed to preserve power for the dictatorships—this was a logical fight. While for decades all the loudspeakers in the East had been chanting “The party, the party is always right” and proclaiming the dogma of infallibility for the party leader, Gorbachev now declared that he was neither in possession of the truth nor the only one who knew the right way. He merely stood for the right socialism, he said. Many high-ranking party officials perceived such admissions as a sign of weakness and fickleness. Among “normal” people, especially outside the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s reputation rose considerably as a result, and in the West he became more and more of a pop icon. When he came to power, he had no program. This made it easy for his conservative opponents to criticize him and his policies. The advantage was that his lack of preconceived notions freed up the space that pragmatists needed to take results-oriented action. Gorbachev was able to correct himself without having to accept new losses of reputation. His critics accused him of this as a weakness anyway; his followers saw it as his great strength. Gorbachev woke the society from its sleep, which, in gratitude, was soon chasing him onward. The more openness he demanded, the more openness was demanded of him at the same time. It was a vicious circle—the kind in which closed societies break down if they do not want to return to the old means of terrorist repression of society. As late as November 1987, Gorbachev praised the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, but it was not until a year and a half later that he admitted that this aberration had cost millions of people their land and lives. Whereas until the end of 1986 he had concentrated primarily on restructuring the economy, it became clear in the course of 1987 that this would also require changes to state policy because the reform process had produced hardly any noticeable results. His head was sore. More determined reformers than Gorbachev, such as Boris Yeltsin, Moscow’s party leader and candidate for the Politburo, fell from grace and lost influence and offices because they pushed for a faster pace and more radical state restructuring. Gorbachev found himself in a pincer grip between old concrete heads and liberal reformers. In contrast to the economic restructuring, the intellectual and cultural opening of society was more successful. The newspaper and magazine landscape became colorful and interesting. Numerous forbidden books were published. The big issue was coming to terms with the past. With each new revelation about the communist crimes of the preceding seventy years, the system lost its reputation and popularity. This opening was also—alongside the disarmament efforts—the characteristic that was particularly noticed abroad and eagerly absorbed in the Eastern Bloc. The new view of their own past became the communists’ gravedigger of present and future. When Gorbachev decreed in December 1986 that the world-famous dissident and physicist Andrei Sakharov could return to Moscow from his exile in Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), he was symbolically putting an end

General Conditions | 21

to Stalinist history and indirectly recognizing the political opposition as a factor. The fact that he again found it difficult to implement this in everyday political life is a different story. For example, when Sakharov called for the abolition of the party’s leading role at the Congress of People’s Deputies in May 1989 in front of running cameras, he simply turned off the microphone. One must give Gorbachev credit for having pushed against the resistance of the military to the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, which began on May 18, 1988. His general disarmament efforts contributed significantly to the end of the Cold War between East and West. For the Eastern Bloc, another political shift was at least as important. On April 10, 1987, Gorbachev gave a speech during a state visit to Prague: “We do not think that we have found the final answers to all the questions that life has presented us with. We are also far from wanting to call on anyone to copy us. Each socialist country has its own specificity. The brother parties determine the political course, taking into account the national conditions.”10 With this statement he reversed the “Brezhnev Doctrine” formulated in 1968. After the Warsaw Pact troops invaded the ČSSR in 1968, Pravda announced on August 22, 1968: “The defense of socialism in the ČSSR is not only an internal affair of the people of this country, but is also linked to the defense of the positions of world socialism.”11 With this statement, Moscow justified military interventions such as those in Hungary in 1956 or in the ČSSR in 1968 and announced that it would continue to suppress any change in the Eastern Bloc, if necessary by force of arms. In April 1987, Gorbachev rejected this invasion policy. On behalf of the CPSU, while he did not apologize for the earlier invasions, he assured that such a thing would not happen again. He gave up the empire in the process. Although he only had the socialist states of Eastern Europe in mind, the Baltic, Caucasian, and Central Asian republics annexed by Russia understood this message just as well as the Ukraine, where attempts at independence, which could no longer be controlled by Moscow, soon emerged. In contrast to its stance toward the Eastern European countries, Moscow tried to suppress them with force of arms, but in this case too it became apparent that the genie, once out of the bottle, could no longer be contained. History is not made by “great men.” Historically, Gorbachev was the last answer to the deep social crisis of communism. Without the Polish Solidarność there would have been no Gorbachev. One can also agree with Adam Michnik, quoted above, in a historical perspective. Václav Havel, a Czech poet and opposition activist, described witnessing Gorbachev’s aforementioned visit to Prague at the end of 1987. On an evening walk, he was passing the National Theater, from which Gorbachev had just stepped out. A frenetic crowd cheered on, as Havel put it, this “man who in Prague praised one of the worst governments this country has ever had in its modern history.” Havel saw a friendly waving man, and it seemed to him as if “he is waving and smiling at me. . . . Suddenly I realize that my politeness, which commands me to return a greeting, was quicker than

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my politological considerations: shyly I raise my hand and wave to him as well.” Once Gorbachev was gone, the masses scattered to nearby pubs and Havel went home with his dog. Having arrived there and thinking about what happened, he experienced his next surprise: “I don’t blame myself at all for my shy waving. I really have no reason not to return the greeting of an enlightened tsar! After all, it is one thing to return his greeting, and another to lie about your own responsibility by putting it on him.”12

Binding Forces of the System: The Apparatus of Power and Domination Many people in the GDR followed the events in the Soviet Union very closely. They were not as poor as their “friends,” nor were they as cut off from the rest of the world thanks to the Western media. But the majority of them believed that the social situation could only change in principle if something improved in the USSR. Gorbachev thus became the bearer of hope. Many people in the GDR in the mid-1980s saw nothing but stagnation, regression, and decay. Resignation and hopelessness spread. Although masses still largely marched in step, as the British journalist Timothy Garton Ash observed in the late 1980s, the SED only managed to move their bodies; it did not reach their “hearts and minds.”13

Pictures of a Party: The SED The Socialist Unity Party of Germany, as the party called itself after the forced unification of the KPD and SPD in April 1946, ruled by the grace of Moscow for over four decades and against a majority of the population. It never faced democratic elections. The “elections” that it regularly held had been falsified since 1950 in order to suggest that almost 100 percent of all eligible voters were in agreement. Until 1968 the GDR had a constitution in which the SED’s claim to leadership was not even laid down. However, the electoral procedure did not differentiate between candidates or lists but merely offered a single list for approval, on which SED members dominated openly or covertly. This undermined the alleged constitutional principle of free elections from the outset. In addition, anyone who visited a polling booth, orphaned in a remote corner of the polling station if it existed at all, was suspicious and usually registered. In 1968, the SED leadership issued a new constitution, laying out the SED’s claim to power in Article 1. As early as October 17, 1949, ten days after the founding of the GDR, the SED party leadership had ruled that all decrees, laws, ordinances, and decisions had to be confirmed by the SED Politburo or the Politburo Secretariat before being passed by the People’s Chamber or the

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government.14 The SED Politburo acted as an “over-government.” As a result, a double structure existed in the GDR, which, in effect, shaped the entire state and society, with the exception of the churches, private companies, and a few other sectors. The SED Central Committee consisted of a large number of specialist departments ranked higher than the ministries. The heads of the CC departments were each subordinate to responsible secretaries of the CC of the SED, who were also members of the actual center of power—the Politburo of the CC of the SED. This structure extended to the district level and was also reflected in universities, associations, companies, and hospitals. In other words, a director was quite powerful, but the party secretary was more powerful. Because the director or state leader was usually a member of the SED and thus subject to the party line principle, he received—depending on the level of hierarchy—party instructions from the party secretary, the district or district secretary, the CC sector leader, or even the secretary of the CC, which he had to implement as a state functionary. The communists had translated this principle into a very simple and characteristic formula for their system: “Where there is a comrade, there is the party!” In 1988, there were about 16.67 million people living in the GDR, of which about 12.84 million were 18 years or older. One could become a member of the SED at the age of 18. From 1985 to mid-August 1989 the party had an average of 2.32 million members. Slightly less than one adult in five was thus a member of the SED in the second half of the 1980s. It was not the MfS, with its 91,000 full-time and about 110,000 unofficial employees (1989), that had spread like an octopus across the country but its client, the SED. Of the SED members, less than 5 percent were—one could well say only—also IM. Of the IM, however, about 50 percent were—it must be said, astonishingly so—also SED members.15 The SED was omnipresent. Yet despite its mass character, it remained a kind of secret sect. Non-members learned little of its inner life. Even simple members were mostly silent about it. The official announcements seemed to be the same year after year in their dry, meaningless tone. The speakers remained contourless, pale, and always looked the same: grumpy, ashen, bored, or expressionless. With the exception of SED general secretary Erich Honecker, MfS minister Erich Mielke, Education Minister Margot Honecker, the leader of the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB) Harry Tisch, perhaps the Council of Ministers chairman Willi Stoph or Volkskammer president Horst Sindermann, the other members of the SED Politburo, especially the ministers and other officials, remained unknowns who could have walked along the streets at any time without being recognized. Precisely because they were constantly present in the GDR media with their cryptically long titles and posts, people did not listen to or look at them, or they simply switched off their devices; the individual figures counted for nothing and seemed interchangeable. For example, Margarete Steglich, a worker born in Berlin in 1925, who had been party secretary in the agricultural

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production cooperative “Solidarity” in Hohnkirchen since 1974, did not even recognize Günter Schabowski in 1994. Schabowski had been the editor in chief of the SED central organ Neues Deutschland from 1978 to 1985, a candidate since 1981, a member of the Politburo since 1986, and first secretary of the SED district leadership in Berlin since 1985, yet, as Steglich remarked, “I didn’t even know him before. I only noticed him on television in the autumn of 1989. . . .”16 Though her ignorance of him may not have been representative of a party functionary, it was certainly representative of the mass of the population. Even Gorbachev generally appreciated this when he said in April 1987 in the CPSU Politburo: “Wherever you go in the West, there are a whole range of personalities—both in earlier times and in recent years. But with us, there is no one. One has lived, worked 20–30 years but does not know who was in the government.”17 This ignorance not only had to do with disinterest and the assumption that the individual functionary was uninteresting and that everyone was similar anyway. The SED itself adhered to a principle that it called democratic centralism, “the absolutely most democratic social order in the world.”18 Somewhere among the higher-ups, something was decided and then passed down. That such orders, called resolutions, often developed in a complicated network from “bottom” to “top” is another story. But the decision came from “above,” and therefore people were only interested in the very top. In the end, only the man at the top was of interest; all power decisions were attributed to him, and, again paradoxically, it was often assumed that he did not even know what the “bottom” was like. In the Soviet Union, this thinking led to many petitions for pardon that condemned persons or their relatives wrote to “Little Father Stalin,” unaware that he himself had ordered, signed, or at least approved the death sentence or camp imprisonment. In dictatorships, the followers especially (but not only them) often believe that the dictator himself is actually anything but dictatorial. Usually he is regarded as being kept ignorant of the true circumstances by those in his inner circle. Part of the reality of the workers’ and peasants’ government in the GDR was that its representatives were never seen in person. “Spontaneous” conversations were well organized. Selected participants were carefully screened before the discussion. At mass events, party officials remained far away and well shielded. Nothing was to be left to chance. The people’s government remained a chimera for the people, which in its perpetually identical suits, convoys of vehicles, and cookie-cutter speeches did not even differ within itself. Even in the highest apparatus of power, the East Berlin Central Committee building, where the Foreign Ministry is now located, there were several security areas. The members of the Politburo used their own elevators and had a floor to which only very few functionaries were admitted. A political staff member who described the regulations in the party building stated: “In other states, too, leading figures and their staffs are subject to special rules, behavior and guards, but the total sealing off in the

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building of the SED Central Committee was probably unique.”19 Honecker, for his part, believed that “I nevertheless always had direct contact with the masses.”20 However, apart from mass marches, in which he stood waving happily for hours, there is no further evidence of his “direct contact with the masses.” The SED was not a traditional or politological party but a religious community. Its members were united by their belief in an Arcadian future in which all people would be equal. They believed that history knew an end point, which they called communism, in which everyone would work for the community according to their needs, free from all selfishness. The supporters of communism and the members of the party were caught in a self-made trap from which there was no escape. This is because the communist ideology was a very special worldview. As Milovan Djilas described it, “It pushes its adherents into the position which makes it impossible for them to hold any other viewpoint.”21 That is why the GDR was also a “dictatorship of truth” and the SED the party of organized lies, because “the tyranny of a particular opinion is always the dictatorship of lies . . . , even if it could previously claim to have expressed a partial truth (there is no other) about society.”22 For its members, the SED also meant fascism would never rise again—this is what they called National Socialism—and no more war. In their eyes, “SED” was an abbreviation for peace. But for them it was also a community of hope. Members were constantly hoping that things would get “even” better. Their hope was nourished by an ideology that knew how to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, according to “scientific principles.” With very simple doctrines, they were able to calm themselves even when their inner restlessness drove them to despair: “Marxism is omnipotent because it is true.” It was that simple. The SED also represented a community of desperate people. Party discipline demanded that a decision, a directive, an argumentation was to be defended even when one’s own knowledge, experience, and reality of life stood in opposition to it. Many SED members despaired, and more than a few broke. They cheered each other on with slogans for survival: “You have to look at this objectively”; “It depends on the right point of view”; “Don’t play into the hands of the class enemy”; and the classic slogan par excellence: “You have to look at this dialectically,” with which you could explain away any nonsense or crime and turn it into its opposite. With 2.3 million members, the SED obviously represented a career gateway to many. Numerous posts could not be obtained without an SED membership book. Nonentry into the party was often already a confession. But even when one could still hope for a career without an SED membership book, then exclusion from the party normally meant at best the end of the career ladder, usually followed by a crash. Attrition remained fairly low in the 1980s. New admissions compensated for party members’ deaths. The few exclusions were of little consequence. If someone wanted to resign (a statistically negligible occurrence in

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the 1980s), he was unceremoniously excluded. One does not leave a communist cadre party; at most one is expelled from it. The SED was ultimately a social place that most people apparently thought they had not chosen. This may sound paradoxical, but, in practice, there were only three reasons to become a member of this party. First, there were ideological, political reasons for joining the party. Out of conviction one dedicated oneself to “the cause.” Second, as I said, many joined for reasons of opportunity and career. It was a big group. Third, there was a sizable group that probably could not even have said why they had joined: “That’s just the way it is.” It is precisely the second and third groups that explain why the state party fell apart so quickly at the end of 1989. Such structural opportunism, the predominant push to join the party, was succinctly summarized in Jochen Schmidt’s 2013 novel Schneckenmühle: Langsame Runde, which featured young people talking to each other at a holiday camp: “In the bungalow, I get upset about Rita, who read my card. She’s probably in the party. Holger says: ‘So what? I’ll join when I’m 18 too.’ ‘Why?’ ‘You’re not supposed to shirk.’ ‘But you’re not a Red?’ ‘That has nothing to do with it.’”23 The social space “SED” was characterized by many rituals and unwritten laws. These included the weekly party meetings at which all comrades were informed of the latest decisions and developments. Even ideology-minded members have described these meetings as boring and uninteresting. Nevertheless, they often came out of the events with a firm expression on their faces, believing themselves to be ahead of the non-members in terms of knowledge. This knowledge came in careful doses: everyone was only supposed to know as much as his superior thought he needed to know. The key phrase for understanding the SED and the processes it institutionalized is “party discipline.” Everything was to be subordinated to the party. In principle, the party members had committed themselves to a master plan; they called it the historical-legal development from the lower to the higher (communism), to which one had to submit, which one could not oppose, even if one wanted to, because it would take place independently of individual will, as it were, following a natural law. And the party leadership, embodied in the person of the comrade general secretary, was the only body who knew the big picture and was therefore the only one capable of steering the “lawful course.” No matter what happened, no matter what nonsense existed, everything proceeded according to the “lawful course,” even if today the opposite of yesterday was ordered or carried out. These were puzzles of dialectic and regularities that only the wise party leadership was able to solve. Nor did it have any other explanations to offer. Erich Honecker once put the selfperception of many functionaries in a nutshell: “The cause of my actions was that of a communist who, in accordance with his party mandate, endeavored to carry out his duties.”24 He did not explain who had given him this “party mandate.” This was too obvious for him. It was the “historical laws” that were carried out.

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Günter Schabowski, Wolfgang Berghofer (the last SED mayor of Dresden), and other high party officials confirmed that the SED did not take people seriously who thought differently from themselves, and, as predetermined, it did not concern itself with them at all. The state security and the justice system existed for this purpose. Political dissenters seemed like molesters whose inexplicable urges had to be curbed not in accordance with the law but by law. Party officials considered themselves to be trustees of unshakable truths, even if the truth was the same as yesterday’s lie. The entire East, not only the GDR, was marked by an unfriendliness of the functionaries, which often bitterly offended visitors. Officials and uniform wearers were supposed to appear aloof, superior, and knowledgeable. Since they were not, they at least pretended to be, hiding their insecurity and ignorance behind icy walls of silence, unkindness, and harsh tones. Policemen and SED functionaries were ridiculous figures that reasonable people were afraid of. They represented state power, and their representatives were as unpredictable as they were. The only thing that was reassuring was that the cold-heartedness in the offices, on the streets, or in meetings did not stop at the functionaries themselves. Christine Ostrowski, an SED functionary in Dresden, once said that the party, which allegedly committed itself to humanistic ideals, was difficult to bear within the party. “Thus the relationship with the superior party secretaries remained mostly cold and sterile. What should have been a thing between people was a thing between decision-makers and those who fulfilled the decisions.”25 When you look at photos of functionaries or old television reports about their work today, the coldness and aloofness still hits you. They may have laughed at times, they may not all have been so one-sidedly (un)educated, they may not even all have been equally stubborn; in public they hid all this very cleverly and always gave the impression that they did not stand out from the like-minded collective. “Party discipline” and “party mission” were at the same time the key phrases that made organized irresponsibility possible, because in the end nobody felt responsible for anything; everyone delegated responsibility up or down. It was, above all, SED functionaries who were constantly on duty from morning to night to advance the “cause.” At least that’s how they themselves saw things. When asked whether party functionaries could enjoy privileges, a typical answer is: “I had the privilege of being the first in the company and the last in the evening. And quite often.”26 Or: “The privilege of taking a lot of beating for other people.”27 Because of the party structure, which stood above the state structure, party officials acted in their areas like small heads of cabinets who had to decide about everything and everyone and felt responsible for everything. The main task of each official was to “control the enforcement of decisions.” The organized irresponsibility was not evident in the zeal of the functionaries but in the fact that they were not responsible for a decision or its implementation, and certainly not for its possible failure. Incidentally, in 1989–1990 this led to the strange circumstance that

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no party functionary presented himself as responsible for the ailing state of affairs. Everyone pushed the responsibility up one floor at a time, and all claimed to have always tried their best. When only Honecker, Mielke, Mittag, and Herrmann were left as the sole culprits, they turned the tables without further ado, affirmed that they had done only the best in their party’s mandate, and handed the responsibility downward. In principle, this game is still going on today, with only the small differences that an estimated two million SED members no longer want to be approached about their former SED membership and that the person asking the question about possible party membership usually feels shame. Officials organized, controlled, guided—and gave speeches all the time. Higher powers seemed to have put them in their place, which they could only leave if they were punished by their own downfall. For functionaries, work was synonymous with a perpetual struggle: for peace, for socialism, for increased production, for prosperity, for progress, for all the good and against all the bad in the world. Perhaps this was also the reason why most functionaries looked so unfriendly, grumpy, hardened. They sacrificed themselves “for the cause” and reaped only ingratitude. The icy cold that reigned in the central party apparatus has been described many times. The old men in Wandlitz lived together behind a shielded fence, but they did not really live together. They neither spent their free time together nor visited each other’s homes. They did not even speak to one another; they strictly avoided friendships there. It is a simple strategy that these men had internalized in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, when communists were killing hundreds of thousands of communists in the Soviet Union: you don’t shoot friends so easily. But political and physical death is part of communism; these men knew that only too well. For self-protection alone, friendships were therefore obsolete in this context. Horst Sindermann defended this self-chosen isolation somewhat more cautiously. His wife complained at the end of November 1989 about the cold atmosphere that prevailed in Wandlitz: “There was never any getting together,” whereupon Sindermann replied, somewhat surprisingly, “Thank God, no.” He then also explained why this was a good thing: “When you live together in one place, there is always the danger that certain factions will form. . . . The danger of factions already existed, through friendships for my sake, personal friendships.”28 In 1921 Lenin had issued the so-called faction ban, which corresponded to a general ban on both internal and external opposition. The formation of internal party groups was regarded as hostile to the party and was punished with expulsion from the party, and, from the 1920s to 1950s, often with death. Every communist, especially the older ones, knew this verdict as well as the deadly consequences. Now the functionaries knew and were aware that the leading power in the state, the SED, enjoyed the worst possible reputation even among many of its members. They therefore tried again and again to improve the prestige of the “leading force.” But they had no chance because the old men sat firmly in their

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ugly leatherette armchairs, and almost everyone in the country hoped for their death; biological solution was the more distinguished term. A joke circulated about this: “Every morning, a man buys a daily newspaper at a kiosk, looks at the first page, and then throws the newspaper into the wastebasket. One day, the newspaper woman approaches him. ‘I don’t understand you. You don’t even look at the local pages or the sports section; why do you even buy the paper?’ ‘Because of the obituaries.’ ‘But they’re on the last page.’ ‘The ones I’m interested in are on the front page.’”

Communists and Their Friends: The National Front In the second half of the 1980s, SED leaders repeatedly tried to legitimize the system by pointing out that about one in three adults was actively involved in “socialist democracy” as an elected representative of the people, as a party or association functionary, mostly on an honorary basis. This was much more democratic, they argued, than the “bourgeois sham democracy.” They were right about one thing. Far more people actively participated in the system than appears to be the case today. In addition to the SED, there were four other parties that were vicarious compliant agents either from the beginning or, at the latest, from the early 1950s. At the end of the 1980s about half a million people were organized in these parties: in the CDU just under 140,000, in the LDPD about 113,000, in the DBD about 115,000, and in the NDPD another 110,000. The existence of these parties did not seem to be in keeping with the times but had to do with the immediate postwar period—when the communists were still trying to conceal their totalitarian claim to power. The bloc parties defended the Wall until 1989 and praised SED policy as without alternative. Still, at the ceremony for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR on October 7, 1989, everyone in the hall jumped up and devotedly sang the “Internationale.” In the television footage, it is easy to see how the representatives of the bloc parties sang along eagerly. The DBD did not oppose agricultural policy but was its representative. The LDPD did not protest the dismantling of private skilled trades and the expropriation of medium-sized businesses; only some members left the party in protest. The NDPD, which had been founded in 1948 as a gathering place for Wehrmacht officers and NSDAP members, was neither conservative nor democratic but served as a door that opened up opportunities for advancement for incriminated persons. This party seemed particularly anachronistic in the 1980s. Finally, the CDU tried to implement SED church policy, which it found difficult because the churches did not appreciate it as a dialogue partner. Only once did fourteen CDU members in the Volkskammer vote against a bill, and eight abstained. This happened on March 9, 1972, when the People’s Chamber adopted the law on abortion. It can be assumed that even these dissenting voices came about with the active assistance of the SED leadership. Honecker

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said it would look unbelievable if all Christians were in favor and persuaded CDU leader Gerald Götting to let some representatives vote against it. The reasons for joining a bloc party were as varied as those for joining the SED. Some believed that they could avoid joining the SED in this way, while others may have believed that they could correct or mitigate the SED policy somewhat. These parties were popularly called “recorders” because they had united under the leadership of the SED in the “Democratic Bloc.” They were not respected much—not by SED members because they were considered too cowardly to commit themselves “properly” to the “cause,” and not by most others because they were considered opportunists and disguised communists. For example, a Christian who was an official of the Eastern CDU was considered suspect by many nonparty Christians. These parties had little influence and played practically no role at all in public. If you add up the members of SED and bloc parties, you come to about 2.8 million, so that more than one in five adults was affiliated with a party. But that was by no means enough. Of the six- to sixteen-year-olds, more than 90 percent were members of the pioneer organization or, from the age of fourteen, the FDJ. Almost all high school graduates and students were organized into this association beyond the age of sixteen, but many others remained members for many more years. The FDJ was essentially a compulsory organization. One did not have to justify entry but only refusal to enter. Such a refusal was usually coupled with reduced career opportunities; it was only possible to acquire an Abitur (school-leaving certificate) or to pursue studies without FDJ membership in exceptional cases. Like the FDJ, the FDGB was a kind of compulsory organization with 9.6 million members in 1988, acting as the transmission belt for the party. The FDGB holiday service was particularly attractive to people as it allocated almost all of the holiday locations between Kap Arkona and Fichtelberg, of which there were never enough. In total, there were almost one hundred associations and organizations in the GDR, all of which were under the curatorship of the SED. Statistically, every adult inhabitant of the GDR was organized in three to four associations (excluding the German Gymnastics and Sports Federation and the FDJ), which at first glance says little, especially as many were not members of anything except the FDGB and the Society for German-Soviet Friendship, so that in reality there were millions in five, six, or seven organizations. By incorporating the population so comprehensively into these organizations, the SED aimed to shut society, allowing individuality to perish in the collective and suggesting that everyone was pulling in the same direction. In retrospect, the collaboration rate was much higher than it seemed to many. The mass of the population had settled down, joined in—whether they were discontented, reluctant, or completely convinced—and tried not to stand out.

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Even if one has to be careful in assessing how much of society the organizations covered and how dense such coverage was, there were areas comprising well over 100,000 people that have to be added to all the full-time party functionaries, the full-time functionaries of the FDJ, FDGB, Society for German-Soviet Friendship, DFD, Volkssolidarität, Society for Sports and Technology, air raid protection, civil defense, etc., among the system pillars. For example, there were the approximately 209,000 members of parliament (1989) who were often also functionaries of parties and organizations. There were 500 in the People’s Chamber, 32,000 in the district and county councils, 172,000 in the municipal councils, and 4,000 men and women in the municipal assemblies who did nothing more than agree to what the SED had already decided. In addition, there was an almost unmanageable network of institutions that served SED policy in very different ways. In the Arbeiter- und Bauerinspektionen (workers’ and farmers’ inspection units), about 290,000 men and women checked whether everything was proceeding along its “socialist course.” There were 61,000 volunteer jurors working in the courts, 255,000 in company conflict commissions, and 56,000 in municipal arbitration commissions, all of whom volunteered in “social courts” in the name of socialist legality. About 150,000 volunteers of the People’s Police, about 3,000 volunteer border guards, and almost 210,000 “fighters” of the operational “combat groups,” a paramilitary force with police duties in “cases of tension,” aimed to help secure “domestic peace.” The list is far from complete. But it does show how the SED leadership understood how to integrate an army of millions under the MarxistLeninist flag into the system in such a way that it had to be considered stable in the long term. When it seems that so many people were willing to participate and be functionally integrated, even outside their companies, then there seems to be no paradox between legitimacy and stability. The lack of democratic legitimation of the SED’s leading role by means of free elections was compensated for in everyday life by the millions of committed people—at least that is how the SED leadership saw it. Officially, this was put somewhat differently: “Socialism is an order of meddlers, of the many competent people who know: ‘We have to take care of ourselves!,’ and who act accordingly.”29

The Pillars of the Dictatorship The State Council, Council of Ministers, National Defense Council, District Council, County Council, City Council, Combined Cities, agricultural production cooperatives, and many other institutions were supposed to ensure that the SED resolutions were implemented and led to success. Political functionaries and technocratic elites met in these bodies, which often provoked tensions. Since the most important cadres were subject to party discipline as SED members, they either bowed to the party resolution or were dismissed and transferred.

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While the organization of the state and party into a dual structure already engendered an enormous waste of resources for society as a whole, the frequent (intraparty) conflicts of competence between different structural units at the regional and district levels not only increased this waste but often prompted the formation of additional structures within which even the planned economists lost the overview. This also encouraged organized irresponsibility. Within these party bodies, the SED played out its leading role without restriction, for which purpose it had also created the military and security apparatus under its orders. In 1989, these included the MfS with 91,000 full-time and 110,000 unofficial employees; the MdI with 127,000 employees, including some 67,000 police officers (among which were professional police officers of the riot police); the NVA with 92,400 professional and temporary NVA officers and 75,600 conscripts; the border troops with 47,000 men, about half of whom were conscripts; and smaller units such as the transport police with 5,600 professional police officers and 800 conscripts and the customs administration with 8,000 employees. Several paramilitary organizations were also involved. In total, almost half a million people (excluding IM) were permanently under arms, with a number of officials (Politburo, CC members, 1st and 2nd SED district secretaries, 1st SED district secretaries, agricultural production cooperative chairmen, combine directors, and many others) among the permanent arms bearers. This does not even take into account the approximately 500,000 Soviet soldiers who were stationed on GDR territory. Total expenditure on the military and security apparatus in the GDR—both for the stationing of Soviet troops and for “its own” military, police, secret police, and paramilitary units—accounted for at least 11 percent of GDR national income. The GDR state and society were militarized to a degree that had no similar example in peacetime in Europe after 1945. A person in uniform—even a Reichsbahner (someone working for the National Railway)—was basically unfriendly, dismissive, and impolite to citizens for reasons not further specified. The tone was instructive, from the top down; everyone was supposed to feel guilty, and every uniform wearer seemed to see a potential source of unrest in the citizen. Many people had grown accustomed to this over the decades, but in everyday life the narrowmindedness, the ignorance, and the rigidity of the uniform wearers, which emerged not only from the recruiting practice but also the system itself, took some getting used to. The system had the uniform wearers it needed. Only on television did they appear to be friendly and circumspect “friends and helpers.” Numerous books wove laurel wreaths for district leaders. And if a school class came to visit the NVA godfather regiment, they were mostly met with friendliness. But otherwise, everyday life was characterized by the fact that the citizen as a petitioner faced people in uniforms, even if it was at the ticket office. The section commissioner of the People’s Police strutted through his territory like a small prince, never lacking admonitions, but at the same time always aware that he was not exactly a popular figure. Many

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were afraid of uniform wearers, and as the latter were aware of their low prestige, they appeared all the more energetic and unfriendly, which did not lessen their rejection. They played a proxy role since they were the only ones who were open and identifiable everywhere as representatives of the state. Less visible for most people was the work of the MfS. Similar to the party and the state, this ministry’s structure incorporated a central office, district administrations, and county offices, as well as object services and facilities in universities, the police, the army, customs, and other institutions. The individual departments completely focused on state and society. In the 1980s, there was hardly anything that the MfS did not feel responsible for. In the summer of 1990, Schabowski told an anecdote that illustrates this “rational madness,” using Mielke as an example: “Mielke was the only one who regularly ate breakfast in the casino in Wandlitz. If someone from the waitstaff scurried past, he immediately shouted ‘Who is it?’ He had to know everything, have everything under control.”30 Even though it must be taken into account that many SED functionaries, including Honecker, tried to portray the MfS and its officers as the sole evil after 1990, suggesting that they knew nothing about its activities31 (which was not true for the Politburo or for the district level), this anecdote is quite characteristic of the MfS, its staff, and especially Mielke. Mielke claimed of himself, “Nobody really knows how I am and how I was.”32 What we know is enough, though. His opinion about traitors was “execution without a verdict.”33 He idolized the USSR—because it was so unassailable. With regard to refugees and applicants for emigration, he said, “If I were in the lucky position of being in the Soviet Union, I would have some shot.”34 A secret police officer, he held, needed to have internalized the “necessity of fanaticism.”35 The MfS did not act as a state within a state but played the role assigned to it, namely, to be the “shield and sword of the party.” There were regular oral consultations between the SED and MfS at all levels. The SED functionaries were not familiar with the individual working methods of the secret police. They did not need to be because the MfS had to act as a “shield” to ward off possible attacks and a “sword” to eliminate attackers. And since it was not the MfS but Marxist-Leninist theory that had invented a multilayered concept of the enemy (“He who is not for us is against us!”), the work of the secret police unfolded on the basis of communist state practice and theory.36 This also applied to the “Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung” (HV A), the secret service within the East German secret police. General Markus Wolf headed the HV A until late 1986, when General Werner Großmann succeeded him. Contrary to many legends, the HV A neither was a “normal” secret service nor did it act alone abroad. For one thing, it had to carry out assignments in the GDR as well as abroad, and, for another, it obtained a great deal of foreign information for use by the secret police within the GDR. Some of this information, for example, pertained to refugee matters, and it also especially helped with clarifying and combating the connections of the churches and the opposition

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abroad. When Pastor Rainer Eppelmann spent some time in Bonn’s chancellery in September 1987 while on a private visit, the Working Group of Ministers A (AGM A) reported on it. It also provided information about the expatriates from the GDR such as Jürgen Fuchs, Wolf Biermann, and Roland Jahn. There are many documents that prove that the MfS would have taken harsher and more unyielding action against opposition members or other unpopular persons in the 1980s if the SED leadership had not ordered it to show greater consideration for foreign and German policy reasons. At the same time, however, the MfS often fell on deaf ears among party functionaries with its reports and analyses, particularly in the second half of the 1980s. The State Security (Staatssicherheit, known colloquially as “the Stasi”) not only warned against underestimating the growing opposition but also repeatedly pointed out economic deficiencies, social grievances, and much more. It did this not with critical intent but to strengthen SED socialism. Nevertheless, it was also the only institution that could get away with this relatively openly and realistically. Everyone else was expected to report successes, and when there were failures, they were often attributed to no one other than those who reported the failures, who could be prosecuted. Thus, the constant search for and detection of enemies, opponents, deviants, and fickle people who could be blamed for the failures and abuses was one of the MfS’s tasks, because it was not the system that was flawed, not the ideology, not even the practice but always only an individual or a small collective that was responsible for the contradictions between theory and reality remaining so obvious. Even though the MfS was hardly visible, it seemed omnipresent. Hardly any GDR people knew details about the State Security, but almost everyone took part in speculations about the omnipresence of its spooks. There was hardly any realm in which people did not suspect the presence of “the Stasi.” Every seminar group at universities and every army barracks was believed to have two informers each, and no matter how small the number of informers was, they themselves believed it was a secret. Many people only talked about irrelevant matters on the phone since many were sure that all calls were being tapped.37 This sense of threat was part of the dictatorship’s calculations, and the MfS utilized it itself. If one wanted to harm a person, to destroy his reputation or his social relations, the MfS itself circulated the information that the person in question worked for the State Security. That was part of its decomposition strategy. The term decomposition was used to describe subtle, anonymous MfS activities that were not transparent to those affected.38 The writer Jürgen Fuchs, himself affected by decomposition measures in East and West for years, characterized this “silent” terror as a “psychosocial crime,” as “an attack on the soul of man.” Decomposition took various forms, including: the staging of professional failures; educational and professional denial; exclusion from or nonadmission to professional associations; insecurity and discipline; constant debates with professional

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superiors, the police, and the MfS; restriction of freedom of movement; revocation of driving licenses; discreditation through the spreading of rumors and false information, concentrated on adultery, pornographic interests, alcohol abuse, seduction of minors, greed, neglect of parental duties, betrayal of political comrades-in-arms, friends and relatives in interrogations, and contacts with extreme right-wing circles; and destruction of an individual’s private life through demonstrative dayand-night observations, constant telephone calls, advertising campaigns, secret house break-ins and the misplacement of objects, damage to private property, the pretense of extramarital relations, and covertly organized alienation of children from their parents. IMs played a special role, as no one could know what the MfS officers themselves would do with seemingly unimportant information. The MfS was not demonized after 1989. It demonized itself, purposefully, until 1989. The game with fear, with the fear of the MfS, was based on sheer terror in the 1950s and on its invisible but constantly felt presence from the 1960s. Just as people were amazed in the winter of 1989–90 that police officers were friendly and could even laugh, that bureaucrats in offices could be of unselfish help, so too was the amazement at the actual work of the MfS in 1989–90. This also applied to another pillar of the SED ruling apparatus: the judiciary. After 1945, the judicial system was one of the first institutions the communists completely rebuilt. As early as the mid-1950s, judges and public prosecutors already consistently aligned with the party line, and by the end of the 1980s this applied equally to the almost 1,500 judges and 1,200 public prosecutors, but also to most notaries, court secretaries, in-house counsels, and almost all of the (only) 590 lawyers who practiced within narrow limits in the GDR. At the end of the 1950s, SED leader Walter Ulbricht had announced that the lawyers in the GDR had to understand that the state and the law enacted by it only served to enforce SED policies. Even though there were modern laws and judgments in civil law, the judiciary served these claims formulated by Ulbricht for decades. There was no independent judiciary. But there were always thousands of political prisoners—in the history of the GDR, they totaled about 200,000 to 250,000, a fact the SED in turn officially denied. For them, every political dissident was potentially a criminal, every person convicted by a court—whether for political opposition or escape intentions—was a criminal. The most visible symbol of this unjust state was the Wall and the inner-German border. The hundreds of individuals shot by border guards or otherwise killed in attempted escapes bear witness to the fact that the SED often used every means possible to assert its claim to power. At the same time, it did not shy away from bending the law it had enacted. It did not abide by its electoral law, nor did it apply family, traffic, or civil law if it thought its interests were in danger. Precisely because the judiciary and legal system followed political-ideological guidelines, because there was no administrative jurisdiction or independence from the SED’s claim to power, the GDR was a state of injustice.

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Binding Ideological Forces and Self-Imposed Traps Fear, adaptation, intimidation, and persecution alone were not enough to keep the system going for forty years. There must also be an explanation as to why millions of people tried to get involved, many of them convinced of “the cause.” There are no easy answers here. There were, for example, people who, even after humiliations or experiences of imprisonment or exclusion, did not want to give up “the cause,” did not want to give up the idea of “democratic socialism” in the GDR, and who regarded the views of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, and/or Lenin as right and worth living for and assumed that only the implementation of these ideas was deficient, insufficient. Time and again, one heard the saying, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” This meant that mistakes and sacrifices in building such a great society, for which there was no model, were inevitable. However, this saying was only ever on the tongue of those who held the reins. How the horse thought about it was neither the subject of public debate nor even a glimmer in the eyes of the rider. The attraction of real socialism after 1945 was based on three pillars. War was never again to emanate from German soil. Fascism/National Socialism needed to never be repeated. And finally, all sections of the population were to be given equal opportunities for social advancement, to fill management positions, and to live in security. The communists declared that their radical social restructuring should provide a framework to ensure that the GDR would become an antifascist peace state in which “everyone could work and live according to their abilities and possibilities.” The party was breaking up. Famous German intellectuals such as Brecht, Eisler, Dessau, and Seghers returned from exile and went to the East, often with the vociferous argument that “antifascist structures” would only be established there. Antifascism became a lasting myth of the GDR. In the GDR, antifascism as staged and practiced by the state fulfilled three functions: first, it served the ruling classes as the historical, political, and moral legitimation of the system; second, it was considered by many people to be an honest and sincere principle of life; and third, it was used as a political and legal instrument by the rulers, applied their understanding of antifascism to it. In the communist view, National Socialism was a direct product of the rule of capitalism and imperialism. It was not just a matter of denazification. To a far greater extent, the communists carried out structural denazification: land reform, nationalization, socialization, expropriation, and unbundling were the keywords. Since the Federal Republic did not pursue these efforts to the same extent, SED propaganda suggested that a new fascist regime could emerge there at any time. The communists’ concept of fascism, which was based solely on socioeconomic causes, enabled the ruling classes to instrumentalize antifascism for the transformation of society. The communist leadership declared itself the “victor of history.”39 Antifascism already became state doctrine with the foundation of the

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GDR. It was the central legitimizing authority of the system and, at the same time, the central educational goal. What remained hidden was what could not be integrated into the communist historical ideology, whatever seemed to disturb the legitimate course of history. Millions of pupils, students, and, last but not least, teachers, party members, and officials of all organizations and levels had this drilled into them constantly and penetratingly, and they had to swear to uphold it. And what could be wrong with thinking and living in an antifascist manner? Who could have guessed that half a truth amounts to almost a whole lie? For many people, especially for intellectuals, antifascism was also a principle of life. Many believed that through their commitment in the GDR, they were serving a just and “antifascist cause.” Whatever social undesirable developments individuals may have seen and criticized, whatever they may have suffered from, they stood on antifascist ground. This self-perception was a domestic stability factor in the GDR. Antifascism thus functioned as a kind of substitute patriotism, which was supposed to forge a community in which everyone could stylize themselves as victims of the Hitler dictatorship and as fighters against fascism. As citizens of a socialist state, GDR citizens were considered antifascists per se. Even today, the legend invented by the SED that antifascists occupied the politically and socially important offices without exception in the GDR is still widespread. Inevitably, many former Nazi Party members also lived in the GDR, and they had to be integrated. But the fact that a whole series of them managed to get into the highest offices remained a taboo subject in the GDR, as this did not fit into the state’s stylization as antifascist: the former Nazis lived in the Federal Republic, whereas in the GDR the antifascist elite had gathered and built something new. Hitler and his ilk had virtually mutated into West Germans within the official SED conception.40 Former National Socialists worked in the GDR as publishing directors, chief editors, university rectors, academy presidents, public prosecutors and judges, ministers, or party officials. Heinrich Homann became deputy chairman of the State Council in 1960. Ernst Großmann, a member of the NSDAP and a member of the SS guard team of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was a candidate in 1952 and a member of the CC of the SED in 1954. In thousands of political criminal trials in the 1950s, however, the accusation of fascism played a central role. If a saleswoman had let a few kilograms of meat rot in a trade shop (a Handelsorganisation, or HO), she could get several years imprisonment for it, not only because she had been careless with socialist property but because she had benefited from, if not actively contributed to, imperialist and fascist forces. Those in power projected opposition and resistance upon antifascism from the outset. It was in the logic of this understanding that the ruling class characterized the popular uprising on June 17, 1953, as a “fascist coup attempt.” And it was also logical to call the Wall in 1961 an “antifascist protective wall.”

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Like the antifascist ideology, the peace rhetoric of the SED was one of the political components that generated binding forces. Because the communists had eliminated the structural (capitalist) preconditions for wars of aggression, a communist state guaranteed peace. And just because it was still surrounded by external enemies and threatened by internal ones, “peace [had to] be armed.” Those who stood up against the socialist army, against military service, against military education and pre-military training in schools and universities proved, in the SED’s view, to be opponents of peace and socialism. Everything served peace, the party announced nonstop: the work assignment on weekends as well as military service, the overfulfillment of the plan as well as good grades in school. This peace rhetoric did not stop at kindergartens or nursing homes. There was no escaping it. Propaganda continuously hammered into an individual’s head leaves traces, deep traces, whether the individual wants to admit it or not. Antifascism and peace constituted rather abstract values that simultaneously contained a potential threat and, especially at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, developed the power to integrate when East and West seemed to be splitting into two super nuclear regions. The promise of social prosperity and social advancement, by contrast, was very concrete but enormously risky. This is where the biggest discrepancies between the 1950s–60s and the 1970s–80s became apparent. The poverty and shortages in the 1950s could still be justified as conditioned by postwar circumstances. In the 1960s, the GDR experienced modest prosperity. Modern technology found its way into households en masse. The advantage of the 1960s, however, changed into its opposite from the mid1970s, when developments stagnated. This was not only because people felt that the GDR was treading water or saw on West German television every day that their living conditions were getting worse year after year compared the Federal Republic; rather, they had learned in the 1960s that there could also be spurts of modernization under socialism. In the 1980s, though, everything seemed old-fashioned and outdated. The same was true of social advancement opportunities. In the 1950s and even in the early 1960s, the career floodgates were wide open. One merely had to refrain from attracting political attention and be a member of the usual organizations and, if possible, also of the party. Hundreds of thousands of people pursued careers in this way, many of them from formerly educationally disadvantaged classes. By the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, this was over. The reign of the old guard, who had started their careers as young people, lasted practically until the end of the 1980s. Mobility was extremely low in the 1970s and 1980s. Managerial positions were dominated by those born between 1920 and 1939 in industry, agriculture, higher education, science and research, and many other areas, causing many “junior cadres” to resign. What did not apply to “peace” and “antifascism” applied to the promises of social prosperity and social advancement from the 1970s onward; these promises lost ground as a binding force and turned into the opposite in the 1980s,

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prompting broad sections of the population to become detached from socialism. One should not be deceived by opinion polls conducted after 1990. The fact that low-cost housing and a secure job counted among the advantages of the GDR at that point had to do with the social upheavals after 1990. Before 1989, there were only a few in the GDR who would have voluntarily praised this as an advantage of GDR socialism—on the one hand, this was because most took it for granted; on the other, it was because many people were only too aware of the double-edged nature of this policy. Now, of course, these were not the only binding forces. Regional ties, family, friends, and private property were as much a part of it as sluggishness, laziness, tiredness, but also the desire and hope for change. In addition, there were two further circumstances whose long-term effects are often underestimated. Many perceived and internalized the division of Germany as a measure of atonement for National Socialists’ mass crimes. The whole world seemed to have resigned itself to this state of affairs. The West also constantly praised GDR socialism as “modern,” as an “industrial society,” as “capable of development,” and did not even contradict SED leaders when they praised the GDR as the “tenth-largest industrial nation” in the world. It was, above all, the CSCE process with the Helsinki Final Act of August 1, 1975, that made the Iron Curtain more porous. The GDR, which had been a kind of pariah of the world community until the end of the 1960s, had been gaining international recognition. Within just a few months in 1972–73, it was officially recognized by over one hundred states. In September 1973, the GDR—like the Federal Republic—became a member of the UN. When the Ulbricht era ended in 1971, Honecker’s reign began quite promisingly. Not only had the West now recognized the GDR as an independent subject of international law but domestic policy also seemed to be loosening up: rock music was no longer so frowned upon, English lyrics were now permitted, long hair and short skirts were tolerated by the old men with discontent, and even the reception of Western media was more or less declared normal by SED leaders, who allowed artists to portray the world subjectively. The East German cult book from those years, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf (1972), culminates in a statement that sums up the cultural self-confidence of the rock generation across borders: “I mean,” says the protagonist Edgar, “jeans are an attitude and not trousers”; “real music, people,” and everything else that goes with them, belonged to the jeans category. Plenzdorf lets his protagonist go a little further—he does not mean just any jeans: “Real jeans, for example, must not have a zipper in the front. There is only one real kind of jeans. If you’re a real jeans wearer, you know which ones I mean. Which is not to say that everyone who wears real jeans is also a real jeans wearer.”41 Edgar lets the Levi’s word “501” drop bluntly and uncompromisingly in a country where these jeans did not officially exist and could not be obtained for the national currency.42 This brief relaxation of cultural policy gave many

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people renewed hope that democratic socialism under SED leadership might one day work out at last. In this context, too, one can observe the paradox that as one hope died, the next hope emerged. If Moscow, with its hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and the East German police state formed the everyday visible space of rule, then Marxist-Leninist theory was the invisible putty that held the structure together. For this “scientific worldview” had two other functions that have not been mentioned so far, and which are usually barely considered. In the GDR there were tens of thousands of people at schools, universities, in companies, in party institutions and institutions of mass organizations, in the army and police, and actually almost everywhere outside the churches who were paid to teach and pass on Marxist-Leninist theory and, above all, to interpret it according to current political developments. The country was inundated with a political education and training system that many people mocked as “red light radiation.” They could hardly escape it. This complex training system not only served to convince people of the only scientific worldview but also functioned to monitor them. The Marxist-Leninist teachers, who were called civics teachers, ML teachers, PolÖk teachers, and simply agitprop secretaries, took on the role of the ideology police. Here it was possible to register exactly who refused to reiterate the pre-punched formulas, who criticized SED policy, and who argued against Marxism-Leninism. And especially in the schools, the control inevitably extended not only to the pupils but also to the parents. In millions of families, it was good manners to tell your children to speak differently after leaving home. The ideological state had demanded mendacity, dishonesty, and insincerity and received them en masse. Leaders were not interested in inner conviction but in external participation to assure peace, also for one’s fellow human beings. That is why people’s own colleagues, classmates, and fellow students not only frequently remained silent, unjustly and unfairly, but also called freer spirits to reason, admonished silence, or denigrated what was actually brave. After all, there was another reason for the comprehensive Marxist-Leninist instruction with its confusing excesses. With its claim to being unique and the only scientific form of education, the humanistic educational heritage could be trimmed down to a terribly shrunken torso. The education system in the GDR deliberately generated broad political ignorance and lack of knowledge. Now critics were initially able to counter such a thesis with the argument that classical German literature was taught and read in the GDR just as much as English, French, and Russian literature. Even though considerable limitations were imposed in these fields, this was true, in principle. If critics were to extend their argument to the literature of the twentieth century, one would have to tell them that it would be easier to mark the literature under discussion than to list the undesirable literature, because the latter hardly seems manageable. But that is not the point at all. Behind the thesis, rather, was the SED’s attempt to suppress independent, creative, political thinking by means of a theory praised as scientific. And it has

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succeeded in doing so to an extent that can still often be observed today, because behind the facade of science, there were many prohibitions. Staunch functionaries were unanimous in their view that one did not need much more than the classics (Marx, Engels, Lenin), the current programmatic statements of the SED leaders, and finally the daily edition of the SED newspapers in order to understand the world. After 1990, Wolfgang Leonhard once described how he drove to visit the former educational minister, ambassador, and deputy foreign minister Paul Wandel. After looking at his library, Leonhard asked him whether he did not also read other communist authors, to which Paul replied: “I have access to a library at the Central Committee and can acquire any book without disruption; but I simply have no time for such things.”43 Now, even in free societies, most people do not read these or other philosophical or political thinkers. It’s not even about the fact that they would at least have the opportunity to do so. In schools and universities, individual theories are at least reported as variants of thought. But under communism, almost everybody could “explain” why they were all wrong—at best they were part of the prehistory of Marxism-Leninism, and at worst they were disgusting apologists of imperialism and human exploitation—without ever getting hold of a work or at least a longer excerpt or even having heard of the existence of these thinkers. The consequences for society were dramatic. Where free thought is not allowed, free speech cannot flourish. The training courses and teaching units tailored to a few writings and thinkers allowed not only political and philosophical thought to wither away but also—another paradox—their own classics, which died a second death. Whoever is declared a dogma cannot defend himself from being considered a dogma. Marx and Engels were on everyone’s lips, but very few, least of all the functionaries and political teachers, read them in any sense of intellectual debate. Nothing killed Marxist thought more than the communist state teachers and propagandists. This could even be regarded as almost right for freedom-minded people, but intellectuals from all walks of life would probably find it bitterly offensive. To be sure, there was a popular sport in the GDR that many called “reading between the lines.” Almost everyone was trained in this. For example, if the newspaper reported that the supply of panties would be guaranteed next year, everyone could interpret it as admitting that panties were in short supply this year. Almost everyone had noticed this anyway, but the message indicated that the individual experience was more widespread and obviously had not only led to one’s own displeasure. In essence, to put it in modernist terms, it was a matter of deconstructing a message or a speech, sometimes simply turning it into its opposite. That was more exhausting than it sounds. It added up to the fact that many people did not believe the SED functionaries even when they told the truth. “He who lies once …”

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Those interested in philosophy, history, literature, art and culture, and politics in the true sense of the word were masters in “reading between the lines.” They extended this skill to all situations of intellectual life. For example, innumerable terrible works were published in the GDR, not only by GDR authors but also by ideologues from the Federal Republic, France, Italy, and, of course, also from Poland, the ČSSR, and the Soviet Union, in which they long-windedly denigrated the infernal “late capitalist,” “imperialist” apologists, “revisionist dissenters,” left-wing radicals, right-wing radicals, conservative “war worshipers,” “green alternative utopians,” or simply “bourgeois sociologists, philosophers, historians, lawyers, economists, and psychologists.” Specialist journals were just as full of such drivel as were self-developed publication series, encyclopedias, and countless monographs and graduation publications. And these were eagerly read by the masters of “between-the-lines reading.” After all, the authors of these works could not avoid naming the works they demonized or, usually, quoting them in detail. The quotations were gold mines, the bibliographical footnotes found their way into the collector’s and hunter’s corner of sought-after books, and the comments and interpretations of the ideologues were often simply turned into the opposite for lack of other aids and originals. But, as I said, only an exclusive minority practiced this sport because only they, either as students, scientists, freelance writers, cemetery gardeners, doormen, or food delivery men, found enough time, leisure, and, above all, interest for such intellectual silliness. The consequences of this entire “scientific worldview” and its omnipresent mediation are only revealed today in very subtle forms, for example, when the society is divided into “superstructure” and “base.” Or when “production relations,” “productive forces,” and “means of production” are quite clearly and unmistakably located and classified. And not least when “social justice” is equated or “confused” with “social equality” and, at the same time, “freedom,” “democracy,” and “human rights” are denigrated as subordinate values or even completely disregarded. There is one more thing to add: In the 1980s, especially, some books were published by these authors in the GDR that otherwise could only be found in “between-the-lines reading” or with a lot of luck in antiquarian bookshops or with a lot of skill in the library. Several anthologies with texts by Sigmund Freud counted among these, as well as a volume of essays by Max Weber. This cautious easing of restrictions, which did not hurt and was only noticed by insiders, did not suit many people. Paul Wandel’s attitude was typical of many functionaries and cadre scientists. In this circumstance you can find answers to the question of why many people in 1989–90 knew so well what they no longer wanted but were always so strangely vague, glorifying social romanticism and clearly influenced by the GDR, when asked to positively determine what they wanted instead. Most people didn’t really know; how could they?

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History as Legitimation of Power In most communist countries, a joke circulated that originated in people’s experiences: “Question: What is the most difficult thing to predict about communism? Answer: Its past!” Whatever was considered to be a historically irrevocable truth “yesterday” could be presented as slander “today.” Such jokes testify to the fact that there was an awareness in society that, of what presented itself as “scientifically proven historical truth,” probably not even the opposite was true. At the same time, they symbolize that the much-discussed “blank spots” in history—i.e., the lying, the concealment, the lack of exploration, the unspeakable matters—were nevertheless known in principle: “In one train, prisoners are being taken to a labor camp in Siberia. After a week one of them asks the person sitting next to him: ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I was against Alexevich when he was still powerful.’ A week later this one asks the other, in turn: ‘And you, why are you here?’ ‘I was for Alexevich when he was already powerless.’ A week later they both ask a man sitting opposite them: ‘And you, why are you here?’ ‘I am Alexevich.’” For lack of democratic legitimation, the communists had established a worldview that was not only to be “scientifically” founded but also “historically consistent,” following “historical laws,” and in which socialism/communism was the end point of history. In this worldview, communist rule did not need democratic legitimation through free elections because it was the result of historical development itself. This teleological worldview was elevated to state doctrine, with the consequence that history, history studies, history teaching, and history propaganda were assigned an exclusive, state-supporting place in the GDR. Quite a few high party functionaries also saw themselves as historians. Ulbricht had said of himself: “The study of history has long been my third profession, so to speak.”44 Even though Honecker did not later appear as openly a “historian” as his predecessor, historical science and historical propaganda gained more importance in his era. Perhaps the most sarcastic examination of this historical ideology was published by Franz Fühmann in 1981–82 in his book Saiäns-Fiktschen. In obvious reference to George Orwell, Fühmann dissects the “Wahrhaft Wahre Geschichtsbetrachtung” (Truly True Historical Contemplation) in the “Wahrhaft Befreite Gesellschaft” (Truly Liberated Society). In this fictional world, the search for truth and the recognition of reality are suppressed by the police state. “Truth” and “knowledge” have become sacred formulas of an untouchable ideological world. Science has become a caricature of itself. It has perfect organization, a meticulously planned process, an exuberant “scientific language” that is no longer even comprehensible to the initiated—but no content anywhere. Here, science no longer constitutes a search for solutions to problems but only an ideology of justification. Several ludicrous “social science arguments” show that science cannot exist in the “Truly Liberated Society.” Historical science has been degraded to the handmaiden of power. Almost logically, the book ends

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without illusions, without utopia, and in the complete resignation of the literary protagonist, whose hopelessness and obvious collapse only seem to anticipate the collapse of the “Truly Liberated Society.” GDR historiography represented a type of science or scholarship that the SED had specially created for the purpose of legitimizing its rule. It had to meet political demands and implement results-oriented external targets. It lacked autonomy within the scientific community. Scientific criteria of rationality were overridden, just as it lacked methodological, interpretative, and theoretical pluralism. The competence for interpretation lay with nonscientific and prescientific bodies and institutions. Early on, in 1955, Walter Ulbricht had determined the function of historical scholarship when he reproached historians for being “too concerned with questions of the past.”45 Although the historiographical concepts of the SED leadership changed several times, historians always had the task of presenting the GDR as the legitimate “end and climax” of German history. This simple scheme was based on a naive belief that operated with simple categories such as “progress” and “reaction,” without there being room for discussion of the crisis symptoms of modernity. For the Marxist-Leninists, negative consequences of modernity were merely developments that could be attributed to capitalism and would be overcome by socialism/ communism. The Eighth Party Congress of the SED, which took place from June 15 to 19, 1971, was regarded as a caesura in the GDR. The “Honecker era” began. The party conference marked a turning point in Germany’s political life as the SED leadership officially bid farewell to the unified German nation. From then on in the GDR, “when assessing the national question, one had to proceed from its class content.” Honecker explained: “In contrast to the FRG, where the bourgeois nation continues to exist and where the national question is determined by the irreconcilable class contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the working masses . . . the socialist nation is developing in our country.”46 Honecker, a Saarländer, thus rejected concepts that rhetorically adhered to a unified nation. Honecker’s “bi-nations concept” was decisively evoked by the thesis of the Bonn social-liberal coalition of the “Two States—One Nation.” The federal German government’s new policy toward the East and toward East Germany, in particular, since 1969–70 pushed the SED onto the defensive and intensified its efforts to set itself apart. The thesis of the two German nations was valid in the GDR until 1989. Both recent analyses and surveys from the GDR show that at no time did a majority of the GDR population adhere to the official SED theory of nations. SED functionaries and social scientists spent twenty years trying to prove the two-nation theory. In this perspective, German history degenerated into the mere “prehistory” of the GDR, which was composed primarily of its “positive references” to the GDR. In order to make these “positive references” clear, it was necessary to distinguish between “heritage” and “tradition.” By inheritance, one understood the history of all of Germany, the

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result of which was the GDR. “In contrast, the historical tradition or traditional image of the GDR includes only those historical lines of development, phenomena and facts on which the GDR is based, whose embodiment it represents, which it preserves and continues. Tradition and the image of tradition therefore only cover part of history, only part of the entire heritage.” In other words, a construct was created that could be adapted to changes in political direction at any time while it likewise had “the secure class positions of the Marxist view of history as a prerequisite.”47 In 1987, plans were even developed to establish a “GDR National Archive” and thus to adapt even the established archive tradition to the demands of those in power. Everything was subject to the idea of creating a “GDR national consciousness.” Notorious theses on Berlin’s 750th anniversary, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the KPD, and a multitude of historical accounts on the occasion of these and other anniversaries were published, including a monograph on the “socialist German nation.” In June 1989, the author of this book, Joachim Hofmann, a professor at the Academy of Social Sciences at the CC of the SED, pointed out in a confidential paper to the SED leadership that the consolidation of the “GDR nation” could only be considered “relatively complete” when the national self-image had become “firmly anchored and internalized in the everyday consciousness of the citizens of the GDR.” This needed to include citizens identifying themselves with the socialist German state. As Hofmann argued, “The profiling of the national self-image of the citizens of the GDR absolutely requires the propagation and practical realization of the values and achievements of socialist society. Their internalization is a central question of consciousness development.” The concept of inheritance and tradition, he maintained, proved to be an effective lever for generating an “image of history that could affect the masses,” but it was “still necessary” to conduct “a consistent examination of ‘all-German’ doctrines and illusions.”48 Hofmann’s remarks show that the state could obviously not yet “completely” achieve its desired goal of ideological indoctrination. The events of 1989–90 proved irrefutably and empirically that the “GDR nation” idea was a flop. Nevertheless, this historical propaganda did have consequences. Even if only a few exceptional history enthusiasts and scholars took note of the works of GDR historians, despite their high circulation, millions of people were continuously confronted with this kind of history propaganda in schools, at universities, in vocational training, in their mandatory year of party apprenticeship, on radio and television, and in daily newspapers for decades. That had to leave its mark.

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Notes 1. Jerzy Kochanowski, Jenseits der Planwirtschaft. Der Schwarzmarkt in Polen 1944–1989 (Göttingen, 2013). 2. Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present (Oxford, 2001), 24. 3. Heinrich August Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 2 (Munich, 2000), 385–89; Heinrich August Winkler, Geschichte des Westens. Vom Kalten Krieg zum Mauerfall (Munich, 2014), 803–5; Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2014), 950–52. 4. Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium, with an afterword by Margaret Atwood (London, New York 2007), 85–86. 5. In the end, though, the “election” proceeded without difficulty or resistance: Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (London, New York, 1996), 162–68; György Dalos, Gorbatschow. Mensch und Macht. Eine Biografie (Munich, 2011), 56; Helmut Altrichter, Russland 1989. Der Untergang des sowjetischen Imperiums (Munich, 2009), 16; Stefan Karner et al., eds., Der Kreml und die Wende. Interne Analysen der sowjetischen Führung zum Fall der kommunistischen Regime. Dokumente (Innsbruck, Vienna, Bolzano, 2014), 80–84 (Doc. 2). 6. This policy thus intervened in a key traditional state tax: Mark L. Schrad, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (New York, 2014); Sonja Margolina, Wodka—Trinken und Macht in Russland (Berlin, 2004). 7. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York, 1996), 436. 8. Dietmar Neutatz, Träume und Alpträume: Eine Geschichte Russlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2013), 503; David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York, 2009), 532–41. 9. Adam Michnik, “Gorbatschow und die Polen,” Der Spiegel, no. 44 (Oct. 26, 1987): 155. 10. Michail Gorbatschow, “Rede auf der Kundgebung der tschechoslowakisch-sowjetischen Freundschaft, 10. April 1987,” in Ausgewählte Reden und Aufsätze, vol. 4: Juli 1986–April 1987 (Berlin, 1988), 530. 11. Brezhnev had formulated the doctrine in 1969; see Internationale Beratung der kommunistischen und Arbeiterparteien—Moskau 1969 (Prague, 1969). 12. Václav Havel, “Treffen mit Gorbatschow,” in Glasnost. Stimmen zwischen Zweifel und Hoffnung, ed. Freimut Duve (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1987), 28. 13. Timothy Garton Ash, “Carmen-Sylva-Strasse (June 1981),” in The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (London, 1991), 9. See also Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (New York, 1993). 14. Beschluss des Sekretariats des Politbüros vom 17. 10. 1949. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30, I IV 2/3/57, Bl. 26–28. 15. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Stasi Konkret. Überwachung und Repression in der DDR (Munich, 2013). 16. Margarete Steglich, “Da dachte ich, ich sei der Pfarrer,” in Noch Fragen, Genossen! ed. Brigitte Zimmermann and Hans-Dieter Schütt (Berlin, 1994), 175. 17. Karner et al., Der Kreml und die Wende, 154 (Doc. 12). 18. Stenografische Niederschrift des Treffens des Genossen Erich Honecker mit dem Sekretariat des Zentralrates der FDJ am 22. 12. 1988. BA, MfS, BdL 1100, Bl. 70. 19. Manfred Uschner, Die zweite Etage (Berlin, 1993), 110. 20. Reinhold Andert and Wolfgang Herzberg, Der Sturz. Erich Honecker im Kreuzverhör (Berlin, Weimar, 1990), 378. 21. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York, 1957), 124. 22. Leszek Kolakowski, “Diktatur der Wahrheit: Ein quadratischer Kreis,” in Der revolutionäre Geist (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Mainz, 1972), 93. 23. Jochen Schmidt, Schneckenmühle: Langsame Runde (Munich, 2013), 89–90.

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24. Andert and Herzberg, Der Sturz, 359. Practically all of the leading functionaries made similar remarks to the extent that they said anything in public at all; Axen characterized himself as a “servant of the party.” 25. Christine Ostrowski, “Diese dünne Überzeugung ganz vorn auf der Zunge,” in Zimmermann and Schütt, Noch Fragen, Genossen! 107. 26. Thea Fischer, “Wofür habe ich mich aufgeräufelt,” in Zimmermann and Schütt, Noch Fragen, Genossen! 43. 27. Brigitte Kühnöl, “Es wird geflaggt, es wird nicht geflaggt,” in Zimmermann and Schütt, Noch Fragen, Genossen! 127. 28. Interview of November 30, 1989, in Peter Kirschey, Wandlitz Waldsiedlung—die geschlossene Gesellschaft. Versuch einer Reportage. Gespräche, Dokumente (Berlin, 1990), 23–24. 29. Gabriele Günter, “Ein Mann. Ein Wunsch. Ein Irrtum,” JW, 19. 6. 1989. 30. Günter Schabowski, Das Politbüro. Eine Befragung (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1990), 41. 31. The following interview presents an example of this as factual, and temporal contexts were repeated in a way that was provably false: “‘Wenn wir die Partei retten wollen, brauchen wir Schuldige.’ Der erzwungene Wandel der SED in der Revolution 1989/90. Interview mit Wolfgang Berghofer von Manfred Wilke,” JHK (2007): 396–421. In his memoir, which appeared later, his memories differ somewhat from these remarks and show how a longtime FDJ and SED functionary looks back on his career in the GDR: Wolfgang Berghofer, Keine Figur im Schachspiel. Wie ich die “Wende” erlebte (Berlin, 2014). 32. BA, MfS, SdM, Tb 153 (excerpt from a speech, n.d.). 33. MfS, Kollegiumssitzung, 19. 2. 1982. BA, MfS, ZAIG, Tb 1 (recording excerpt). 34. MfS, Zentrale Dienstkonferenz, 11. 5. 1984. BA, MfS, SdM, Tb 53 (recording excerpt). 35. MfS, Zentrale Dienstkonferenz, 6. 10. 1986. BA, MfS, SdM, Tb 2 (recording excerpt). 36. For a detailed account, see Kowalczuk, Stasi konkret. 37. For a detailed account, see Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Telefongeschichten,” in Fasse Dich kurz! Der grenzüberschreitende Telefonverkehr der Opposition in den 1980er Jahren und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, ed. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Arno Polzin (Göttingen, 2014), 17–172. 38. For a comprehensive account, see Sandra Pingel-Schliemann: Zersetzen. Strategie einer Diktatur (Berlin, 2002). 39. Bericht über die Verhandlungen des 15. Parteitages der KPD. 19. und 20. April 1946. Berlin 1946, p. 36. 40. This formulation can be traced to the Bochum historian Bernd Faulenbach; see his statement in Materialien der Enquete-Kommission “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland,” ed. Deutschen Bundestag (Baden-Baden, 1995), vol. III/1, 106. 41. Ulrich Plenzdorf, “Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.,” Sinn und Form 24, no. 2 (1972): 264. 42. The Levi’s sold a few years later had a zipper, by the way. 43. Wolfgang Leonhard, Spurensuche. Vierzig Jahre nach ‘Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder’ (Cologne, 1994), 252. 44. Qtd. in Lothar Berthold, “‘Sozusagen mein dritter Beruf.’ Walter Ulbricht als marxistischer Geschichtswissenschaftler,” ND vom 14. 6. 1963. 45. ZK-Abt. Wissenschaften, Aktennotiz, 12. 5. 1955. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30, IV 2/904/111, Bl. 212. 46. Protokoll der Verhandlungen des VIII. Parteitages der SED. Berlin 1971, Bd. 1, p. 56. 47. Horst Bartel, “Erbe und Tradition in Geschichtsbild und Geschichtsforschung der DDR,” in Erbe und Tradition in der DDR, ed. Helmut Meier and Walter Schmidt (Berlin, 1988), 133, 135. 48. Jürgen Hofmann, Fragen der Entwicklung der sozialistischen Nation in der DDR, Juni 1989. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30/IV 2/2035/15, Bl. 126, 128, 131.

Chapter 2

THE GDR IN ITS INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

S Like any other state, the GDR had a foreign ministry, the “Ministry for Foreign Affairs.” But the Central Committee (CC) apparatus also played a role in determining and controlling foreign policy. The most important foreign policy representative in the 1970s and 1980s was SED leader Erich Honecker. All the others—whether foreign ministers, ambassadors, or CC secretaries—acted as his negotiators. That is beyond dispute. More controversial, however, is the question of whether the GDR was able to determine and pursue its own foreign policy. Most historians see East German foreign policy toward African, Asian, and Central and South American states (which were mostly limited to left-wing dictatorships or quasi-socialist regimes) as merely an extended arm of Moscow. The SED understood its corresponding commitment as support for “antiimperialist movements.” In all parties and mass organizations, members paid not only membership fees but also regular “solidarity” contributions. What the SED did with these millions remained secret. In Nicaragua, the hospital “Karl Marx” was built, and many young people from Vietnam, Angola, or Mozambique learned a profession in the GDR or studied there. But that was not all. The MfS also provided solidarity aid and trained Ethiopian secret police officers, for example, who then tortured and murdered even more efficiently. Many an NVA officer also moved outside Europe to serve “the cause.” Such events remained top secret and have still not been brought to light today. The foreign policy of the GDR was complex and by no means exhausted in diplomacy. The most important GDR ambassadors wore tracksuits. In turn, “diplomats” who carried out industrial espionage, who infiltrated the Western embargo lists, who maintained cover companies in the West, or who organized Western money for secret missions were meaningful in unofficial ways. Notes from this chapter begin on page 80.

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Directly under the Politburo in the 1980s, the “Department of Commercial Coordination” was primarily responsible for these missions. The true importance and size of this top-secret institution, which was largely secured by the MfS, was not known to everyone even there. The athletes and the commercial coordination troop under MfS colonel, CC member, and state secretary Alexander SchalckGolodkowski were probably the most successful “GDR diplomats,” even though neither exactly represented classic foreign policy fields.

The GDR in the Eastern Bloc The Warsaw Pact was the military alliance formed in 1955 under Moscow’s leadership. With its border to West Berlin and the Federal Republic, the GDR played a special strategic role in the planning games of this pact. The NVA was no more than a maneuvering mass in this and would have been subordinated to the supreme commander of the Soviet occupation force in case of emergency. Its low military effectiveness alone degraded it to a military unit for which Moscow’s chief planners expected particularly high losses in the case of attack and defense in the first phase of a war. From the 1970s, NATO strategists knew that the Eastern military alliance was planning attacks, thanks to information provided by Polish colonel Ryszard Kukliński, who worked for the CIA out of conviction. From as early as the 1960s, the alliance had practiced the taking of Western countries. Those from West Berlin planned the staffs of the armies and secret services with particular care. There were detailed arrest plans for about 5,000 West Berliners, and the staffing had already been determined for the 604 most important positions in West Berlin after the communist conquest. The logistics of the takeover of enemy territory had also been prepared. These included, for example, the production of “military money,” the generation of orders for bravery and the secret issue of a corresponding order to be awarded in an emergency (1985), the preparation of leaflets with rules of conduct for the population in enemy territory and of radio speeches and addresses to the fighting units (1986), and much more. “Until 1986, about 40 percent of the GDR territory was a military restricted area, later about 25 percent.”1 From 1950, the GDR was also a member of the “Council for Mutual Economic Assistance” (Rat für gegenseitige Wirtschaftshilfe, or RGW, known in English as “Comecon”), the Eastern economic alliance founded in 1949. Comecon coordinated economic relations in the Eastern Bloc and aimed at harmonizing the living conditions of the people at a high level. Party technocrats regarded the most important lever for this as being the specialization of the individual branches of industry in the national economies in a way that also allowed them to cover the needs of the “friendly states.” Wherever you went in the Eastern Bloc, Hungarian Ikarus buses were running almost everywhere.

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The fishing trawlers were preferably built by the GDR. The perpetually similar car types in the East were also part of the Comecon strategy. There were also bilateral agreements between the individual states that were formally based on commodity-money relations, although money remained more of a virtual variable and, in fact, foreign trade was based to a large extent on commodity-material exchange relations. Foreign trade between the states remained almost balanced. As long as the Eastern Bloc existed, the Comecon system had its advantages. In times of tension and after the collapse of the bloc, however, the system precipitated a pronounced structural weakness that some of the individual countries still suffer from today. For many years, the Soviet Union supported the GDR with subsidy packages worth billions. In this, the special role of the “GDR” as an artificial construct came to light, as it was dependent on transfer payments from the beginning. The other states always had to make do with smaller subsidies than the GDR. Their economies were in a much worse position, and the communist rule within them also remained without legitimacy and was more or less imposed except in the ČSSR, so that people perceived the communist rule as foreign rule. But unlike the GDR, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria did not require legitimation as nation-states. Subsidy policy was part of the Comecon strategy. Just as the planned economic system was based on self-sufficiency, the Comecon states tried to make themselves independent of the world market and to counteract globalization by working within a self-sufficient economic community. That never worked.2 The most famous example of this was the oil policy. The Comecon states based their trade on prices that lagged behind world market prices by several years. It was believed that this was the way to escape economic fluctuations. This had the advantage in the mid-1970s that the oil price shock that rocked the West reached the East only after a considerable delay. The GDR took advantage of this crisis by refining cheaply imported crude oil from the USSR and reselling it at world market prices, thus reaping substantial foreign exchange gains. This was not exactly friendly toward its big brother. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Soviet Union cut back oil exports to its smaller brother states, in some cases considerably, forcing them to buy oil at world market prices, which led to a rapid increase in debts to Western creditors and caused a noticeable drop in the standard of living in all Eastern Bloc states, including the GDR. The GDR was considered a model pupil within the Eastern Bloc. Most people in other Eastern Bloc countries looked at Moscow’s most studious pupil with skepticism, mockery, or contempt, especially since they perceived the GDR as part of the whole of German history and had not forgotten the National Socialist policy of occupation, war, and annihilation. The GDR’s living conditions, infrastructure, and economy were considered exemplary compared to the other

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Eastern Bloc states, and the internal stability of the system was guaranteed. The other regimes could only dream of this. The ČSSR resembled the GDR in many respects, but from 1968 it had to struggle with the domestic political consequences of the suppression of the “Prague Spring.” Tensions between Czechs and Slovaks were added to this. Bulgaria had neither strong industry nor a structurally strong agricultural economy to offer. Most of its people lived in poor conditions, and the country was marked by corruption. The Turkish minority was harassed and humiliated by a tightened policy of Bulgarization,3 so that there were several limited revolts in the 1980s. The country traditionally oriented itself toward Russia and therefore had the fewest problems with Moscow’s domination. Many GDR people got to know and appreciate it because of its tourist attractions on the Black Sea and in the high mountains (Rila, Pirin). They also frequently traveled to the other Eastern Bloc countries, if only because there was a lack of other options. Hungary was the most “Western” of all Eastern Bloc countries because practically anything known from Western advertising could be bought there in the 1980s. However, most Hungarians could not afford these items, nor could the tourists from the GDR. Hungary remained structurally weak in industrial terms, but from the 1970s it had cautiously opened up its domestic policy so that most of the typical features of dictatorship disappeared there first. Hungary was considered the “happiest barrack in the Eastern Bloc.” The darkest one besides the Soviet Union itself was Romania. The country, like others in the Eastern Bloc, experienced a harsh communist upheaval at the end of the 1940s so that in 1944 it seamlessly transitioned from a fascist dictatorship to a communist one. Since 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu had held the reins of power. Because he did not let his troops participate in the invasion of the ČSSR in 1968 and because he insisted on sovereignty and independence vis-à-vis the USSR, he was long considered a reform communist in the West. The Federal Republic of Germany awarded him its highest order in 1971. Yet Ceaușescu was anything but a reformer. On account of some oil deposits, he covered the country with industrialization, which led it into abject poverty. He smashed up the agricultural industry, and what was left he sold to the West, but he could not feed his population in the 1970s and 1980s. The infrastructure remained pre-modern. Electricity was usually only available on an hourly basis, wage payments often failed to materialize for months, and shops rarely offered the most essential items. He got troops to shoot up several uprisings. The Securitate, the Romanian secret police, was particularly brutal. Their terror was directed against all population groups. The Hungarian and German minorities, as well as the Roma and Sinti, were particularly hard hit. In the second half of the 1980s, almost warlike conflicts erupted several times between Hungary and Romania because the Romanians were oppressing the Hungarian minority. There were several military border incidents because Romanian soldiers and

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Securitate officers pursued and fired at Hungarian refugees on Hungarian territory. Ceaușescu’s personality cult was particularly striking. From the mid-1970s he was called “Conducator” (leader) like Ion Antonescu, the military dictator who had allied with Hitler during World War II. He also liked to listen when he was called “the chosen one,” “our earthly God,” or “our genius from the Carpathians.” Other insignia of megalomania were also present. He could often be spotted sporting a scepter, orb, and cloak. His wife Elena, who could neither read nor write properly, was head of the Academy of Sciences. None of this was ridiculous. Hundreds of thousands had to pay for it with their blood. Ceaușescu did not quite manage to destroy eight thousand villages, nor could he blow up all the churches, but he left behind a gigantic “people’s palace” in Bucharest with over three thousand rooms that will probably remain a monument to his madness and dictatorship for a long time to come. He demolished half of the city center for this.4 By far the most politically interesting country was Poland. It was also the People’s Republic of Poland that the SED leadership found most threatening. Economically, Poland was usually in a bad way, at least almost always worse off than its Western neighbor. Domestically, the 1970s and 1980s were rarely quiet there. Strikes, uprisings, and growing political opposition brought the country to the brink of civil war several times. The SED leadership stoked anti-Polish resentment in the GDR, which fell on fertile ground: “They should work rather than go on strike” was a statement often heard even from unsuspicious contemporaries. At the annual “Festival of Political Song” on February 12, 1981, for example, an FDJ singing group alluded to the strikes in Poland in a song: “The Poles should finally meet their quota.” The ZDF journalist Joachim Jauer noticed the audience’s enthusiastic applause in response, whereas the ARD correspondent Fritz Pleitgen characterized this clever song appropriately as a “song of incitement.”5 The Polish pope John Paul II, a self-professed anticommunist, strengthened the already influential Catholic Church in Poland and gave the Polish resistance movement a powerful boost. A firm moral foundation opposed to the MarxistLeninists existed there. Founded in 1980, the independent trade union movement Solidarność took up arms in the 1970s and 1980s like almost all the other resistance movements in the Eastern Bloc, not in order to eliminate communist rule but to democratize their country, open it to the West, strengthen the economy, and improve the living conditions of the people. The Poles, too, knew that their fate was too closely intertwined with Moscow for them to be able to dissolve the bipolar bloc on their own. As we know today, the imposition of martial law in December 1981 meant the beginning of the end of communist rule—not only in Poland. Critically minded GDR people looked with hope at Poland, where a “second society” was developing underground.

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The SED and Perestroika The most important partner for the GDR in all matters was the USSR. Without Moscow the GDR was neither economically nor politically viable. Even though the master-servant relationship remained in place until 1989—Gorbachev’s “hints” in autumn 1989 still remained those of a benevolent patriarch—there were several crises in the relations between the two states, especially in the 1980s. The first began under Brezhnev and had to do with the USSR’s aforementioned curbing of oil exports. The Honecker regime reacted by intensifying its efforts to establish better and more sustainable economic and political relations with Western states, especially with the Federal Republic. This displeased Moscow, because USSR leaders feared that East Berlin would go it alone in foreign policy and domestic affairs. Moscow’s strongest argument against independent SED policy toward the Federal Republic was probably very simple: if relations between the two German states continued to improve, the GDR would become an insecure ally in the event of a military conflict. Until Gorbachev came to power, Moscow had the SED leadership largely under control. However, when the relationship between the two party leaderships deteriorated visibly in 1986 as a result of the reform process, SED leaders also began to detach the GDR’s domestic German policy from Moscow. The SED leadership had a phobia of glasnost and perestroika, which manifested itself in crazy phenomena. During mass marches in 1988–89, the MfS noted “negative-hostile activity” when participants wore a portrait of Gorbachev, and some even had such clothing items taken away; and not far from there, official slogans celebrating the “unbreakable friendship with the Soviet Union” could be seen. Only portraits of Gorbachev that were precisely accounted for were to be tolerated by SED functionaries. In no case should there be more than there were of Honecker. Young people shouted “Gorbi, Gorbi” in protest. The close connection between social reality, the political intentions of the SED leadership, historical debates, and individual experiences can be illustrated by this moving example: On Tuesday, October 13, 1987, Soviet state television and ZDF broadcast the first live conversation between Leningrad and Mainz. Talks between Germans and Soviets were taking place via television. One Leningrad citizen said: “In any case, we wish Germany to be reunified as soon as possible. We wish for a strong Germany, and we believe that the day of reunification is coming.”6 Honecker was outraged and said to Gorbachev on November 4, 1987, in Moscow: “Leningrad’s call for reunification is a scandal.”7 At the end of the joint program, ZDF broadcast the feature film Remorse that was banned in the Soviet Union until 1986. In it, Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze uncompromisingly settles the score against communism and totalitarianism of all kinds in a tragicomedy lasting over two hours. It is about the deceased dictator

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Warlam, who is dug up by a woman who wants to reveal his crimes. Warlam, wearing a Hitler mustache and a fascist black shirt, looks like Stalin’s head of state security Lavrentiy Berija. The film brought Abuladze worldwide fame, as he had provided the cinematic underpinning for the reassessment of the past. The film was a topic of conversation in the GDR for days. One day after the broadcast, a twenty-year-old noted in his diary: “A moving evening lies behind me. Yesterday evening, the Soviet film ‘Remorse,’ shot in 1984, was shown on ZDF. A piece of real socialism was brought before our eyes. The part of socialism that I and thousands of others are fighting against. My attitude was rather aggravated: these corrupt criminals are to be physically destroyed, these pigs do not possess a psyche. I am without words.”8 After this film there was such a fierce ferment in the GDR that Hans-Dieter Schütt, JW editor in chief, and Harald Wessel, deputy editor in chief of ND, felt compelled to respond.9 Egon Krenz and Erich Honecker personally released Schütt’s article for printing. They were literally in a quandary. They had to condemn the film, and at the same time this condemnation was not allowed to degenerate into anti-Soviet resentment. This balancing act did not succeed because it replaced the pure doctrine of the Moscow center, prompting talk once again of the GDR’s specific national path to socialism. They implemented what Kurt Hager had formulated in March 1987 in the stern wallpaper interview. Schütt and Wessel’s article was particularly explosive because the two were fiercely condemning a film that had been broadcast on West German television, which, according to official logic, GDR citizens were not supposed to know about. Admittedly, even the SED functionaries knew that well over 90 percent of GDR people mainly consumed Western radio and television stations, and only a tiny minority deliberately refrained from receiving Western television and radio programs altogether. In principle, these were social outsiders, but they often held middle and high positions in the SED, the state apparatus, the MfS, the NVA, the FDJ, and the police. The harsh criticism of Remorse demonstrated that the SED leadership rejected perestroika and glasnost outright. This was also evident when several issues of the German-language Budapester Rundschau in 1987 and 1988 and one issue of the German-language Rumänische Rundschau in April and July 1987 went undelivered. The background for this was the Hungarian-Romanian disputes and polemics. However, since these periodicals had only a limited circulation (GDR circulation: sixty-five hundred and three hundred, respectively), these censorship measures remained largely unknown. In the case of the Soviet weekly newspaper Neue Zeit, this was somewhat different. The GDR received thirty-five thousand copies every week, but this was not enough to meet the high demand: since 1986—as in some other Soviet German-language journals such as Kunst und Literatur—GDR citizens could follow the debate on glasnost and perestroika in it firsthand. At the beginning of 1987, one issue was not released. The first three editions in 1988 also fell victim to the East German censor. And it was always

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about historical issues. Only the nondelivery of issue 7/1989 had another reason: the magazine printed an interview with Lech Wałęsa, the leader of Solidarność. But even the displeasure over these censorship measures remained limited to small groups in 1987–88, especially since Neue Zeit was read primarily by critical party cadres, intellectuals, opposition members, and students. In autumn 1988, however, there was a ban whose effects on society can hardly be overestimated. On November 19, 1988, the SED central organ Neues Deutschland reported that the Soviet monthly magazine Sputnik would henceforth no longer be distributed in the GDR because “it does not make a contribution that serves to strengthen German-Soviet friendship, but instead makes distorting contributions to history.”10 At the same time, the deputy minister of culture, Horst Pehnert, announced on November 18, 1988, that several Soviet films that had been shown in cinemas since October 27 as part of the “Festival of Soviet Film” should be withdrawn: And Tomorrow Was War, The Theme, Games for Schoolchildren, The Commissioner, and The Cold Summer of 53. The films had been seen by hundreds of thousands of people at that time, but the real scandal was the “Sputnik shock,” “Sputnik crash,” “Sputnik scandal,” or whatever else the ban on the magazine modeled after America’s Reader’s Digest was called. The magazine was named after the first satellite that the Soviet Union launched into space in 1957. At that time, too, many people spoke of “Sputnik shock”—but in Western Europe and the United States. Now the SED leadership shot down Sputnik. Some joked that the Honecker squad had achieved what US president Ronald Reagan had been planning with his Strategic Defense Initiative since 1983. The glossy and colorful Sputnik had been published in several languages since January 1967 and had developed into a respectable magazine in the 1970s. One could read exciting travel reports as well as recipes. Of course, there were also enough propagandistic contributions, but they were framed by serious essays on yetis, parapsychology, or cave wonders. Everyone could find something in it, and everyone had enough reasons not to read one or the other posts. In a protest letter to the State Council, a Dresdener wrote angrily after the ban: “Bravo! Bravo again! They have finally managed to ban the only magazine that you could still read without blushing. This is surely the so-called freedom of the press ‘Made in the GDR?’”11 During the Gorbachev era, the paper printed articles that reflected the reform process. Critical contributions on the communist past were included in issue 10/1988, where Stalin was put on a par with Hitler. The German communists were credited with their share of Hitler’s rise. The SED leadership felt that this directly attacked its integrity, even though the events described had taken place in the early 1930s. On September 30, SED leaders decided not to deliver issue 10/1988. Censorship thus reached a new level. At one stroke, the SED leadership alienated 190,000 subscribers and buyers, and probably many more readers of the magazine, most of whom—and this made the matter particularly

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explosive—were close to the system or attached to it in crucial ways. The 130,000 subscribers were the first to notice the absence of the magazine. After the SED’s terse justification of the Sputnik ban, a storm of protest rose up that could be heard and seen everywhere, although it was not reported in the GDR media. The special thing about it was that it was not limited to certain population groups, regions, or generations but encompassed all of them. The discontent that had accumulated in society in the months before was now released into a multitude of petitions, party and company meetings, thousands of leaflets, and much more. By November 4, 1988, two weeks before the official confirmation of the ban, more than 26,000 people had already inquired about Sputnik with official authorities, and 887 had made a written submission to a state or party institution. A total of 10,000–15,000 people had protested the ban in writing by the end of January 1989. There were many discussions, but concrete actions were rare. One of the most courageous actions took place in Grimmen in March 1989. German teacher Christine Bondör explained to her students that without Stalin there would have been no Hitler. Then she gave them the following written assignment: “Imagine you are a ZDF correspondent and you have to express your opinion on the ban of ‘Sputnik’ in the GDR.”12 The teacher was denounced by her parents. Her action was more courageous than any appeal in a church because she encouraged her students to engage in independent critical reflection by herself and in an unprotected space. It was a very rare exception in the field of national education. Comparisons made in local, informal publications in Berlin, Rostock, and elsewhere were particularly explosive: “Whoever bans magazines today will burn books tomorrow!” A presenter of Jugendradio DT 64, Silke Hasselmann, said in her program on November 19: “Unfortunately, we now have one magazine less to inform us, but that is only fair. We didn’t have the last issue. We readers cannot afford these delivery irregularities.” She was then transferred to “Voice of the GDR.” At the performance of the Barber of Seville in Dresden’s Semper Opera House on November 26, the main actor Jürgen Hartfiel sang that he wanted to shave Count Almaviva, that he had time now, since he had always read Sputnik before. In Leipzig on November 28, about forty civil rights activists protested in front of the “Capitol” cinema against the ban on Soviet films and Sputnik and released balloons with the inscription “Sputnik” into the air. Members of the MfS tried to thwart the action with cigarettes. Many more people got worked up about the ban than had read Sputnik. On December 29, 1988, the SED Politburo estimated that “loyalty to the party leadership” and “party discipline” had declined after the ban. There was hardly any protest in the block parties, even though Post Minister Rudolph Schulze, who had officially imposed the ban, was a member of the CDU. He had learned of the ban from the newspaper just like everyone else. The oft-claimed wave of resignations among members of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship did

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not take place, just as there was no relevant increase in SED party resignations. Of the 6.3 million Society for German-Soviet Friendship members, slightly more than 2,100 had announced their withdrawal by Christmas 1988, 331 of whom later rescinded their withdrawal. As with the petitions and internal party resolutions, there was also a collective protest, for example, by the previously inconspicuous employees of the VEB Minol Autobahn filling station Thiendorf in the Großenhain district. The SED and MfS had to register that almost none of their functionaries was able to justify the ban: hardly anyone understood it. This was true simply because nobody had been able to read the outlawed contributions. The MfS destroyed the editions so thoroughly that they did not even end up in the poison cabinets of the large libraries.13 It is still unclear how the decision to ban the paper was made on September 30, 1988. Since 1990, all the other former protagonists have presented it as a decision made solely by Honecker and his close confidant Joachim Herrmann, who was responsible for media in the Politburo. This does not seem plausible because they could hardly have been the first to have had the fresh 10/1988 edition in hand. The ban had already been announced internally in the summer. In a conversation with a top Soviet functionary in mid-August 1988, Honecker had lamented that in the “New Era,” the “development in the Soviet Union was described as ‘barrack yard socialism.’” Although it was correct to “point out shortcomings and individual negative phenomena,” this had all been happening in the GDR since 1956. Honecker therefore asked “to exert influence to ensure that such views do not appear in publications that are distributed in German, such as ‘Neue Zeit,’ ‘Sputnik,’ etc.”14 Within the apparatus there was a large anti-glasnost faction on which Honecker could rely. He may not have asked Hager, Mielke, Krenz, Stoph, Sindermann, Schabowski, and the other faithful members of the inner circle of power, but he could have presumed they would agree. When Hager took part in a discussion with artists in the East Berlin Academy of the Arts on December 20, 1988, he admitted, under the impression of widespread displeasure, that “the decision . . . should have been made in a more differentiated way.” At the same time, however, he stated that there had been no alternative.15 Honecker warned internally that a new view of the communist past would lead to it no longer being comprehensible and complained that too many students already failed to understand it. Those who called for “perestroika” and “glasnost” in the GDR “do not know what they are doing. Imagine,” he said with an eye to national independence aspirations, nationalist clashes, and many deaths, “if we had such events in the Schwerin district as in Armenia. . . . So why this recommendation from the West to introduce perestroika and glasnost here? Let them start with themselves. There are so many possibilities for a socialist transformation in the Federal Republic of Germany; no one is stopping it.”16 There were four things that people were most upset about: First, that the explanatory statement was so short and concise, and then the first longer explanatory

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article in Neues Deutschland was a commentary from the German Communist Party newspaper Unsere Zeit.17 This caused party officials and members in particular to oppose the decision because they were at a loss in discussions and made themselves the laughingstock of their interlocutors. When, for example, the chairman of the council of party secretaries, Wolfgang Dornbusch, defended the ban on December 5, 1988, in the SED company newspaper Verkehrsspiegel of the Potsdam Transport Combine under the headline “Who benefits,” he received a letter certifying that he was obviously totally “calcified.” The anonymous collective also pointed out to him: “With what poisonous things have you corrupted your ‘mind’? Ten years ago, you would have been imprisoned for such [anti-Soviet] statements.”18 Second, many officials had preached and defended German-Soviet friendship for decades and now faced a disaster. The clichéd nature of this policy had become too obvious. Third, many people were upset by the way the ban undermined their personal choice. They wanted to read for themselves what was written there and form their own opinion. The SED leadership had made a high-handed decision, forming a broad view of what its flock could and could not digest. Educated Marxist-Leninists, especially, protested, saying that they had a firm worldview after all that enabled them to recognize even what was ruinous. A fifty-five-year-old civics teacher and deputy director of a school, a long-standing member of the SED with numerous functions, wrote: “In addition, we are probably able to think and judge for ourselves.”19 Quite a few also recognized, however, that the SED leadership had never treated the people as adults. An ADN (Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst) photographer said to a German journalist: “You cannot imagine what is going on here. People all say they’ve taken away our self-determination. I could only sarcastically ask back, haven’t we always been deprived of our self-determination?”20 The tone in an anonymous submission to the Ministry of Postal Services was clearly angry: “We are shocked at the way you treat us! . . . It is outrageous that you deal with ‘developed socialist personalities’ as with a defenseless, underage horde of uniform thinkers! We want to be free men!”21 One year later, the word maturity was one of the key words in the political shift. Fourth, and finally, party officials and cadres in particular complained about the gaping contradiction in the ban on Soviet magazines and films while West German media were available throughout most of the country. The Sputnik ban came as a shock, but it did not prompt people to a greater willingness to oppose the SED and circles close to the party. Thousands ventured briefly out of cover, but only a few remained there. Helga Schubert, for example, had tried in vain to convince her colleagues in the Berlin chapter of the Writers’ Union to join in a joint protest. Nevertheless, the crisis of legitimacy of the system and its representatives had been visibly and tangibly intensified for most. On November 20, opposition writers Lutz Rathenow and Jürgen Fuchs exchanged views on the events by telephone. Rathenow, who lived in East Berlin,

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told Fuchs, who had been expatriated to the West, that apparently a few people “here” were running amok. Many of those he knew considered these measures “the last death twitch,” so that there was no longer any need to react.22 Not everyone thought so. The underground newspaper of the East Berlin Environmental Library, the Umweltblätter, for example, not only published a chronicle of the protest and a fictional interview with Gorbachev but also reported what was in the banned Sputnik articles—in the West the German-language edition was available—and gave a longer excerpt of the text. Wolfgang Rüddenklau, one of the heads of the Environmental Library, also commented on the process. He warned against a strong shift to the right: “If we want to avoid this or even a right-wing regime as the successor state of the GDR, we will have to get into a little discussion about mistakes with our brothers and sisters in the SED.” This appeal to the left-wing opposition was followed by an appeal to SED members: “We are supporters of a community of equals, free and responsible. And some of you have kept it a secret. We call upon you to engage in critical discussion and to make a new beginning together!”23 Rüddenklau spoke a year before the social awakening, and yet he was already thinking about the post-GDR era of blessed remembrance. Students at many universities also engaged in critical discussions about the ban, often embarrassing their political teachers, but few were exmatriculated in the GDR because of protests against the ban. Leaflets and posters appeared at almost all universities. A rhyming text posted at the TU Magdeburg was not taken down, and it made its point very clearly: “Sputnik is forbidden—how long do you want to rest. Things will only change—if we do something about it.”24 These and other actions already hinted at a creative protest culture that was otherwise hardly visible outside opposition groups. For example, wall newspapers featured pictures of Gorbachev in which his mouth had been sealed shut with plaster. The Sputnik ban was analogous to another process that outraged many people just as much, though by no means as many. At about the same time as the ban, the Romanian dictator Ceaușescu made a guest appearance at Honecker’s. On January 26, 1988, Neues Deutschland had already announced that on the occasion of Ceaușescu’s seventieth birthday he would be awarded the highest GDR award, the Karl Marx Order. Just how outdated this decoration appeared even in the Eastern Bloc is shown by the minutes of a meeting of the CPSU Politburo on November 13, 1986. Gorbachev was reported to have said that Ceaușescu was “simple-minded as always” and even “worse than before,” and that Ceaușescu said “a lot of useless stuff together, and there’s a lot of demagoguery in him.” The Romanian party leader was also against perestroika: “Just give him a medal for democracy, even though the country is ruled by Ceaușescu’s dictatorship.”25 In the middle of November, the time for the ceremony had come. Gorbachev’s two fiercest opponents exchanged earnest and deep fraternal kisses, and Honecker

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hung the medal on his friend’s chest. Since many people in the GDR knew about the terrible living conditions and the brutal dictatorship in Romania, this award proved to be an additional slap in the face for all those who hoped for change. Romania and the GDR seemed to be isolated together in the Eastern Bloc, which was not true, as the ČSSR and, with some reservations, Bulgaria were also on their side. At the TH Magdeburg, students made a wall newspaper out of various clippings spreading the following message for a few moments before loyal comrades removed it: “It’s about time something happened in the GDR, too! The old men in Berlin ignore the development in the socialist countries. The citizen of the GDR wants a new beginning! What does the SED want?” Underneath it hung a photo—Ceaușescu and Honecker side by side, with a big question mark painted next to them.26 At the TU Karl-Marx-Stadt, a student came up with a slogan that reacted both to the awarding of the order and to the repressive SED state: “I hereby propose that the Office of Censorship at the Ministry of State Security be awarded the Karl Marx Order for outstanding services to the development of socialist society.”27 There was a small aftereffect of the banning campaign that the public could not perceive. The Soviets took revenge secretly and without reference to the Sputnik ban. They promptly canceled subscriptions to numerous GDR publications, including newspapers and weekly and monthly periodicals, on April 1, 1989—exactly the same as the number of Sputnik copies that had been introduced into the GDR by September 1988. Numerous tensions existed between East Berlin and Moscow from 1986 onward, and society could see them manifest in such drastic measures as the bans. The “between-the-lines readers” were able to register withdrawal symptoms in the SED media almost daily. Less well known or even secret were events in the military and security apparatuses. On April 7, 1989, MfS minister Mielke received the Soviet major general Leonid Shebarshin, head of the KGB espionage department. Mielke gave a sharp and detailed account of the reform processes in Poland, Hungary, and above all the Soviet Union. He was fairly clear that these reforms would result not in better socialism but in its abolition. Mielke was able to interpret the consequences for the GDR with great accuracy and logic. Although he believed that the SED and the MfS still had everything under control, he recognized that “we always talk about not allowing surprises. Maybe we’ll be surprised tomorrow?” Mielke read the Soviet general the riot act. The following passage in his account underscores why historical questions played such a central role in this: Now I come to the thickest “chunk”—to the article in the “Moskowskaja Prawda” of 30 March 1989 about Stalin: “Stalin was an agent of the Ochrana [the tsarist secret

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police].” Now I ask: Didn’t the State Security take control of the archives when power was seized? Are there still such archives that are not under the control of the State Security? Are the documents still there? If Stalin liquidated the people who knew about it, why didn’t he liquidate the archives? . . . I must be afraid that you will also reveal our agencies if there is a possibility to look into the archives. . . . You harm yourself and you put us in a predicament whether we can still tell you where we got the information from. This is a bottomless pit. Then I am also an agent of the Ochrana, since I have fulfilled orders of the Soviet power. Then we are all agents of Ochrana, because we worked under Stalin. Maybe there are more archives you do not know about? We’ve checked all the archives. Unfortunately, we are not getting anywhere in other countries. But in the GDR we got this under control. The results of the evaluation are presented to the party leadership for decision. . . . If it is the case that you do not have the archives in your hands, then you have made a big mistake.

The Soviet general rarely got a chance to speak. He commented timidly on this passage from Mielke’s speech: “I sit here like an accused man. I am not responsible for this article.” Mielke played his trump card and seemed to want to turn the former power structure between Moscow and East Berlin into the opposite: “Think about what conclusions you can draw from this. So far, this has not been leaked this way in the West. They’ve only just started. If they start doing so, the whole socialist world movement will be discredited.”28 Even in dealing with the Soviet occupying army, the SED leadership began to demonstrate greater independence in the second half of the 1980s. This was particularly dangerous because the Soviet army provided the main protection for the SED regime. The Soviet military and secret service showed no understanding for Gorbachev’s reform process or for Honecker’s resistance, which they now perceived. A KGB officer expressed this in a threatening way: “It is time to stop this irresponsible talk about an alleged imbalance in the exchange between German friends and us. This exchange is balanced. In addition, we protect them with our nuclear missiles, which cost us a lot of money.”29 The SED leadership’s fear of Gorbachev’s domestic policy was neither irrational nor incomprehensible. The party’s reform phobia was not actually a phobia because—as the Mielke example suggests—it probably knew better than many others in both East and West that the communism project, as they had built, defended, and understood it, could not be reformed. If the past was “wrong,” the present could not be brought into alignment with the “historical laws,” and the future could not be based on this present. It was, therefore, logical that the SED leadership also took censorship measures against Soviet periodicals from 1987 onward. And it seems just as logical that it reached for the Stalinist straws offered by the USSR. Thus, on April 2 and 3, 1988, Neues Deutschland reprinted a contribution by Nina Andreyeva under the heading “I cannot reveal

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my principles,” in which this hitherto largely unknown Leningrad lecturer, as a hardliner, stubbornly defended Stalin’s legacy and uncompromisingly attacked Gorbachev’s domestic policy. The horror in large parts of the GDR was great. People often assumed that Andreyeva was a pseudonym for the anti-Gorbachev faction in Moscow. It was, but at the same time Andreyeva was a real person, who now plays a leading role in the communist movement in Russia. The excitement subsided a week later when Neues Deutschland reprinted a contribution by Gorbachev in which he dismissed the attacks.30 After November 25, 1988, a written argument circulated in official circles strongly condemning the glasnost policy and, at the same time, trying to present the CPSU secretary general as chief witness. Most probably this fictitious speech, which was conceived only for “oral agitation,” was written in the chief editorial office of Junge Welt. In it, the authors formulated in sharp and historically distorting tones why the Sputnik ban was right and why any departure from the previous “historical truth” was hostile. “The most important thing for me is that the basic message of the contributions in ‘Sputnik’ allows bourgeois totalitarianism theory to speak for itself.” The world, the authors argued, was divided into democratic and dictatorial states. Hitler and Stalin were put into one. What was remarkable was the admission that historical recriminations were made “not against fascism but against dictatorships, and therefore also against us.” Verbosely yet compellingly, the authors tried to explain why historical revisionism in Sputnik was dangerous. Capitalism, imperialism, and monopolies stood for world domination, while socialism, communism, and Stalin stood for peace, freedom, and equality, they maintained. Individual undesirable developments should not be exaggerated. Almost every “historical argument” that the authors made was based on a lie. But they did not stick to historical events. Too many people in the GDR were confused by the daily infiltration of the German media, which constantly claimed the opposite of what was officially proclaimed in the GDR. One ought not to tolerate Soviet magazines that take the same line. When Schütt’s article against the film Die Reue was published in Junge Welt, the authors complained that there was not a single letter from the readers welcoming or supporting this polemic, but only negative letters. Against this background, the SED leadership had no other option than to banish “bourgeois conceptions of history” from the GDR, as in Sputnik, as there was already enough “ideological confusion.”31 A few weeks later, the SED leadership had found a formula for reacting to Gorbachev’s bloc pluralism on the one hand and for demonstrating its firm bloc ties on the other. Erich Honecker put forth the idea of socialism “in the colors of the GDR” on December 29, 1988, at the ceremony for the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the KPD. It would turn out to be the Honecker administration’s last ideological attempt at reassessment to save the GDR as it was.

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Between Dialogue and Distancing Nothing gave the SED state more legitimacy and stability than the international wave of recognition in the early 1970s. It stabilized the domestic political situation, eliminating the GDR’s provisional character for most of those who lived there, even as it failed to compensate for the regime’s lack of democratic legitimacy. The SED regime seemed permanently established, and the postwar order of Yalta was cemented. At the same time, nothing undermined the dictatorship more than the CSCE Helsinki Final Act and the CSCE process with its follow-up conferences in Belgrade, Madrid, and Vienna. With these conferences originally initiated by Moscow, the Soviets wanted to negotiate a system of collective security in Europe. Toward the end of the 1960s, as the East-West conflict eased, the Allies responded to this initiative but at the same time called for the conference to include respect for human and civil rights. Discussions focused on three thematic areas (“baskets”): Basket I: questions concerning European security; Basket II: cooperation in the economic, scientific, technical, and environmental fields; Basket III: human contacts, cultural and information exchange. With the adoption of the Final Act in 1975, all signatory states were obliged to publish it in full in their respective countries. In particular, the signatories’ commitment to respecting human rights and fundamental freedoms, not hindering cross-border travel, providing the population with pluralistic informational materials, and creating adequate working conditions for foreign journalists henceforth served as a welcome argumentation aid for opposition, emigration, and other critical forces in the communist states. Thus, it is not surprising that MfS minister Mielke and other SED Politburo members warned strongly against the CSCE process and assessed the domestic political consequences as incalculable. Honecker dismissed these objections. He wanted to play an equal role on the international stage. In 1972 he described the Federal Republic of Germany as a foreign country for the first time. Now, what had been acknowledged at the Olympic Games since 1968—an independent GDR team—was also practiced on the international stage: two German states formally acted as independent subjects of international law. In practice, Western states were cautious about fully recognizing the GDR. Some Western embassies, for example, were characterized as being not “in” but “at” the GDR. The newly appointed Allied ambassadors pondered how they could enter East Berlin without having to show their passports. These and similar games may have been attentively registered in Bonn and may have been regarded as particularly steadfast in Paris, London, or Washington—but in East German society such subtleties of diplomatic etiquette had no consequences. It made quite an impression that party and state leader Honecker made official state visits to Ulan Bator, Addis Ababa, Maputo, Managua, Pyongyang, and

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Havana. He officially visited a total of thirty-eight states. In November 1980, he made his first official state visit to a Western country—to Vienna in Austria. Of the other trips, his visits to Japan (May 1981), Finland (October 1984), Italy as the first NATO state to have an audience with the Polish Pope (April 1985), Greece (October 1985), Sweden (June 1986), the Netherlands (June 1987), Belgium (October 1987), France (January 1988), and finally, as the last Western state visit, Spain (October 1988) were particularly important for domestic political stability and legitimacy. In the last decade of the GDR’s existence, Western heads of state, ministers, and industrialists in East Berlin also came to the rescue. In his last years, Honecker seemed to be overcome by the wanderlust that he aimed to drive out of his citizens by all means. Apparently, he wanted to consolidate his worldview by looking at the world. On his arrival in Japan, he supposedly said he would rather see something once than hear about it a thousand times. There were two goals Honecker failed to achieve. Neither the British government together with the queen nor a US president could bring themselves to receive the roofer from Neunkirchen near Saarbrücken before 1989. They did not see the “slightest chance” of “the wall coming down” in the near future.32 Economically, the GDR was uninteresting for the large Western states, with the particular exception of the Federal Republic. The Americans also insisted on reparations for Israel and for the victims of the Holocaust. The SED leadership not only rejected this but also was unable to make the reparations payments. The internationally worthless money it had to offer was of no use to anyone. In Britain as well as in the United States there was no lobby for the SED regime. The number of communists in both states was so small that they all knew each other. In France, where Honecker was received, the communists were much stronger but had moved away from Moscow. Honecker was also received there more as a substitute. In Paris he had to listen to François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac’s clear words about the inhumanity of the Berlin Wall. With this visit, Paris demonstrated above all its independence from Bonn and Western Europe. Nevertheless, foreign policy recognition and Honecker’s activities were the regime’s most important domestic stability factor. The mental pattern in society was quite simple. If Honecker was considered an equal among equals in Rome, Paris, Tokyo, and Madrid, then he had to be accepted by the opponents of the SED dictatorship as a power factor on behalf of the regime who would continue to be in control for a long time. The opposition had to limit itself to reforms and democratization processes within the system framework. The demolition of the Wall could only be carried out by rebuilding the entire “House of Europe.” This was the prevailing logic of most opponents of the system. In Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, this was viewed differently. Many members of the opposition in those countries believed that only when the Wall fell in Germany would their countries be able to “return to Europe.” Historically, both were right, but in rather different ways than they had anticipated.

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Since then, the GDR’s foreign relations with the Western states have been well researched. In all the studies, one aspect concerning the 1980s is emphasized that is rarely contradicted, even in GDR society. As head of state, Erich Honecker was a man with an impeccable past from 1933 to 1945 who could not be accused of anything except not being honestly committed to disarmament and being against interstate or even nuclear wars. Honecker was a simple-minded man. He was often laughed at, as the following widespread joke in countless variations illustrates: “Honecker gives a speech on the development of socialism. ‘Dear comrades,’ he proclaims with his unique emphasis and intonation, ‘the development of socialism cannot be stopped! Already today socialism covers one-fifth of our earth! And soon it will be one-sixth, one-seventh, one-eighth, one-ninth, and one-tenth!’” Even today, most believe that he was modest, as he presented himself. He was obstinate, wooden, not blessed with intellectual or rhetorical brilliance. His view of the world had been shaped by the final phase of the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, and the Cold War. In the 1970s and 1980s, like most of his functionary colleagues, he had not been able to supplement these impressions with modern elements of the changed world. One cannot even blame him for that. Had he eked out his existence in an arbor on the outskirts of Berlin, we might even have been able to honor him today. Tragically, however, his arbor was a government palace in the center of Berlin, where he presumed to decide what seemed important to him for state and society. This included the production of elastic bands for underwear, banana imports, Western car imports, as well as fishing line exports. He decided who was an enemy and who was a friend. He acted like a monarch—not like an enlightened one, not like an absolutist one, but like a “historical-dialectical” one. And yet he was not a monarch with a staff of advisors but only equal among equals. The system was not a Honecker system but a communist dictatorship with a multilayered apparatus of power, domination, and oppression. Unlike his predecessor Ulbricht, he did not pretend to be a theorist. He did not see his life’s goal in being accepted into the Olympus of the Marxist-Leninist deities. As a practitioner, he believed that he could build a framework for a roof under which all his remaining sheep could feel Arcadian comfort. For this, he used almost any means. It was not illogical. Utopia, the egalitarian society, “is terrible: Utopia is not the home of freedom, the forever imperfect scheme for an uncertain future; it is the home of total terror or absolute boredom.”33 Honecker’s tragedy is thus dissipated. But it remains tragic that he, his peers, and their ideas and theories were able to become material violence—and still could do so again today. Honecker’s Western interlocutors were thoroughly impressed by him, especially Franz Josef Strauß. They did not necessarily praise his looseness or mental agility. But they were surprised that in a personal conversation he seemed less boring, less wooden, and less stubborn than he presented himself in public. Honecker was not a file hunter but a pragmatist at heart. What could he actually

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do about the fact that his gut feelings were not capable of winning a majority after the laws of history had catapulted him to the top of the historically inevitable? Honecker, again unlike Ulbricht, was not a cynic. He was lovable in his person, just not in his job. If he had covered roofs after 1945, and there really was enough such work, he would have been able to live his personal life’s dream, even in the Saarland, and realize it in small parts. But it was not only the tragedy of “having to” carry out the wrong activity “out of party discipline” in the wrong place that determined his life and, through him, that of millions of “other” tragic life plans in the GDR. In Honecker’s case, he added that he saw himself as a peace politician who wanted to bring lasting peace to Germany, Europe, and the world. In 1983, he even indiscriminately called nuclear weapons, whether Soviet or American, “devil’s stuff.” This was remarkable, since all those who demonized Soviet SS-20 medium-range missiles as well as American Pershing 2 missiles were persecuted in the GDR. This is only a superficial paradox. While Honecker remained vague, the East German critics of the SS-20 missiles clearly expressed themselves. The peace rhetoric of the SED was persuasive to many people, despite the lack of internal peace. Most people did not even bother to militarize the whole of society in a publicly visible way. It all seemed to serve the cause of peace. Even today many people, and by no means only apologists for the SED regime, still praise the SED peace policy. Tragic for Honecker, probably tragic for the apologists, is only the fact that the SED peace policy was as beneficial to world peace as that of the Valletta government. The superpowers were not particularly interested in what East Berlin had to say. Neither Honecker as a politician nor the GDR as Sputnik’s satellite were suitable as negotiators or as mediators or certainly as spokespeople of any kind. None other than US president Ronald Reagan made this clear in West Berlin on June 12, 1987. Shortly before, the GDR had spent days dealing with protests led by thousands of youths in East Berlin.34 In this emotionally charged situation, Reagan visited West Berlin. Although even Neues Deutschland reported the day before that Reagan was planning to speak out against the Wall in his speech at the Brandenburg Gate, his words went strangely unheard in the East. In front of the Brandenburg Gate on the east side, state security and police were visibly present. Four or five times, the People’s Police used loudspeakers to ask passersby who had stopped to continue walking (“Citizens, you are requested to continue on your way. Don’t stop, please keep moving”). Only a few onlookers came: some reports mention 150, others 300 or even 1,000. The few known photos suggest the lower figure. Police and state security had everything under control. Reagan’s speech could not be heard acoustically in the East. Three people who wanted to leave the country tried to demonstrate during the speech, but they were arrested faster than Western journalists could have noticed them. And even the action of a bus driver remained unobserved. He blocked the entire intersection Unter den Linden in front of Pariser Platz at about 5 p.m.—Reagan had

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already left for Tempelhof two hours earlier. He switched on the hazard lights and remained seated in the closed bus. The police arrested him, and he declared his solidarity with the speeches of Reagan, Kohl, and Diepgen, which he had seen on television. The most famous passage from Reagan’s speech was: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”35 In turn, these sentences were heard again in the East, as the speech could be followed live in the Western media and the decisive sequences were constantly repeated, but his words did not reach the hearts of most East Germans. Few of them saw the US president as a guarantor of hope. For most, his foreign, military, and security policy—as in the West—instilled fear and insecurity. What most communist functionaries in the Moscow sphere of power had known for a long time happened to him as well: even if they once said something right or true, nobody believed them. Only a small minority wanted Reagan to be a door opener. Three left-wing opposition groups from East Berlin declared three days later: “Mr. Reagan, pick up your suitcase again!” When the US president calls for the opening of the wall, the opposition said, he does not mean to free the imprisoned people but rather to demand new markets for the capitalism he represents. This is why these opposition members felt a connection to the thousands of West Berliners who demonstrated against Reagan. And they added: “By the way, people [in the eastern part during the Pentecost riots] called to Gorbachev and not to Reagan or even Kohl.”36 Ralf Hirsch and Rainer Eppelmann, on the other hand, two wellknown members of the opposition, sent a message in mid-January 1987, on the occasion of Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebrations, to Erich Honecker, Bishop Forck, Eberhard Diepgen, Helmut Kohl, and the four highest political representatives of the Allies, calling for the removal of all relics of the Cold War. Apart from Diepgen, Reagan, or the ambassador to East Berlin on his behalf, was the only one who responded and declared his solidarity with the demands. From mid-June 1987, the MfS had to have noticed that the shouts demanding the Wall’s removal had multiplied considerably in the GDR. It remained unclear whether this was due more to the Pentecost riots or to Reagan’s appeal to Gorbachev. One thing almost no one reflected on at the time, either because some took it for granted or because others did not notice, was that when Reagan stood at the Wall on the West Berlin side, he appealed to Gorbachev, not Honecker, the SED leadership, or the GDR government. Reagan’s call in Berlin, in the GDR, in Germany, in Europe to change something went over the heads of the vassals. In terms of foreign policy, the GDR was considered at best a secondary factor. For the internal constitution of the regime, on the other hand, the SED’s foreign policy both stabilized the system (through the West) and undermined its legitimacy (through its anti-perestroika policy).

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This paradox found its counterpart in German-German relations and in SED policy toward the Federal Republic. This is not the place to discuss the tense relationship between the SED leadership and West German politics in detail. Since 1990, a lot has been written and argued about it. Yet two events bear mentioning as they particularly moved people; both occurred in 1987, and both were controversial and have remained so to this day in the debates and assessments. On August 28, 1987, the SPD and SED published a joint paper under the ambiguous title “The Clash of Ideologies and Common Security.” Was it really about “ideologies” between West and East? A few days later, from September 7 to 11, Erich Honecker made an official working visit to the Federal Republic of Germany, during which he was received with all honors and by all the top politicians. So what was officially declared a working visit was equivalent to a state visit. After all, only seven police cars, rather than fifteen, escorted Honecker’s limousine in Bonn. In Bavaria, the number rose to fifteen, and the visit was at the same time the highlight of Honecker’s work on the international stage, even if it remained a national stage in the true sense of the word. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher was absent from Honecker’s welcoming address in the Chancellor’s Office, which made it clear that the Kohl government was not a foreign country. GDR foreign minister Oskar Fischer met for a working meeting with the minister for inner-German relations, Dorothee Wilms, and also with Genscher—demonstratively in his study instead of in a guest house of the federal government as planned. One thing had not changed in the Honecker era since 1971: the Federal Republic was described daily in propaganda as a refuge of imperialism, exploitation, political oppression, and neofascist tendencies that spearheaded Washington. Historically, the GDR only made sense, as the SED itself repeatedly stressed, against the background of the horrible federal German regime and a bright, legally predetermined communist future. However, in contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, when Adenauer was repeatedly portrayed as a direct successor to Hitler, the sounds were not quite as shrill now. Hardly anything had changed in German political rhetoric either. Officially, the Brandt, Schmidt, and Kohl administrations maintained that German unity was their goal and relegated the two-nation thesis advocated by the SED to the realm of propagandistic legends. In German society, however, the GDR was increasingly perceived as a normal foreign country. As early as 1964, three prominent journalists—Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, Rudolf Walter Leonhardt, and Theo Sommer—undertook a trip to the GDR and subsequently reported on a country that had previously been unknown in the West. The book triggered fierce debates, and even in the 1990s it engendered bitter discussions on several occasions. As a conclusion for this trip “to a distant country,” Sommer wrote: “Those who demand and promote the counterrevolution in the GDR will block the gradual evolution.”37 In 1968, Peter Bender, the SPD mastermind of East and West German policy, explained why there were “ten reasons for recognizing the

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GDR.” This happened at a time when the renowned journalist Hanns Werner Schwarze was able to record and glorify the real social situation in the GDR almost beyond recognition in a five-hundred-page book, for which he received much praise and recognition. For example, Schwarze managed to boast about the “electoral system” in the GDR and concluded: “As long as neither the one electoral system is ‘very good’ nor the other ‘very bad,’ the demand often raised today, mostly honestly, for free elections remains a prop of the propaganda repertoire that has grown rather old in the meantime.”38 Another author, Rüdiger Thomas, reinterpreted the SED dictatorship a little later without much fuss in a highly acclaimed book as “calculated emancipation” and modern industrial society. Reforms were both necessary and possible, Peter Bender said shortly before the fall of the dictatorship, in order to finally establish “democratic socialism in the GDR” under the leadership of the SED.39 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, there were constant, sometimes tough, debates in politics, journalism, and science about the character of the GDR. While some maintained that it was a dictatorship without civil rights, quite a few others believed that the GDR had become an industrial society of its own type, which certainly granted its people freedoms and democratic opportunities for codetermination. The two-nation thesis also found supporters in West German journalism. Added to this was the argument often put forward in the 1980s that it was simply historical reality that German history had almost always taken place in several states at the same time—except between 1938 and 1945.40 These views did not necessarily come about from a dictatorship-blind dominant zeitgeist or even from accomplices of the SED dictatorship. One can argue this elsewhere. But it is important to point out that in the Federal Republic, too, many people had resigned themselves to the division and glorified the realities of the GDR, ascribing to it potentials that did not exist. This contributed significantly to the internal stabilization of the dictatorship. While the various, mixed-party camps showed little ability to move within the Federal Republic, they proved all the more flexible in their concrete dealings with the GDR and the SED. The most famous example of this was probably the Bavarian minister president and CSU chairman Franz Josef Strauß. He was never suspected of being particularly friendly toward East Berlin. And yet it was he, of all people, who in 1983 arranged the first loan worth billions and thus made the GDR internationally solvent again. He deliberately stabilized the GDR because, as he agreed with all leading politicians of the SPD, Free Democratic Party, and CDU/CSU, he did not want to provoke internal unrest in the GDR, endangering the stability of Europe. Willy Brandt’s new politics toward the East and toward East Germany introduced at the end of the 1960s, which was known as “Change through Rapprochement,” remained the constant in West German policy toward East Germany even after 1982, when Kohl took over the chancellorship. All federal governments tried to achieve humanitarian improvements

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for East Germans and facilitate traffic between the states. Again and again they wrestled concessions from the SED leadership by providing it with generous financial incentives. All of this was well received in GDR society and taken as a sign that the Federal Republic had not forgotten and that the federal German government was acting as the all-German government in the best sense. Despite the propaganda bluster, however, the SED leadership’s policy toward West Germany changed in the 1980s. This policy was not oriented toward rapprochement or even liberal reunification, which the SED would only consider under communist auspices. Rather, due to economic constraints and the economic crisis in the Eastern Bloc, the SED leadership tried to profit more from the economic power of the Federal Republic. The FRG’s federal governments responded to this in order to help the population in the East directly. The Wall became more porous due to rapidly increasing visitor traffic. The order to shoot at the Wall was lifted, automatic-firing installations were removed—yet there were still deaths to be mourned. The Kohl administrations wrested these and many other measures and facilitations from the Honecker regime. Kohl also assumed that the European postwar order could only be overcome by slow reforms in the East. On the German question, he left no doubt that it was open. And unlike many other politicians, he repeatedly pointed out the dictatorial character of the GDR and the Eastern Bloc. Kohl provided the two most famous examples of this in the mid-1980s. These two memorable appearances, which clearly reflected the political atmosphere at the time, illustrate that 1987 was closer to 1978 than to 1989/90: first, in October 1986, Kohl had indirectly compared Gorbachev to Goebbels, and then, at the beginning of January 1987, he described the GDR as a regime “which . . . holds political prisoners . . . in prisons and concentration camps.”41 What did Kohl really say at the time about Gorbachev and Goebbels? Which words generated sheer horror and prompted violent reactions from both enemies and friends? Kohl literally said that Mikhail Gorbachev “is a modern communist leader who knows how to handle public relations. Goebbels, one of those responsible for the crimes of the Hitler era, was also an expert in public relations.”42 Kohl made this statement at a time when the German public was doggedly pursuing the “Historians’ Controversy,” a controversy that some also called the “Hysterics’ Controversy.” In this dispute in 1986–87, left-liberal historians, philosophers, and sociologists rejected the possibility of comparing National Socialism and communism. The crimes of National Socialism, especially the Holocaust, were unique, and National Socialism was not an answer to the alleged communist threat. Kohl now had done nothing more than compare National Socialism and communism without equating them. In 1986 Gorbachev was the leader of world communism with millions of dead, and it was not yet clear that, against his will, this communist hopeful would come to be recognized worldwide as a gravedigger of the system. Kohl later admitted that in 1988 he stated “that

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my assessment of the General Secretary of the CPSU was wrong. I had underestimated Gorbachev’s ability and power to bring about a change in Soviet policy. . . . It was stupid of me to mention Gorbachev and Goebbels in the same breath.”43 And Kohl’s second statement also calls for historical contextualization. Just as the Western world began to lie at Gorbachev’s feet, and later generously forgave him for tanks in the Baltic States, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Tajikistan and ignored the many deaths for which Gorbachev was responsible—on this, Kohl remained strangely silent; the enemies had meanwhile become close friends—so the Western world had just as generously ignored the fact that thousands of people were imprisoned in the East for political reasons. Kohl had pointed this out with drastic words, like a lonely admonisher in the desert. His mention of concentration camps, which of course no longer existed, gave this speech and its contents a level of attention that it would otherwise not have received. Many people in the GDR, even those with critical attitudes, were outraged. The chancellor attracted criticism but managed to get the question of political prisoners in the GDR back on the all-German table. Analyses that are still impressive today pointed this out at the time—for example, those by the Cologne journalist Karl Wilhelm Fricke and the East German opposition figure Arnold Vaatz.44 Both these journalists had endured everyday prison life in the GDR at very different times. In 1987, it was by no means the case that the German public was dominated by an image of the GDR that would have shown the dictatorial character of the regime as a central pillar. In this respect, Kohl’s omissions, for which he incomprehensibly apologized again and again ever afterward, were definitely against the German zeitgeist.45 Thus, a significant change in the Federal Republic’s policy toward East Germany took place in the 1980s; although Kohl had expressed himself very clearly, his people in East Berlin negotiated with objectivity and pragmatism. This was a new policy for the CDU, because it had constantly accused the Social Democrats of recognizing the GDR and its conditions while the SPD had been in power until 1982. The CDU’s prior tactic had been well suited to an opposition party as a political corrective; it made it look good. But the CDU looked even better when, after taking over the government business, it adopted the pragmatic and humane SPD line. This put the Social Democrats in a precarious situation. They saw themselves as the inventors of this appeasement policy, and now, after 1982, they had to watch as the CDU harvested the fruits of their labor. SPD strategists invented the “second phase” of the policy toward East Germany, with which they wanted to overtake the federal government in its move to the left, to maintain their domestic importance, and to remain in demand as a discussion partner in foreign policy. Since the SPD had become less important as a negotiating partner for the SED leadership after 1982, both of them tinkered with a “dream of the workers’ movement” from 1984 onward, the convergence of Social Democrats and communists. Since 1917–18, the organized labor movement in

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Germany had been divided. At the end of the 1920s the communists regarded the Social Democrats as “social fascists,” and after 1933 they held them as partly responsible for the National Socialists’ seizure of power. After the end of the war in 1945, communists and Social Democrats in both East and West tried to restore unity. All efforts were in vain: the trenches were too deep, the injuries unforgotten, and the goals unforgiving. The forced reunification of the KPD and SPD into the SED in the Soviet Union, the subsequent banning of the SPD in the Soviet Union (with the exception of East Berlin until 1961), and the persecution of hundreds of thousands of Social Democrats seemed to make the rupture permanent. After the first rapprochements began in 1970, always leaving ideological rifts visible, an SPD wing turned around after 1982 and sought political dialogue with the SED leadership. Initially, these dialogues focused on peace issues, but from 1984 onward more and more ideological issues moved to the fore, culminating in the aforementioned paper “The Clash of Ideologies and Common Security” in August 1987. This paper was based on the idea that the preservation of peace and disarmament had to form a central pillar of German policy and of global domestic policy on the whole. Only in peace could there be a “peaceful competition of social systems.” This competition, which, the paper argued, had to be based on cooperation and mutual trust, could promote social progress in both systems. It was part of the culture of conflict that both sides recognized and respected each other, accepted opposing positions, did not seek compromise formulas, and avoided generating enemy images. Neither side was to deny the other its right to exist. “Our hope cannot be that one system will abolish the other,” the paper stated. Criticism of the other side had to be based on verifiable facts. Neither side could claim for itself what it wanted to deny the other.46 The publication of the paper at the end of August 1987 was a sensation. The SPD utilized it to push the SED onto the defensive because, if you take a closer look, the content reflected not only commonalities, for example, in the international peace question but also the opposing positions. German Social Democracy had literally handed its cultural and political values to an audience of millions in the GDR overnight. From then on, anyone who wanted could refer to this paper and use the (Social Democratic) arguments in the GDR as their own. Perhaps the biggest coup in this respect was landed by one of the main initiators, the SPD politician Erhard Eppler, as he had already published almost all the essential thoughts shaping the paper in a highly acclaimed book in 1983.47 Beginning in the 1960s, Erhard Eppler, Egon Bahr, and Peter Bender had acquired many laurels in the West German policy toward East Germany. They cannot be accused, as sometimes happens, of distorting the realities of the GDR beyond recognition. They probably knew more about GDR society than many of their critics. They assumed that any view of the GDR detached from Moscow was unrealistic and would therefore necessarily lead to unrealistic policy concepts. However, it

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was problematic that they advocated a concept that, even from a theoretical point of view, could not reach the Eastern Bloc: the end of the ideological age.48 The controversial title of the SPD-SED paper “The Clash of Ideologies” only seemed to contradict this because if the “ideological age” were to come to an end, even liberal Social Democracy and the anti-free Communists could argue about their ideologies, which in an underhanded way—and probably unintentionally from a Social Democratic point of view—would lead to a fundamental equality of freedom and the lack thereof in all opposites and “competitions.” The effects of the paper were devastating—for both sides. In the Federal Republic, SPD critics accused it of having acknowledged the realities of the GDR, of having supported the SED leadership, which was unwilling to undergo reform, and, above all, of having put their own liberal democratic society and the communist regimes on the same level. The very title “Clash of Ideologies” proved to be assailable as it was not ideologies that were at odds with each other; instead, freedom and democracy were at odds with dictatorship and lack of freedom. Some critics, like Gesine Schwan, came from within the SPD itself and were stunned. The proponents of the paper—from Eppler and Bahr to Karsten Voigt, Oskar Lafontaine, Gerhard Schröder, and Hans-Jochen Vogel, comprising a large share of prominent SPD members—repeatedly and verbosely replied that it was all about peace, the ability to have peace, and change. In the East, reforms could only be brought about if one remained in dialogue, exerted gentle pressure, and negotiated with the powerful. The strongest accusation, however, came from CDU secretary general Heiner Geißler, namely, that the concept of “change through rapprochement” had become “change through ingratiation.” Since the 1990s, there has been a lot to read about how politicians like Lafontaine and Schröder behaved toward the Honecker team. In fact, these politicians (along with almost all Green politicians) decided to recognize Honecker’s “Gera Demands” of October 1980. In a speech, Honecker had demanded that the Federal Republic recognize GDR citizenship, that the “Central Registration Office” in Salzgitter—where the crimes of the SED regime were registered—be dissolved, that the inner-German border be run according to international customs (Elbe), and that the Permanent Missions of both states be converted into embassies.49 The Greens and some SPD members responded to this and, from the mid-1980s onward, demanded that the first three points be implemented politically. The history of German unification would have been very different if a federal government had recognized and implemented these demands; rapid unification would not have been possible. Several SPD-governed federal states suspended their payments for the registration office in Salzgitter. It should be noted that this institution was a thorn in the side of the apparatus of the MfS, the judiciary, the SED, and border troops because many SED crimes had been documented there indicating those who had been responsible for them. Many people from the GDR who left the country or visited the Federal Republic reported

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legally relevant events. This certainly had an effect. On the one hand, the mere existence of “Salzgitter” made many a henchman of the regime hesitate, knowing that his deed might be reported there. This was also known to the federal government;50 SPD and Green politicians could have been aware of this as well. On the other hand, the MfS, SED, and the judiciary warned many relatives even weeks after the opening of the Wall against traveling to the West, because under certain circumstances “an incident” might “be lying in” Salzgitter. In any case, such “autumn warnings” revealed a sense of injustice that might seem surprising in view of later public statements. In the GDR, the effect of the SED-SPD paper was at least as devastating, but quite different. The party leadership had provided its functionaries with advanced notice at the beginning of August that such a paper would be published in a few weeks.51 Unlike in the Federal Republic, the paper’s impact was only comparable to that of a 1975 CSCE document. If the SED leadership declared its support for equal ideological debate with Social Democrats, this also had to apply to “dissenters” within the GDR. SED leaders argued that it was all about peace, peace, and again peace, and that concessions consequently had to be made. In an internal paper, the SED did not say a word about the possibility that critics in the GDR could understand this process as recognition of dissenters or opponents. Such opponents, in turn, cared little about the party’s internal argumentation, which they usually were not even aware of, but invoked the spirit and letter of the paper and demanded dialogue and recognition. The mood and situation reports of the SED and MfS make it clear that large swaths of society welcomed the paper and hoped, at the same time, that the SED would move away from its previous policies. Realists had fewer hopes but used the paper in their own sense as an “argumentation aid,” quoting from it again and again with relish. If the SED was striving for dialogue with all external positions, then this had to apply all the more to the internal oppositional and critical positions. On September 1, 1987, there was another sensation, albeit a smaller one. At 8 p.m., four of the protagonists of the SPD-SED debate held a live discussion on GDR television: Otto Reinhold and Rolf Reißig for the SED and Erhard Eppler and Thomas Meyer for the SPD. The mere fact that two West German politicians appeared on live GDR television was a sensation. Even more sensational, of course, was Eppler’s announcement that the German question was open and nobody could say what the future would bring. Nevertheless, Eppler relativized the effect of the television program itself in a later comment: “However, I learned the following morning how little attention was paid to the GDR’s own television program. When I was strolling through East Berlin, only two people responded to the discussion, and they both came from West Berlin.”52 In this circumstance, even having “the best time to air” meant little.53 It is no coincidence that the SPD-SED paper was published a few days before Honecker’s visit to the Federal Republic. It meant that the SPD was very present

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in everyone’s mind, although it played only a minor role during Honecker’s visit. This visit had been repeatedly postponed in the previous years: Moscow had repeatedly denied Honecker permission to travel. In 1987, however, he could no longer be dissuaded, although Moscow still had reservations about any GermanGerman rapprochement. The departments in charge of organizing the visit had done a good job, and the MfS was enthusiastic about the professional work of the Bonn bodyguards. Only once was the organization not strictly adhered to. Udo Lindenberg staged an interim appearance in Wuppertal, where he presented Honecker with a guitar with the inscription “Guitars instead of guns.” Lindenberg had already sent Honecker a leather jacket in June 1987 on the occasion of the Pentecost riots in East Berlin. Honecker’s reply was clever: he sent Lindenberg a shawm with the comment, “The jacket fits.” With this penetrating instrument, the young Honecker had chewed out the labor movement in Saarland. In the GDR, Honecker’s visit was accompanied above all by one hope: that travel opportunities would be expanded. In the Federal Republic, the visit remained highly controversial and had no high expectations attached to it. Pragmatists defended him with a sense of reality, critics accused the federal government of de facto recognition of the GDR, and politicians oriented toward equal understanding declared the visit to be the norm. All parties were convinced that their policies were the best way to help the people in the GDR. No one outside German Communist Party circles and left-wing fringe groups stood up and declared that the internal constitution of the GDR should and could remain as it was. The GDR was considered a factor of stability and peace in Central Europe. Although all were convinced of the necessity of internal reforms, they advocated very different strategies. Nor did they agree on how and what needed to be reformed. Those who advocated the concept of state recognition and wanted to change the Basic Law behaved toward the GDR as if it were a foreign state and, according to opinion polls, were in agreement with a growing number of German citizens. For almost two-thirds of them, the GDR was practically a foreign country.54 A little more than half of the German citizens welcomed Honecker’s forthcoming visit at the end of August 1987, only 6 percent were expressly against it, and the others did not care. Only 9 percent of German citizens did not know who Honecker was.55 About 30 percent were more inclined to find him likable and trustworthy.56 German citizens were particularly fond of Gorbachev, closely followed by Mitterrand; Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan followed at a distance. The only person more unlikable than Honecker to a majority was the Polish general Jaruzelski, who hid behind tinted glasses and had declared martial law in Poland in 1981. A clear majority of German citizens considered Honecker to be “peace-loving” (58 percent), while only 21 percent thought he and his policies were “aggressive.” The most revealing question asked by the opinion research institutes in the run-up to Honecker’s visit was, “What would you want to ask Honecker personally if you could talk to him?” A quarter

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would have talked to him about the situation in Berlin, 20 percent about travel facilitation for GDR citizens, 16 percent about the same for West German citizens, 13 percent about freedom and human rights in the GDR, 10 percent about the shooting order—which was suspended during the Honecker visit—and Wall deaths. Only 9 percent would have wanted to debate German reunification. The idea of German unity was more vital in GDR society than in the Federal Republic. This was a mirror image of the policies of both governments. Even before Chancellor Kohl was able to welcome Honecker in Bonn, Oskar Lafontaine, forty-three years old, deputy chairman of the SPD, and prime minister of Saarland, had written an essay welcoming the GDR head of state to the Federal Republic; he knew him personally from several meetings. It would be too cheap to dismiss Lafontaine’s long article as the only adulation for Honecker. Lafontaine clearly marked the boundaries between liberal democracy and communist dictatorship in his essay. Nevertheless, many “buts” remain. He wrote that Honecker was “not even unpopular in his own country” and was not very suitable “for dry apparatchik,” without making any reference to sources. Further, Lafontaine emphasized Honecker’s relaxed attitude: “Like all people of Saarland, he is entirely capable of taking it easy.”57 One wished that the author might have taken it easy as well, because he went on to claim that Honecker had asserted himself “against a strong majority in the SED Politburo” to plead against intervention in Poland to crush Solidarność—which turned real history and even apprehensive street knowledge upside down at the time. This claim betrayed not only Lafontaine’s dubious sources but also his rather astonishing ignorance of the procedures in the SED apparatus of rule. On this point almost every GDR citizen was ahead of him. Above all, Honecker’s biography of respectable resistance under the National Socialist dictatorship wrung respect for him from Lafontaine. Lafontaine presented communism as a confession of faith, which was also understandable. But why he attributed a similar developmental potential to it as to Western democracies was not comprehensible even then. And it was precisely this kowtowing, which Lafontaine was only one example of, that critically minded people in the Eastern Bloc could not deal with: they felt betrayed and sold out. However, it was not Lafontaine who ruled in Bonn, but Kohl. At that time Kohl was quite unpopular in both East and West. Among Western politicians, only Reagan was less popular. But Klio, the muse of historiography, had great plans for both of them. They found a place in the Olympus of the “Great Men,” although in the 1980s not even their followers believed them capable of it. The highlight of the visit took place on the very first evening. Kohl gave a dinner in Honecker’s honor, both of their speeches were broadcast live on television, and one day later they were also published in Neues Deutschland. Kohl left no doubt about his fundamental convictions: “The consciousness of the nation’s unity is as awake as ever, and the will to preserve it is unbroken. . . . This visit cannot and will not change the differing views of the two states on fundamental issues, including

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the national question. On behalf of the federal government, I repeat: The preamble to our Basic Law is not up for debate because it is in keeping with our convictions. It wants a united Europe, and it calls upon the entire German people to complete the unity and freedom of Germany in free self-determination.” Kohl described the “German question”—that is, how to deal with East Germany—as open and managed, but at the same time, he appeared to be willing to communicate and to be looking for what was feasible, and for a policy of dialogue in small steps with the GDR. The following passage of his noteworthy speech had a particularly strong impact: Peace begins with respect for the unconditional and absolute dignity of the individual in all areas of his life. Every person must be able to decide about and for himself. For this reason, the Final Act of the CSCE explicitly recognized that respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms is “an essential factor for peace, justice and wellbeing.” We want peace in Germany, and that includes the permanent silencing of weapons at the border. Violence, which affects the defenseless, is particularly damaging to peace. Let us not fail to take measures that also create a bit of peace from person to person, by creating more closeness, togetherness and freedom. The people in Germany suffer from the separation. They suffer from a wall that literally stands in their way and repels them. When we reduce what separates people, we take into account the unmistakable desire of the Germans: they want to be able to come together because they belong together. Obstacles of all kinds must therefore be removed. People in Germany expect barriers not to be piled up. They want us—especially these days—to build new bridges.

In his subsequent speech, Honecker reacted and did not give the speech he had originally intended. He noted that he also considered the observance of human rights to be of enormous importance and was therefore happy that they had been realized in the GDR. Incidentally, he added that capitalism and socialism “could not be united . . . any more than fire and water.”58 Karl Wilhelm Fricke, senior editor at Deutschlandfunk, commented on the speech and the trip: “It was not the only time that Honecker deviated from his pre-formulated speech text. . . . Alluding to borders, he said that . . . ‘under these conditions, borders are not as they should be . . . But I believe that if we work together in accordance with the communiqué, . . . then the day will come when borders do not separate us, but borders unite us, just as the border between the German Democratic Republic and the People’s Republic of Poland unites us. . . . All in all, Erich Honecker’s visit turns out to be neither a ‘historical event’ nor a confirmation of the completed division, but rather a further step on the path that had been taken a decade and a half earlier with the conclusion of the Basic Treaty, in order to reduce the oppressive consequences of the division for the Germans, to preserve what unites them and to create new common ground.”59 Fricke’s thoughtful comment was representative of many similar analyses in the Federal Republic. In contrast, an IM of the MfS noted outsider positions after a

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conversation with a German church historian. According to the IM, the scholar teaching in West Berlin had said in a similar vein that Honecker’s self-confident appearance in Bonn “was due, among other things, to the fact that the real ‘miracle’ after 1945 was performed in the GDR.”60 In the GDR, the visit was assessed differently internally. Günter Herlt, one of the most influential journalists at GDR television and present during the visit to Bonn, gave a lecture to MfS cadres about Honecker’s visit to Bonn, among other things, and assessed the visit as follows: “Of course there were also pinpricks, my God. It was not a state visit, but an official visit, the Foreign Minister did not come to the airport, but the Minister of the Chancellery; it was nice that he did not send Aunt Wilms as an inner-German lady. It wasn’t enough for 15 motorcycles, but he sent 7, after all. And they didn’t quite manage the tempo on the hymn, but the notes were right. They still need to practice, the boys.” “Among ourselves,” he could say, it was “a great, deep satisfaction that this Bonn state finally has to call you to us.” And this whole “petty bourgeoisie” that Kohl demonstrated was sovereignly overplayed by Bavarian minister President Strauß. He had treated the GDR in accordance with his social standing. One could talk to “the guy.”61 The SPD-SED paper and Honecker’s visit to Bonn only represented brief phases of hope. No sooner was Honecker back than his reluctance to criticize the SED system turned into a new wave of repression.62 The aesthetic theory of “approaches to a culture of political dispute” (the fourth point in the paper) had been overtaken by SED rule. Most of the opposition in the GDR had not had high hopes anyway, neither with regard to the surprising paper nor to Honecker’s long-anticipated visit. Grenzfall, an East Berlin underground magazine by the “Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte,” laconically described it as “a noncommittal joint paper that completely passes over the real concrete problems.”63 After the live broadcast in GDR television, regime critic Wolfgang Templin of East Berlin, however, remarked in a telephone call with a journalist from the Federal Republic and Roland Jahn, who decisively supported the GDR opposition from West Berlin, that the paper’s intention could turn very rapidly against the SED drafters themselves.64 On October 14, 1987, a panel discussion took place in Freudenberg, which was attended not only by coauthors Thomas Meyer (SPD) and Rolf Reißig (SED) but also by a CDU and a Green Party politician as well as Jürgen Fuchs. This had not been made known to the SED leadership beforehand; otherwise, Reißig would hardly have been able to participate.65 Thomas Meyer had ensured that “GDR public enemy” Fuchs was able to conduct a public dialogue with a high-ranking SED representative. He had brought Jahn with him. Both put Reißig under pressure. We cannot know whether he did not want to or could not answer their questions. What should he have said, after all, when Jahn, in a disarming statement, called on the SED to enter into dialogue with the opposition? “Personally, of course, I am also interested in this culture of strife, and

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would like to participate in it. I would like to take part in a discussion with you in Berlin, the capital of the GDR . . . I would also be prepared to appear on GDR television with representatives of the SED . . . applause; laughter . . . I call on you . . . to include me in this . . . I hope to see you again in Berlin, in the GDR.”66 With this, the limits of the dialogue considered permissible by the SED had been exceeded. Reißig was a high-ranking member of a party that refused to engage in reforms and dialogue and thus became the figurehead of the refused dialogue. The verbatim record of the event was smuggled into the GDR by Fuchs and Jahn. The SED leadership and the MfS were disappointed by their SED professor’s lack of vigor, and the two “enemies of the state” decided the round in their favor. GDR civil rights activist Ulrike Poppe was one of those who saw in the SPD-SED paper the opportunity to open new dialogues in the country. With a view to the debate in Freudenberg and the SPD-SED paper, she stated that it was necessary to seek contacts with the “middle level” and “to enforce a right by taking it.”67 Particularly in the Federal Republic and in critical GDR circles, an article by Kurt Hager in Neues Deutschland on October 28, 1987, was interpreted as a rejection of the SPD-SED paper. Hager had once again denied the fundamental ability of Western states to achieve peace and castigated civil societies as the fundamental evil of the present. One has to agree with one of the participants in the SPD-SED talks, SED professor Erich Hahn, in that he relativized the Hager article and did not consider it to be counter-reformatory68 because the article expressed what the SED leadership thought of this dialogue. It remained merely an apparent dialogue that, from the SED’s point of view, did not change its own positions but aimed to soften and differentiate the “front” in the “Western camp.” The SED leadership, up to the SED academies and party colleges, was not divided into “conservative” and “reformist” forces, as is sometimes claimed and assumed. There may have been differences of opinion, but there were no camps. A person cannot be declared a reformer afterward; reformers must be recognizable as such in their time. Within the GDR in the second half of the 1980s, this was nobody from the SED apparatus. Soon some SPD participants also noticed that the SED was preventing dialogue instead of promoting it. Erhard Eppler formulated this most clearly. In July 1988, he published an essay in which he still claimed that Europe needed a stable, viable, self-confident GDR. But now he resisted the idea that the paper could not be reduced “to the banal formula that peace is more important than anything else”; rather, the paper also had to be understood as a call for dialogue within. If this continued to be denied, then “the GDR [would have] no future in the wake of the Federal Republic.”69 On June 17, 1989, on the “Day of German Unity,” Eppler then took the speaker’s desk in the German Bundestag. He received sustained applause from all political groups: “Poland and Hungary are recalling their national traditions, the Baltic States are insisting on independence . . . ,

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we must also keep national realities in mind.” He admitted a political deficit because “we . . . have not yet been able to say precisely and in sufficient detail what will happen in Germany if the Iron Curtain rusts through more quickly than expected.” There was no longer any talk of Europe needing a stable GDR. Eppler rejected all those “of this house who, in making a clean sweep, wish to take the issue of German unity off the political agenda for good.” In doing so, he also distanced himself from SPD politicians like Bahr. Eppler held on to the idea that the majority of East Germans did not want the end of the SED state but its reformation. This could change, however, “if the SED remained reality blind” and this majority became a minority in two years.70 In Junge Welt, a journalist raged that, in contrast to the GDR, there could be no question of “the people of the FRG being called upon to intervene on a massive scale in the internal affairs of developed capitalism in that country! . . . It is conceivable, however, that such a speech would once again be intended to support the ‘right’ to anti-state activity by so-called oppositional forces in the GDR, i.e., the undermining of the socialist order.”71 Eppler’s message had been understood by the SED powers. However, there was a drop of bitterness in this great speech. Only a few days later, on July 8, 1989, Eppler appeared in Leipzig at the forum of the alternative Statt-Kirchentag, an event meant to draw together opposition forces in place of the usual church congress, in the Lukaskirche with pastor Christoph Wonneberger: “Eppler entered that panel discussion with the assertion: The wall is part of what is static in the European house.” Civil rights activist Günter Nooke remembers: “Unfortunately, he spent the whole evening trying seriously to justify this thesis. After two hours the audience . . . asked the disarming question: ‘Herr Eppler, what would actually happen if the people in the GDR democratically decided that they did not want this wall at all?’ To this question he knew no answer. Nooke saw this as symptomatic.”72 In 1988, twenty-four-year-old opposition activist Benn Roolf made the following comment about the SPD-SED paper: “Everyone reads out [of it] what they want to read: SPD, SED and also the ‘ordinary’ people in this country. They were probably the most eager to study the ‘ground rules of a culture of political strife.’ In this sense, the SPD/SED paper contributed to raising the social and political awareness of GDR citizens.”73

Notes 1. Otto Wenzel, “Der Tag X. Wie West-Berlin erobert wurde,” DA 26 (1993) 12: 1361. 2. When Gorbachev assumed power, all Comecon relations were also tested. Above all, Gorbachev, as well as Poland and Hungary, wished to establish modern market relations and to strengthen the role of money in Comecon trade. The European WG served as a model. For many informative documents on this, see Karner et al., Der Kreml und die Wende.

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3. Ibid., 426–29 (Doc. 69). 4. For information on the problems mentioned about Romania, see ibid., which also has several documents. 5. BA, MfS, HA XX 12394, Bl. 138. 6. FAZ vom 15. 10. 1987. 7. Daniel Küchenmeister and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, eds., Honecker—Gorbatschow. Vieraugengespräche (Berlin, 1993), 178. 8. I would like to thank the staff of the Robert Havemann Association for the opportunity to use excerpts (copies) of this diary and other untapped personal testimonials. 9. Hans-Dieter Schütt, “Kunst und Geschichtsbewusstsein. Gedanken zu einem Film,” JW vom 28. 10. 1987; Harald Wessel, “Wie die Geschichte befragen?” ND vom 31. 10/1. 11. 1987. 10. Mitteilung der Pressestelle des Ministeriums für Post- und Fernmeldewesen, in ND vom 19./20. 11. 1988. 11. Vorname Name: Eingabe an den Staatsrat vom 20. 11. 1988 aus Dresden. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, BV, Abt. XX 10423, Bl. 5. 12. BA, MfS, Ast. Rostock, BV, AKG 279, Teil 1, Bl. 157–58. 13. Just for the GDR readership, the special issue was published in late 1989: “Das Beste aus Sputnik: Oktober 1988–Oktober 1989.” 14. ZK der SED, Büro Honecker, Aktennotiz über ein Gespräch zwischen E. Honecker und W. Medwedjew, Sekretär des ZK der Kommunistischen Partei der Sowjetunion, am 24. 8. 1988. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30/2388, Bl. 26. 15. MfS, HA XX/7, Information zu einem Forum mit Genossen Hager im Verband der Film- und Fernsehschaffenden, 21. 12. 1988. BA, MfS, HA XX 11099, Bl. 10. 16. Stenografische Niederschrift des Treffens des Genossen Erich Honecker mit dem Sekretariat des Zentralrates der FDJ am 22. 12. 1988. BA, MfS, BdL 1100, Bl. 84–85. 17. Wolfgang Breuer, “Die DDR und der ‘Sputnik,’” ND vom 24. 11. 1988. 18. BA, MfS, Ast. Potsdam, Abt. XIX 898. 19. MfS, KD Perleberg, Information, 3. 2. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Schwerin, AKG 6b, Bl. 5. 20. MfS, Information G/036597/25/11/88/02. BA, MfS, HA II 28577, Bl. 34. 21. Eingabe an das Ministerium für Post- und Fernmeldewesen, 27. 11. 1988 (Poststempel). BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, BV, Abt. XX 10423, Bl. 35. 22. MfS, Information G/036045/21/11/88/02. BA, MfS, HA II 28577, Bl. 7. 23. Umweltblätter, Dezember 1988, 3; as well as 4–9. 24. MfS, BV Magdeburg, Information, 24. 11. 1988. BA, MfS, Ast. Magdeburg, AKG 94, Bl. 37. 25. Karner et al., Der Kreml und die Wende, 148 (Doc. 11). 26. BA, MfS, Ast. Magdeburg, Abt. XX 1484, Bl. 66. 27. BA, MfS, Ast. Chemnitz, AKG 318, Bl. 11. 28. “Erich Mielke (MfS) und Leonid Schebarschin (KGB) über den drohenden Untergang des sozialistischen Lagers. Protokoll eines Streitgesprächs vom 7. April 1989, hrsg. von Walter Süß,” DA 26, no. 9 (1993): 1027, 1030. 29. Iwan N. Kusmin, “Weitgehende Abhängigkeit. Zum Verhältnis von KGB und MfS in der DDR,” DA 31, no. 2 (1998): 288. Colonel Iwan N. Kusmin was the head of the information department at the KGB office in Karlshorst from 1984 to 1991. 30. The contribution by Andrejewa led to extensive debates in the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The minutes are printed in Michail Gorbatschow, Gipfelgespräche. Geheime Protokolle aus meiner Amtszeit (Berlin, 1993), 233–54. 31. N.N., Argumentation zu einigen aktuell-politischen Fragen. Nur zur mündlichen Agitation im Zusammenhang mit dem Artikel im ND vom 25. 11. 1988, “Gegen die Entstellung der historischen Wahrheit” zu verwenden, o. D., BA, MfS, Ast. Leipzig, Abt. XX 485, Bl. 2, 3, 16.

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32. Qtd. in Stefan Berger, “Norman LaPorte: Ein zweiter Kalter Krieg? Die Beziehungen zwischen der DDR und Großbritannien 1979–1989,” in Views from Abroad—Die DDR aus britischer Perspektive, ed. Peter Barker, Marc-Dietrich Ohse, and Dennis Tate (Bielefeld, 2007), 171. 33. Ralf Dahrendorf, “On the Origin of Inequality among Men (1961),” in Essays in the Theory of Society (London, 1969), 178. 34. On this, see the section “Born in the GDR” in chapter 4 of this volume. 35. Remarks of the president of United States of America, Ronald Reagan, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, June 12, 1987, in Helmut Trotnow and Florian Weiß, eds., Tear Down This Wall: U.S. President Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate, June 12, 1987 (Berlin, 2007), 219. 36. Friedenskreis Friedrichsfelde, Gruppe Gegenstimmen, Umweltbibliothek: “Mr. Reagan, holen Sie Ihren Koffer wieder ab!” 15. 6. 1987. RHG, B 02/01. 37. Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, Rudolf Walter Leonhardt, and Theo Sommer, Reise in ein fernes Land. Bericht über Kultur, Wirtschaft und Politik in der DDR (Hamburg, 1964), 142. 38. Hanns Werner Schwarze, Die DDR ist keine Zone mehr (Cologne, Berlin, 1969), 253. 39. Peter Bender, Deutsche Parallelen. Anmerkungen zu einer gemeinsamen deutschen Geschichte zweier getrennter Staaten (Berlin, 1989). 40. Peter Glotz: “Wider das ‘nationale Prinzip,’” in Erben deutscher Geschichte. DDR-BRD: Protokolle einer historischen Begegnung, ed. Susanne Miller and Malte Ristau (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1988), 89. 41. Qtd. in Karl Wilhelm Fricke, “Weder Konzentrationslager noch politische Gefangene in der DDR (1987),” in Der Wahrheit verpflichtet. Texte aus fünf Jahrzehnten zur Geschichte der DDR (Berlin, 2000), 324. 42. Der Spiegel, no. 44 (27. 10. 1986): 17. 43. Helmut Kohl, Erinnerungen. 1982–1990 (Munich, 2005), 441, 451. 44. Fricke, “Weder Konzentrationslager noch politische Gefangene in der DDR?” 324–34; Arnold Vaatz, “Offener Brief an Stephan Hermlin, März 1987,” in Art 27—für einen demokratischen Frieden, ed. Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte (Berlin, 1987 [Samisdat]), reprinted in Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, ed., Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit. Politischer Samisdat in der DDR 1985 bis 1989 (Berlin, 2002), 204–13. 45. Kohl later wrote that the phrase “just sort of slipped out”: Kohl, Erinnerungen. 1982–1990, 464. 46. ND, 29. 8. 1987. 47. Erhard Eppler, Die tödliche Utopie der Sicherheit (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1983). Eppler himself presents the process of the transcription differently, although this does not preclude the interpretation presented here; see Erhard Eppler, Komplettes Stückwerk. Erfahrungen aus fünfzig Jahren Politik (Frankfurt/M., 2001), 187. 48. This is the title of a book by Peter Bender, Das Ende des ideologischen Zeitalters. Die Europäisierung Europas (Berlin, 1981). There is a similar message in Eppler, Die tödliche Utopie der Sicherheit. 49. ND, 14. 10. 1980. 50. “‘Ein schwieriges und delikates Ereignis.’ Kanzleramtsminister Wolfgang Schäuble über den Honecker-Besuch und die deutsch-deutschen Beziehungen (Interview von Ulrich Schwarz und Richard Kiessler),” Der Spiegel, no. 35 (24. 8. 1987): 32. 51. Zum Dokument “Der Streit der Ideologien und die gemeinsame Sicherheit.” Informationen 1987/8, Nr. 234, 16 pp. (parteiinternes Agitationsmaterial). 52. Eppler, Komplettes Stückwerk, 192. 53. Rolf Reißig, Dialog durch die Mauer. Die umstrittene Annäherung von SPD und SED (Frankfurt/M., New York, 2002), 107. 54. “Emnid-Umfrage,” Der Spiegel (31. 8. 1987): 21. 55. ARD-Magazin “Kontraste” (25. 8. 1987) (representative survey).

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56. The sympathy values were as follows: “Kontraste”: 29 percent; “Spiegel”: 31 percent; “trustworthy” was only in “Kontraste.” 57. Oskar Lafontaine, “‘Er lässt auch fünfe gerade sein.’ Der stellvertretende SPD-Vorsitzende über den DDR-Staatsratsvorsitzenden Erich Honecker,” Der Spiegel, no. 35 (24. 8. 1987): 34, 35. 58. Der Besuch von Generalsekretär Honecker in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Dokumentation (Bonn, 1988), 26–27, 29–30, 34, 32. 59. Karl Wilhelm Fricke, “Der Besuch Erich Honeckers in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Europa-Archiv, Folge 23/1987: 690. 60. MfS, HA XX, Bericht vom 11. 9. 1987. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 189, Bl. 63. 61. N.N., Medienpolitik, n.d., BA, MfS, BdL 1100, Bl. 131–32, 136. 62. See also the section “Publicity for Freedom” in chapter 6. 63. Stephan Michalke, “Kommentiert,” Grenzfall 9/87, reprinted in Ralf Hirsch and Lew Kopelew, eds., Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte. Grenzfall. Vollständiger Nachdruck aller in der DDR erschienenen Ausgaben (1986/87). Erstes unabhängiges Periodikum, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1989), 102. 64. MfS, HA XX/2, Information, 4. 9. 1987. BA, MfS, AOP 16922/91, Bd. 14a, Bl. 261–63; Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz!, 384–86. 65. This is how it appears in Reißig, Dialog durch die Mauer, 180. 66. “Lassen Sie Biermann in Leipzig singen. Wortprotokoll vom 14. 10. 1987,” dialog 8/87, 52 (RHG). 67. Ulrike Poppe, “Neue Wege?” Grenzfall 11–12/87, reprinted in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 172. 68. Erich Hahn, SED und SPD. Ein Dialog. Ideologie-Gespräche zwischen 1984 und 1989 (Berlin, 2002), 240–48. The assessment of another SED participant was different; see Reißig, Dialog durch die Mauer, 137–39. 69. Erhard Eppler, “Links blinken, rechts fahren,” Der Spiegel, no. 29 (18. 7. 1988): 30, 31. 70. Deutscher Bundestag, 11. Wahlperiode, Wortprotokoll zur Gedenkstunde am 17. 6. 1989, pp. 11297, 11298, 11299. 71. Gabriele Günter, “Ein Mann. Ein Wunsch. Ein Irrtum,” JW, 19. 6. 1989. 72. Günter Nooke, “Die friedliche Revolution in der DDR 1989/90,” in Oppositions- und Freiheitsbewegungen im früheren Ostblock, ed. Manfred Agethen, Günter Buchstab (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna, 2003), 184–85. 73. Benn Roolf, “Das SPD/SED-Papier. Eine ‘Fehlersuche’ oder der Versuch, ein ungutes Gefühl zu rationalisieren,” Kontext. Beiträge aus Kirche & Gesellschaft & Kultur, no. 4 (November 1988 [Samisdat]), reprinted in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 454.

Chapter 3

SYMPTOMS OF CRISIS

S Living Conditions A woman walks into a store and asks the clerk, “Do you have bedding?” Bored, the salesman replies: “We have no towels; it’s next door that has no bed linen.” Such jokes circulated in unmanageable numbers. The laughter about it didn’t even stick in most people’s throats. Everyday life needs valves to let off steam; jokes are one such mechanism, especially in dictatorships. Nobody in the GDR—contrary to legend—went to prison for a political joke. In the 1950s and 1960s, the retelling of political jokes was an aggravating factor in court cases. In the 1980s, rumors repeatedly circulated that the political jokes—all of them critical of the system, like the one above—came from within the SED apparatus itself. That too is a legend, but it shows that such jokes hardly ever had any subversive power because what people experienced and had to endure every day surpassed even the best joke. It was just that hardly anyone could laugh about it. The conditions within the international framework were unusually flexible; they had changed in an astonishing way since 1985–86, yet in the GDR they remained peculiarly without consequences. This is certainly one explanation as to why the system collapsed so quickly in 1989 to almost everyone’s surprise. The symptoms of the crisis, however, formed a large part of the reality that the people of the GDR had to experience every day. Nobody had to tell its citizens about that. But precisely because these crisis symptoms rapidly worsened, because the social standstill was perceived as a step backward compared to impressions of other countries, we must now take an illustrative look at these symptoms. This is because the stagnation in the GDR quickly came to be perceived as regression in the context of other nations seeking ways out of the impasse—whether in Notes from this chapter begin on page 108.

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the East with various reforms (Gorbachev), openings (Hungary), and resistance movements (Poland), or in the West with sharper demarcation (Reagan), a flexible willingness to engage in dialogue (the Kohl government), and an ambivalent but not meaningless policy of engaging in dialogue (the SPD wing around Bahr, Eppler, etc.). This may be obvious from political events such as the Sputnik ban, but one’s own life reality is not measured by remote political debates, or at least not by that alone, but in the supermarket, the cinema, the factory, when one builds one’s own home or tries to get something repaired.

“The Economy of the GDR Is Completely Down” When Honecker took power in 1971,1 he saw one thing very clearly: his predecessor’s previous policy of legitimation was worn out. Explaining the advantages of the GDR system on the basis of history alone no longer sufficed to stabilize it permanently in terms of domestic policy. In the 1950s, a slogan came up that every child knew: “The way we work today is how we’ll live tomorrow.” That was frustrating. People toiled and toiled, but never reached “tomorrow.” It was true that the standard of living had improved considerably since the end of the 1950s. Everyday life had become easier: Saturday had become work free, and households approached almost the West German level in terms of being equipped with technical appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, TVs, radios, etc.). Consequently, people had more leisure time overall, which changed their everyday lives. But people were not more satisfied because the GDR was constantly lagging behind the much-vaunted world standard, and the gap compared to the West was growing visibly. So in 1971 Honecker invented an economic and social policy that turned the old slogan from the 1950s upside down. In essence, his policy was now based on the idea that “the way we live today is how we will work tomorrow.” No one formulated it this way, and certainly no functionary did so publicly, but the new economic and social policy was based on this idea. People were supposed to be socially pacified, and in the best case even satisfied. In the run-up to the Ninth SED Party Congress held in 1976, the party invented the formula of the “unity of economic and social policy” in 1975. Officially, this was linked to a social policy program that, on the one hand, was intended to improve people’s living conditions and put an end to the postwar period of privation, but that, on the other hand, was to be based on a modern and efficient economy for society as a whole that would finance a generous social policy as if it were running on its own. Unofficially, money was spent “today” that would be earned “tomorrow.” That didn’t go well. Almost a year before his resignation, Honecker admitted to FDJ functionaries that “we are living partly beyond our means.”2 In the Honecker era, the GDR economy was based on a five-year plan adopted by the respective SED party congress, formalized by the People’s Chamber, and published in the Gesetzblatt (a law gazette). The five-year plan was accompanied

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by annual plans, plans for individual sectors, as well as plans for each individual farm. There were plans galore, yet there were even more plan corrections. Central economic steering institutions were responsible for the implementation of the plans, first and foremost the Central Committee’s Economics Department headed by Politburo member Günter Mittag, followed by the State Planning Commission, specialist ministries, district and county institutions, and the companies and combines themselves. In view of the large number of plans and plan corrections, each of which was supposed to be supported by technical expertise, it is not surprising that the proportion of employees in the nonproductive sector in production companies was usually higher than that of workers who were supposed to produce what the “big head” thought up. Since this disproportion also violated the plans, many employees were listed in the statistics as blue-collar workers or not at all. This brings us to a basic problem planned economies have for their countries: the decisive factor is the fulfillment and overfulfillment of the plan, which was mostly not realized in the production halls but on the drawing boards of the planners and statisticians. Every GDR person knew that, almost everyone made fun of it, and almost everyone joined in somehow. There is hardly any reliable statistical data on the economy, on individual branches of the economy, and even on individual companies and combines from the GDR. The basic error of the GDR planned economy was to plan goods instead of values. This led not only to a de facto devaluation, even abolition, of money in the plan but to the grotesque fact that the plans were based on product quantities instead of measurable values (in the form of profits). “The more elaborate the production, the more could be invoiced.”3 In the preparation of the plan, farms usually stated their production targets below the theoretically possible production target because ideologically it was not a question of meeting the plan but of exceeding it. For example, a company stated that it produced a quantity X of a product Y. In reality, however, it produced X+, with the result that the goods produced under the plan were in surplus because there was no market for them, since the plan did not provide for either underperformance or overperformance. A planned economy is highly inflexible, unable to react to unexpected challenges or implement innovations effectively and promptly. At the same time, every over- or underperformance precipitated a chain reaction whose consequences could be seen throughout the country. In 1982, the GDR was regarded internationally as insolvent. It had to pay more than 1.5 times the amount of foreign currency it received in principle and interest payments to international creditors. Since 1976, the experts in finance and planning had repeatedly drawn the attention of the SED Politburo and Honecker himself to this steadily worsening situation. The Federal Republic helped with loans and other politically motivated transfer payments (transit routes, use of postal services, prisoner releases, etc.) to prevent instability in the GDR. Honecker remained unmoved by signs of crisis and instead continued

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the “unity of economic and social policy” he had begun. Contrary to the proclamations that the GDR was the tenth strongest industrial nation in the world, it stood in the middle of the international rankings. Today, economic historians tend to classify economies in this range as emerging markets. With the help of the loans, it was possible to reduce the GDR’s international debt for a short time. However, the price of oil on the world market collapsed in 1985. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance price policy now turned on its head. The import prices for crude oil from the USSR rose rapidly for the GDR, but the revenues for petroleum products dropped off precipitously. A source of foreign currency that had been important until then did not dry up but, after a mere two years, amounted to merely a third of what it had been in 1985. Other GDR goods were hardly in demand on the world market. Since the GDR had not modernized industries such as mechanical and electrical engineering and had not made adequate investments, the products hardly found any buyers despite their low prices. Labor productivity dropped so that by the end of the 1980s it was only about a third of that of the Federal Republic. Despite some attempts to transfer greater competencies to the combines and companies and to reorient the economic plans more strongly toward value creation as they had been in the 1960s, ideologically fixed central steering bodies maintained curatorship of them. The companies had only limited room to maneuver, partly because they did not dispose of profits independently, had to pay them to the state budget, and had to take out loans for investments. It remained a vicious circle in which only downward corrections to plans were handled flexibly. A facade was erected behind which everything visibly collapsed. Both international and internal debt grew. This amounted to more than half of the state budget expenditures in 1988–89. The real investment ratio, a central pillar of any prospering economy, declined in the 1980s. The SED Politburo fended off every change, even internally, that a few high-ranking economic functionaries, combine directors, and financial experts had called for with arguments that were always similar: the previous policy had proved its worth, the GDR was also economically recognized internationally, every country had debts, and changes would only lead to political destabilization. In addition, the SED leadership used the little investing it did almost exclusively in industry. Other important pillars such as communication networks, transport, and agriculture were criminally neglected. Eighteen percent of the road network was considered impassable, the motorways were in a dilapidated condition, and on some stretches the floating concrete slabs lifted so that the cars crashed against a small curb. The railway network was outdated, electrification made little progress, and 17 percent of the network could only be traveled at low speeds, in some cases only at double walking speed. In September 1989, five million prestressed concrete sleepers had been damaged—a total stretch of about five thousand kilometers, one-fifth of the total network; in the three previous

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years, the Reichsbahn had already replaced two million of them.4 In mid-1989, there were well over one million applications for telephone connections, which was considered an unfeasible number, but the installation of sixty thousand new connections was planned for 1990.5 All this amounted to catastrophic conditions. Goods could not be delivered, which led to further production and food losses because deliveries did not reach their recipients in time. A particularly depressing example was handed down from Greifswald. On June 22, 1989, the director of the University Institute of Forensic Medicine wrote a letter to the MfS District Office, complaining that the already provisional cold storage cells were completely inadequate, that “the corpses had to lie stacked on double-placed stretchers,” that “some” were lying in “ancillary rooms that could not be cooled,” and that “maggot infestation and rot” and “rat infestation” were occurring “quickly.” “All employees suffer from the odor nuisance, even those who have nothing to do with the actual opening of the corpse.”6 Added to these conditions were incalculable external influences—the weather proved every year to be the worst of them. Although the weather could not be planned, it was predictable apart from extreme situations in the true sense of the word. In this context as well, there was a joke in circulation: “Question: What are the four greatest enemies of socialism? Answer: Spring, summer, autumn, and winter!” One branch of industry was excluded from the misguided economic planning and, in retrospect, was the most bankrupt of all: microelectronics. From the mid-1970s, the SED leadership pursued an ambitious program in this sector. It tried to counter the embargo regulations for exports of Western technologies to the East. With the use of large sums of money and active secret service operations (“industrial espionage”), the GDR succeeded in copying modern microelectronic elements.7 When on September 12, 1988—under the propagandistic roar of Wolfgang Biermann, the absolute ruler of the Carl Zeiss Jena combine— Erich Honecker handed over the “first” internally developed 1-megabit memory storage device, hardly anyone in the GDR could stop laughing. This was because almost everyone knew from experience that although Robotron computers, for example, could be found in the factories, they were rarely used. The national economy was not prepared for this—it lacked the necessary flexibility, knowhow, and, last but not least, commitment. The cost of producing a 256-kilobit memory in the GDR was 534 marks, and on the world market it was available for five marks in foreign currency. The GDR lagged eight to ten years behind the international development standard, its production efficiency was 10 percent that of Western companies. Ultimately, this was the GDR’s attempt to develop structures to sustain itself, yet they appeared to be rather misguided. The constant labor shortage in the GDR was particularly irritating. Although it may have been a great sociopolitical achievement that unemployment did not exist as a social problem, citizens were actually required to work. Those who did

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not work were quickly accused of being “asocial,” a charge that was relevant under criminal law. In the 1980s, young people, in particular, found many ways not to work, at least not in the sense the SED wished, without being considered “asocial.” Many people could hardly understand the perpetual labor shortage because they knew about downtimes from their own experience. Something was always missing—orders, raw materials, many little things—so that workers often wound up resting like “workers’ monuments.” On the other hand, jobs that had to be done could hardly have been more absurd, yet they were rooted in the system. For example, in the television electronics plant in Berlin-Schöneweide, a state-of-the-art Japanese plant for the production of color television tubes was built in the 1980s. The installation remained incomplete due to payment difficulties, so two strong men stood between two ultramodern treadmills, lifting the heavy television tubes from one belt to the connecting belt for eight hours in lieu of the unaffordable intermediate piece. Again and again rumors circulated in many factories that comrades had been given unofficial party orders to ask their parents, who as pensioners were allowed to travel to the West, to bring a certain part with them for a few deutschmarks so that production would not collapse. While these rumors may not have been true, they point to an overall mood and social perception that reflect the paradoxes GDR citizens experienced every day. The labor shortage ultimately derived from the circumstance that a lack of willingness to invest ran up against extensive resources. Structurally, innovations required more labor than they released. However, since the full employment program (91 percent) meant that there were no labor reserves, the SED leadership quadrupled the quota of “foreign contract workers” (around one hundred thousand in 1989) within a few years, using these cheap labor slaves from Vietnam, Angola, or Mozambique to try to rescue what could not be saved. The communist internationalism propagated by the SED was already structurally conceived as a racist ideology. The consequences are still visible today.8 But it was not only these foreign workers but also members of the army, employees of the state apparatus and the Academy of Sciences, and students who were increasingly deployed to economic hotspots for weeks on end. Officially, such operations were branded as demonstrating solidarity with the working class; in fact, the main objective was to tackle the “four enemies of socialism.” The miserable state of the production facilities in all branches of the economy—in quite a few factories, the machines used for production had been installed before 1933 or 1914, which also explains the inventiveness and improvisational skills of many people from the GDR—had another dark side. Accidents and mishaps were part of everyday working life, sometimes with fatal consequences and lasting environmental pollution. At the same time, the “repair and maintenance” sector grew in importance—something hardly comprehensible today. In both personal and business life, those who could repair, renovate, and

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sometimes modernize machinery were uncrowned kings whose favor everyone tried to curry or buy. Agriculture also remained a problem child of the SED. People had enough food, but the cost was extreme. In this sector, too, investments declined sharply. Every child learned at school that the economy benefits from intensive rather than extensive production. It was only in reality that the reverse coercive principle applied. If you ask GDR people today about the news program Aktuelle Kamera, it usually evokes three associations: first, monotonous newscasters who seemed to be cloned rather than cast in a cadre selection institute; second, endless word sequences of recurring titles that the announcers read out; and third and last, combine harvester formations, apparently incessantly collecting the grain. No one, though, could have explained why these things were shown. The daily newspapers, moreover, constantly announced in odd statistics and columns of figures how much seed had been distributed and how much grain had been harvested. The cost of agricultural production increased, but food prices remained constant. In 1989, the SED subsidized almost half of it, and at the same time in the mid-1980s it had roughly halved subsidies for agriculture. This led to the twisted circumstance that farmers bought bread, potatoes, and other foods at low prices to feed their livestock. These and other paradoxes not only meant that the SED had to repeatedly import grain, fodder, and meat in exchange for foreign currency but that there were also repeated “bottlenecks” in the provision of basic foodstuffs. There were several reasons for this. A youth from the Pritzwalk district made the following observation to a West German citizen: “The potato harvest is over, and it was good this time. It was so good that our Soviet friends have been loading wagon after wagon for weeks—and off to the big and rich Soviet Union. You have to imagine that. They have so much land and we have to feed the people. Then how are we ever gonna get anywhere? Now imagine you had to feed the Americans the same way. But let’s leave that; this is politics in its purest form.”9 All of this mismanagement eventually prompted the GDR to export everything that it could somehow sell to the West to obtain foreign currency. Shops became emptier, savings grew, and citizens’ excess purchasing power became inflationary. And at the same time, in the 1980s, a phenomenon began to spread that did not officially exist in the propaganda or in the consciousness of the GDR people: a new poverty. This mainly affected old people whose pensions provided them with enough for housing, food, and entertainment but not enough to purchase the industrial goods that were constantly becoming more expensive. They fell below the average standard of living. Although the overall wage level increased, people also wanted to use their money, usually for things they could not get. The state subsidies for rents, energy, food, and much more rose immeasurably. People got used to the security of the basic supply, but they wanted more. And the official “market” did not offer them

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that. There was practically nothing that was not sometimes or always considered either “scarce” or that could only be purchased “under the table.” That’s why people in “socialist waiting communities” stood for hours in front of shops, even though they didn’t know if the shop would open or what would happen when it did. Consequently, they bought everything that was in short supply, even if they did not need it, so that they could exchange it for products they needed but did not have. Queuing and searching for scarce goods resulted in every employee missing on average six hours of work a week without an excuse in 1989. Gerhard Schürer was the head of the State Planning Commission. This man should be appreciated for repeatedly and cautiously making his party leadership understand that the “unity of economic and social policy” the country had been practicing since the 1970s was leading to disaster. But he did not seek publicity, nor did he quit. Communists don’t do that. But Schürer clearly saw what was coming. For example, in April 1988, he suggested a policy change to Honecker, proposing that the unprofitable economic programs such as microelectronics be discontinued and that the freed-up funds be transferred to export-intensive branches of the economy such as mechanical engineering. Furthermore, he recommended that a number of nonsensical subsidies be restricted or eliminated. Honecker and Mittag rejected these ideas, on the one hand, for ideological reasons—they regarded the subsidy policy as the strongest social binding force—and, on the other hand, for sound political considerations—microelectronics was for them a means of breaking the West’s embargo policy so that the GDR could survive on the world market with these products, acquire foreign currency, and reduce debt at the same time. Honecker’s defensive strategy was not irrational, and Schürer’s concept did not go outside the cycle of the planned economy. Neither approach had any chance because SED functionaries knew that the GDR people wanted secure jobs, social security, cheap rents—and the range of goods offered by German department stores. The SED offered them the former, and theoretically they could only have offered them the second by giving these up.

“Work as in Socialism; Live as in Capitalism” In retrospect,10 many people consider the “social achievements” in the GDR to be worthy of positive mention; thus, nostalgic or even apologetic views of GDR history seemed justified to many. At a greater distance from 1989 and 1990, these “achievements” seemed quite undeniable to many people. This also had to do with the restructuring of society and the associated changes, cuts, and distortions that have accompanied it since 1990. Many East Germans counted themselves among the losers of the unification process, and quite a few felt themselves to be among those who were left behind. Job security, low rents and travel costs, cheap basic foodstuffs and admission tickets, free and almost universal preschool and kindergarten spots (around 80 percent), and much more were listed as

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“social achievements.” The price for this—a suspended economy—was described in the last section. The question remains as to what these “achievements” really looked like. The SED social policy guaranteed a basic social security system that protected large sections of society from material destitution. At a low level, the supply ranged from the cradle to the grave. It was based on the basic idea that if people had a roof over their heads, a full stomach, and a job, the system would remain stable despite all other shortcomings. People would be socially reassured and would have no reason to rebel. This was also one of the main reasons that West German society was portrayed until the end within the GDR as a den of poverty and impoverishment. In the West, it was claimed, there was no social security whatsoever, let alone social security systems. The fact that the SED leadership gave its state social policy a function that legitimized the system is not unusual, even by international standards. Unlike in liberal societies, however, state social policy in dictatorships has the function of compensating for a lack of democratic legitimacy. It is itself part of the dictatorship’s practice. The GDR demonstrated this in that its social policy did not emerge as the result of competing offers, conflicting interests, and regulatory negotiation processes but rather as a gift from the authorities that could only be accepted, not rejected. Such talk of the “welfare dictatorship”11 misses the heart of the problem because the state’s welfare for the people was not about “caring.” Caring pertains to the interests of individuals as well as those of society, it questions them, puts offers up for discussion, and “cares” to meet the needs of the people concerned rather than the demands of the logic of domination. One pillar of GDR social policy was subsidies. A high percentage of the state budget was used for this purpose, either openly or covertly. Those in power subsidized just about everything from rents, foodstuffs, and tariffs to millions of jobs. In other words, the nation always spent more than it earned. At the end of the 1980s this subsidy policy came to be widely debated in society, as officially reflected in the comments and speeches that high-ranking officials and SED scientists made defending and “explaining” it. Pensioners were the main beneficiaries due to their low incomes. Most other groups experienced the absurdity of this policy on a daily basis—admittedly without always being aware of what abolishing the subsidies, which they were calling for, would mean for their everyday lives. There was no lack of warning voices from the apparatus. But they were not considered ideologically consolidated. Honecker and his crew always had “June 17” and other uprisings in the Eastern Bloc in mind. They recognized these as homemade because they had been preceded by sociopolitical deterioration. That was true, but it was only half the truth because sociopolitical deterioration was always accompanied by manifest political dissatisfaction with the system. That was no different in 1989. The SED police state had the GDR social state firmly in its grip. SED social policy was a central pillar of the GDR system. The

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government’s “all-around care” for its citizens not only concerned the living conditions, however good or bad they may have been individually, but also covered people’s minds like mildew. SED social policy was bought at a high price. It was expensive for the state because many resources that should have been urgently diverted into investment were squandered on subsidies and social programs with no future, thus achieving the exact opposite of the political-ideological goal of legitimizing the system. People were also fed up with the system because they took the SED state’s social benefits for granted in the late 1980s, and the power of these benefits for legitimation was largely used up. Moreover, in countless internal reports, one can read what many people seem to have forgotten after 1990 because the dark side of social policy was before everyone’s eyes—even in circles close to the system: cheap rents resulted in a lack of funds for urgently needed renovation work, cheap fares reflected a disrupted infrastructure, and cheap books and newspapers could not compensate for media synchronization, censorship, and banning practices. Hundreds of thousands of people had permanent jobs, but many did no meaningful work. They carried more and more money home, for which they got less and less. There were nursery and preschool spots for almost all children, but hardly anyone could accommodate their children outside of state institutions (4 percent of the spots existed in denominational institutions; there were no independent providers at all). Social policy had reached its zenith in the early 1980s and then stagnated; there were hardly any new advances, and social spending declined somewhat. This was particularly evident in the case of pensions, which declined in real terms in the 1980s. Family policy (favorable loans for spouses under twenty-six, preferential housing, etc.) was one of the pillars of social policy. This also explains the early age of marriage and giving birth—and the high divorce rate. Most historical work on SED social policy suffers from taking government expenditure and the net income of households at cash value, overlooking the fact that the cash was of little value and had to assert itself against the unofficial second currency, the West German mark (DM), as well as the fact that this calculated cash value fails to fully reflect citizens’ quality of life. This is a value that is difficult to substantiate with data. A person who received a normal pension had to live on the edge of the subsistence minimum and was threatened by poverty. Everyone knew the joke that a good communist leaves his place on earth—or at least moves to the West—when he reaches retirement age to avoid using the state’s funds and harming its budget and, at the same time, to undermine the FRG budget by drawing a high pension without having paid a cent into the system. Every pensioner in the GDR received a state-guaranteed minimum pension that was less than half the average net income. Only one-third of the approximately 2.7 million pensioners in 1987 improved their income through a “voluntary supplementary pension.” There were specific special pensions for 27 specific occupational groups. In 1988

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the average net income was just under 1,000 marks, an average pension without a supplementary pension was 376 marks, and an average pension with a supplementary pension was 478.50 marks.12 The SED’s pension policy was one of those social benefits that had been the subject of fierce criticism long before 1989. Young people could not understand why older ones were fobbed off so shabbily. Those affected were unable to understand why they were so shamelessly and ruthlessly excluded from the blessings of socialism after the end of their professional life. Hundreds of thousands of pensioners took up part-time work to supplement their meager income. The SED state did not find these additional workers inconvenient. The state dealt even more shabbily with elderly people in need of care and with people with physical or mental disabilities. The reality turned out to be a system of medical, nursing, and social care that was deficient in “every respect, with outpatient services, homes, state administrations of the health and social services, social organizations, and volunteers. Above all, buildings, technical equipment, and vehicles did not meet the necessary qualitative and quantitative requirements, so that many people in need of care and the disabled received only insufficient or no assistance at all.”13 Although the institutions of the Diakonie, Caritas, and other church institutions prevented this social system from failing completely—almost 50 percent of all places for the rehabilitation of severely handicapped people, as well as about 5 percent of hospital beds and 8 percent of places in old people’s and nursing homes, were associated with church institutions—they could not eliminate the misery either, especially since they suffered from similar material and personnel problems as the state institutions, despite generous Western support. In the 1980s, the healthcare system in the GDR reflected the state of crisis in society. Life expectancy in the GDR declined slightly after the early 1980s, contrary to the international trend, not only because of increased environmental pollution. In comparison to the Federal Republic, the death rate for curable diseases in the GDR was 4.6 times higher. Diagnostics and therapy lagged behind in international comparison, due to material reasons and poor research opportunities. In addition, the percentage of refugees and applicants for departure was particularly high, not least from the occupational group of medical personnel. Workplace healthcare, which was geared toward the immediate needs of the respective workers and employees, at least in theory, deserves special mention. The care of pregnant women, young mothers, infants, and children was equally comprehensive. The dense network of preventive medical care and prophylactic treatments (e.g., vaccinations) was exemplary, especially against the background of current debates, yet it had the dark side that the nonacceptance of these care and prevention offers would have been punished with sanctions. Prevention was part of the guardianship system.

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The SED leadership was aware of the deficiencies in the healthcare system. In 1988, negative reports from the individual districts became more frequent. After a visit to the Federal Republic, a chief gynecologist from the Rostock district said that the GDR would “never reach . . . the high standard of healthcare.” “In the GDR,” he was supposed to have said, those who did not “belong to the ‘upper class of functionaries’ had to die earlier.” He recommended that pregnant women ensure that they got healthy food by shopping at Intershops. Those who did not have West German money enabling them to do so were “just unlucky.”14 Moreover, there were tremendous shortages in hospital personnel. In 1988, about one-third of the hospital beds in the Greifswald district could not be occupied “because of a lack of staff.”15 In 1987, the University Hospital Greifswald could not fill openings for fifteen specialists in internal medicine alone, the district hospital Bergen on Rügen had thirteen of twenty-four general practitioner positions vacant, and the district hospital Stralsund needed twentyfour more doctors. Nurses were also in short supply. The Greifswald district alone needed over two hundred nurses, and in Wolgast, 40 percent of the nurse posts were unfilled.16 In addition, some parts of buildings had to be closed due to the poor conditions, for example, to prevent smoke poisoning in hospitals. Due to a lack of nurses for home care, 25 percent of the beds in the University Hospital Greifswald were occupied with nursing cases.17 Such alarming reports reached the SED leadership from all districts and counties. In autumn 1988, the director of the Institute for Medicinal Products said that the production of medicinal products was “far below international standards”18 and claimed that the “highly outdated” material and technical basis of production was responsible for this. This development could not remain hidden from international organizations such as the World Health Organization, which would lead to considerable losses in exports. Young doctors turned away from the system more and more openly. In mid-November 1988, the MfS summarized its findings from the districts and submitted a report on the situation to the SED leadership. For a long time, forty to fifty drugs had been unavailable, alternating between them. Important cardiovascular resources, as well as numerous surgical instruments and other medical materials, were lacking or in extremely short supply, and only 30 percent of diabetics could be provided with the correct medical care. Disposable cannulas, urine bags, and stomatological instruments were missing half of the requirements, and blood-transfer devices were missing almost two-thirds. The situation was similar with numerous life-saving drugs. The rapporteurs were particularly concerned that these conditions not only enraged the medical staff but also generated harsh criticism and lack of understanding among broad sections of the population.19 Without strong investments and value-intensive imports far above the planned figures, the situation would grow worse. Neither was possible to the necessary extent. In mid-December 1988, Erich Honecker, who had read

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this report very carefully, described these circumstances as a “scandal”: “I would never have thought it possible.”20 The most ambitious social program was for housing policy. Honecker had announced that housing would be solved “as a social problem” by 1990. Between 1976 and 1989, 2.8 million apartments were newly built or modernized, according to official figures, although research estimates that the real number was 1.7 million dwellings. The average living space per inhabitant increased from just under 21 square meters in 1971 to about 27 square meters in 1989. In real terms, however, the housing stock had only increased by about 950,000 dwellings between 1971 and 1989. The regional variations were substantial. East Berlin was considered a “showcase for the republic.” This is where most of the funds flowed, and tens of thousands of workers were withdrawn to Berlin. This led to widespread discontent among the population. Hatred of Berlin was not infrequent, especially during the pompous 750th anniversary celebrations in 1987: in the southern GDR, for example, Berlin cars had their tires slashed, and young Berlin hitchhikers were thrown out of cars. Leipzigers, Dresdeners, Potsdamers, and others showed their flags and made banners referring to their own cities’ anniversaries (“822 years Leipzig—Berlin will never be that old”). There was great anger toward Berlin because it received most of the scarce resources and manpower, leaving less than usual to the rest of the country.21 The Berlin celebrations failed to conceal the irresolvable housing problem. With great pomp, the millionth new apartment was handed over in 1978, the two millionth in 1984, and the three millionth in 1988—always in East Berlin. For many people, the housing situation had indeed improved—in satellite towns on the outskirts of the city, they enjoyed running water, standard bathrooms, and district heating in brightly lit standard flats. They had escaped the postwar period, although it remained present in the inner cities because the housing construction program focused on new construction, gutting, and demolition. As a result, the old buildings deteriorated so much that even hard-boiled SED representatives were speechless. It makes little sense to list the cities that still had ruined landscapes or ruin-like quarters at the end of the 1980s. Some were downright orphaned as in Halberstadt, Potsdam, Stralsund, and Leipzig, while people lived under unspeakable circumstances in others. The SED housing policy was aimed at industrially manufactured mass-produced goods that delighted hundreds of thousands but angered millions on a lasting basis: satellite towns were only a paradise for a minority, especially since at that time, apart from housing, the infrastructure was in a desolate state (colloquially, housing was often jokingly referred to as “workers’ lockers” or sometimes “fuck cells with district heating,” a phrase often incorrectly attributed to Heiner Müller). Moreover, the inner cities deteriorated except for a few cleaned-up corners, and the living quarters in the old buildings continued to deteriorate from year to year. In quite a few cities, the inhabitants of such run-down districts

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formed citizens’ initiatives that were committed both to opposing demolition as historically irresponsible and to modernizing the districts. For the most part, it was not even system critics who gathered in these groups. Many people were concerned less with major policies than with securing a roof that kept out rain, a toilet on the same level (about 25 percent), windows and doors that closed properly, and an unblocked chimney whose brown coal smoke would not pollute their apartment. In the autumn of 1989, many people rendered true what the “GDR national anthem” announced in its first lines, although it had not been sung since the beginning of the 1970s because of the commitment to German unity therein expressed: “Risen from ruins / And turned towards the future.”

“In the GDR, Everything Is Gray—Only the Rivers Are Colorful” The world had become aware of the potential threat to human livelihoods and the environmental problems associated with unlimited growth by the early 1970s,22 not least through the publication of Limits to Growth.23 A strong environmental protection movement formed in the Federal Republic, most visibly represented, apart from nongovernmental organizations, by the Green Party founded in 1979/80. In the GDR, industry began gathering scientific expertise on environmental protection and environmental hazards in the 1950s. A number of laws issued by the SED suggested that the party considered the environment to be serious and worthy of protection. In 1972, it formed a Ministry for Environmental Protection and Water Management, one of the first in the world; the Federal Republic of Germany did not establish a similar ministry until June 1986, following the Chernobyl disaster. Hardly any other event shook Europe in the 1980s as much as the massive nuclear accident in Ukraine on April 26, 1986: many dead, a media landscape in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union that long remained silent, reminiscent of the Brezhnev era, as well as an extensively contaminated landscape with agricultural products rendered inedible as far away as Western Europe. Chernobyl showed that borders and walls kept people and systems apart, but it also highlighted that Europe and the world were just one big building with different apartments and floors. If the water drips, other tenants and owners are also affected; the energy supply fails, and everyone sits in the dark. People in both the East and the West were in a state of great agitation, most of them less due to the dead in Ukraine than due to contaminated food and threatened habitats. Only over the GDR did the atomic cloud seem to have passed in a peculiar way. In the summer of 1986, there was an amazing range and quantity of fruits and vegetables on offer. It was not only the sun that was shining. What was not accepted elsewhere because of high health risks found grateful buyers in the emerging market of the GDR. This was grotesque, and it outraged many people, which is why the otherwise scarce and much sought after fruit and

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vegetables often went to waste unsold in the GDR. This circumstance reached its visible climax on February 1, 1987, when West Berlin first issued a smog alert of level one. On this day, the Wall not only protected the West from fascists but also from environmental pollution. Those in power in East Berlin declared that the air in the eastern part of the city was clean. When, as happened in East Berlin, an SED party secretary and civics teacher stood up and explained to his baffled and amused pupils that only “clean dirt” came out of “our chimneys,” not even his colleagues could refrain from laughing. In the 1980s, the GDR was one of the biggest polluters in Europe. No other country had such high sulfur dioxide emissions. It also took first place for dust emissions. And with almost all other pollutants, it consistently held its own in the top group. In 1989, only 3 percent of running water sources and only 1 percent of standing water sources were considered ecologically sound. Fish mortality due to industrial wastewater was part of everyday environmental life. As in the Federal Republic of Germany, more than 50 percent of the forest stock was sick or dead. Many soils were contaminated by pollution caused by the army, but also by industry, agriculture, and almost eight thousand uncontrolled dumping sites, some of which were of considerable size. The sewage system was completely dilapidated, the agricultural land was largely contaminated with fertilizers and pesticides, energy was scarce, and the GDR had only one-tenth of the average water supply of the industrialized and emerging countries. This, too, was a consequence of the GDR’s failed economic policy, its failure to modernize, and the subordination of environmental protection to SED policy, despite its laws and the ministry. In January 1990, according to demoscopic surveys, over 80 percent of GDR citizens were dissatisfied with the environmental situation. It was no wonder: in the Leipzig-Halle-Bitterfeld chemical and lignite region, a particularly hard-hit area, fog reigned every five days on average at the end of the 1980s due to industry, and every day—on average—there was a stench, and air quality caused people’s eyes to water. The only remedy that the SED could offer was vans equipped with loudspeakers announcing that residents should keep their windows and doors closed. This could not help the sick children and old people. The SED had not escaped the growing outrage of the people in the 1980s about this and similar conditions between the Baltic Sea and the Ore Mountains. It alone lacked the means to alleviate this condition. This much might be comprehensible, but the fact that its economic policy was constantly aggravating the situation was not acceptable. Millions of people in the industrial urban areas were directly affected, and everyone else knew about it or saw the bare mountains. In addition, the rate of illness exploded because of this environmental catastrophe—the health system could not react adequately. From the point of view of the SED, this was a vicious circle, but for historians it offers a further explanation as to why millions of people were utterly fed up with the system at the end of the 1980s. The environmental protection movement of the opposition was as

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much a nail in the coffin of the regime as its counterproductive environmental protection policy. Most of the population had personal associations with both of these things. But the environment is more than dead forests, dilapidated sewage systems, contaminated soil, lakes closed to swimming, stinking air—in many areas, unbearable stench was part of the GDR’s scent brand. The Saale in Jena also stank in the “Paradise” park. Environment in the broader sense is the entire surroundings of an individual. And it didn’t look any better. The widespread decay of the old building stock was the mirror image of the destroyed environment. The rough, harsh atmosphere in the offices was another reflection of it. And the manifold supply problems were not the last such reflection. Röbel, a charming small town on the Müritz River, was a focal point of the northern citizens’ movement in 1989. Berndt Seite gave a lecture on the environment, environmental protection, and pollution in the St. Marien Church there in July.24 Seite counted among the dignitaries of the relatively small region; he was a practicing veterinarian. He explained unequivocally that an environment that made people ill reflected a society that was ill. He not only diagnosed the problem but also knew what the therapy could be. In the past, he had told lies in Urania lectures for money; now, he would have liked to tell the truth in Urania lectures for free, but he was no longer invited to speak.25 The therapy, he suggested, consisted in radically changing the structures and eliminating the ideologies that were not only responsible for environmental pollution but that were also in themselves, in a broad and comprehensive sense, the main environmentally damaging factors. Berndt Seite, who joined the CDU in 1990, was minister president of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania from 1992 to 1998.

“There’s Always Something Rattling around on the Trabant” Friedrich Engels wrote in 1877–78 about a central insight of his friend Karl Marx: “History was for the first time put on its real basis; the tangible, but so far totally overlooked, fact that people have to eat, drink, live, and dress, i.e., work, before they fight for power, politics, religion, philosophy, etc.—this tangible fact has now finally gotten its historical due.”26 One could ironically say that because the SED rulers had internalized this insight, they operated a scarcity economy in order to keep people occupied with satisfying their basic needs and to keep them away from the struggle for power, from “politics, philosophy, religion, etc.” Much has been written about everyday life in the GDR in recent years, and even more theorizing has been done. There is no everyday life in the singular. The person in front and the woman behind in an everyday line may have felt, thought, cursed, grumbled, and laughed in a different way, yet the time they spent waiting was objectively the same. There was practically nothing but bread, milk, and alcohol that was not occasionally or constantly in short supply in the

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GDR. The shops seemed to be full, but another basic experience people had was not having what they needed. Quotable entries, documents, and self-testimonies that have survived prove this a million times over. Each product had its own jokes, mocking poems, and sarcastic rhymes: “No nails, no screws, no planks for the arbor, no paper for our butts, but we have a Sputnik.” The scarcity economy does not get any better in retrospect either, but it was by far not as bad as its social histories and statistics often suggest. Most people, however, felt that they suffered from what was lacking. Having to drive home after ten hours of lining up for tiles, cement, or limestone without having the building material in the trunk generates stress, anger, and resignation. And almost everyone had experienced such wasted time. This was one experience that was available in abundance. Workers waited for work, record enthusiasts for records, fruit lovers for fruit, sick people for doctors, doctors for medicine. Most people had adapted to these conditions for many years. They developed creative bartering relationships, illegal markets flourished, and professors were gifted with good craftsmanship even when they were not from the working class. People made their own lawnmowers, just as they could mason, solder, weld, sew, bake, cook, and actually do almost everything themselves. Moreover, they were masters of improvisation. Green tomatoes garnished tasty stollen if candied lemon peel was unavailable. A letter of complaint from the beginning of 1989 illustrates how far exchange relationships could go. Nursery schoolteachers from Espenhain reported that, responding to an advertisement in the Wochenpost, they had applied for a private holiday accommodation at the Baltic Sea. (Domestic holiday accommodations were also in short supply.) The private landlord replied that he had received more than five hundred letters, so he asked for understanding that his “personal interests” were paramount in the selection. He was planning extensive renovations and extensions to be able to rent more rooms. “When choosing my holidaymakers, I prefer partners who can help me with the procurement of materials or construction. I need assistance in obtaining good floor and wall tiles, parquet flooring, radiators, a central heating stove of 2.2 m2 heating area and work as a tiler and plasterer. I expect guests to work for two or three days at the most. My offer applies not only to individual applicants but also to companies.”27 Contrary to the official ideology, the “working class” was not the leading force in the state. The SED may have exercised political control, but craftsmen and salesmen in specialized shops were the kings because they were the unofficial administrators of the deficiency economy. Their social prestige was very high and probably only comparable to that of doctors. They distributed goods and possessed skills, tools, and other aids that even the most cunning improvisers and the most active barterers sometimes lacked. People experienced humiliation not only in offices, where they often expected nothing else, but also in craft stalls, specialty shops, and restaurants. The salesmen and craftsmen were the kings, not the

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customers. Bribes were part of the basic rules of etiquette, small gifts improved favors, large gifts ensured preferential treatment, but the best thing—apart from West German money—was that one could offer something in return that seemed useful to the craftsman or specialist salesman at the time or in the future. Most people had somehow got used to the unbearable arrogance of the plumber and the sheer unfriendliness of the waiter. These service providers knew they would get their money with or without offering kindness. They were only displeased if they were met with the same unfriendliness—whether in their shop or in another one. And that’s why even they got sick of the system in the end. However, some of them were less able to cope with the almost immediate loss of their exclusive social position. Almost nothing occupied the majority of the people at that time as much as having their own car. A cultural history of the car in the GDR has not yet been written.28 The entire GDR system could be described very vividly using this everyday object alone. In 1989 there were about 3.8 million private cars on the roads. The monotony of the country, which one can marvel at today in traditional film footage, was reflected not least in the uniform appearance of the car fleet. About two million Trabants and almost 700,000 Wartburg cars polluted the air and caused their own two-stroke noise. Added to these were Lada (330,000), Škoda (300,000), and, in much smaller numbers, other models from the USSR, Romania, and Poland. Wherever you went in the Eastern Bloc, the street scene was similar. Comecon policy made sure of this. One knew the box vans from national production, even if the national cars dominated in each case. The street scene in the GDR was merely refreshed by “bonze skidders” or “vehicles of the nouveau riche.” However, the 22,000 VW Golfs, 11,000 Mazdas, 5,000 Zastavas, 2,500 Citroëns, and 1,000 Volvos, as well as the several thousand other, however privately imported, Western cars of various brands could not really break up the uniformity. It is no joke that in the early 1980s the SED leadership decided to introduce Westwagen (Western cars) to vary the streetscape. Almost every schoolchild laughed about it back then because word of this motivation somehow got around. In the 1970s and 1980s, the SED leadership made several efforts to modernize the automobile industry, although the possibilities and means remained limited. For this reason, the planners did not envisage any model changes but decided to equip the Trabant and Wartburg cars with four-stroke engines primarily because the two-stroke engines used too much fuel and caused considerable pollution. Moreover, GDR citizens’ dissatisfaction with the two standard models was steadily growing, and demand in the Eastern Bloc was dropping significantly. Volkswagen AG supplied the production equipment for a four-stroke engine. It was a compensation deal, because VW was later to receive a considerable share of the production. The GDR car market would, therefore, not have experienced any increased supply. The SED leadership was displeased that the

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originally estimated costs exploded and almost all investments for machine and vehicle construction were withdrawn. The consequences were dramatic because this hole had to be plugged, which tore open new ones in several other places. In October 1988, the first Wartburg with the new engine rolled off the production line. In spring of 1988, rumors had begun to spread that the car would cost up to 32,000 marks instead of the previous 20,000 to 22,000 marks. The outrage was considerable and reached far into circles close to the system. In the GDR, people paid for a car in cash. Many feared that they would not be able to afford a car in the future and that the sales price for the new Trabant would nearly double, increasing by about 18,000 to 20,000 marks. In fact, the new Wartburg came out in the basic version at a price of 30,200 marks. The indignation now even reached sections of the population who found the Sputnik ban less exciting, who found the environmental pollution less tragic, who were less concerned about the lies in the media in view of the Western media consumed. In other words, at the end of the 1980s, the crisis had become tangible and palpable to almost everyone. This did not escape the attention of the SED leadership. The party reacted to the “Wartburg crisis” with a long line of arguments.29 Experts calculated that the new engine would have twice the life expectancy (150,000 kilometers), use less fuel, and be less susceptible to damage, thus saving repair costs. The bottom line, they argued, was that the price was only higher at the moment and would pay for itself in five, ten, or fifteen years—depending on use. The party further argued that the billions of marks in subsidies for apartments, food, fares, and much more prevented the Wartburg from being sold cheaper. Of course, it failed to mention that the construction of the VW plant was about twice as expensive as if the Eisenach-based company had developed the new engine itself and modernized the facilities for it as well as the suppliers. Millions of people heard and read the official arguments in the weeks that followed the rollout. Car problems were on everyone’s mind. Laughing about it, rather sarcastically, contributed to the undermining of system stability, intensified the erosion processes, and undermined belief in the system’s legitimacy even in party circles. After all, despite the high price of new cars, little else had changed on the GDR car market. Slightly more than half of all households owned a car. More than 60 percent of private cars were more than ten years old. The resulting high demand for spare parts and repairs could not even begin to be met—to the indignation of motorists. People had to wait 12.5 to 17 years for a new car. Eighteen-year-olds in most families received two registration forms free of charge: a car order and registration for their “driving license,” which also took up to five years of waiting time “without connections.” (Quite a few received a third application from their mother or father—an application for admission to the SED). Car registrations were similar to valuables. When the date of purchase came closer, they could be sold; prices ranged from a few thousand to 40,000

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marks. A new car was automatically worth twice as much on the day of purchase—on the flourishing black market. A Trabant, for example, which had been bought for 10,000 marks, could still be sold for the original price after ten years. A used VW Golf fetched up to 60,000 marks. Many GDR boys longed to become car mechanics. The profession promised high social prestige, a high “additional” income, and diverse “relationships” as if by magic. Motor vehicle mechanics belonged to the aforementioned hall of kings. Do-it-yourself repair manuals were particularly hot commodities because the demand for repairs could not even begin to be met. Internal reports in the second half of the 1980s repeatedly mention that 50 percent of commercial vehicles on average were unfit to drive due to a lack of spare parts. Since well over half of the private cars were more than ten years old, they too had a high need for repairs. Corresponding literature enjoyed great popularity. If one bought a Trabi, one received a blue booklet with many useful tips. The first sentences were not meant ironically: The “Trabant” passenger car is no longer a newcomer on the roads of the German Democratic Republic or abroad. It has passed its practical test in all areas from the start of series production to the present day. It should be emphasized that the Trabant has achieved great success in national and international rallies, which has proved to the workers, technicians and engineers that the concept of the vehicle, which was the basis for series production, was correct. The “Trabant” model is a sleek, elegant and spirited vehicle in its class.30

Operating manuals with instructions for maintenance and repairs were accompanied by books that provided practical tips for eliminating any potential problems. These are interesting less in themselves than in the representation that struck the hearts of the proud Trabi owners. Not much could be done about the noise. One could actually only talk in a screaming voice at higher speeds. Experts wrote about the background noise of the Trabi in the classic Ich fahre einen Trabant: There’s always something rattling around on the Trabant. Sometimes it’s the heater silencer that bangs against the horn, sometimes the black floor pan underneath the bumper when its middle retaining screw has come loose, sometimes the exhaust system, whose retaining screws also tend to come loose, sometimes the plastic handle on the Hycomat’s gear lever, and so on. Nevertheless, you should soon find out what is actually rattling, as there may be serious causes behind it that require a quick remedy (in order to prevent the damage from getting worse).

This book teems with remarks that are based on reality. GDR cultural historiography has not yet discovered this and other such remote works.31 Even the scientific literature published in the first years after 1990, which was based on demoscopic surveys and secret analyses from GDR times, showed time and again that the mass rejection of the system was related to dissatisfaction with

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material living conditions, cultural offerings, an increasingly disrupted environment, inner-city disintegration, and many other system-related developments. These had intensified in the 1980s and made the rift between the GDR and the FRG seem ever deeper. The SED leadership was helpless against these developments. Honecker put it in a nutshell during the Wartburg crisis. The SED had promised to solve the housing problem “as a social issue” by 1990, but not that every family would have a car. The man did not lie. But the people oriented their needs not to SED promises but to their individual desires and to the shop windows of the FRG. The SED leadership had also issued an internal slogan for this in 1988: “That [party member] who succumbs to enemy agitation and demagogy, we will part with. He has forfeited the right to bear the honorary name of a communist. The same applies to whiners and eternal grumblers.”32 One year later, millions of whiners and grumblers parted not only from Honecker but also from the GDR.

“It Is a Mass Medium without Masses” When looking to the east, the population of the GDR could feel privileged and enjoy living materially at a high level. Only they were not oriented toward their friends in the east but toward their brothers and sisters in the West. They did not live in a magnetic field, at least not one that exerted forces of attraction from the east. These came from the west alone. The most important means of transporting these forces were the media—radio and television stations. They had it easy, as the GDR media were hard to beat in terms of boredom, monotony, and lack of imagination. The Hungarian writer and dissident György Dalos in his novel The Hide and Seek Player ends his protagonist’s visit to East Berlin in the late 1970s with a humorous nod to GDR media’s lack of entertainment value. Reading Neues Deutschland with dull reports of expressions of gratitude to the state and its leaders, he falls asleep.33 The GDR stations were extremely unpopular. Christoph Hein put it in a nutshell in 1982: “It is a mass medium without masses.”34 At the end of the 1980s, the radio media of the GDR offered almost all transmission formats that were also common in the West at that time. There were a few popular television programs like Außenseiter—Spitzenreiter (concerning bizarre hobbies and collecting passions), the Sandmännchen (for children), Ein Kessel Buntes (with international entertainers), Willi Schwabe’s Rumpelkammer (with old film sequences), Prisma (with critical contributions to everyday life), Telelotto, Die Flimmerstunde (children’s feature films), and other children’s and, of course, sports programs. Of the radio stations, recordings and radio plays were particularly in demand. Newspapers also had some popular columns: local news, advertising and exchange markets, and court reports. A number of weekly or monthly magazines were difficult to obtain. These included Neue Berliner Illustrierte (NBI),

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Eulenspiegel, Wochenpost, FF dabei, practic, Mosaik, Das Magazin, Frösi, Pramo, Sibylle, Guter Rat, the youth magazines Neues Leben and Melodie und Rhythmus and the bimonthly magazine Sinn und Form. The few over-the-counter copies of these publications were usually sold out within an hour. “In the written submissions, whose content shows an increasing tendency toward aggression, citizens express their lack of understanding of such situations. The reason for this is the increase in displeasure on the part of the sales staff of the postal newspaper sales force, who feel they are constantly confronted with customers but are unable to achieve a change in the situation.”35 In 1987, the Ministry of Posts announced internally that a general change was not to be expected before 1990. Media convey information. In the name of the SED and under its guidance, the media were part of the disinformation campaign. Once a week, the editors in chief of the CC of the SED were informed about the latest media policy guidelines and focal points. In many editorial offices there were unofficial notebooks, “taboo books,” in which journalists listed the terms and topics that were not to be used. If oats were scarce, nothing about horses was allowed to appear; if an agreement with France, Japan, or Sweden was about to be concluded, friendly articles about these states were to be published; other entries exhorted journalists not to turn the GDR “into a museum in the media!”36 The list was long and changeable. In a 1981 book about the GDR that led to diplomatic entanglements between the GDR and Great Britain, the British journalist Timothy Garton Ash wrote: “There are many obstacles to reporting the truth from a totalitarian state. It’s hopeless to want to hear it from the official media. What they have to convey as truth is always biased, that is, what is true today may already be false tomorrow. Nor is it at all the intention of the party newspaper to convey news. ‘Neues Deutschland’ is best understood as a combination of agitprop wall newspaper, political weather report and court gazette.”37 The media, as Günther Holzweißig famously noted, were among the “sharpest weapons of the party.” In autumn 1987, a member of the GDR television staff gave a lecture on “media policy” to MfS executives. The speaker was the editor in chief for foreign reports, Günter Herlt. Herlt argued that consciousness had to be created for people to act correctly: “But how many fellow citizens mix a hardto-digest coexistence cocktail in front of the screen in the evening and get on our nerves the next day with their hangover mood?” In the GDR media, two plus two was always four. In the Western media, it was always said that two plus two equals six. In GDR television, not too much “success propaganda” was broadcast. The GDR simply had successes, Herlt argued. He exhorted his audience to look at the Western media and how they reported on the forecasts of the five economic wise men every six months. “And the whole nation over there—from the chancellor to the lavatory attendant—is holding its breath, even if it turns out afterward that they were 50 percent wrong in their forecast—never mind! But it’s the five wise men. Question of price: How do we have to baptize our Politburo,

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because for 15 pennies in the ND they give us a scientific forecast for the next 5 years with the directive for the 5-year plan and are accountable for every number. If the guys are making a big fuss for 2.5 percent growth, then we must be able to open our mouths twice as wide at 4.6 percent—right?” He added, unrealistically, “But we don’t do that.” The media had to engage in tutoring the masses. If one were to report on a scarcity of spare bicycle parts in Suhl, the Stralsunders “would move to the next bicycle shop, buy up the rest of spare parts, and then they would have the mishap as well.” The GDR media had a duty to show everyone the advantages of socialism. The “media of imperialism, on the other hand, have a duty of secrecy. They must push away the essential facts of life so that the people do not know too much, do not recognize too much, do not intervene too much, so that the rulers can rule more undisturbed. . . . Now there’s no question what goes down better at the end of the day. . . .The annoying thing about our company”—he told GDR television—“is that all products are unfolded before the eyes of 17 million quality inspectors.” The opponent could, “when he comes through the back door of the emotional world, outline with his bottom what we have built up with our hands, if he just sings the little song about the little brother and sister, and all the Germans and shots at the wall . . . huh!” And he concluded: “Well, we do have the Wall—the most profitable building in the GDR.”38 The media functionary not only implicitly explained why the GDR media remained a blunt “weapon of the party,” he also painted a picture of GDR society that was unintentionally almost subversive in its unspoken arguments because he conceded that the West German media were far more attractive. If one wanted to learn about the conditions in the GDR, one could not avoid switching on West German television and radio stations. This led to the grotesque circumstance that GDR daily newspapers, as well as radio and television reports, were constantly reacting to Federal German programs and information without naming them. A very small part of the GDR population deliberately refrained from using West German media for political and ideological reasons. The proportion was supposed to have been much larger because this was expressly forbidden to members of the MfS, the MdI, the NVA, and a large part of the SED and state apparatus until 1987–88.39 At the beginning of the 1970s, Erich Honecker had publicly admitted that everyone knew that people were also receiving West German stations. In April 1988, he told the largest Danish daily newspaper that no one in the GDR was prevented from obtaining information from Western television and radio stations.40 Some regions in the northeast and southeast (popularly known as the “valley of the clueless”) were excluded from receiving German television channels because they had no signal. In many places, therefore, expensive community antennae were erected in the 1980s—mostly illegally—to remedy this problem. Only in East Berlin was the possibility of receiving West German television channels via community antennae in newly built apartments an expected amenity from the

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fall of 1976.41 Such inequalities increased people’s hatred of the “showcase of the republic” in many regions. In the south, especially, knowledgeable laymen and open-minded experts built community antennae. In Marienberg, one antenna provided reception for four thousand households, in Eppendorf sixteen hundred, and in Weißenberg thirty-five hundred, mostly with the support of local officials, even if this support merely consisted of their not hindering the construction. Thus, in 1988, the chairman of the council of the Marienberg district turned to the chairman of the council of the Karl-Marx-Stadt district and asked “in the interest of a sober assessment” to allow the privately built communal antenna, which had been erected between 1983 and 1985, to continue to exist. Elsewhere some had been shut down. The chairman defended his request on several occasions, pointing out that the “negative ideological influences” of the Western media should not be underestimated. “On the other hand, of course, I still remember that the removal of technical reception facilities does not improve the ideological attitude of citizens. You can also see programs with poor transmission quality.”42 In the second half of the 1980s, the districts of Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Halle, Leipzig, and Rostock began to accumulate petitions vehemently protesting the lack of West German television reception. Threats of terrorism were rare, but there were some. For example, the GDR Council of State once received a threatening letter made up of newspaper clippings stating that if the German radio and television programs could not be received in Dresden by a certain day, the Dresden television tower and the VHF station Löbau would be blown up.43 It did not escape the attention of state and party analysts that the proportion of applications to emigrate from these regions—with the exception of East Berlin— was above the national average. In spring 1988, intensive discussions took place within the SED management, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, the MdI, and the MfS on how to deal with the satellite programs in the future. On the one hand, they saw the dangers of the Western reception but they also calculated the risks of state repression. Any ban would only create new conflicts and promote illegal activities whose widespread effect the state would be powerless to prevent. In addition, within the framework of the UN, the Comecon and the CSCE process, satellite programs were to be promoted. The GDR could not close itself off from this development in the long term. Against this background, the SED Politburo decided on August 23, 1988: “Throughout the whole of the GDR, no action is generally taken by administrative means against the erection and operation of technical installations for the reception of television and radio programs broadcast by other states via satellite. The technical possibility of receiving such programs is not propagated.”44 Not even the last point could be upheld. Word of the decision got around. Precise building instructions, which had been published in trade journals and books as well as in do-it-yourself magazines since the mid-1980s under the guise

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of technical innovations “without ideological intent,” proved to be helpful. The debates in the governing bodies in 1987–88 remained sober and ideologically charged but also surprisingly rational in light of the Politburo decision. The leading comrades silently cleared what for decades had been a fiercely contested ideological battleground. They saw that they had lost this battle for the media. They hoped to soften up the restless masses, but this calculation did not pay off. In a dictatorship, every little loosening causes exactly the opposite. People’s needs are not satisfied but rather charged and increased.

Notes 1. The subheading quotation was an opinion expressed in a company in Anklam; source: IM “Diana Sommer,” 2. 6. 1988. BA, MfS, Ast. Neubrandenburg, KD Anklam 478, Bl. 2. 2. Stenografische Niederschrift des Treffens des Genossen Erich Honecker mit dem Sekretariat des Zentralrates der FDJ am 22. 12. 1988. BA, MfS, BdL 1100, Bl. 80. 3. André Steiner, “Zwischen Konsumversprechen und Innovationszwang. Zum wirtschaftlichen Niedergang der DDR,” in Weg in den Untergang. Der innere Zerfall der DDR, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch, Martin Sabrow (Göttingen, 1999), 156. 4. Ministerrat, Beschluss 132/I.37/89 vom 10. 11. 1989. BA, MfS, SdM 1506, Bl. 72–92. 5. For a detailed discussion, see Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz! 6. Universität Greifswald, Institut für Gerichtliche Medizin, an MfS, KD Greifswald, 22. 6. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Rostock, BV, A[uswertungs- und] K[ontroll]G[ruppe] 279, Bl. 288–91. 7. Reinhard Buthmann, Kadersicherung im Kombinat VEB Carl Zeiss Jena. Die Staatssicherheit und das Scheitern des Mikroelektronikprogramms (Berlin, 1997); Reinhard Buthmann, Hochtechnologien und Staatssicherheit. Die strukturelle Verankerung des MfS in Wissenschaft und Forschung der DDR (Berlin, 2000). 8. For a very informative discussion of this, see Christoph Wowtscherk, Was wird, wenn die Zeitbombe hochgeht? Eine sozialgeschichtliche Analyse der fremdenfeindlichen Ausschreitungen in Hoyerswerda im September 1991 (Göttingen, 2014). 9. MfS, KD Pritzwalk, Zusammenfassende Einschätzung der Reaktionen der Bevölkerung aus dem inoffiziellen Informationsaufkommen, 5. 11. 1985. BA, MfS, Ast. Potsdam, KD Pritzwalk 335, Bd. 1, Bl. 216. 10. The quotation in the subheading was a popular saying in the 1980s. 11. Konrad H. Jarausch, “Realer Sozialismus als Fürsorgediktatur. Zur begrifflichen Einordnung der DDR,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, supplement to “Das Parlament,” B 20 (1998): 33–46. See also Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-cultural History of the GDR (New York, Oxford, 1999). 12. Gunnar Winkler, ed., Sozialreport ’90. Daten und Fakten zur sozialen Lage in der DDR (Berlin, 1990), 336. 13. Monika Kohnert, “Pflege und Umgang mit Behinderten in der DDR,” in Materialien der Enquete-Kommission “Überwindung der Folgen der SED-Diktatur im Prozess der deutschen Einheit” (13. Wahlperiode des Deutschen Bundestages), ed. Deutschen Bundestag (Baden-Baden, 1999), vol. 3/2: 1779. 14. MfS, Leiter BV Rostock, Information Nr. 104/88, 3. 9. 1988. BA, MfS, ZAIG 14903, Bl. 2–3.

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

MfS, Leiter BV Rostock, Information Nr. 101/88, 31. 8. 1988. Ibid., Bl. 5. MfS, Leiter BV Rostock, Information Nr. 42/87, 25. 6. 1987. Ibid., Bl. 23–24. MfS, Leiter BV Rostock, Information Nr. 60/88, 5. 5. 1988. Ibid., Bl. 13. MfS, HA XX, Information zu einigen Problemen der quantitativen und qualitativen Sicherung der Arzneimittelproduktion in der DDR, 14. 11. 1988. BA, MfS, HA XX 7429, Bl. 168. MfS, ZAIG, Information über einige beachtenswerte Probleme der materiellen Versorgung des Gesundheitswesens der DDR, 14. 11. 1988. BA, MfS, ZAIG 3713, Bl. 1–8. Stenografische Niederschrift des Treffens des Genossen Erich Honecker mit dem Sekretariat des Zentralrates der FDJ am 22. 12. 1988. BA, MfS, BdL 1100, Bl. 69. One can read this strong rejection on the part of East Berlin in Peter Richter, 89/90 (Munich, 2015). Nevertheless, the author sometimes exaggerates, for example, when he suggests that Saxony would have been less susceptible to the SED dictatorship than “Prussia” (Berliners, Brandenburgers) or “Mecklenburgers.” By the way, they rather assumed that the dictatorship functioned above all because of Saxons and Thuringians, which was reflected (in their view) in the typical idiom of the functionaries. The subheading is a famous slogan of the independent environmental movement. This is the title of a world-famous 1972 study commissioned by the Club of Rome and written by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. E.g., BA, MfS, Ast. Neubrandenburg, BV, KD Röbel 86, Bd. 1. Urania is a scientific society dedicated to communicating recent scientific findings to a broad public founded in Berlin in 1888. Friedrich Engels, “Karl Marx,” in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke, vol. 19, 9th ed. (Berlin, 1987), 103. Printed in Ina Merkel, ed., “Wir sind doch nicht die Mecker-Ecke der Nation.” Briefe an das DDRFernsehen (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1998), 180. However, a more recent publication is Luminita Gatejel, Warten, hoffen und endlich fahren. Auto und Sozialismus in der Sowjetunion, in Rumänien und der DDR (1956–1989/91) (Frankfurt/M., New York, 2014). Zum neuen Wartburg. Informationen 1988/11, Nr. 252, 16 pp. (parteiinternes Agitationsmaterial). Betriebsanleitung für den PKW “Trabant,” 15th ed., Zwickau. Gerhard Klausing and Bodo Hesse, “Ich fahre einen Trabant.” Fahrzeugvorstellung, Fahrzeughandhabung, technische Durchsicht, Störungssuche und -beseitigung, nützliche Ergänzungen, 17th rev. ed. (Berlin, 1981), 97, 66–67. Zum einheitlichen und geschlossen Handeln der Mitglieder und Kandidaten der SED. Informationen 1988/4, Nr. 245, p. 4 (8 pp., internal party agitation material). György Dalos, Der Versteckspieler (Frankfurt, Leipzig, 1997), 240. Christoph Hein, “Öffentlich arbeiten (1982),” in Christoph Hein, Öffentlich arbeiten. Essais und Gespräche (Berlin, Weimar, 1987), 37. MfS, BV Dresden, Information Nr. 41/87 vom 8. 4. 1987 für SED-Bezirkssekretär Modrow. BA, MfS, ZAIG 14910, Bl. 9. Ulrich Bürger, Das sagen wir natürlich so nicht! Donnerstag-Argus bei Herrn Geggel (Berlin, 1990), 178. Timothy Garton Ash, “Und willst Du nicht mein Bruder sein. . . .” Die DDR heute (Hamburg, 1981), 14–15. N.N., Medienpolitik, n.d., BA, MfS, BdL 1100. Then the prohibition only applied in “communal accommodations.” This easing of the restriction, however, was not made publicly, nor were the family members of MfS, MdI, or NVA members officially informed of it. Reprint of the interview from “Jyllands Posten” in ND vom 21. 4. 1988.

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41. Oberbürgermeister Berlins an Bezirksbaudirektor: Schrittweise Umrüstung bestehender Gemeinschaftsantennenanlagen auf die erweiterten Empfangsbedingungen, 24. 10. 1976 (Abschrift). BA, MfS, SdM 1990, Bl. 49–50. 42. Vorsitzender des Rates des Kreises Marienberg an den Vorsitzenden des Rates des Bezirkes KarlMarx-Stadt, o. D. (1988). BA, MfS, SdM 1990, Bl. 70–71. 43. BV Dresden, Leiter, Androhung von Terrorakten, 24. 7. 1984. BA, MfS, BV, Bezirkskoordinierungsgruppe (MfS) 8065, Bl. 124–28. 44. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30 I IV 2/2/2290.

Chapter 4

NUANCES Regional Variations and Subcultures

S Most people were aware of the symptoms of crisis. But nobody could be sure that the crisis experienced in Greiz could also be observed in Wolgast. The media and the huge party and state apparatus made sure of this. They constantly suggested that problems existed only temporarily and locally. As long as the rulers did not call the crisis a crisis and took responsibility for the grievances (as in the run-up to June 17, 1953), many people remained uncertain, despite the Western media they consumed, whether life as they experienced it was typical or rather atypical. The SED leadership knew that very well. Its media policy, which the term whitewashing does not begin to adequately capture, resulted not from random whim but from the strategy of presenting the manifold symptoms of deficiency as individual rather than system-typical experiences. However, even in dictatorial states it is not possible to suppress all signs that the symptoms of crisis are not merely local or temporary phenomena. In the GDR, there were supraregional public spaces in which the crisis of power and society could be addressed. One must consider that in the final crisis of SED rule, not only did the binding forces of the system erode but the SED regime also was increasingly unable to recognize the symptoms of the crisis as such. What for many years had been advantageous to power—namely, to have bought and coerced the tolerance of the millions without using police terror as in the 1950s—now turned into a decisive disadvantage. This was because the disgruntled loyalty of millions now became destabilizing for the regime because they could no longer be mobilized. Just as millions had endured the SED regime more than they actively supported it for many years, they now watched with pleasure or displeasure as it disintegrated. And quite a few had already dreamed of the regime’s final downfall in the last Notes from this chapter begin on page 140.

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years of the GDR, even though it did not come about until 1989. In the period up to the fall of 1989, the SED was perceived more as an “in-between” power than a legitimizing and stabilizing one, and rather as a political counterforce seeking social alternatives.

The Art of Looking and of Looking Away Diagnosis and Literature Before and after 1989, the fictional texts published in the GDR were the subject of intense and diverse debate. The biggest misunderstanding is probably that these literatures should be grouped under the heading of “GDR literature.” As in any other country, there were a few lighthouses that outshone the others; now and then buoys appeared in the cone of light. The mass of published aesthetic literature remained unread—here too international normality prevailed. Yet three phenomena were unusual. First, a number of the most talented writers put themselves at the service of the system politically and ideologically. Second, there was a small but not insignificant group of authors who were neither allowed nor wished to publish officially in the GDR, either temporarily or for life. The works of these authors (or some of them) were published underground, in the Federal Republic of Germany or—applicable to only very few—not at all. And finally, about one hundred authors (many of whom were fairly important) from 1961 to 1989 went into exile or were driven into exile in Germany. Whether Hermann Kant, Wolf Biermann, Erik Neutsch, or Stefan Heym— authors only literary critics can list—these authors all stand for literature created in and with the GDR. The actual significance of literary production in the GDR resulted less from the works than from the way the state dealt with them, on the one hand, and the reading culture, on the other, in which readers often understood books as political statements. Such “reading between the lines” was not limited to newspapers and other media but also affected fiction to a large extent. For this reason, avid readers found passages in Hermann Kant’s books that did not seem to fit the writer, who publicly appeared to be a zealous SED functionary. And because truths were sometimes spoken in literature, unlike other media, it functioned as a kind of “substitute public sphere.” The publication of important Russian, Kyrgyz (Aitmatov), Ukrainian, Polish, and Hungarian, but also French, British, Spanish, American, and German authors further strengthened this function. There was a lot to read, but there was also a lot not worth reading. At the Tenth Writers’ Congress of the GDR in 1987, writer Christoph Hein forcefully pointed out that censorship in the GDR survived, was useless, paradoxical, misanthropic, anti-grassroots, illegal, punishable, and unconstitutional.1 When Hein’s speech in the GDR was published about a year later—copies and

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transcripts of the abridged speech had previously been circulated, for example, in the Hamburg weekly newspaper Die Zeit—it had become clear that a system that practiced censorship while publishing harsh words against it was about to come to an end. Hein’s attack on censorship became a model for a number of writers. SED and MfS spared neither cost nor effort to influence literary production. At times they were able to suppress publications, even unofficial ones, but they could not prevent them in principle. Rather, censorship culture contributed to the development and establishment of independent and sometimes subversive cultural milieus. The practice of censorship was part of this dictatorship of education and information. In the GDR, the public sphere was a “staged” or “controlled” space. Individual satirical magazines could not overcome this state of affairs; they merely made it worse. Censorship also extended to libraries, which were divided into accessible and nonaccessible areas. In the nonaccessible areas were so-called poison cabinets housing the books that could only be “used” with special permits. The GDR list of forbidden books was long. No one had a precise overview because— as paradoxical and yet systemic as it may sound—there were no lists of banned books at all. Items blacklisted today might be accessible to everyone tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow they might be prohibited again. And yet everyone knew what was allowed, what was “hot,” and what was forbidden. Nevertheless, some books published in the GDR prompted people to wonder whether the censor had been sleeping. These included, in particular, books from the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries, but also works by Sartre, Huxley, and Adorno/Horkheimer. When, for example, the social satire Saiäns-Fiktschen by Franz Fühmann appeared in 1981/82 in the Rostock Hinstorff publishing house and racked up several editions, readers agreed that the censor had not only been asleep but had probably not understood the content. One review published what all readers of Fühmann’s book inevitably thought: “Orwell’s ‘1984’ is without a doubt a related book.”2 Of course, this raises the question of why one would assume that readers knew George Orwell and his novel 1984, even though the author was proscribed and the book was strictly forbidden. Quite simply: Orwell’s books were in circulation because bans could only be enforced to a limited extent, especially within the German-German reading market. In the GDR, prohibited volumes did not even have to be translated first as in the other states of the Soviet Empire but merely smuggled across the border. Although this was not always successful, it succeeded often enough that almost any book could be read with a little imagination. One year after Hein’s incendiary speech, Klaus Höpcke, the deputy minister of culture who was responsible for publishing and literature, announced on October 12, 1988, at a nonpublic meeting of the executive board of the GDR writers’ association that from 1989 onward the “print approval procedure,” as censorship was nobly described, would be abolished. In the future, publishers

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would be able to decide for themselves what they wanted to print. Even today, some still believe that this was tantamount to the abolition of censorship in the GDR. But books by Wolf Biermann, Jürgen Fuchs, Robert Havemann, Rudolf Bahro, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, and Václav Havel, to name but a few common authors among a few thousand, seemed to remain prohibited. Höpcke remained the “minister of censorship,” also known as the “minister of book prevention,” as he was called on behalf of the censorship system practiced by the state.3 Höpcke’s secret revelation contained another interesting aspect, however. Just like the community TV antennae, it represented the state’s attempt to escape the historical impasse. But what was advertised as a 180-degree turnaround was actually a shift of only a few degrees, with no consequences for the SED regime. In an impressive study of the bimonthly magazine Sinn und Form, which was highly regarded in intellectual circles, the cultural scholar Matthias Braun showed how the paradoxical juxtaposition of censorship and the publication of unusual nuances excited intellectuals and destabilized the system on the one hand but, on the other, also tied regime-related circles to the system anew because, by loosening censorship, it aroused hope. Officially, the SED leadership condemned glasnost, but at the same time it allowed Sinn und Form to publish articles with impunity that dealt harshly with the Stalinist past and the practice of censorship. Although the distribution rate was low and the few thousand copies were coveted, what did it matter? As MfS minister Mielke supposedly asked: “Who reads this?”4 The journal’s effect was limited to small intellectual circles, which were rather unsuited to political counteractions. And yet Sinn und Form was also part of GDR reality. Many things in its pages are still revealing today, showing, above all, what was possible in the second half of the 1980s. Of course, this magazine also teemed with articles that were conformed politically and ideologically; Hager and Honecker had their say, as did their adepts. But that was acceptable. What was more interesting was the nuances. Two debates were held that did not necessarily belong in a literary journal but now clarify the special position of Sinn und Form, on the one hand, and, on the other, show that there was rumbling underneath its standardized surface as well as what that rumbling consisted of. The first was published in the last issue of the 1984 volume and revolved around science ethics as debated in the annual “Kühlungsborn Colloquia,” which internationally renowned molecular biologist and science ethicist Erhard Geißler had founded by the end of the 1960s.5 At these colloquia, natural scientists, ethicists, lawyers, sociologists, theologians, artists, and writers from East and West debated ethical questions in the sciences and humanities in an interdisciplinary dialogue. Geißler addressed questions of scientific ethics against the background of genetic research perspectives under the title “Bruder Frankenstein.” His thesis was that, for the sake of science and research, there could and should be no guidelines, nor ideological and ethical boundaries. Rather, he relied on scientific forces

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to self-regulate; moreover, he said, scientists had only limited, if any, competence and responsibility for the exploitation of research results. In several issues, intellectuals from East and West spoke out, contradicted, agreed with, supplemented, and presented new points of view. It was an exciting and open debate that initially touched on fundamental questions of humanity. Similar debates have been taking place worldwide ever since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945. What was special about this discussion, however, was the fact that the questions of the ethics of science in the GDR had a relatively large audience, without the authors invoking the usual “class positions” or using the “only scientific worldview” as a yardstick. It was an open discussion. If natural scientists were able to conduct such a debate on the present and the future, both of which were ideologically plural, then, critical minds concluded, such a debate must also be possible about the past. The second debate involved an essay titled “Revision of the Marxist Nietzsche Image?” by the historian of philosophy Heinz Pepperle, published in the fifth issue of Sinn und Form in 1987. For many years, Friedrich Nietzsche had been regarded as the intellectual pioneer of the National Socialists in the GDR (in this context, Georg Lukács’s “The Destruction of Reason” of 1952 had remained the key point of reference). Pepperle attempted a cautious revision that resulted in a Marxist historicization of Nietzsche’s work. The essay was part of efforts since the late 1970s to integrate once-ostracized historical figures such as Luther, Bismarck, and Friedrich II into the official historical picture of the GDR. The real debate only started when Wolfgang Harich published an essay under the same title exactly one year later. Harich was a philosopher with a jaunty pen— and a celebrity. Arrested at the end of 1956, he had been sentenced to ten years in prison in March 1957 for allegedly forming a counterrevolutionary group and was released in 1964. He soon commuted between East and West and followed developments almost everywhere but with confusion. He ruined his relationships with all his patrons as he was highly intelligent but apparently lacked social intelligence. Only insiders knew this before 1989, but in 1987 even those who had not known him before could guess that something was wrong with him. One side of the essay was probably still acceptable for many. He demonized Nietzsche without any reservation and made him jointly responsible for the historical rise of National Socialism and its mentality. But the other side of his philippic generated horror even among those who still followed him in the demonization of Nietzsche. He unequivocally spoke out in favor of bans on thinking and reading, using Stalinist templates for thought and language with only one goal in mind: no changes, revisions, reinterpretations—not only was philosophy in danger but the socialist system as such was as well. For Nietzsche and other early or late bourgeois thinkers, only the following could apply—with the help of a Brecht quote: “Into nothingness with him!”6 These arguments did not remain only in Harich’s copies but were perceived far beyond the borders of the GDR.

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Several writers and philosophers rejected his argumentation as late Stalinist. Among them was the bourgeois philosopher Rudolf Schottlaender, living in East Berlin, who did not want to follow Pepperle or Harich completely but brought a third reading of Nietzsche into play. And as in the ethics debate, Sinn und Form had managed to spark an open, pluralistic discussion that undermined the allegedly exclusivity of the only scholarly worldview. The two debates made Sinn und Form a diffident glasnost organ in the midst of the SED dictatorship. The SED leadership was ill-advised in terms of maintaining its power to allow their publication, despite the notoriously low circulation of the magazine. Sinn und Form was one of those pebbles that, when thrown into the water, generated ripples that spread farther and farther. And it was by no means just these two debates. In 1985 Volker Braun published an essay in which GDR socialism was called “History on the Siding.” He saw the only way out as democratic elections; only they could give new hope. In the GDR, there was only life with the brakes on, but no more hope.7 A little later Heiner Müller added in an interview: “What we need is more utopia. And this is endangered, the utopia here. Above all, the desire for utopia is in danger of being paralyzed by everyday life, and one has to be careful. You must not let this will be taken away from you.”8 Later, after 1990, he would say that the GDR primarily interested him as “material” for his work. Shortly after the “Sputnik ban,” the editors of Sinn und Form reacted quietly by publishing a text by Johannes R. Becher, who had originally been an avant-gardist who then went into Soviet exile and later became a state-supporting poet and functionary and the first minister of culture in the GDR. He had died in 1958 at the age of sixty-seven. Word got around that he had been torn up inside, suffering from drug addiction, which several suicide attempts testified to. Now in 1988, under the simple title “self-censorship,” Sinn und Form published a text that proved what had been rumored. Becher had truly been torn in two. After the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU, at which party leader Khrushchev reinforced the cautious destalinization that had already begun with a famous secret speech9 and called a few of the mass crimes by name, Becher wrote down his anguish for posterity. Many loyal communists were horrified by Khrushchev’s revelations, which millions knew from their own experience. Becher wrote: “I not only suspected, oh, I knew!” In 1988, the SED leadership was busy covering up the disclosure of Stalin’s historical crimes. And Sinn und Form printed Becher: “The fundamental error of my life was the assumption that socialism would end human tragedies and mean the end of human tragedy itself. . . . It is as if with socialism human tragedy had begun in a new form, in one that is new, completely unexpected and as yet unimaginable to us. Socialism has only set human tragedy free. In it, tragedy has, as it were, transcended and exaggerated itself, and announces not a ‘happy future,’ as it is generally said, but an age whose tragic content cannot be compared to any of the preceding ones.”10 Sinn und

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Form did not leave it at that; each issue contained small sensations, such as texts by Alexander Tvardovsky, Czesław Miłosz, or Anna Achmatowa, the ostracized poet who lent her voice to the victims of communist terror. A number of independent publications also reflected the crisis, such as works by de Bruyn and Heiner Müller. Volker Braun always took a critical look at real socialism but remained true to the utopia project. In 1988 he finished working on the prose text “Bottomless Sentence.” Not only was the landscape destroyed but the socialist ideals were worn out and no longer had any traction; GDR socialism appeared in his work without a future or hope. As in the abovementioned debate on questions of the ethics of science, many authors in the 1980s took up the topic of environmental destruction and, at the same time, extended their diagnosis to the whole of society. Monika Maron’s 1981 novel Flugasche (Flight of Ashes) is formally about the “dirtiest city in Europe” (Bitterfeld) and a young woman’s attempts at emancipation, but at the same time it paints a picture of a bleak and futureless society. In the literary diaries of Hanns Cibulka, such as Swantow (1982) and Seedorn (1985), there is neither a belief in progress nor hope of escaping the impasse on the chosen path against the background of environmental destruction, the diseases resulting from it, and the dangers of nuclear energy. The book’s global message is that a revolution is needed that overcomes all existing paradigms. Christa Wolf’s writing is even more moralistic. With the diary Störfall (Accident: A Day’s News, 1987), she reacts to the Chernobyl disaster. The atomic cloud makes it clear that the borders between East and West are artificial. Although the author seems to believe in a paradisiacal primeval state of mankind, this natural romanticism has long since been lost to her. Her former belief in progress has turned into deep criticism of civilization and evolution. Her book is marked by skepticism about science and technology. Both may seem morally insane, but in a system that defined itself as scientifically sound, readers interpreted such statements as rejections of their own political present. When Christa Wolf’s prose text Sommerstück (Summer play) finally came out in 1989, critics and attentive readers were well aware of the island location of the idyll of family and friends she had drawn. The society surrounding this island, the GDR, no longer seemed to be livable. No other published author, however, rejected the GDR and its promise for the future as clearly as Christoph Hein. What Wolf, Braun, de Bruyn, Cibulka, Müller, and others stated unambiguously and yet somehow hidden and abstract, Hein unmistakably stated outright. From the late 1970s he was considered a particularly interesting playwright, and from 1982 he was also internationally acclaimed for his prose texts (“Der fremde Freund/Drachenblut” [The distant lover], “Horns Ende” [The end of horn]). His journalistic work was highly appreciated. At the MfS, Hein’s works were considered “clearly hostile.”11 In Hein’s work, one could no longer read anything about a future of the present. Writing in this way, he pointedly opposed the historical view of the rulers. For example, the story “The Tango Player” published in 1989 made it

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clear that the ideas of 1968—“democratic socialism”—were worn out. In the comedy “The Knights of the Round Table,” Hein went one step further. The Staatsschauspiel Dresden performed the play in the spring of 1989.12 Contrary to all fears, the SED did not cancel it. The author seemed to be too famous, the theater seemed too united, and the local rulers, all the way up to SED district secretary Modrow, supported the artistic commitment of the director and his staff. Minister of Culture Hoffmann countered the MfS by saying that Hein was one of the most important, talented, and internationally known authors and criticized the “alleged censorship” very sharply. Hoffmann claimed a ban on the play could lead to Hein’s departure, and it would be too great a shame to lose him. Everything had been discussed with the Central Committee. The minister was playing a trick because Ursula Ragwitz, the head of the responsible CC cultural department, knew nothing. In Hein’s play, the young, rebellious Mordred calls out to his father Arthur: “Your Grail is a phantom that you have chased after all your life. A fantasy for which you banged your heads bloody. Look at your Grail knights. Distraught, discontented, helpless old men suing life.” But Mordred doesn’t just think the Grail is a fantasy. Even wanting to find the Grail, he thinks it’s “a terrible idea. . . . An endless stream of happiness that would make one sick.” Lancelot is the first of the Knights of the Round Table to realize that their hour has come: “To the people, the Knights of the Round Table are a bunch of fools, idiots and criminals.” In the end, Arthur tells Mordred that the Round Table does not understand what he wants. Mordred replies: “I don’t know myself. But all this, I don’t want this.” Arthur realizes that his son Mordred wants to take him and his table to the museum. That first creates room to breathe. Arthur: “‘I’m scared, Mordred. You’re gonna destroy a lot.’ Mordred: ‘Yes, Father.’ END.”13 Probably only the Neues Deutschland reviewer managed to recognize in Arthur the hero and in Mordred the “dropout” who is “negligently willing to give up . . . what was fought for and won with difficulty. In this way, he makes us aware that it is only from living faithfulness to the ideal that legitimacy and strength for necessary changes arise.”14 In the end, is it possible that even a theater critic in the SED central organ deliberately misunderstood the work in order to save the performance from being banned?

News on Stages and Screens In 1988, there were about two hundred theaters in the GDR, which were frequented by almost ten million visitors. Although the number of venues was constantly increasing, the number of visitors dropped by almost half between 1960 and 1980 and then remained fairly constant. The number of cinema seats had dropped by half between 1960 and 1980, and in 1988 there were just over eight hundred cinemas boasting around seventy million visitors, a third of the 1960

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figure. The triumphant advance of television was responsible for these developments. From the mid-1970s almost every household had a receiver, and in the 1980s there were statistically two receivers in each. Even though the importance of theater and cinema declined, they remained affordable for almost everyone due to high subsidies and the resulting low admission prices. Theaters were not hotbeds of opposition but centers of critical thought. This was reflected in many repertoires in the 1980s. Plays by local authors like Christoph Hein met the zeitgeist of the crisis-ridden “transitional society” (which is the title of a play by Volker Braun). In Heiner Müller’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee, an edition of Neues Deutschland was burned at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin in 1988. In addition, there were stirring performances of plays by Soviet, West European, and North American authors that met the East German zeitgeist. It was clear that theaters were pushing limits more and more, they were bringing politically unruly things onto the stage, and bans only led to temporary blockades—even plays that had been banned for years or decades were now being performed. The production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Dresden Staatsschauspiel in 1987 is symbolic of this. The Irish writer wrote the play in 1948/49; it was first performed in 1953 in Paris, where Beckett lived. For many years, Beckett, who belonged to the French resistance, was considered a symbol of bourgeois decadence in the GDR. The Dresden performance was therefore a small sensation. Godot seemed to stand for the promise of communist ideals, where one waited without knowing exactly what for, where one’s own passivity turned into the grotesque. In the play, Beckett seemed to describe the GDR without ever having entered it and even before it existed. Audience and actors alike absorbed not only such productions but also classic performances. When Friedo Solter staged Goethe’s Egmont at the Deutsches Theater in 1986 with the young Ulrich Mühe in the leading role, most of the audience and the German critics agreed that the special thing about the production and the actor’s performance lay in the unmistakably critical references to the present. A creative and independent, albeit small, “free theater landscape” also developed outside of official theater culture. Alternative theater groups sprang up almost everywhere, developing deliberately in an experimental and avant-garde manner alongside official channels. Werner Theuer (ETA), for example, wrote his own avant-garde plays in the 1970s and early 1980s and performed them with friends and like-minded people in an independent theater without a fixed stage. Often it was not the content that was political but merely the fact that people had organized outside of official cultural structures and implemented their productions on their own, which made them difficult for the state to control. This is where a second, independent culture emerged; while this was particularly prominent in literature, music, and painting, it even existed in the field of film. This second culture permeated the entire country and was not bound to urban centers.

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In the theater sector, the group “Zinnober” (meaning “cinnabar”), formed by artists in 1980, played a special role as a trendsetter. A small rehearsal room at Kollwitzplatz in Prenzlauer Berg was its domicile, kitchen, and work center. Famous actors stopped by; Heiner Müller supported it; and the tenants above the rooms, cultural scholar Wolfgang Thierse and art historian Irmtraud Thierse followed the troupe with interest. Zinnober abolished the difference between everyday life and theater. “Zinnober was a foreign body with no connection to existing institutional structures or their laws. In this sense, Zinnober, as an autonomous group, was alien to the system, it had no prerequisites, it was anti-social and not socially acceptable. It did not fit into the existing social space. When it started using its rehearsal room as a space for public performances, there was a constant threat of police eviction.” The practical consequences of such an existence were almost obvious: “No tax office could calculate the taxes of a free group; no law provided for even the slightest provision for such a case. . . . While each individual member of the group had both a performance permit and a tax number with the tax office, it was the existence as a group that was in principle not juridical.”15 One of the heads of Zinnober, Günther Lindner (1948–2021), a theologian and puppeteer, later remembered that the group was, above all, an alternative way of life, whose great success was based on independence.16 After its de facto recognition in 1985 and guest performances in the West from 1987 onward, the group’s structure gradually dissolved, although its nimbus had not been completely exhausted. When the Wall came down, a new chapter began, now under the name “Theater o. N.” (that is, Theater without a Name). But the group’s example set a precedent in the 1980s. Zinnober was only an example—nationally the best known—of artistic emancipation beyond party and state structures. On October 4, 1985, East Berlin writer Lutz Rathenow said in a Radio in the American Sector telephone interview: “And in the fact that there is an increasing number of players, people interested in playing, who also want to do something outside of the institution of theater, perhaps there is a parallel to what can be seen in the [East German] peace movement, that there is a growing need for a form of activity that is not organized from above, perhaps not by the church from above.”17 In contrast to literature, theater, painting, and music, the film industry offered less leeway for independent structures. The high production costs, the large number of necessary competitors, and the lack of profitable screening possibilities limited independent film art to Super 8 and video formats. Although an avant-garde film scene did develop, its charisma and sphere of influence remained limited in comparison to other alternative art scenes.18 In contrast, official cinema policy in the 1980s was characterized by a cautious opening up as audience numbers stagnated. Individual box office hits from Hollywood came into the cinemas as well as German hits such as Loriot’s Oedipussi (1988) and Otto Waalke’s Der Film (1985), in both cases at the same time as in the Federal Republic of Germany. In addition, DEFA and GDR television, which never

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shied from criticizing their circumstances, produced their own films. Lothar Warnecke’s Die Beunruhigung (1982) addressed social stagnation using the example of a single mother. Heiner Carow’s Coming Out (1989) was dedicated to homosexuality, a taboo subject in the GDR. All non-cisgender individuals were considered social outsiders. The film sketched homosexuals’ processes of self-discovery and self-assertion and, against the concrete social backdrop of the GDR, stimulated reflection on individual political emancipation. Even Einer trage des anderen Last (1987), directed by Lothar Warnecke, discussed a topic that had been largely ignored in the GDR: state and church, Christian faith, and communist convictions. The two terminally ill protagonists manage to come to an understanding without giving up their basic convictions. The communist ultimately survives because the Christian leaves him his medicines sent from the West, without the former knowing it. Insel der Schwäne by Herrmann Zschoche (1982) tells of childhood and youth and, above all, of a standardized, boring life in an estate of prefabricated housing. Junge Welt and Neues Deutschland ranted: “This is not our world!” In the DEFA documentary Flüstern und Schreien (1988), punk groups and their fans whose existence the authorities denied are given a voice. A final example: Erwin Stranka’s comedy Zwei schräge Vögel (1989) takes a look at the GDR working world and GDR computer technology. Cinemagoers really enjoyed the humor—hardly comprehensible today—at the expense of the ailing and unstable state of GDR industry; it was merely laughable. The film was released in September 1989.

“Everything Will Be Better, but Nothing Will Be Fine”: Youth Cultures “Seeing the Same Country for Too Long” The SED had always understood its “GDR” project as a vision of the future. The communists’ ideology was strongly based on historical determinism and teleological prophecies because they presented the efforts of the present as historically grounded and, at the same time, promised a bright future. Countless books from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s explained the communist paradise that lay in the future—only wafer-thinly separated from the present—to children and young people. Communism seemed attainable, but strangely enough, even in the predictions of the ideology watchmen, it always remained equidistant from its own present. Honecker’s accession to power in 1971 seemed to bring the future a little closer again. A few years later, after Biermann’s expatriation in 1976, this hope was also dashed for many. In the 1980s, the GDR resembled a gerontocracy, and not only in the SED Politburo. Practically all career paths were blocked. This precipitated discontent and undermined prospects even among

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middle-aged party cadres. This was another reason why everything collapsed so quickly in 1989 and why so many people rose up against what they had apparently defended so bravely just the day before. But it hit the youth hardest. The former hope of the system had become its greatest threat. Young people in the GDR could no longer relate to the myth of the nation’s difficult beginning. They could not and did not want to enjoy the fact that they did not have to experience postwar hunger, and they selected their heroes not from the antifascist struggle but from popular culture—their heroes wore jeans, had long hair, and made loud music. And their jeans could also be leather pants, tattered pants, or no pants at all. Long hair could be dyed, and hair standing on end and even shaved heads belonged to this scene. GDR youth cultures were oriented toward Western models. Young people had it rough because the old men and, often enough, their own parents had no interest in such fashions. In the West, society always managed to integrate even the craziest youth at some point, at least for commercial reasons, yet the East did not work that way. Perhaps punks brought this difference most aptly to the point. They turned the Western “no future” into “too much future.” In the age of the Iron Curtain, youth cultures knew no state borders. The borders they came up against were initially the same in the cultural history of East and West. In the East, tolerance of subcultural movements was always only possible after they had sometimes been harshly persecuted, criminalized, and culturally outlawed. They never became official symbols. This mostly corresponded with the “healthy popular feeling” of the masses, who, seemingly allergic to tattered parkas, men with long hair and tight leather clothes, braless women, home-sewn clothes, and shrill, loud, incomprehensible music, called for state intervention. The most peculiar phenomenon in the small GDR was probably hitchhiking. Why hitchhike in a country whose transport costs were extremely low and whose motorways and highways were constantly coming to an end? Hitchhiking was a worldview, nothing more. With Jack Kerouac in their scanty luggage, tramps could tour around their own village as a way of taking a grand tour into the realm of imaginary freedom. And then a few times a year, they could go as far as Prague, Budapest, Bratislava, and Brno to the hidden anti-discotheque Jethro Tull concerts, to Poznan and Krakow (if it happened to be possible), to the high mountains in Bulgaria or Romania, or to the Black Sea. Especially talented tramps also made it to the Baltic states, the Caucasus, or Tajikistan. But such long treks were only for very audacious people who were not deterred by Soviet or East German threats of punishment: hitchhiking was forbidden at all times, so it required a lot of imagination and resourcefulness.19 Protestant churches took up the cause of these young people who had been ostracized by the SED state as early as the early 1970s, developing the concept of “open work.” They offered those who did not fit into the official youth policy because of their otherness or who consciously distanced themselves from it a

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meeting place to find self-fulfillment. In the 1980s, these places were no longer sufficient, and a considerable number of adolescents and young adults said goodbye to the GDR as a future project. Punks, skinheads, rockers, ecofreaks, peaceniks, and others belonged to the everyday phenomena of urban agglomerations. To be sure, all these dropouts remained in the minority in percentage terms; the large majority of young people continued to march in step, and did so symbolically as late as October 6, 1989, at the torchlight procession of the FDJ in East Berlin. More young people cheered at this event than at the oppositional counterdemonstrations. Even so, over the course of the 1980s, more and more young people openly turned away from the system. Internally, youth researchers, youth functionaries, SED officials, senior police officers, and MfS officers pointed this out repeatedly. The party’s standby army, as the active FDJ members were called until the end, dwindled noticeably. GDR socialism had lost its future basis in the 1980s. The more fragile it became, the more the regime made an effort to use statistics to prove that young people were occupying responsible offices, functions, and posts to an unprecedented degree. A great deal has been written and debated about school systems and the enslavement of young people in schools even before 1933. There are numerous examples of schools being described as slave ownership systems. Not only in Germany but practically everywhere school has at some point been synonymous with oppression. At the beginning of the 1990s, the East German psychotherapist Hans-Joachim Maaz summed up his experiences in a much-discussed book that dealt with the GDR: “Schools were the breeding grounds of the nation.”20 There was no uprising against these conditions until the very end. The schools and teaching institutions were still functioning in the autumn of 1989, and only after the fall of the Wall did they also collapse because a significant proportion of the teaching staff—but, above all, the school system as a whole—had lost credibility and legitimacy. Every year, youth researchers, sociologists, criminologists and, not least, MfS officers carried out independent “youth analyses” to assess the extent to which the officially conveyed values had been accepted. Each year, they determined that these values were accepted less and less and were meeting with ever stronger criticism. The situation in urban centers, in particular, worsened from year to year. In the mid-1980s, pupils tried to form representative councils independent of the FDJ from time to time, but this was stopped, as were their efforts to publish independent pupil magazines. Young people’s willingness to go to the NVA for more than 1.5 years decreased rapidly, so planned quotas could no longer be achieved. Similarly, more and more young men withdrew their original commitment to join the army as temporary soldiers, professional NCOs, or career officers for ten or twenty-five years. The official peace ideology was not getting through to them. In many basic FDJ organizations, young Christians took over leading positions, considerably softening the ideology. Particularly in southern and southeastern GDR districts, more and more young people took

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part in religious instruction outside of schools once again. The SED observed with concern that young people were increasingly calling into question premilitary training at schools, vocational schools, and universities, and ever more of them were refusing to shoot. There were only a few thousand of these a year, but they were present in practically every school class, which, in turn, gave rise to debate and imitation. At the beginning of 1989, a school class in East Berlin rejected air rifle shooting in honor of a GDR border guard shot at the Wall on the grounds that one could not “shoot for honor” to pay tribute to a person who had been shot.21 Every year, the number of those who totally refused to participate in the NVA weapons service, accepting up to two years imprisonment as a result, also increased, as did the number of those who opted to join the unarmed construction soldier service, a nucleus of the opposition and a “legal concentration of enemy forces.” One can see how politicized conscientious objectors in the GDR had become in an anecdote from 1988, in which a regional representative from Schwerin, in a gag, demanded at a general meeting of conscientious objectors that the GDR be abolished. “Most hands went up with great laughter.”22 The GDR youth undermined official state doctrine less by spectacular actions than by its orientation toward the West. The East Berlin rock band Pankow captured the GDR youth’s attitude toward life in 1988 in its song “Langeweile” (Boredom) on the much-heard LP Aufruhr in den Augen (Tumult in their eyes). It says, among other things: “Seeing the same country too long / hearing the same language too long / waiting too long / hoping too long / worshiping the old men too long / running around too much / running around too much / running around too much / but nothing happened.”

“Let’s Be Good” Since the beginning of the 1980s, small subcultures had emerged that the state was quite powerless to address. Especially in East Berlin, but also in Leipzig, Dresden, Halle, Magdeburg, Potsdam, and some other cities, punks and skinheads appeared in the cityscape. Initially, left and right were hardly distinguishable, and there were migratory movements between the two groups, which only gradually subsided in the mid-1980s. While their number always remained small, their impact increased from year to year. Until the second half of the 1980s, the police, state security, and youth researchers still had problems keeping the two groups apart. Only from 1987 to 1988 did they manage to succeed in this. “Punks” and “skins,” as they were called, were united in their rejection of the state and their environment, as well as in their adherence to radical, alternative concepts. At the same time, such “fads” were regarded as of Western origin, only having meaning within that decadent society. Punks mostly wanted “anarchy,” or what they understood it to be. Skins, on the other hand, wanted a strong Greater German state and glorified National Socialism, and they hated the GDR

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just as much as they rejected and beat up punks. Both groups included a few thousand open supporters, but the number of sympathizers was much higher. A criminologist and sociologist at the Humboldt University, Loni Niederländer, after evaluating extensive trial and interrogation documents on behalf of the MdI/MfS in 1988, noted that practically every young person under twenty-five in the GDR knew about the Punks and Skins and talked about them with peers, while older people rarely noticed these youth subcultures; their children would not talk about it with them. She saw a great danger in this: young people were dealing with topics and events that older people had no access to.23 But such experts saw another development that seemed far more threatening. While the social importance of punks was declining in the 1980s, that of skins and their ideology was steadily increasing. If we were to diagnose an outright decline of punk culture, however, we would miss the point historically. First, as in the West, numerous cultural markers of punks found their way into other cultural phenomena. Secondly, the impulses of punk rock music in the 1980s were also taken up in many other musical genres. In the 1980s, music groups formed whose names alone already indicated that they would be difficult to integrate into official cultural policy, such as Anti-Trott, Bolshevik Kurkapelle, DekaDance, Democratic Consumption, the Expander of Progress, the others, Freygang, Danger Zone, Autumn in Beijing, Germ Time, Eastern Front, Pink Extra (as women’s sanitary napkins were called), Slimegerm, Skeptics, Angry, Decay, Anger, and Useless. The editor in chief of Junge Welt Hans-Dieter Schütt reacted accordingly: “Tell me what you call yourselves and I will tell you who you are.”24 The songwriters did not seem to care about censors, and most of these groups did not care about acquiring an official playing permit. Again and again, individual bands were banned and individual band members were arrested. The songs were about the longings of young people, about the Wall, the Stasi, freedom, love, and fun. In the beginning, these bands played mainly in churches, private homes, and backyards, but more and more they also often played in youth clubs or at street festivals. Afterward, there was usually trouble. For example, when Autumn in Beijing played in Altentreptow in May 1988, the first secretary of the FDJ district leadership demanded the group be banned. The head of the culture department of the FDJ district management replied on June 9, 1988, “that under today’s conditions it is not a solution to ban these bands administratively, to not allow them to make music or to express themselves.”25 One year later, Autumn in Beijing was nevertheless banned when the group publicly expressed solidarity with the Beijing students. It had long been a cult among critical young people. In the summer of 1989, the band wrote a song processing Ulbricht’s famous statement from the Second SED Party Congress in 1952, when he announced the “building of the foundations of socialism.” A recording of Ulbricht was sampled in the song, which included these lyrics: “One will drag the red gods / many who don’t understand that. /

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The idolater pisses himself / It’s so easy to be human. / / We live in the Bakshev Republic / and there is no victory. / Black red gold is the system / tomorrow it will sink. . . . The idolater is pissing himself / it could have been all wrong.” Those in power showed themselves powerless in the face of this music and youth culture. So they tried to do something not in line with their usual strength: to participate in this new, alternative music scene. For example, youth radio DT 64 regularly broadcast the program Parocktikum since 1986. Music groups that no longer had anything to do with “socialist culture” were also played on this program, which even prompted Christopher Tannert to recommend in the Samizdat: “Just listen to GDR radio.”26 But this recommendation only applied to these and a few other broadcasts. In April 1987, an editor of DT 64 was supposed to have said to the youth that she did not even listen to the program herself. Her driver literally specified: “Nobody listens to this shit from us anyway, not even the editors.”27 Amiga produced two samplers with songs of these “other bands.” Some bands had produced records already in 1989 that didn’t hit the stores until 1990 or later, if at all. Some of these bands received coveted passports to be able to perform in the West, also with the hope that they would not return to the GDR. The most famous of these bands, not the most radical, was Feeling B. It consisted of Aljoscha Rompe, who died on November 23, 2000, at the age of fifty-three. In addition, Christian Lorenz, known as “Flake” (b. 1966), and Paul Landers (b. 1964) also played in the band. Both have been members of Rammstein since 1994. Feeling B, like “other” bands, provided its members and fans with a way to live in the GDR without adapting to mainstream society. Aljoscha Rompe was a chaotic, powerful, and versatile person, the adopted son of CC member Robert Rompe. He was a dogmatist par excellence, dogmatically ready for world changes, at least those that were the exact opposite of what the ruling dogmatists and those who ruled the country wished for. Environmental activist Carlo Jordan, who occupied a house in Prenzlauer Berg with Rompe in the 1980s, believes that Aljoscha Rompe was the Klaus Störtebeker of punk. Others believe that Feeling B played the music to accompany the fall of the GDR (“We always want to be good / Because that’s the only way we’re liked, / Everyone lives his life all alone / And that’s why we split the stars”). Feeling B radiated a desire for boundless freedom in the often bleak, uniform concrete communism à la the GDR. In this subculture there was no more fear. The state was the enemy. Feeling B did not see itself as a political band; it did not call for a coup d’état, but hardly any other band did that either. To the arrogant state functionaries, it didn’t matter what people thought of themselves as. The sovereignty to decide about it lay elsewhere. Feeling B was a synonym for resistance to dictatorship, for the joy of overcoming dictatorship. In this respect, the band not only accompanied the fall of the dictatorship musically but also helped prepare this fall in its own way. Feeling B contributed to the demise of louder punk

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songs: “Mix me a drink / that will take me somewhere else / I don’t want to stay / any more under these corpses / that give me their soft hands / I don’t want to stay / any more under these corpses / that give me their soft hands.” Even though there were such bands in many places in the GDR, the main center was in East Berlin. This city harbored not only the centers of power and, consequently, a particularly large number of actors who bore the system up but also the centers of counterculture.28 Other areas of art were not so concentrated in East Berlin, and this was true of avant-garde music and subversive youth cultures. The reasons are obvious. First, the indirect and direct communication and procurement channels in Berlin were cheaper across borders than elsewhere. Second, along with Leipzig and Dresden, the metropolis of Berlin offered many hiding places in run-down areas with old buildings. In East Berlin there were simply more opportunities to go underground than in smaller cities. Twice as many people lived in East Berlin as in the second largest city, Leipzig. East Berlin was the only really big city in the GDR, with many well-established traditions. Nowhere else could one find the anonymity of the big city as easily as here. Third, East Berlin, as a “showcase of the republic,” was the preferred terrain for investment. The shops here were less poorly filled than elsewhere. The cultural offerings were much broader and more complex than in any other city; there were more theaters, cinemas, and clubs, along with more artists and those who thought they were. East Berlin was also an ideal breeding ground for independent, emancipatory endeavors. It goes without saying that people in the rest of the GDR did not take kindly to the preferential treatment of East Berlin. Archival records are full of complaints about these conditions. For example, a church employee from Barth complained that there was a “class of Berliners” in the GDR; another man said that Berlin was “exploiting the entire GDR.”29 Fourth and finally, due to the presence of Western media representatives and international diplomats in East Berlin, far more was politically possible there than elsewhere. Correspondents were free to move around East Berlin, whereas travel to other cities had to be registered and approved in advance.

“Born in the GDR” As part of the celebrations for Berlin’s 750th anniversary, a rock festival was held in West Berlin over the long Pentecost weekend, from June 6 to 8, 1987, in front of the Reichstag. Numerous international stars performed, who also had fans in the East. The GDR youth was Western oriented, listened to Western music, and paid horrendous sums on the black market for records that were not available in the GDR. And since only a few, hard-to-get acquisitions were licensed on Amiga—about one hundred Western records in twenty-five years—the illegal market flourished. West Berlin’s music stations RIAS II and SFB 2 were the most important sources of music information for young people, and it was

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through them that many found out about the concerts in front of the Reichstag. Hundreds of GDR citizens made a pilgrimage to the east side of the Brandenburg Gate in the evening. They were not able to see the musicians, but they could hear them. And the musicians knew that they were there; some, like David Bowie, greeted their fans in the East. The Wall and the closed-up Brandenburg Gate provoked the fans, who shouted “The Wall must go” and “Gorbi, Gorbi,” sang the “Internationale,” and scolded “fascists.” The state security and the police cracked down on these fans, beating, arresting, and humiliating them. Every evening more fans came, with three to four thousand attending by the third day. Western media representatives documented exactly what happened, and some were injured themselves. The GDR opposition had been as surprised as the SED leadership by these spontaneous protests against the SED system, the Wall, and the lack of freedom. Roland Jahn commented on June 10: “The eco- and peace groups [in East Berlin] seem to be missing a bit of reality with their work; otherwise they would not have been so surprised by what happened.” And Wolfgang Templin wrote in the West Berlin tageszeitung on June 12: “It is precisely because there is no concept, no developed consciousness and no program behind it that this outbreak is to be taken so seriously.” In other words, East German society was longing for freedom and democracy more than could be perceived on the boring surface. Konstantin Wecker greeted thousands of fans on June 13 at the press festival of Neues Deutschland, of all places, exclaiming that he was happy to be able to play in East Berlin in front of an unselected audience, all the more so since those in the audience—he called them “you”—had sung the Song of Freedom at the Wall a few days prior. The fans celebrated with him for over three hours in the pouring rain, after which they once again chanted “The Wall must go!” There was no other topic for days in East Berlin or the GDR after these Pentecost riots at the Berlin Wall, where what hardly anyone had dared to hope for had happened, and where what millions of people thought had been shouted out loud. And in the midst of this emotionally charged situation, US president Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin on June 12, 1987, calling on Gorbachev to “open this gate” and “tear down this wall.” The East Berlin Pentecost riots had a positive aftereffect for the young people. FDJ leadership feverishly considered how to get the situation under control again. Internally, it was acknowledged that the state, the party, and the youth association had lost influence and control over rock music—and, thus, over the youth. Although there were still enough hardliners in the second half of the 1980s who thought they recognized in rock music the “drug” of “imperialist mass culture for the deformation of consciousness,”30 between 1987 and 1989 the SED and FDJ pursued counterstrategies to regain lost ground with attractive offers. Rock bands were given greater leeway, including for the procurement of Western equipment. For the fans, the most important result was that from 1987

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on, larger open-air concerts with real, international rock stars were held for the first time. These events aimed to help the youth integrate into society, and again they missed their target. Instead of reassuring and winning back the youth, these highlights failed to satisfy them and made them want to see and hear the stars more and more often. Before 1987, very few foreign rock stars—in contrast to jazz greats—had performed in closed rooms in the GDR. Although Roger Chapman (several times since 1982), Billy Bragg, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Lage (who sang Biermann’s “Encouragement” in October 1987), Peter Maffay, and Wishbone Ash performed, the really big names were missing. Udo Lindenberg had an embarrassing, short official appearance on October 25, 1983, in the famous Palace of the Republic in East Berlin as part of an SED propaganda event. His GDR tour, which had been firmly agreed upon before, was subsequently canceled, just as the Cologne group BAP had to pack up again the night before their performance in January 1984 because they did not bow to censorship. In the spring of 1987, Peter Maffay, Shakin Stevens, Solomon Burke, and John Mayall, among others, attended Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebrations. The first highlights were performances by Carlos Santana on April 5 and 6, 1987, in the Palace of the Republic. Most of the tickets had been “given away,” not freely sold. Several dozen angry fans tried to storm the hall. They were admitted after the concert started and were able to experience an unforgettable evening. The first open-air spectacle took place on short notice on July 14, 1987, in Berlin with Barclay James Harvest, followed three days later by John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia. Two months later, at the invitation of East Berlin, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roger McGuinn moved their planned concert from the Waldbühne to East Berlin. Eighty thousand fans were able to cheer for Dylan freely and unhindered. He didn’t cheer back and played his concert as if he were anywhere else in the world besides behind a death strip and barbed wire. One could say that he was already practicing the casual normality that would quickly take hold in the East after the fall of the Wall—for example, when the Rolling Stones played behind the fallen Iron Curtain in East Berlin for the first time in the summer of 1990.31 Two further highlights of these major concerts should be mentioned. On June 16, 18, and 19, 1988, the FDJ organized a big rock spectacle in East Berlin—Joe Cocker had delighted 85,000 people in the same place just a few days prior—to keep the fans from strolling to the Wall as they had done the year before because concerts were once again also being held in front of the Reichstag. This strategy paid off: 260,000 people made a pilgrimage to Weißensee in three days, but only 3,000 made it to the Brandenburg Gate, including many MfS forces. These, in turn, attacked West German camera teams in the East with electric shocks, reports of which the GDR then immediately characterized as “pure invention.”32 On June 19, the Canadian rock singer Bryan Adams performed. The FDJ and SED had come up with a special highlight, having a young woman announce the

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performance. On the huge stage, she was hardly recognizable as she explained to the baffled fans that she had met her boyfriend Bryan in Canada a few days prior and asked him if he would like to play at her home in the GDR. This was Olympic figure skater Katarina Witt, but her words became inaudible because, gradually and ever more loudly, a mighty storm of protest of tens of thousands rose— against Witt and against the system she represented. Adams was visibly irritated since Witt was already a much-acclaimed star in North America. Misjudging the situation, the editors of DT 64 believed that “many would have liked Eberhard Aurich [the FDJ chairman] to go on stage himself to say a few words, to talk to the people, not from them (e.g., instead of K. Witt).”33 And the star herself? She left the stage crying, not even able to finish her presentation. The “most beautiful face of socialism,” as the Western media had been calling her since the mid1980s, was an SED member who never tired of explaining worldwide how great the GDR and communism were.34 The figure skater appeared in North Korea in the summer of 1989 on the occasion of the Communist World Festival, where she performed a private show for dictator Kim Il Sung on July 8, 1989. Junge Welt took up the widespread displeasure of many young people toward Witt under the headline “Too Much Hype about Kati?” writing: “Achievement and attitude for socialism find recognition with us. We celebrate them.”35 The next highlight was not long in coming. Bruce Springsteen came to Weißensee on July 19, 1988. The concert was almost canceled because the Boss did not like the motto of the event, which was dedicated to the ninth anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution. GDR authorities presented the developments in Nicaragua one-sidedly, instrumentalizing them at the same time to reinforce the state’s anti-Americanism. Finally, however, some 175,000 fans cheered him on, and he shouted back: “I hope that one day all barriers will fall!” Everyone in the wide area knew that he meant the Wall, and many screamed with joy and hope. Dozens waved star-spangled banners as a symbol of freedom. This was the first time these waved in the GDR unchecked. Sandow, a punk band from Cottbus, later that year immortalized these memorable performances of Bruce Springsteen, Katarina Witt, a well-known FDJ song (“Bau auf, bau auf”), and Hager’s famous wallpaper saying in a song called “Born in the GDR,” which also nicked its name from Springsteen’s, “Born in the U.S.A.”: “. . . we’re building up and not wallpapering along / we’re very proud of Katarina Witt / Born in the GDR / We can go to our limits / have you ever looked past them / I’ve seen 160,000 people / they sang so beautifully / they sang so beautifully: / Born in the GDR.” Almost all of these rock concerts took place in East Berlin, including an unannounced concert by Depeche Mode on March 7, 1988, in the WernerSeelenbinder-Halle. When Rio Reiser, the former front man of the leftist West Berlin cult band Ton Steine Scherben, also played at the same location on October 1 and 2, 1988, it seemed as if the roof would blow off, especially when

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he played the hit “The Dream Is Over” and thousands shouted along: “All doors were open, the / prisons were empty, / there were no more weapons and no more wars. / That was paradise. / Is there a land on earth, / Where this dream is reality? / I really don’t know. / I know one thing and I’m sure of it: / This country isn’t. / This country is not.” The concert was broadcast on GDR television on the evening of December 10, 1988—without this song and the scenes accompanying it. The GDR’s limited opening to international rock music not only aroused longings among young concertgoers but also put pressure on local rock musicians. The popular music scene was divided into those who didn’t hope for official recognition at all—though they still got it first from the youthful audience and then at the end of the 1980s even from Amiga and DT 64—and those who, like Silly, Pankow, City, Rockhaus, and Engerling, were among the figureheads and yet, unlike Karat or the Puhdys—the most famous GDR bands—still managed to fascinate many fans with their music even in the last years of the GDR. Not only were their concerts well attended, but their records were the only Amiga rock productions that still achieved respectable sales figures. In 1987, the band City released the LP Casablanca. Singer Toni Krahl had received a three-year prison sentence as an eighteen-year-old high school student after protesting the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Prague, which was commuted to a suspended sentence in mid-December 1968. One song was titled “Wall-to-Wall.” The last verse read: “In spite of only twenty centimeters we can’t get hold of each other / If we want to get to know each other, we have to leave the house / When you laugh, it sounds like from another country / Wall to wall.” In a fairly undisguised manner, this song lamented the division of Germany and the partition of Berlin. The lyrics of another song, “Half and Half,” even said, “In half the country and half the city, / half the country and half the city, / I’m half satisfied with what you have / half and half.” Functionaries were outraged that such sounds came from within the GDR, where they echoed in the synchronized ether, but they apparently had no means left to suppress the words of a famous band like City. With their uneasiness about the continuing division of Germany, the musicians knew how to connect with their fans. Toni Krahl explained in a taz interview that the GDR needed glasnost and that the band wanted to contribute to changing half of the country.36 Junge Welt hardliner Karin Retzlaff said the following about the band: “City sings about the GDR as ‘half the country,’ for example. The most brilliant rhetorician could try to persuade me for days—for me there is no German ‘whole’ of which the GDR and its capital could be half.”37 Functionaries articulated themselves more clearly internally. In the FDJ Central Council, it was opined “that no sufficient state controls and text analyses were carried out before the release of the record; otherwise this record could not have appeared on the market.”38 Education Minister Margot Honecker even publicly mocked the LP, after which it was removed from the shops. City’s members found out about this while they were touring the

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West. Krahl called the GDR Ministry of Culture and demanded that the LP go back into the shops or the band would not be able to return to the GDR.39 The functionaries had no choice but to put the record back on the shelves if they did not want to produce new headlines. The band had been internationally famous since their hit “Am Fenster” (1977); they were the first GDR band to receive a gold record, and Casablanca also sold 250,000 copies in West Germany in 1987 and 200,000 in the GDR. The record with the most pointed political commentary was Februar, released by Silly on the Amiga label with front woman Tamara Danz in early 1989. Produced in West Berlin, it contained several titles of a rock-n-roll doomsday bent. Tamara Danz, like Toni Krahl of City and André Herzberg of Pankow, critically associated with the GDR, had been a thorn in the side of the SED functionaries for years because of her shrill behavior. Her song “S.O.S.” on this album was unequivocal: “We conquer oceans / with a used fool ship / above us a golden flag laughs / below us a black reef / still the steam engine / is stomping / full speed ahead / still the canteen / is giving us free food.” And then further: “still the man in the lookout / thinks he sees a silver lining / still no one is found who spits out / and no one is allowed to stand by the compass.” The climax follows: “Still light on in the boiler room until 4 in the morning. / We still don’t have the key to the armory.” In another song, with indirect reference to the SED propaganda, it says, “Everything will be better, but nothing will be good.”

“Danger from the Right” As with the punks, the state also regarded the skins as follows: “Their rejection of existing legal norms and moral views is demonstrated by their outward appearance and decadent appearance as well as by rowdy actions.”40 The skins were also concentrated in East Berlin. Other focal points were the districts of Potsdam, Cottbus, Frankfurt/Oder, Magdeburg, Gera, Dresden, and Leipzig. Many young people who were not prepared to adapt had already been criminalized because they dressed differently—more colorfully and outlandishly—and because they did not go to work but simply wanted to live, and lived differently than how they were told. The first skinhead generation at the beginning of the 1980s was composed almost without exception of hippies, punks, or rockers, and not infrequently everything in succession. They saw themselves as enemies of the GDR, communism, the Wall, and barbed wire. As late as spring 1989 there were reports of skinheads wearing t-shirts of the bands Die Ärzte and Die Toten Hosen. Hooligan cliques also formed around the soccer clubs, which became the reservoir of skinhead groups. Their openly antisemitic, racist, chauvinist, and neofascist approach united them. In football stadiums, chants like the following occurred with some frequency: “Step on the gas, step on the gas when the FCV [army soccer club Frankfurt/Oder] races into the gas chamber.” Or:

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“Hang it up, the black pig, I don’t want him to be happy anymore.” And: “From Stalingrad to the Spree my most beautiful BFC [Berliner Fußballclub—soccer club of the Stasi].”41 Although the SED leadership and the MfS were well aware of these developments, they did not take them seriously. Until the mid-1980s, they ignored the skinhead groups, which comprised barely more than one thousand young people in total. Nor did they deal with the rampant antisemitism, racism, or neofascism. Yet the SED and MfS files are full of reports of “incidents” that began to occur more often in the late 1970s. Were the SED functionaries choosing to look away? Yes, in a way, they were because the flip side of state-practiced antifascism was a trap the SED set for itself. The party’s ideology dictated that what could not be could not be. In the case of political opposition, this was easy to settle: opposition members were branded criminals. In principle, this also applied to neofascists, antisemites, and racists, only most of the statements and attitudes such people presented fell short of prosecutable criminal behavior. And the main problem was they were not limited to certain small social groups but pervaded society like an epidemic. Widespread jokes, in such circumstances, are almost harmless. But, vice versa, the official internationalism of the SED produced dangerous and aggressive nationalism.42 The SED could not face up to the right-wing extremist problem for two reasons. First, this would have required it to acknowledge the double-edged effects of its official antifascist stance because, if a single interpreting authority constantly asserts “the truth,” it is rather obvious that the persons concerned are closer to the “countertruth” than to the official one, already out of pure self-assertion. Rightwing sentiments were an expression of fundamental opposition. Nothing else hit the antifascist state harder than neofascism and right-wing radicalism. Many reports that the police, MfS, and judiciary drew up of right-wing perpetrators also openly stated this. But seemingly conformist people too made use of the strictly forbidden, the dangerous, the obscene. Antisemitic slogans were rampant in the schoolyards, as in soccer stadiums and factories. Racism was commonplace in the country whose few foreigners were interned in ghettos and abused as work slaves. At the beginning of 1989, only about 166,000 foreigners were staying in the GDR for lengthy periods of time, among them just 34,000 with a permanent residence permit. Of them, 136,000 came from socialist countries. Most of the foreigners came from Vietnam (55,000), Poland (38,000), Cuba (15,000), Hungary (10,700), Mozambique (10,000), and the Soviet Union (excluding the army: 9,500).43 Second, the communists advocated an ideology in which racism, fascism, and antisemitism were defined as “legitimate” consequences of capitalist and imperialist conditions. In other words, even if the SED had wanted to fathom the undesirable effects of its practiced antifascism, it could only have done so consistently by abandoning its Manichean world view. Since the GDR had radically

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eliminated all the structural preconditions for fascism, racism, and antisemitism, the official view was that such phenomena could not exist. The “only true” images of history disseminated by the SED reinforced the state’s failure to come to terms with the Nazi past, which ultimately extended to families. A popular history calendar for 1990 published by the Central Institute of History and the Institute of General History of the Academy of Sciences in the spring of 1989 provides examples of the way the official history propaganda misrepresented the Holocaust. In it, an article about the Auschwitz trial in 1965 managed to skip over the fact that it was mainly Jews who were killed in Auschwitz. Every reference to the Holocaust was missing; the word “Jew” did not appear.44 Another article about Eichmann, one of the technocrats of the Holocaust, ascribed the responsibility for it to an “economic mafia” and, moreover, once again left out details about who, above all, the “millions of people” killed in the “extermination camps” were.45 This historical ideology would take a bitter revenge. Even though the skinhead scene was visible and the police, MfS, and judiciary had already made dozens of arrests and instigated investigations and trials after brutal assaults, it was not until October 1987 that the problem came to public awareness. On October 17, 1987, several dozen skinheads—among them five or six West Berliners— attacked punk concertgoers in the Zion Church in East Berlin. Die Firma (the Stasi was colloquially also called Die Firma), a punk band from East Berlin, and the band Element of Crime from West Berlin, which still sang in English, were playing there that evening. The skins indiscriminately beat up visitors and passersby, shouting neofascist and antisemitic slogans—and the police did nothing. The West Berlin band had participated in the concert illegally, and Western media reported on the attack, so even the GDR media could not silently ignore it.46 This attack did not occur spontaneously. Already one day before, skins and punks had fought in front of the venue, the Haus der Jungen Talente, in BerlinMitte, where the plan to raid the concert the next day was born. Since then, this assault has been puzzled over and written about a great deal. In particular, the passivity of both the police and the ubiquitous Stasi was seen as evidence that the skins had worked hand in hand with them. The fact that many skins came from families loyal to the SED with members in leading positions also supported this. But this is not strong evidence, because punks, goths, and even organized opposition members often had such family backgrounds. The revolt against the system often began as internal family conflict with one’s communist parents, or at least one of them. The passivity of the local police officers was more due to the fact that they were as surprised by this violent event as the majority of society. When the first trial resulted in prison sentences for four defendants of between fourteen and twenty-four months, this sparked a storm of indignation—because the sentences were regarded as too lenient. The sentences were revised on appeal (eighteen months to four years). Even many critics of the system cried out for

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the state to be strong in the face of a frightening and inexcusable act that mostly precluded the idea of giving the young perpetrators a chance of parole. In this, an “antifascist united front” revealed itself. Although this was morally understandable, some critics felt it had nothing to do with constitutional thinking. The interventionist state, which was otherwise so unanimously rejected, was now criticized for being too lenient. It gave in to the protest because it did not want to be accused of weakness at this time. As paradoxical as it may sound, it swung to the “right” and struck out at the “left.” No one demonstrated this as splendidly as Junge Welt editor in chief Schütt. Under the headline “Warum freue ich mich über den Protest gegen ein Gerichtsurteil” [Why am I happy about the protest against a court ruling], he managed to argue that on account of the verdicts in the first trial in mid-December 1987, neofascist thugs, nonconformist writers, and oppositional “dunning guards” should be lumped together and the highest level of criminal punishment should be demanded for all of them.47 The “young carver,” as Schütt was secretly called,48 involuntarily contributed to the delegitimization of the SED regime with this article, as Hager had done before. A storm of protest arose in response to this contribution, which was also reflected in numerous letters to the editor. Schütt handed most of them over to the MfS. The subject remained highly topical and hotly debated until autumn 1989. Before 1989, only a few critical minds were prepared to regard neofascist tendencies in GDR society as homemade. Even the East Berlin city youth pastor Wolfram Hülsemann, who argued sharply against Schütt and his theses and was also one of the few to call the prison sentences into question as missing the fundamental problem, believed that these incidents were ultimately imported from the West.49 In July 1989, when an editor of DT 64 broadcast a program in which two black Germans reported on their everyday experiences with racism, articles appeared in German newspapers describing this as a cautious opening of the media. Behind the scenes, however, those responsible for the program were disciplined and punished. The editor in chief was removed from her post, and the deputy editor in chief received a stern reprimand—it was argued that both had “objectively” played into the opponent’s hands. One exception was the filmmaker Konrad Weiß. His participation in the Aktion Sühnezeichen, which Lothar Kreyssig had founded in 1958, was of decisive importance for his political development. Aktion Sühnezeichen, not an organized oppositional group but a learning space for nonconformist thinking and acting, shaped Weiß. He took part in Aktion Sühnezeichen’s first trips to Poland. On October 6, 1989, he wrote about it in the taz: “That I am German, I understood in Auschwitz.” In a commentary for the Protestant weekly newspaper Die Kirche, he wrote in June 1988 that the “danger from the right” came from the middle of GDR society.50 The delivery of the newspaper was immediately banned. In March 1989, Weiß published the sensational article “Die neue alte

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Gefahr: Junge Faschisten in der DDR” [The new old danger: Young fascists in the GDR] in an underground newspaper.51 Weiß was secretly supplied with material by Bernd Wagner, an officer in the MdI, who was responsible for the skinhead scene and whose findings were politically and ideologically undesirable.52 Thus equipped, Weiß looked into the causes of this right-wing extremism, finding them directly in SED politics, the education system, media policy, the lack of a culture of public debate, the one-sided and selective view of history, and much more. He considered it irresponsible to hold the West responsible for these phenomena, as was officially customary. According to Weiß, the main problem was that the brown swamp was thriving in a broad social breeding ground and at the same time generating a strong response. His diagnosis was as captivating as it was convincing: “Only true democracy can immunize the youth of our country against fascist ideas in the long run.” In the summer of 1989, another article appeared in the oppositional Umweltblätter in East Berlin, which also heated up public opinion. The former communist Jewess Salomea Genin, who also worked as an IM for the MfS, wrote a long article on the manifold manifestations of antisemitism in the GDR. This honest and stirring contribution has lost none of its density and emotionality since then.53 At the beginning of the 1990s, scientific studies and autobiographies appeared that confirmed Genin’s experiences as typical. She herself rejected the criminal conviction of young neofascists and antisemites because she felt that they would only turn into even more staunch antisemites “after these long prison sentences. . . . Somebody’s gotta lend a hand here.” A truly democratic society could absorb these “perpetrators” in a “culture of political strife and tolerance,” she argued, and visited young people in prison.54 The radical right-wing scene also learned from the attack on the Zion Church in autumn 1987. Since 1988, skinheads had come to regard the outward markings of membership in the right-wing scene—typical items of clothing such as bomber jackets and jumper boots, which were not available in the GDR, or bald heads and short hairstyles—as rather obstructive. Skinheads wished to gain influence and not to frighten citizens with “unnecessary violence” but to win them over by persuasion. The scene grew steadily and rapidly across the country. They eagerly engaged in military service purposefully to learn fighting techniques and how to handle weapons. They regarded it as natural that one should work committedly in a company, on a construction site, or in an office. From 1988 onward, a “fascist” or neo-Nazi scene that no longer relied primarily on brutal violence against others developed alongside the skinhead scene. In training courses, the members received information on how to behave in interrogations with the police, state security, and the judiciary, how to cope with everyday life in prison, and how to recognize and recruit comrades of conscience in prison. Other courses were devoted to the history of National Socialism and World War II, in which both East and West German historical interpretations were rejected, replaced

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by neofascist interpretations and hero worship of great National Socialists. The group structures were very stable and close-knit, as were the communication structures with other groups and allies in the West. One could gain access to the groups only with relevant recommendations and after passing the exams, so few were penetrated by spies. The members mostly perceived their group as a warmhearted family substitute that one would go through thick and thin for. Betrayal was just as rare as hardly anyone was forgotten, whether he went to prison or skipped out. Prisons were an important recruiting ground for right-wing extremists. It was found that among them, “educational background and qualifications, parents’ family and general living conditions correspond to the cross-section of what is found in society in general.”55 One quarter came from homes where at least one parent was employed in intelligence, and almost half of their parents were skilled workers. Right-wing radicals also represented the society as a whole, with skilled workers, pupils, apprentices, unskilled and specialized pupils; only openly neofascist students, however, hardly existed. Some right-wing extremists were active as FDJ or trade union officials. When they attracted attention as criminals, the astonishment among their coworkers was usually great. The labor collective of one right-wing radical expressed disbelief that their colleague could have committed such a crime—a typical reaction, in this case quoted by the Criminal Investigation Department.56 This was not only due to the suspect’s disciplined and committed behavior on the job. In 1988/89, the analyses repeatedly stated that basic ideological attitudes such as xenophobia; discrimination against homosexuals, the disabled, dissidents, and punks; the rejection of the political GDR system; the call for the restoration of German unity; and other things met with a positive response or were, at least, passively tolerated by many colleagues and parents. Correspondingly, on September 5, 1988, the SED district leader of Dresden, Hans Modrow, warned in a speech to the first secretaries of the SED district leadership in his district: “Xenophobia is building up dangerously.”57

Undesirable Everyday Occurrences Nuances can be found in many social areas. In open societies, many things are possible in principle, but often only recurring patterns and stereotypes are served in reality; likewise, most closed societies do not manage to bring about the behaviors and thought patterns that it has elevated to norms without any alternatives. The GDR was not a “niche society” and certainly not a “welfare dictatorship” or even a “consensus dictatorship.” All of these language creations are attempts at definition that sound beautiful but are empty formulas historically and empirically. If one wants to explain why the GDR state, economy, and society collapsed in 1989 and why revolutionary changes took place, one does not get far with characterizations of the system oriented around stability and internal legitimacy.

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The SED rulers may have regarded themselves as caring fathers of the nation. However, many people rejected this kind of care early on. As early as July 1953, an SED member in Görlitz pointed out: “All that is missing is that the date of death is determined for the individual.”58 Of course, many people gladly accepted some of the state’s social benefits and offers. But the “all-around care” the regime aimed to provide, addressing social issues as well as emotional and intellectual matters, went considerably too far for many. The constant paternalism in all situations was not one of the phenomena that even strapping SED comrades at middle and lower levels praised as advantages of GDR socialism. The generations born after the founding of the GDR were particularly hard hit by this because they took low rents; cheap bread rolls; free schooling, training, and university education; or a guaranteed job for granted. The intended “allaround care” of the “guardian state” (E. Gans 1797/98–1839) did not remain without consequences. The mentality of many GDR people was geared to “not being able to do anything,” being at the mercy of an ominous fate, having to march along in the invisible middle, not wanting to attract attention, and, consequently, rejecting others who attracted attention in a fit of self-hatred. The psychologist Hans-Joachim Maaz described this in 1990 with the image of “emotional congestion.” The GDR’s attempt to standardize thinking did not remain without consequences either. Any preoccupation with the process of German and European unification must take these long-term communist effects in the former Eastern Bloc into account. Much of what happened in the GDR in 1989–90 cannot be grasped without knowing the situation beforehand. Much of what was said and done in the autumn of 1989, what was laughed and smirked at, often appears wooden and die-cut today. It seemed very different then. Stefan Heym expressed this on November 4, 1989, at the rally on Alexanderplatz: “Dear friends, fellow citizens, it is as if someone had opened the windows after all the years of stagnation, of intellectual, economic, political [stagnation], the years of dullness and stale air, of phrasalism and bureaucratic arbitrariness, of official blindness and deafness. What a conversion!”59 Much of what Heym meant has already been discussed in exemplary fashion. Some things are still missing. The SED had transformed language as an important means of communication into a “new language” in the sense of George Orwell.60 This was often described and analyzed in a thoughtful and amusing way. Even in the GDR, many people laughed or at least shook their heads in secret at the fixed idioms, the juxtaposed genitive constructions, the unsurpassable superlatives of words, and much more. At the same time, however, the “slave language” came easily off the lips of many, so easily that they no longer even noticed that they were basically laughing at themselves. Hardly anyone outside church rooms was practiced in free and fearless speech. The language literally became impoverished, which made the autumn of 1989 appear to be a revolution of language and linguistic

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wit. At some point, the standardized language crept into the (sub)consciousness of many people to such an extent that it was regarded as their own individual language. Collectivization covered thinking, language, and speech, even in everyday life. The Russians and the Soviet Union were not particularly popular, but few resisted the partial Russification of the language. And yet, at the same time, there was unofficial linguistic humor because many political jokes subverted official slogans. The slogan “Creating peace without weapons,” for example, was popularly rendered as “Creating ruins without weapons—40 years GDR.” Victor Klemperer’s famous philological notes on language in the “Third Reich” titled Lingua Tertii Imperii, or LTI, were standard reading for those with a critical view of the system, not least because many associated a possible language of the Fourth Reich, meaning the GDR, with it; as we know today, Klemperer himself thought about writing such a book. There was no possibility in the GDR of “critically examining and questioning the reality of language in public discourse.”61 This made the language so boring, fixed, and at the same time a subversive weapon, a gateway to scorn, wit, and creativity. Rumors also flourished and were part of the fixed repertoire because opinions and news could not be communicated publicly. The hoard of rumors in the GDR has yet to be discovered, which should reveal a great deal about GDR political and cultural history, social history, mentalities, and everyday life. Most of the rumors related to what was supposedly coming: Honecker would resign at this time or that; there would be this and that tomorrow; this had been decided because of that, etc. Such rumors accompanied the history of the GDR from the beginning. In July 1950, for example, a rumor in an FDJ training camp caused about 90 percent of the youth there to throw their FDJ badges into the lake for fear of possible retaliation. In times of crisis such as 1953, 1956, 1961, 1968, 1976, and 1981, the SED always registered a significant increase in rumors. They were an expression of an expected change in political direction. Within the MfS, rumors were registered attentively; in the 1950s, people went to prison merely for spreading them. In 1971, a strategic secret police work was written addressing how to deal with political rumors. The Stasi knew how dangerous rumors could become for the stability of the system.62 In the second half of the 1980s, rumors were unprecedentedly rampant. Everything that moved people circulated in the form of optimistic or pessimistic rumors: fruits of the south would come in masses, Honecker would resign, the Bible would be dealt with in school lessons, Saturday would be free of school, the period of military service would be shortened, Pravda would be banned in the GDR, trips to the West would be possible, the bread rolls would be more expensive, the latest LP would be released by whomever, a previously banned book would be published, etc. Their credibility was based on the “source,” usually someone “at the top.” Precisely because almost nobody came into contact with people “at the top,” the rumors could not be confirmed.

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There were many taboo subjects that almost everyone knew existed: prostitution, pornography, and suicide, for example. All such issues occurred below the official surface, as well as murder and manslaughter. However, the most visible problem everywhere was alcoholism. Alcohol was the number one drug in the GDR. Health Minister Klaus Thielmann said at a central health conference in September 1989: “I also believe that the time has come to generally stop the consumption of alcohol during working hours in all sectors of the economy.”63 Officially, alcohol was prohibited during work, but the reality was different here too. Alcohol consumption increased rapidly between the mid-1970s and the end of the 1980s. In the consumption of beer and spirits (wine was less enjoyable and good wine was too expensive), the GDR occupied world-leading positions. In principle, a country’s alcohol problem is independent of the government system. Nevertheless, alcohol problems should be analyzed within the context of society. The steadily growing consumption of alcohol in the GDR was also a consequence of the deeply felt social crisis, as two 1986 publications confirmed.64 They first proved what everyone knew: alcohol was a problem for society as a whole. Drinking was ubiquitous. The therapies provided proved to be useless, and the health system failed in this context as well. The church alternatives—the churches brought up the problem more often in the 1980s—could not close the yawning gaps, particularly since the churches also underestimated the problem for a long time and regarded alcohol addiction as a sin. Now alcohol could be called the “exit” or “desperate” drug of the “little man,” which it was often enough. More importantly, however, alcohol and alcohol addiction were central social problems, especially in the state and party apparatus. Where the pressure to adapt and opportunism were particularly pronounced, the use of the bottle was also extremely frequent and intensive in the workplace. In September 1989, the problem was raised as a cause for concern in the SED Politburo. In other words, the GDR was an “intoxicated” society. The archives overflow with examples of this. It was a mass phenomenon. It was not an exit, not a resistance, but a clouding of one’s own reality. And at least while drinking beer, system supporters and system critics could meet out of frustration, despair, hopelessness, and depression. So GDR society also went under because it was terminally ill.

Notes 1. He called GDR censorship this and other things; see his speech in Schriftstellerverband der DDR, ed., X. Schriftstellerkongress der DDR. Arbeitsgruppen (Berlin, Weimar, 1988), 224–47. 2. Karin Hirdina, “Parodien ohne Komik,” Sinn und Form 34, no. 4 (1982): 908. 3. The following books provide a good and very worthwhile perspective: Siegfried Lokatis and Ingrid Sonntag, eds., Heimliche Leser in der DDR. Kontrolle und Verbreitung unerlaubter

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

Literatur (Berlin, 2008); Simone Barck and Siegfried Lokatis, eds., Zensurspiele. Heimliche Literaturgeschichten aus der DDR (Halle, 2008); Siegfried Lokatis, Theresia Rost, and Grit Steuer, eds., Vom Autor zur Zensurakte. Abenteuer im Leseland DDR (Halle, 2014); Ann-Kathrin Reichardt, Von der Sowjetunion lernen? Die Zensur sowjetischer belletristischer Literatur in der DDR in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren (Münster, 2014). Qtd. in Matthias Braun, Die Literaturzeitschrift “Sinn und Form.” Ein ungeliebtes Aushängeschild der SED-Kulturpolitik (Bremen, 2004), 154. For a very interesting view, see Erhard Geißler, Drosophila oder die Versuchung. Ein Genetiker der DDR gegen Krebs und Biowaffen (Berlin, 2010). Wolfgang Harich, “Revision des marxistischen Nietzschebildes?” Sinn und Form 39, no. 5 (1987): 1053. Volker Braun, “Rimbaud. Ein Psalm der Aktualität,” Sinn und Form 37, no. 5 (1985): 982, 991. Ulrich Dietzel, “Gespräch mit Heiner Müller,” Sinn und Form 37, no. 6 (1985): 1215. For a still worthwhile account of the destalinization process from 1953, see Wolfgang Leonhard, Kreml ohne Stalin (Cologne, 1959). Johannes R. Becher, “Selbstzensur,” Sinn und Form 40, no. 3 (1988): 544, 550–51. MfS, HA XX, Information über antisozialistischen Tendenzen im Roman “Horns Ende” des DDR-Schriftstellers Hein, Christoph, 17. 10. 1985. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 5396, Bl. 240. A concise description of this performance is contained in the novel by Richter, 89/90, 92–93. Christoph Hein, “Die Ritter der Tafelrunde. Eine Komödie,” Sinn und Form 41, no. 4 (1989): 793, 811, 826, 829. Gerhard Ebert, “Parabel auf das Streben nach menschlicher Vervollkommnung. Dresdner Uraufführung von Christoph Heins ‘Ritter der Tafelrunde,’” in ND vom 3. 5. 1989. Petra Stuber, Spielräume und Grenzen. Studien zum DDR-Theater (Berlin, 1998), 245. “‘Wir wussten, dass wir etwas ziemlich Exotisches machen.’ Der Puppenspieler Günther Lindner vom Theater Zinnober,” in Durchgangszimmer Prenzlauer Berg. Eine Berliner Künstlersozialgeschichte in Selbstauskünften, ed. Barbara Felsmann and Annett Gröschner (Berlin, 1999), 240–58. Mitschrift des am 4. 10. 1985 durch den RIAS ausgestrahlten Telefoninterviews mit Lutz Rathenow. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 5396, Bl. 102. For a very informative and insightful view, see Claus Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung (Berlin, 2011). For an account that is very entertaining and full of surprises, which also confirms my own travel experiences but also contrasts with them, see Jörg Kuhbandner and Jan Oelker, eds., Transit. Illegal durch die Weiten der Sowjetunion (Radebeul, 2010); Cornelia Krauß and Frank Böttcher, eds., Unerkannt durch Freundesland. Illegale Reisen durch das Sowjetreich (Berlin, 2011). Hans-Joachim Maaz, Der Gefühlsstau. Ein Psychogramm der DDR (Munich, 1992), 27. MfS, HA XX/9, Information vom 1. 2. 1989. BA, MfS, AOP 17396/91, Bd. 8, Bl. 42. Gerold Hildebrand, “Wehrpflichtverweigerer,” in “. . . das war doch nicht unsere Alternative.” DDR-Oppositionelle zehn Jahre nach der Wende, ed. Bernd Gehrke and Wolfgang Rüddenklau (Münster, 1999), 347. Loni Niederländer, Sektion Kriminalistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Forschungsprojekt Jugend, 30. November 1988 (streng geheim! Inoffizielles Material, nicht auswertbar). BA, MfS, HA XX 13508, Bl. 56–92; Loni Niederländer, Institut für marx.-lenin. Soziologie der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Information: Problemhintergründe für die Lebensweise junger Bürger, die Punk- und Skin-Head-Gruppen angehören. BA, MfS, HA XX 10687, Bl. 1–14. The second manuscript is a summary of the first. It was probably intended for a broader circle of recipients, which could also explain why the institution named in the second was different. Kriminalistik, the criminology department, was a hidden MfS establishment. For a good example from MdI, see MdI Information, Sonderheft 1/1988, Dienstsache 100/88. Ibid.,

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Bl. 22–79. The HA XX of the MfS presented a special, summarizing report on the situation of the youth every year; one is preserved in BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 1487. Leipzig’s Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung (main institute of youth research) under the direction of Walter Friedrich, who maintained close relations with the SED leadership and the MfS, generated several highly confidential expert reports on the the situation of the youth; some can be found, for instance, in BA, MfS, Ast. Leipzig, BVfS Leipzig, Abt. XX 1007 und 1010. JW vom 19. 10. 1988. The bands’ names in German were Demokratischer Konsum, Der Expander des Fortschritts, die anderen, Gefahrenzone, Herbst in Peking, Keimzeit, Ostfront, Rosa Extra, Schleimkeim, Skeptiker, Wutanfall, Zerfall, Zorn, and Zwecklos. BA, MfS, HA XX 12413, Bl. 112. Christoph Tannert, “Post-Punk, auch ohne rote Sterne. DDR-Rock aus dem Unterholz,” Kontext, no. 4 (November 1988): 57; reprinted in Kowalczuk, ed., Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 372. MfS, BV Berlin, Abt. VI, Operativinformation 99/87, 8. 4. 1987. BA, MfS, HA XX 914, Bl. 1. On this, see my description of my personal experiences in Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Ein Buch und seine Geschichten. Erinnerungen und Akteneinsichten. Vorwort,” in Ost-Berlin. Leben vor dem Mauerfall, 6th exp. ed., ed. Harald Hauswald and Lutz Rathenow (Berlin, 2014), 5–31; Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Geteilte Erinnerungen an eine versunkene Stadt,” in Wer ist Berlin? ed. Uwe Lehmann-Brauns (Berlin, 2015), 54–66. BA, MfS, Ast. Rostock, AKG 61, Bd. 2, Bl. 114; Ibid., AKG 259, Bd. 2, Bl. 436. MfS, Informationsmaterial für die Öffentlichkeitsarbeit: Angriffe gegen die Jugend, 1/1986. BA, MfS, SED-Kreisleitung 3304, Bl. 10. See Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “‘It’s Only Rock’n’Roll’? The Rolling Stones und der SED-Staat,” in Gefängnis statt Rolling Stones. Ein Gerücht, die Stasi und die Folgen (Berlin, 2014), 5–15. Sabine Stefan, “Abend in schock-schwerer Not,” JW, 21. 6. 1988. MfS, HV A/XII, Aktuelle Diskussionen unter Redakteuren von Jugendradio DT-64, 6. 7. 1988. BA, MfS, HA XX 914, Bl. 21. In March 2015, Katarina Witt announced in an interview that she had been used by the SED system and that she had already seen through this at the time. For example, the whistles at a rock concert were intended more for the system, not just for her. The following statements are notable: She claimed that in 2014 she was in Berlin on the anniversary of the fall of the Wall for the first time, the twenty-fifth. Together with friends, she was looking upon the former sector border at a chain of lights “and watched how the lighting balloons rose into the sky. I found the mood was wonderful. There, for the first time, I thought really intensively about this time. I wished that I had already been a bit more grown up in my head at that time.” One should add that she probably would have saved herself (and us) her embarrassing performances on Ostalgie TV shows in which she advertised for the FDJ. (“Katarina Witt wird 50. Ein Interview,” ZeitMagazin, no. 12 [19. 3. 2015]: 16–22, quote 22). Junge Welt, “Zuviel Rummel um Kati?” 12./13. 3. 1988 (Autor: Wolfgang Kirkamm, Rubrik: So sehe ich das). “Irgendwo ist immer ein lockeres Brett. Interview von Holger Kulick mit Toni Krahl,” taz, 12. 1. 1988. JW, 10. 6. 1987. BV Magdeburg, Abt. XX, Information vom 20. 7. 1987. BA, MfS, HA XX 12413, Bl. 510. Toni Krahl was so kind to share this information with me privately on July 9, 2008. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 97, Bl. 28. Qtd. in Christoph Dieckmann, “Diplomatie in Trainingsanzügen. Deutsches zum Thema Sport,” Kirche im Sozialismus, no. 6 (1986): 250; see also Frank Willmann, Stadionpartisanen nachgeladen: Fußballfans und Hooligans in der DDR (Berlin, 2013). For more on this, see Wowtscherk, Was wird, wenn die Zeitbombe hochgeht.

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43. MdI, Minister, an ZK der SED, Abt. Sicherheitsfragen, Wolfgang Herger, 22. 2. 1989. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30, IV 2/2039/193, Bl. 3–9. 44. Günther Wieland, “Auschwitz-Mörder vor Gericht,” in Dietz-Geschichtskalender 1990 (Berlin, 1989), 172–73. 45. Jörn Schütrumpf, “Eichmann—Kein Nachruf,” in ibid., 110. 46. At this time, there were several such illegal concerts; for example, on April 9, 1988, Die Toten Hosen performed a benefit concert for Romanian children on the playground of a Protestant childcare center in Pankow. 47. JW, 12./13. 12. 1987. 48. Later, he published an autobiography that counts among the most self-critical and interesting of those published by former SED functionaries: Hans-Dieter Schütt, Glücklich beschädigt. Republikflucht nach dem Ende der DDR (Berlin, 2009). 49. See his contemporary statements from 1987/88, reprinted in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 350–55. 50. Printed in ibid., 356–57. 51. Kontext. Beiträge aus Kirche & Gesellschaft & Kultur, no. 5 (March 1989): 3–12, reprinted in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 392–404. 52. Of Wagner’s numerous publications since 1990, see Bernd Wagner, Rechtsradikalismus in der Spät-DDR: Zur militant-nazistischen Radikalisierung. Wirkungen und Reaktionen in der DDRGesellschaft (Berlin, 2014). Wagner was involved from 1990 in numerous civil society efforts against right-wing radicalism and neofascism; among other things, he founded the initiative “Exit Deutschland.” In 2014 he was honored by Federal President Gauck with the Order of Merit. 53. Salomea Genin, “Wie ich in der DDR aus einer jüdisch-sich-selbst-hassenden Kommunistin zu einer Jüdin wurde,” Umweltblätter (July 1989) (Samisdat). 54. Salomea Genin, “Hand oder Hass?” Neues Leben 4 (1990): 2–3. See also Birk Meinhardt, “Der Weg zwischen allen Irrtümern. Die verschlungene Biographie der Salomea Genin,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17. 8. 2007; Salomea Genin, Ich folgte den falschen Göttern: Eine australische Jüdin in der DDR, 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin, 2012). 55. Studie über Erkenntnisse der Kriminalpolizei zu neofaschistischen Aktivitäten in der DDR (1989). BA, MfS, ZKG 128, Bl. 22. 56. Ibid., Bl. 27. 57. Hans Modrow, Schlusswort, 5. 9. 1988. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, Leiter der BV 10626, Bl. 7. 58. ZK der SED, Abt. L[eitende] O[rgane der] P[arteien und] M[assenorganisationen, Zusammenfassung der Tagesberichte der Bezirksleitungen vom 6. 7. 1953. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30, IV 2/5/560, Bl. 61. 59. 4. 11. 89. Protestdemonstration, Berlin, DDR (Berlin, 1990), 163. 60. Of the comprehensive literature on language use in the GDR, two examples include Manfred W. Hellmann and Marianne Schröder, eds., “Sprache und Kommunikation in Deutschland Ost und West. Ein Reader zu fünfzig Jahren Forschung,” Germanistische Linguistik 2008, Heft 192– 94; Bettina Bock, Ulla Fix, and Steffen Pappert, eds., Politische Wechsel—sprachliche Umbrüche (Berlin, 2011). 61. Jürgen Schiewe, Die Macht der Sprache. Eine Geschichte der Sprachkritik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1998), 269. 62. Das politische Gerücht, März 1971. BA, MfS, JHS, MF VVS 160–281/70. 63. Klaus Thielmann, Referat, 27.–29. 1989. BA, MfS, SdM 1506, Bl. 755. 64. Hans Szewczyk, ed., Der Alkoholiker. Alkoholmissbrauch und Alkoholkriminalität (Berlin, 1986); Rudolf Ziemann, Rechtliche Regelungen bei Alkoholproblemen im Betrieb (Berlin, 1986).

Chapter 5

COUNTERMOVEMENTS The Pull of the West and the Churches

S The remarks made so far have shown where the causes for the collapse of the regime are to be found. However, they do not yet explain why there was not only a collapse but also a revolution, an action-oriented resistance. There are historical conditions for this, too. Three closely related social levels must be considered. This chapter examines the first two: the strong pull and charisma of the West, and the churches as a counterforce in East German communism. The next chapter looks at the third: the development of the organized political opposition in the 1980s.

The West in the East In August 1989, Otto Reinhold, head of the Academy for Social Sciences at the CC of the SED, said that the GDR could only be conceived as “a socialist state.”1 The SED rulers always understood the system as an alternative to the Federal Republic. There was practically no area of society that was not subject to the comparison with the Federal Republic. Tables were published in Neues Deutschland showing that the GDR was the better German state because bread rolls, rents, and electricity were cheaper and the jobs were more secure. But when people made the comparison themselves, they usually found the opposite result. In an open-ended comparison, there was actually one area in which the GDR had been among the world leaders in many disciplines since the end of the 1960s and had usually done better than the Federal Republic: sports. Many people honestly kept their fingers crossed for their athletes and were happy about their successes, even if rumors about the winning methods followed. The winning Notes from this chapter begin on page 185.

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GDR swimmers rising out of the pool usually looked overly masculine, and the winning sprinters spoke unmistakably deeper than their colleagues. It was not until the 1990s that it became apparent that athletes in many sports were systematically doped. More than this, many people were disturbed by the fact that popular sports lagged behind highly bred competitive sports and, as a result, the support and material conditions for popular sports were rather poor. As proud as many people were of the successes of the athletes, there were also downsides. Many people found the hype about Katarina Witt exaggerated, even if they liked “Gold-Kati.” Since Boris Becker and Steffi Graf played at the top of the world rankings, with Becker inspiring with his powerful emotional game and Graf winning almost everything with her reserved and shy nature, tennis had also moved to the top of the popularity scale in the GDR. The two stars were immensely popular—except among the functionaries. They sparked a propaganda stunt against Witt but also real hate campaigns, especially against Becker, who was acknowledged for his sporting achievements was likewise portrayed as a spawn of capitalist commercialism, which actually only damaged the popularity of sports programs. It was quite similar with soccer. GDR soccer players’ skill rarely exceeded the mediocre. So most soccer fans had no choice but to cheer for the West German team in the World Cup and European Championship, as well as in most European Cup rounds. It also showed how strong the idea of national unity had remained. When West German clubs played in Eastern Europe, hundreds or thousands of GDR fans traveled to the event. In September 1989, even during a match of the 1st FC Köln in the ČSSR, two hundred GDR fans entered the traditional club en masse. Year after year, “analyses” appeared in daily newspapers, monthly magazines, and countless books, seeking to demonstrate the ruin of German professional sports, especially soccer. In view of the success of the West German players, however, most fans would just as soon have seen their East German teams disappear.

Longing for the West The West was omnipresent in the East. Television and radio stations took the top spot. The Potsdam-based cultural scientist Lothar Bisky lamented this overabundance in a book for young people: “The overabundance of entertainment, the television chaos that is disguisingly called diversity, the unimaginativeness that today requires 11 channels and used to manage with one, the waste of working time, resources and talent, the dulling effect of numerous productions all point to the urgency of change. Democratic control of production would already be a major step forward.”2 Certainly, Bisky himself could not have taken seriously his patent remedy of regarding the GDR’s “democratically controlled” media offerings as a model.

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The images conveyed in Western media had a significant impact on the way many East Germans viewed the West. Western media compensated for the lack of information in the GDR media. The SED described this as “interference in the internal affairs of the GDR.” The media have the task of providing information; that the Western media did this was a matter of course. Although it is sometimes claimed today that broadcast media in the 1980s only targeted West Berliners and West Germans, this is not true. Some broadcasting formats were deliberately tailored to GDR needs. And this included not only the weekly announcement of the television program, the request program, and the political magazines. Many public broadcasting programmers kept the East German viewers and listeners in mind, often anticipating SED reactions. GDR society was largely an informal imitation society. Almost everything that smelled, looked, or tasted like the Federal Republic of Germany seemed desirable. Illegal markets for Western products flourished throughout the country. These markets could be seen in private advertisements in daily newspapers and trade journals as well as in informal retail chains. The music magazine Melodie und Rhythmus, for example, ran monthly advertisements in which Western musical instruments and related equipment were offered in astonishing sizes and at equally astonishing prices. The illegal markets offered everything the heart could desire. In the south of the GDR, for example, private individuals traded computers and accessories. As the MfS noted, the amounts involved were in the millions. How the goods came into the country remained unknown. The DM became the unofficial second currency in the GDR. If you had West German money, you could get practically anything. In the 1980s, craftsmen and other service providers could afford to offer their services for West German money in view of the great demand. As a result, the value of the DM rose steadily. While in the early 1980s, one could typically get four Ostmarks illegally for one DM, by 1988/89, exchange rates of 1:7 or 1:8 were not uncommon. Advertisements also made this public. For example, one could read in advertisements: “Bid for 1 kg of copper 7 kg of aluminum.” GDR money was also popularly known as “aluminum chips.” Only the 20-pfennig pieces were heavier so that the public telephones would work. There was a private shadow economy dominated by the DM and bartering relationships. Many, therefore, spoke of a two-class society: one class had West German money, and the other did not. This also led to considerable unrest, especially among those who did not have West German money. “According to estimates, the proportion of DM in the total money circulation in the GDR (converted at the black-market rate) increased from more than 1 percent in 1974 to more than 13 percent in 1988, and the GDR’s holdings of DM cash . . . accounted for 62 percent of all cash in circulation in 1988. Regardless of whether this estimate is correct in detail, it illustrates the loss of confidence in the GDR currency and is an indication that the system had failed economically, ideologically and also morally.”3

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Private “imports” from the West, which reached a volume of billions every year, helped prevent East German society from collapsing earlier. At the end of the 1980s, private imports and the associated “second market” are said to have exceeded the supply in official trade. At the same time, this encouraged dissatisfaction and the longing for the “right” West among those in the East as well. The SED leadership had itself promoted the subsidiary currency, the DM, by setting up Intershops. Intershops sold Western goods for Western money. Originally built in 1962 for Western visitors to get their money’s worth, Intershops became the most attractive shopping opportunity in the East, even for GDR people. Starting in 1974, it was no longer forbidden for East Germans to possess West German money. In 1979, “forum checks” were introduced. GDR citizens were now officially only able to shop in the almost four hundred Intershops with this replacement money. Previously, they had to exchange the DM at the state bank for forum checks at a rate of 1:1. This led to the popular craftsman’s slogan: “Forum geht’s?” expressing the type of payment the craftsman expected.

The West as a Resort A large majority in the GDR demanded freedom of travel. Unlike people in Poland, Hungary, and the ČSSR, there were no legal guarantees, only optional provisions, for travel abroad in the GDR until the fall of the Wall in November 1989. Beginning in 1972, GDR citizens were able to travel to the ČSSR and to Poland by presenting their identity card, but this became impossible in Poland in 1980 due to the political situation there. The SED leadership feared the Solidarność bacillus. For trips to Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, GDR citizens needed a permit from the police, although this was almost always issued. Members of the opposition who had been generally banned from travel were excluded from this option as well. Currency exchange—except for the Czech crown until 1988—was limited to a meager annual rate, so that GDR citizens themselves traveled to other communist states as poor relatives. When, from 1988 onward, the exchange rate to the ČSSR were also limited at a low level to an annual quota (438 Ostmarks = 1,320 Kcs) and, in addition, the annual rate for Hungary was reduced (377 Ostmarks = 2,300 Forint), heated debates arose, which the party registered with concern without revising its decisions. It almost seemed as if the SED leadership was putting one fuse after the other on the powder keg. In order to go to Poland, GDR citizens had already needed a justified invitation since 1981, but more and more people were getting it. One got into the USSR the same way, although it remained dangerous for individual travelers there, in contrast to the other Eastern Bloc countries. The travel agencies Das Reisebüro and Jugendtourist (for young travelers) offered organized trips not only to socialist states but also Western states (including Yugoslavia), cruise trips, and even long-distance trips to Vietnam, Cuba, Mongolia, or North

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Korea. There were only a few thousand spots available, which were expensive and primarily reserved for citizens who were considered politically and ideologically stable. The predominant goal of people’s longing was the Federal Republic. There were millions of familial and friendship ties between the two German states. In late 1964, pensioners were first allowed to travel to the West once a year and later for a total of sixty days a year. Following the conclusion of the Basic Treaty in 1972, several thousand younger people were also able to travel each year on “urgent family matters” (birth, baptism, marriage, wedding anniversaries, round birthdays, high birthdays, serious illnesses, deaths). It was up to the police, the local council, the state security, and one’s company to decide. The responsible section representative was asked, as were the community management of one’s house and one’s company superior. Until 1985, an average of 1.3 million pensioners traveled each year. Private trips “for urgent family matters” increased only slowly: in 1982 the statistics recorded 110,000 of these trips, in 1983 118,000, in 1984 124,000 and in 1985 139,000.4 At the same time, there were 5 to 8 million private trips a year from the Federal Republic and West Berlin to the GDR. Under the pressure of having to make concessions to the Federal Republic in order to receive economic aid, the SED leadership significantly relaxed its approval practices from 1986 onward. Although the relevant resolutions were not published, word quickly got around. In 1986 573,000, in 1987 1.3 million, in 1988 around 1.6 million, and in the first half of 1989 829,000 “journeys on urgent family matters” were registered. Between 1987 and 1989 the authorities also rejected a further million travel applications or did not accept them at all “because of a lack of conditions.” Just under half of the applications were rejected by the MfS, about a quarter by the sections of the People’s Police, 5 percent by the Criminal Investigation Department, and the rest by the job centers or other “social organizations.” But trips for pensioners in this period tripled. Almost all of the travelers reached the Federal Republic as tourist welfare cases. Once a year, a traveler was allowed to exchange fifteen Ostmarks for fifteen DM at the state bank. The tickets could be purchased in the GDR on the basis of corresponding intergovernmental agreements. For all other expenses, GDR tourists were dependent on the support of the federal, state, and local governments and, above all, on the generosity of relatives, friends, and acquaintances in the West. This did not exactly help to strengthen ties with the GDR. Nevertheless, only a small minority used such trips for escape (1985: 307; 1986: 1,144; 1987: about 2,800; 1988: about 5,200). Even though travel with spouses and children increased, most travelers had to go alone, so the pressure to return remained high. This increase in travel activity, however, did not provide much relief to the SED in other respects. Instead of calming people’s spirits, trips to the West had the opposite effect. After their return, many had only one thing in mind:

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getting back over there as quickly as possible and, best of all, bringing the West to the East. Returning travelers were usually euphoric, and after hours or days as a GDR inmate, this euphoria often turned into aggression, rage, or a desire to speak out against the state. This private visit program, initiated and supported to a large extent by the West German government, was one of the longest-lasting destabilizing and delegitimizing factors of the SED dictatorship. Hundreds of thousands of people of all ages, social classes, and political convictions were, thus, able to make comparisons themselves. In the face of this, SED propaganda seemed to break down. In addition, the practice for approving applications for such trips illustrated individuals’ lack of rights. Each application was subject to the arbitrary decision of the permission-granting authorities, whose decisions were neither justified nor transparent. The police services involved in this matter were hopelessly overwhelmed by the flood of applications. Although hundreds of new posts were created, they did not keep up. The situation was exacerbated by high sickness rates among the police officers, most of whom were female. Waiting times of several hours were the rule, which increased mutual irritation and aggression. In these offices, police officers and applicants, representing the state and society, respectively, battled one another every day. This also demoralized the police, who were tired of their role of being the “bogeymen of the nation.” In this context, one could also observe tendencies toward softening and fatigue. The majority of the population not allowed to travel to the West experienced even greater frustration. Practically everyone who did not have a Western class enemy as a family member was disadvantaged. Even if hundreds of thousands were allowed to travel in the second half of the 1980s, millions were not. The statistics did not really help those who came up short.

Escape to the West On September 7, 1987, on the occasion of Honecker’s state visit to Bonn, the West Berlin newspaper taz enclosed a page based on Neues Deutschland in its regular edition. ND editions had been forged several times, the most famous being the six thousand copies of mid-March 1988 distributed by the Hamburg editorial staff of Tempo. Only a few copies of the fun taz had at ND’s expense reached East Berlin and the GDR. But the ND-style lead story would have pleased most people in a double sense. In big letters it said: “‘Erich Take Us with You!’ Laborers Gave the President of the Council of State a Dignified and Warm Farewell.” Below it was a large photo of a mass march where the slogan “Take us with you, Erich” had again been displayed. On the back side of the page, there were articles humorously addressing the lack of glasnost in the GDR, caricaturing the SED’s environmental pollution policy, as well as opposition reports. The page ended with the sentence: “Nothing would be more dangerous than if communists were to accommodate non-communists by a unilateral renunciation

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of the genitive without the latter, for their part, renouncing the buildup of arms with relative sentences.” “Erich, take us with you” summed up what millions wanted: to travel to the West. However, hundreds of thousands of people wished to leave not only on a visiting basis but forever. Flight and emigration were the central destabilizing factors of GDR state and society throughout its existence. Whenever a feature film or documentary about escaping from the GDR was broadcast on West German television, the viewing figures in the East were particularly high. When, for example, ZDF showed the feature film Der Wind geht nach Westen on June 17, 1985, a report from Pritzwalk noted: “This film was watched by broad sections of the population. . . . Out of a sample of 80 citizens, 76 were enthusiastic about this ‘work of art.’ Opinions such as ‘The film was exciting, and I was eager to see that this escape would succeed’; ‘These people and their courage were to be admired’; ‘There are even more possibilities and methods for leaving the GDR illegally’ were not uncommon in the discussions.”5 Between the founding of the state and the summer of 1961, around three million people fled the GDR.6 In social crisis situations such as in 1953, 1956, and 1961, the number of refugees skyrocketed, and this was also the case in the late 1980s. The construction of the Wall on August 13, 1961, stopped the flow of refugees. Between 1962 and 1965, more than 50,000 people were still able to flee, but then the number declined steadily due to strengthened border control. In the 1970s, an average of 4,800 people fled every year, and between 1980 and 1985 the average remained around 3,000. That border guards had the order to shoot those attempting to flee discouraged many people who otherwise might have. There was a wide variety of escape methods: some simply tried to climb over the Wall, while others struggled to overcome the internal German border fortifications. Homemade balloons, airplanes, and submarines were also used. Again and again, individuals or entire groups fled to Western embassies and the Permanent Representation in East Berlin, but also to the German missions in Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest. In 1984, 607 people took part in such actions. In the following years, there were fewer than 100, but in 1988 there were 273 again, and in 1989, from January to March alone, there were 779. Dozens of people believed they could reach the West by swimming across the Baltic Sea. The western borders of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and the ČSSR also served as destinations for escape. The arm of the SED reached as far as Bulgaria’s southern borders, and corresponding agreements existed with all communist states. In Bulgaria and Romania, the GDR paid a bounty for its captured citizens. In the end, churches were repeatedly occupied in efforts to force emigration. Mostly, the public did not find out about these occupations because there was an internal agreement within the churches that priests would not involve GDR institutions in the case of nonviolent occupations. Weimar’s superintendent, Hans Reder, violated this agreement on December 4, 1988, calling the police to have

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“squatters” removed from the Stadtkirche (Herderkirche), which had been occupied for the fifth time. Two priests had been informed in advance of the impending occupation. Reder’s behavior met with indignation and protest, and not only in his regional church. On January 10, 1989, seven GDR citizens were sentenced to prison terms of between nine months and three years.7 Reder, who had been registered as an IM of the MfS since 1970, retired voluntarily on March 1— and moved to the Federal Republic of Germany. The first two convicts were not able to follow him until mid-April—bought free by the West German government. Even when eighteen adults and fourteen children did not leave the Protestant church in Eisfeld (in the district of Hildburghausen) on September 6, 1988, to force their departure, Martin Kirchner, a member of the High Church Council, called in the state. Since he worked as IM for the MfS under several aliases, he facilitated the enforcement of the state line. Until the end of 1988, there was no legal basis in the GDR for an individual to be able to submit an “application for departure.” Only in the case of “family reunification” and other “humanitarian reasons” (almost all of which relieved the GDR’s social burden) did the authorities examine an application; otherwise an application to leave the country was considered “illegal.” Many applicants referred to the UN Declaration on Universal Human Rights, the CSCE Helsinki Final Act, as well as the agreements made at the follow-up conferences. Only in the course of the Vienna follow-up conference (1986–89), when the GDR became increasingly isolated and pressured, was a legal basis established on November 30, 1988. In the 1980s, the number of applications to leave the country increased steadily. In 1980, there were 21,500 existing applications for departure, in 1985 53,000, in 1987 over 105,000, and, finally, at the beginning of summer 1989 around 160,000. From 1986, well over 40,000 applications were added each year, with over 50,000 even in 1986. As a share of the total population, most applications were submitted in the district of Dresden (165 applications per 10,000 inhabitants) and East Berlin (122). The age structure was as worrying as the qualification level of the applicants: in 1988, 86 percent were younger than forty, 66 percent were skilled workers, and 14 percent were university and technical college graduates. Most escapes and attempted escapes were made by residents of East Berlin, followed by those of the districts of Leipzig, Potsdam, and Dresden. In 1984, the SED leadership had allowed 20,000 people to leave the country within a few weeks in order to relieve some of the pressure. This turned out to have a boomerang effect, as the number of new applications skyrocketed afterward. While SED leaders allowed around 14,500 people to leave the country in 1985 and 1986, they reduced the number to 6,300 in 1987, and in spring 1988 they again believed increasing exit permits would let off some steam. In 1988, they allowed more than 24,000 people to move to the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1989, by the end of June alone, almost 37,000 people had been allowed to move.

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Between 1962 and the end of October 1989, a total of more than 600,000 people officially escaped or fled to the Federal Republic. The drastic increase in the number of refugees and people willing to leave the country in the late 1980s, as in 1953 or 1961, indicated that a deep social crisis combined with hopelessness and lack of prospects was responsible for this. The SED and MfS, but also the bloc parties, mass organizations, and, last but not least, economic leaders tried to criminalize and humiliate people who intended to leave the country. Thousands lost their jobs or were deported to jobs that did not match their qualifications. Tens of thousands were imprisoned because of failed escapes, betrayed escape plans, or multiple applications to leave the country. The SED leadership turned this into a business. From 1963, the West German government had freed a total of 33,775 people from GDR prisons and transferred DM 3.44 billion to the SED leadership. Initially, the SED’s per capita price for this human trafficking was DM 42,500; by 1988, it had risen to an average of DM 221,500. It was often rumored that the SED would keep on filling the prisons, not least because of this lucrative business. Such rumors were part of the manifold pulling effects of these departures. These effects cannot be measured in numbers, nor can they be readily overestimated. In the 1980s, long before the mass exodus in the summer of 1989, this was a recurring topic of discussion and debate in all areas of society. Not only were relatives, friends, and colleagues suddenly missing, but public protests were also increasingly part of everyday life. In the vernacular, the “GDR” soon came to be called only “The Stupid Rest,” and people smugly remarked: “Whoever’s last should turn out the lights!” Western media publicized the abovementioned embassy occupations, as well as spectacular escapes by balloon, boat, or truck, and the people shot at or shot during escape attempts. East German TV viewers saw these too, which generated outrage. Only hard-boiled comrades replied with: “Everyone knows what happens then. It’s their own fault.” In addition, applicants for departure placed lit candles in their windows to draw attention to their request. White or black (rejected) ribbons were hung on thousands of car antennas, just as cars were decorated with numerous other symbols (e.g., “D” or “go West”), to indicate the status of one’s application to leave the country. The police and the MfS tried to prosecute such behavior, but, from 1988 onward, they also proved to be powerless against it. Eventually, those who wished to leave began to organize. The first actions took place in 1973, 1975, and 1976 in several places. In 1983–84 there were more and more attempts to engage in public demonstrations to effect the departure. From 1986 onward, these efforts did not stop, swelling almost monthly and soon becoming recurrent events in all regions. The centers were located in the districts of Dresden, KarlMarx-Stadt (Chemnitz), and East Berlin, followed at a distance by the districts of Leipzig and Halle, with the lower-population districts of Suhl, Neubrandenburg, and Schwerin bringing up the rear.

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The SED’s counterstrategies were half-hearted. On March 7, 1985, Neues Deutschland printed large-format articles in a series called “20,000 Former Students Want to Return.” SED leaders published excerpts from 136 letters as examples of the “20,000” people wishing to return, which were all authentic requests. At that time, the West German media carried out random checks and likewise only found authentic cases among the persons listed by name, age, and place of residence. Now everyone in the GDR knew that returnees had a hard time reintegrating. It was not the state that caused problems but society, which mocked returnees and considered them suspicious. Only foreigners and West German citizens who moved to the GDR in the 1980s, who were considered strange at best and mostly just stupid, had a harder time of it.8 The 20,000 people who wished to return did not exist. This was one of the many lies the Communist apparatchiks made up as propaganda, probably not because they expected that many would believe it but because they hoped that people would suspect a grain of truth in every lie. Between early January 1984 and late 1986, there were only 719 applications to return, 473 of which were submitted after the ND article ran. By late February 1989 the total number of those wishing to return had risen to 1,128, of which only 112 ever did return to the GDR. However, 794 of these applications had been rejected, and the rest were still being processed when the GDR ceased to exist. Of the 136 applications mentioned in the 1985 ND article, 103 were rejected and only 33 were granted. In addition, there were persons allowed back into the GDR after having used business or private trips to escape. The majority of them returned within the first three months after the approved end of the trip. Between January 1, 1984, and May 31, 1989, 1,349 people returned, including 170 children. That was almost 10 percent of those who failed to return to the GDR after a business or private trip during the same period. Also in this same period, 1,587 people emigrated from the Federal Republic, including 412 former GDR citizens who had already lived in the Federal Republic for several years. At the same time, the MdI and MfS rejected 400 applications for resettlement by West German citizens. In propaganda, journalists regularly portrayed the lives of former GDR people in the Federal Republic as unfulfilled, disappointing, and bleak; they painted pictures of broken people. Even skilled SED functionaries took part in it, such as lawyer Gregor Gysi in an interview with Der Spiegel in early 1989.9 Certainly, there were people who failed in the Federal Republic, who could not live as they had hoped. It was not only “winning types and go-getters” but also people who had a hard time everywhere and under all circumstances. Perhaps this was the greatest advantage of the GDR for such people: as long as they lived there, they could believe that life would be different somewhere else. Thousands (and after 1990, tens of thousands) only realized after their flight or relocation that the biggest problem was themselves—because, of course, not everyone consciously left because of the dictatorship, not everyone demonstrated against it in autumn

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1989, and even fewer voted for democratic parties on March 18, 1990, because of it. Abstractly, this may have been so, but concretely, many sought paradise on earth and were later bitterly disappointed not to have found it. Perhaps this Arcadian longing is a particularly long-term consequence of the dictatorship in large parts of the East. In October 1989, the MfS took stock and “calculated” internally how much economic damage escapees and exit permits caused. The official per capita national income served as the basis for calculation. According to this, the state had lost an average of 155.4 million marks a year between 1963 and 1983 as a result of emigration. In the aggregate, this is an almost ridiculous sum, which does not describe the loss of “human capital” so much as the ruling class’s self-image of having weak economic power. From 1984 to 1988, the annual loss according to this calculation amounted to 435 million marks, the magnitude of which seems almost inconsequential. In the first nine months of 1989, the loss was then almost 2 billion marks, almost as much as in the years 1984 to 1988 combined.10 The importance of emigration and flight to the internal delegitimation and decline of the GDR cannot be overestimated. It affected all social classes and regions. The loss of medical staff was particularly serious, not only because it endangered the already problematic provision of care but also because it was socially very noticeable. This also applied to the departure of teachers, scientists, artists, and functionaries, mostly on official or private trips, because they had not previously been noticed as critical to the system. This excited people all the more and more lastingly.

The Churches under Communism Dear Karl Marx, Yeah, you’re right. Many of us abuse religion as opium. Thanks for your harsh criticism. But please let me tell you something: Many of us experience religion as a vitamin. It’s a pity that you obviously haven’t met such Christians enough! (Poster in the display case of the Schwerin Cathedral on March 17, 1983, which was removed after a short time.)11

Explosions as Symbolic Acts The topography of the GDR was characterized by socialist satellite towns, restricted military areas, a border zone into which even GDR inmates were only allowed to enter with special permits, the collapse of entire city centers, and only a few restored model islands with functional buildings, as well as state and

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party buildings, often on huge plots. In contrast, there were also medieval castles, early modern towns, baroque palaces, and, last but not least, districts from the Wilhelmine period that had survived the war. Some were lovingly and lavishly restored and often dedicated in acts of state, such as the Schauspielhaus in East Berlin in 1984 and the Dresden Semperoper in 1985. Only one type of building, however, proclaimed from afar that the country was built on solid historical foundations, had more than just communist traditions, and, at the same time, indicated that many people lived, thought, and believed differently than was officially specified: everywhere church towers and church buildings bore witness to the fact that, contrary to what the Communists claimed, “God is not dead.” There were about ten thousand church buildings in the GDR. The rulers were aware that these buildings opposed their claims to totalitarian autocracy. Just as the authorities had the Berlin Palace blown up in 1950 for ideological reasons alone, they also saw to it that numerous churches—the exact number is unknown—were torn down, demolished, or blown up. About sixty churches were said to have been destroyed by 1978. The number is certainly too low. The destruction of many churches in small towns and villages did not get registered. However, in almost all known cases, regardless of the degree of destruction, a majority of church officials, monument conservators, parishioners, and residents agreed that the church in question should not be demolished but rebuilt. Examples included the Georgenkirche on Alexanderplatz (1950), the Petrikirche not far away (1961), and at least fourteen other churches in East Berlin; three in Rostock; St. Marienkirche in Wismar (1960); Sophienkirche in Dresden (1963)’ and seven churches in Magdeburg alone. Almost always, ideological arguments—disguised as urban planning justifications—had an impact. The spectacular demolitions of Leipzig’s University Church (Paulinerkirche) and Potsdam’s Garrison Church in 1968 under the protest of the population are symbolic of cultural and historical outrages, as well as of the struggle the SED waged against the church. Two other churches symbolized the division of Germany in a special way. The Sacrower Heilandskirche (near Potsdam) was located on the death strip, the no-man’s land separating East and West Berlin, as was the Church of Reconciliation on Bernauer Strasse in Berlin. In total, the Wall divided twentytwo parishes. The Sacrower Heilandskirche could be saved because the West Berlin Senate and the Tagesspiegel made an effort to solicit donations and, thus, bribed the responsible GDR governmental officials to leave the church standing and to save it from final decay. The Church of Reconciliation on Bernauer Strasse was not granted this respite. In January 1985, the church, which had been completely intact, was blown up in two days. Chancellor Kohl appeared outwardly concerned in the Bundestag. Many people in the GDR were shocked by the television pictures. Like a sign from God, when the church tower was blown up, the cross had detached itself from the top and taken a path of its own. The sculpture of Christ, which until then had stood guard over the entrance portal, now stands in front

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of the Gethsemanekirche in Prenzlauer Berg. Other insignia were also distributed among East Berlin churches. Today, the Chapel of Reconciliation is located there, not far from the Wall memorial at Bernauer Strasse. Even if churches in the GDR were not destroyed to nearly the same extent as in the USSR or in Romania, the destruction that did take place testifies to the struggle of the Communists against churches, religion, and, not least, cultural traditions. The gradual disintegration of many churches compounded this intentional destruction. Sacred buildings collapsed again and again because their structure was worn out and there were no means to stop the decay. In December 1984, for example, the tower of the 750-year-old Gothic Church of St. Mary in Pasewalk collapsed. The subsequent partial blasting was so amateurish that the west gable and gallery were almost completely destroyed. The new consecration took place in 2000. Four dilapidated churches (Vehra, Donndorf, Frömmstedt, Scherndorf) collapsed in the 1980s in the parish of Sömmerda alone. The same fate befell the medieval church in Sietzsch near Halle on February 11, 1987. Few churches, by comparison, were damaged by shells, but there were some. For example, Soviet army units accidentally shot the spire of the church in Gossel at Ohrdruf. Many churches were saved through the efforts of the congregations. If you came to towns and villages in the GDR, you often saw one, two, or three construction workers working on church buildings to stop their complete decay. The cathedral of Halberstadt was repaired, as were hundreds of village churches. The Paulus Church in Dessau, for example, was rededicated forty years after it was damaged in 1985. Horst Sindermann, the president of the People’s Chamber, said on April 2, 1986, that about three hundred churches had been rebuilt in the GDR since 1949, but he did not specify which structures he had in mind. He also failed to mention that most of the reconstruction and new buildings had been made possible almost exclusively with financial aid from the Federal Republic. There are only a few examples of alternative financing for these projects. The consecration of a small church in Groß-Lübbenau on December 20, 1987, is one. It was the first to be financed entirely by opencast lignite mining as compensation for numerous demolished village churches. The new construction program for community centers negotiated between the state and the church—thirty new buildings were planned—was tantamount to an indulgence trade. The SED sold land and granted the building permit, but the money for the construction work came from the churches in the Federal Republic. Such new community centers were established after 1985 in KarlMarx-Stadt, Gotha, Schwerin, Rostock, Weimar, Pirna, Eisenach, Potsdam, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen and Berlin-Marzahn, Hoyerswerda, Frankfurt/Oder, Bautzen, and Wismar. All these examples were in new development areas. The best known of these was the Protestant church built in 1981 in the socialist model town of Eisenhüttenstadt. After all, this story also includes the fact that the new construction program came to a standstill in 1988/89, and a building

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stop was announced for economic reasons. Moreover, with this special construction program, the SED pursued the goal of better controlling church activities. SED Politburo member Paul Verner said on July 22, 1976, in front of staff members for church issues in the GDR districts: Without doubt, the church work . . . will be made easier by the planned church buildings. This is one side. On the other hand, it is clear to us that the churches also have an effect in the new development areas when suitable rooms are lacking. . . . The churches try to gather congregation members in house groups and to move church work to private homes, especially in those areas where they do not have their own rooms. You know from your own experience, dear comrades, how complicated it is to control such activity or to prevent it by administrative measures, and what unfavorable effects such measures can have on winning over church officials and church-bound citizens for open-minded and loyal behavior towards our socialist society.12

The Churches as Institutions Even though many church buildings were blown up, the Church as an institution remained an integral part of East German society. It was the only remaining major institution that acted independently of the SED in the GDR, unlike in most of the Eastern Bloc states. This alone already marks the Church’s unique historical, political, and cultural value. It remained an institutional bulwark with an independent legal tradition in and against communism—regardless of how individual pastors, congregations, and church leaders behaved. In the early 1950s, church dignitaries were largely in agreement on this bulwark function; after 1953 this unity crumbled. In the 1970s and 1980s, the eight Protestant regional churches had very different basic structures. The Berlin Catholic Bishops’ Conference, in which the dioceses that were wholly or partly in the GDR were united, also radiated greater uniformity in the 1980s. The Catholics were, in principle, distanced from the communist regime and could not be instrumentalized by the SED, but they also behaved in a predominantly apolitical manner. The Catholic Church abstained from sociopolitical questions and was, therefore, more acceptable than the Protestant Church. Free churches and other religious communities played only a subordinate role. The New Apostolic Church, with over 120,000 members in about 1,000 congregations, was the largest, and the Mormon Church, with about 4,500 congregants, was one of the best known because in 1985 a temple was consecrated in Freiberg that probably almost everyone could see to some extent. At least twelve religious communities were banned, the most prominent of which was that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had some 30,000 active followers in the GDR in the 1980s. The exact number of church members in the GDR could no longer be determined after 1964. In 1954, statistically more than 90 percent of the population were church members; in the census ten years later, 72 percent of the people

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still professed to be church members. The number of baptisms, confirmations, church weddings, and even church funerals then steadily declined from the late 1950s and stagnated at a low level from the 1970s. The people’s churches had become churches for a minority. However, this minority could hardly be overlooked. Precise figures cannot be given because the state did not levy a church tax, allowing it to be an individual’s voluntary obligation to the churches. There was an ongoing debate about this. Some theologians demanded that those who did not pay church tax should be deprived of church rights. Other theologians showed themselves more merciful. Professor Eberhard Winkler of Halle said at a synod in 1987: “Instead of bringing people what they need, namely, the Gospel, we demanded that they bring us what we need, namely, money.”13 At the end of the 1980s, the GDR Catholic Church had almost one million members, for whom about 1,100 clergy and 135 religious priests were available. About 245,000 people professed their faith in the free churches and other religious communities. At the end of 1989, the eight regional churches in the Federation of Protestant Churches in the GDR had, according to their own statements, 5.1 million members in 7,385 parishes headed by 4,617 pastors— although more than 600 of these positions were vacant—and several thousand church employees. All in all, about one-third of the GDR population was considered a church member at the end of the 1980s.

The Churches for Counter-elite Recruitment Confessing Christians in the GDR experienced many instances of exclusion. Most pastors and church workers who were active in the 1980s had encountered two waves of church struggle in 1952–53 and 1956–58, when they were children, teenagers, students, or in the early stages of their careers. These fundamental experiences of exclusion, discrimination, and also oppression shaped their view of the state and society. Within the churches, there was great continuity in personnel, which, unlike in the state and party apparatus, did not lead to a loss of memory but became the actual historical memory and place of remembrance in the GDR. The options for action that followed were different and sometimes diametrically opposed. Some rejected the communist state uncompromisingly; others affirmed the social experiment. Most stood between these poles. It is, however, an SED legend that one-third of the Protestant pastors had worked in the “Christian Circles” working groups of the National Front. Only a few church employees and pastors actively served the system. In Neues Deutschland, some people always had their say. Pastor Cyrill Pech of Berlin-Marzahn, a CDU member, long-time IM “Posol” (“The Messenger”) of the MfS, and 1981 candidate for the Dresden District Council, announced on February 5, 1988, in an open letter to Honecker “that the majority of the faithful want to continue on the . . . path with you. We do not want to be disturbed by enemies of global and

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domestic détente. . . .”14 Pastor Karl Pietsch of Göda near Bautzen explained why he had been a candidate in local elections since 1974 and wanted to be reelected in 1989: because he wanted to make his contribution to “our lovable country . . . our GDR.”15 There were such confessors in almost all regional churches. In the local elections in May 1989, a total of 100 pastors (of all denominations and religious communities) and “over 1,000 citizens holding church office”—which means that, in addition to church employees, also parish church councils16— intended to run for office. These figures give a realistic idea of the size of the circle of church employees who intentionally served the SED. The experience of exclusion was typical for confessing young Christians at schools and universities, and in education in the 1980s as well. Young men, in particular, were plunged into moral conflict. Since 1964, it had been possible for conscientious objectors to fulfill their obligatory military service among the unarmed construction soldiers. But for many, this was only a sham compromise because with or without weapons, they were, in the end, still serving the military needs of the army with the construction projects. Less than 1 percent of youth reaching the age of obligatory military service opted for construction soldier service. A total of twelve to fifteen thousand young men served in this role. From the early 1980s, the proportion of construction soldiers increased considerably. In addition to religious motives, open rejection of the political system also had an impact. Total refusal to serve was another alternative. In the 1960s and 1970s, about one hundred men per year refused to serve in any capacity. In the second half of the 1980s, the number increased to about two thousand per year. Total conscientious objectors, the absolute majority of whom were Jehovah’s Witnesses until the mid-1980s, generally received two-year prison sentences. This did not protect them from being called up again and reconvicted after their prison sentence. The drastic increase in total conscientious objectors after 1985 was also due to the fact that no one had been in prison for more than four weeks, if at all, for total conscientious objection since then. Information for construction soldiers and those who refused any service was provided exclusively by the churches. Although the construction soldier service was regulated by law, construction soldiers were considered enemies of the state. As a result, choosing this service hampered professional career opportunities and, until the mid-1980s, made it nearly impossible to study at a state university. A fairly large part of the opposition came from the construction soldiers’ movement. Many other examples of Christian exclusion could be listed. At the same time, it should be noted that East German society underwent a process of secularization, although this process differed significantly from that of modern industrial societies because the individual was not strengthened and protected in his freedom but rather restricted and collectivized. In this respect, processes of secularization also appeared to be part of the state’s intervention and ideological policy. Paradoxically, the SED always denied that it aspired to create an atheistic state.

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As Olof Klohr, the GDR’s leading atheism researcher, stated, the GDR “is . . . not an atheistic state. And the society in which we live is not an atheist society, but a socialist society, characterized by clearly defined economic, social and cultural characteristics, structures and processes, which include neither a general commitment to religion nor to atheism.”17 In fact, communism has often been derisively called a “substitute religion”— and after 1989, this seems to have been scientifically proven; likewise, the SED was often called a “substitute church.” This was neither absurd nor true, just as socialist society had strong features of deformed religiosity. The communists adapted many church rituals to their ideological needs, such as the youth consecration celebrated with a triumphal procession of fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds since 1954; in the 1980s, 90 to 95 percent of this age cohort participated each year. Catholics as well as Protestants decreed that a young person who had taken part in the youth consecration could receive communion or confirmation at the earliest one year later, although most of the Protestant churches were more generous and renounced such an interim period. In addition to borrowing such rituals from church traditions, the state considered Christian behavior vital, actually hindering resistance rather than encouraging it. Even if, in the 1980s, the parents of most young people under thirty no longer went to church, did not belong to a congregation, or did not believe in God, they could not deny their own, mostly Christian socialization and passed it on, at least in part, to their children. The grandparents greatly strengthened this as well. In this respect, despite the SED’s secularization and massive ideological intervention, East German society remained culturally rooted in Christian—predominantly Protestant—traditions. At the same time, Christian exclusion had a paradoxical advantage that the SED had not fully taken into account. Those who were excluded often assumed that they would be, so that by the 1980s many young people, among them many professing Christians, no longer even tried to meet the state’s demands but immediately cut their way through the undergrowth and sought to find a path for themselves beyond state paternalism and direction. Even so, SED exclusion was tantamount to nonrecognition—despite official statements to the contrary—so that the state did not recognize church universities and training centers or church academies. These were only considered to be training places and “debating clubs” with a purely internal church character. An exception was the Catholic Theresienschule in East Berlin, where girls passed school-leaving exams; yet although the state recognized these, it also threatened to close the school many times. The Abitur at the Proseminar Moritzburg and Naumburg as well as at the Kirchlicher Oberseminar Potsdam-Herrmannswerder, in turn, only entitled graduates admission to church-owned universities, from where they could be transferred to a university. In contrast to the theological sections at the universities, there were three independent, traditional church colleges for Protestants. The Sprachenkonvikt in East Berlin, the church universities

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in Naumburg (Catechetical Seminary) and Leipzig (Theological Seminary), as well as other church training institutions were not subject to direct state control. This made them islands of free thinking, learning, working, and speaking where non-Marxist teaching and thinking occurred and Marx, his adepts, and Marxism-Leninism were critically questioned. A small counter-elite was formed at these islands, which produced some of the civil rights activists who emerged in autumn 1989. Within the regular universities, the theological sections too formed islands of different thinking. By the end of the 1980s, a few more than five hundred men and women studied in them, comprising just as many students as at the church-owned colleges, yet they remained rather inconspicuous in society as a whole in spite of a relatively critical student body and some lecturers capable of criticism. It was one of the exceptions that in February 1989 the MfS processed two theology students in Halle because they intended to found a student council that was independent of the FDJ. The high proportion of theologians and church workers in the political events of 1989/90 was due not only to the moral prestige of the churches and the autonomy of these training institutions, which promoted civic involvement. In addition, quite a few young men and women completed theological and ecclesiastical training because of the domestic political conditions and/or because of experiences of exclusion. Theology and the Church were, thus, also places of refuge for people who did not want to adapt completely to the conditions of the political system. The churches also offered a limited labor market for those who came into conflict with the state. They were able to make a living within this context, which saved them from legal sanctions due to a lack of employment. As more and more people came to be accommodated in such rooms, some social welfare work sites developed into “schools” of contradiction and rebellion. Church music symbolized the preservation of cultural freedom within the churches. It was a magnet for listeners, also attracting many non-Christians and others not connected to the Church into the houses of worship. The churches had their own publishing houses, theological journals, and church newspapers, which were offered in the more than one hundred confessional bookstores. These publishing venues gave men and women whose views were at odds with the communist ideological state a place where they too could have their say. The printing was done with considerable financial and material support from the Federal Republic. Although the circulation figures for these publications remained very low compared to other printed matter in the GDR, they provided a space where debates could be held and information not printed elsewhere could be conveyed. Even though these publications were subject to state censorship, they had a different tone and addressed issues not found elsewhere that people tuned into and discussed. One attentive observer noted that the SED regarded the church press “as a trial balloon.”18 Another even said that the church newspapers played a pioneering role in glasnost.19

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From February 1988, however, the SED began to rigidly censor the church newspapers. The relationship between church and state had deteriorated considerably since November 1987.20 Between February 28 and December 11, 1988, alone, there is evidence of almost fifty censorship measures, twenty-seven of which resulted in one of the six Protestant church newspapers or one of the four official church journals not being allowed to be published and distributed. In the other cases, there were delays in distribution because texts the state took issue with had to be corrected. There were various reasons for the censorship interventions. For one, reports of debates at synods at which speakers had addressed sociopolitical problems were censored. For another, individual articles dealing with environmental pollution, the consequences of uranium mining, xenophobia, the problem of emigration, the GDR’s educational system, everyday problems, Gorbachev’s glasnost policy, or neofascism in the GDR were not tolerated. And any contribution criticizing the work of state censors fell victim to censorship. On April 3, 1988, the East Berlin weekly newspaper Die Kirche was published with white blanks marked by dots: everyone could thus see where the censor had intervened. On October 10, 1988, nearly 200 individuals, mainly church employees, tried to demonstrate publicly against the censorship of church newspapers. The protest march had been preceded by a declaration on October 3, in which 27 pastors and church employees, mostly from East Berlin, had protested against the censorship measures. At the same time, an unsigned declaration had been circulated calling for a “silent march.” Around 4:40 p.m., people from the consistory of the BerlinBrandenburg Church in the center of East Berlin set off to demonstrate in front of the press office at the Council of Ministers. Several church employees, among them Consistorial President Manfred Stolpe, had tried to dissuade the demonstrators, although all were united in their indignation about the censorship measures. The demonstrators carried banners that read “Freedom of the press for ‘The Church,’” “Stop the practice of banning,” and “No praise for the press office,” as well as a white wooden cross with the inscription “Silence to the press office— against the practice of banning.” After they had gone a few meters, the police and MfS disbanded the demonstration and placed 78 people temporarily under arrest. West German camera teams filmed the action. By midnight, all those who had been arrested were free again. A little later, the “Church from Below” protested the arrests with a letter to the State Secretariat for Church Affairs signed by 274 men and women. In addition, a new demonstration was to take place on October 24. The State Security was on duty with hundreds of employees. The state had previously held talks with 23 “church leaders and church employees” to prevent the protest and warned 115 others, with 9 being temporarily arrested. Such intimidation, as well as the distancing of several “church-leading forces,” stopped further demonstrations; instead, only an emotionally charged “readers’ debate” with about 260 participants took place in the rooms of the consistory.

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This example shows the ambivalent actions of the churches, which could be demonstrated in practically any sphere of church activity. On the one hand, there were those, including pastors, deacons, theology students, and other church employees, who protested government measures but saw their church as part of society and, as a consequence, also saw social problems as church problems and tried to actively intervene. They were often part of the political opposition. On the other hand, church employees acted cautiously and prudently, and, above all, they were careful not to burden the relationship between church and state. The churches were not monolithic but pluralistic in their actions and social views. Berlin bishop Gottfried Forck, Görlitz bishop Hans-Joachim Fränkel, and Saxon bishop Johannes Hempel are examples of dignitaries who went through a learning process and increasingly understood the Church as a political counterpart to the dictatorship. The bishop of Greifswald, Horst Gienke, on the other hand, represents the group of people who saw the Church as part of the socialist state, striving to develop a new people’s church and therefore a new “alliance of throne and altar.” On June 23, 1985, he said at the conclusion of the church congress of the Greifswald Regional Church that Christians in the GDR were “equal, equal in rights, equal in opportunities.”21 Eberhard Natho, the church president of Anhalt, was one of those who sharply argued against grassroots groups, repeatedly glorified GDR relations, actively participated sometimes in state committees, and, at the same time, took conservative positions on the social place of the churches. Erfurt provost Heino Falcke, on the other hand, stands for those who understood the Church as a place where all social problems could be debated critically and without taboos in order to sustainably improve political and social living conditions. Consistorial President Stolpe embodied the technocratic church elite, speaking and negotiating with the state and only under duress with critical church groups or even the opposition. Officially, he constantly praised the “invaluable achievements” of “social and cultural rights” in the GDR while criticizing the lack of travel opportunities or freedom of expression. Stolpe, who liked to play skat, was taking a risk. Berlin superintendent general Günter Krusche (IM of the MfS), unlike Stolpe, symbolizes the group of church leaders who almost completely adapted to the state’s guidelines, even though he sought balance between state and church interests at the expense of grassroots church groups. The abovementioned pastor Cyrill Pech (IM of the MfS), a whole series of leading functionaries in the Christian Peace Conference around Heinrich Fink (IM of the MfS), and the “Weißensee Working Group” centered around Hanfried Müller (IM of the MfS) were already regarded as the “5th column” before 1989. But this was very small and insignificant within the Church. Finally, Pastor Walter Schilling from Braunsdorf in Thuringia symbolizes those in the Church that cared, above all, for people who were socially excluded, humiliated, persecuted, or oppressed. Schilling deliberately opposed the

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SED state, as did numerous others such as Rainer Eppelmann, Markus Meckel, Martin Gutzeit, Stephan Bickhardt, Heiko Lietz, Christoph Wonneberger, and Christian Dietrich.

The Churches for Youths The SED leadership had disliked the youth work of the churches since the end of the war. If the future project of socialism was to be successful, it needed the youth. That is why in the 1950s the communists always focused especially on the “young congregations” and their committed pastors and staff. This did not change even after 1961, but the means and methods became more refined. The triumphal procession of youth consecration especially, along with a dramatic decline in baptisms, first communions, and confirmations, seemed to indicate that the churches were losing ever more opportunities to win young people for themselves. The traditional work in the “Young Communities” remained too strongly limited to the core church community. In the 1960s, however, a large group of young people came to be oriented toward Western subcultures and maladjusted to society, so they were rejected and persecuted by the SED state. Recognizing this, individual pastors and deacons began to open church rooms to these young people, offering “a different kind of service” or “jazz service” in the mid-1960s. Pioneers of this “open work” were the pastors Claus-Jürgen Wizisla in Leipzig and Walter Schilling in Rudolstadt. Schilling, who stated that “to speak of Jesus is to speak of politics,”22 converted the stable next to his rectory in Braunsdorf into a youth home. Since 1971, the term open work was used for such nonconformist youth work, and groups like this came together in numerous Thuringian cities. In addition to Rudolstadt, Jena became a center for “open work” from the early 1970s. Deacon Thomas Auerbach shaped the scene in Jena until he was arrested for protesting Biermann’s expatriation in November 1976. “Open work,” which renounced missionary work, was otherwise characterized by teamwork, grassroots decision-making processes, cultural offerings that offered space to nonconformist and banned artists, as well as counseling and training for youths on how to behave when arrested, placed into custody, or recruited by the MfS. Auerbach was forcibly expatriated and deported to West Berlin in September 1977 after international protests with others from the Jena group. In addition to Thuringia, centers also developed in Saxony (around Pastor Frieder Burkhardt) and in East Berlin (around Pastor Rudi-Karl Pahnke). By the late 1970s, “open work” groups existed in all GDR regions. Individuals from within these groups were repeatedly arrested and convicted. For example, Deacon Lothar Rochau of Halle was sentenced to three years in prison in 1983. But beyond the state, members of the churches also viewed “open work” critically. The unconventional youth work and the even more unconventional young

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people engaged in it disturbed quite a few pastors, church employees, and church councils. Up through 1989, this often led to conflicts and fierce arguments. In June 1978 and 1979 there were major events in Rudolstadt with thousands of participants. Thuringia’s church leadership then banned the event planned for 1980, and Schilling’s youth home in Braunsdorf was closed in October at the instigation of the MfS without resistance from the church leadership. However, this could not prevent the growth of “open work.” In 1979, East Berlin had its first blues fair, which would become a legendary recurring event. Blues musician Günter Holwas stood one day at the door of Pastor Rainer Eppelmann and asked if he could play in the Samariterkirche (Berlin-Friedrichshain). Eppelmann consulted with his colleagues Heinz-Otto Seidenschnur and Bernd Schröder, and they came to the conclusion that a church setting could make such an event work. Supported by Rudi-Karl Pahnke and Martin-Michael Passauer as well as a setup group around Uwe Kulisch and Ralf Hirsch, twenty blues fairs were held through 1986, each a success with thousands of visitors. Deacon Lorenz Postler and Pastor Gerhard Cyrus took care of the punks. On the whole, “open work” proved to be a very successful concept for socializing, politicizing, and also re-Christianizing maladjusted young people to a certain extent. It reached tens of thousands of young people who were scorned and reviled by the state and the party, turning many of them into political actors. This effect was not due to the church leadership but to the committed pastors and staff at the grassroots level. The situation with the peace work of the churches was different. Since 1980, the Protestant churches throughout Germany put on the event Decades of Peace in November. The churches called these into being against the backdrop of the worldwide arms madness and its threat of all creation, as well as the cross-border peace movement. In the GDR, the independent peace movement developed in this context. The biblical motif “swords to ploughshares” served as a symbol of the movement as the motto of the first Decade of Peace in 1980. The Saxon state youth pastor Harald Bretschneider, the actual founder of the “swords to ploughshares” movement, chose this model and symbol based on the sculpture, a Soviet gift, that had stood in front of the UN headquarters in New York since 1959. In the youth consecration books of the GDR, a photograph of this sculpture had been on display since the late 1970s. As a symbol it seemed unassailable—not least because of its Stalinist show of power—yet it also conveyed a Christian message. The Potsdam graphic artist Herbert Sanders designed the symbol and Bretschneider had it printed on fleece, but due to a legal loophole he did not need a printing permit for this. In the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine in Upper Lusatia, about two hundred thousand fleece patches were produced. The demand could hardly be satisfied. Everywhere in the GDR in 1981–82, young people were seen wearing the patch. This hit the SED state at its most sensitive point because this movement, symbolized by the patch, denied the state its exclusive right to “peace policy” and the

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“granting of peace.” Although foreign peace policy and disarmament demands were the policy areas in which the SED and church leadership came closest to each other, this was not an equal partnership. Although the ecclesiastical symbol was never officially banned, from the beginning of 1982 the police and the MfS targeted many young people for wearing the patch, tearing them off jackets on the open street. There were thousands of disputes in the schools resulting in school punishments and expulsions. In protest, many wore a white circle on their jackets or cut a hole the size of the patch. With this hardline response, the SED insisted on its monopoly on peace and publicly tolerated only its own symbols, rejecting the basic pacifist attitude associated with the church symbol: peace as the SED understood it had to remain armed. The movement opposed the militarization of GDR society and advocated “social peace service” as a substitute for military service—all points that the SED characterized as against the state. Although the churches stood behind the sponsors and showed solidarity after disciplinary measures in principle, they once again revealed their ambivalence. Bishops Forck and Rathke demonstratively wore such a patch themselves. Forck demanded that the SED apologize for the disciplinary measures and persecutions in Neues Deutschland, but the party would not even think about it. When the new defense law was enacted in March 1982, Defense Minister Hoffmann declared before the People’s Chamber: “Socialism still needs our ploughshares and our swords; peace still needs our ploughshares and our swords!”23 Against this background, many church people gave in. Manfred Stolpe declared on April 18, 1982, on behalf of the Berlin-Brandenburg church leadership that this was a legal problem, and since the legal situation was clear, the circumstance could be made objective again. The state and church, he remarked, seemed to be plagued by the same problems: “The legal order must prove itself in conflict! The problem is well known to us even within the Church!” According to Stolpe, there was neither a ban on the patch nor a legal issue with its manufacture. But from that point on, a permit should be required. (This was never granted.) Finally, Stolpe pointed out that school principals could prohibit students from wearing the patches: “This is legally possible on the basis of the principals’ right to give instructions. This is in keeping with the old tradition of so-called ‘domiciliary rights.’” This legal argumentation was tantamount to complicity with the party. Moreover, Stolpe unnecessarily went one step further in imploring that another danger was coming from the West because Western media misinterpreted the symbol as the “badge of a GDR opposition party.”24 This seemed to effectively cut off the movement as a church peace movement. In September 1982, the Federal Synod even declared that the church would “renounce it for the sake of peace.”25 That sounds cynical. Quite a number of leading churchmen had already distanced themselves from the movement; yet besides Bishop Forck, above all, parish priests such as Stier, Schorlemmer, Eppelmann, Schilling, and others held on to the badge and the movement. On September 24, 1983, Friedrich

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Schorlemmer initiated a spectacular action at the Wittenberg church congress that was filmed by a West German camera team. Art blacksmith Stefan Nau formed a ploughshare from a sword in a ninety-minute performance piece under the gaze of two thousand people in Lutherhof. He subsequently came under considerable state pressure and later left the country. By summer 1982 at the latest, it had become clear that oppositional work under the roofs of the churches would always meet with criticism from the churches themselves. This tension remained until autumn 1989. Although the churches continued to support the initiatives for social peace service as an alternative to military service, church leaders overall shied away from open support of oppositional activities and did not wish to be considered opposition themselves. The Synod of the Evangelical Church Province in Erfurt in June 1985 stated on behalf of the Church that it wanted to continue to show “critical solidarity” with SED peace policy but that it would by no means be pushed into “destructive opposition.”26 The churches always faced the problem of not wanting to be considered political even as the prevailing conditions almost automatically put them into a political role and function. Their very existence was a political fact during the dictatorship. In the 1950s, the churches were still fully aware of this fact against the historical background of the Nazi era, but after 1961 this insight crumbled, and in the 1980s only a minority still held this view. This minority within the minority church led to the Protestant churches today generally being considered of great importance to the process of change. To this day, the churches have not given due thanks to this political minority. In principle, the churches should not be blamed for not accepting this political role in toto. It would be more critical to note that they did not base their decisions equally on the needs of the party-state and the demands of the opposition but rather stood up too often for the state’s needs in cases of doubt. But because they did not do so consistently, both sides—state and opposition—were dissatisfied with the churches’ role as moderators, as is typical when one tries to satisfy two opposing sides equally. In effect, until well into the second half of the 1980s, the churches unspokenly adopted the SED’s ideological equation of state and society. Not least for that reason, and not only because of theological considerations, they remained more oriented toward the state and less toward society. In their own words, this meant: “The Church is for everyone but not for everything.”27 The East Berlin church congress vividly demonstrated this paradox in 1987. Since the mid-1980s, the tensions between church leaders, congregations, and grassroots groups had not abated. Eppelmann’s blues masses had been obstructed, as had the “open work” initiatives. In summer 1986, General Superintendent Krusche announced that the peace workshop that had been held annually since 1982 would not take place in 1987. At the peace workshops, various grassroots and opposition groups met, exchanged materials, held public debates, and, above

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all, sought dialogue with people who were not active in any group. The main argument for postponing the workshop was to examine its ecclesiastical character and have it organized again in future solely by church members. The communication between church leaders and groups was considerably disturbed, even if this instance, as in many other church fields, the conflict was not uniformly distributed. Precisely because the Protestant churches had basic democratic structures, tense disputes always occurred alongside uncomplicated cooperation. The Berlin church leadership, however, feared that the Church would become the stronghold of the opposition. Krusche called for a “pause for thought.”28 Whatever he may have understood by this—a break to think and to reflect or from thinking?— church leaders repeatedly demanded a “pause for reflection” until far into the year 1989. These state-oriented defensive strategists lost all battles—in 1987, 1988, and, finally, 1989. After the announced postponement of the peace workshop, pastors, deacons, and, above all, representatives of the “open work” initiatives, from ecological, peace, women’s, and Third World groups, but also from the Church, gathered rather distant people and prepared a “Church Day from Below.” This was to be held as part of the East Berlin church congress in June 1987. For the first time since 1951, a full-fledged church congress was held in East Berlin—and in the jubilee year marking the 750th anniversary of the divided city, no less. For many critics in East Berlin and especially in the GDR, this was further proof that the Berlin-Brandenburg church leadership was complicit with the SED leadership. After 1990, the negotiation documents of the churches, the SED, the state, and the MfS showed that the church leadership did indeed go very far in its concessions, partly implementing state requirements without contradiction but, in turn, also implementing other ideas that countered the state’s expressed wishes, despite statements to the contrary. The church congress itself did not meet with the expected public response; the stream of visitors was not overly large, and the mere fact that it took place was the headline that followed. At the end of April, leaflets that fell on the Berlin-Brandenburg Synodalists during a meeting at the Stephanus Foundation announced: “We’re doing a church congress from below because we no longer find our concerns and ourselves in churches/municipalities.” The church was criticized for having become overly bureaucratic, for allowing its congregations to become incapacitated, for focusing too much on renovation and new construction of prestigious church buildings, for fixating too strongly on state guidelines, and for choosing to integrate into socialist society and to obstruct the “open work” initiatives. The leaflets also called for a House of Open Work in East Berlin. The church leaders reacted negatively. The church congress, they maintained, was to run smoothly and without provocation. Preparations were proceeding as planned. The access rules had been determined to the state’s satisfaction. The working groups would take up taboo topics,

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but hardly any actions were to be expected. Only the activists of the “Church from Below” (Kirche von unten, or KvU) did not give in. They did not accept their exclusion from the church congress, threatening to occupy one or more churches. Finally, one day before the opening of the church congress, the church management—again in consultation with the state—gave in and made community rooms available. For three days, about six thousand people attended the church congress from below. The KvU people were also publicly visible at the closing service in the football stadium of the 1st FC Union in Berlin-Köpenick with twenty thousand participants. They walked for two hours on the lawn with banners bearing the slogans “Glasnost in state and church,” “No money for ostentation,” “A house for open work,” “Miracles are always happening. Church from Below,” and “We are in favor of an alternative civil service.” After the church congress, fixed structures of the “Church from Below” developed in most regions. From the end of 1988, it was also politically perceptible outside the churches that a separation from the Church had begun, and this became clearly visible in 1989. The KvU basically wished to criticize the SED state but attacked church leaders as a stand-in for the state because it misunderstood them as its mouthpiece. As understandable as the KvU’s demands were, it was incomprehensible why the movement did not target the main culprit, namely, the SED state, but rather played sandbox games within the Church for a long time. The state, on the other hand, understood as early as 1987 that these “internal church” activities would not remain within the Church for long. In retrospect, it is evident that the activities of the “Church from Below”— many of its members played an important political role in 1989–90—represented political training programs. In their discussions with church leaders and congregations, they and the other groups learned how to build and defend structures, develop programs, negotiate compromises, make impressive threats, stage public activities, interest the media, and, in the end, present the minority position as so important that the other side had no choice but to respond to it and talk about it. For many people, the churches were places of active political learning, and this process simultaneously contoured and, for a brief historical moment, abolished the boundaries between action within the church and in society as a whole.

The Churches and the MfS The churches were always aware that the East German secret police targeted and infiltrated them. Even if not every GDR person knew, every church leader certainly was aware that the SED exercised state power, not the MfS. In this respect, the churches had to speak and negotiate with everyone but only under the condition that they themselves would neither fall into secret diplomacy nor carry out unofficial activities for government agencies. There was a clear rule that one was to report conversations to superiors and take notes on conversations,

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but, in practice, things turned out differently. Church leaders found it particularly depressing when people were arrested in church rooms with church members’ help and without protest. One example occurred on February 9, 1982. Pastor Eppelmann was staying with twenty confirmands in Hirschluch, a home for young people near Storkow when the home’s director Erich Pfuhl, a church employee and the Federal Synodalist from 1984 to 1988, kindly asked Eppelmann to follow him to his office where MfS officers were waiting to arrest him. Eppelmann later described this event: “The director . . . did not protest in my presence with one word against the fact that the MfS arrested a priest in a church institution. Instead, he helped the Stasi people to make the arrest secretly and unnoticed by the confirmands. Had they had to do their dirty work in front of their eyes, this would have been an important lesson. . . . I never went there again because I didn’t want to meet the traitor.”29 Since 1994, it has been known that Manfred Stolpe, in particular, had distanced himself from Eppelmann visà-vis state authorities, described him as a problem in the Church, classified his activities as “endangering peace,” and showed himself willing to testify to this also vis-à-vis judicial bodies.30 Apart from such extreme examples, church members had four main strategies for dealing with the MfS. The first was to refuse any contact and not to accept the secret police as interlocutors. This was possible except in the case of arrests and transfers. The MfS then operated partly undercover or instructed other state and party bodies. The MfS was largely powerless against a direct refusal to talk. The second possibility was to report on them publicly, i.e., in church rooms, after the discussions had taken place, and to share one’s own experiences. This was often done to prepare others for such discussions. There were some training exercises to prepare for such discussions. If someone reported MfS attempts at recruitment, quite a few pastors filed complaints and, thus, immediately ended the process. The third strategy is the least clear-cut and was practiced by some church leaders. Manfred Stolpe made this strategy famous after 1990. Since the end of the 1960s, he had met with MfS staff in his office, in his apartment, in clubs and restaurants, and even in the homes of conspirators. In doing so, he wanted to achieve “political goals also by way of the state security.” Stolpe also argued that he knew “of nine men” who “followed the same strategy as I did in dealing with state security.”31 When he presented eight of them at a press conference on May 3, 1992, this earned him little confidence because most of them were themselves confronted with considerable IM accusations. Among them were Bishop Ingo Braecklein/Thuringia (IM “Ingo”), Superintendent General Reinhard Richter/ Cottbus (IM “Roland”), president of the Consistorial Council Hans-Martin Harder/Greifswald (IM “Winzer”), High Consistory Member Siegfried Plath/ Greifswald (IM “Hiller”), and Pastor Rolf-Dieter Günther (IM “Wilhelm”), press spokesman of the federation. All were considered to be employees of the MfS. Only Pastor Martin-Michael Passauer, who was the personal advisor to

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Bishop Forck from 1988 to 1990, Senior Church Councilor Martin Ziegler, head of the secretariat of the federation, and Pastor Werner Braune, head of the Stephanus Foundation in Berlin-Weissensee, had no conspiratorial or unofficial contacts with the MfS. Since 1964 Stolpe had been involved in IM preliminaries and was re-registered as IM “Sekretär” within the MfS in 1970. His IM activity seems to be proven, especially since he repeatedly influenced decision-making processes in the interest of the state, passed on internal church information, and, in particular, managed to implement his position when dealing with opposition members. He himself always had an IM position. But it was also part of his policy to stand up for opposition members, for those who had been arrested, and for those who were convicted. He always remained unpredictable—for all sides.32 This was definitely an advantage in the 1980s. It is hardly possible to make a clear overall assessment of him because he was almost everything at once. There is no written declaration of commitment for him, but this was just as typical for high-ranking persons like Stolpe as the absence of handwritten documents. Several expert opinions confirmed that Stolpe had worked as an IM. The decisive and incriminating point in all his actions was that he acted on his own authority and without consulting with his superior, Bishop Forck. Quite a few theologians are of the opinion that a churchman should not have been allowed to talk or even negotiate with the secret police out of principle.33 State bishop Werner Leich also spoke with the MfS but never outside of his offices, and never without informing others beforehand and afterward or writing appropriate notes. In the Catholic Church there were also such discussions with superiors to determine appropriate strategies. The chairmen of the Berlin Bishops’ Conference, Alfred Bengsch and, since 1980, Joachim Meisner, appointed commissioners who spoke with the MfS. They were managed by the MfS as IMs, but they rarely acted as such. Fourthly and finally, a number of clergymen, synodalists, and church employees consciously worked with the MfS as IMs. The Berlin priest Gottfried Gartenschläger, who for years housed the opposition group Friedrichsfelder Friedenskreis in his church and actively participated in its work, was one of them, for example, as IM “Barth.” The fact that someone like Detlev Hammer, the president of the consistory in Magdeburg, was first an IM and then an officer on special assignment for the MfS (OibE) is a rare but not singular exception. Even if numerous IMs were active, especially in church leadership, including full-time IMs who received salaries from the MfS, it was definitely not the case that the churches were infiltrated by the secret police. Internal church decision-making structures already stood in the way of this. Exact figures on IM activity in the churches do not exist. At the beginning of the 1990s, there were only a few church disciplinary proceedings against church employees due to MfS involvement.34 The small number was not only due to an esprit de corps, which would judge more generously and liberally in self-responsible scrutiny than outsiders.

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Rather, the total number of IM, which is supposed to be between five hundred and about two thousand, refers to the entire church area from the federation, church leaders, synods, and church newspapers down to the individual congregations and includes not only pastors but also all other church employees, from technical staff to elected church councils. In this respect, the figures are considerably relativized. Any single pastor or theologian who was an IM was one too many and considerably damaged the reputation of the churches. But only a few IMs worked as pastors and pastoral workers, so that although IMs were able to influence church policy debates and provide the state with internal materials and information, confessional secrets and pastoral relationships were rarely betrayed.

“The Church under Socialism” In dictatorships, churches, in order to be able to assert themselves, must precisely determine their sociopolitical place. This remained controversial in the GDR, which also explains the ambivalent appearance of the Protestant churches. They showed themselves to be inconsistent and indecisive on political issues, sometimes even helpless. There are several reasons for this. The eight regional churches of the GDR, which had been united in the Federation of Protestant Churches in the GDR since 1969, took different paths not only because of different traditions but also because they remained pluralistically oriented in themselves. The church structure promoted individuals who were commonly considered the mouthpieces of the churches to the top of church governing bodies. In spite of their high offices, they ultimately stood for the churches no more than a parish priest, a member of the parish church council, yes, a “simple” parishioner. Precisely because some Protestant church structures contained grassroots democratic elements, conflicts between the hierarchical levels were inevitable. This, too, led to the fact that neither the federal government nor the regional churches were able to clearly define their place in GDR society in the 1970s and 1980s. That inevitably had to lead to internal church conflicts and disputes with non-church institutions and problem areas. Just as it is almost always permissible to speak of the SED leadership, indeed, mostly of the SED as a politically unified collective, so, too, would one have to speak of individuals in the case of the Protestant churches in almost every political and theological conflict. Even resolutions of the federation, the church leadership, the federal or state synods, however meaningful they may have been, were almost never unanimously accepted without contradiction. This may sound banal, but it explains why the churches provided no clear definition of their position that could have produced clear reactions to political and social developments and events in the 1970s and 1980s. And that also explains why the slogan “The church under socialism” could be interpreted in any number of ways; one merely had to understand that one’s own interpretation was not universally accepted. The most famous formulation came from the

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Federal Synod 1971, following a suggestion of the SED: “We do not want to be the church beside or against, but the church in socialism.” The real intellectual, theological, and political failure lay not in the slogan “The church in socialism” but in the fact that it was never more precisely defined. The poles of interpretation are obvious: “The church in socialism” could mean that the church wished to become loyal to the state, that the church was for socialism, and, thus, that the church recognized the state, society, and social order as they were. The antithesis claimed to be just as exaggerated and historically incorrect: the slogan merely described the present reality, namely, that the church was present in socialism on socialist territory. The advocates of this interpretation failed to explain how they understood “socialism”: did it represent the existing system or was it an ideal state to be striven for? Heino Falcke’s formulation with a view to the “Prague Spring” of “improved socialism” did not help in this.35 Therefore, the slogan remained not only anemic but also always open to interpretation. Another paradox is that it played practically no role in concrete church work. The discussants were only too aware of this. In contrast to the political bureaucrats, even the highest church officials had constant contact with ordinary people and knew only too well that their “superstructure debate” did not always reach the “base,” nor did it particularly impress them. This is not to say that they did not deal with it in these contexts, but they did not specify it, focusing instead on an individual assessment of the situation. But from a historical perspective, the slogan “The church in socialism” cannot be read so mercifully because it aroused expectations among the state and the SED. The SED believed that this slogan implied that it could demand that churches agree with its social experiment, which the churches did not want, were they able to grant such agreement politically or theologically. Bishop Albrecht Schönherr’s meeting with Honecker on March 6, 1978, marked a symbolic standstill agreement. The Protestant churches agreed to avoid confrontations with the state, and the SED state agreed to respect the churches’ autonomy. This compromise remained the guiding principle for most “church leaders” until the fall of 1989. And at the same time it was a further cause for tensions within the church because by far not all of them were prepared to support this standstill agreement. Ultimately, it was up to each Christian to decide how to deal with it. This appeasement policy between the state and the churches continued to have ambivalent effects. The SED could not treat the churches as hostile per se; it had to justify legal positions, not just proclaim them, and it had no choice but to differentiate. That again helped the internal church debate to establish clearer contours because the discussants had to take a position on “the church in socialism” and, at the same time, could refer to church autonomy. These debates within the church were never only within the church. It was always a matter of the individual deciding which society he or she wanted to live in. In this respect,

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the real problem was that church leaders were prepared to use such a slogan at all. The church does not exist in socialism, in capitalism, in freedom, in bondage, in the GDR, in the Federal Republic; the church lives in the proclamation of the gospel and its interpretation. The path that led to the ambiguous slogan “The church in socialism” was not inevitable. There were many critics at the time. Bishop Fränkel, for example, said: “It is consciously the church in socialism, but not under it and not in its spirit.”36 SED-related theologians like Hanfried Müller, on the other hand, called for “a church for socialism.” If Fränkel’s interpretation had mustered a majority, only a numerically very small group (Weissenseer Arbeitskreis since 1968) publicly present in the GDR represented Müller’s position. The ambiguity remained on both sides. At least the majority could have brought a debate to an intellectually and theologically consistent conclusion. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous formulation of 1944 “the church for others”37 was present in the debates.38 Many theologians referred to it, but mostly in a shortened antifascist dimension rather than in dimensions of resistance and ethics. Especially in the 1980s, when the churches repeatedly restricted themselves and merely took “pauses for thought,” they could just as well have argued with Bonhoeffer’s phrase “the church for others” and with his almost simultaneously equally famous and universally recognized dictum after 1933 that the church, to the detriment of itself and of society, “fought only for its self-preservation . . . as if it were an end in itself”39: Churches in the GDR could be concerned not only with asserting themselves but also with asserting society as a whole vis-à-vis the state, the defense of civil society, and the establishment of structures based on the rule of law. All this would have been part of their own self-assertion because the churches, in the end, stood before the state as petitioners and not on legally enforceable grounds that always included the theoretical threat to their existence. The churches had become too involved in confusing the law with justice. In 1933 Bonhoeffer wrote: “The state that endangers the Christian preaching denies itself. That means a threefold possibility of church action towards the state: first . . . the question addressed to the state about the legitimate state character of its action, i.e., the responsibility of the state. Second, the service to the victims of state action. . . . The third possibility is to not only connect the victims under the wheel but to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself. . . . The church cannot let the state dictate its actions to its members.”40 Now Bonhoeffer should not be misconstrued as a Protestant saint. But it would certainly be revealing to know why one of his companions and confidants, Bishop Schönherr, from the late 1960s onward appeared in the GDR as one of the protagonists of the misunderstood, somewhat chummy interpretation of the phrase, “the church in socialism.” He even believed that the path of the churches in GDR socialism followed in a direct line from Bonhoeffer’s legacy.41 The Berlin-Brandenburg bishop Otto Dibelius, who also belonged to the Confessing Church, presented a paper as late as 1959 in which he drew exactly

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the opposite consequences for the contemporary period. Only in exceptional cases did theologians not know this paper. In “Obrigkeit?” [Authority], Dibelius wrote: “In a totalitarian sphere there is no law in the Christian sense of the word at all.” In a democratic state, he said, one must abide by legislation because of the way it is enacted. “And if I act against it [the state], I feel guilty.” In an arbitrary state, he could not recognize prohibitions, regulations, laws, because no law existed, the laws and regulations were illegitimate, because the state was not democratically legitimized. If he were punished, he would accept this, “but my conscience will be completely free of any consciousness of guilt!” Because everything was only “decreed out of the will to power of the totalitarian regime,” the most intimate wish could only be to overcome the system.42 The SED leadership unleashed an unprecedented defamation campaign against Dibelius, some of which continues to have an effect to this day. Even within his church, Dibelius remained isolated with his conclusions drawn from both the Nazi era and the GDR context. Hardly anyone wanted to follow him in this radicality. Even if one argued less sharply, the principal direction comprised an alternative that the federation never represented. Typical for statements by church leaders was “the full affirmation of life and Christianity in the socialist society of the GDR as the place of calling, where God places us.”43 This would not even have contradicted Dibelius or Bonhoeffer if the affirmation of life in this society had, at the same time, been interpreted as a duty to adhere to the legal norms disregarded by the SED and as an affirmation of resistance to this state. In the late 1980s, however, the slogan “the church under socialism” was used less and less often against the backdrop of social and political events on the world stage. In September 1987, the Wittenberg priest Friedrich Schorlemmer spoke of “the ruins of the concept of the ‘church under socialism.’” He described a country whose hopes lay in ruins as much as its future prospects. Truths, he argued, had to be put on the table and not sacrificed to “tactical calculation”; otherwise the churches would “no longer [be] with the people.”44 One year later, the social situation had further intensified, with several church leaders convinced that many things resembled a “powder keg” (Pastor Martin-Michael Passauer) and that there would be a big explosion “in the near future” (Bishop Johannes Hempel). Manfred Stolpe stated that agreements and cooperation between the state and churches were no longer working. Bishop Christoph Demke exhorted the churches to take on responsibility for society as a whole because of the situation in the GDR, although he himself preferred to separate from the opposition and let the church be the church. An MfS document based on an IM report notes the following about these debates: “It became known in strict confidence that Provost Furian/Berlin . . . said in an internal circle during a break in deliberations . . . that he did not understand why it could not be clearly stated here in the conference that this social order was to be replaced by socialism. The real church mission is to abolish socialism, he said.”45

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Richard Schröder, a lecturer at the Sprachenkonvikt, published the most fully developed rejection of the slogan “the church in socialism” in 1988. He argued that the concept was ambiguous and gave the impression that the churches shared SED socialism in theory and practice but that this could not be the case. “The characterization ‘the church in the GDR’ would be less misleading. It would name as the place of the church a country . . . a state and its citizens that, on account of their particular history, refer to one another although they stand in very different relations within this history.”46 At the beginning of 1989, the deputy MfS minister Rudi Mittig described this as an appeal “to the church to unambiguously confess its opposition to socialism and place itself at the head of an opposition.”47 In a second contribution, Schröder went even further. He called on the state to withdraw from all those areas that were none of its business—if one wanted to, one could think of Dibelius as providing the impetus for this. Society, Schröder maintained, had to be able to live out its freedom in a self-organized, selfgoverning manner. Law was indispensable for this. “Organized satisfaction of needs, on the other hand, makes (mostly dissatisfied) servants. Whoever wants to be of age must not spare himself the plague of a reliable lifestyle. . . . A state of hedonists needs a secret police.”48 There were other voices that responded to Schröder with the argument that one had to keep the slogan because it was so open and integrative.49 But things actually turned out differently. On March 5, 1989, the Thuringian regional bishop Werner Leich, who had been the chairman of the Conference of Protestant Church Leaders since 1986, spoke out against the further use of the slogan “the church in socialism.” In his view, the churches had never clarified what “socialism” and what “church” meant. The debate was over. The churches found themselves confronted with Luther’s dictum, “For man does not live alone in his body but also among other men on earth,”50 which was probably also the impetus for Bonhoeffer’s “church for others.”

The Churches in the GDR and German Unity Many observers of the founding of the Federation of Protestant Churches in the GDR in 1969 also understood this as the Protestant churches rejecting German unity. Official documents from the church leadership suggested this. At the same time, however, the “special community” between the federation and the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) remained undisputed, especially since membership in the EKD was only dormant. As late as autumn 1989, however, many church leaders were unanimous in discouraging reunification. But this is not the end of the chapter because within the churches there was more than just a constant debate in the 1980s; the churches themselves contributed to overcoming the German division. The Catholic Church played almost no role at all in this, either. In a few statements, Berlin’s bishop, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, expressed himself on the

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problems of leaving and traveling, pleading for leniency, forbearance, and generosity. He relentlessly supported the rights of the unborn. Yet this verve was missing when he spoke of the Wall and a divided Germany. Although he lamented the consequences, he also found words that were disturbing: “Even if the price [for the erection of the Wall] seemed too high to some people, was it really, considering the price that the outbreak of an open conflict would almost certainly have cost . . . ?”51 This remark aligned closely with the declarations that the SED had always made to justify the construction and maintenance of the Wall. At the same time, however, the cardinal emphasized the unity of the diocese of Berlin and that all members, including West Berlin, symbolized this unity. Even if some clergymen understood this as a longing to overcome the division of Germany, on the whole the Catholic Church in the GDR—unlike in Poland—adhered to its self-imposed political restraint in this question, as well. The activities of the Protestant churches were more inconsistent and contradictory. The “Evangelical Church of the Union,” which was a member of the EKD, was comprised of seven member churches from 1954, five of which were located on GDR territory. It continued to exist after the foundation of the federation and was a symbol of unity despite division. Similar to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Berlin (1976), the structure of the federation can be characterized as a reasonable adaptation to the circumstances. Proper cooperation among Protestants in the EKD was just as impossible as for Catholics in the German Bishops’ Conference because of the Wall. For this reason, the founding of the federation initially meant that the Protestant churches in the GDR were capable of acting as a single body again. The federal government officially added “in the GDR” to the federation’s name. However, the retention of the names of the state churches (Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg, the Church Province of Saxony, Greifswald, the State Church of Anhalt, the Görlitz Church Area, as well as the Lutheran State Churches of Saxony, Thuringia, and Mecklenburg) formed an unmistakable counterstructure to the GDR’s district divisions, which had dissolved the states in 1952. This aspect should not be underestimated (but also not overestimated). In view of the church names, many young people who were born in the GDR and received nothing from the states were curious about these names, wondering about the traditions that gave rise to them and also where it would lead. A delicate plant of tradition and unity was, thus, symbolically preserved and cultivated. The churches represented places of encounter between East and West Germans. Almost every community had partner communities in the Federal Republic or in West Berlin going back to the 1950s. These connections remained vital until 1989, with people on both sides finding common ground on the basis of the church and beyond the Wall and division, as well as discussing and disputing the differences. While there were sixty-two East-West German town twinnings,52 there were also thousands of East-West German church twinnings that helped to

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ultimately preserve unity in division with effort and hope, despite contradictions and disappointments. In addition, churches formed additional East-West German meeting places. On May 18, 1985, a much-acclaimed exhibition of the work of the artist Loriot was opened in Brandenburg Cathedral in his presence. There were many such cultural highlights in the 1980s, but there were also political ones. After lots of deliberations, the acting mayor of West Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen, decided not to take part in the anniversary celebrations in East Berlin in 1987. However, he went “privately” to a service in the Gethsemane Church in Prenzlauer Berg on January 22, 1987. Bishop Gottfried Forck greeted him there with the words: “And we are also pleased about the venerable visitors from West Berlin.”53 Forck could say no more because the SED mayor of East Berlin Erhard Krack was also sitting in the church, and welcoming two mayors of what was technically one city would have been problematic from a protocol point of view. Half a year later, the first wordless handshake between Diepgen and Krack took place—on October 21, 1987, in St. Mary’s Church. Even more important were lectures and discussion events with West German politicians in churches. There was hardly a church congress without SPD or CDU politicians present. Egon Bahr and Erhard Eppler frequently appeared. They tried to transport the spirit of the SED-SPD paper to the GDR with whatever means they had. Eppler spoke several times of the fact that the age of tolerance, of toleration of the lawless areas in Europe, was coming to an end and that the age of dialogue was beginning. Dialogue, he averred, meant not wanting to enforce one truth with state means but letting different truths struggle with each other in order to find out what is right. If the monopoly of truth was actually abandoned by the communists, he maintained, their monopoly of power would also fall.54 Even though Eppler mostly failed to address the domestic political conditions in the GDR more clearly, his listeners understood such messages. The highlight of these political appearances can be seen in former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s speech on June 18, 1988, at the Rostock church congress in front of 2,500 listeners in St. Mary’s Church and his participation in a podium round table in the Church of the Holy Spirit in front of one thousand visitors. The mere fact that a former chancellor spoke was a sensation. When Pastor Joachim Gauck, whose sermon at the concluding service gave the MfS officers a particularly bitter reception, now greeted Helmut Schmidt in St. Mary’s Church, the minutes noted: “Calls of joy, long lasting stormy applause.”55 As Schmidt recalled, the people “were prepared to cheer the speaker simply because he had come.”56 Under thunderous applause, Schmidt explained that he experienced the day in Rostock as a day of unity. Especially in those places where Schmidt emphasized the respect and protection of human rights, his speech was interrupted by fierce applause and sometimes by storms of cheers. “They certainly suffer much more than we in the West [from the division

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of Germany], but we both have to learn serenity. Beyond that I have nothing to advise you, dear Rostockers. I don’t advise you to come over, and I don’t advise you to stay here. . . . But one thing I do know, the more bridges there will be, across and over, the more we can all travel over these bridges, the more the question of emigrating or staying here will lose weight.”57 Schmidt referred to the fifth thesis of the Barmer Confession of 1934 of the Confessing Church and explained that no one—neither the church nor the state—could represent a claim to totality but that such a claim should be disputed and that both the rulers and the governed bore responsibility for their society. Speakers like Schmidt and Eppler encouraged people to act responsibly in their own name. It was not so much what they said but the fact that they said it at all in the East, and that as politicians they used a language clearly different from that of the SED functionaries, that proved to be significant. In this respect, the churches were a bridge between the two Germanys even with these podiums. It was not for nothing that the SED and MfS noted that GDR critics such as state bishop Christoph Stier, Pastor Joachim Gauck, and the civil rights activist Heiko Lietz Schmidt also warmly welcomed Schmidt because he said many things they thought. And because he expressed it, they picked up his thread in Rostock and pleaded for self-determined, responsible action, called for social change, and emphasized that opposition was necessary to achieve this.58 A report to Honecker about the event noted that Schmidt’s appearance aimed to awaken “reveries” about a unified Germany “in the participants.”59 In all these speeches and in many questions of West German policy toward the two German states and the SPD opposition from the early 1980s, it was striking that East German church leaders used many of the same language elements, formulations, and political objectives. The closeness to the SPD was especially obvious. The reason was not, as one might assume, that the SPD was particularly close to the churches. Rather, it resulted from leading Social Democrats holding intensive talks with the SED rulers and also speaking with church leaders. The central figure in these briefings was Consistorial President Stolpe. Many West German politicians later described him as their most reliable interlocutor, who informed them very thoroughly about the situation in the GDR and spoke with them about politically desirable steps. For Stolpe, all doors in the Federal Republic were open to him at the major parties, including the Federal Chancellery and the Office of the Federal President. Oddly, only in Helmut Kohl’s memoirs does he not appear, but Wolfgang Schäuble, head of the Federal Chancellery from 1984 to 1989, can remember his activity and relationship of trust with Stolpe all the better for it.60 Apart from Stolpe, others also played a role, although no one was like him. The regional bishops were consulted, and individual pastors maintained intensive contacts. Rainer Eppelmann could refer here to a particularly extensive network of contacts. When he visited the Federal Republic of Germany in September

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1987, he met with numerous high-ranking representatives of the CDU/CSU and SPD and pointed out to them that not only was the GDR opposition fixated on the “Greens” but that talks had to take place with them as well.61 How far such discussions went and how strongly individual politicians listened to their guarantors in the GDR is shown by the relationship between Erhard Eppler and the Erfurt prophet Heino Falcke. In preparation for the SED-SPD talks, Eppler consulted with Falcke. And before Eppler held the abovementioned speech in the Bundestag in 1989, he had only given it to one person to read: Heino Falcke from Erfurt. This complex of issues has not yet been sufficiently researched. How did the Protestant churches of the GDR influence the Federal Republic’s policy toward the two Germanys, and how did they influence the image of the GDR in the West German parties? We have only fragments from which to construct answers. However, they suggest that the East Berlin consistory, in particular, had a relatively large and surprising influence on German political activities, and not only those of the SPD. At the same time, there were countercurrents. Bishop Forck, for example, indirectly called on the West German government several times in 1988 and 1989 to abandon the right of sole representation for “all Germans” as laid down in West Germany’s Basic Law. Stolpe also advocated this. A broad swath of the SPD was willing to do so, but the governing party, the CDU, was not in the least willing. It is a known fact. But one could frame the question the other way around and ask what actually would have happened in the SPD if “unrealistic” church people had confronted its members in the 1980s and described the GDR as a dictatorship to them, thus bringing German reunification closer to them as an unavoidable goal. There is still exciting research work to be done in this field. Finally, one last example of “the churches and German unity,” the perennial topic of the 1980s: escape and emigration from the GDR. At an ecumenical service in Dresden on February 13, 1985, on the fortieth anniversary of the destruction of the Elbe city, the bishop of Saxony, Johannes Hempel, said in front of a crowd of five thousand: “It burdens, it bleeds that two German states have come into being with their difficult border. It burdens and bleeds the fullness of borders in general.”62 It was not only Hempel who found such drastic words. He knew that many members of the Protestant churches agreed with him. A few church employees found themselves ready to demonstrate. On August 13, 1986, Reinhard Lampe chained himself to the window cross of a vacant apartment in East Berlin just opposite the Wall so that he could be seen and photographed from West Berlin. Two posters said: “Jesus dies from the wall in his head” and “25 years is enough.” The MfS arrested Lampe. On December 3, 1986, he received a prison sentence of one year and nine months. In the meantime, the state and the party had received several letters of protest from members of the opposition and church employees. Bishop Forck also assured the authorities that

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he would personally take care of Lampe after his release on parole. Consequently, Lampe was released immediately after the judgment was delivered. The state did not want to burden its relationship with the church. Another example: On December 3, 1986, the FDGB district chairman reported to the head of the MfS district administration (last name indicated as Parchim) that he had just seen a man demonstrating with a poster in the city center. The police arrested the man whose poster said: “Stop the war against us; no more murders at the Wall.”63 In the days before, three more men had just been shot at the Berlin Wall. It soon became apparent that the demonstrator was the pastor of a nearby parish. Several church representatives distanced themselves from him. Since in this case, too, the state did not wish to burden its relationship with the church, the pastor “only” received a fine of 1,000 marks. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Mecklenburg followed the state request and transferred the man. But the churches preferred rather quiet admonitions. In principle, they called for people to stay in the GDR. They justified this with Luther but did not deny themselves political justifications. Bishop Leich said on October 30, 1985, that in the Federal Republic of Germany freedom was no greater than in the GDR but was only limited in another way.64 The churches called on the people not to leave the GDR “to others” and to understand the GDR as their place of activity. This stance showed great continuity from the 1950s to the late 1980s. Members of the West German government were repeatedly irritated when individuals such as Bishop Forck accused the Federal Republic of pursuing an indirect poaching policy in 1988 and early 1989. Forck, for example, had even suggested that the West German government ought to send doctors and other highly qualified experts back by hinting that they had to fulfill their responsibility as Germans in the other German nation as well and ought not to leave the people there in the lurch.65 Visibly annoyed, the West German government rejected such suggestions and said that it was not even thinking of abandoning the Basic Law for reunification. Schäuble once added that it was not his fault that the Federal Republic was more attractive than the GDR.66 For clergy who left the GDR—about one hundred did so between 1975 and 1989—pastoral rights were suspended for at least two years and then reinstated only after consultation with the national churches. For those leaving the country—whether pastors or not—the churches only helped in so-called humanitarian cases (illness, marriages, nursing cases, after political imprisonment). They justified this stance with theological arguments, indicating also that they were not responsible for state affairs. They essentially interceded in practical matters by stressing that they were not responsible and did not want to “interfere.” This was not consistent or credible, also because they repeatedly claimed that the reasons for leaving the country were manifold, but only material and psychological reasons applied for most of them. Up through the autumn of 1989, the churches were unable to resolve the contradiction of wanting to stand up for freedom

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and freedom of movement on the one hand while not supporting individuals’ claimed right to freedom on the other. The motivation is obvious: the churches did not want to be regarded as residences for those who wanted to leave the country and burden the state-church relationship by aggressively advocating for those who wished to leave. The church leaders found the greatest possible support even among their congregations for this stance. Nevertheless, the churches were always faced with the problem of many confessing and active Christians also wishing to leave the GDR, although the churches maintained that these Christians should remain integrated in the church work. Seminars such as “Being a Christian in the GDR,” or elaborations such as “Living and Remaining in the GDR,” served not only to encourage those willing to leave the country to remain but even more to weaken the pull of the departure movement. The churches still had one more fear. If they were to aggressively support those willing to leave the country, they feared that these groups would use church spaces for their demands, as some opposition groups did, and get organized under the church roofs. In 1987, the first four groups formed, the best known being the “Working Group on the Citizenship Law of the GDR” in East Berlin. The origins of this organized emigration movement lay in the 1970s when the first groups came to light in Pirna and Riesa in the CSCE process. In 1983, one group began demonstrating in Jena. From 1987 onward, demonstrations by people wishing to leave the country occurred in Leipzig and Dresden, and then soon in all regions. Usually at least several dozen people participated, the number reaching as high as five hundred in some cases. Only rarely were there larger crowds. In mid-1987, organizational efforts began in Leipzig, Dresden, Halle, and East Berlin on the part of those wishing to leave the country. In the following year, about forty groups were added.67 Almost all of them were looking for spaces, and almost all ended up at churches in parishes from which individual members either came themselves or that they chose to visit for other reasons—mostly because of openminded pastors. With the exception of very few communities, almost all of the parishes closed their doors to those who wanted to leave the country. At the beginning of February 1988, Günter Krusche announced that the East Berlin superintendent general would offer advice and pastoral care for people wishing to leave the country. Hundreds of people gathered in front of the church office building the next day. One day later, the superintendent withdrew the offer and declared that he was not responsible. Krusche complained that the churches were overwhelmed with these people who had never been to churches before. That was again only a protective statement because he could not know whether they had indeed ever attended church. In addition, he thereby again declared the problem of leaving the country to be one of the state and not of the churches. On March 6, 1988, a police action took place in front of the Sophienkirche in Berlin-Mitte. Hundreds of visitors who wanted to attend a service were prevented from entering the church on the grounds that the church did not wish to welcome them

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because they sought to go to church for reasons other than religion. In fact, most of them were applicants for departure, but there were also parish members who did not have their membership identification with them. The church leaders were angry about this procedure. Unanimously, all of them demanded—once again—that this should not be repeated, that the churches could “really only bear this once” (Werner Leich). The priest in charge, Johannes Hildebrandt, in the presence of Forck, Stolpe, and West German journalists, went much further and called the enemies of God enemies of man. The churches still often endured such state interventions. In the Johanneskirche in Saalfeld, for example, “prayers for peace” were held from the late 1970s. Since 1987, there was also an increase in the number of people wanting to leave the country. In September 1988, the MfS and the police prevented some from entering the church. State bishop Leich protested again.68

The Churches on the Lookout In June 1988, Pastor Friedrich Schorlemmer gave a highly regarded speech at the Kirchentag in Halle on behalf of the Wittenberg Peace Circle, which resulted in twenty theses on social renewal. In his speech, Schorlemmer called for “changes in social structures” that, if successful, would be “the downfall of dogmatic and bureaucratic socialism and the beginning of true, creative socialism.” The contemporary society, he maintained, was broken, and hardly anyone felt further desire for change. “We are broken on the inside,” he continued. Everything had to be changed, and the ghettos within society had to be broken up and overcome, he said: “I think we need an enormous power of resistance, a will to resist, to overcome our own inertia and fear and shout ‘stop’!” Further, the state needed to be persuaded to give up its claims to omnipotence and omniscience. Some considered the group around Schorlemmer “crazy” because its members believed that GDR society could “still be reformed at all.”69 With this statement, Schorlemmer had succinctly captured the basic mood of society in one sentence. Finally, the theses addressed the most important questions that were debated in critical circles: the opportunities for social participation, media policy, the social climate, the electoral system, the creation of an administrative jurisdiction, a revision of the penal code and penal system, the abandonment of the monopoly on truth by the communists, the dismantling of enemy images, changes in the entire popular education system, freedom of movement for travel in all directions, xenophobia, and state subsidy policies. Every single point was a sharp attack on SED policy and the reality of the GDR. Today these theses may seem tame to some people, but back then they were “hot potatoes” that were among the central points of discussion up to the autumn of 1989. The theses were developed at a time when the churches were also in a new learning process, leading many pastors, church employees, synod members, and

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parishioners to new options for action. Thus, the Federal Synod of the Protestant Churches in Görlitz in September 1987, accompanied by Western media representatives, was marked by sharp contrasts inflamed by the question of how to deal with the SED regime. At about the same time, the Ecumenical Assembly for “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation” convened. On February 13, 1986, based on an initiative of the 1983 Vancouver Assembly of the World Council of Churches, the Dresden City Ecumenical Circle proposed to the churches in the GDR that an Ecumenical Assembly be convened. In February 1987, the members’ conference of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Christlicher Kirchen in der DDR (Working Group of Christian Churches in the GDR, ACK) accepted the proposal, and a few weeks later a preparatory group began work. An appeal from October 1987 by Erika Drees, Heino Falcke, and Christof Ziemer on behalf of the ACK, which was circulated as a leaflet and printed in many community magazines and church newspapers, gave the assembly its dynamic and tremendous importance. In it, they called upon all Christians, congregations, and grassroots groups to respond in writing to the assembly’s leading questions: “1. What tasks of justice, peace and the safeguarding of creation should be discussed by the Assembly, and 2. What should Christians do in these areas of responsibility in their churches in the GDR?”70 By February 1988, the assembly had received about ten thousand submissions, followed by another three thousand in the months thereafter. In total, there were thirteen thousand submissions, representing the largest political, sociopolitical, and ecclesiastical debate in the GDR in the 1980s. Nobody had expected GDR citizens to be so willing to engage in discussions. Most of the letters had previously been prepared and discussed in churches and groups. They show that dissatisfaction with the regime actually resembled a powder keg across large swaths of GDR society and that, in addition to internal church problems, questions of internal democratization, basic and civil rights, the rule of law, and everyday life under dictatorship were often crucial.71 Of the thirteen working groups, one attracted particular attention: “More Justice in the GDR—Our Task, Our Expectation.” The highly controversial and repeatedly revised paper from this group amounted to a comprehensive rejection of the realities in the GDR in the end.72 Other papers discussed and adopted by the circa 150 delegates from nineteen churches and ecclesiastical communities at three plenary assemblies in Dresden (February 1988), Magdeburg (October 1988), and again in Dresden (April 1989) also made clear statements. The assemblies were accompanied by broad debates involving all levels of the church and tens of thousands of Christians. The historical significance of the Ecumenical Assembly lies in the broad learning process it initiated, which went far beyond the actual assemblies. Parliamentary habits were practiced in the debates, which were marked by democratic procedures. Many contemporary witnesses, whether delegates or regular

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people who engaged in discussions at grassroots level, confirm that they experienced this learning process as one of internal democratization. The freedom of expression became more important. Many of those involved knew that their concerns would be taken care of in a large community. To be sure, one should not glorify the Ecumenical Assembly: it displayed general ignorance of economic and sociopolitical questions and alternatives just as blatantly as its members were fixated on maintaining the division of Germany. Yet it contributed decisively to the politicization of the populace in the run-up to the autumn of 1989. Essential demands that were written down in the autumn of 1989 can be found in earlier iterations in the assembly’s papers, some of them even with identical formulations. This was due not only to common perceptions of the social conditions but also to the fact that persons who had actively participated in the assembly and its debates now also played important roles in forming and establishing the new opposition groups and parties. This continued right up to the round tables, whose moderators also mostly came from churches. This was also related to the lasting experience of the Ecumenical Assembly. And even the People’s Chamber, elected on March 18, 1990, was based on the spirit and atmosphere of that meeting, even if this was not apparent to many. The Ecumenical Assembly reached many people and encouraged them to express themselves. It did not spearhead criticism or even opposition, but it was a reflection of sociocritical thinking on the eve of the revolution and a place of learning.73 The SED feared that the assembly could become the political platform for a new opposition movement. It was not. After the spring of 1989, it no longer played any role as an institution—yet many of its delegates, writers, and discussants did.

Notes 1. Printed in Volker Gransow and Konrad H. Jarausch, eds., Uniting Germany: Documents and Debates, 1944–1993 (New York, 1994), 36. 2. Lothar Bisky, The show must go on. Unterhaltung am Konzernkabel (Berlin, 1984), 141. 3. Andre Steiner, That Plans That Failed: An Economic History of the GDR (New York, Oxford, 2010), 189. 4. MdI, Einschätzung über Ausreisen in dringenden Familienangelegenheiten nach nichtsozialistischen Staaten und Westberlin (Stand 31. 12. 1987), 1. 2. 1988. BA, MfS, HA VII 2650, Bl. 15. The count pertains to “trips,” not to traveling individuals. In 1982 and 1983, around forty-five to sixty-five thousand people actually traveled to the Federal Republic on private visits (ibid., ZAIG 21273). 5. MfS, KD Pritzwalk, Zusammenfassende Einschätzung der Reaktionen der Bevölkerung aus dem inoffiziellen Informationsaufkommen, 7. 8. 1985. BA, MfS, Ast. Potsdam, KD Pritzwalk 335, Bd. 1, Bl. 209.

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6. Karl F. Schumann, “Flucht und Ausreise aus der DDR insbesondere im Jahrzehnt ihres Unterganges,” in Materialien der Enquete-Kommission “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland” (12. Wahlperiode des Deutschen Bundestages), ed. Deutschen Bundestag (Baden-Baden, 1995), vol. V/3, 2397. The author also shows why it is problematic, due to various collection methods, to ascertain exact figures. The values vacillate between 2.7 and 3.99 million people. 7. epd Dokumentation 6/1989, 24. 8. In general on the problem, see Ulrich Stoll, Einmal Freiheit und zurück. Die Geschichte der DDR-Rückkehrer (Berlin, 2009); a study that focuses on a special group is Bernd Stöver, Zuflucht DDR. Spione und andere Übersiedler (Munich, 2009). 9. “‘Wir haben unterschiedliche Gewalten.’ Der Vorsitzende des Rates der DDR-Rechtsanwaltskollegien, Gregor Gysi, über Recht im SED-Staat,” Der Spiegel 11/1989, 42. The statements he made in this interview are interesting in that he expressed more critical and much more extensive views to state functionaries at the same time (MfS, BV Berlin, Abt. XX/1, Ltn. Berger, Information zu Fragen der Rechtssicherheit, 29. 3. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX 6886, Bl. 340–41). 10. BA, MfS, ZAIG 5272. 11. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 827, Bl. 162. 12. Qtd. in Axel Noack, “Die Phasen der Kirchenpolitik der SED und die sich darauf beziehenden Grundlagenbeschlüsse der Partei- und Staatsführung in der Zeit von 1972 bis 1989,” in Materialien der Enquete-Kommission “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland,” ed. Deutschen Bundestag (Baden-Baden, 1995), vol. 6/2, 1083. 13. Eberhard Winkler, “Missionarische Existenz heute. Referat auf der Synode der Ev. Kirche des Görlitzer Kirchengebietes, Görlitz, 28. 3. 1987,” in epd Dokumentation 36/1987, 66; “Kirchensteuerpraxis schreckt ab,” KiS 13, no. 2 (1987): 37. 14. “Für ein gutes Miteinander. Brief eines Pfarrers an Erich Honecker vom 5. 2. 1988,” ND, 11. 2. 1988. 15. Karl Pietsch, “Als Abgeordneter engagiert für das Wohl der Gemeinde,” ND, 10. 4. 1989. 16. The regional churches in GDR territory utilized the term church parish councils or church boards. 17. Olof Klohr, “Atheistischer Staat?” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 36, no. 4 (1988): 384. At this point in time, Klohr was working as a professor at Warnemünde-Wustrow University of Seafaring and was the most well-known GDR atheism researcher investigating contemporary problems of atheism. 18. Christoph Dieckmann, “Zeit und Zeitung. Gedrucktes aus der DDR,” KiS 15, no. 1 (1989): 7–11. 19. Matthias Hartmann, “Glasnost im Gemeindeblatt,” KiS 13, no. 6 (1987): 224–26. 20. Vgl. dazu in diesem Buch, pp. 254–86. 21. “Chronik 21.–23. Juni 1985,” KiS 11, no. 4 (1985): 183. 22. Qtd. in Thomas Auerbach, “Offene (Jugend-)Arbeit (OA) der Evangelischen Kirche,” in Lexikon Opposition und Widerstand in der SED-Diktatur (Berlin, Munich, 2000), 269. 23. Qtd. in Ehrhart Neubert, Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR 1949–1989, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1998), 401. 24. Manfred Stolpe, Zur Rechtslage um die Aufnäher “Schwerter zu Pflugscharen,” 18. 4. 1982. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 827, Bl. 108, 109. 25. Qtd. in Neubert, Geschichte der Opposition, 403. 26. “Chronik 14. bis 16. Juni 1985,” KiS 11, no. 4 (1985): 182. 27. This phrase was originally attributed to Bishop Werner Leich in 1983 (see, e.g., the presentation by Christoph Kähler, downloadable from http://www.gesellschaft-zeitgeschichte.de/geschichte/friedensgebete/kerzen-und-gebete/). The statement was generally known, but its origins cannot be verified in the sources. This tendency is confirmed in numerous documents. See,

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28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

e.g., Werner Leich, “Antworten auf Anfragen zum Bericht der K[onferenz der Evangelischen] K[irchen]L[eitungen], Potsdam, 16.–20. 9. 1983,” in epd Dokumentation 43/83, 56–57; Gunter Krusche, “Antwort der Kirchenleitung an die Synode zu den Themen ‘Kirche und Gruppe’ und ‘Frieden,’ Potsdam, 6.–11. 4. 1984,” in ibid., no. 21/84, pp. 12–13; Gunter Krusche, “Gemeinden in der DDR sind beunruhigt. Wie soll die Kirche sich zu den Gruppen stellen?” in ibid., no. 52/88, pp. 70–72; Vorlage der AG Menschenrechte für die 207. Sitzung des Vorstands der K[onferenz der Evangelischen] K[irchen]L[eitungen] am 24. 2. 1988. BA, MfS, HA XX/4 1202, Bl. 2–5. Günter Krusche, “Offener Brief an die Friedenskreise und Friedensgruppen in Berlin, 29. 9. 1986,” KiS 12, no. 6 (1986): 238–39. The phrase comes up in the resolution of the Evangelische Kirche in Berlin-Brandenburg of July 11, 1986 (ibid.). Rainer Eppelmann, Fremd im eigenen Haus. Mein Leben im anderen Deutschland (Cologne, 1993), 196. Some of the documents are published in Landtag Brandenburg, Bericht des Untersuchungsausschusses 1/3, Drucksache 1/3009, Anlagen, Teil A, Potsdam 1994, Anlage 135–42. Manfred Stolpe, Schwieriger Aufbruch (Berlin, 1992), 122, 121. For more information on this, see the differentiated assessments on Stolpe’s role in 1988: Kowalczuk, “Telefongeschichten,” 154–57. Wolf Krötke, “Musste die Kirche mit der Stasi reden?” Die Zeit, 4. 9. 1992. “Überprüfungen auf Stasikontakte in den östlichen Gliedkirchen der EKD,” Die Zeichen der Zeit (1997), Supplement 1. Heino Falcke, “Christus befreit—darum Kirche für andere. Hauptvortrag bei der Synode des Kirchenbundes in Dresden 1972,” in Heino Falcke, Mit Gott Schritt halten. Reden und Aufsätze eines Theologen in der DDR aus zwanzig Jahren (Berlin, 1986), 24. Qtd. in Richard Schröder, “Der Versuch einer eigenständigen Standortbestimmung der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR am Beispiel der ‘Kirche im Sozialismus,’” in Materialien der Enquete-Kommission “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland,” ed. Deutschen Bundestag (Baden-Baden, 1995), vol. 6/2, p. 1196. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, 16th ed., ed. Eberhard Bethge (Gütersloh, 1997), 206. See, for example, Gerhard Altenburg and Karl-Matthias Siegert, eds., Mecklenburgia Sacra. “Kirche für andere—Kirche mit anderen.” Festschrift für Dr. Heinrich Rathke zum 85. Geburtstag, JB für Mecklenburgische Kirchengeschichte; Sonderband 1 (Wismar, 2014); Heinrich Rathke, “Wohin sollen wir gehen?” Der Weg der Evangelischen Kirche in Mecklenburg im 20. Jahrhundert. Erinnerungen eines Pastors und Bischofs und die Kämpfe mit dem Staat (Kiel, 2014). Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Entwurf für eine Arbeit (1944),” in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, 16th ed., ed. Eberhard Bethge (Gütersloh, 1997), 156. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Die Kirche vor der Judenfrage (1933),” in Werke, vol. 12: Berlin 1932– 1933 (Gütersloh, 1997), 353, 355. Albrecht Schönherr, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer und der Weg der Kirche in der DDR,” in BonhoefferStudien. Beiträge zur Theologie und Wirkungsgeschichte Dietrich Bonhoeffers, ed. Albrecht Schönherr and Wolf Krötke (Munich, 1985), 148–56. Otto Dibelius, Obrigkeit? Eine Frage an den 60jährigen Landesbischof [Hanns Lilje, Hanover] (Berlin, 1959), 15, 17, 18. “Bericht der Kirchenleitung auf der 2. Tagung der IX. Synode, Halle, 13. 11. 1980,” in Berichte der Magdeburger Kirchenleitung zu den Tagungen der Provinzialsynode 1946–1989, ed. Harald Schultze (Göttingen, 2005), 405. Friedrich Schorlemmer, “Vor den Trümmern zerbrochener Träume (1987),” in Träume und Alpträume. Einmischungen 1982–1990 (Munich, 1993), 40, 42.

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45. MfS, HA XX, Information über eine Sondersitzung der K[onferenz der Evangelischen] K[irchen]L[eitungen] am 3. 12. 1988 in Berlin, 8. 12. 1988. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 5619, Bl. 43. Provost Furian confirmed for the author on July 9, 2008, that the crux of the matter had been correctly conveyed, but he certainly would have formulated it in a more differentiated manner because he had frequently formulated this thought. What he meant to say instead was that the church’s task in respect to sociopolitical responsibility consisted in overcoming socialism. 46. Richard Schröder, “Was kann ‘Kirche im Sozialismus’ sinnvoll heißen? Diskussionsbeitrag zur Standortbestimmung der Christen in der DDR,” Kirche im Sozialismus 14, no. 4 (1988): 137. 47. MfS, Rudi Mittig, 11. 1. 1989. BA, MfS, SED-K[reis]L[eitung] 4994, Bl. 3. 48. Richard Schröder, “Was kann DDR-Bürger verbinden? Gefährdungen und Möglichkeiten einer ‘DDR-Identität,’” Kirche im Sozialismus 14, no. 5 (1988): 178. 49. Manfred Punge, “Zum Gebrauch des Begriffs ‘Kirche im Sozialismus,’” Kirche im Sozialismus 14, no. 5 (1988): 182–85, 277. 50. Martin Luther, Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (Stuttgart, 2005), 145, no. 26. 51. Qtd. in Martin Höllen, Loyale Distanz? Katholizismus und Kirchenpolitik in SBZ und DDR. Ein historischer Überblick in Dokumenten, vols. 2/3 (Berlin, 2000), 154. 52. This figure relates to the time period up through December 29, 1989; ten further ones were planned: Nicole Annette Pawlow, Innerdeutsche Städtepartnerschaften. Entwicklung, Praxis, Möglichkeiten (Berlin, 1990), 150–51. 53. “Ansprache Gottfried Forcks am 22. 1. 1987 in der Gethsemanekirche,” in epd Dokumentation 19/1987, 58. 54. Erhard Eppler: Der Beitrag der europäischen Kirchen für die Entwicklung von Dialog und Toleranz in Europa. Potsdam am 29. 10. 1988. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 6059, Bl. 15–28. 55. Transcript of recording of 18. 6. 1988. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 6059, Bl. 1. 56. Helmut Schmidt, Die Deutschen und ihre Nachbarn. Menschen und Mächte II (Berlin, 1992), 65. 57. Transcript of recording of 18. 6. 1988. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 6059, Bl. 2, 7. 58. MfS, BV Rostock, AKG, Information, 27. 6. 1988. BA, MfS, Ast. Rostock, BV, AKG 51, Bd. 1, Bl. 74–101. 59. SED, ZK-Abt. Parteiorgane, Information, 20. 6. 1988. SAPMO, B-Arch, DY 30/2181, Bl. 87. 60. E.g., Wolfgang Schäuble, Der Vertrag (Munich, 1993), 32. 61. MfS, HV A, Leiterinformation über Pläne und Aktivitäten gegnerischer Kreise zur Schaffung einer inneren Opposition in der DDR. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, BV 9530, Bl. 19–20. 62. “Chronik 13. Februar 1985,” KiS 11, no. 2 (1985): 82. 63. BA, MfS, HA XX/4 2228, Bl. 65–76. 64. “Chronik 30. Oktober 1985,” KiS 11, no. 6 (1985): 274. 65. E.g., Interview with Forck in the “Tagesthemen” on April 21, 1988, in epd Dokumentation 21/1988, 79–80. 66. E.g., Interview with Bundesminister Schäuble am April 15, 1988, in “Deutschlandfunk,” in ibid.: 81 (3. US). 67. Seraina Sattler, “‘Erich gib den Schlüssel raus!’ Die Ausreisegruppen in der DDR 1987 bis 1989. Entstehung, Aktionen und Strukturen,” Lizentiatsarbeit an der Phil. Fakultät der Universität Zürich, 2003. 68. MfS, BV Gera, Leiter, Information Nr. 207/88, 27. 10. 1988. BA, MfS, Ast. Gera, AKG PI 207/88, Bl. 1–4. 69. Friedrich Schorlemmer, “Umkehren und Umgestalten (1988),” in Träume und Alpträume, 48, 63, 60, 62. 70. Katharina Kunter, Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume. Evangelische Kirchen in Deutschland im Spannungsfeld von Demokratie und Sozialismus (1980–1993) (Göttingen, 2006), 173.

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71. Christian Sachse, “Mündig werden zum Gebrauch der Freiheit.” Politische Zuschriften an die Ökumenische Versammlung 1987–89 in der DDR (Münster, 2004). 72. Ökumenische Versammlung für Gerechtigkeit, Frieden und Bewahrung der Schöpfung. DresdenMagdeburg-Dresden. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 1990), 72–86. 73. Christian Sachse, “Politische Stimmungslagen im Spiegel der Zuschriften an die Ökumenische Versammlung für Gerechtigkeit, Frieden und Bewahrung der Schöpfung in der DDR (1987– 1989),” unpublished manuscript, 2002, p. 60.

Chapter 6

OPPOSITION IN THE SED STATE

S This chapter looks at the third “countermovement” that contributed to the revolution: the development of the organized political opposition in the 1980s. Every dictatorship is shaped by, among other things, individuals and groups that oppose it. A system is called dictatorial not least because it does not allow opposition, instead persecuting, suppressing, and attempting to destroy it whenever possible. In the communist states, oppositional persons and groups were active at all times; that is, there were always acts of resistance. Political opposition differs from everyday resistant behavior in the willingness of those who engage in it to organize, to systematize, and to take public political action. The success of opposition groups depends on their degree of political maturity, the methods they use, public relations work, and, last but not least, their willingness to accept disadvantages including prison sentences or expatriation, if necessary, for their commitment. The events of 1989—the first mass demonstrations and the formation of civil movements and opposition parties—cannot be explained without taking the diverse opposition currents of the 1980s into account. Even though many new actors joined in 1989, the first demonstrations and the new groups in late summer and fall 1989 were essentially initiated by people who had previously been active in the opposition for years. This movement underwent a political maturation in the 1980s that decisively enabled the new civil movements to reach and mobilize large swaths of society in 1989. Therefore, the present section traces this development in order to make this process culminating in the autumn of 1989 comprehensible. As such, this chapter is similar to the previous chapter on churches. One of the most important sources of opposition in the GDR was individual life experiences in and with the SED dictatorship. Almost all the biographies of members of the opposition are characterized by breaks—that is, very few were Notes from this chapter begin on page 235.

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opponents their entire lives. Opposition often meant searching for alternatives to the present, which is why opposition was multifaceted and had no particular dogma of resistance. Suffering repression—whether oneself, in one’s family, or among friends—often initially provoked oppositional engagement. Other important sources were people’s political aspirations and experiences in the ČSSR since 1968 (Charta 77), in Poland (Solidarność), and in Hungary, but also the Western European peace and alternative movements, especially those in West Germany. The central figure for most GDR opposition members was Robert Havemann (1910–82), who had a tremendous moral charisma, especially against the backdrop of his antifascist convictions during the Nazi dictatorship, for which he had been imprisoned and sentenced to death. He had engaged in numerous oppositional actions and developed his oppositional thinking since the mid-1960s. His political foster son, Wolf Biermann, was also a central figure of the opposition. Havemann and Biermann had indicated a path early on that would be followed in the 1980s, yet it promoted tensions, confrontations, and proxy disputes. After an eleven-year ban on performing, Biermann performed again in the GDR on September 11, 1976—not officially, but publicly, in the Nikolaikirche of Prenzlau. Mere weeks later, he was forced to expatriate. With this appearance, Biermann and the church essentially joined forces, giving expression to the idea that both Marxists and Christians critical of the state had to approach one another because, despite all their ideological differences and criticism of each other, their criticism of the SED state took precedence. Havemann, for his part, wrote the “Berlin Appeal,” a fundamental document of the GDR opposition, with Pastor Rainer Eppelmann shortly before Havemann’s death in 1982. This was an appeal for peace that called for domestic and international disarmament that also addressed overcoming the division of Germany. More than two thousand people signed this appeal, even though the government had threatened punishment and Berlin-Brandenburg church leaders distanced themselves from it. Biermann had brought about the coming together of the church and critical communists, whereupon the communist Havemann and the Christian Eppelmann took concrete steps together. To be sure, Eppelmann had needed to go to Havemann in Grünheide on the outskirts of Berlin because the latter was seriously ill; nevertheless, the appeal symbolizes that more and more people who had distanced themselves from the churches and Christianity were visiting churches and using parish rooms for their political concerns during this time.

From a Small Peace to a Great One: Peace and Human Rights The history of GDR opposition in the 1980s is closely linked to the Protestant churches. There were three decisive reasons for this, which resulted from the way the churches developed, as described in the preceding chapter. First, numerous

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pastors, deacons, and other staff members worked in the churches in all regions; they took care of people who were excluded, oppressed, and persecuted by the state and considered it their Christian duty to support them and offer them a “roof.” Second, some pastors and theologians were themselves part of the opposition. This sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish between the opposition and the church. It was precisely these church employees who offered rooms and other support to people who wanted to be politically active in the opposition. This fact also shows that the often-used image of the “roof of the churches” for the opposition does not always apply because a segment of the church staff engaged in oppositional activities as part of their theological and sociopolitical self-image. Third, the beginnings of the new opposition lie in the formation of an independent peace movement in the late 1970s. This movement, as already described above, was almost completely connected with the Protestant churches, and there were relatively few independent oppositional efforts. The best known included the group Women for Peace (1982), with numerous regional offshoots and international networking; the Jenaer Friedensgemeinschaft (Jena Peace Community) (1983, its roots go back to 1976), with its spectacular actions; and the group Wolfspelz (Wolf’s Pelt) from Dresden, whose origins go back to 1981/82.1 All groups were affected by persecution and arrests and eventually disintegrated. When Roland Jahn, who had already spent six months in prison in 1982, was forced to depart from Jena in June 1983, it caused an international sensation.2 Similarly, in December 1983, Ulrike Poppe and Bärbel Bohley of the Women for Peace movement were imprisoned, but they were released after six weeks due to international protests. These groups worked for domestic and international peace, environmental protection, and universal human rights. Dozens of peace circles were working in the churches, which were part of the oppositional peace movement. In order to coordinate the work, talk about their experiences, and establish communication structures and reliable information channels, the Frieden konkret (Peace Concretely) network began meeting in 1983 on the initiative of the Magdeburg pastor Hans-Jochen Tschiche. In 1985, an institutional innovation took place: the assembly elected a “continuation committee” consisting of regional representatives for better coordination of the work between the annual meetings and to prepare the seminars. Frieden konkret thus became the most important and largest oppositional network up to 1989, but it ultimately remained a church institution, leading to limitations and obstacles. The independent peace movement reached its peak in 1983/84. Many groups remained in place but reoriented or expanded their subject areas. Peace issues remained the focus of interest. In addition, environmental protection issues, gender equality, and the global North-South divide became increasingly important. Dealing with the blotted-out parts of history was an ongoing theme, such as discussions about officially ostracized or suppressed philosophical, sociological, politological, or fictional literature. In 1985, debates on human rights issues also

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grew more crucial. There were fierce clashes in East Berlin. First, the church leadership had prevented a planned human rights seminar, which opposition members such as Wolfgang Templin, Peter Grimm, Gerd Poppe, Ralf Hirsch, Reinhard Weißhuhn, Ulrike Poppe, Werner Fischer, and Bärbel Bohley took as an opportunity to found the Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte (IFM, Initiative for Peace and Human Rights) at the end of 1985. This initiative designed its structures on the model of the Czech group Charta 77. In the GDR, the IFM was one of the best-known opposition groups in the second half of the 1980s and the most important group to define itself from the outset as independent of the church. It came to be known nationally and internationally on account of its strong emphasis on human rights issues, its basic statement that those who do not guarantee peace within cannot guarantee it to the outside world, its strong Western and Eastern European orientation and networking, its public relations work through its members’ writings and open letters (e.g., the periodical Grenzfall), and, finally, its ties to Western media and demonstrative protests. It was one of the groups that invoked democratic values and the rule of law and was the quickest and strongest to abandon the socialism project. At the same time, the East Berlin group Gegenstimmen (Counter Voices) was formed around Thomas Klein, Vera Wollenberger (Lengsfeld), Silvia Müller, and Reinhard Schult. The protagonists came from various other groups in which they also continued to work. There was also a conspiratorial grouping around Schult. This was unusual in the 1980s because, apart from certain appointments and details of printing technology and publication, which remained conspiratorial, almost all opposition groups had renounced conspiratorial methods at that point. Gegenstimmen took a clearly Marxist position, unlike the IFM. It also organized public actions and published underground publications (e.g., the periodical Friedrichsfelder Feuermelder), but it refrained from aggressively publicizing its work in Western media until 1988. The founding history of the two groups was closely connected and marked by mutual demarcation. While the two groups were largely able to jointly support the call “Chernobyl affects everywhere” of June 5, 1986, since a whole series of oppositional activities against nuclear power were unfolding in East Berlin, Stendal, Greifswald, and Dresden at the same time, their different political views became apparent on the occasion of a submission to the SED party conference. On April 2, 1986, there was an IFM initiative involving twenty-one men and women from East Berlin, Naumburg, Halle, Braunsdorf, and Magdeburg who addressed an open letter to the SED leadership.3 The long letter constituted a thorough criticism of the SED state. Hardly any area of society went unmentioned. It resembled a program for the democratization of the GDR without suggesting what the democratic society to be striven for should be named. It ended with a sentence that could also have come from the autumn of 1989: “We therefore expect that a constructive dialogue will begin in this country.”4 The group Gegenstimmen criticized the IFM

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for being too uncritical of the West and failing to address how power should be distributed in the future. There were two rounds of discussions between the two groups. Gerd Poppe defended the submission, emphasizing the need for political pluralization as a precondition of democratic societies and criticizing the “old left” concept of his opponents. Gegenstimmen, for its part, insisted that pluralistic concepts without consideration of concrete social power distribution were merely ideology. In principle, this brief but heated debate highlighted a fundamental conflict within the opposition. It was not between “leftists” and “rightists,” between Christians and Marxists, but between opposition members who—whether consciously or unconsciously—aimed at overcoming the system, which did not necessarily mean overcoming the division of Germany, and those who wanted to dismantle or abolish the SED monopoly of power but hoped for a reform of GDR socialism. This basic conflict was never resolved.

The Environment Is More Than Nature In the 1970s and 1980s, the grassroots environmental movement extended across the Eastern and Western Blocs, but whereas in the West it relatively quickly became part of the general discourse on the development opportunities of industrial society, in the East it remained largely taboo until the fall of communism. In the GDR, it was an oppositional current that remained closely intertwined with others. Ultimately, it was always a question of democracy, freedom, and publicity. The Ecological Working Group of Dresden Church Districts, founded in 1980, was one of the most effective. Several actions reached a broad public. The campaign “A Mark for Espenhain,” which was developed within the Christian Environmental Circle of Rötha, drew attention to the catastrophic environmental situation, attracting the support of eighty thousand people. The protest organized in the spring of 1989 against the planned construction of a hyperpure-silicon plant on the outskirts of Dresden affected thousands of citizens. This was an early form of the political citizens’ movement of that autumn. The protest against environmental destruction has always been against the political system. The oppositional “Pleißemarsch” (plebiscite march) organized in Leipzig in June 1988 and 1989 aimed not only to draw attention to environmental pollution but also to make the political statement that GDR problems could no longer remain taboo. Thus, the environmental movement came to mean striving for social change. The Protestant churches also offered spaces for environmental groups to develop. The Theological Studies Department of the Federation of Churches and the Kirchliches Forschungsheim Wittenberg (Ecclesiastical Research Home of Wittenberg) were the places that gave rise to the first impulses for debates

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on the relationship between man and nature. From the end of the 1970s, concrete actions supplemented the theoretical discussions. In 1979, the first “treeplanting campaign” took place in Schwerin and was then imitated throughout the GDR. What initially sounded unspectacular was significant because people came together to act without state assurances. This self-organization alone called the state to action, which then persecuted the environmental activists and, thus, politicized them. In the 1980s, unofficial bicycle demonstrations (“peace ride without winners”), some with hundreds of participants, pointed out the harmful carbon dioxide in the air as well as other environmental destruction in the 1980s. The environmental movement was always able to generate more publicity, for example, by broadcasting documentaries on environmental pollution in the GDR that East German opposition members had filmed on West German television. Roland Jahn, having been forced to emigrate, provided most of the recording equipment by having it smuggled from West Berlin to the East. In 1988 the film Bitter from Bitterfeld showed the appalling ecological and health consequences of the chemical industry in the eponymous central German region. In the same year, the ARD broadcast a documentary about West Berlin waste transports that deposited their freight on East German landfills. In 1988 and 1989, television reports supplied by East German opposition members also informed the public about forest dieback and the condition of the nuclear power plants—in particular, the poor construction of the plant near Stendal. Even the sensational study on the consequences of uranium mining in the Ore Mountains, Pechblende by Michael Beleites, published in 1988 in the East German underground in an edition of one thousand copies, only became known to most GDR citizens via Western radio broadcasts. Environmental and ecological circles existed in all GDR regions. For them, too, 1986 marked a turning point, with East Berlin once again being the main place of action. In April of that year, the Peace and Environment Circle of the Zion Community in East Berlin made its first public appearance, inviting people to an event in light of the reactor disaster in Chernobyl. The initiators prepared for the foundation of the Umweltbibliothek (UB, Environmental Library), which then took place in September. In this way, they took up the idea of networking with the opposition groups and ensuring a constant exchange of information. Initially, the idea was to collect scattered literature that was mostly inaccessible officially and to offer it within the framework of an alternative library. Polish “flying libraries” and “flying universities” served as models. Up to then, the centers of the action-oriented environmental groups had been the Friedrichsfeld Ecology Circle and the Peace and Environment Circle in AltLichtenberg. Confrontations arose between the two, fueled by an IM deployed by the MfS. The Friedrichsfeld group was moderate, willing to negotiate with state authorities, and refrained from spectacular actions. The Alt-Lichtenberg circle, in turn, addressed a broad spectrum of social issues. This led to disputes

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with the church congregation that had previously supported it, whereupon the group moved to Zionskirche, centrally located on the border between Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Marion Seelig had mediated the contact to Pastor Simon, who made rooms available in the parish hall from April 1986. Of the initiators of the UB—Wolfgang Rüddenklau, Christian Halbrock, and six other people, all of whom had been active in the oppositional scene for a long time—the congregation elected Halbrock to the parish council, facilitating and easing communication between the congregation and the UB organizers. From then on, the UB was one of the central contact points for opposition members from all over the GDR. Many events and debates took place there, rendering it a new form of institutionalization. The monthly periodical Die Umweltbibliothek, later renamed Umweltblätter, was one of the best-known underground journals of the opposition, along with Grenzfall of the IFM. However, East Berlin’s Environmental Library was not only a GDR-wide center for oppositional activities and information exchange; it also inspired other groups in seventeen cities to establish their own environmental libraries. Among these new forms of institutionalization was the Green-Ecological Network Ark, founded by activists associated with Carlo Jordan when a split took place in the movement in January 1988. This new group also published an underground magazine and operated several regional offices, engaging in intensive international networking. The split had occurred because ark proponents were rather skeptical about some of the radical grassroots democratic (and sometimes even anarchic) concepts of the UB groups. The UB groups, in turn, accused the ark group of having a bourgeois understanding of politics. Both arguments were exaggerated, as was the “incompatibility decision” the UB groups made in May 1988, which stipulated that one could only be a member of one of the two groups. This was unusual for East Berlin and the GDR, as most activists often engaged in several groups.

Refusing to Be Set Apart The close connection between the Protestant churches and the opposition became apparent in 1986 in two remarkable initiatives, both of which also became precursors of the 1989 movement in their own way. Some church employees at various levels as well as some laypeople suffered from the division within the churches and brought them into close connection with social marginalization tendencies and state exclusion. On October 7, 1986, the thirty-seventh anniversary of the founding of the GDR, they published a “Basic Declaration” in East Berlin, which is regarded as the founding document of the Arbeitskreis Solidarische Kirche (AKSK, Working Group Solidarity Church). This group formed part of the Protestant churches, which were present in all regions, and it was supported by many regional groups and had between three hundred and four hundred

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members. The AKSK, like the Kirche von Unten (KvU, Church from Below) was one of the most visible associations, both within the churches and in political opposition. In contrast to the KvU, which had a clear political-ideological position, the AKSK remained open in this respect. Its theoretical foundations were composed not only of the Bible and theological writings but also of writings by relevant Western thinkers, including, strikingly, those by Hannah Arendt. The working group not only connected critical church employees with each other; since almost all of them also worked in other grassroots groups, the AKSK itself functioned as a network that became a general information pool. Plenary assemblies were held twice a year, on May 1 and October 7—state holidays on which church employees, as long as they were not working in social welfare programs, had real time off; not even the state seriously expected them to take part in the staged anniversary demonstrations. In contrast to the IFM and the UB, the AKSK’s organization was concentrated in East Berlin but covered large parts of the GDR. However, again, unlike with the other two groups, a part of its energy for political action remained in internal church proxy disputes. At the same time, another group began to take other paths. In the run-up to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the building of the Wall, Bishop Martin Kruse of West Berlin and his East Berlin colleague Gottfried Forck published an exchange of letters in mid-July 1986.5 Ludwig Mehlhorn, who lived in East Berlin and had been active in the Aktion Sühnezeichen (Action Reconciliation) since 1969 and in various opposition groups since the mid-1970s, took this as an opportunity to answer both bishops.6 Although, as he wrote, he wished to largely follow their argumentation, he actually could not because both had emphasized in their clever letters that the Wall was ultimately the result of German guilt from the period between 1933 and 1945. Moreover, the consequences of the Wall, the internal and external demarcation, were, therefore, in principle attributable to this German guilt. With many concrete examples and generalizing sociopolitical statements, Mehlhorn argued that such a historical-deterministic view, in the end, accepted the realities of the Eastern European dictatorships and presented them as unalterable.7 Bishop Forck, to his credit, answered Mehlhorn in detail and offered to meet with him—an offer that Mehlhorn accepted.8 But his letter had a more far-reaching result. It became the starting point of the “Initiative Rejection of Practice and Principle of Demarcation.” The somewhat cumbersome title referred to international church texts that were also debated and continued in the GDR. The adapted basic text usually read “spirit, logic and practice of deterrence.” In autumn 1986, Ludwig Mehlhorn, Stephan Bickhardt, Hans-Jürgen Fischbeck and Reinhard Lampe drew up a proposal that superficially called for complete freedom of movement for travel and relocation in any direction. The physicist Fischbeck, a synodalist of the Protestant Church Berlin-Brandenburg, presented the motion at the synod in April 1987, justifying it with the assessment that isolation, as was the usual rule in the GDR, made everyone and society ill.

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Isolation, in his view, represented stagnation, ignorance, and impoverishment, and led to death. Heino Falcke adopted the proposal as a member of the Federal Synod, introducing it at the Görlitz Federal Synod. In neither synod did he get a majority, but he caused quite a stir. The initiative was very popular as it made many people feel represented and addressed. The debate about this initiative, which severely attacked the entire principle of SED rule, continued until 1989. For it had managed not only to address the issue of travel restrictions but also, at the same time, to suggest that the complex consequences of the Wall were deadly for the individual and society.9 The political-oppositional orientation of this group not only symbolized Reinhard Lampe’s abovementioned spectacular action of August 13, 1986, which he later justified in a theological examination paper.10 Bickhardt and Mehlhorn also published the most intellectually and politically sophisticated underground series, the radix-blätter, choosing the term radix—meaning “source,” “origin,” or “root network”—in reference to a Paul Celan poem. Between 1986 and 1989, eleven radix-blätter of 60 to 100 pages in length were published, including contributions from 112 authors from home and abroad. The illegal Radix publishing house also published calls, pamphlets, and other samizdat publications. Heinz Suhr, a member of the Bundestag for the Greens, had brought three printing presses to East Berlin in the trunk of a car in the summer of 1986 at the instigation of Roland Jahn, taking advantage of his immunity as a member of parliament. One was given to Rainer Eppelmann, one to the IFM, and one to Stephan Bickhardt. Bickhardt took the press to his parents’ apartment in BerlinKaulsdorf—his father Peter Bickhardt was a pastor and had supported oppositional activities for years—and the printing shop was set up in a back room. There was already a photocopying machine there that Alfred Mechtersheimer, then active with the Greens, had donated in 1986. Later on, an electric typewriter, a layout machine, and a cutting machine were added. The production and publication of a booklet were divided into three areas—editorial work, reproduction, and distribution—which were separated from each other in order to protect the printing works from MfS access as far as possible. Each issue of radix-blätter was given its own title—the state reacted less allergically to individual issues than to periodicals. The contributions were typed on wax matrices and handed over to the printer Konrad Blank until May 1989, when Blank was forced to go to the West, after which they went to the printers Hans Hilker or Dirk Sauermann. In the Kaulsdorf apartment, the publications were copied within about two to three weeks. The printed pages were brought in small quantities from the Kaulsdorf apartment and then folded and stapled elsewhere. The editors and authors sold the editions at unofficial readings and exhibitions in private homes, at meetings of opposition groups, at synods, and at church congresses. The booklets were also sent by mail, which the MfS tried to prevent. One issue cost between two and fifteen marks. Payment for the booklets was called a “donation” in order

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to escape a charge of tax evasion. The printing, layout, and binding process was conspiratorial. The location of the printing press remained secret and was not known to anyone—not even the MfS—except Stephan Bickhardt, his parents, and the printers. In addition to Bickhardt, Mehlhorn, and the printers, Carola Hönn, who successfully participated in championships in speed-typing, copied the manuscripts onto wax matrices. The radix-blätter foregrounded questions of democratic theory. The language was clear and unambiguous but not revolutionary. The papers criticized the isolation of the people in GDR society and openly addressed the totalitarian character of the system. Moreover, they argued that society was seriously, if not fatally, ill and that social changes needed to be openly discussed. The radix-blätter editions were remarkable not only in their design and professional layout in the context of opposition literature but also in their content among the more politically advanced writings. They focused more on creating independent informational and public structures than on formulating abstract social ideals or models. Many opposition groups were accused of having affinity for GDR socialism, but this did not apply to the radix-blätter. They clearly declared the democratization of society as one of their goals, along with the implementation of human rights and the end of the SED’s leading role; they also cast as natural components of such a system the freedom of travel and speech, freedom of assembly and association, as well as the formation of a multiparty system, a democratic electoral system, and structures based on the rule of law or the establishment of new parties or groups. In addition, they radically criticized and questioned communist views of history and, in terms of German politics, predominantly wished for a confederation of the two German states. Every single point the radix-blätter argued would have meant the end of the SED dictatorship if it had been realized, and everyone involved in their production was aware of this, as Rainer Eckert later summarized: “It was the program of a democratic revolution. Even if ‘democratic socialism’ was occasionally called ‘democratic socialism’ as a vision of the future, the demands made were not inherent in the system, but rather explosive.”11

Olof Palme and Illusions The Olof Palme Peace March, which had been officially approved, took place between September 1 and 18, 1987. The Swedish prime minister had been shot dead in the street on February 28, 1986, in the evening in the center of Stockholm. The Europe-wide march was intended as a reminder of Palme’s proposal to implement a nuclear weapons-free corridor in Central Europe. The idea came from the West German group Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft—Vereinigte Kriegsdienstgegner (German Peace Association—United Opponents of War Service), which also submitted the proposal to the GDR Peace Council. After

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the council happily accepted it, GDR newspapers reported on it in the spring of 1987. The Federal German representatives in the preparatory committee insisted that the GDR Church Federation be invited to participate as well. The latter accepted the invitation. In August 1987 the idea became known during a “Mobile Peace Seminar” in Vipperow, where a peace group led by Markus Meckel had been active since 1982/83. Pastor Meckel suggested that opposition groups take part in the official march with their own banners. At the same time, Erich Honecker was visiting the Federal Republic of Germany. Thus the SED was unable to prevent the participation of opposition groups without undermining its self-presentation as a peace-building factor in Europe. On September 1, 1987, the peace march began with an event in Stralsund, and independent banners were already apparent. The highlight was the pilgrimage of over eighty kilometers between Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen from September 2 to 5, prepared by Aktion Sühnezeichen, in which five to six hundred people, including many representatives of independent groups, took part. They carried banners with slogans like the following: “Swords to ploughshares,” “Social peace service for conscientious objectors,” “Peace education instead of military service,” “Disarmament also in schools and kindergartens,” “Abolition of compulsory military service,” and “No war toys.” At the same time, there were protests against environmental policy, against nuclear power plants, and against demarcation policies. When the pilgrimage came to Oranienburg, five thousand appointed demonstrators had been positioned in front of the procession to break the dominance of the independent banner-carrying groups. The pilgrims had passed through a large number of villages, with local mayors and pastors greeting them with a short speech as they arrived, and schoolchildren singing peace songs. In the early evening of September 5, 1987, there was a demonstration in BerlinPrenzlauer Berg by one thousand opposition members who, on the initiative of the city’s youth pastor Wolfram Hülsemann, moved from the Church of Zion to the Gethsemanekirche with independent banners, slogans, and demands. The police did not interfere with or obstruct this legal demonstration of the opposition, the largest of its kind. The march officially ended on September 18, 1987, in Dresden with a rally after events in Leipzig, Königswalde, Brandenburg, and Torgau. On September 19, smaller peace marches followed in Saalfeld and Weimar. However, the SED prevented further independent pilgrimages so that the peace march was essentially a chain of rallies in various cities. Only from Torgau to Riesa was there still a two-day pilgrimage on September 12 and 13, 1987. After Honecker’s return from the Federal Republic of Germany, the police acted more aggressively, confiscating many independent posters in Leipzig, Torgau, and Dresden, for example. Official photos and film footage of the “Palm March” reflect the dominance of SED and FDJ forces, yet the march is also considered to have been a legal demonstration by the opposition and a stimulation to its development. Many

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hoped that the state’s approval of the march signaled a policy change. However, some critics believed that the march had been approved solely because Honecker was visiting the Federal Republic. When Markus Meckel proposed in March 1988 on behalf of the Vipperow Peace Circle that independent demonstrations be held on the occasion of the state “International Meeting for Nuclear-WeaponFree Zones” organized in East Berlin in June 1988, the state firmly rejected the proposal. The Olof Palme Peace March remained a singular occurrence.

Exchange across Borders If the “Palm March” signaled the existence of opposition groups to the public, just under a month later there was a rift between the groups that further cemented the directional dispute that the debate about the submission to the 1986 party congress had laid bare. The IFM’s orientation around Czechoslovakia’s Charta 77 group also represents the cross-border dialogue that the opposition sought. One of the most important early documents of independent human rights efforts, the “Querfurt Paper” of Christians of April 29, 1977, had already been inspired by Charta 77 and reflections of Polish dissidents associated with Edward Lipiński. The independent peace movement always had contacts to both East and West. These intensified in the mid-1980s. Civil rights activists such as Jürgen Fuchs, Roland Jahn, and Peter Rösch, who established and mediated contacts for opposition groups in the East, helped to connect the groups. In addition to connections to the Netherlands, England, and Italy, relations with the Federal Republic of Germany were of particular importance. Above all, Green politicians associated with Petra Kelly, Gert Bastian, Lukas Beckmann, Ulrich Fischer, Elisabeth Weber, Heinz Suhr, Wilhelm Knabe, Marie-Luise Lindemann, and Birgit Voigt were interested in forging contacts with the opposition in the GDR.12 On October 31, 1983, Kelly, Bastian, Beckmann, and others met with Honecker in the State Council building. The meeting had come about after several Greens associated with Kelly and Beckmann had demonstrated, bearing a banner with the slogan “Swords to ploughshares” on the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin on May 12, 1983. As a result, a dispute broke out within the Green Party over how to deal with the GDR. The wing around Kelly, which clearly showed solidarity with and support for the independent groups in the GDR, was in the minority. The Kelly Wing wrote a letter to Honecker and asked for a meeting, which he granted them, because the SED needed “the Greens” as allies for its peace policy. Petra Kelly wore a T-shirt with the symbol of the GDR peace movement “Swords to ploughshares” during the surprising conversation. Immediately afterward, the Greens went to see Rainer Eppelmann at the Samariterkirche, where they met with opposition members. On the next day,

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another conversation took place in an apartment in a smaller group with Bärbel Bohley, Gerd and Ulrike Poppe, Wolfgang Templin, and others. In consequence, Kelly was not allowed to enter the GDR for about a year afterward. However, contacts with the opposition remained. With the circle around Petra Kelly alone, there were about twenty-five to thirty meetings in East Berlin up through 1989, which almost always took place at Bärbel Bohley’s, Antje and Martin Böttger’s, Gerd and Ulrike Poppe’s residences, or with members of the “Pankow Peace Circle.” The participants were mainly members of the IFM but also people from other groups, almost exclusively people from East Berlin, which deepened the rift between East Berlin and the countryside, even in the opposition scene. Rainer Eppelmann’s extensive contacts in the West were mentioned above. Between January 1, 1986, and the end of February 1987 alone, the MfS counted, including the Kelly Circle, “40 significant meetings of Green Party leaders” or the “Alternative List” with “exponents of underground political activity.”13 Although there were isolated contacts with other parties, the most important and continuous were with the “Greens.” There were three reasons for this. First, the “Greens” and the opposition scenes had similar cultural milieus. In 1984, Antje and Martin Böttger met with Petra Kelly for the first time in their apartment and talked about founding a branch of the Green Party in the GDR. This did not happen, but the political proximity, especially between the later IFM members and the Kelly circle, was obvious. Second, it should be noted that such meetings took place on the edge of legality and that the West German interlocutors, even as members of the Bundestag, had to be prepared to accept (calculable) risks for themselves. These increased when they smuggled printing technology, cameras, books, and magazines, mostly organized by Roland Jahn and Jürgen Fuchs, into the East. It was mostly the Greens who did this because their political socialization gave them the necessary prerequisites. Third, the opposition groups had to be accepted as political interlocutors in the first place, and it was almost exclusively Green politicians who did so. CDU or SPD politicians were more likely to visit Eppelmann because he was a priest. Most SPD and CDU politicians did not seek out opposition members because they did not want to endanger their relations with the SED state and party, if they took them seriously at all. In this, one sees political opportunism and protective assertions, such as not wishing to endanger one’s interlocutors in the East, as well as an understanding of politics that was not uncontroversial at the time and has not yet been overcome today. One must only consider the different ways in which former chancellors Schmidt, Schröder, and Merkel dealt with Russia or China to notice this. Unlike relations with Western interlocutors, relations with like-minded people in the Eastern Bloc were uncontroversial. There were connections to Charta 77, as well as to Poland, Hungary, and various regions in the Soviet Union that derived from the members’ similar experiences and living conditions. Individual members of the opposition made political transfers from these countries by translating

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materials and documents into German, passing them on, and publishing them in the samizdat. Ludwig Mehlhorn, Wolfgang Templin, Hartmut Kühn, and Günter Särchen maintained many contacts with Poland. Reinhard Weißhuhn and Bernd-Rainer Barth were among the “Hungary experts.” The largest number of connections arose with people in the ČSSR, especially since the conditions of travel were the least problematic there. The “Ark” associated with Carlo Jordan built up contact networks in the Baltic states. Groups in the districts of Dresden, Halle, and Leipzig also cultivated such contacts and many others. On October 12, 1987, two memorable meetings took place in private apartments in East Berlin with Western politicians, a group of CDU/CSU members of parliament, and a high-level group of US politicians gathering information for the Vienna CSCE follow-up conference in Europe. Members of the IFM and the Samaritan community associated with Rainer Eppelmann took part in the talks. For the first time, opposition members spoke with Western government representatives. The group from the United States had previously talked to high-ranking SED officials such as Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer, State Secretary Klaus Gysi, and Politburo member Hermann Axen. Eppelmann established contact with the CDU/CSU group when he was able to attend the chancellor’s party in Bonn on September 12, 1987, during a private visit. The talks focused on the human rights situation and on policy related to the two Germanys and Europe. The GDR participants were not afraid to also express criticism of social conditions in the West. Different conceptions of democratization in relation to the Eastern Bloc and the GDR were discussed. In principle, a normal political discussion took place between political actors. No agreement or concord was required. In such situations, it is, above all, the conversation itself that counts as the result. At the time, Gerd Poppe and Rainer Eppelmann, two of the GDR participants, broke a taboo that seems hardly comprehensible today, but then revealed the internal limits of the opposition. Left-wing opposition members of the Friedenskreis Friedrichsfelde, the Gegenstimmen, the UB, and the KvU distanced themselves sharply in several statements from such talks with Western politicians who were not considered “left-wing.” One should not talk to CDU/ CSU politicians, it was said, as they had agreed to NATO’s decisions on disarmament, pursued inhumane asylum policies, and supported dictatorships in Chile and South Africa. Gerd Poppe defended such talks in Grenzfall. His argumentation was clear and simple: nobody could or should be told who talks to whom about what and where. If one wanted freedom, one also had to behave in a free manner. One could only honestly denounce deterrence and marginalization if this applied to everyone, including in discussions with politicians whose political convictions one did not share.14 Eppelmann gave an interview to the taz on October 14, 1987, in which, like Poppe, he emphasized the differences between himself and his interlocutors and expressed the hope that more would follow

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this conversation. Der Spiegel wrote on October 19, 1987, that the independent groups in the GDR had gained “international recognition” with these two visits. More than half in the left-wing opposition (KvU, UB, Gegenstimmen, Friedrichsfelde) were very angry.15 Reactions outside of East Berlin were largely absent, and the excitement was incomprehensible there, especially since Western politicians were much less likely to go beyond the big cities to talk to opposition groups. In less populated areas, they met almost exclusively church people. In East Berlin, however, several groups and personalities were vying for sovereignty of influence and interpretation. If Eppelmann and Poppe were now declared opinion leaders on behalf of the opposition—also by the newspaper Unsere Zeit of the German Communist Party—this had to be bitterly condemned, because opposition members such as Schult, Rüddenklau, and Klein did not feel represented by them. In addition, the members of the strongly anti-capitalist opposition groups rejected contacts with Western media and did not want their messages to be transported via Western public channels. The IFM had already overcome this separation in 1987. Its members understood not only that increased awareness offered the group protection—members’ biographies and photos were also deposited in the West in case of arrests—but also that they could reach far more people in the GDR with the help of the West German media. An event that was not communicated by the media may as well have never taken place. Role models such as Biermann and Havemann had already exemplified this political insight, and the IFM, the circle associated with Eppelmann, and individuals such as Lutz Rathenow had aggressively pursued it from the mid-1980s onward. This development was enormously important for 1989, but it would also prove significant merely a few weeks later. At the end of October 1987, however, the rifts in the East Berlin opposition seemed insurmountable—aggravated by discussions about the “peace workshop” church leaders had canceled and the establishment of the KvU, as well as the “question of violence” raised by Karl-Rudi Pahnke at a Berlin-Brandenburg base meeting at the end of October and his accusation that some in the groups apparently had an unresolved Stalinist past.16

Publicity for Freedom Within two years, by autumn 1987, the opposition had developed far more contours. This was mainly due to the formation and consolidation of various groups with different political profiles. The need to differentiate between the groups was the reason each group needed to state its objectives more clearly. This process of differentiation proved to be a historically important precondition for the development of the collective and citizens’ movements in 1989, whose strength lay in their diversity and who, for this reason, were able to get a great many people to become involved. In addition to the new group formation, the most important

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point was the establishment of resilient communication and information structures. In addition to the UB and the AKSK, the numerous new periodicals in the samizdat are particularly worthy of mention. In 1952, the Russian writer Nikolay Glazkov had stapled together unpublished poems under the publishing label “Sam-sebja-isdat” (English: “Publishing House for Oneself”), which later came to be known as “samizdat” (self-published), and distributed them privately. The name was an ironic allusion to the Soviet Union’s tendency to generate linguistic monstrosities and a plethora of abbreviations. Samizdat represented the opposite of “Gosisdat,” the “State Publishing House.” In 1987, the most important periodicals in the GDR samizdat—the term was rarely used by the opposition, more rarely than by the MfS, incidentally—were Grenzfall (since 1986, Berlin), Umweltblätter (1986, Berlin), Friedrichsfelder Feuermelder (1987, Berlin), Blattwerk (1984, Halle), Friedensnetz (1984, Mecklenburg), Glasnost (1987, Leipzig/Naumburg), mOAning star (1985, Berlin), radix-blätter (1986, Berlin), Schalom and aktuell (1984, Berlin), Streiflichter (1981, Leipzig), Umweltbrief (1987, various cities), Wendezeit (1987, Berlin), and Zweite Person (1987, Leipzig). In addition to these and other periodicals with varying frequency of publication, a number of individual thematic issues were also produced. Between 1985 and the autumn of 1987, a total of about sixty individual issues or magazines were produced in this informal manner of publication. Even though most of the editions were not widely distributed, they proved to be conducive to opening and fostering communication within and between groups. When Roland Jahn remained illegally in Jena and East Berlin in April 1985, he had a memorable meeting with opposition members, which he later summarized as follows: On the one hand, it was sobering. For the first time I really understood how broken, small, gray and dirty this GDR was, and the rest of my friends in Jena only talked about leaving the country. But, on the other hand, in East Berlin I met Martin Böttger, Gerd and Ulrike Poppe, Rainer Eppelmann, Ralf Hirsch, Rüdiger Rosenthal, Reinhard Schult and others—all people from the GDR opposition who wanted to stay in the GDR and change it. Specifically, it became clear to me at this meeting how important it was to support their work from West Berlin, and that I had to be patient. With the exception of Reinhard Schult, who would have preferred to hide me in the GDR for the time being, all the others clearly urged me to go back to West Berlin and continue my work, the support of the GDR opposition, from there.17

Roland Jahn then became the most important supporter of the GDR opposition alongside Jürgen Fuchs. They smuggled printing technology and many other things into the country, compiled the reader dialog for the GDR opposition from 1985 onward, and set up a veritable news agency from which they supplied West German media outlets, including daily newspapers, weekly journals, as well as radio and television stations. The taz regularly published the “East Berlin Page”

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with reports, some of which East German opposition members wrote themselves. The television contributions already mentioned represent only a small selection. On August 25, 1987, the ARD political magazine Kontraste broadcast “Glasnost from Below—Desire for Freedom of the Press.” This program made not only the KvU but, above all, also the political underground magazines known to an audience of millions. Ultimately, Jahn played a decisive role in ensuring that the West Berlin station Radio 100 regularly ran the program Radio Glasnost—Out of Control with original contributions from the opposition for one hour every four weeks beginning on August 31, 1987. The pilot program was broadcast as early as July 22, 1987, and the last one aired on November 27, 1989. Moreover, there had already been a predecessor program from October to December 1986: the Black Channel. Unlike Radio Glasnost, it was produced entirely in the GDR by the circle associated with Reinhard Schult and Stephan Krawczyk, then smuggled to West Berlin where it was broadcast by a pirate station near the Wall in Kreuzberg. Since the station was broadcasting illegally, the West Berlin police were also on its trail. Schult and Krawczyk decided to terminate the project due to the risk of discovery, successful technical interference attempts by the MfS, and the limited range. Radio Glasnost, on the other hand, was one of the most successful undertakings to inform the public about opposition activities and secret domestic political events in the GDR. Its broad impact was unintentionally revealed by a commentary in Neues Deutschland: “This station is known to call itself ‘Glasnost.’”18 It is true that GDR opposition members were annoyed that they had no means of editorial intervention, prompting repeated conflicts with Jahn. But Jahn did not allow himself to be distracted by this or to lose sight of the actual political purpose.

The Battle of Zion The SED and MfS saw realistically that a new kind of opposition had emerged in 1985/86, and although its size was manageable, its ability to draw people in was incalculable. The MfS assumed that the “internal enemies” were controlled and paid from “outside,” and the communists believed that the fight against “internal and external enemies” should be waged in concert. At the same time, it was also necessary to “prevent, uncover, and combat all oppositional activity.”19 The central means of this were the use of IMs and extensive decomposition measures to undermine the activities. In early 1986, Minister Mielke ordered the MfS to consistently thwart the formation “internal opposition,” giving priority in its efforts to “political means.” Apparently with a view to the IFM, Mielke emphasized that the formation of human rights groups and new leaders should be “consistently prevented”; they should not develop into interlocutors of the state.20 On the one hand, the MfS conceded that political means were preferable to penal ones. In

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doing so, it was reacting to the increasing publicity of the opposition, which, at the same time, made it difficult for the SED to assert the criminal relevance of opposition actions. Political means were, for example, the increased use of administrative sanctions, but it was mainly secret police methods that were difficult to prove as such. Overall, the MfS assumed that it would be able to prevent the formation of opposition groups and, where groups existed, to break them up. A new point was added to the work plan for 1987. It stated: “All reproduced materials published by hostile negative associations, including literary and graphic ‘samizdat’ products that are distributed, must be immediately . . . assessed from a legal point of view, and regulatory and other measures to prevent their further production or distribution must be examined or initiated.”21 On August 20, 1987, Department XX, which was responsible for the prosecution of opposition members, determined that the MfS was receiving disturbing news almost daily, and, thus, it submitted new proposals, among other things, in a document. The document Department XX presented shows that the actions the MfS initiated in November 1987 were by no means spontaneous or illconsidered. It is a strategy paper on how the opposition could be hindered in its development. Old methods, it was argued, should be retained and new ones tested. The old ones included the use of IMs and decomposition measures, as well as the deployment of trained staff from the Christian Peace Conference, the CDU, the Democratic Women’s Federation, and MfS students, and of experts at events on church premises. However, the astonishing admission this document contains is that the political-operative work would be made more difficult by taboo social problems, tendencies to gloss over public opinion, or a lack of freedom of expression. Especially against the background of Gorbachev’s policy, which many people loyal to the state welcomed, something had to change. The MfS proposed that the SED district press as well as Junge Welt and Sonntag take up topics that had hitherto been kept secret or treated too one-sidedly, and that trade journals should also open up. “In addition, it is proposed to create a special periodical publication organ with which a direct ideological confrontation with hostile-negative ideological concepts and their bearers in the GDR will be conducted. This publication organ is to be given a special status in order to prevent the polemics in it from taking on an official government character and thus ‘impacting’ foreign policy, foreign trade and other state interests of the GDR.” The MfS strategists suggested several possibilities, such as developing a new profile for Weltbühne, newly founding special state advisory bodies that would publish such a journal, or having such a journal published by the Academy of Sciences or “as a journal of an exclusive group of social scientists (e.g. with Prof. Kuczynski).” The target group was to be large and by no means exclusive and was to include SED functionaries, social scientists, university teachers, civics teachers, and functionaries of block parties and associations. This publication would not only discuss controversial social problems but also include MfS information and reprints of

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Western contributions and from the samizdat. Although this journal never came into being, this proposal makes it clear that some forces within the MfS could see that a mere policy of repression could not subdue the opposition. The project was intended to counteract the draw of oppositional publicity. For the MfS observed that the ideas of the opposition, broadcast via the Western media, fell on fertile ground. The central “factual focus,” according to the strategists in August 1987, was the fight against the “periodically appearing underground magazines” such as Grenzfall and Umweltblätter and other high-profile activities. Since the possibilities of criminal proceedings were limited, it was argued, it was necessary to work primarily with administrative criminal proceedings. The MfS hoped that this attrition tactic would engender fatigue and financial problems in the opposition. Finally, the MfS officers developed precise proposals concerning the “hostilenegative leaders.” They estimated that the number of such leaders was manageable and that they were “mainly concentrated in the Berlin area” but that their impact could hardly be overestimated. “To isolate or limit these persistent enemies, who operate with high intensity and fanaticism, must therefore be placed at the center of the fight against political underground activity.” Because the “proof of hostile control of political underground activity by forces from the area of operations . . . was still regarded as a key problem,” it was no coincidence that Roland Jahn was regarded as one of the most important enemies. In his case, the aim was to prove that he was being controlled by the secret service. Wolfgang Templin was to be discredited with the “determined and credible dissemination of indications of cooperation with the MfS.” Gerd and Ulrike Poppe were to be forced to leave the country permanently through attrition, and for Bärbel Bohley, a long-term work assignment in the West was considered. Martin Böttger was to be drawn more into church work. Werner Fischer, in turn, was to be encouraged to publish his own underground magazine in order to then “lead it to a fiasco” by secret police means. For Rainer Eppelmann and Ralf Hirsch, the MfS officers devised a plan to lead them more strongly to CDU circles and “political forces in the FRG that are even more right-wing” in order to isolate them from left-wing forces within the GDR opposition. They sought to integrate Lutz Rathenow immediately into the extreme right-wing milieu in West Germany in order to compromise his position in the GDR. In the case of Peter Grimm and Peter Rölle, the MfS officers wanted to stage “mishaps” in the “content design, production and distribution” of Grenzfall in order to “emphatically prove their inability to work both journalistically and conspiratorially.” Stephan Krawczyk and Freya Klier, both of whom were effectively banned from working, were to be presented with official job offers and thus made unreliable. A similar strategy was planned for Katja Havemann. She was to receive special treatment “for travel requests and other private projects” that would set her apart from her circle of contacts and could be used in the long term as a starting point for decomposition measures.” Finally, the paper also mentioned Heiko Lietz (Güstrow/Rostock),

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Markus Meckel (Vipperow), Hans-Jochen Tschiche (Magdeburg), Edelbert Richter (Naumburg/Erfurt), Roman and Johanna Kalex (Dresden), Christoph Wonneberger (Leipzig), Katrin Eigenfeld (Halle), as well as Reinhard Schult and Uwe Kulisch (both Berlin), for example, noting that “analogous” decomposition plans were to be worked out for them as well.22 Against this background, MfS officers developed the concrete plan to “catch opposition members in the act” and arrest them in church congregations when they were under pressure from Grenzfall. In October 1987, Minister Mielke ordered the prevention of the production of “anti-socialist pamphlets”23 and the liquidation of the IFM. The SED leadership—Honecker, Krenz, and Schabowski—were aware of the plans. Grenzfall had been produced in various places, mostly in private homes, but also in the rooms of the Zion parish where the UB was located. In the night of November 24 to 25, an MfS commando of about twenty people, together with public prosecutor Ludwig Gläßner from the General Prosecutor’s Office, raided the UB. A tape recording of the event captured “clay, stones, [and] shards” roaring. As the legend would have it, there was “no power for anyone.” Due to a slip-up, this undertaking became a disaster for the MfS because the raid occurred when Wolfgang Rüddenklau and his comrades in arms were printing the Umweltblätter—officially an internal church publication—rather than Grenzfall. Peter Grimm had arranged with Rüddenklau in the afternoon of November 24 for the Grenzfall editors not to participate in the printing and to “demonstratively” be somewhere else. Rüddenklau, in turn, printed the Umweltblätter first because too many people were present, including a fourteenyear-old, and only very few were to know where the current issue of Grenzfall was being printed. The IM who had helped to initiate the MfS action, Reiner Dietrich (IM “Cindy”), could no longer warn her commanding officer. “Cindy” sat in a pub having a beer with the Grenzfall editors Peter Grimm, Peter Rölle, and Ralf Hirsch and found no way to let the MfS know of the shift without revealing her undercover role. Within the MfS, the action was known by the code word “Falle” (trap).24 The secret police thought they had indeed set a trap—if Grenzfall was printed in the UB, both groups could be dealt with at once: the IFM with its publication Grenzfall because its members were enemies of the state who were independent of the church, and the UB and its publication Umweltblätter because the group had developed antistate activities within the Zion parish. But, as it turned out, it was the MfS that was trapped. Although it confiscated extensive materials and technology, including six duplicating machines, at least four of which were more than forty years old, it did not confiscate the Grenzfall editorial team’s bag containing the printer’s blackening pump, so that the MfS could not even prove that the Grenzfall printing press would have been operational at all. In addition to Wolfgang Rüddenklau and Bert Schlegel, the MfS arrested five other persons

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who, with the exception of the two mentioned, were released by the evening. Rüddenklau and Schlegel remained in custody for three days longer, and the preliminary proceedings were not discontinued until weeks later. Even during the night-time arrests, UB employees were able to call the parish priest Hans Simon, who had rushed to the scene, and ask him to inform Bärbel Bohley. She and Werner Fischer began to inform the others. Ralf Hirsch informed Roland Jahn in West Berlin. Already that very night, the news tickers in the West began to run hot. In the morning, the first crisis meeting was held in Bohley’s studio rooms. Subsequently, the main East Berlin opposition groups issued a joint statement protesting the attack, calling for the immediate release of all those arrested, the full restoration of the UB’s ability to function, and “the cessation of all repression against politically committed persons.” The MfS had believed that the disputes between the groups would prevent them from cooperating. In this, too, it was wrong. The declaration was signed by the UB, the KvU, the IFM, the Friedenskreis Friedrichsfelde, the Women for Peace, the Gegenstimmen, the AKSK, as well as “members of the Zion parish,” and stated: “We see in this action . . . an attack on all groups. . . .”25 In the following days there was hectic activity on all sides. The MfS arrested several people from the IFM, as well as Vera Wollenberger, and also placed Bärbel Bohley, Ulrike Poppe, and Regina Templin under house arrest. The police and MfS went around the Church of Zion and carried out checks on people. Superintendent General Krusche made several irritating statements. He claimed that behind the church’s back, antistate writings were being produced in the church and that the state had confiscated “the most modern Western small offset presses,” which the UB did not even have. At about 10:30 p.m. the first vigil began in front of the Church of Zion. The ten participants were immediately arrested and driven away. Half an hour later the next vigil began, which was now on the steps of the church; the participants could not be arrested under the eyes of Western television crews. Candles were lit everywhere as a sign of peaceful protest. In the evening, a vigil office was set up, whose main task was to collect and pass on information. This “contact telephone” remained in operation until January 14, 1988. On the morning of November 27, 1987, firefighters took a banner from the tower of the Church of Zion that read, “We protest the arrests and confiscation of the Environmental Library.” It had been displayed for only a few minutes. The first declarations of solidarity from West Germany and abroad were received on November 26. Informational devotions were held in several churches, and not only in East Berlin; in many other places intercessions were recited during church services. In Weimar, Wismar, Saalfeld, Braunsdorf, Erfurt, Halle, and Dresden, there were brief arrests, indoctrinations, and other attempts at intimidation. From the population came food donations for those maintaining the vigil. The international protests started, sometimes by chance. Jürgen Fuchs was in Paris on November 25. His friend Roland Jahn informed him about the

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events. Fuchs informed the French public and encouraged French writers to compose a protest letter. The writer Sascha Anderson, who moved to West Berlin in August 1986 and worked for the MfS as an IM, met Fuchs in Paris and told his senior officers about it.26 The key figures creating publicity at this time were Roland Jahn and the GDR civil rights activist Rüdiger Rosenthal, who also lived in West Berlin. The “Zion Affair” marked the beginning of a development that lasted almost two years. With the crisis situation in society as a whole in the background, this development would contribute decisively to the formation of a broad citizens’ movement. Five points can be identified that became important in the following period. First, the protest did not remain regionally limited but reached large parts of the GDR and had international dimensions. Actions of solidarity took place that strengthened the networking of the opposition groups throughout the GDR. With regard to structures, internal processes of differentiation, dealing with the public, and political objectives, the East Berlin groups were already acting in a more professional manner than groups elsewhere. Second, out of necessity, new forms of opposition, such as the vigils, proved to have a high public profile. When the vigil was stopped on November 30, 1987, to signal concessions to the state and the church leadership after the release of Schlegel and Rüddenklau, a protest march with candles was held from the Elias Church to the Zion Church a few kilometers away. Even more important, as mentioned above, was the first installation of the vigil office, that is, a contact telephone. Third, it had now also become clear to the skeptics that a relaxed approach to Western media helped to make a difference. The rapid release of the detainees resulted in part from the church leadership’s willingness to compromise in its actions around Stolpe and Krusche; it was also due to lawyer Wolfgang Schnur, who worked for the MfS as an IM. Both the leadership and Schnur knew how to channel the protests. Above all, however, the rapid release was prompted by international reporting, which seriously damaged the SED’s image. Fourth, this unexpected attack politically radicalized the opposition as the few remarks by the state made it clear how little it and its leading party were willing to engage in internal dialogue. The SEDSPD paper and the Olof Palme March, as well as the hopes for internal change associated with them, smacked into the wall of reality. For the SED state, writer Hermann Kant once again stepped into the breach. On November 26, 1987, on the Tagesschau, he declared that anyone working for the environment in the GDR did not need to go into catacombs. He, thus, defended the attack and arrests and positioned the churches and opposition in the underground. Fifth and finally, after the state raid on one of their congregations, the churches could no longer be satisfied with their role as moderators between the state and groups. This led to a process of differentiation within the churches that was not very flattering to them because some members of all the regional churches began to speak out after this action, demanding that these oppositional individuals be banished from church

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rooms. “The churches in the GDR are ‘churches in socialism,’ not against it,” leaders in the Berlin-Brandenburg church believed they had to affirm in order to declare that Grenzfall was “antistate” material and that the Western media had sparked a “wild smear campaign” against the GDR.27 These arguments served the SED as a model for future actions. In contrast to previous debates, many ordinary parish priests throughout the GDR now took such a position, especially when they had no contacts with opposition groups. At the same time, however, the attack also prompted many church people to show more open solidarity with the groups—whether they were Christian or not. In many church services on November 29 and December 6, Christians made intercessions, and many pastors expressly showed solidarity with the UB, but few did the same for the IFM and Grenzfall. “The Church” even titled a big report about the raid on December 6, 1987: “Environmental Library—Part of the Church.” Particularly noteworthy in this was West Berlin churches’ involvement, as they began to show solidarity, mentioning the Zion Affair in many services and explicitly praying for those affected on November 29. It did not require any reform forces within the MfS and SED apparatus for the “Falle” mission to be characterized as a failure. To this day it is still not completely clear how the concrete courses of action and command situations came about. However, it can be proven that the MfS management level, including Mielke and Mittig, gave the green light and apparently also received Honecker’s verbal approval beforehand. It is, therefore, not surprising that they did not wish to settle for this defeat.

“Freedom Is Always the Freedom of Those Who Think Differently” This quotation, attributed to Rosa Luxemburg, was never published by her but was merely a handwritten comment she wrote in a dispute with the Russian revolutionaries in the margin of an unfinished manuscript: “Freedom only for supporters of the government, only for the members of a party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom. Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently. Not because of the fanaticism of ‘justice’ but because all that is vitalizing, healing and purifying in political freedom is attached to this being, and its effect fails when freedom becomes a privilege.”28 In the GDR, many who were critical of the SED conditions used this quotation. One example occurred on Sunday, January 16, 1977, when three East Berliners protested the system with a banner that had this quotation on it in the midst of the official LiebknechtLuxemburg demonstration; they believed that freedom did not exist and that Luxemburg’s legacy was not being fulfilled. For this, they received prison sentences between twelve and eighteen months.29 The quote was subversive, but it was not until 1988 that it became ubiquitous.

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By September 1987, a new alliance had already been formed that was worrying for the SED. The Working Group on the Citizenship Law of the GDR, founded in East Berlin by applicants for emigration, had found two prominent supporters and comrades in arms in Regina and Wolfgang Templin. The Templins consistently defended the human right to freedom of movement. Most opposition groups distanced themselves and were sometimes hostile toward those who wanted to leave the country—and not only for tactical reasons. Politically, they did not want to be lumped together with them because they themselves had consciously decided to change the GDR. They were also reserved toward emigration applications because they suspected that the latter only wanted to leave the GDR for material reasons. But this assumption was not correct, even if material reasons were sufficient for wishing to move. The MfS had been investigating many of the persons active in the working group for a long time, and not only because of their intention to leave the country. Quite a few were under secret police investigation even before they had applied for an exit visa. This pertained not only to this working group but also to a whole series of other applicants who drew attention to their request to leave by means of spectacular actions from 1987 onward. On December 10, 1987, International Human Rights Day, the Working Group on the Citizenship Law of the GDR handed over a declaration to several state institutions in which it called for a legally secured and enforceable freedom of movement.30 In the evening, the group attended an event held in the Gethsemane Church marking the occasion, which was also attended by several opposition groups and four hundred other people. The IFM distributed a statement on its political self-image, formulating as central concerns for society the following: “1. establishment of the rule of law, 2. democratization.” The statement continued: Commitment to human rights that are regarded as inalienable inevitably means that social development can no longer be measured against a certain utopian image of society. This may be a step backwards for some, but it is especially so for those who think themselves in possession of the only true world outlook, acting as authorized spokesmen of a class or even a whole people without even admitting to them the achievements of the bourgeois revolution. . . . It is in keeping with the self-conception of the “Peace and Human Rights” initiative that, in addition to demands on governments in the form of petitions and appeals, rights not yet granted should be exercised as if they had already been granted.31

Several IFM members could not be present at the event in the Gethsemane Church itself because they had been arrested that morning and were not released until the next day. Thus, the MfS also thwarted their plan—similar actions were taking place in Poland, Hungary, and the ČSSR—to submit a declaration with political and legal demands to the official “GDR Committee for Human

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Rights.”32 An MfS officer told IFM members when they were released that they could henceforth travel to visit “their friends” from now on, but they only had to declare such plans. The IFM did not let up despite the Zion Affair. The UB enjoyed a high profile and an influx of visitors that exceeded its capacity. And the emigration movement throughout the country seemed to take on structures and forms that had been organized by the Zion Affair. Before Christmas 1987, the MfS developed another “draft plan for the intensified fight against political underground activity.”33 It corresponded to the cited paper of August 20, 1987, but went further, arguing that press work should be intensified and, in particular, the offensive confrontation (defamation) with the opposition that it had begun in the Junge Welt should be continued. The CC of the SED also was to inform all district administrations in detail about MfS plans. A legal opinion on Grenzfall was to be obtained. On January 15, 1988, three professors from the Humboldt University in Berlin—Horst Luther, Günter Röder, and Anni Seidl—presented an expert opinion on Grenzfall with which they wished to prove on behalf of the secret police that Grenzfall was a case for the judiciary. They “proved” this as well as—without being asked—for the Umweltblätter.34 The MfS took this as an opportunity to also classify other samizdat products as subversive with an expert opinion. Roland Jahn was to be publicly portrayed as issuing orders on behalf of the West. Social institutions and associations were to be involved in the smear campaign, and state pressure was to be increased on church leaders to further disengage them from the opposition groups. From “positive” church people, distancing statements should be obtained—corresponding letters from Pastor Cyrill Pech and Pastor Walter Unger in Neues Deutschland were part of this strategy. Requests for the relocation of opposition members were to be fulfilled on short notice. It was not possible to expatriate GDR citizens “who are not abroad” against their will, because there was no legal basis for this and it was contrary to “international practice.” Criminal procedural measures against Rüddenklau, Hirsch, Grimm, Rölle, Bohley, Fischer, Böttger, Mißlitz, Schult, and Kulisch, as well as the married couples Templin and Poppe, were to be examined without delay. The SED organizational units were to be prepared in good time for this because such measures could promote “solidarity effects” even among groups of people who had “not yet been involved in these hostile activities.”35 Then a timetable followed: By January 10, 1988, the “first stage” of the relocations was to be completed; by January 15, 1988, the criminal evidence against the “executives” and the inspiring role of Jahn (“telephone tracing”), as well as the intelligence connections of Jahn, Hirsch, Templin, and Bohley, were to be proven; and then by January 19, 1988, the “second stage” of the relocations was to be completed. Finally, on January 20, 1988, the MfS wanted to hold a press conference at which, first, a documentation of the events since autumn 1987 was to be presented and, second, an IM was to report on the machinations of enemies of the

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state from within. Subsequently, the trials and administrative criminal proceedings against the persons remaining in the GDR would begin.36 It didn’t quite work out that way, but almost. This was because in midDecember, the MfS could not have known that on January 9, 1988, a majority of the Working Group on the Citizenship Law of the GDR would decide, in the UB rooms, to participate with their own banners in the annual LuxemburgLiebknecht march. The annual mass march, a highlight in the SED holiday calendar, marked the anniversary of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919 and always took place on the third Sunday in January, which was January 17 in 1988. The working group planned to carry sixteen banners with Luxemburg quotations in order not to give the state any legal basis for action. Most of the opposition held back and distanced themselves from the plan, allowing members to participate if they wished without representing any group. Wolfgang and Regina Templin strongly advocated for the plan in the run-up to the event. Since January 13, Honecker, Krenz, and Schabowski had been personally addressing the upcoming protests. On January 15, the MfS drew up a list of names of persons who were to be brought in as a preventive measure or arrested when they left their homes on January 17. The first arrests were made on January 16. Wolfgang Templin was also to be brought in, but he managed to escape. In addition, 118 people, including 93 from East Berlin, were instructed between January 13 and 16 not to participate in the demonstration. Nineteen other persons were allowed to leave on short notice. On the evening of January 17, Alvin Lee gave a concert in the Palace of the Republic. He had become world famous through his performance at Woodstock as the front man of Ten Years After, and now he also played his world hit “I’m Goin’ Home” in East Berlin. The fans were screaming the lyrics: “I’m goin’ home, I’m goin’ home, hey ho / Gonna take me back right where I belong.” That was not a solidarity song, just pure coincidence, but history wanted it that way. On January 17, the MfS arrested a total of 105 people, 70 of them on the fringes of the demonstration at the Frankfurter Tor. Most of them actually wanted to leave the country. The other 35 people were arrested by the MfS as a preventive measure, among them Andreas Kalk, Bert Schlegel, and Till Böttcher of the UB, as well as Vera Wollenberger and Frank-Herbert Mißlitz from the KvU/ Gegenstimmen. The most prominent person arrested was the singer-songwriter Stephan Krawczyk, who had carried a banner that read, “Against occupational bans in the GDR.” Krawczyk had resigned from the SED in 1985 and was effectively banned from working in the same year. The same thing happened to the theater director and publicist Freya Klier, who had never been a member of the SED. They developed joint programs that they performed in churches and church assembly spaces. The state put the churches under pressure to no longer offer them performance

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opportunities. Pastors who resisted this often received administrative fines. Klier and Krawczyk were nevertheless able to perform their system-critical pieces and songs in front of tens of thousands of church visitors. Both were considered enemies of the state. In this respect, the opportunity did not come amiss for the MfS to involve the two celebrities in this campaign. Klier remained free at first because she had not participated in the demonstration. In the MfS, the operation to prevent this counterdemonstration was called “Störenfried” (Troublemaker). Oddly enough, the MfS did not stop this operation until the end of its activities. Many thousands of documents can be found in its archives under this code word. For every day until the beginning of December 1989, there was a report on the opposition throughout the GDR. In addition, summary reports were produced every week and every month until early December 1989. In addition to the “Störenfried” line, there were other systematically prepared reports—daily, every ten days, and monthly—on oppositional and other hostile activities. The fact that the “Störenfried” operation could never be completed unintentionally symbolizes the connection between the events of November 1987 and January 1988, on the one hand, and the autumn of 1989 on the other. Not only these secret police reports but also hundreds of testimonies on the part of opposition members provide evidence of the remarkable dynamics of the events after the arrests of January 17. On January 18, a first informational meeting concerning the events took place in the Zion parish. The contact phone had been reactivated. At first, Bärbel Bohley’s private connection was used for this purpose, but a few days later the general superintendent allowed for this connection in his office; it worked until February 8. On January 18–19, a coordination group was formed in which representatives of various opposition groups worked together, including Reinhard Weißhuhn for the IFM, Wolfgang Rüddenklau and Martin Schramm for the UB, Reinhard Schult for Gegenstimmen, Marianne Birthler and Ulrich Stockmann for the AKSK, Marion and Roland Seelig for the Zion parish, and Uwe Kulisch and Walter Schramm for the KvU. The main task of this group was to coordinate solidarity actions and to prepare the information and intercession missions in East Berlin. The East Berlin groups stuck together. In other parts of the GDR, the first solidarity actions began on January 20, first in Leipzig churches. The West German media reported on them continuously. But the events initially enjoyed only a low level of attendance. The West German journalist Gerhard Rein commented that the applicants for emigration had “instrumentalized Rosa Luxemburg as much as the party. Namely, for themselves.”37 Rein, who knew the church and opposition groups very well as a permanent correspondent, displayed an attitude that is incomprehensible today but would have been capable of winning majority support at that time. On the evening of January 22, 1988, the West German television stations—Ralf Hirsch helped with the production and transmission to ARD correspondent

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Hans-Jürgen Börner—broadcast a video message from Freya Klier. She explained who her husband Stephan Krawczyk was, that he had been banned from working since 1985, and that he longed for a true socialist society. She called on the GDR government to release Krawczyk immediately. And she appealed to German artists not to perform in the GDR until Krawczyk was released. She also asked Günter Kunert, Reiner Kunze, Wolf Biermann, and Erich Loest, all originally from the GDR, to support the singer-songwriter by name.38 Freya Klier’s appeal seemed like a cry of despair. The SED and MfS rightly feared that Klier wanted to ignite a solidarity movement such as had existed in East and West after Biermann’s expatriation in 1976.39 Quite a few opposition members found her appeal exaggerated. But the West German artists whom she had addressed reacted immediately. Peter Maffay discontinued his negotiations to conduct a tour in the GDR and did not return until the end of the state. In an open letter to Honecker, he and other West German stars, such as BAP, Herbert Grönemeyer, Udo Lindenberg, Dieter Hildebrandt, Bruno Jonas, Rio Reiser, Konstantin Wecker, Ulla Meinecke, and Marius Müller-Westernhagen, demanded the immediate release of all detainees and the lifting of Krawczyk’s working ban.40 Günter Grass called the events “shameful” but at the same time drew parallels to how West Germany dealt with people who thought differently.41 Biermann, Kunze, Fuchs, Loest, and many other artists who came from the GDR also published a statement. Even the title packed a punch: “Yes, It Is War.” They stressed that the statement was not a petition. “No man can give what he does not have. So we do not demand freedom of thought from people who do not have it. No, we’re not asking. Nor can we threaten, for we have no power. But we have an ancient memory. And we have the open word and will use it in the fight for the release of our friends in the GDR.”42 What exactly happened in the offices of the MfS strategists in the days after January 17 is not known. However, the events after January 25 showed that there was a strong will to implement the plans of August and December 1987 because that Monday morning, MfS arrest groups detained Freya Klier, Bärbel Bohley, Werner Fischer, Ralf Hirsch, as well as Regina and Wolfgang Templin.43 After the arrest of these six for “treasonous contact”—prison sentences of up to twelve years (§§99, 100, 219 of the German penal code)—became known, a storm of protest arose at home and abroad. Nobody had reckoned with it—not the state, not the churches, not the opposition, and not even the detainees. When they were “admitted” into custody, this was not foreseeable, and they did not find out about it once they were in prison. From the next day on, there were protests throughout the country inside and outside the churches. In almost all large towns, as well as in many smaller towns and villages, civil rights activists and pastors organized informational and intercessional prayer services. In East Berlin, but also in Leipzig, Dresden, and other cities, several such services took place on some days. Opposition members in Leipzig, Dresden, Jena,

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Halle, Weimar, Erfurt, and Braunsdorf also set up contact telephones to collect information. The protest now came out of the churches. There was hardly any other topic at work, at school, at university, in the office. It was particularly threatening for the state that slogans appeared on the walls of houses, bus stops, and many other public places throughout the country, and leaflets were circulated even in small towns such as Grimmen, Sebnitz, and Radebeul. The slogans were, for example, “Freedom for Stephan and Freya,” “Freedom for those who think differently,” “I am Krawczyk,” “Free elections,” “Release Krawczyk,” “Luxemburg in GDR prison,” “Down with the SED,” “Freedom for Vera,” and “Stasi out,” and even in the southern part of the GDR, “Solidarity with Berlin” appeared several times. Especially popular were two sayings that were in circulation throughout the 1980s: “He who does not move does not feel his fetters,” as well as “Stay in the country and fight back daily.” Hundreds of people wrote petitions and open letters to the state and the SED. Monetary donations amounting to 35,000 marks were collected for the upcoming trials. Arrests were repeatedly made outside East Berlin. The SED had instigated this action in order to “avoid a development typical of the early 1980s in the People’s Republic of Poland”44 and to get ahead of it. But now the situation seemed to escalate. Between February 1 and March 20, 380 preliminary proceedings for such protests were opened. During this time, 120 proceedings were also completed, half of which ended with prison sentences of up to two years. For months, there were 60 new cases and 60 new convictions each week.45 Hundreds of emigration applicants were suddenly granted their wish. Every day new protest letters and resolutions became known from the Federal Republic and from abroad. The Bundestag debated the issue, and politicians, intellectuals, and civil rights activists from almost all Western and Eastern European countries took the floor. There were also protests from Canada and the United States—from Norman Birnbaum and Joan Baez, for example. Even more protest letters came from the GDR itself. From then on, the senders of such letters were regarded as persons suspected of being hostile, and their number was so large that the MfS could no longer “operatively process” them all. On January 28, an East Berlin court sentenced Vera Wollenberger to six months in prison, and on February 1, the three employees of the UB received the same sentence. All four had been arrested on January 17. One day later came the surprising news that Klier and Krawczyk had immigrated to West Germany, along with Bert Schlegel, one of the three from the UB. One day later, Klier and Krawczyk declared that they had gone neither voluntarily to prison nor voluntarily to the Federal Republic and demanded that they be returned to the GDR. The public and the opposition were both equally irritated and disappointed. Lawyer Wolfgang Schnur declared on February 4 in the evening in the Gethsemane Church in front of about twenty-five hundred people that Klier

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and Krawczyk had behaved “badly” after their departure. They had agreed not to make any public statements for the time being, and the two of them were only to telephone him.46 But when Klier and Krawczyk met again and talked about the events, it dawned on them that they had been deceived by Schnur. Only in the spring of 1990 did it become clear that they were right and that Schnur had been an IM of the MfS. The irritations became even more acute when on February 5, Ralf Hirsch was forced to leave the country with an application to emigrate to the Federal Republic, the Templins and their children went to the Federal Republic for two years, and Bohley and Fischer went to England for half a year. On February 8, Vera Wollenberger followed them to England for a year, also with two children; her eldest son (aged sixteen) remained in the GDR. (Wollenberger then stayed in England until the fall of the Wall but was allowed to enter the GDR once on a visiting basis in 1989.) The protest movement in East Berlin died instantly. The IFM decided to keep a low profile until Bohley and Fischer returned so as not to jeopardize their reentry. But in contrast to this, the opposition movement expanded in all other regions of the GDR in the following weeks and months. And until the end of the GDR, the public protest of those who wished to leave the country did not abate. They went to churches, gathered in public places, and undertook other acts of demonstration. This was a thorn in the side of many. But in the public space, these acts ensured that criticism of the system henceforth remained public. Everyone was literally forced to deal with this phenomenon. Whatever one thought individually, this broad social discourse could no longer be controlled by the state, which greatly undermined its stability. The state had rammed together the emigration movement and the opposition, and these joint forces now became a nail in the coffin of the system. After February 5, the SED and the MfS seemed to have won. Four groups played a decisive role in this. First, there were the IMs of the MfS who acted within the opposition, preferably within the IFM, who betrayed practically all the plans. Since they also provided many clues that were indispensable to the MfS for elaborating precise psychograms of the opposition members, the secret police knew well how to wear down any detainees. Second, there were IMs, like Sascha Anderson, who were deployed in West Berlin and reported on the work of Roland Jahn, Jürgen Fuchs, and Rüdiger Rosenthal, as well as on their contacts and their strategy. Third, some church leaders longed for new “pauses for thought” and still wanted the state-church relationship to remain unburdened, so some of them, with whatever justification, worked conspiratorially with the MfS. The Catholic Bishop of Berlin, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, strengthened these forces in a statement of February 1, 1988, when he expressed concern that Protestant church services were turning into political information events. Regardless of the reasons for this, he maintained, “If a church service no longer

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serves the worship of God first, then according to our Catholic understanding this is a questionable undertaking.”47 Fourth, there were two perfidious individuals who “stood by” the detainees as friends and, in one case, as a spouse. Both the lawyer Wolfgang Schnur and Vera Wollenberger’s husband Knud (IM “Donald”) were IMs for the MfS for many years. Although star lawyer Wolfgang Vogel played a similar role, his function was generally known both before 1987– 88 and afterward, and he was not considered trustworthy. With his tailor-made suits, signet rings, and ostentatious cars, he also seemed so bourgeois that he did not get into the “scene,” which did not bother him because he found this “scene” just as ridiculous. The conservative Wolfgang Schnur, however, did infiltrate the scene as a man who had studied law who stood up for the interests of construction soldiers, opposition members, and people critical of the government in general. Hirsch and Eppelmann were friends with him, and almost everyone trusted him. Whenever he appeared in churches and provided explanations, there was tremendous applause. Only a few distrusted him. The lawyers Wolfgang Schnur, Gregor Gysi, Lothar de Maizière, and Manfred Stolpe were figures whose telephone numbers had been at least mentally noted by almost anyone who considered himself endangered. They all played an important role in those days. The state deported Klier, Krawczyk, Hirsch, Bohley, Fischer, and the Templins to the West—an action it had been planning with the MfS since the summer of 1987. No one was told while in prison about the wave of solidarity throughout the country. This was particularly tragic in the case of Vera Wollenberger because she was the only one who received visits not only from her lawyer and church dignitaries but also from her husband Knud, who played the MfS’s deceitful game as an IM and did not tell her anything about the events in the GDR. On the contrary, Knud Wollenberger and Wolfgang Schnur reported during their visits that there was nothing going on outside, and that nobody cared about the fate of those who had been arrested. Moreover, Bärbel Bohley, the Templins, Freya Klier, and Vera Wollenberger all had underage children whose fate was unknown to them. Although arrangements had been made to ensure that the children would be taken in by opposition friends, no one could guarantee that the state would not force the children to live in homes. In this respect, the detainees found themselves in a very difficult situation that made leaving the country seem to be the only choice. Meanwhile, the SED had launched a week-long smear campaign in its press against the opposition, churches, and supporters such as Jahn and Fuchs. In this, too, the MfS implemented its plans in a targeted manner. Contributions from West German Communist Party newspapers—which in this context had mostly been written in MfS offices—were printed, as were Pravda comments from Moscow. The MfS produced numerous contributions as ADN commentary or signed articles that were presented as serious background reports. Even before the arrests, Neues Deutschland published an essay on January 24, 1988,

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with the aim of proving that Roland Jahn was supporting the “much longed-for ‘GDR opposition’” from the West, which was true, and that he was connected to the secret service, which was not true. For months, the MfS had been feverishly searching for evidence of Jahn’s secret service activities, albeit in vain. Internally, the officers admitted to having no evidence, but publicly they declared the opposite.48 The background became public on January 25 with the arrests because the accusation against Hirsch, Bohley, Fischer, Klier and the Templins—“suspicion of a traitorous connection”—was based on their intensive contacts with Jahn.49 An interview with Peter Przybylski, the head of the press office of the GDR attorney general, who was well known in the GDR from a regular television program (The Public Prosecutor Has the Floor), suggested on January 28 that the arrested persons should be treated in accordance with the rule of law: they should be entitled to a defense lawyer. Przybylski also affirmed that the arrested individuals had had contact “with persons and institutions outside the state borders of the GDR,” again referring to Jahn and Fuchs, “whose relations with Western intelligence services are known.”50 In this, too, the MfS had its hands in the pie. This was not so obvious in the commentary that caused the greatest stir in this context. Heinz Kamnitzer, a man whose abilities hardly anyone knew exactly, spoke up on January 28. In 1954 he had to resign a professorship in history at Humboldt University because German historians had proven that he had plagiarized others’ work. Afterward, he took on many functions, working as a “free” author and, from 1970, as president of the P. E. N. Center of the GDR. Under the headline “The Dead Exhort,” he now wrote: “The funeral march for the murdered national heroes of our state was deliberately disrupted, the funeral ceremony for the martyrs of the Communist Party was deliberately desecrated. One did not want to join a demonstration in awe but to draw attention to oneself. What happened there is as reprehensible as blasphemy. No church could tolerate the debasement of a procession in memory of a Catholic cardinal or Protestant bishop.”51 Kamnitzer described his Communist Party as church-like, the demonstration as a procession. This angered many people, including Cardinal Meisner.52 Many SED members were speechless. Most people didn’t know what to think. After Klier and Krawczyk’s departure, a defamatory article, hard to beat in its malice, about the singer-songwriter followed the next day. The last line was, “Krawczyk chose the [path] to yesterday. . . .”53 This went on for weeks. And again and again the SED tried to save Rosa Luxemburg and her famous sentence from the dissenters for itself. The most important contribution was made by Annelies Laschitza. She published the works and letters of Luxemburg, wrote biographies on Luxemburg and Liebknecht before and after 1989, was the scholarly advisor to the West German feature and international prize-winning film Rosa Luxemburg (1986) by Margarethe von Trotta, and was a professor with a management position at the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the CC of the SED. In a full-page article, she tried to show how Luxemburg’s sentence, which

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was so famous with the dissenters, had been written. She wrote in such a way that she could end the essay with the following paragraph: “All attempts to interpret Rosa Luxemburg for a so-called third way to an allegedly democratic socialism beyond Marxism-Leninism and real socialism are in irreconcilable contrast to Rosa Luxemburg’s actual development and her understanding of democracy and socialism, which led her to Lenin’s side.”54 The following highlight was also part of the essay: “Incidentally, in the name of this ‘freedom,’ Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by ‘dissenters.’” In November 1989, Laschitza would speak out on the subject again, now to defend the SED as a “dissident” and save it from its impending downfall.55 Heinz Kamnitzer did not miss the opportunity to add more. He too argued at first historically, though not nearly as cleverly as Laschitza, only to admit that “our” freedom did not apply to everyone.56 Both formed part of the abovementioned SED/MfS plan to involve supposed experts in the political debate. This also included an interview published on January 29, 1988, in which the 31-year-old “FDJ youth researcher” Uwe Wöhlbier from Eisleben explained “quite casually” why everything in the GDR had to remain as it was. The GDR, he remarked, represented “one percent of the world’s potential for scientific research,” however this may have been calculated, “far more than our share of the world’s population. There you go.” The whole interview ran under the headline: “Freedom, That Is the Freedom of the Thinking Person in Our Country.”57 Members of the FDJ singing club Oktoberklub also constituted experts on the class struggle. Just as the positively meant phrase “Stolpe will fix it” went around in opposition circles, the Oktoberklub was the singing propaganda weapon of choice for the SED and FDJ from 1967. The club also made a comment on January 17 regarding Luxemburg’s quotation, stating that its members were all present as always in an endless row, the worker, the bourgeois lady, the old man with crutches, and the boys in black “with silver buckles.” The comment continued: When suddenly at the edge of the train a murmur / and those who were just passing by also saw it with amazement: / They were instructed with a quotation / that the dissident desires freedom! Where was there ever a more wrong place, / than this one, for this Luxemburg word / As if not in these January days / dissidents had killed Karl and Rosa! Those who think in a new way must think differently, / but those who wear the word like a cloak, / to drive the old division underneath, / stand in the way of the new one, / will not stay.58

The Oktoberklub (probably) no longer exists. A final example: On February 13, 1988, the anniversary of the destruction of Dresden in 1945, people who wished to leave the country mingled with official demonstrators and displayed banners with the inscription “Do not destroy human rights as Dresden once did.” In response to this, the communist smear

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campaign raged: “dissenters” were again blamed for the murder of Karl and Rosa, and “glasnost broadcasts” were said to drag “our” friendly relationship with the Soviet Union into the dirt, and enemies of socialism again “insulted . . . the living as well as the dead.” “This call was therefore directed against our state, whose order and civic morals make the protection of peace and socialism—these main guarantors of peace—a right and a general duty of everyone.”59 The man who wrote this, Hans Eggert, was the editor in chief of the Berliner Zeitung from 1989 to 1996, and from 2002 to 2007 he held the same position at the Sächsische Zeitung, of all places, for which he has worked as a “correspondent” ever since. Junge Welt employee Jens Walther even surpassed his comrade. Obviously referring to the IFM, he remarked that “those who do not want to do anything for peace and the first human right, the right to life, did not fit in here. His malevolence was hard to beat: “And also the commemoration of the bombing60 and the dead was anything but holy to this handful of idlers and convicts, at the expense of other living people and criminal GDR traitors, mouthpieces of yesterdays and worshipers of capital, the bit-part actors of FRG television.” And further: “But injustice does not become justice61 when it camouflages itself, theatrically flocking together in front of Western cameras and letting tears roll on command. Whoever insults the victims and their heirs finds the contempt of all here who want these stones to remain the last ones to remind us.” In this whole affair, it became apparent how strongly the abovementioned antifascist doctrine still served to legitimate the system until its end. Jens Walther, by the way, remained true to himself: he still works today for Junge Welt, the only radical left-wing daily newspaper in Germany. It is difficult to take stock of these events because the country was then no longer at peace, the social crisis was coming to a head, and, from today’s perspective, the road to the autumn of 1989 was only a short one. At that time, it was hardly conceivable to anyone that things could develop in this way. The state’s approach reminded older opposition members like Gerd Poppe, as he repeatedly emphasized in 1987–88, of the 1950s, when repression became more openly apparent and people constantly sought secret service connections. SED leaders seem to have regarded the events internally as a success. It is difficult to analyze these matters exactly because documents are missing from the SED archives. Thus, although one can find out that Honecker personally provided information about the events and the “measures taken” at the SED Politburo meeting on February 2, the appendix to the minutes has disappeared.62 As the MfS had planned in December 1987, it prepared internal party information for the SED, informing all party functionaries of the background to the events so that they, in turn, could hold the line in discussions. The names of those arrested on January 25 and Stephan Krawczyk were mentioned by name. Their aims, the information reported, were to eliminate the SED’s leading role. Moreover, it had been proven that they were working with circles controlled

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by the secret service, and that Fuchs and Jahn were among these “liaisons” who intended to organize “internal opposition in the GDR.” Grenzfall and Umweltblätter were antistate writings, and they were abusing the churches for political purposes, which almost all Christians rejected. In addition, the information stated, the named persons had helped prepare the “provocations” on January 17. The GDR, however, would not deviate from its path; therefore, these persons would now have to “answer to the court.”63 This informational paper shows that it was not clear from the outset that the decision to take the detainees out of the country had been made. Both imprisonment and release to the GDR were alternatives. The functionaries espoused this highly valued party information. Only two or three days later, however, it was reported that those who had been arrested had left for West Germany or England, some of them for a limited period only. The SED had scored against itself because now many SED comrades showed themselves to be deeply insecure. For days people discussed it. Staunch communists asked why, if the defendants were “traitors to their country,” they would get off scot-free. Others asked why enemies of the state were rewarded with trips to the West. Thus, the SED had once again succeeded in unsettling even those who were actually loyal to it, making them despair of its policies. And most others, even if they wanted nothing to do with the opposition or rejected it for very different reasons—because they were too far left, too far right, too church oriented, or too Western oriented—saw their criticism of the system strengthened. So it was of no use that the daily newspapers, as usual, contained many statements from “the people” who applauded every SED move. In the SED apparatus, there were three decisive reasons for not imposing prison sentences on the arrested opposition members. First, SED leaders had been caught off guard by the ascending social movement expressing solidarity with those arrested after January 25 and feared that they would no longer be able to control it. Second, they believed that “a conviction would not have a small lasting deterrent effect on internal enemies” but would put the detainees in a “martyr role,” which “would have provided a constant source of inspiration to opposing forces of all shades. Even certain leading forces in the church and officials would have been strengthened in their oppositional attitude towards the state.”64 Third, officials had also been surprised by the international protests from the Western European peace movement as well as from parties and social organizations with whom the SED had needed and wished to cooperate “also in the future in the interest of continuing our foreign policy line.” However, Erich Mielke emphasized to the MfS management team that this could be only the beginning. The opposition members who remained in the country would have to be monitored even more intensively, and one would have to prove that they had acted in a way that was criminally relevant. All service units were required to monitor Bohley, Fischer, Klier, Krawczyk, Hirsch, Wollenberger, and the Templins nonstop in the West. The task of proving their connections to secret services still remained.

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“But it is also a matter of recognizing the situation . . . in which they find themselves . . . , what effects this may have on the children.” Mielke continued: “This will also create the necessary basis for denying GDR citizenship to enemies who left the country with a passport. However, this reference is only intended for this circle, which should be aware that these persons have no further business in the GDR in the future either.”65 Until the end of 1987, most MfS papers mentioned smashing, liquidating, and preventing, but now, in relation to the opposition, the terms controlling, restricting, limiting, and narrowing were used. Some MfS officers involved in the actions in 1987–88 seemed disillusioned with what they had done. Although the MfS thought that the opposition was weakened, it did not delude itself into believing that it had destroyed it. There were still many “leaders” in the GDR, and the opposition base was constantly expanding and spreading throughout the country. Even though the MfS planned to continue its methods of decomposition, it could no longer hope to destroy the opposition but could only achieve this by political means and cautious domestic political changes. These were astonishing admissions. The relationship between the SED state and the Protestant churches had also been affected by these events. To be sure, a meeting between Honecker and Bishop Leich was planned for March 3, 1988, at which the 1978 standstill agreement was to be renewed.66 And of the most important members in the BerlinBrandenburg church leadership, only Bishop Forck had clearly shown solidarity with the opposition, and in the other regional churches, too, the quantitative situation in the governing bodies was no different. But on February 18, 1988, Honecker sent a letter to all SED regional and district leaderships pointing out “counterrevolutionary actions” in “some regions and districts” taking place “under the roof of the church.” Discussions had to be held with the churches at all levels in order to prevent “antistate action” in the shelter of the church in the future.67 As a guideline for the discussion, he enclosed a speech that Politburo member Werner Jarowinsky, who was responsible for church issues, delivered one day later during a discussion with Bishop Leich in the State Council building. The communist told off the Christian, exclaiming that “there can be no lawless zone” in the church. The Ecumenical Assembly showed that the events of January 17 had not been a “single lapse.” The state could not overlook the fact that “certain forces” rejected the concept of the “church in socialism” and wished “to revive the long outdated and failed concept of the church as political opposition to socialism, of the church as a ‘Trojan horse.’” In churches “pure political agitation events” were increasingly taking place. Finally, Jarowinsky asked Leich, how much longer was the state supposed to tolerate this? There had to be an end to “turning churches into places of opposition to the state.” The situation was getting too strained. The SED Politburo saw “signs of the dissolution of church structures, church order” and, at the same time, the formation of “real

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‘substructures.’” In the Politburo’s view, church services were being transformed into “contact offices,” “solidarity offices,” offices of the West, or “coordination centers,” and it was “high time to immediately insure and guarantee that everywhere, the church will become the church again.”68 This meeting—at which Martin Ziegler, a member of the High Council of Churches, and Klaus Gysi, the state secretary for church affairs, were also present—lasted one hour. A memorandum about it indicates how shocked Leich must have been listening to Jarowinsky’s speech. He had been invited for a conversation, he replied, “but now we see ourselves as recipients of a declaration. It’s hard for us to accept this.” The churches “continued to play a proxy role that they did not want.” Leich still asked whether he would receive the declaration in writing. Jarowinsky responded that there would be no statement about this conversation, nor would the Federation of Protestant Churches receive the statement in writing, and only reinforced his sharp criticism with further examples.69 On April 18, 1988, this conversation unofficially became known, and it was not until the summer that this memorandum of February 19, 1988, which also contained Jarowinsky’s speech, circulated as a transcript. Klaus Gysi is said to have secretly given it to Martin Ziegler to copy. Regina Templin, who “became highly dramatically aware from outside” of how the GDR was acting as a “state re-educational institution,” was clear-sighted in her opinion that “the internal church controversies about the mission of the church were coming to a head.”70 She was not wrong. Theologians and pastors with close ties to the SED, such as Bruno Schottstädt, Hanfried Müller, Gerhard Bassarak, Bruno Müller, Christian Stappenbeck, Dieter Kraft, Rosemarie Müller-Streisand, Cyrill Pech, and forty-four others wrote an open letter to the Berlin-Brandenburg bishop on February 7, 1988, and called on “Brother Forck” to repent. They attacked him personally, but also Vera Wollenberger, the UB, and even Günter Krusche. The declaration culminated in the sentence that turned social realities upside down: “The danger that a new Cold War could start from the very ground of the Berlin-Brandenburg Church is of the utmost concern to us.”71 These theologians who were loyal to the system, attached to the Weißensee Working Group, the Christian Peace Conference, and the “Christian Circles” of the National Front, who were also often active as IMs of the MfS, were hardly taken seriously by anyone outside the SED, MfS, and CDU (GDR). Still, their public effect was nevertheless ambivalent because people and circles who were far from the church and the opposition mostly did not know the background to such statements and perceived them as part of internal church debates. This group around Hanfried Müller deliberately handled the business of the SED and the MfS, as could be seen from their newsletter, in which they not only constantly attacked the IFM, the UB, Grenzfall, and the church leadership but also made unmistakable declarations of belief in the GDR and communism—even in the 1990s. As early as January 1987, Gerd Poppe filed a defamation complaint against Müller with the

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attorney general, which was rejected on the basis of Article 27 of the GDR constitution (“freedom of opinion”).72 But in the churches, as well, the debates about the grassroots groups began to have a more polarizing effect than before, blending several levels in the process. One reason was because many churches, after the January events, formed points of contact for those who wished to leave the country, often in the hope that this would speed up their departure. Word got around that the Gethsemanekirche (or another church of one’s choosing) was the largest church in the world—you enter it in East Berlin and leave it in Gießen. Second, quite a few church members were disturbed by groups in which non-Christians were involved or even dominated. Third, many feared for the state-church relationship. The reasons for comments were manifold in each case. They ranged from theological and ecclesiastical to political. The debate was complicated and confusing, but the outcome was quite clear: only a minority of church leaders, parish priests, and church employees stood up actively and publicly for the opposition groups. Examples of those who supported the opposition include Vicar Thomas Krüger, now president of the Federal Agency for Civic Education. Referring to the conquest and destruction of Jericho (Joshua 6:1–5), he preached on January 27, 1988, that solidarity with the prisoners must not be allowed to fall away. They, “for whom we stand in solidarity, are our victims. We want to bring them back into our midst. We do not want them to fall by the wayside; we do not abandon them. They belong to us.”73 Pastor Ruth Misselwitz from the parish of Alt-Pankow and the Pankow Peace Circle (founded in 1981), in which Vera Wollenberger and Freya Klier were also involved, said in a sermon that most of “us” had experienced a fate similar to that of the prisoners.74 On the other hand, conservative church people like Superintendent Ulrich Woronowicz (Bad Wilsnack) wanted to let the church be the church again, thus playing into the hands of the state they rejected, just like General Superintendent Günter Krusche, who once again suggested a “pause for thought.”75 On May 11, 1988, still at the University of Münster, Krusche emphasized that the churches must not allow themselves to be pushed into confrontation with the state by groups critical of the system.76 There were only a few other prominent voices. Bishop Forck was one of them. Above all, parish priests and individual church employees ultimately insured that many churches in the country remained open to all. Once again, the political debates went unheard by theologians and church leaders at many a base, fortunately, or, one could even say, thank God. The opposition in East Berlin had to deal with the aftermath of the events for a long time. The remaining IFM members around Gerd and Ulrike Poppe, Reinhard Weißhuhn, Peter Grimm, and Martin Böttger kept in close telephone contact with those now living in the West. At the beginning of August 1988, Bärbel Bohley and Werner Fischer returned to the GDR. At the Prague airport, they were received by lawyer Gregor Gysi and Consistorial President

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Manfred Stolpe and then traveled by car back to the GDR. Since the two had been in England for a limited period of time, the SED had no choice but to let them reenter the country as agreed, but contrary to the plans mentioned above. Honecker still hoped to be able to make an official state visit to London and therefore had to let the two go if he did not want to provoke an international scandal. This is what Krenz had advised him to do.77 Although there had been signs of resignation and “stagnation” in the East Berlin opposition, new groups were forming throughout the GDR. In 1987, necessary processes of differentiation also began in Leipzig, which further professionalized and politicized the groups in 1988, so that from 1988 on, Leipzig became the second opposition center with clear political contours alongside East Berlin. Some of the groups had been formed previously but only gained a political profile from 1988 onward. These included, among others, Democratic Initiative—Initiative for the Democratic Renewal of Society (founded at the beginning of 1989), the New Thinking group (1988), the Initiative Group Life (1987), the Working Group on Human Rights associated with Christoph Wonneberger (since 1987), and the Working Group on Justice associated with Thomas Rudolph (since 1987–88). The Working Group on the Human Rights Situation in the GDR then emerged from these last two groups at the end of 1988, becoming, in turn, part of the IFM in the spring of 1989. The regional and supra-regional communication structures for these groups, which had been born of necessity, were now consolidated and reorganized. In several cities, contact telephone and coordination groups continued to exist, but sometimes—as in East Berlin and Leipzig—without a fixed telephone for months. In January 1989, after months of negotiations between the group consisting of Ulrike Poppe (Konkret für den Frieden, IFM), Marianne Birthler (AKSK, Stadtjugendpfarramt), Reinhard Weißhuhn (IFM), Christoph Singelnstein (Friedenskreis Golgathagemeinde), and Dankwart Kirchner (Friedenskreis Gethsemanegemeinde) and the Berlin-Brandenburg church leadership generated no result, the Gethsemane parish finally made a room and telephone available.78 In Leipzig too, from February 1988, opposition members and church employees had been negotiating with the church leadership about a room with a telephone. Pastor Turek of the Markus parish finally made both available without his superiors’ support on September 15, 1989. In the end, what was crucial was the insight that previous group structures and communication networks were not sufficient if one wanted to move from criticizing politics and engaging in demonstrations to shaping politics. A few weeks after her return, Bärbel Bohley expressed the view that the IFM should form an umbrella for all groups and that in future they must coordinate as much as possible.79 Gerd Poppe said several times that if the political balance of power in the GDR was ever to be changed, an organization based on the model of Solidarność was needed to mobilize the population. Networks such as the Arche (the Ark) or

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the AKSK proved to be too narrow; the individual groups, in turn, only had personalized contacts, which rendered them fragile. Frieden konkret was unsuitable for a clear political structure and orientation due to its heterogeneous composition after 1988, as was already evident at the annual meeting in Cottbus at the end of February 1988. In addition, there was a great deal of staff discontinuity at the annual meetings, which ran counter to developing a targeted and clear political profile. Hans-Jochen Tschiche presented a “consensus paper” in Cottbus80 that placed too many demands on the churches because it implied that they should open up to political groups; the paper also overburdened many opposition members because it suggested a supra-regional form of organization. The paper failed to gain a majority. Tschiche did not allow this to waylay his plans, and he continued to think about concepts that provided for a binding supraregional organizational structure. In the course of 1988, he developed the idea of an Association for the Renewal of Society, but this did not come about because new options arose in 1989. Opposition members like Tschiche, especially, who were not rooted in the Berlin groups, seemed to recognize the narrowness and limitations of the previous structures and possibilities for action after the events. They knew that the groups had to get out of the churches and into society. Another example of a longtime opposition activist who worked to enhance the structure of the opposition was Martin Gutzeit, who was an assistant to Richard Schröder at the Sprachenkonvikt in 1988. He noted on February 3 of that year: We must not be deterred by arrests and convictions. . . . Solidarity must not just be a question of spontaneity and chance. . . . We must not only react but must create conditions under which we can remain active, i.e., we must anticipate the frictions and clarify the possible consequences of our actions in advance. By what means can the contradictions of this state and this society be made manifest? . . . There is therefore also a need for politically viable political catalogues of demands for structural change in this state. Which institutions should be changed first? . . . These analyses must be made public. To do this, we need to establish a theoretical circular, not journalistically loose, but with theoretical claims regarding our society and state. If we do not want to be treated like children, we must behave spiritually as adults. The base must not only be the left-alternative scene. The area of this ghetto has to be overcome and (further) potentials have to be mobilized, such as from the fields of economy, handicraft, scholarship. . . . Why shouldn’t certain people be allowed to speak for certain groups under certain conditions? . . . After the latest events, the findings regarding the Stasi emigration must also be fixed, its logistics clarified and defensive measures thought through.81

Together with his friend Markus Meckel, Gutzeit initially developed the association project “Citizen Participation,” which set itself the goal of changing all social and state structures in such a way that parliamentary democratic structures, separation of powers, a multiparty system, etc., would become possible.82 However, they both realized that their goals could not be achieved with an association

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alone. In 1989, they chose another option, as did Rainer Eppelmann, who in 1988 began to think and talk about founding a new SPD in the GDR. The opposition had moved together in solidarity in the face of the threat. This established or strengthened supra-regional connections. At the same time, however, the East Berlin groups were boiling over because the opposition members held highly heterogeneous political views. Non-Berliners often did not understand this and attributed it solely to the fact that many people who wanted to stand in the foreground in an egotistical manner were particularly active there. After the events of February, many who were far from the IFM anyway saw the departure of the detainees as premature, cowardly, voluntary, or deliberate. The dispute escalated when Reinhard Schult published a samizdat article in April 1988 titled “Weighed and Found to Be Too Light.” Schult, who had spent eight months in prison in 1979–80 and was one of the most prominent opposition figures, was hard on his friends, and not necessarily fair. The article was full of insults, insinuations, and unobjective constructions. In essence, he was concerned with expressing the view that the opposition could never associate politically with people who wished to leave the country, and he put those who had been arrested and sent to the West in this category. He accused them not of having been deported by the “the almighty power of the state, but by people who are supposed to be their own.” He felt that they should have waited for their trial, served a few months, and shown responsibility for “the fellow combatants” outside, and he called them freeloaders: “The detainees went to jail as political persons; they left it as private persons.” Their behavior was tantamount to “a political and moral declaration of bankruptcy.” Finally, he accused them of not having criticized the conditions in the Federal Republic of Germany and not having shown solidarity with the RAF prisoners because, in his view, “bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism cannot be our hope, our future, our goal.”83 This sharp attack initially uncovered a deep wound, but also a political rift that could hardly be bridged. Schult received a lot of applause for this attack, also from church people. But the front of rejection was no less strong. Several rumored that he “objectively” ran the Stasi business, although nobody suspected him of MfS activities. Martin Böttger answered his attack publicly and proved that Schult was wrong on several points.84 Although he did not wish to associate politically with people who wanted to leave the country, he defended the individuals’ human right to leave and expressed solidarity with people who wished to leave if they were persecuted. Stephan Krawczyk and Vera Wollenberger expressed their deep indignation in letters and now publicly accused Schult of unintentionally playing into the Stasi’s hands. They were stunned by his accusation that the detainees had been forced to leave by “people who are supposed to be their own.”85 The most important article in support of Schult came from Schult’s group, from Wolfgang Wolf, who was an important IM for the MfS.86 Only after 1989 did it become clear how the detainees had been deceived.87

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This debate contributed considerably to the consolidation of the boundaries between groups and individuals. This process, too, would continue through 1989 when it would even have political effects with positive consequences.

Secret Agents in the Opposition There were numerous unofficial MfS employees active in the opposition scene. In addition, a few members of the opposition were temporarily active for the MfS. The best-known example of this is Wolfgang Templin, who worked as an IM from 1971 to 1975 and then ended his collaboration with the MfS when his cover was blown, after which he worked in oppositional circles. He resigned from the SED in 1983. It was no coincidence that code word for the MfS campaign against him was “traitor.”88 IMs worked in almost every opposition group. The MfS was well informed about internal procedures and debates in the opposition. The spies were not unsuccessful: they sowed discord, delayed debates and actions, and also prevented some things from ever happening. However, they were not able to exert any lasting influence on the opposition’s political ideas or intentions. Many opposition members had strong personalities and needed group connections, but they were familiar with all the experiences of social isolation and were, therefore, usually stubborn enough to insist on positions even when majorities in the groups wanted something else. In addition, the IMs usually had to fit in with the group dynamics. Manfred Rinke, whom most people only knew as “Box” because of his physical size, had been working as an IM for over twenty years, since he was eighteen years old.89 He was recruited by the MfS in 1968–69, became a full-time IM at the beginning of 1985, and ended his collaboration on December 31, 1988. An “operative individualization,” as the MfS noted, took place for the purpose of securing his social safety. He received a disability pension and a further allowance from the secret police. His contact person was Wolfram Niederlag, of all people. “Raffelt,” as Rinke’s alias was known, was a celebrity throughout the GDR. His radius of action was large: Dresden, Jena, and East Berlin were the most important places where he worked for the MfS. He practically showed up everywhere. He was regarded by many, especially youths and dropouts, as a constant. Since 1987, his main task was to enlighten such opposition figures as Roland Jahn, Ralf Hirsch, Wolfgang Templin, Stephan Krawczyk, Frank-Herbert Mißlitz, and Uwe Kulisch. During the MfS operations “Falle” and “Störenfried,” he was in charge of the Dresden contact telephone, so the MfS did not even have to listen to this line. His last surviving IM report with information from Dresden, Jena, and Erfurt dates from December 15, 1988.90 But he also passed on information and material afterward.91 The MfS remunerated him generously, providing him annually with well over 10,000 marks plus bonuses.

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There were several, but not many, such “top IMs.” Manfred Böhme, who went by Ibrahim as his first name, was among them. His exceedingly numerous reports bear witness to a lonely, sick man working slavishly to bring down the enemy, his supposed friends. Hardly anyone reported as much and as extensively as he did. Nothing seemed superfluous or unworthy of mention to him. And “Maximilian,” his code name, always reported what Manfred Böhme said and did. As with many other IMs, he appeared in his own reports to ensure that his cover was safe within the MfS because nobody there but the commanding officers were allowed to know who was actually hiding behind an IM alias. Böhme never admitted to being an IM. Ulrike Poppe, one of the people he spied on intensively, asked him at his deathbed to at least admit the mere fact that he had been an IM so that she could forgive him. But even in the face of death he could not bring himself to do so.92 Opposition members were aware that they were being shadowed, that their telephones were tapped, their mail was read, and their conversations were overheard.93 Gerd and Ulrike Poppe, for example, found a tiny, highly sensitive condenser microphone on April 8, 1981, with which their apartment was supposed to be bugged. On December 19, 1988, Rainer Eppelmann even tracked down an MfS bugging system in his church office, which not only inconvenienced the MfS but was also very displeasing to his employer and resulted in a “charge against an unknown person.”94 There were already moments of suspicion against many persons who were exposed as IMs of the MfS after 1989. The Wolfspelz group in Dresden suspected Rinke; Martin Gutzeit and Markus Meckel had their eyes on Böhme; and after the events of early 1988, Schnur was also suspected. In the “MfS debate,” however, nobody had any hard evidence. In the 1970s and early 1980s, group-destroying discussions about possible Stasi agents were deliberately stirred up. Almost nobody knew the term IM. When an East Berlin school punk band called itself IM in 1984, the MfS got very nervous. During interrogations of the band, it turned out that “IM” was their own abbreviation for “International Müllstation” (International Garbage Station). In the second half of the 1980s, the groups had not pushed aside the MfS topic, but as they were purposely opening up and moving away from conspiratorial structures, it became less important. Only the people involved knew about certain processes. Anyone who asking about them aroused suspicion. It was clear to most of the opposition members that they could be imprisoned at any time—this was openly discussed. Many of them had been imprisoned, and almost all of them were familiar with detentions and arrests. They deliberately decided not to play the MfS game and to look for the traitors in their own ranks. After the events of early 1988, however, there was a series of debates about supposed IMs that almost always had the right people in their sights. On March

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15, 1988, for example, the ARD political magazine Panorama broadcast an interview with Rainer Wolf. He had left for the Federal Republic of Germany at the end of 1985 and now confessed that he had worked for the MfS as the IM “Schreiber.” His father, Wolfgang Wolf, came under pressure and told Reinhard Schult that his son claimed that he was “still with” the MfS. There was no evidence of this, but the group gathered evidence to support this. Only in 1990 did it emerge that Wolfgang Wolf had been working for the MfS as IM “Max” and under several aliases since 1962. Also Mario Wetzky (“Martin”), Reiner Dietrich (“Cindy”), Sascha Anderson (“David Menzer,” “Fritz Müller,” “Peters”), Lutz Nagorski (“Christian”), Falk Zimmermann (“Reinhard Schuhmann”) Lothar Pawliczak (“Wolf”), Mario Hamel (“Max”), Frank Hartz (“Dietmar Lorenz”), and Sinico Schönfeld (“Rudolf Ritter”) were suspected of being involved with the MfS in 1988–89. A few, such as Wetzky and Schönfeld, were exposed before the autumn of 1989. One of the exposed was Monika Haeger (“Karin Lenz”). The MfS prepared her for an opposition career and brought her into the country. Like Böhme, she reported extensively and rarely left anything out, and the MfS paid her. She was active, above all, in the IFM and the Women for Peace. In early 1989, Bärbel Bohley, Irena Kukutz, and Katja Havemann accused her of working for the MfS. A photo had turned up in which Haeger had put names to faces. This was very suspicious because the people depicted had been known to her for many years. When the IFM met on February 15, 1989, in Ulrike and Gerd Poppe’s apartment, Monika Haeger herself broached the subject of the suspicions against her. The MfS had prepared her for this, and she defended herself for forty-five minutes. Exactly half of the participants present were unofficial employees of the MfS. The gulf in the discussion did not run between IMs and non-IMs. Individual IFM members who did not work for the MfS did not want to get involved with vague evidence and voted for a cautious approach in order not to play the MfS game. The opposition was aware, as the documents show, that the debate had a destructive effect intended by the secret police. According to the reports, Gerd Poppe pointed out that this debate could only be avoided on several occasions by working with the greatest possible transparency, while certain organizational aspects should only ever be known to those responsible for them.95 In early April 1989, shortly before she confessed to Gerd Poppe and Bärbel Bohley that she was an IM, Monika Haeger wrote a report to her commanding officer titled “Attempt at an Analysis.” Against the background of her “near exposure” as a “lone fighter in the political underground movement” on “the front line,” she made a number of suggestions as to how IM activities should be made more efficient. The main problem, she averred, was that she could “smell” other lone fighters on the basis of their behavior, of their arguments, of their prevention and delaying tactics. The problem was not only that they would recognize

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each other but also that the enemies would be able to recognize the silent fighters.96 On October 16, 1990, the ARD television show Kontraste broadcast a long segment about Haeger. She gave an interview to Roland Jahn, a journalist and her former friend, which lasted longer than anticipated, partly because she kept bursting into tears.97 She died lonely in Prenzlauer Berg in 2006. The subject of the MfS has engendered intense and extensive discussions and research since 1990.98 Less attention has been paid to the consequences of SED propaganda about the opposition members’ alleged ties to Western secret services. Rainer Eppelmann repeatedly had to put up with being publicly treated like a CIA agent until the 1990s because he also spoke with employees of the US Embassy in East Berlin. Not only are these accusations marked by ignorance of the political circumstances and Eppelmann’s actions, they are also abstruse because, even if they were true, they miss the core of the problem. After all, what would have been so reprehensible about opposition activists fighting communism with the help of Western secret services? But they simply did not do this. They rejected this path, unlike some resistance fighters in the 1950s and 1960s. The accusations themselves are based on a worldview that is not prepared to acknowledge communism’s inhumane practice and theory. The SED’s barrage against Roland Jahn even led to individual employees of the UB and the KvU considering it conceivable that he worked for a secret service. Such information was spread by IMs and by friends who left West Berlin. Christian Halbrock recalls that many people were more influenced by the “ideological re-importation of SED theses from the West than reports from their own underground press.”99 In the autumn of 1988, Jahn’s honorary membership in the UB, which had been awarded in December 1987, was revoked. Such conspiracy theories were not limited to opposition members in the east. More than a few West German politicians of all parties also saw “troublemakers” in the opposition. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash found an SED document that, even if one removes its SED coloring, proves this because it depicts the negotiating style of West German parties before and after 1989. Bärbel Bohley reported very similarly about her experiences in the Federal Republic.100 On July 7, 1988, SPD politician Karsten D. Voigt received two SED officials. He told them that he had information that Templin and Bohley wanted to test whether they could travel back to the GDR. In Voigt’s personal opinion, this SED note states, “the happiest solution would be to let them enter the country first and to seize and deport them during or because of corresponding activities. They themselves and the services behind them are counting on it and hope that the security organs of the GDR will already prevent their entry. This is intended to be played off against the security policy cooperation between the SED and SPD. For this reason alone, K.D. Voigt informs comrades Uschner and Wagner about it.” Ash commented: “Unsurprisingly, the interpretation of this unsigned note is hotly disputed by those involved.”101

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Notes 1. The group Wolfspelz is mentioned several times in a rather amusing fashion in Richter, 89/90, e.g., 85. 2. Roland Jahn’s emigration took place in the context of a rather large and hectic wave of expatriation among Thuringian applicants seeking permanent emigration. Jahn had submitted an emigration application in prison and did not officially retract it after his release but rather reinforced it (probably unintentionally): Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Aktion Gegenschlag,” Gerbergasse 18 1/2013, Heft 66, pp. 17–23; Kowalczuk und Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz! 558–59, 835. By contrast, see the authorized presentations: Roland Jahn (Interview), in Wir wollten nur anders leben. Erinnerungen politischer Gefangener im Zuchthaus Cottbus, ed. Heiner Sylvester (Cottbus, 2013), 298–315; Gerald Praschl, Roland Jahn. Ein Rebell als Behördenchef (Berlin, 2011); Roland Jahn and Dagmar Hovestädt, Wir Angepassten. Überleben in der DDR (Munich, 2014). 3. This included four IMs from the MfS in order to safeguard the conspiracy. 4. Offene Eingabe an die SED vom 2. 4. 1986, in Kowalczuk, ed., Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 189–200. 5. epd Dokumentation 33a/1986. 6. Stephan Bickhardt, ed., In der Wahrheit leben. Texte von und über Ludwig Mehlhorn (Leipzig, 2012). 7. The letter is printed in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 405–12. 8. Forck replied on September 15, 1986 (letter in the archive of Ludwig Mehlhorn). 9. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Es gab viele Mauern in der DDR,” DA 45, no. 1 (2012): 117–25. 10. In Stephan Bickhardt, ed., Aufbrüche. Belege. Festschrift für Edelbert Richter, radix-blätter, (Berlin, 1987) (Samizdat); reprinted in part in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 412–33. 11. Rainer Eckert, “Das Programm einer demokratischen Revolution. Debatten der DDROpposition in den ‘radix-blättern’ 1987–1989,” DA 32, no. 5 (1999): 779. 12. For a detailed account, see Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz! 13. [MfS, HA XX], Aktuelle Tendenzen zum subversiven Vorgehen des Gegners und feindlichnegativer Kräfte im Innern gegen die verfassungsmäßigen Grundlagen der sozialistischen Staatsund Gesellschaftsordnung, [Februar/März 1987]. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 7037, Bl. 32. 14. Gerd Poppe, Dialog oder Abgrenzung? (1987), reprinted in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 163–69. 15. Wolfgang Rüddenklau, Störenfried. DDR-Opposition 1986–1989. Mit Texten aus den “Umweltblättern” (Berlin, 1992), 112–14; as well as his text from Umweltblättern of November 1, 1987, 149–51. 16. Thomas Klein, “Frieden und Gerechtigkeit.” Die Politisierung der Unabhängigen Friedensbewegung in Ost-Berlin während der 80er Jahre (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2007), 336–38. 17. “Wir tun einfach so, als gäbe es Pressefreiheit.” Interview with Roland Jahn by Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk on March 8, 2001, in Berlin, in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 144. 18. Quoted from the transcript provided on the same day in JW, February 2, 1988. 19. “MfS, Minister, Dienstanweisung Nr. 2/85 zur vorbeugenden Verhinderung, Aufdeckung und Bekämpfung politischer Untergrundtätigkeit, 20. 2. 1985,” in Grundsatzdokumente des MfS, ed. Roger Engelmann and Frank Joestel (Berlin, 2004), 436. 20. MfS, Minister, Zentrale Planvorgabe für 1986 und den Zeitraum bis 1990. BA, MfS, BdL 6019, pp. 111–12. 21. MfS, HA XX, Arbeitsplan der HA XX für das Jahr 1987, 2. 2. 1987. BA, MfS, HA XX 4296, p. 5. 22. MfS, HA XX, Vorschläge zur weiteren politischen, ideologischen und operativen Bekämpfung politischer Untergrundtätigkeit, 20. 8. 1987. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 7037, Bl. 17, 21–22, 24, 25, 25.

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23. MfS, Minister, Zentrale Planvorgabe für 1988, 23. 10. 1987. BA, MfS, BdL 8699, p. 61. 24. Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz! 25. Printed in Dokumenta Zion. Sonderausgabe der “Mit-Welt-Blätter” (Umweltblätter) (Berlin, 1987) (Samizdat). 26. MfS, HA XX/9, Tonbandbericht Quelle IMB “Peters” vom 8. 12. 1987. BA, MfS, HA XX/ AKG 2143, Bl. 55–59. 27. Pressemitteilung vom 4. Dezember 1987. BA, MfS, ZAIG 5592, Bl. 5–6. 28. Rosa Luxemburg, “Zur russischen Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke (Berlin, 1974), 4:359n3. 29. BA, MfS, HA IX 18444, Bl. 125. 30. Printed in Günter Jeschonnek, “Ausreise—das Dilemma des ersten deutschen Arbeiter-undBauern-Staates?” in “Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit . . .” Die Andersdenkenden in der DDR, ed. Ferdinand Kroh (Frankfurt/M., Berlin 1988), 266–70. 31. Vorstellung der IFM zum Tag der Menschenrechte am 10. Dezember 1987 in der Gethsemanekirche Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, reprinted in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 162, 163. 32. “Grenzfall 11–12/87,” reprinted in Hirsch and Kopelew, Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte. Grenzfall, 143–44; Werner Fischer, “Aktion gegen ‘Frieden und Menschenrechte,’” Umweltblätter 19 (1987), reprinted in Rüddenklau, Störenfried, 160–61. 33. MfS, [HA XX], Konzeption zur forcierten Bekämpfung politischer Untergrundtätigkeit, n.d. [mid-December 1987]. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 7037, Bl. 1–10. 34. This expert opinion is reprinted in DA 26, no. 5 (1993): 624–32. 35. MfS, [HA XX], Konzeption zur forcierten Bekämpfung politischer Untergrundtätigkeit, n.d. [mid-December 1987]. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 7037, Bl. 6, 7. 36. For more information on this, see Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz! 37. Gerhard Rein, “Über Karl und Rosa, aber auch über Vera und Stephan,” KiS 14, no. 1 (1988): 10. 38. FR, 26. 1. 1988, reprinted in epd Dokumentation 9/1988, 53. 39. BV Berlin, Abt. XX, Auskunftsbericht Freya Klier, 24. 1. 1988. BA, MfS, Ast. Berlin, AOP 3341/88, Bd. 1, Bl.165. 40. “Offener Brief,” taz, 25. 1. 1988 41. German Press Agency announcement from January 27, 1988. 42. “Ja, es ist Krieg,” taz, 26. 1. 1988. 43. All of the events are documented very well in Peter Grimm, Reinhard Weißhuhn, and Gerd Poppe, Fußnote 3 (Berlin, July 1988) (samizdat). 44. BA, MfS, HA IX 10822, Bl. 95. 45. Ibid., Bl. 116r. 46. HA XX/2, Bericht zum Treff mit IM “Martin” vom 4. 2. 1988, 5. 2. 1988. BA, MfS, AOP 1010/91, Bd. 25, Bl. 430. 47. “‘Lasst niemanden allein.’ Kardinal Meisner an die Priester und Diakone (1. 2. 1988),” in epd Dokumentation 9/1988, 64. 48. “Leute, mit denen wir im engen Kontakt stehen . . . ,” ND, 24. 1. 1988. Almost all the articles on the subject were reprinted the same day or a day later by most other GDR dailies: “Dem ‘Deutschlandfunk’ missfiel eine U[nsere] Z[eit]-Enthüllung,” JW, 28. 1. 1988; “Journalisten auf der Gehaltsliste der BRD-Geheimdienste,” ND, 3. 2. 1988; “Wer steuert die sogenannte DDROpposition,” ND, 17. 2. 1988 (for these articles, the authorship of MfS workers can be directly proven). 49. For more detailed information on this, see Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz! 50. “ADN-Interview mit Pressechef der Generalstaatsanwaltschaft,” ND, 28. 1. 1988. 51. Hein Kamnitzer, “Die Toten mahnen,” ND, 28. 1. 1988.

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52. “‘Lasst niemanden allein.’ Kardinal Meisner an die Priester und Diakone (1. 2. 1988),” epd Dokumentation 9/1988, 64. 53. Peter Neumann, “Der unaufhaltsame ‘Aufstieg’ ins Abseits. Anmerkungen zum Fall Stefan (sic) Krawczyk,” JW, 3. 2. 1988. 54. Annelies Laschitza, “Rosa Luxemburgs Verständnis und Kampf für Demokratie,” JW, 29. 1. 1988. 55. Annelies Laschitza, “Rosa Luxemburg und die Freiheit der Andersdenkenden,” ND, November 11–12, 1989. 56. Heinz Kamnitzer, “‘. . . immer nur die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden,” ND, February 2, 1988. 57. “Freiheit, das ist bei uns die Freiheit des Mitdenkenden. Interview von Hans-Dieter Schütt und Peter Neumann,” JW, January 29, 1988. 58. “Am Sonntag, dem 17. Januar,” JW, February 16, 1988 (lyrics: Gerd Kern; composition: Michael Letz, premiered at the Eighteenth Festival of the Political Song, mid-February 1988). 59. Hans Eggert, “Ein Recht auf Unrecht gibt es bei uns nicht,” BZ, 20.–21.02.1988. 60. The destruction of Dresden was remembered particularly on account of the “Anglo-American bombers,” that is, on account of the imperialist anger for war and destruction; in this, the Western Allies and the Nazi system were conflated. 61. In this—see the title of the BZ commentary—the “propaganda offensive” that had been agreed upon becomes evident, even in the choice of words. 62. Sitzung des Politbüros am 2. 2. 1988. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30/I IV 2/2/2258, Bl. 4. For a comprehensive account, see Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz! 63. Zur Festnahme von Personen wegen des begründeten Verdachts landesverräterischer Beziehungen. Informationen 1988/2, no. 243, 4 pp. (parteiinternes Agitationsmaterial). 64. BA, MfS, HA IX 10822, Bl. 99 65. Erich Mielke, Referat vom 9. 3. 1988. BA, MfS, ZAIG 8618, Bl. 49, 71. 66. “Gespräch Erich Honecker—Werner Leich am 3. 3. 1988/Krusche zieht Bilanz: Zehn Jahre nach dem 6. 3. 1978,” epd Dokumentation 12/1988. 67. Erich Honecker an die 1. Sekretäre der Bezirks- und Kreisleitungen, 18. 2. 1988. BA, MfS, SdM 2224, Bl. 94. 68. [SED-Politbüro, Werner Jarowinsky], Zu prinzipiellen Fragen der Beziehungen zwischen Staat und Kirche, [19. 2. 1988]. BA, MfS, SdM 2224, Bl. 95, 98r, 100, 101. Also in epd Dokumentation 43/1988, 61–65. 69. “BEK, Vertraulicher Vermerk, 19. 2. 1988,” epd Dokumentation 43/1988: 66, 68. 70. “Demokratisierung der Gesellschaft. Interview von Peter Wensierski mit Regina Templin,” KiS 14, no. 6 (1988): 219, 220. 71. Weißenseer Blätter 1/1988: 2–3. 72. Gerd Poppe, “Artikel 27,” reprinted in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 200–204. 73. Thomas Krüger, “Um die Feste Jerichos. Predigt in der Galiläa-Kirche, Ost-Berlin, 27. 1. 1988,” epd Dokumentation 9/1988: 54–55 (reprint from FR of February 6, 1988). 74. This is according to Martin Böttger, “Gedanken zu einer Rückkehr [November 1988],” reprinted in Kowalczuk, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit, 319. 75. Woronowicz: MfS, BV Schwerin, Berichterstattung, Fernschreiben an MfS, General Mittig, Februar 1988. BA, MfS, HA XX/4 1728, Bl. 73–74; Günter Krusche, “Im Gespräch (Kommentar),” Potsdamer Kirche, February 17, 1988. 76. “Chronik 11. 5. 1988,” KiS 14, no. 3 (1988): 126. 77. For a thorough account, see Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz! 78. RHG, Bestand MBi 08. The groups’ names in German were Demokratische Initiative—Initiative zur demokratischen Erneuerung unserer Gesellschaft, Gruppe Neues Denken, Initiativgruppe Leben, Arbeitsgruppe Menschenrechte, Arbeitskreis Gerechtigkeit, and Arbeitsgruppe zur Situation der Menschenrechte in der DDR.

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79. MfS, HA XX/9, Faktenanalyse zum OV “Bohle,” 29. 12. 1988. BA, MfS, AOP 1055/91, Beifügung Bd. 15, Bl. 111. See also quotations in Katja Havemann and Joachim Widmann, Robert Havemann, oder: Wie die DDR sich erledigte (Munich, 2003), 407. 80. Printed in Hans-Jochen Tschiche, “Nun machen Sie man, Pastorche!” Erinnerungen (Halle, 1999), 116–19. 81. Printed in Markus Meckel and Martin Gutzeit, eds., Opposition in der DDR. Zehn Jahre kirchliche Friedensarbeit—kommentierte Quellentexte (Cologne, 1994), 353–54. 82. Ibid., 355–56. 83. Reinhard Schult, “Gewogen und für zu leicht befunden. Versuch einer Einschätzung der Januarereignisse. Aufruf zur Diskussion,” Friedrichsfelder Extrablatt, April 1986, 3, 4, 6, 7 (Samizdat). 84. Martin Böttger, “Brief,” Friedrichsfelder Feuermelder, May 1988, 9 (Samizdat). 85. Both letters are printed in Friedrichsfelder Feuermelder, June 1988, 1–6 (Samizdat). 86. “Wolfgang Wolf,” Friedrichsfelder Feuermelder, June 1988, 6, 17 (Samizdat). 87. Freya Klier, “Aktion ‘Störenfried,’” in Hans Joachim Schädlich, ed., Aktenkundig (Berlin, 1992), 91–153; Vera Wollenberger, Virus der Heuchler. Innenansichten aus Stasi-Akten (Berlin, 1992); Bärbel Bohley in Havemann and Widmann, Robert Havemann, 410–13. 88. Stasi-Akten “Verräter.” Bürgerrechtler Templin: Dokumente einer Verfolgung. SpiegelSpezial 1/1993; Wolfgang Templin, “Nachts ging das Telefon. Erfahrungen, Einsichten und Erinnerungen eines Abgehörten,” in Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz!, 203–66. 89. Without mentioning his civic name, “Kiste” comes up in the following tightly written novel with autobiographical features: Richter: 89/90, 57, 110, 140–41, 183–84. Nevertheless, it is not explained here who “Kiste” was working for; he simply disappears without explanation (ibid., 211). The explanation does not appear until the appendix (409). 90. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, AIM 254/89, Teil II, Bd. 12, Bl. 265–68. 91. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, AOP 419/90, Bd. 1, Bl. 72–73. 92. Kowalczuk, Stasi konkret, 350; in general, see Christiane Baumann, Manfred “Ibrahim” Böhme. Ein rekonstruierter Lebenslauf (Berlin, 2009). 93. Kowalczuk and Polzin, Fasse Dich kurz! 94. Evangelische Kirche in Berlin-Brandenburg, Propst Furian, Mitteilung vom 3. 1. 1989, in epd Dokumentation 6/1989, 25. 95. BA, MfS, AOP 1010/91, Bd. 28. 96. Irena Kukutz and Katja Havemann, Geschützte Quelle. Gespräche mit Monika H. alias Karin Lenz (Berlin, 1990). 97. Kontraste: Auf den Spuren einer Diktatur, 3 DVDs (Bonn, 2005). 98. Even when my book Stasi konkret was published by Verlag C. H. Beck in 2013, in which I questioned, among other things, some statistics about IMs of the MfS that had been regarded as unalterable (which Der Spiegel immediately reported and, thus, made known) and likewise cast doubt on whether all the categories were actually well suited to be listed as IMs (which the MfS itself did not even do), several highly specialized “Stasi researchers,” “Stasi processors,” and “journalists”—who also had profound tunnel vision in their views of the world— unleashed a storm in a teacup, pelting me with accusations of trivializing the GDR, the Stasi, and the SED state; some even publicly asked me whether I myself had not been an IM of the MfS. This storm reached its grotesque climax when a “Stasi researcher” got the German parliamentary faction “Die Linke” [The Left] to direct a formal parliamentary question to the federal government to find out how it regarded my thesis and to what extent I could be prosecuted with labor law (Bt-Drs. 17/13331 as well as the answer Bt-Drs. 17/13581). What else can one say about this? It also highly disturbed this critic that the book was accepted into the publishing program of the Federal Agency for Civic Education and that, despite the harsh criticism in a few newspapers and journals dedicated to historical reappraisal (and personal slander), the

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book received favorable reviews in most print, radio, and television media (for one example among many such reviews, see Andreas Molitor, “Der Zweifler. Die DDR-Staatssicherheit war nicht so allmächtig und allgegenwärtig, wie sie selbst glauben machte, hat der Historiker IlkoSascha Kowalczuk herausgefunden. Und damit den Zorn der ‘Stasi-Jäger’ auf sich gezogen,” Brand Eins 2013/8). In addition, some scholars were more likely to suggest that I had only said what others had said long before (which I do not deny, nor do I assert that I was the only one to have said everything I did). One scholarly journal saw the book as a trendsetter and used one issue to deepen some of my proposals: “Stasi konkret? Zur gesellschaftlichen Wirksamkeit der Staatssicherheit,” Totalitarismus und Demokratie 11, no. 2 (2014). 99. Christian Halbrock in a conversation with the author on December 10, 2007. 100. Qtd. in Havemann and Widmann, Robert Havemann, 406. 101. Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York, 1994), 338.

Chapter 7

GERMINATION TIME The Ossietzky Affair

S In the second half of the 1980s, the political, social, and cultural crisis swept through the entire GDR. Some withdrew even more, others only wanted to get out, and still others were committed to change. The state reacted more repressively, more opaquely, seemingly more senselessly than in previous years. People loyal to the SED, whether party members or not, willingly followed the zigzag course. The economic decline, the poor supply situation, the “Sputnik ban,” the “Wartburg crisis,” and the “Zion affair” caused more and more people to turn against the system. The political opposition remained small in quantitative terms, but its popularity had grown enormously, not least because of state persecution. Right-wing radicals and skinheads began to appear publicly in greater numbers, and the state’s reactions raised doubts about the SED’s antifascist concept. The hardliners in the party congresses still held the reins of action, the churches were indecisive, intellectuals and artists came forward with topical critical contributions only in exceptional cases. In the autumn of 1988, another incident occurred almost at the same time as the Sputnik ban that, combined with a whole series of these crisis symptoms, got almost all the important groups of actors involved and caused a stir both nationally and internationally. It made even more people, including many loyal to the system, cast doubt on it and despair of its prospects. In this, too, it became apparent that the system was destabilizing and delegitimizing itself in a way that left no social group unaffected. Public agitation could be witnessed alongside indifference, just as the courageous attitudes of some were juxtaposed with the opportunistic silence or even opportunistic participation of so many. On September 11, 1988, secondary students Philipp Lengsfeld (sixteen years old), Benjamin Lindner (eighteen), Shenja-Paul Wiens (seventeen), and Notes from this chapter begin on page 245.

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Alexander Krohn (seventeen) took part in a rally for the victims of fascism on Bebelplatz in East Berlin. They carried two banners they had made: “Against fascist tendencies” and “Neo-Nazis out.” Security forces took down their personal data. The four went to the Carl-von-Ossietzky secondary school in BerlinPankow, a school where traditionally many children of celebrities and intellectuals were taught. One student was Carsten Krenz, the son of Egon Krenz; Wiens’s parents were writers and active in the opposition scene; Lindner’s mother was a doctor, while his father was a dramaturge for television. After the suppression of the “Prague Spring” in 1968, he had resigned from the SED in protest. Krohn’s mother was a teacher, and Lengsfeld’s mother was Vera Wollenberger. In February 1988, Lengsfeld had made a conscious decision to stay in the GDR and take his school-leaving examination. In the Ossietzky School, there was a Speakers’ Corner that had been approved by the principal Rainer Forner—something very unusual. On September 12, Benjamin Lindner and Shenja-Paul Wiens placed a wall newspaper article there in which they reported on the Polish strike movement that had broken out in August and considered “participation in power by Solidarność and other opposition forces” to be “indispensable.”1 On the same day, Carsten Krenz took down the article and took it to Wandlitz. A day later he put it back up and suggested that the students discuss it publicly.2 On September 14, Kai Feller (sixteen) pinned a contribution on the subject and said that the GDR should dispense with the annual military parade on October 7, marking the day the GDR was founded, and thus demonstrate its desire for peace. He collected signatures without permission, and although only thirty-seven classmates signed, a majority agreed with him. However, thirty soon distanced themselves from their signatures. The director confiscated the list and admonished Feller to refrain from further collecting signatures. The SED party secretary Renate Eulitz informed the SED district leadership about what had happened. Within a few days, a tremendous array of high-ranking individuals and organizations had gotten involved, including the SED district leadership with Günter Schabowski in person, the city school councilor, the Ministry of State Security, the SED Politburo with Erich Honecker and Egon Krenz, and the Ministry of National Education in the person of Minister Margot Honecker. As late as September 21, 1988, Philipp Lengsfeld, Alexander Krohn, Benjamin Lindner, and Wolfram Richter (seventeen), whose father was a university lecturer and member of the SED, posted a poem at Speakers’ Corner that was well known in the GDR. They wrote that the poem impressed them very much and gave them food for thought. Called “Du Meine” (You mine), the poem, a declaration of love, had been written by a professional noncommissioned officer and was published in May 1986 in the newspaper Volksarmee: “I still think of once, / on sunny days / when I proudly carried you / over the brook. / You have shown me your skills, / I willingly inclined myself toward you. / The strengths are well

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known to me, / often you twitched in my hand, / And I will / go into your chamber, / will see you in purest / splendor. / I’ll roam with you / to the moonlit night / The sight of you / makes me sure / I know why, / I know your how, / you, / Kalashnikov Mpi.” This poem, whose lines rhyme in the original German, took on a meaning that was difficult to understand afterward. Officially printed in an SED organ, it had a subversive effect and was directed against the militarization of society as soon as it was quoted or recited in another context. Meanwhile, the situation had barreled out of control. The young students, still almost children, were shadowed by the MfS. Behind the scenes, Margot Honecker ordered the students to be expelled. In the classrooms, a cold war raged. The FDJ demanded that the rebellious students be excluded, which included Georgia von Chamier (seventeen) and Katja Ihle (sixteen). The first FDJ district secretary said that the while FDJ would take care of everyone, skinheads, ghouls, antisocial individuals, or hooligans, it would not tolerate a “pacifist,” “antistate” platform. The FDJ then sought to expel Lengsfeld, Feller, and Ihle, though Lindner’s expulsion failed because not enough votes were collected in his class. He resigned voluntarily. Margot Honecker’s specifications were implemented on September 30. A big school meeting took place. Philipp Lengsfeld, Kai Feller, Katja Ihle, and Benjamin Lindner had to step forward individually. The principal announced to each individual that he or she had been subject to expulsion proceedings, that they were on leave, and that they had to leave the school immediately. Individually, they were escorted directly out. Then someone at the meeting stated that the approval for the FDJ expulsion was not supposed to have led to this. Students applauded. Several classmates started to cry. Alexander Krohn now stepped forward and received a reprimand. He replied that he was ashamed of his school. The principal spontaneously threw him out as well. Wolfram Richter, Shenja-Paul Wiens, and Georgia von Chamier received reprimands, and the latter two also had to change schools. The expulsions were finally imposed on October 11 and 13. At the Heinrich-Schliemann-School in Prenzlauer Berg, a friend of Kai Feller’s, Jeannine Haase, already showed solidarity with those who had been punished in September; the school threatened her, but her classmates remained silent. At the end of the year, she left the coldhearted school, she had already left the FDJ, and her parents threw her out of their flat. She moved in with Feller. This example alone shows how little could be enough to destroy a person’s life. Fortunately for these young people, it can be said today that the fall of 1989 was not far off. Investigations and disciplinary discussions began in October among the parents’ milieus. The reprimanded pupils remained under MfS observation. The state’s message was clear: what happened to them can happen at any time to anyone else who presents himself as a “dissident.” In a statement, the students wrote about their “dissenting opinions”:

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We are accused of antisocial behavior. We are accused of violating socialist legality. We are accused of having organized ourselves, of wanting to impose our opinion on politically unstable students in order to build a pacifist platform. These defamations hurt and outrage us very much. We feel that the school punishments that have been applied for or imposed on us and the exclusion of some of us from the FDJ are gross injustices. The accusations leveled against us lead us to once again demonstrate the common ground of our political convictions and thus our basic attitude towards our state: We want to live and learn in the GDR. We want to participate creatively in the shaping of the socialist society. We want to openly express our opinion and discuss it publicly. The political events around the world are of great interest and concern to us. We stand by the peace policy of the GDR. With our antifascist basic attitude we appear against neofascist tendencies among young people. We all were confronted with such phenomena, some of us were attacked and insulted by fascist skins. We will always and everywhere resist such phenomena. Kai, Benjamin, Katja, Alexander, Shenya-Paul, Philipp.3

Need we comment that sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds had to believe that they had to make such political statements in order to save their future? It has already been pointed out that communism, as a project for the future, relied especially on the youth. Since the 1950s, ideological debates that sometimes had terrible consequences for affected pupils were part of everyday life in GDR education. Dozens of high school students were sentenced to death and hundreds to prison in the early 1950s; thousands were expelled during the Honecker era, and tens of thousands were not even allowed to take their school-leaving exams for political reasons.4 The Ossietzky students were part of this tradition of which they knew nothing. But, as in the early 1950s, a wave of protest developed in the GDR within a few days that the SED, MfS, FDJ, and the Ministry of Education had not expected. How could they have? School expulsions for political reasons occurred frequently in the 1980s. Protests were rare but never nationwide. By the autumn of 1988, however, the GDR social crisis had progressed to such an extent that this incident was no longer hushed up. Added to this was the fact that Vera Wollenberger was directly affected. Regina and Wolfgang Templin were also indirectly affected because they had lived in the same house as the Wiens family, and some of the punished students now lived in their apartment. The blow against Philipp, on the other hand, was also meant to hit his mother, with the aim of keeping her away from the GDR forever. Bishop Forck tried to get her to return to the GDR for at least three days to assist her son. She stayed in West Berlin with Roland Jahn and Rüdiger Rosenthal but waited in vain. Without a permit, she drove to the border and requested admission. The MfS sent her back. She then called lawyer Gregor Gysi at home and begged him to represent her, also in vain. After her file was opened, she found a detailed

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transcript of this telephone call in the MfS files. “There is no indication that Gysi’s private phone has ever been tapped.”5 Other MfS documents mention that Gysi’s conversations with the Wiens family should be used to explain the legal situation to them.6 Philipp was able to visit his mother in West Berlin several times, but she was unable to speak to the people in charge. She wrote the school principal Rainer Forner a letter. The contents of this, too, she later found in the MfS documents. The entire GDR educational system had been a central point of criticism of all the churches, the opposition groups, and many others in the GDR for years. Many students and parents found the conditions unbearable. Against the background of the state of society, the Ossietzky affair acted as a further beacon and showed what was really going on in the system. Bishop Forck got involved, and Manfred Stolpe declared publicly that all of this reminded him of the 1950s. The Umweltblätter and the Friedrichsfelder Feuermelder published detailed accounts of the events in their October issues and made them public. The Western media took up the subject. Marianne Birthler and Michael Frenzel of the Berlin City Youth Parish Office distributed detailed information on November 4, 1988, which was distributed to all Protestant congregations in Berlin. From the end of October, informational and intercessional devotions were held in churches in East Berlin. The affected pupils had written out precise descriptions of their memory of the events, and these were also disseminated. On November 27, 1988, a nationwide day of action took place with protests and information events in several East Berlin churches, as well as in Dresden, Halle, Leipzig, Jena, Magdeburg, Potsdam, and Wismar, for example. FDJ leader Eberhard Aurich felt compelled the next day to inform all FDJ district leaders about the events at the Ossietzky school in Pankow in order to bolster functionaries’ arguments that everything had been carried out properly and with a sense of proportion. Not only the churches but also the opposition and the Western media got involved and provided information. Thousands of protest letters reached the SED, the Council of Ministers, the Volkskammer, the media, and institutions of further education. Well-known personalities who were not suspected of acting in opposition to the SED state, such as Stephan Hermlin and Jürgen Kuczynski, took action on behalf of the expelled students. Prominent critics of the GDR such as Christoph Hein also protested. And, above all, countless students, parents, and teachers throughout the country were horrified, disappointed, and saddened by what had happened. The subject remained a hot topic until the autumn of 1989. The Ninth Pedagogical Congress was held in June. In the run-up, working groups for the opposition were formed all over the country, which sent submissions and proposals to this state congress. Erich Honecker presided over the congress for three days with almost stoic calm, thus giving it the importance it was supposed to have. His wife Margot announced that everything must remain as it was and

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that any deviation would be dealt with severely. The horror of this was great and gripped many teachers. The Ossietzky affair had sensitized society. Young people were horrified, parents showed concern, and grandparents remembered bad times. Almost no one remained untouched by this. Jens Reich said in the autumn of 1989 that the courageous Ossietzky students were—almost in a double sense of the word—“pioneers” of the 89er movement. Although this was something of an exaggeration, such upheavals would not succeed without such claims. These events proved to be important for mass mobilization, and they were not forgotten. In October, people across the country recalled the political scandal. It was not until November 1, 1989, that the SED state managed to rehabilitate the victims in practice.7 School principal Forner warned in December 1989 that the reprimanded pupils would first have to earn renewed trust. A commission of inquiry later found that eleven laws or regulations had been disregarded by the state and the school. Exasperated, Philipp Lengsfeld had left for Cambridge on November 9, 1988, to join his mother. On November 9, 1989, he wanted to return to the GDR and to the Ossietzky School. He missed the ferry at Harwich. He watched the Wall come down in an English hotel room. This is also a symbol for the events. They were students of the “Ossietzky School.” What could be more obvious than that in the autumn of 1988, numerous people turned to Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky’s own weekly newspaper of which he was editor in chief from 1927, with critical articles and letters on this matter? The Nobel Peace Prize recipient had died in 1938 as a result of torture and imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps, and his weekly newspaper had long been bereft of his spirit. The paper remained silent, not even replying to the numerous letters. It was not until February 6, 1990, that it printed a commentary in the column “In eigener Sache,” casting off any blame for not having reported on the affair, and confessed: “Yes, we are still ashamed.”

Notes 1. Jörn Kalkbrenner, Urteil ohne Prozess. Margot Honecker gegen Ossietzky-Schüler (Berlin, 1990), 16. 2. Carsten Krenz, however, asserted that he did not “rat out” his fellow pupils, particularly since his father was allegedly on vacation at that time (“Schülerwiderstand in der DDR,” BZ, September 11, 2013; “Kinder der Revolution,” Der Tagesspiegel, 11. 9. 2013). 3. Kalkbrenner, Urteil ohne Prozess, 57–58. 4. An instructive source for this on the basis of the evaluation of Saxon rehabilitation files is Tina Kwiatkowski-Celofiga, Verfolgte Schüler. Ursachen und Folgen von Diskriminierung im Schulwesen der DDR (Göttingen, 2014). 5. Vera Lengsfeld, Von nun an ging’s bergauf . . . Mein Weg zur Freiheit (Munich, 2002), 277. 6. HA IX 17077, Bl. 31.

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7. JW, 1. 11. 1989; “Brief von Rainer Forner,” JW, 2. 11. 1989; “Wortmeldung aus der OssietzkyE[rweiterte-]O[ber]S[chule] Pankow,” BZ, 7. 11. 1989; “Zu Unrecht bestrafte Schüler rehabilitiert,” BZ, 10. 11. 1989; Kerstin Jentzsch, “Protokoll eines Unrechts,” in Der Morgen vom 8. 11. 1989.

Part 2

FROM THE SOCIAL CRISIS TO A CRISIS OF THE DICTATORSHIP

S

Chapter 8

THE SOCIAL CRISIS DEEPENS

S “Honecker’s Hundred-Year Reich” Not only in France but almost everywhere in the world, preparations for the commemoration of the French Revolution of 1789 were in full swing at the beginning of 1989. Was the revolution over, as the French historian François Furet claimed in 1978?1 Maybe in France. In the GDR, SED historians declared that “1789” had only become reality with the October Revolution of 1917; moreover, the legacy of “1789,” according to the Leipzig revolution researcher Manfred Kossok, was under the brand of socialism.2 No one could have known at the beginning of the year that a revolution, only a few months later, would bring down the Berlin Wall, pave the way for German unity, and finally transform the look of Europe in peace.3 For communist Eastern Europe, the ideas of 1789 finally seemed to be feasible. Kossok’s thesis proved to have a short half-life. Even though the deep social crisis in the GDR, as in the entire Eastern Bloc, seemed very tangible, and many hoped that the crisis would finally be overcome, no one had any idea how this would actually happen and, above all, with what drama. Moreover, it was not yet clear in any of the countries apart from Poland and Hungary who would emerge from the crisis as a winner. Could the old rulers hold their ground, or would they make way for reformers from their own ranks? Other alternatives did not even seem conceivable, let alone realistic. The irony of the history of “1989” is not limited to the celebration of the Great Revolution. In the GDR, the year also began with the commemoration of Thomas Müntzer, a great German revolutionary whose fate is symbolic of most attempts at freedom in German history: they failed, stopped halfway, or fell far short of their own goals. When the long year 1989 ended with the free elections on March 18, 1990, German history finally had a successful freedom revolution to show for itself. It was a short but thorny and fiercely contested way to get there. Notes from this chapter begin on page 284.

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In January 1989, the commemoration of Thomas Müntzer began in the GDR on the occasion of his five hundredth birthday. The revolutionary had rebelled against spiritual and secular authorities and was executed in 1525 as a leading figure in the German Peasants’ War. Karlen Vesper, a history editor at Neues Deutschland, summed up the official view of Müntzer: Müntzer’s “bold idea” had become “reality in the GDR,” and the GDR was “the executor of Thomas Müntzer’s will, including his fight.”4 The SED always tried to assimilate Müntzer more effectively than Luther for legitimation purposes. Logically, it ought to have been the other way around because Luther preached obedience to the worldly authorities while Müntzer fought precisely against them. But for the SED, any revolt against authorities was considered right and consistent as long as it was not directed against its own rule. Erich Honecker himself did not miss the opportunity to give a topical political speech in memory of Müntzer on January 19, 1989. In his speech, he referred to the CSCE follow-up conference in Vienna, which was just coming to an end, and claimed that all human rights were respected in the GDR. The Vienna Conference had been a great success for the GDR as it had been able to introduce many valuable proposals. In fact, many GDR citizens perceived the decisions as a success, but not for the reasons Honecker had thought. The document made many people sit up and take notice, encouraging them to demand that human rights be respected. The GDR had not only committed to the idea “that everyone is free to leave any country, including his own, and return to his own country” but also promised to guarantee this right by law and to monitor compliance.5 A church employee applied immediately, albeit in vain, to officially found an Association for the Observation and Promotion of the CSCE Process in the GDR.6 Of course, Honecker did not mention in his speech that the GDR was largely isolated precisely because of the human rights situation and that even “brother states” like Poland, Hungary, and the USSR kept a perceptible distance. Instead, he sharply attacked the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States, blaming them for the GDR’s lack of freedom to travel. These nations, he explained, had precipitated the GDR’s need to build the “antifascist protective wall” in 1961, and there were still no reasons to change this: “The wall will remain . . . as long as the conditions that led to its construction are not changed. It will still exist in 50 years, even in 100 years, if the reasons for this have not yet been eliminated.”7 Honecker’s words upset many people. His vision of the Hundred-Year Reich of the Wall often caused sheer horror. Opposition members associated with Ludwig Mehlhorn, Stephan Bickhardt, and Hans-Jürgen Fischbeck from the initiative Rejection of Practice and Principle of Demarcation and from the Peace Circle of East Berlin’s Bartholomew parish answered Honecker with an open letter on January 23: “Everyone knows that the Wall is not directed outwards

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against any robbers, but above all inwards. . . . We and our children don’t want to wait another fifty years.”8 Nobody could know at that time that Honecker was unintentionally right about the Wall falling when its reason for being was removed. For, in contrast to what he meant, the reason fell away within a few weeks in the autumn: the SED dictatorship itself. How bad the human rights situation in the GDR really was can be seen from the victims that were still succumbing to the East German border regime at the end of the 1980s. On February 6, 1989, twenty-year-old Chris Gueffroy was shot and killed by border guards. He would be the last person shot at the Berlin Wall. The last death in Berlin was on March 8, 1989. Winfried Freudenberg escaped in a hot-air balloon, crashed over West Berlin, and died. The international public protested, and in the GDR many people angrily asked when this would finally stop. Honecker ordered Egon Krenz, as the Politburo member and CC secretary responsible for security issues, to cancel the firing order and quell the international protests. Krenz called the deputy defense minister, Colonel General Fritz Streletz, on April 2, 1989, and passed on the order. A memo of the conversation provided the rationale: “Better to let a person run away than to use a firearm in the current political situation.”9 A few days later, shots were fired again, preventing an escape by truck. Erich Mielke expressed his annoyance on April 28, 1989, about the cancellation of the shooting order—and about some shooters’ lack of accuracy: “If you are going to shoot, then you have to do it in such a way that the person in question does not get away, but that he has to stay with us. What is going on, what is this: firing off 70 shots and he runs over there and they make a huge campaign. They’re right, man, if someone shoots that badly, let them run a campaign. . . . And then of course it’s clear that there’s no point in shooting at someone when he gets over there, right? . . . Where there were more revolutionary times, it was not so bad. But now that everything is so new, we have to take the new times into account.”10 There were still deaths until shortly before the wall was opened. On August 22, a Hungarian border guard accidentally shot and killed Werner Schulz, a GDR citizen who was trying to escape to Austria with his wife and baby. On October 30, Polish border guards pulled Dietmar Pommer dead from the Oder River. The twenty-three-year-old from Ludwigslust had wanted to visit the German embassy in Warsaw on October 18–19. He was the last victim of the GDR border regime.11

“The SED Freethinkers” On January 10, 1989, Die Welt published an interview with Manfred Stolpe. Since 1987 the consistorial president had developed an omnipresence in the West German media, which made him known far beyond the churches. In

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this interview, he demanded once again that the preamble in the Basic Law be changed and reinterpreted. Reunification was out of the question in the foreseeable future, and a policy that aimed to achieve this, as provided for in the Basic Law, would only hinder German-German rapprochement. To speak of reunification, he continued, was “politically and historically wrong, arouses emotions and confuses people.”12 He also suggested that the Springer publishing house refrain from using quotation marks when mentioning the “GDR” in its publications in the future. (In fact, this took place on August 2, 1989, and had been planned since the beginning of the year.13) This is what many people in both the East and West were thinking. Actually, Stolpe was aiding SED leaders, but they did not see it this way. One day later, the SED published a commentary in almost all GDR daily newspapers with the somewhat confusing headline: “Herr Stolpe and the Ideal Case.” The article accused Stolpe of stepping out of his lane by getting involved in politics and associating “something bad” with the GDR instead of concerning himself with the only moderately attended church services. “From the time of his FDJ experience alone up to today, Herr Stolpe must not have missed that fact that in the GDR full freedom of religion prevails. To overlook this and instead deal with state issues is, of course, no service to the free exercise of religion. Obviously, it is not the GDR leadership that has to go through a learning process with regard to European policy, but Herr Stolpe in matters of the free exercise of religion.”14 The message of the attack remained encrypted. In the church leadership it was considered a general attack. Western correspondent Gerhard Rein called it “unusual” and noted: “[The SED leadership] is attacking a man who uses every opportunity to portray the GDR well, usually better than it is.”15 After the events of 1987–88, SED leaders seemed to want to announce right at the beginning of the year that they would take a harder line. So it made sense to attack the very man who was particularly loyal to the state but who also enjoyed respect and trust in many groups. It is typical in dictatorships that they tighten the reins of domestic policies in times of sociopolitical crises. It is equally typical that in times of intensified repression, persecution, and ideological rigidity within dictatorships, the people grow more willing to contradict and resist them grows. The GDR, not Stolpe, was, in a way, the ideal case for this. However, the attack not only indicated that domestic policy was hardening but also prepared the ground for an offensive. Only a few days later, all GDR newspapers announced with great fanfare that a preparatory committee for the foundation of a Freethinkers’ Association had been constituted. In a quick succession of several articles, speeches, and interviews, the SED explained what was intended with such an association, which traditions it stood in, and that all people over fourteen years of age could participate. The association, officially established in June, set the goal of providing a secular and dignified framework for celebrating and carrying out personal and family holidays as well as funerals.

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It would provide “contact phones” and discussion opportunities on all social, political, and cultural issues. The public clamor was out of all proportion to the social impact. Even pupils realized, as the MfS learned from a civics teacher who reported on discussions in her classroom, “that in this association, too, one cannot ‘freely’ express one’s opinion. She [a pupil] recognized this by the fact that the Freethinkers would approach the solution to the problems from a Marxist worldview. . . . Within the class collective there is generally a similar attitude. . . .”16 People remained relatively unwilling to cooperate, so only a few thousand got involved. Among them were a number who wanted to have materials from the association but did not even think of cooperating. The MfS feared infiltration by “hostile negative forces” from the outset. The Freethinkers’ Association was the SED’s last attempt to officially advance into the rooms occupied by the churches and the opposition. Some members of the opposition saw it as an SED attempt to further divide society. After the events of 1987–88, it constituted the SED leaders’ de facto admission that they could no longer control a large part of the country’s political and social problems. The association was supposed to be a means of counteracting this. This could not possibly work. Some churches saw the foundation of this association as a renewed declaration of war. Joachim Garstecki and Ehrhart Neubert argued that the founding of the association could only be welcomed if the opposition were granted the same organizational opportunities.17 Nobody believed that the Freethinkers’ Association, as publicly claimed, had come into being without state support. Not even the first chairman, education professor Helmut Klein, a longtime rector of Humboldt University and an SED functionary, represented this. In fact, on December 6, 1988, the SED Politburo had reacted to the events of 1987–88 by deciding to found the association. The MfS was involved from the very beginning. It was planned that the association would have one hundred full-time functionaries instead of having its own radio and television broadcasts, that it would publish a magazine, and that it would function through district and county structures. The MfS moved into its own workroom at its headquarters in East Berlin. The first managing director was Eberhard Schinck, a former deputy director of the Berliner Verlag and the secretary for agitation and propaganda within the SED leadership of a Berlin district. He asked his MfS contact at the end of February to check on a secretary who was to work in the association, as the woman was divorced “and he had no knowledge of [her] social and leisure time behavior.”18 In January, Helmut Klein wished “a close cooperation with the MfS.”19 His contact person was Colonel Joachim Wiegand, who had been in charge of HA XX/4 at MfS since 1979, the department responsible for the processing of the churches. At the end of February, Klein asked the MfS for “brief information on 5 authors of negative submissions.” In many letters, the senders expressed their hope that the Freethinkers’ Association would be able to work in the spirit of glasnost. “In order to prevent political abuse, possible

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counter-revolutionary efforts and ‘church struggle,’ a tribe of solid comrades must be won over as the core in every residential area group with the establishment of the association according to his [Klein’s] opinion.”20 The Freethinkers turned out to be exactly what they were: SED functionaries who wanted to disguise themselves behind an association that acted as a spearhead in the fight against the churches and the opposition but who officially promised a sociopolitical opening. The domestic political situation was already so acute that hardly anyone took such offers seriously.

Leipzig’s Path to Becoming the Capital of Demonstrations In Leipzig, some new opposition groups began forming in 1987; they initiated public protests, especially from 1988 onward, and caused a stir beyond the city limits with some of their campaigns.21 At the same time, as in many other cities, Leipzig had had a tradition of prayers for peace since the late 1970s, with grassroots groups actively and independently involved in their preparation and implementation. After the events in Berlin in January 1988, the prayers for peace all over the country received a strong influx of people who wished to leave the country. And again and again there were demonstrations after the peace prayers and talks—in Schwerin, in Dresden, in Zwickau, in Bautzen, in Erfurt, in Stralsund, in Pasewalk, in Jena, in many other cities, and also in Leipzig, where they even occurred throughout the year. On March 14, 1988, during the Leipzig Spring Fair, a demonstration procession of about 100 to 120 people marched silently to the Thomaskirche after the peace prayer with 800 to 900 participants in the Nikolaikirche, which is located directly in the city center. The demonstrators formed a circle in the forecourt of the church then walked back to the Nikolaikirche. The prayer for peace had been prepared by the AKSK. The pictures of the demonstration were shown in the evening on ARD and ZDF news programs on West German television. The church was not pleased with this rededication of its prayers for peace. Although there had been discussion circles with applicants and, since 1986, the slogan “Nikolaikirche—open to all” stood before that edifice, the politicization of the prayers and the tendency for those who wished to leave the country to join forces with opposition members who wanted to stay but change the GDR went too far for many. Superintendent Friedrich Magirius implemented the policy that the prayers for peace would no longer be prepared and carried out independently by the groups in future. The groups were informed of this in August 1988. There had been arguments about the prayers’ design already since the spring, but the backdrop to the current situation was provided by the Peace Prayer on June 27, 1988, when the collection plate takings were used to pay an administrative fine of several thousand marks that had been imposed on dissenter Jürgen Tallig.

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In February 1988, Tallig had written a Gorbachev quotation in a pedestrian tunnel: “We need democracy like the air we breathe.” After that Monday, the state increased its pressure on church leaders, and they gave in. Magirius removed Pastor Christoph Wonneberger, who had been on the side of the groups for years and was himself active in the opposition, from the responsibility of coordinating the prayers for peace22 and gave it to Pastor Christian Führer. After the summer break, the Monday prayers for peace continued from August 29. There were several demonstrations. Above all, however, the dispute between the churches and the opposition groups escalated. Declarations and counterdeclarations circulated, group members sat in churches on September 19 and October 17 with gags in their mouths protesting “speech prohibition.” On October 24, several group members demonstrated in the Nikolaikirche with four banners equally directed against the restriction of the prayers for peace and the social conditions. This conflict encouraged the opposition groups in their desire to bring their political protest to the streets more clearly than before. Michael Arnold, Uwe Schwabe, and Gesine Oltmanns drafted an appeal. On the occasion of the first anniversary of the Berlin events, the “Initiative for the Democratic Renewal of Society,” an association of people from various Leipzig opposition groups, called for a memorial demonstration to commemorate the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The appeal read: “Let us stand together for freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association, freedom of the press, and against the ban on the magazine ‘Sputnik’ and critical Soviet films.”23 The demonstration was to begin on January 15, 1989, at 4 p.m. so as not to disturb the official rally. The meeting point was the market in front of the Old Town Hall, from where a silent march to the Liebknecht memorial was planned. According to the group, about ten thousand flyers were printed with this appeal. By January 12, some six to seven thousand had been distributed. During the night, a man, who worked as an IM for the criminal investigation department, observed two flyer distributors and immediately called the police. In the group of ten or twelve people preparing the demonstration, there was also a woman who worked as an IM for the MfS. By January 14, the Stasi had arrested eleven people. The MfS and the police searched Leipzig extensively and confiscated many flyers, finding thirty-five hundred in the apartments of those they had arrested, and, in the end, many Leipzig citizens—Uwe Schwabe estimates more than one hundred24—voluntarily handed the flyers over to the police or in their companies. In three streets of Leipzig alone, 16 residents handed over the appeal to state authorities without being asked.25 Nevertheless, about 150 to 200 people gathered at the appointed time. Fred Kowasch gave a short speech and informed the crowd of the eleven arrests. Afterward they set off, and others spontaneously joined the group, so that 300 to 500 people were then walking silently through the city center. Many were afraid—a factor that can hardly be overestimated for the stability of dictatorships.

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But by taking such actions, they also began to overcome their fear. They remained peaceful and disciplined. When the traffic light was red, the retinue stopped and waited for green. The state did not deploy its massive security forces, but the police broke up the demonstration and arrested fifty-three more people temporarily, releasing them by evening. Those who had previously been arrested were released by January 19, arranged by Honecker himself. He wanted to prevent a repeat of the previous year’s events. Immediately after the arrests, groups in several cities, including in churches in Leipzig and other places, showed solidarity with those arrested, holding intercessory prayers. Thomas Rudolph kept the Western media and opposition in East Berlin informed, and they also passed on the information. Polish and Czech opposition members protested the same day.26 The civil rights activists from East Berlin who were expatriated a year earlier, including Bohley and Fischer, also wrote a joint declaration. The protest by US secretary of state George Shultz and West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher on January 15 in Vienna was most effective; they signed the CSCE follow-up document there a few days later. Honecker’s speech at the Müntzer commemoration responded to this. The Leipzig events thus acquired national political significance beyond what the organizers themselves could have imagined. There could not have been better proof than the action against peaceful demonstrators in Leipzig that the signature of GDR foreign minister Oskar Fischer at the bottom of the CSCE document was worth nothing in those days. Mielke issued a command for future responses to be faster and harder. A few days later the Junge Welt published a photo reacting to the opposition’s actions that suggested the mosquito in the West was being turned into an elephant under the headline “This is how big a mosquito is. . . .” A comment accompanied the photo indicating that some people in Leipzig wanted to disturb the memory of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, and fifty-three of them had been arrested, instructed, and dismissed. Next to this photo was an image of an elephant printed very small (“and an elephant this small”) and underneath it, in tiny print, were eleven reports of human rights violations and mass misery in the Western world.27 In March, opposition members responded with extensive documentation of the events and the solidarity they engendered. The samizdat authors gave this text the ironic title of “The Mosquito.”28 On March 13, when about three hundred people demonstrated—shouting “Stasi raus!”—in Leipzig’s city center after the peace prayer to advocate for the right to leave the country and for freedom of travel, MfS forces could not intervene: the spring fair was underway in the city, so there were not only tens of thousands of visitors but also numerous media representatives present. In the evening, ARD and ZDF again broadcast detailed reports. But other things besides such demonstrations were happening in Leipzig. The bitter dispute between church leaders and the church council of the Nikolaikirche about the organization of the prayers for peace, on the one hand, and the groups,

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on the other, was settled. On February 14, 1989, the church council decided that the groups could again organize the Monday Peace Prayers independently. On April 10, a prayer for peace was held again under their responsibility. Within the church, this decision on the part of the group associated with Pastor Führer continued to be highly controversial. Pastors loyal to the state protested. Four days later, in a debate that was unusually heated for pastors, Bishop Hempel tried to find out how the prayers for peace could continue. The information available to him came only from those who were against the open prayers for peace. Above all, pastors Christoph Wonneberger (Lukaskirche), Rolf-Michael Turek (Markus parish), and Christian Führer (Nikolaikirche) insisted on the organizational structure that had been reintroduced. Hempel was torn and suggested that one not speak of “prayers for peace” but of “Monday prayers”: “I remember what war is! Magirius spoke out sharply against those who wished to leave: ‘Church is not an underground organization. Not even its helper. We want to remain a church.’”29 The meeting adjourned without a result. On May 18, Bishop Hempel spoke to the Nikolai church council and announced that, as a compromise, the “prayers for peace” were to be renamed “Monday prayers.” This ended a long tug-of-war. Three circumstances contributed to this. First, domestic political conditions had become dramatically more acute, and many people who wished to leave the country had sought greater publicity for demonstrative actions. Second, the opposition groups had continued to raise their political profile and had increasingly moved their actions outside the church since the beginning of the year. Third, individual pastors such as Wonneberger, Turek, and leaders had supported the groups and those who wished to leave the country within the church, openly showing solidarity with their demands. Thus, in the spring of 1989, the first roots of Leipzig’s role as a central place of action in the autumn appeared, delicate as they yet were.30

Crisis Games of the SED and SED Reformers The SED leadership was well aware of the deep social crisis. In many scholarly articles, and even more in journalistic ones, authors of all political tendencies, even today, very often claim that this was not so. This is because their individual articles do not interpret the historical developments in depth but only as independent events, and in doing so, like contemporaries in 1989, they search for “reformers” and “reform potential” within the SED, which is hard to find. There were only a few exceptional cases of “reformers,” but there were disputes about superficial changes that were hidden from the public. In preparation for the Twelfth SED Party Conference planned for 1991, more than one hundred studies were written on the future development of SED socialism in the 1990s on behalf of the party leadership at party institutions such as the Academy

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of Social Sciences at the SED Central Committee, the Institute for MarxismLeninism at the SED Central Committee, the SED Party College, and the Academy of State and Law. In these studies, the SED remained committed to its previous course but gave a detailed listing of numerous points that needed changing. In addition, smaller groups of SED social scientists were working on concepts for “modern socialism” at some universities. What they all had in common was that they neither overcame the prevailing dogmas nor proposed to overcome them. No one suggested calling the leading role of the SED into question; there was just as little talk of constitutional structures as there were plans to legalize the opposition. The most far-reaching proposal was that ever more mechanisms needed to be developed “to enable a clear and principled dialogue with ‘dissidents’ in socialist society, thus preventing citizens who are uncertain in their opinions from siding with the real enemies of socialism simply because they see every opportunity there is to raise all questions without disturbance, to express all concerns, and to not immediately encounter overly sensitive reactions.”31 The most famous group of these “SED reformers” associated with the brothers André and Michael Brie, and including Dieter Klein, Dieter Segert, Rainer Land, and Rosemarie Will at Humboldt University, still considered it legitimate, as late as October 22, 1989, to ban groups hostile to the constitution—that is, those that undermined the SED’s monopoly on power.32 Their paper was based on a paper of October 8, 1989, in which they emphasized the following as “foundations” for “modern socialism”: “retention of the system of the National Front,” no admission of nonsocialist opposition, and prevention of political opposition groups seeking to participate in or take power.33 Jurist Rosemarie Will still believed in September 1989 that SED leaders continued to have the determination and the ability to “further expand the GDR consistently as a socialist constitutional state.”34 Communist regimes were not capable of reform. Reality did not contradict the theory; it made it recognizable. Every political opening of a closed system ultimately leads to another system. Thus, it also made logical sense within the system that Honecker stood up to Gorbachev because he saw what Gorbachev did not want to believe. This is not an after-the-fact assertion; rather, one can derive it from the historical examples of the Hungarian events of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968. The SED’s perception of the crisis always included “firmly closing its own ranks.” For this purpose, it had a means at its disposal that had been tried and tested many times in practice: “party cleansing.” The party information from 1988 already quoted above indicated that whiners and naggers had no place in the party. The SED Politburo implemented this announcement on February 7, 1989, and decided to issue new party documents to members between September 1 and December 31, 1989. The purpose of this was to check members for their ideological stability in several talks, to award long-term party contracts to each member, and to assess how the party contracts had been

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fulfilled in the past. As a result, tens of thousands of members were removed from the rolls, and this was intended to discipline the party internally. This reissuing of party documents was flanked by an internal party discussion with a “leading comrade” or even an “internal party platform,” with “platform” being a paraphrase for “party-hostile individual.” The effect of this was, likewise, very simple, allowing the party leadership to demonstrate that it would be consistent in this discussion at the highest level, without regard for the prestige of the person, and thereby set an example to be followed at all party levels. Since neither the system nor the theory could be faulty in the party’s view, deficiencies, errors, inadequacies, and dissatisfaction could only be subjective. For this reason, the SED Politburo also decided on February 7, 1989, to send a group of CC instructors led by Politburo member Günter Mittag to the Dresden district to examine the working methods of the SED district leadership there. By the way, this content-related connection has so far mostly been overlooked. The next day, the group of about 100 high-level officials representing all the special departments arrived there and began their review. The work took ten days. The Dresden district was chosen for several reasons: for years it had had one of the highest rates of “applicants for permanent departure,” the population was particularly critical of the living conditions, social and material provisions were particularly poor, and people wishing to leave the country and members of the opposition had been engaging in public actions for months. The district seemed to be exemplary for the crisis. In addition, Hans Modrow, who was not a member of Honecker’s inner circle and was considered a follower of Gorbachev, was the head of the SED district leadership there. Although Modrow hid his Gorbachev sympathies from the public,35 he remained reserved and did not take a hard line in the internal party discussion at the Dresden Staatsschauspiel theater. On the one hand, his reputation as a perestroika man was invented by the Western media without any supporting evidence, but, on the other hand, it was confirmed by church dignitaries from Saxony who had several conversations with him. They were impressed that he spoke differently from the hardline faction in East Berlin associated with Honecker, Krenz, Schabowski, and Mielke. What secured his reputation, above all, however, was that the Politburo Commission’s examination of the district did not go unremarked upon and made people sit up and take notice: the simple conclusion was that if Honecker reprimanded Modrow, then Modrow must be one of Honecker’s opponents. What the commission noted in the Dresden district was what it could have observed throughout the country: many things were not satisfactory, including the supply situation and the plan fulfillment, among others, and the responsibility for this lay with the SED district leadership, although it demanded no consequences for personnel. Honecker sharply attacked Modrow in the SED Politburo meeting on February 28, and Modrow replied by voicing selfcriticism and vowing to do everything better in the future. Subsequently, all

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district managers received the report of the working group, who also knew how to interpret the signs of the time. First, they had to orient themselves to it; second, Modrow was marked as a potentially wavering candidate from whom one should keep one’s distance in future; and third, it was important not to allow a gap to arise between the central party leadership and the district leadership—this was also true of all the other levels of the hierarchy. At the eighth convention of the CC of the SED on June 22, 1989, Joachim Herrmann gave the main lecture and made the results of the working group public.36 This finally brought the Dresden SED and its leader Modrow into the public eye in the West, where observers did not know how to interpret these internal party games and believed Modrow to be a Gorbachev man. There are four answers to the question of why Honecker did not drop Modrow. First, there were already enough domestic trouble spots. Second, both in Bonn and Moscow his removal would have been (mis)interpreted as a new blow against any opening. Third, this would have essentially pushed Modrow into a reform corner with the formation of an internal opposition group as one possible outcome. Fourth, however, Honecker wished to keep the option of dismissing Modrow open because the “internal party cleansing process” was not to begin on a large scale until September, when the new party cards were to be issued. Depending on the course of this process, Modrow could still have acted as a pawn sacrifice. Over the decades, this is how the cadre communists had learned, practiced, and then continued to act. There is nothing to suggest that they did not also plan this strategy for the autumn of 1989. Things turned out “a little” differently. And Modrow had also been put in a position by Honecker—without anyone having expressly wished it—to save the party and the state. Real reformers reveal themselves before the outbreak of an open crisis in the face of the manifold symptoms. Can there be reformers who adhere strictly to party discipline, do not wish to violate it, and remain as stagnant as those who supposedly want to shift it? Perhaps Modrow or the Brie brothers flinched with their eyebrows, but this “movement” was not perceptible in public, and at most only in their closed circles. They probably even contributed to the outbreak of the open crisis in the summer in that their lack of obvious action gave no one hope that there were any influential party comrades committed to reform and willing to take risks. Can someone be stylized as a reformer who is publicly silent, does not act, thinks first of the party and only then of “all the rest”? That so much has been said about the “SED reformers” to this day can only be comprehended as individual hopes later being projected onto this group, and also as misperceptions of social processes and the internal principles of communist cadre parties. Were there really no SED reformers at all? Yes, there were. These were men and women who deliberately criticized, made demands, and got involved in public, and who also accepted disadvantages and party exclusions in return. They were involved in the informal citizens’ initiatives against inner-city decay

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that had first begun forming in 1987, as well as in environmental protection groups, and some SED members could be found in opposition groups even before the summer of 1989. The most famous example of an SED reformer is the lawyer Rolf Henrich from Eisenhüttenstadt in the district of Frankfurt/Oder. Born in Magdeburg in 1944, he studied law after graduating from high school. At twenty he joined the SED. For almost three years until 1968 he worked as an IM for the MfS, betraying intimate details of others and traveling to the Federal Republic of Germany for the party. After working as a research assistant at the Academy for State and Law “Walter Ulbricht” in Potsdam-Babelsberg—a stint interrupted by military service—he received his law license in 1973. From 1976 to 1986 he was SED party secretary of the lawyers’ college in Frankfurt/ Oder. He had previously completed a course at the district party school and was awarded the GDR medal of merit. This man knew the system from the inside in many facets, especially since his parents-in-law were full-time MfS employees. He did not draw public notice before 1988. He was a defense lawyer in only twelve political criminal cases, which shows that he was initially unknown even in opposition and critical circles. Until the submission of a manuscript in May 1988, which was published by Rowohlt in Reinbek near Hamburg in March 1989, he largely maintained his MfS cover. He had distanced himself from the SED policy years earlier, and his close associates included Hans-Joachim Maaz and Erika and Ludwig Drees, who, in turn, introduced Henrich to Bohley and Katja Havemann. The MfS targeted Henrich at the end of February 1988. In July 1988, he performed for the first time at the summer academy of the AKSK in Samswegen near Magdeburg. Several meetings with members of the IFM and with Katja Havemann took place in autumn 1988. At the beginning of January 1989, the MfS started an operation against Henrich, which was conducted with the aim of collecting evidence relevant to criminal law using secret police methods. In 1988, his book manuscript reached the West in two ways—once via a channel from Erika Drees, Bärbel Bohley, and Katja Havemann to Jürgen Fuchs, and once through an employee of the Permanent Mission. Henrich himself used a visit to the West to negotiate with the publisher. When the Spiegel reported at the end of March on Henrich’s forthcoming publication Der vormundschaftliche Staat—Vom Versagen des real existierenenden Sozialismus,37 the SED leadership was, nevertheless, surprised. The book described the state of the GDR. Much of its analysis resembled Bahro’s 1977 Alternative, and Henrich’s disastrous picture of “real socialism” quickly became known in the GDR. The book was circulated, and German radio stations, including the program Radio Glasnost, reported on it in detail. Henrich also lectured about and discussed the book at numerous opposition events, but it hardly triggered any debates.38 This was because, as clear and unambiguous as the findings were—which many saw as confirming their own views—its ideas for how to remedy the situation remained unclear, nebulous, diffuse, and eclectic. The

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diagnosis suggested a total rejection of socialism in theory and practice, whereas the remedy tried to create “real socialism” from a mix of anthroposophy and Habermasian and Marxist communication theory. At that time, however, the emphasis was less on debate than on action. Henrich became one of the symbolic figures in the autumn, but he withdrew from public life quite quickly in 1990. His merit remains that he provided a sharp moral response to the crisis. And he knew what he was doing—he expected a long prison sentence. In a legal opinion of the MfS, all conceivable paragraphs of criminal law that could come into play in his case were already being discussed on April 3, 1989.39 Even a colleague of his stated already at the end of March 1989 that the elements of §106 (“anti-state agitation”) in the penal code had been fulfilled.40 For political reasons, however, no charges were brought. The SED expelled Henrich in April, and at the end of March he lost his license to practice law. He suffered the fate of the internal party reformers who strove to create a “democratic socialism” and were not afraid to be punished for it. He was lucky that his social disadvantages only lasted for a few months.

“Those Who Vote Are Tormented; Those Who Choose Not to Are Tormented” In the spring of 1988, the SED leadership decided to hold local elections on May 7, 1989, for the approximately seventy-eight hundred people’s representatives. Once again, the leadership called on “its people” to acclaim the status quo. People were very interested in elections; millions regularly followed the elections in the Federal Republic with great interest and internal tension, and the US presidential elections also drew great interest. The electoral farce in their own country was mostly done as a compulsory exercise to which they attached no importance. In 1989, this also turned out differently. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had led an election debate in 1988 that Soviet dissidents had initiated. He finally pushed through a constitutional amendment so that several candidates were up for election in 1989. In Poland and Hungary, there had been calls for democratic elections for some time, and these led to initial successes in 1989. The SED leadership was unimpressed by this, but against the background of the domestic political crisis, GDR society did not remain unaffected by these foreign policy developments. In the summer and autumn of 1988, various opposition groups in East Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Plauen, Coswig, and other cities wondered how they should act in the upcoming local elections. Until 1989, most opposition members either did not vote at all or went to a polling booth and crossed out the candidates to cast a dissenting vote. Either way, the MfS registered this response. Individuals

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wrote slogans directed against the system on the ballot papers. In the larger cities, there were also “election parties” in private apartments where, to be admitted, guests had to hand over their voting notification as a sign of not having voted, and these collected notifications were then burned together. Since 1950, elections in the GDR, which did not deserve the name, had been accompanied by protests. High school student Hermann-Joseph Flade was even sentenced to be executed for distributing leaflets against the first elections to the Volkskammer in October 1950—only massive protests throughout East and West Germany prevented this murder. All other elections were also always accompanied by protests. Two students of the Sprachenkonvikt, Hans-Karl Kahlbaum and Michael Kubina, wrote an astute and ironic letter to Neues Deutschland editor in chief Schabowski after the 1981 Volkskammer elections, in which they made fun of the electoral fraud and suggested that the few thousand no-voters should simply be released to the West so that the 99.86 percent of the votes in favor would finally become 100 percent the next time. Moreover, if the communists from the West were also allowed to vote, they argued, the approval rate would be even more than 100 percent—something unique in world history. In a “side note” they stated: “For economic reasons, one could now consider whether under these conditions it would be better to forego such a costly choice for the time being.” This letter quickly fell into the hands of the MfS.41 In the run-up to the 1989 elections, it became apparent that opposition members wished to systematically observe the public vote count in several places and then compare it with the officially announced results. In doing so, they made use of experience gained in East Berlin and in Coswig, for example, which they had already gained in the 1986 elections to the Volkskammer. Although almost everyone in the GDR knew that the SED falsified the election results, the falsifications had been proven for the first time in 1986 in a few polling stations in the aforementioned places. In 1989, the opposition wished to provide this evidence systematically and in all regions of the GDR. Initially, opposition groups still debated how they should behave in the run-up to the elections. The idea of putting up independent candidates came up. On January 8, 1989, Berlin opposition activists associated with Stephan Bickhardt, Ludwig Mehlhorn, Martin Böttger, Wolfgang Ullmann, Hans-Jürgen Fischbeck, Wolfgang Apfeld, Rainer Flügge, Reinhard Lampe, and Pastor Peter Hilsberg published a call for independent candidates to be nominated for the elections.42 Legally, this possibility existed in theory, but in practice it was not possible. Ulrike Poppe and Stephan Bickhardt, for example, tried in January 1989 to obtain documents from the Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg city council that would allow Poppe to stand as a candidate and be elected. Even at this low level—the issuing of appropriate registration documents—the undertaking failed because the local politicians in charge refused to provide information and documents.

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The SED planned the election of 1989 with the help of general staff. There were 270,000 seats to be distributed. Well over one million people were actively involved as election councilors and election workers on election day. These figures alone make it clear that the regime could still rely on its troops in the spring of 1989. Even at the outsized and costly FDJ Pentecost meeting from May 12 to 15, 1989, which communists in Africa, Asia, and South America had already heavily criticized in the run-up to the event, some 750,000 young people celebrated the GDR. The rector of the Potsdam Film Academy, Lothar Bisky, discussed the following questions at a forum of this event: “How much democracy does our dictatorship need?” and “How much contradiction can we endure?” Unfortunately, the answers were not preserved, but such an event had become necessary. After all, hundreds of students from Humboldt University had also refused to take part in the Pentecost meeting, and the FDJ symphony orchestra had even been disbanded in the run-up to the meeting because the majority had refused to perform in their FDJ shirts and wanted to engage in critical political discussions instead. Rumors that the meeting had been co-financed with 50 million marks from the “Solidarity Fund” for people in need in Africa and Asia also caused unrest. Later it turned out that the rumors were true and that the FDGB also made such withdrawals from its solidarity fund. Even though millions of people still supported the system, SED leaders had already become aware in the run-up to the local elections that the mood in the country threatened to dangerously tilt. A doctor from the district of Rostock summed up an attitude that more and more people shared: “This state is locking us all up. I haven’t done anything wrong and I’m not allowed to go wherever I want. I have been punished for doing my work every day, and I will not go to the polls. I can’t choose my own prison guards, can I?”43 Neues Deutschland had published its election appeal on January 27, 1989, and by the beginning of May 1989, almost 230,000 petitions had been submitted to central and local state organs. Of these, 40,000 were directly related to the forthcoming elections. This has been a popular means of obtaining a telephone, an apartment, or permission to travel to the West for many years. But never before had there been so many; the increase was almost 100 percent compared to the 1986 Volkskammer elections, and this does not even include tens of thousands of submissions to the SED. Most of them came from East Berlin and the districts of Leipzig, Dresden, Halle, and Karl-Marx-Stadt. The senders called for social improvements, pushed for urgently needed repairs, sought support for a trip to the West, advocated environmental protection issues, or generally criticized social and cultural problems. Behind each entry was a direct or indirect threat to not vote or to vote against the SED in case of noncompliance. The SED understood this very well and tried to react positively, but it could only succeed in individual cases. In several regions there were collective refusals to vote, also on a previously unknown scale. In Dersekow (in the Greifswald

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district), twenty families refused to vote if they did not finally receive telephone connections. In the municipality of Wusterhusen, which is located in the same district, sixty people refused to vote if a small access road was not finally renovated. In Claußnitz near Chemnitz with over three thousand inhabitants, there had already been critical discussions throughout the year because the SED was planning to erect new buildings. The inhabitants feared environmental pollution, suppression of the church, and negative effects on the townscape. At the head of the small citizens’ movement with over 260 petitions and several citizens’ debates was the local Evangelical Lutheran pastor. State observers estimated that around 50 percent of the population would not be able to participate in the elections. At the end of April 1989, forty residents of Werneuchen and Hirschfelde near Berlin returned their election notification cards and declared their refusal to vote because the unbearable noise of Soviet military aircraft and constant detonations from the military training area had been a heavy burden on their everyday lives for years. In this case—it went against Gorbachev’s army—the procedure even met with a certain degree of understanding within the party leadership. The display of slogans in public spaces also increased considerably in March and April, reaching levels not seen for many years. The one chosen as this section’s title was one of the most popular.44 However, “Imagine, there’s an election and nobody goes” was painted in meter-high letters on streets and walls in many cities. In East Berlin, it became clear that Kohl’s speech of early 1987 was having an aftereffect. There the MfS found the inscription “GDR-KZ” (equating the GDR with a Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp) at two polling stations, each 1.4 meters long. At Dresden’s main station, a 2-meter sign read: “Free thinking not required, free action too daring, your vote against is required—election ’89.” In Müncheberg near Strausberg, the MfS discovered the 10-meter slogan painted on a street: “7th of May, shall the chaos continue?”45 In addition to these slogans, other signs of protest included thousands of leaflets circulated between Rügen and Erzgebirge. In Neubrandenburg in mid-February, a “federation of dissatisfied citizens” distributed an “election appeal” that read: “Are you dissatisfied with: the supply of apartments, furniture, motor vehicles, industrial goods, tropical fruits, the wage structure? Then don’t go to the polls. Our goal: Voter turnout 50 percent.”46 Nothing more is known about who was behind this. It probably included one or two people. Even though, as with the slogans, most of them appeared in East Berlin, the police and MfS had to register such discoveries in all districts. Individual leaflets in larger quantities were distributed in Leipzig, Dresden, East Berlin, Magdeburg, Rostock, and Schwerin. In Stralsund, the MfS registered 1,500 “handouts.” In the run-up to the elections, the SED, according to its own statements, held over one million election events up to April 6 alone. In contrast to previous elections, a strikingly large number of election critics attended these propaganda

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events. In many cities and communities, people used these events to get some air. In some places, critically minded people used them to try to nominate their own candidates without success. Many members of the opposition also turned up, criticized the election procedure, and called for real elections. The SED was not prepared for this offensive strategy, so that internally it had to complain time and again that the critics were superior to the candidates both in terms of content and rhetoric. At some events there were tumultuous scenes, for example when SED functionaries drove the troublemakers out, not shying away from threats of physical violence. These discussions had an impact. By April 19, 1989, 300 candidates had withdrawn and been replaced by new ones,47 and by election day this number had risen to 4,071.48 The SED did not communicate this publicly. However, at the end of March, it did allow news of one case to spread under the headline “Changed election proposal adopted in Neuglobsow.”49 On March 22, 6 of the 24 candidates had been rejected in a voters’ meeting, so that subsequent nominations had to be made a week later. No reasons were given in the official communications. The only thing that was obvious was that this was intended to demonstrate the “vitality of socialist democracy.” In fact, considerable conflicts prevailed in this community of about 500 inhabitants; these extended so far that the SED members did not nominate one another, so that no SED member appeared on the suggested list of nominees. The SED, however, was able to present Neuglobsow as a model case of socialist democracy because it did not have to fear that it would get into trouble with the main character in this play, the SED mayor, after he was removed. For apparently everyone in the village was aware of his immoral living conditions and his poor job performance, so that he would have lost all credibility even if he fled to the West. There was also an increasing number of cases in 1989 of people being installed as mayors or in other functions against the will of the SED. In Glowe and Altefähr (Rügen), for example, the CDU tried to nominate people whose critical stance toward the SED was known. Opposition circles used several strategies to make their protest against the election public. Open letters appeared in which the signatories stated that they would not vote because of the undemocratic election procedures and their apparent legitimizing character. The Thuringian regional group of the AKSK issued such a declaration on March 16, just as such a declaration, initiated by Marianne Birthler and Werner Fischer, came from East Berlin on April 15 from forty-eight opposition members. In Leipzig the Initiative for the Democratic Renewal of Society associated with Michael Arnold, Gesine Oltmanns, Thomas Rudolph, Rainer Müller, and Uwe Schwabe distributed calls to boycott the elections. The Saxon state synod also decided on April 4 that all had to decide for themselves whether to vote and, if so, whom to vote for. Even though many pastors and church employees took part in the elections (an estimated half, and of these another one-third to one-half voted in favor of the proposed slate), the general

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criticism of the electoral system formed a basic consensus that all Protestant regional churches shared. In addition to calls for an election boycott, opposition groups and Protestant community groups circulated explanatory papers in all regions about the legal framework in which these elections took place and what an invalid or dissenting vote should look like. For in all the years of the GDR, people had speculated again and again about what constituted a dissenting vote. There were wild rumors: it was said that a ballot would be counted as a yes vote if, for example, only sixteen of the seventeen names were crossed out, if the paper as a whole but not each individual name was crossed out, or if the names were not neatly crossed out from the first to the last letter. In particular, these explanatory papers pointed out that participation in the public ballot count should not be denied. An IM from Anklam told his commanding officer in mid-February that the secretary of the district council had “recently said that the elections are as good as in the bag. She can already announce the result today, as it will be 98.3 percent or 99.3 percent. Uncertainties have been removed from the lists and if they do come, they will vote on ballot papers. They won’t even notice.”50 In this example, one sees one of the principles of elections: the election commission removed those who applied to emigrate, known opposition members, and nonvoters in previous elections from the electoral lists so that these were not included in the total number of voters from the outset. In mid-April 1989, the central election commission already possessed figures suggesting that 82,560 men and women had announced that they would not participate in the elections.51 They were also removed from the electoral rolls. Moreover, since January, the SED had been releasing more and more people who wished to emigrate to the Federal Republic if it had expected them to take public action against the elections or believed them capable of mobilizing like-minded people. In the run-up to the elections, one-third of all eligible voters voted in special polling stations52 where they found, to their astonishment, that they were not voting for candidates from their own constituency but from others. The number of such cases had also doubled. In an internal handwritten memo, Knuth Parthey, the MfS district office manager in Parchim, noted that the special polling stations achieved good results. He also stated that one should be “100 percent careful with communities.” For counting purposes, “no admission controls of any kind” were to be carried out but “to ensure a majority ratio.” A “dissenting vote” was politically more important than one of “nonparticipation,” which was why the election workers should only cautiously urge people to the ballot box. Finally, he noted that the security of the polling stations was to be handled as it always had been: “us inside, People’s Police outside.”53 On election day, the country was festively decorated. There were flags and posters everywhere. Exemplary citizens went to vote in the morning, preferably before breakfast. This, too, was a demonstrative action that the SED wished to

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see. Unlike in previous elections, far fewer house communities or other collectives came together to vote. What was new was that 160,000 foreigners with permanent residence permits in the GDR were granted the right to vote and stand for election upon application. That met with a lot of criticism. Opposition members suspected that the SED wanted to improve the election results once again. Many people strictly rejected the right of foreigners to vote for racist reasons. About one-third of the foreigners took advantage of their right to vote, and slightly more than 130 of them, mainly from the USSR, Vietnam, and Mozambique, stood for election. Most of them ran for the FDGB. The farm worker Karl Bettler and the writer Marcel Brun (Jean Villain) came from Western countries. The two Swiss candidates in the district of Neubrandenburg ran for the city council of Dargun and the district council of Prenzlau, respectively. In the district of Potsdam, Austrian Elise Griebenow was added. The seamstress wanted to sit on the Hohenlobbese municipal council. In the military barracks, election day went on as it had in the old days: for breakfast there was tropical fruit to celebrate the day, after which the recruits had to “move” into the polling station in loose groups. Once there, those interested in voting often found that the comrades had “forgotten” a voting booth. Those who refused to vote were “worked on” all day but still had to vote, with numerous lucrative promises being made to them. Recruits who went to a polling booth were under considerable pressure because they were watched not by any electoral committees but by the superiors they dealt with every day in military life. Nevertheless, there were a few individual men—only a few dozen—fulfilling their basic military service requirements who, under these particularly threatening circumstances in the barracks of the National People’s Army, border troops, or riot police, cast a vote against the party slate or did not vote. Such men were subsequently called to account for their actions for days or weeks, had to make statements about their actions, were socially excluded by their own “comrades,” and were often then subjected to particularly harsh treatment and humiliation by their superiors. It is understandable that it was precisely these young men who began to hate the system, or to hate it more. Since the construction soldiers were considered potential nonvoters or people who would vote no anyway, they were supposed to either vote beforehand in a special polling station in their hometown or to be “on leave” on election Sunday so that large concentrations of dissenting votes at the site could be avoided. On election day, individuals across the country handed in their voting cards at polling stations, demonstrating that they were unwilling to participate in the spectacle. Some even called the polling place to announce that they would not come. Everywhere, SED officials and MfS staff observed that more people than ever were going to polling booths, prompting a phenomenon that had never been seen before: the formation of lines to vote. The public counting of the ballot papers began at 6 p.m. In most larger cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants

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and in many smaller municipalities, opposition members supervised the counting. In the district of Leipzig-Mitte alone, citizens controlled the count at 83 of 84 polling stations, in Berlin-Weißensee at 66 of 67, and in Dresden at 227 of 444. Many people who had not previously belonged to opposition groups took part in the count in around 50 cities and municipalities at more than 1,000 polling stations, as these figures make this clear. They comprised between 3 and 30 percent of the dissenting votes. Voter turnout was usually between 60 and 80 percent, to which the special polling stations’ counts had to be added. In most cases, without justification and in violation of the law, the controllers were not given access to the counting of these votes. When the chairman of the election commission, SED Politburo member Egon Krenz, announced the usual election results in the evening—in the entire GDR the turnout had been just under 99 percent and the dissenting votes comprised a good 1 percent (the absolute number was 142,301)—various groups reacted with joy or horror. The election observers were pleased because their suspicions were confirmed. Within a few days, they were able to prove the widespread election fraud in many constituencies because they could show that the number of dissenting votes they had observed was usually already significantly higher than the number officially stated for the individual constituencies. In Dresden, for example, it was possible to prove that 12,379 dissenting votes were counted at the controlled polling stations with 104,727 eligible voters. The official result for 389,569 votes cast, however, showed only 9,751 dissenting votes.54 The horror arose as it became clear that SED leaders were still happy to use any means necessary to assert their agenda. Moreover, the election fraudsters’ brazenness tamped down any hopes for the future and gave rise to fears that such brazenness would only increase. Finally, a particularly large number of people loyal to the system were angry about the way the SED rulers ruled with such a misjudgment of reality. That evening in Leipzig, a small demonstration against the elections, which had been planned long before, took place, and 72 demonstrators were arrested. In view of the violence that occurred in this process, numerous passersby and onlookers showed solidarity with the demonstrators. The Monday prayer the following day also focused on the elections. In many places people celebrated at the election parties mentioned above. The largest one was held in the rooms of the Elisabeth parish in Berlin-Mitte, which also housed the KvU. About 300 individuals who had refused to vote met there, among them numerous activists who had observed the ballot counting at more than 230 polling stations in East Berlin. Vicar Thomas Krüger gave a devotional service and quoted passages from the Old Testament suggesting that there were situations in which one had to defend oneself against priests and kings. The permanent correspondent of the Frankfurter Rundschau, Karl-Heinz Baum, reported on Krüger’s remarks. People who participated in dissent would probably suffer, but it would also be fun, “a

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game in which some moves have to be executed ‘with cheekiness.’” But Krüger also warned his audience that only proper participation in society would show that “history is not made by laws, but is based on differences.”55 It had now become a matter of saving the community in the GDR, and he hoped that other meetings would follow to carry on the protest.56 Election observers also gathered in the Samaritan parish of Pastor Eppelmann, who kept close contact with the party in the Elisabeth parish. Gradually, reports from other parts of the GDR also arrived. The “Coordination Group for Elections” associated with Mario Schatta and Evelyn Zupke from the Friedenskreis Weißensee in East Berlin decided to systematically collect the data and published the first Report on the 1989 Local Elections on May 19. It revealed the falsifications and was quickly distributed throughout the country. On June 8, the UB made Election Case ’89 available, a samzidat publication with more comprehensive documentation of the election falsifications. There were also samizdat documentations in Leipzig, Zittau, Coswig, Eilenburg, and other cities. In addition, hundreds of people, mainly from East Berlin and Potsdam, compiled a criminal complaint leading to 84 criminal charges being filed against unknown persons for electoral fraud, none of whom were prosecuted. On May 19, the GDR attorney general, in close cooperation with MfS minister Mielke, ordered that no response be made to the content of such reports. In addition, there were petitions, open letters, and, above all, a tremendous media response in the Federal Republic. The church leaders criticized the elections and demanded a new electoral system. The circle associated with Bickhardt, Mehlhorn, and Fischbeck once again wrote an open letter on July 1 complaining of “a fundamental change in political practice.”57 Although it was clear that there had been “electoral fraud,” it remained unknown for a long time how the elections had actually been falsified. Two means have already been mentioned. First, the ballots at the special polling stations could not be observed, so that manipulations took place there. The following was stated in a report found in the Krenz office: All in all, however, it can be assumed that from all districts results have been reported for their special polling stations that were already included in the respective target for the later final result. Heads of district election offices emphasized that without the high number of voters in special polling stations and the internal count, the final result obtained by the district would have been almost impossible to achieve.58

SED leaders pretended to tolerate a maximum of 1 percent of dissenting votes. Second, not only was the aforementioned purging of the electoral rolls carried out but there were also numerous reports, including from IMs, that election administrators or their close associates filled out the ballots for nonvoters or simply added ballots. For example, one report stated: “I only noticed the mayor coming with some ballots in his hand and saying that they should be added. Where they came from is unknown to me.”59 In the polling stations themselves, however, the count

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was usually correct. Most likely, the SED district administrations gave an exact percentage of nonvoters and invalid or dissenting votes to the individual districts, and these were, in turn, divided and passed on to the cities and municipalities. The latter, in turn, reduced the percentage targets with concrete absolute figures and reported these back to the higher level as the election result. This electoral fraud program not only occurred nationally but also involved a dense network of SED functionaries and mayors. On the lower levels there was still occasional resistance, but this was wiped out with a pencil at the next hierarchical level. Of the over 270,000 candidates, exactly two were not elected; that is, they received less than 50 percent of the votes.60 Officially, East Berlin had the highest number of those who refused to participate in the election (2.8 percent). The SED functionaries admitted to almost 5 percent of nonvoters in the district of Prenzlauer Berg (4.95 percent) and almost as many in the Saxon city of Glauchau (4.93 percent). The highest percentage of dissenting votes was given to the Potsdam-Land district (4.14 percent), followed by the Leipzig-Land district (3.98 percent) and the city of Plauen in Vogtland (3.82 percent). It was not by chance that this city became a focal point of events in the autumn of 1989. Since the end of 1988, a group had been working there to prove electoral fraud and then also played a decisive role in preparing the protest events in the city.61 Seelow, Frankfurt/ Oder, Schwedt, Görlitz, Freital, Glauchau, Freiberg, Altenburg, and Leipzig also officially had dissenting votes of more than 3 percent. In the 1980s, the MfS called the campaign for safeguarding elections “Aktion Symbol.” This code word also indicates why SED leaders insisted on a 99 percent result and used so many tricks to keep the nonvoter share (officially just over 150,000) low. Nonvotes and dissenting votes officially made up around 300,000 of the 12.5 million total eligible votes. This seemed manageable when distributed over 15 districts. It is in the nature of communist dictatorships to officially concede only a small group of opponents of historical progress, historical laws and above all the all-encompassing “welfare policy” as a residual group of bourgeois views. Had the election fraud allowed for only three percentage points more for dissenting votes and three more for nonvotes, as well, these two groups would have already comprised about one million people and would not have been so easily argued away. Above all, the SED saw the danger of imitation, an effect it particularly feared. Since all election documents and instructions were destroyed a few days after May 7, it is no longer possible to determine how many people actually cast dissenting votes under the close observation of the SED and MfS and how many refused to vote at all. There were also considerable regional variations. Some individual details were preserved. Universities and colleges formed their own constituencies to ensure that they could keep a close eye on the ideological condition of the teaching staff and student body. In the GDR’s higher education and vocational training sector, there were 7,844 registered eligible voters who

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were considered to be loyal or supportive of the system; only a few individuals belonged to the opposition. Even in these constituencies, dissenting votes comprised 5.3 percent. Of the nearly 2,200 students at the College of Architecture and Construction in Weimar, 15.5 percent voted against the proposed slate; at the University of Jena it was 8.3 percent (of 5,300), at the University of Leipzig it was 7.4 percent (of 12,000), at the University of Rostock it was 6.5 percent (of 6,300), and at the College for Transportation in Dresden it was still 4.3 percent (of 3,700).62 At Humboldt University, 5.4 percent voted “no” (377); in 1986, there had only been 26 such votes.63 The Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee made up the peak of such votes: 51 percent (slightly more than 100 students) voted against the election proposal. Real turnout was very high due to the pressure exerted in these settings, ranging from 98 to 99.5 percent, and dissenting votes were particularly hard to cast. Even though some small towns and municipalities had voter refusal and dissenting rates of 20 percent or more, a value of about 10 percent seems realistic for the entire GDR. After all, that would represent well over two million people who would have openly dissented. In other words, the SED had no choice but to falsify the election. In June 1989, Krenz assumed that 8 to 15 percent would cast dissenting votes. In the past it would have been easier because the enemies of the state did not vote, but now more people than before came out to vote against it. Long before these elections, popular jokes suggested that it was only a matter of time before 105 percent of those eligible to vote would agree to the election proposal with 110 percent of the votes. In 1989, things had almost gotten to this point because when the central election office conducted a dress rehearsal on May 1 to see whether all the communication networks and computer calculations were also working, a turnout of 200 resulted. In June, Krenz proposed that the targets for voter turnout and yes votes be lowered by “a few points” because this would be easier to “cope with . . . than subsequent inconsistencies.”64 The historical significance of two immediate consequences of the local elections should be appreciated. The first may have been inevitable—it marked the beginning of a period in which a constantly growing segment of society increasingly pushed the SED forward. No oppositional demonstration, no public protest went without reference to the election fraud. The protest demonstrations in East Berlin organized by Mario Schatta and young men and women from his circle on the seventh of every month from then on came to be emblematic of all the demonstrations. The SED’s usual methods for dealing with opposition—instructions, arrests, and punishments—remained ineffective against these demonstrations in East Berlin. On June 7, the demonstrators intended to march from the consistory in the city center to the State Council Building to submit a petition. The effort failed because of the large contingent of security personnel, who made forty-eight arrests. In the evening, a commemorative information service was held in the Sophienkirche in the city center. From there several hundred

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people marched to the State Council Building, carrying banners with the slogan “Never enough electoral fraud” and a black ballot box with the inscription “Here democracy lies buried.” The MfS also thwarted this action with a large security contingent; West German television cameras filmed scenes of MfS forces pushing peaceful demonstrators away and snatching the banners from them. There were 140 arrests. Schatta and his oppositional crew now came up with the idea of organizing protest demonstrations on Alexanderplatz from July 7. This idea was as brilliant as it was simple. The square was always busy in the late afternoon, so the MfS would have to act more cautiously and, likewise, passersby might be persuaded to join the demonstrators. On July 7, August 7, and September 7, the SED and MfS held thousands of forces at the ready directly on the Alexanderplatz; hundreds of protestors dressed as tourists—and yet still recognizable—walked around the square. On July 7, for example, 3,265 MfS members, 1,500 police officers, and 1,500 “social troops” were in action. Each month there were arrests, bans from occupying certain spaces, and administrative penalties. The activists were mainly young men and women who had had enough of talking and writing open letters and petitions. The demonstration on October 7 coincided with the anniversary of the founding of the GDR. A second consequence of the local elections and the disclosure of the election fraud was at least as significant. Many people, whether they upheld the system, were loyal to it, or were politically disinterested, felt humiliated and angry because SED leaders kept them in a state of immaturity. Even many people who had cast their “yes” vote with conviction asked why the SED was taking the people for fools and why it could not be satisfied with winning the election by 80 or 90 percent. As many SED comrades noted, each party in the West could only dream of such results in their own electoral system. The speed skater Karin Kania, for many years the world’s most successful athlete in her discipline who retired from competitive sports in 1988, said in July 1989 in the Federal Republic of Germany that the GDR elections had been rigged and that 70 percent of the votes would have been closer to the truth. But cadres beyond those generously supported by the SED were also clearly moving away from the system. IM “Waldemar” from Potsdam, a policeman who had been working for the MfS since 1965, reported that his wife, a teacher, was active as an election worker and that a neighbor, who worked as a secretary to the head of the NVA Wehrkreiskommando Zossen, had told her on May 8, 1989: “Why the effort—the result of the elections was certain beforehand anyway.”65 The most alarming news came from employees of the youth radio station DT 64. As late as the end of February 1989, IMs from there reported that Rainer Eppelmann was “unanimously” rejected by the staff. The blues masses constituted “meetings of antisocial elements.” The DT 64 communists were worried: “These concerts are a disgrace to the church.” They saw very clearly that Eppelmann was “controlled and influenced by the West. This is particularly evident in the impression that

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the ZDF is aware of his planned activities even before he is.”66 A few weeks later, the youth radio station reported that Eppelmann’s statements in Western media about election rigging were being widely discussed, which suggested that it was the first time statements made by Eppelmann had been believed. Acquaintances of DT 64 employees “who were used on election committees” indirectly confirmed the information. Finally, the report stated that an overwhelming majority felt that the current electoral system no longer fulfilled the necessary requirements that such systems had by definition.67 The electoral fraud and its public exposure remained a topic of discussion until the autumn and beyond. In December, the first preliminary investigations were carried out, and three individuals were sentenced to prison for electoral fraud—still in GDR times: the mayor of Leipzig, Bernd Seidel; the first secretary of the SED city leadership, Joachim Prag; and the head of the arithmetic group, Lieselotte Schön. The preliminary proceedings had been initiated by the public prosecutor, Hans-Karl Sitz, who only weeks before had been indicting political opponents of the SED regime. Further proceedings followed later, including the sentencing of alleged reformers such as Hans Modrow and Wolfgang Berghofer, the mayor of Dresden, to prison terms for electoral fraud. When Prag was in custody, he wrote significantly to Modrow on February 12, 1990: “Since I have been in prison, shame is added to the way people were kept under lock and key in our country. That’s just inhumane. . . . Under such conditions, how can one prepare properly and with dignity for the trial? It’s unspeakably difficult.”68 Such confessions, whose senders today mostly wish to know nothing about, were made in 1990 in great numbers. What needs more explanation is the fact that the UN also officially invited the GDR to send election observers to Namibia in October 1989. The SED Politburo agreed on September 12, and thirty comrades set off on October 11: twelve each from the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defense, five from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and one from the MfS. Among the “police observers” were, in addition to the MfS man, an additional undercover MfS officer (OibE) and several IMs. Their assignment ended in the spring of 1990.

Between Reform and Civil War: The Eastern Bloc Breaks Apart In mid-September 1989, a symposium of socialist states on the development of criminality took place in North Korea. An IM who worked in the GDR Ministry of the Interior subsequently reported on it, observing that the head of the delegation, a lieutenant general from the Ministry of the Interior, showed “an almost childish enthusiasm” about North Korea’s cult of personality. On several occasions, he noted that the positions held by the GDR delegation were mostly shared by Romanians. He described the North Korean terror regime realistically:

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“The DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] has an almost perfect system of surveillance and security. The complete conformity of society is clearly visible.” He found it particularly noteworthy that decisions to banish (imprison in camps) conspicuous persons were quite unbureaucratic. “There is no trial or anything. The authority to make decisions is in the hands of the precinct commander.” This too led him to the conclude “that our contacts with the DPRK will be considerably strengthened and deepened.”69 Similar remarkable documents can be found commenting on meetings of top SED politicians such as Hermann Axen with high-ranking functionaries from Cuba or Nicaragua. For example, on September 3, 1989, Axen told Raul Castro in East Berlin that the GDR’s greatest problems lay “in some socialist countries, i.e., on our backs.”70 Moreover, the GDR only reestablished close relations with Albania in 1989. All of these things were signs of the GDR’s increasing international isolation even within the Eastern Bloc. In May 1989, millions of people in the GDR became aware that the Honecker regime needed to resign. Only a few thought of overthrowing the system; most people in both East and West were counting on an evolutionary process. It was generally expected that Honecker and a large number of his allies would formally depart at an early SED party conference in 1990. His potential heir to the throne, Egon Krenz, never enjoyed much popularity. As the head of the FDJ for many years he stood for “professional youth,” as the CC secretary for security issues he represented the system of oppression, and as the head of the election commission he had now also been discredited, revealed to be the supreme election fraudster. Meanwhile, developments in the Soviet Union, which had been growing considerably more dramatic since 1988, gave people continued hope that glasnost winds would at some point blow in the GDR. The riots in Azerbaijan and Armenia, which resulted in many deaths from 1988 onward, were an example of the late effects of Moscow’s imperialist policy. Communism’s ugly face grew ever uglier by the week. By August 23, 1988, the anniversary of the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, when hundreds of thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians demonstrated for independence and against the communist regime, the downfall of the Soviet Empire had symbolically begun. Gorbachev’s troops tried to stop this with military force on several occasions, for example in April 1989 in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi,71 and in January 1991 in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. Many dead bodies lined the path to the final dissolution of the empire. The courage with which the Baltic states confronted Moscow was particularly impressive. On August 23, 1989, 1.25 million residents of these states demonstrated again for state independence, forming a human chain from Tallinn via Riga to Vilnius. If such news met with great interest in the GDR, the events in Poland and Hungary seemed to serve as models. In May 1988, János Kádár resigned as the

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leader of Hungary’s state party. The pressure to reform was particularly strong there precisely because Hungary had been pursuing a cautious policy of opening up for years. After Kádár’s resignation, the way was clear for a new round of reforms. On February 10–11, Hungary’s CC discussed a new historical assessment of the events of 1956 and advocated that a multiparty system be introduced. On June 13, 1989, the Round Table met for the first time with government and opposition representatives who negotiated a quick way to dissolve Hungary’s Communist Party, proclaim the founding of a Hungarian republic, and hold free elections. The upheaval in communist Europe in 1989–91 was closely connected with the “rebirth of history,” to use Ralf Dahrendorf’s famous phrase. June 16, 1989, was more symbolic of this than almost any other date. Eight years before, Ágnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér had written: “Who could have predicted with certainty that there would not be a state funeral for Imre Nagy in Budapest? And should the city experience this and its minister president find peace in a place of honor at last, then there can hardly be any more doubt about which slogans will be on the banners of the people accompanying him.”72 Exactly thirty-one years after Nagy’s execution, the impossible happened—the collapse of communism had experienced another symbolic break. On June 16, more than two hundred thousand people participated in a rally in Budapest commemorating those murdered after the 1956 revolution. At the same time, they—along with thousands of tourists from the GDR—buried communism. Poland, the GDR’s eastern neighbor, experienced several large waves of strikes in 1988. In late August that year, the Polish government resumed formal talks with Solidarność. The latter proposed to convene a round table to discuss the future of Poland and the path to democracy. Poland’s “Round Table” became a symbol of the country’s largely peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. Its first meeting was opened on February 6, 1989. In mid-January 1989, Solidarność was once again made legal for all practical purposes, and on April 17, it was formally made legal again. Polish society, step-by-step and led by Solidarność, negotiated the dictatorship out of existence. Semi-free elections were held in June—only 35 percent of the Sejm seats (the lower house of parliament) were up for election. Solidarność won them all, and in the Senate it won ninety-nine out of one hundred seats. On August 24, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarność advisor, became the Polish prime minister. There was a great deal of excitement among the SED, and the bloc parties were also deeply unsettled. Many GDR people followed the developments in Poland and Hungary with great sympathy. The problem in the summer was that there were no comparable opposition groups, like the Polish Solidarność or the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) and the Federation of Young Democrats (FIDESZ), that had mass appeal and were deeply rooted in GDR society. Many people, in turn, showed solidarity with Romania because the living conditions there were

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catastrophic and the political regime was particularly brutal. The GDR opposition also initiated several Romania Days to show this solidarity.73 The ČSSR, for its part, seemed to resemble the GDR in many ways, and many followed the protest demonstrations on Wenceslas Square in Prague, which had increased in number since 1988, with great sympathy. When the playwright Václav Havel, one of the spokespersons for Charta 77, was again sentenced to nine months in prison in February 1989, the resulting great wave of international solidarity was also felt in the GDR. GDR opposition activists organized a nationwide day of solidarity with the political prisoners of the ČSSR on March 19. Even the official P.E.N. Club of the GDR, under pressure from Rolf Schneider and Christoph Hein, showed solidarity with Havel. Their proposal to draft a protest resolution did not win a majority, but Stephan Hermlin’s compromise proposal did, namely, to write a letter to P.E.N. headquarters in London assuring them that they would support their efforts to secure Havel’s release. The reformist dissolution of the communist regimes in Poland and Hungary was countered by the dictatorships in Bulgaria, Romania, the ČSSR, and the GDR in the summer of 1989. All of them were in a deep crisis to which the rulers tried to react with an intensified policy of repression, while at the same time growing sections of society rebelled. There were many differences in the details, but the symptoms were similar. For example, a decision of the Warsaw Pact states of July 7–8, 1989, in Bucharest met with little interest in these societies. The representatives there had agreed that, in future, there should be no more interference in the internal affairs of other states, even if they were allies. The Warsaw Pact thus also formally repealed the “Brezhnev Doctrine.” This was intended as a political signal to Poland and Hungary, especially since Gorbachev had already said things along these lines several times since 1988.74 By chance, but symbolically, Honecker collapsed during the meeting and had to be flown to East Berlin in a special plane for medical treatment. His representative Willi Stoph is said to have stammered monosyllabically. In the GDR, this development had little impact because most people had no longer believed that Gorbachev would use Soviet tanks in the event of any unrest in the GDR anyway. More importantly, however, a large part of the population had been in shock since the beginning of June 1989 and believed, in any case, that the SED leadership itself was capable of anything, including the use of military force against its own people. This was because on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party leadership had ordered the violent evacuation of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square by tanks. In April 1989, a new oppositional student movement had formed in China. About two thousand students moved into the Tiananmen Square on April 17 to advocate reforms. A few days later, the first clashes with the police occurred. At the same time, the student movement was turning into an opposition movement that encompassed the whole of society. The communist propaganda contributed

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to this with untrue and demagogic claims. When the first Soviet-Chinese summit since 1959 took place in Beijing from May 15 to 18, Gorbachev dragged hundreds of press representatives from all over the world with him to China so that the world public could also learn about the events in Beijing. On May 17, about one million people protested there. One day after Gorbachev’s departure, the Beijing authorities imposed martial law, which hundreds of thousands ignored. They prevented army units from penetrating the center of the city. Riots broke out in many Chinese cities. On the night of June 3–4, 1989, the Chinese military finally took ruthless action against the protesters on Tiananmen Square. To date, the exact number of victims remains unknown, but about one hundred demonstrators were killed in Beijing. Most of the deaths were in other cities. Estimates range up to three thousand, and the CP of China subsequently unleashed a nationwide wave of repression and oppression, carrying out at least forty-nine executions and handing down hundreds of prison sentences.75 Almost the entire world was horrified and showed solidarity with the Chinese demonstrators. Even during the communist world festival in North Korea at the beginning of July, there were protests against the massacre in China but also against the regimes in North Korea and Romania. Scandinavian festival participants initiated a protest resolution that ten European country delegations joined, including Hungary and Yugoslavia. The MfS was helping its North Korean comrades, who were not used to so many foreigners in the country, with a strong operational group on the ground. Although the MfS officers noticed that a few GDR participants also signed the resolution, they could not find out who they were. On June 5, SED leaders already celebrated the Chinese crackdown with a headline in Neues Deutschland: “China’s People’s Liberation Army Crushed Counterrevolutionary Uprising.” The SED leadership’s alliance with Ceaușescu had already caused great shock and dismay, and the fact that Honecker had received the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam amicably a few days earlier also fit into this picture. But when the SED leadership openly showed solidarity with mass murderers and welcomed China’s suppression, many people were speechless. Many were also concerned about this sentence in the article, “The rebels had intended to overthrow the socialist order,” which suggested a subliminal threat.76 On June 8, the Volkskammer passed a declaration that Ernst Timm, the first secretary of the SED district leadership in Rostock, introduced on behalf of the SED leadership. It stated: “The deputies of the Volkskammer note that in the present situation the political solution to internal problems persistently sought by the party and state leadership of the People’s Republic of China has been prevented as a result of the violent and bloody outbreaks of anti-constitutional elements. As a result, the people’s power felt compelled to restore order and security by using armed forces. Regrettably, many people were injured and also killed.” Not a single member of the Volkskammer protested

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against this cynical statement. Under applause, it was unanimously adopted.77 A week later, GDR foreign minister Oskar Fischer met his Chinese counterpart and assured him that the GDR was firmly on the side of the Chinese Communist Party. At the Pedagogical Congress on June 13, the minister of education, Margot Honecker, also gave a goosebump-inducing Cold War speech. In it, she stated, to the horror many SED comrades: All forces hostile to socialism have once again stepped onto the scene—and they will do so again and again—to stop socialism from progressing on its way to harm it; that is something that young people can, must, and should recognize. For this we have to open their eyes so that they realize: It is not yet time to sit back and relax, our time is a time of struggle, it needs youth who can fight, who can help strengthen socialism, who can stand up for it, who can defend it in word and deed, and, if necessary, with a weapon in their hands. (Applause.)78

Hurrying to China as late as June, Hans Modrow demonstrated whose side the SED was on, as well as his own personal inclinations. Egon Krenz publicly affirmed several times that the Chinese Communists had shown themselves to be steadfast class warriors. The demagogy of SED propaganda knew no bounds in those days. Junge Welt published a full-page photo of a charred corpse with the comment: “This is how the counterrevolution raged in Beijing.” Jan Helbig, the commentator, also wrote: “On the leaflets of the counterrevolution it said: ‘Kill all 47 million communists!’”79 A Chinese propaganda film documenting the bloody suppression was broadcast twice on GDR television with terrible, inhumane commentary. A lot of people were amazed because they already knew most of the pictures from Western television—but there the commentary had been quite different, according as it did with the truth. The Chinese propaganda film turned out to be a pure lie and demagogy. The SED’s message had gotten through to GDR society. From now on, people believed that the “Chinese solution” would be applied in cases of unrest and mass protests. On September 7, Günter Schabowski opened the “Beijing Days” in East Berlin. Egon Krenz, for his part, as the highest-ranking SED representative, spent time in China from the end of September for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, repeatedly praising the communist nation.80 Krenz had once again discredited himself with lasting effect.81 The events in China and the attitude of the SED leadership did not remain unchallenged. Opposition members demonstrated in front of the Chinese embassy in East Berlin on June 5 and 6 and were arrested by the police. At a well-attended concert in Brandenburg on June 10, the indie rock band Herbst in Peking observed a minute of silence for the victims and protested against the election fraud—and was subsequently banned from performing again. Aram

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Radomski, who was well acquainted with the musicians and had designed a logo for the band, succeeded in creating a special cabinet piece. At the end of May, the photographer and his friend Siegbert Schefke, both active in the opposition, had attracted attention during a targeted vehicle check near Wismar. His car contained numerous Western books, samizdat publications, and Western photo and video technology. Radomski, a son of Gert Neumann, received a summons to the Ministry of the Interior on June 7. When he had to go to the restroom, he stuck stickers of “Autumn in Beijing” on the walls in there. Questioned by the officers, Radomski declared in writing that this had to do with a band that played, for example, “Soviet folklore,” and that he wanted to promote the band “nationwide” to the “security organs.” “Possible interpretations of current political events are not intended or wished for.”82 Such boldness directly in a center of power was hardly to be surpassed. From June 6, intercessional services for the Chinese victims began throughout the country, some of which were repeated until the end of August. In the Pankow Church of Hope, Mario Schatta said on June 6 that the conditions in the GDR could lead to similar military massacre, and he repeated this several times in the following days. Schatta was by no means alone with this assessment. One day earlier, Gerd and Ulrike Poppe as well as Reinhard Weißhuhn of the IFM had already stated “that the commentary on the events in the GDR media allows the conclusion that the GDR leadership could also proceed with armed force in the case of demonstrations.”83 In Dorndorf (Thuringia), Pastor Oberthür, a member of the AKSK, put protest posters up in the window, which he was pressured to remove repeatedly, but he always replaced them. Twenty-five opposition groups protested on June 21 against the declaration of the Volkskammer. In the Church of the Redeemer a “drumming fast” took place from June 25 to 28; it was continued one day later in the Elisabethkirche and in Potsdam and was resumed on July 9 in and in front of the Dresden Kreuzkirche under the motto “Drumming for Beijing.” Rainer Eppelmann organized a service of lamentation in the crowded Samaritan Church on June 29. This example was also followed by churches throughout the country. When the Church Congress of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saxony ended in Leipzig on July 9, opposition members carried posters with the words “Democracy,” also in Chinese, and “Never again election fraud.” Since they were not allowed to speak in front of the fifty thousand participants in the closing ceremony, about one thousand moved to the city center. The MfS snatched the posters from them and finally forced them into a church. Even more threatening for the SED state, however, was the fact that people who were not active in the opposition groups were again speaking out. The first action already took place on June 4 in front of the Chinese embassy, when two young men lit candles there. At the Goethe-Oberschule in Brandenburg, unknown persons painted a protest slogan on June 5. Similar actions were carried out in many places. Banners were temporarily displayed on numerous churches.

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Brave motorists decorated their Trabants and Wartburgs with declarations of solidarity. In all regions of the GDR, leaflets were circulating again, and slogans appeared on streets and walls. In Zossen, one worker even terminated his employment contract because he no longer wanted to fill export orders for China. Many people showed sympathy and concern for the Chinese. In Prenzlauer Berg there was a small protest meeting. The government once again deployed its usual methods of oppression: arrests, teachings, and disciplinary punishments. The MfS functionaries in charge of checking the mail registered hundreds of protest letters to the Chinese embassy. Among them were not only collective letters and letters written by numerous church employees but also letters by many people who had previously gone unnoticed, even several by SED members who were considered loyal to the party line. This was particularly alarming to the SED and MfS. And the tendency that had already been observed during the Sputnik ban, the local elections, and the Pentecost meeting now grew even more pronounced: at the universities and colleges more and more students came out of hiding and protested against the massacre and thus against the SED’s stance toward it. The first protests sprang from the two departments of theology of the Universities of Rostock and East Berlin as well as the TH Ilmenau and TU Magdeburg on June 5. In Ilmenau and Magdeburg, signatures were collected over several days. There were also public protests at the Rostock University of Drama, the Technical University of Leipzig, the Universities of Jena and Leipzig, and Humboldt University throughout the month. Erich Honecker was directly confronted with the negative majority opinion of society on the Chinese massacre and the SED statements at least once. This happened on June 11, 1989, of all days, when he was attending the festive rededication of Greifswald’s cathedral. Bishop Horst Gienke, working as IM “Orion” for the MfS, had prepared everything conscientiously and ensured that critics like Bishop Forck could not participate in the insider meetings with Honecker. But he could not prevent two things. In front of the cathedral, oppositional leaflets against the spectacle were distributed, banners were unrolled, and at the same time Pastor Reinhard Glöckner preached in the Marienkirche against Gienke’s state-supportive attitude and asked why the cathedral did not commemorate the victims of China, Romania, Lebanon, South Africa, or the Soviet Union.84 In principle, he was right, but he could not know, any more than Gienke could know, that the cathedral’s pastor Joachim Puttkammer said an intercessional prayer during the controversial rededication that, although ambiguous, was again clear enough in view of Honecker’s presence: “We pray for the People’s Republic of China, that peace may enter the country and that everything may come to a good end.”85 The rededication of the cathedral had a violent aftermath. On July 19, 1989, Neues Deutschland published an exchange of letters between Gienke and Honecker on its front page. In his letter, Bishop Gienke expressed that his church had full confidence in the SED’s policies and in Honecker, in particular.

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All over the country, Christians, pastors, and church leaders were horrified by Gienke’s solo effort, which was as far from presenting reality as the SED leadership. Men like Bishop Gienke, with their willingness to adapt, supported the system and caused lasting damage to the reputation of the Protestant churches. In November 1989, he resigned from the episcopate after the state synod passed a vote of no confidence in him by thirty-two votes to thirty.

Autumn in Beijing, Winter in Berlin, Spring in Moscow One can hardly grasp the dynamic of the events in these weeks the way the participants experienced them at the time. Critics of the state had hardly calmed down since the raid on the UB and the Zion Community in November 1987. One unbelievable event followed the next, barely digested. In the GDR, the SED and MfS were always coming up with new tricks; in the Eastern Bloc it was getting dangerous, but people in the West seemed to have even fewer answers than the people who were affected. Politicians were thinking and acting in the categories of the early 1980s, and Western societies seemed uninterested in the zone as before; only the media reported, even if sometimes euphemistically, at least about what was happening behind the Wall. All of them missed the inner dynamic, the inner erosion, that had afflicted the GDR. In the early summer of 1989, most German commentators and intellectuals believed that the GDR was stable “in spite of everything,” although the political legitimacy of the regime was now more frequently called into question. Hardly anyone, and certainly no one in the opinion-making forums, questioned the communist principle of power and domination. It legitimized Gorbachev, too, in the West in a new way that continues to have an effect to this day. Chancellor Kohl, Foreign Minister Genscher, and many others still talk about him as if he had been legitimized by a democratic process. During this phase, many GDR people transformed into citizens who utilized rights as if they were guaranteed by the state. From late 1987 and early 1988, more and more citizens became truly conscious of the fact that they were living in a country without civil rights. One of them was Martin Rohde, born in 1967. Rohde grew up in Berlin-Friedrichshagen at the Müggelsee, completed the tenth grade there, and trained as a toolmaker. He was a stubborn but highachieving student, a member of the FDJ, and he held FDJ functions in his class. His parents were physicists; his father was an SED functionary in a Berlin company. Rohde enjoyed a lot of freedom at home, had a wide circle of acquaintances, and made it clear from his outfits as a teenager that he would not conform. His political thinking was somehow left-wing, and he focused on parties, his desires, and joy. He was interested in politics and history; read newspapers, books, and magazines daily; and gradually acquired church group materials and

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oppositional samizdat products. In 1985, he left the FDJ by not paying any more contributions. He graduated from an evening school, took other courses such as Latin, and worked as a building caretaker and truck driver from January 1988. In the same year, he decided for political reasons to completely refuse to do his military service. He did not take part in the local elections on May 7 but participated in opposition election monitoring. On the night of July 1 to 2, 1989, a policeman arrested Rohde in Frankfurt/Oder, where he was staying for a party. He had painted large-scale slogans in various places in the Oder city: “Autumn in Beijing,” “Winter in Berlin,” “Spring in Moscow,” “RAF up,” “Those who vote are tormented; those who choose not to are tormented,” “With Hager things are lean,” “Beijing lives,” “The Wall is dying.” Martin Rohde followed the policeman almost willingly, thinking that the most he could be charged with was damage to property and hoping to convince them that he was right after all. Rohde’s interrogation transcripts are exemplary documents of sincerity, courage, resistance, clear-sightedness—and also a little naivety. In the interrogations, the young man virtually drew up a program of all that needed to be changed in the GDR. He showed that he was not an enemy of socialist ideas but very much an opponent of SED socialism. Rohde’s interrogators must have been perplexed because their delinquent showed himself to be open, honest, and so incessantly self-incriminating in their eyes that they probably couldn’t help thinking about this sincere and intelligent young man and his ideas. Martin Rohde remained steadfast, did not reveal a single name, not even the origin of oppositional and church materials, did not sign certain transcripts because they did not reflect his statements correctly, went on a hunger strike at times—and suffered under these completely new life circumstances. The surviving documents are testimonies of individual courage and at the same time illustrative material for why this system had come to its end in the summer of 1989. For weeks, the interrogators and the prisoner worked through almost the entire catalogue of questions that critical people asked about the conditions in the GDR. Rohde professed his support for the opposition groups, called human rights violations by name, and criticized the GDR’s press policy. In mid-July, an interrogator asked: “Where do you get off claiming that freedom of expression is not guaranteed in the GDR? What is the answer to this in the summer of 1989 in prison?” Rohde’s answer must also have disarmed him: “In concrete terms, I can see this by my own example, i.e., that I am currently in custody only because I have exercised my constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of expression by placing the writings I have been charged with producing in the Frankfurt (Oder) city area.” One month after his arrest, he wrote a detailed statement that was tantamount to a fundamental critique of the GDR. It ended with the sentence: “I regret the deed as such, but I cannot regret my opinion at this time because I am convinced that it is right.” The MfS did not manage to break the young man despite subjecting him to solitary confinement.

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On September 22, 1989, the District Court of Frankfurt/Oder sentenced Martin Rohde to fourteen months in prison. His work collective (another part of the dictatorship’s reality) wrote on September 20 “that Colleague Rohde must answer for his misdemeanor.” It declared that it was prepared to take him back after he served his sentence “and to support him in regaining a firm foothold in the collective.”86 And not untypical of behavior in those days, the director announced in September that when Rohde returned he would only clean the yard. When Rohde actually faced the director in 1990, the director called him a “hero.” Not until shortly before Christmas 1989 was the political prisoner Martin Rohde released from Cottbus prison, emerging to find a different country. In February 1990, the young man made a moving seventeen-minute film about his “case,” filming at original locations. On August 21, 1991, the District Court of Frankfurt/Oder rehabilitated him, clearing his record. He had already spent ten months in Switzerland, where he studied, founded a family, was employed at a university, and wrote a dissertation on French remembrance culture in the nineteenth century. Martin Rohde is an example of the thousands of people who, still in the summer, without any sort of safety net, stood up for democracy and freedom and, thus, quite unexpectedly, individually but decisively contributed to the elimination of the SED dictatorship.

Notes 1. François Furet, 1789—Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt/M., Berlin, Vienna, 1980) (French ed., 1978). 2. Manfred Kossok, “Eine große Revolution und ihre Weltwirkung,” Einheit 44, no. 7 (1989): 657. 3. In 1989–90 it was not yet possible to foresee the later wars in the Soviet Union or among the Commonwealth of Independent States, in the Balkans or in Ukraine: Andreas Wirsching, Der Preis der Freiheit. Geschichte Europas in unserer Zeit (Munich, 2012); Heinrich August Winkler, Geschichte des Westens. Die Zeit der Gegenwart (Munich, 2015). 4. K. V., “Wie wir Revolutionäre ehren,” ND, 23. 1. 1989. 5. “Aus dem abschließenden Dokument des Wiener Treffens,” ND, 21./22. 1. 1989. 6. MfS, ZAIG, Nr. 79/89, 16. 2. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 3740. 7. ND, 20. 1. 1988. 8. Offener Brief an Erich Honecker, 23. 1. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Berlin, BV Berlin, Abt. AKG 37, Bl. 28. 9. Grenztruppen der DDR, Niederschrift über die Rücksprache beim Minister für Nationale Verteidigung, i. V. Generaloberst Streletz, am 3. 4. 1989, 4. 4. 1989. BA, MfS, HA I 5753, Bl. 4. 10. MfS, Zentrale Dienstbesprechung vom 28. 4. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG/Tb/3 (audiorecording). 11. At the end of 2009, there was also a report about the last deaths on the border in October 1989: Michael Sontheimer, “Tödliche Ungeduld,” Der Spiegel 49 (2009): 43–45.

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12. “‘Ein Weg, der zu einem guten Ziel führen kann.’ Interview mit Manfred Stolpe,” Die Welt, 10. 1. 1989. 13. “DDR—wir ändern die Schreibweise, nicht unsere Überzeugung,” Bild, 2. 8. 1989. 14. “Herr Stolpe und der Idealfall,” ND, 11. 1. 1989. 15. “Kommentar im SFB vom 11. 1. 1989,” in epd Dokumentation 6/1989, 27. 16. MfS, HA XX/9, Information vom 1. 2. 1989. BA, MfS, A[rchivierter] OP[erativer Vorgang] 17396/91, Bd. 8, Bl. 42. 17. Ehrhart Neubert and Joachim Garstecki, “Staat und Freidenker getrennt?” KiS 15, no. 2 (1989): 49–51. 18. MfS, HA XX/4, Bericht über eine Absprache mit Eberhard Schinck, 7. 3. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX/4 934, Bl. 154. 19. MfS, HA XX/4, Bericht über das Gespräch mit dem Vors. V[erband] d[er]F[reidenker] am 19. 1. 1989, 25. 1. 1989. Ibid., Bl. 42–44. 20. MfS, HA XX/4, Bericht über eine Aussprache mit Prof. Dr. Klein, 7. 3. 1989. Ibid., Bl. 159. 21. Helpful as a collection of material is Thomas Rudolph et al., eds., Weg in den Aufstand (Leipzig, 2014) (the first of three planned volumes). 22. Christian Dietrich and Uwe Schwabe, eds., Freunde und Feinde. Friedensgebete in Leipzig zwischen 1981 und dem 9. Oktober 1989 (Leipzig, 1994), 181. 23. The appeal is reprinted in Tobias Hollitzer and Reinhard Bohse, eds., Heute vor 10 Jahren. Leipzig auf dem Weg zur Friedlichen Revolution (Bonn, 2000), 16. 24. Ibid., 38–39. 25. MfS, BV Leipzig, KD Leipzig-Stadt, Protokoll vom 12. 1. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Leipzig, AU 681/90, Bd. 1, Bl. 232–34. 26. Erklärung vom 15. 1. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX/9 664, Bl. 14–15. 27. Junge Welt, January 20–21, 1989. 28. Die Mücke. Eine Dokumentation, edited by members of the Working Group on Human Rights and of the Working Group on Justice (Kathrin Walther, Thomas Rudolph, Frank Richter) (Leipzig, March 1989), 34pp. (Samizdat). 29. Karl Czok, ed., Nikolaikirche—offen für alle. Eine Gemeinde im Zentrum der Wende (Leipzig, 1999), 198, 199. 30. For a detailed account, see Rainer Eckert, Opposition, Widerstand und Revolution. Widerständiges Verhalten in Leipzig im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Halle, 2014). 31. Sozialismus in den 90er Jahren. Studien der Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED. Verantwortlich Otto Reinhold (unpublished). SAPMO-B Arch, IV 2/2035/15 (p. 57). 32. See Rainer Land, Rosemarie Will, and Dieter Segert, “Wie wollen wir mit den entstandenen informellen politischen Gruppen und Bewegungen umgehen, und wie könnte mit dem Prozess des Umbaus des politischen Systems sowie des Staates und des Rechts begonnen werden,” in Harald Bluhm et al., Texte zu Politik, Staat, Recht (Berlin, 1990), 62–71. This group defended itself in, among other writings, Dieter Segert, Das 41. Jahr. Eine andere Geschichte der DDR (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2008). Somewhat more stimulating and not embarrassing but not persuasive either is, by contrast, Rainer Land and Ralf Possekel, Fremde Welten. Die gegensätzliche Deutung der DDR durch SED-Reformer und Bürgerbewegung in den 80er Jahren (Berlin, 1998). 33. See Philosophische Grundlagen der Erarbeitung einer Konzeption des modernen Sozialismus. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Sektion Marxistisch-leninistische Philosophie, 8. 10. 1989 (hectographed copy). 34. Rosemarie Will, “Rechtsstaatlichkeit als Moment demokratischer politischer Machtausübung,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 37, no. 9 (1989): 812.

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35. Hans Modrow, “Optimismus und Kämpfertum zeichnen Parteikollektive aus,” in Aus den Diskussionsreden. 7. Tagung des ZK der SED. 1./2. 12. 1988 (Berlin, 1988), 89–96. 36. ND, 23. 6. 1989. 37. “Die Wahrheit öffentlich machen,” Der Spiegel, no. 13 (1989): 77–96. 38. One of the very few written statements on the book comes from Ehrhart Neubert, “Metaphysik des Sozialismus? [Sommer 1989],” in Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit. Politischer Samisdat in der DDR 1985–1989, ed. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk (Berlin, 2002), 331–38. 39. MfS, HA IX/2, Rechtliche Einschätzung, 3. 4. 1989. BA, MfS, HA IX 17401, Bl. 2–11. 40. MfS, BV Berlin, Abt. XX/1, Information, 29. 3. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX 6886, Bl. 343. Meanwhile, it is now known who was hiding behind the term colleague and whom I was not allowed to name for legal reasons in 2009: Peter Wensierski, “ARD-Doku über den LinkePolitiker und die Stasi: Der andere Gysi,” Spiegel Online, 16. 12. 2013. 41. Hans-Karl Kahlbaum, Michael Kubina, and Günter Schabowski, 17. 6. 1981. BA, MfS, HA XX/4 405, Bl. 104–5. 42. Ein Brief an Christen in der DDR und ihre Gemeindevertreter zu den Kommunalwahlen 1989, 8. 1. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Neubrandenburg, BV, HA XX 836, Bl. 88–90. 43. BA, MfS, Ast. Rostock, BV, AKG 266, Teil 1, Bl. 67. 44. In German, it reads, “Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual, wer nicht wählt, wird gequält.” 45. MfS, Erich Mielke, Information 229/89 [für die SED-Führung], 8. 5. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 3763, Bl. 20, 23, 22. 46. MfS, Information 175/89, 16. 2. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 181, Bl. 105. 47. Wahlkommission, Zentrales Wahlbüro, 13. Kurzinformation, 19. 4. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX/ AKG 181, Bl. 240. 48. [Zentrale Wahlkommission], Zu den Kommunalwahlen 1989, o. D. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30 IV 2/2/2039/230, Bl. 239. 49. ND, 31. 3. 1989. 50. BA, MfS, Ast. Neubrandenburg, KD Anklam 30, Bl. 102. 51. Wahlkommission, Zentrales Wahlbüro, 13. Kurzinformation, 19. 4. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX/ AKG 181, Bl. 240. 52. Meldung an den Vors. der Wahlkommission, 7. 5. 1989. SAPMO B-Arch, IV 2/2/2039/230, Bl. 155. 53. MfS, Arbeitsbuch Knuth Parthey. BA, MfS, Ast. Schwerin, KD Parchim 5193, Bl. 99–102. 54. Offener Brief von 146 Unterzeichnern an Lothar Kolditz, Präsident des Nationalrates der Nationalen Front, 12. 6. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, BV, KD Dresden-Stadt 90092, Bd. 9, Bl. 150. 55. Karl-Heinz Baum, “Fliegende Urnen und der Schwund der Gegenstimmen. Unregelmäßigkeiten bei der Auszählung in den DDR-Wahllokalen,” FR, 9. 5. 1989. 56. BA, MfS, HA IX 17406, Bl. 137. 57. Offener Brief an Christen und Nichtchristen in der DDR, 1. 7. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, BV, Leiter 10850, Bl. 21–22. 58. [Zentrale Wahlkommission], Zu den Kommunalwahlen 1989, o. D. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30 IV 2/2/2039/230, Bl. 242. 59. MfS, BV Potsdam, HA VIII, Information “Symbol ‘89,” 12. 5. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Potsdam, BV, AKG 616, Bl. 177. 60. Klaus Marxen and Gerhard Werle. “Erfolge, Defizite und Möglichkeiten der strafrechtlichen Aufarbeitung des SED-Unrechts in vorwiegend empirischer Hinsicht,” in Materialien der Enquete-Kommission “Überwindung der Folgen der SED-Diktatur im Prozess der deutschen Einheit” (13. Wahlperiode des Deutschen Bundestages), edited by Deutscher Bundestag (BadenBaden, 1999), vol. II/2:1078; Andrea Herz, Wahl und Wahlbetrug im Mai 1989. DDRKommunalwahlen im Thüringer Raum (Erfurt, 2004), 73.

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61. BA, MfS, Ast. Chemnitz, Abt. XIV 102/89 (OV “Lunte”). 62. MfS, HA XX/8, Tagesrapport Nr. 4, 7. 5. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX 294, Bl. 21; MfS, HA XX, Information zur Lage unter den Studenten, 5. 6. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 16019, Bl. 2. 63. Hinweise über ausgewählte bedeutsame Probleme im Zusammenhang mit den Ergebnissen der Kommunalwahlen am 7. 5. 1989, Juni 1989. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30, IV 2/2/2039/230, Bl. 228. 64. [Zentrale Wahlkommission], Zu den Kommunalwahlen 1989, o. D. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30 IV 2/2/2039/230, Bl. 245, 248. 65. BA, MfS, Ast. Potsdam, BV Potsdam, Abt. VII 15. Bd. 2, Bl. 314. 66. MfS, HA VI, Information, 27. 2. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX 914, Bl. 44. 67. MfS, HA VI, Information, 30. 5. 1989. Ibid., Bl. 98. 68. Qtd. in Hollitzer and Bohse, Heute vor 10 Jahren, 137. 69. HA VII, IM-Information, 3. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, Abt. X 244, Bl. 6–13. 70. ZK der SED, Abt. Intern. Verbindungen, Vermerk über ein Gespräch zwischen H. Axen und R. Castro am 3. 9. 1989 in Berlin, 4. 9. 1989. BA, MfS, SdM 54, Bl. 5. 71. In the literature, it is often incorrectly suggested that Gorbachev bore no responsibility for the military quelling of the demonstrations, and the national liberation movements are often falsely interpreted and denounced as “nationalistic,” e.g., Svetlana Savranskaya et al., eds., Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989 (Budapest, New York, 2011), 28–29, 446; Stefan Karner et al., eds., Der Kreml und die Wende. Interne Analysen der sowjetischen Führung zum Fall der kommunistischen Regime. Dokumente (Innsbruck et al., 2014), 16, 26, 324, 329. 72. Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér, Ungarn ’56. Geschichte einer antistalinistischen Revolution (Hamburg, 1982), 187. 73. For background information, see Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Arno Polzin, eds., Fasse Dich kurz! Der grenzüberschreitende Telefonverkehr der Opposition in den 1980er Jahren und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Göttingen, 2014), 710–13, 724–31, 756–58. 74. In the following volume, numerous documents on the task of the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” including Gorbachev’s speech in Bucharest, can be found: Karner et al., Der Kreml und die Wende. 75. Kai Vogelsang, Geschichte Chinas (Stuttgart, 2012), 598; Liao Yiwu, Bullets and Opium: RealLife Stories of China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre (London, 2012); Zhang Liang, comp., The Tiananmen Papers, ed. and trans. by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link (London, 2001). 76. ND, 5. 6. 1989. 77. Volkskammer der DDR. Protokoll, 9. Wahlperiode, 9. Tagung, 8. 6. 1989, p. 192. 78. ND, 14. 6. 1989. 79. JW, 10./11. 6. 1989. 80. ND, 2. 10. 1989. 81. Of course, he denies such accusations as defamatory, which is uninteresting for historians, but it suggests what the source value of such autobiographies is; see Egon Krenz, Herbst 89 (Berlin, 1999), 72. 82. BA, MfS, HA IX 17075. 83. MfS, HA XX/9, Information, 6. 6. 1989. BA, MfS, AOP 1010/91, Bd. 29, Bl. 112. 84. MfS, BV Rostock, Information 47/89, 12. 6. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 829, Bl. 57–58. 85. MfS, HA XX, Ergänzung, 13. 6. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX/4 1746, Teil 1, Bl. 79. 86. BA, MfS, Ast. Frankfurt/O., 221–86–89, Bl. 73, 96, 189.

Chapter 9

REGIME COLLAPSE AND HISTORIC DAYS

S The Collapse of the Regime Begins The fall of the Berlin Wall began in Hungary on May 2, 1989. On this day, the Hungarian government announced that it would dismantle the border fortifications between Austria and Hungary. The Hungarian government announced these plans to Moscow on March 3, 1989.1 Budapest even informed the Austrian government as early as November 1988 and again in February 1989. The border security installations had become a pure currency killer for Hungary as Hungarians had been allowed to move freely since the beginning of 1988 when they were equipped with a passport.2 The “Iron Curtain” between East and West lifted, slowly, but from now on irreversibly. Hungarian foreign minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock symbolically cut the Hungarian barbed wire fence on the border near Sopron on June 27. Border controls remained in place, but the symbolic act documented the opening for all the world to see. In March, Hungary had already joined the Geneva Convention on Refugees, which took effect on June 12, 1989. The real background for this was tens of thousands of refugees from Romania, but also the strengthening of constitutional procedures, a precondition for the indebted country to receive new loans from Western creditors. Hungary thus committed itself to not extraditing refugees if they were to face criminal charges or other prosecution in their country of origin. MfS major general Gerhard Niebling flew to Budapest the same day to speak with the head of Hungarian State Security Ferenc Pallagi. They agreed to maintain the previous practice of handing over refugees to the MfS and added: “The expected termination will be announced in due time. Surprises are to be excluded in this manner.”3 Notes from this chapter begin on page 334.

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This turned out to be impossibly wishful thinking. In the first two months of the year, the relevant authorities had already received more than 54,000 new exit applications. It was not only the applications that skyrocketed; the increase in the number of escapes and authorized departures was even more dramatic. From the beginning of January to the end of April, they initially rose only slightly but already exceeded the comparable figures from previous years. The number of people who managed to escape continually rose: in January it was 4,627 people, in February 5,008, in March 5,671, and in April 5,887. SED leaders also allowed increasing numbers of people to leave the country: in the first month it was 3,741 people, in February 4,087, in March 4,487, and in April 4,996. In May the numbers doubled for the first time: 10,642 people fled and 9,115 were allowed to leave. In June (1,242 and 10,646) and July (1,170 and 9,563) the number of those who fled declined as the number allowed to leave increased. The summer had just begun and around 100,000 people had already turned their backs on the GDR. These figures were reminiscent of the crisis years of 1953 and 1961. At the beginning of July, the two-month school holidays began in the GDR, drawing tens of thousands of people to Hungary for a few weeks as in every preceding year. GDR citizens did not need a visa for this but merely a travel permit from the East German police. In 1988, about 800,000 people had traveled to Hungary, and only a very small number of applications were rejected by the People’s Police and the MfS. By the end of July 1989, the People’s Police registration offices registered a 25 percent increase in travel requests. The reports of successful escapes in the Western media created a pull effect that caused the number of escapes to rise from week to week. Thousands of holidaymakers were waiting for a suitable opportunity. Hundreds of Hungarians recognized the opportunity and tried to increase their income a little bit by working as local escape helpers. There was no systematic aid to escape. Starting in late July, embassies were once again occupied. On August 8, the Permanent Representation of the Federal Republic of Germany in East Berlin, where about 130 people were camping, closed its doors. On August 14 and 22, the German embassies in Budapest and Prague also closed; there were 171 and 140 refugees residing in them, respectively. On August 10, talks between top-ranking functionaries of the East German and Hungarian secret police once again took place in Budapest. Since June 12, the Hungarians had still handed over 101 “criminals” to the GDR. International and national pressure also increased in Hungary. It was said that the previous procedures could still be maintained but that it was probably only a matter of a few weeks before the previous practice of handing over refugees would be discontinued. On July 12, the Hungarians handed over a fleeing GDR citizen to the MfS for the last time. On August 13, 1989, the anniversary of the construction of the Wall, Hungarian and Leipzig opposition members formed a symbolic wall in the center of Budapest. About one thousand people were watching. Three Hungarians, two Britons, one Pole, and a Leipzig native who had come especially for this purpose

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gave speeches. As the MfS noted, the basic tenor of all the speeches amounted to “the Wall must go; the system in the GDR must go.”4 Other scenes the MfS described included a “soldier” with a “rifle” patrolling in front of the “Wall”; various banners in different languages demanding democracy and displaying a line of text from Pink Floyd’s concept album The Wall: “We don’t need no thought control”; and a “Wall” symbolically torn into a thousand small pieces, the “rifle” flying into the crowd, and the “soldier” disappearing. In GDR society at that time, there was hardly any other topic of conversation besides the people fleeing the GDR. Only the SED leadership said nothing about it, having seemingly taken leave. Above all, this made the people who were loyal to the party feel very insecure. They waited for clear words, assessments, or orders, but nothing came. The SED’s inability to act in the face of refugee camps in Hungary and occupied embassies symbolized to more and more people that this regime knew no way out of the crisis and was at an end. Within the party, however, there was hectic activity. Local politicians quickly shifted the many apartments that had become vacant to people looking for accommodation in order to relieve the pressure. A new problem arose: What should happen to the many cars that refugees left behind in Hungary and later in Prague? How could they be brought back to the GDR; how could they be distributed? The medical system was in danger of collapsing completely. And even at many schools there was a shortage of teachers at the start of school on September 1. How should the party explain all of this or compensate for potentially canceled classes? Problem upon problem accumulated. In August, working groups headed by the CC Security Department, the MdI, and the MfS worked out various alternative courses of action. The alternatives discussed included the immediate closure of all borders or the adoption of a generous travel law, or letting tens of thousands emigrate at once. None of the political leaders in the SED Politburo showed any willingness to make a decision or even to propose one. Every decision involved enormous risks that would be set down in writing and, if an action failed, blamed on the Politburo member responsible for it and his entourage. The West German government repeatedly called on the SED leadership to mitigate the flight problem by opening up its domestic policy. It appealed to the GDR population to remain in the country and work for reforms there. At the same time, in August, debates began in the Federal Republic on how many GDR refugees West German society could still accept and cope with. On August 14, 1989, Honecker reacted for the first time to the current outward stream of refugees. He explained, picking up on a lofty quote from August Bebel, “Neither ox nor donkey can stop socialism in its tracks. This old insight of the German labor movement finds its current confirmation through the great initiative of the laborers of the GDR.”5 He didn’t have many laughs on his side, but many others were prompted to laugh at him. Another man also caused laughter,

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but for completely different reasons and only much later. Jörg Kotterba was a sports journalist for the Berliner Zeitung, and as editor in chief he had volunteered to be in charge of the weekly magazine Der Leichtathlet (The track-and-field athlete). A new edition appeared on August 11, 1989. On page 2 there was a list of athletes with the headline “42 Left the World of Sport.” They were all trackand-field athletes who had dropped out of the GDR’s select team. Kotterba commented on this farewell to international competitive sport as follows: There are emotions, later reflections, and then decisions in the life of a person that another person—whether a confidant or outsider—cannot suspect. . . . Who can describe, weigh, and finally judge why someone decides to actually start from scratch in the alphabet of life. At A—like Abschied [leave-taking], adieu, Ausgang [exit], Abgesang [farewell]. Such a weighty step, such a taking of hat and coat, such a never-tobe-seen-again [state] matures. In days. In weeks. In months, years. And has reasons. . . . Udo Beyer, one of the 41 “old people” who will no longer appear in any of the results records, knows a thing or two about it. In his case . . . I philosophized for a long time in Neubrandenburg. In the words of a mature man, he spoke of new paths that must finally be taken, criticized, on the basis of his experiences, the small-mindedness, the narrow-mindedness, the lethargy that have seeped in to many places, spoke clearsightedly of the difficult path that GDR athletics will take in the coming years, demanded greater attractiveness of athletics, “otherwise you can no longer motivate talent.” Udo Beyer—he stands here for many—has taken leave. Such a step, I can feel it, is not easy for anyone because one leaves behind what one has grown fond of, one sees familiar faces less often. . . . It gets under one’s skin when the day X for which one has been preparing for a long time approaches. . . . Quietly say Servus [goodbye] as one departs— the little Viennese ditty comes to my mind. It can make one’s heart heavy. Servus!6

The headline was “42 Left,” but in the commentary Kotterba only spoke of “41 old people.” That was perhaps the cheekiest and most comical escape announcement that anyone made: Kotterba stayed in Malmö on the day the magazine was published, August 11, wrote a “real” farewell letter while there, and fled to the Federal Republic. He himself was the forty-second athlete—the list had actually only included forty-one. Meanwhile, the situation in Hungary had worsened considerably. There were now well over two hundred thousand East Germans there, most of them on holiday, but thousands were waiting for new opportunities to escape. On August 19, a “pan-European picnic” was held on the Hungarian-Austrian border near Sopron to celebrate the changes that had taken place, as well as those that were foreseeable in Europe, and to symbolically open a new border crossing between Hungary and Austria. The organizers of the event also distributed leaflets in German, but they were targeting Austrians with them rather than East Germans. According to the organizers, eight to nine hundred East Germans fled to Austria that day. László Magas, one of the initiators of the event, later reported on what he had witnessed and felt:

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The next morning my first walk took me to the picnic site. There were at least 20 cars with East German license plates on the road and in yesterday’s parking lot. That made my heart cramp up because I knew that such a Wartburg [East German car] was often the only fortune an East German family had, and as is well known that they had had to wait at least ten years for a car. Now they left everything and still threw themselves onto the earth of a foreign country, crying with happiness. This is what the hope for freedom means! This is a good measure of what communism had done to the eastern half of Europe.7

Even if the border was closed again the next day and guarded militarily and all GDR citizens were sent back into the interior of the country, a new dam had broken here. The news and pictures of it went around the world. A few days later, the people stuck in the German embassy in Budapest left via Austria with the help of the International Red Cross. August marked new highs in the departures: twenty-one thousand people managed to escape and almost thirteen thousand were officially allowed to leave the GDR that month. Hungarian opposition members, the Red Cross, and, above all, the West German federal government and West German associations took care of the numerous refugee camps in Hungary. As the situation became more acute from day to day, the Hungarian government decided to act. On August 25, Hungarian prime minister Miklós Németh and foreign minister Gyula Horn traveled to Bonn and opened up to Chancellor Kohl and Foreign Minister Genscher, saying that they would open the borders for humanitarian reasons and allow GDR citizens to leave the country. Kohl expressed his enthusiasm and promised generous financial aid in return for the economic disadvantages in trade with the GDR that this action would likely generate, as well as support for Hungary’s intended accession to the European Community. A few days later, Austria temporarily lifted the visa requirement for GDR citizens in order to ensure that refugees’ transit would be unbureaucratic. On August 31, Horn met with GDR foreign minister Oskar Fischer in East Berlin and declared that from September 11, Hungary would open its borders to GDR citizens if the GDR had not by then brought its people back into the GDR by means of a public guarantee of exit. The SED Politburo rejected the proposal. At midnight, the Western borders of Hungary were opened. Within the first three days, fifteen thousand GDR citizens fled, and by the end of the month the number had risen to thirty-four thousand. The SED also officially allowed twelve thousand others to leave the country. Within two months, more than eighty thousand people had fled. In the meantime, the embassy in Warsaw also had to be closed due to overcrowding. The comrades in arms in the ČSSR, who were themselves fighting for their political survival, tried to aid their East German friends by stepping up surveillance of the open border to Hungary. The GDR authorities no longer allowed GDR people to travel to Hungary. This was the main reason why the German embassy in Prague became the meeting

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point for GDR refugees from September 24 onward. Three days later, more than 900 people were already there. The conditions were getting worse every day, with the danger of outbreaks of disease and growing unrest due to an uncertain future. The ČSSR government declared on September 27 that there would be no Hungarian solution.8 In the GDR, SED leaders launched a new smear campaign against the Federal Republic and the refugees in late August. They suggested that there were professional human trafficking gangs, that the West German government had initiated all this, and that the Western media were engaging in psychological warfare to trigger mass psychosis in the GDR. The MfS was astonished to find that the majority of the refugees were well-educated young people under forty years of age. It seemed portentous that only a very small percentage of the refugees had previously expressed their intention to leave the country and had attracted attention as political critics of the system. It was the “normal people” who were running away. The Junge Welt, in particular, in cooperation with SED leaders and the MfS, launched a campaign. On August 30, it published a big interview with a young machinist who had been arrested in Hungary in July 1988 while attempting to escape and was sentenced to sixteen months’ imprisonment in the GDR in September and released to the Federal Republic of Germany in early December 1988. He remarked on how cold West German society was and that he, like many other “alumni,” wished to return to the GDR. He was then allowed to go back and just felt “crazy” with happiness.9 Days before, Michael Ortmann had reported that West German media representatives “carted” entire GDR families to the border fence in order to “get hold of the best horror escape story exclusively.”10 Günter Herlt explained that there were “no objective reasons for these people to have been driven away.”11 Hans-Dieter Schütt also participated in the campaign. He stated that the refugees were “poached or misled,” fleeing into a human desert, and that capitalism had “sounded the general attack on socialism.” Moreover, Schütt continued, the West wished to eradicate socialism not because of its disadvantages “but because of its untouchable advantages.” While Schütt admitted that it was sad so many young people were “not up to the burdens of the class struggle,” he also claimed it was embittering and that all were needed, but all also needed to be willing to work on the big picture.12 On September 21, 1989, Klaus Höpcke also chimed in on the campaign. To this day, many interpret his contribution, which took up more than one entire newspaper page, as a first attempt to address the country’s internal problems. In a single paragraph of his article, he argued for open debate in state and society: “Everywhere we need to talk about facts and their interpretation; we need to be open to suggestions for solving the problems raised.” He also provided some examples of what solutions could look like. Those who had run away numbered “16,000,” he lied, and one had to keep an eye on the 16 million “responsible for our development on

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this basis and in the further development of socialist social relations.” The call for reforms from the Federal Republic, he averred, sought to provoke the restoration of the GDR, or, he snidely added, had someone from Italy demanded reforms even though more than half a million Italians were living in the Federal Republic?13 Somehow, West Germany’s Permanent Representation in East Berlin saw in Höpcke and the Junge Welt’s campaign “advocates of changed thinking in the GDR,” according to a dispatch on September 22. How it came to this flawed conclusion will forever remain a mystery.14 Other familiar figures also spoke up. Günter Kertzscher explained once again that the GDR was the best place in the world because pluralism, by which he meant something different from what one might think, would not “work out here in this country!”15 And Heinz Kamnitzer also piped in. He adapted Ernst Reuter’s famous speech, writing: “You peoples of the world, look to this state.”16 He followed this with a philippic against the Federal Republic of Germany, striking a note reminiscent of the 1950s: “Then the patrons and servants of the Third Reich were left unharmed until their offspring were so full-grown that fear and terror seized us.” In the Federal Republic, “one could call Auschwitz a lie and Adolf I a national hero.” Moreover, he argued, the Federal Republic insisted on the borders of 1937 and was still officially shouting the nationalistic verse from the German national anthem under the Third Reich, “Germany, Germany above everything,” and had also set course for supremacy in Europe: “You French and English, you Dutch and Swedes, you Poles and Hungarians, you Germans everywhere: what kind of state is that? You don’t know it? You will get to know it!”17 On September 21, Neues Deutschland published the “interview” that has become the most famous from those days. It was with Helmut Ferworn, a Mitropa cook, SED member, and father of three children from East Berlin. In the interview he alleged that he had been invited to Budapest for a city stroll where “they” led him to the old apartment of a German-speaking Hungarian. There, he continued, he was given a menthol cigarette, and after a few minutes he passed out. He claimed that he then woke up in a coach, befuddled, with his “guide” sitting next to him and explaining that “we” were on the way to freedom.18 Readers could only laugh about so much nonsense. Many asked themselves what a government like this, one that believed all of its people to be so stupid as to believe such drivel, could be capable of. Above all, this interview shocked the SED itself. The cook Helmut Ferworn really did exist, but he had actually escaped. When he arrived in Vienna, he regretted his decision and reported to the GDR embassy. In order to make it up to the regime, he, the SED, and the MfS made up a story that unintentionally contributed to the delegitimization of the system also within loyal party cadres.19 On November 3, Neues Deutschland apologized for this lie. On January 4, 1990, Ferworn revealed the lie on GDR television but claimed that the SED central organ had known nothing about it.

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The Revolution against the Regime Begins Although some in the opposition had sporadically considered reforming it and creating new, nationwide structures since early 1988, there were no clear successes in this direction. This was probably because there were rivalries in East Berlin between individual heads of the groups as well as regional tensions, especially between East Berlin and the other districts, and also political differences and different ideas about how to proceed. In the historical literature up to now, these differences have always been described as an obstacle to the formation of a unified, strong opposition movement. Below, I present the opposite thesis: it was precisely because of these tensions and political differences that the opposition was able to form citizens’ movements, which, along with foreign policy developments, German government policy, the deep domestic political crisis, and the not-to-be-underestimated flight movement, became a very significant revolutionary factor and led to the abolition of the regime. Until the early summer of 1989, the opposition had acted in its usual manner. While some people and groups concentrated on public actions, others thought about new structures, wrote open letters, and tried to create alternative publics. The two cannot be treated as entirely separate and static entities, but they represent ideal types. The IFM tried to network nationwide with an appeal on March 11, 1989. The appeal reflected the group’s self-understanding, aiming for the strict enforcement of human rights, democratization, maintaining a state of law and order, and separating party, state, and society from one another.20 The group remained relatively unsuccessful at this attempt at opening up. Although IFM groups were subsequently formed in several cities, their numbers remained low. The initiative had passed its peak after the MfS actions against it. It remained too strongly bound to its previous structure and methods of working and limited to a small number of people. The group’s programmatic statements were politically too clear, hardly leaving any room for socialist ideas, so they could not have an integrative effect because this put too much pressure on many opposition members as well as many potential SED critics who chose deliberately to remain in the GDR. The IFM took on a historic pioneering role without setting the pace. In Leipzig, the series of spectacular public actions did not let up. A foretaste of the autumn came with the Second Pleißepilgerweg (a pilgrimage trail along the Pleiße River) on June 4 and a street music festival on June 10. On both days there were attacks by security forces. In both cases passersby and onlookers spontaneously showed solidarity with the opposition. This made it clear that the active protest potential in the population was increasing. At the same time, it became apparent that the opposition was now moving more strongly away from the churches, which many had described exaggeratedly but self-critically as the “ghetto.” Again and again, opposition members discussed individual initiatives they wished to newly found. Whereas some stuck to the idea of an umbrella

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organization, others felt that many initiatives were better and would more accurately reflect the pluralism of the opposition. At the beginning of June, Stephan Bickhardt formulated a consensus that was becoming increasingly apparent: the opposition had to move closer to the population.21 Michael Arnold started a first attempt in Leipzig. At the beginning of June 1989, he sent out an appeal to selected individuals titled “Democratic Initiative—Initiative for the Democratic Renewal of Society.” This initiative aimed to foster democratization and a state of law and order, establish alternative publics, and found an opposition archive.22 It was also intended to launch a “movement,” but it did not provide for clear structures, spokespersons, or permanent memberships. In June and July, several different group meetings took place in East Berlin and Leipzig without generating results, but two things had come up again and again: the opposition needed new structures, and these needed to be independent of the churches from the outset. The historian Karlheinz Blaschke, who did not belong to the groups but enjoyed international renown as the “last bourgeois historian” in the GDR, said during the Leipzig Church Congress on July 8 that the open eruption of the social crisis now also rendered it necessary for opposition members to find partners for change in the party and state apparatus23—a strategy that only individual members of the opposition had pursued at that point. In the summer of 1989, many groups discussed this idea because they increasingly recognized, as Bärbel Bohley, for example, said at a colloquium of the Theological Studies Department in mid-June 1989, that the basis of the opposition had to be quantitatively expanded.24 In Königswalde, there had been a Christian Peace Seminar since the early 1970s, making it one of the oldest institutions where opposition members and church employees had gathered together and held discussions. At the seminar in June 1989, Friedrich Schorlemmer called for the creation of a legal opposition that could be officially elected, as in Poland and Hungary. Hansjörg Weigel, the head of the peace seminar, said in July 1989 that an oppositional political party had to be founded in the GDR. Even if one acknowledges that Weigel, of course, was aware of the debates elsewhere, this example shows that the aim was to reconstitute the opposition throughout the country. For Weigel, the most urgent points were the introduction of a democratic multiparty system, a democratic electoral system, the reprivatization of enterprises with up to one thousand employees, the de-ideologization of the education system, the separation of powers, and the establishment of the rule of law. In addition, there was talk of a grassroots democratic model, although it did not become clear yet in this case, as it did later elsewhere, how this would relate to the multiparty system. Grassroots democracy was one of the buzzwords of 1989, and it included a sharp rejection of the SED system but also implicitly rejected parties and parliamentary democracy. The fact that Weigel also assumed a longer process at that time shows that he wanted to wait until early summer 1990 to submit a concrete application for

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legalization.25 Groups in other places also had such ideas about time. Nobody— neither in the East nor in the West—expected at that time that changes in the GDR would occur quickly or even within the next few weeks. However, in early summer, several suggestions were made independently in several places—by Marianne Birthler, Werner Fischer, and Markus Meckel, among others—to consider proposals for the future installation of a “round table” based on the Polish model. At the beginning of July, a paper by Mehlhorn, Fischbeck, Bickhardt, Lampe, Ullmann, Weiß, Böttger, and others circulated in which they called for the preparation of “authorized discussion groups,” i.e., “round tables.”26 If the considerations all remained relatively vague and lacking in profile, the formation of new opposition structures was considerably boosted in mid-July, which, against the background of the social crisis, sparked off completely new dynamic processes. After Martin Gutzeit and Markus Meckel had decided not to pursue their association project because they determined that it would be too indifferent politically, Gutzeit suggested to his friend Meckel that they found a Social Democratic Party at the beginning of 1989. After Meckel briefly considered this, he agreed. In the months that followed, he reported on the idea on various occasions, meeting with interest and rejection in equal measure. The interest related to new forms of organization, and the rejection related to an opposition party, especially a social democratic one. Most members of the opposition favored models of society that presented themselves as hybrid forms of various others, thus always remaining vague. The fact that the founding of a new SPD in the GDR would openly and programmatically contest the SED’s claim to power weighed even more heavily in favor of rejection. If there were an SPD, there would be no negotiations about small reforms or individual concessions; it would then only be a matter of completely abolishing the SED system. Finally, another argument against an SPD was that refounding such a party would call into question the legitimacy of the SED itself as a party because its roots lay in the forced unification of the KPD and SPD in 1946. Many thought that nothing could come of this but the immediate arrest and conviction of those who initiated such a party. Gutzeit and Meckel were not to be put off. They wrote a “Call for the Formation of an Initiative Group with the Goal of Establishing a Social Democratic Party in the GDR,” dated July 24.27 In it, they argued that time was “pressing” and that the “paralyzing feeling of powerlessness” and the “structures of organized irresponsibility” had to be overcome. Arguing that “we live on substance” and “are increasingly losing the richness of our historical heritage and thus our identity,” they maintained that it was necessary to eliminate the SED’s “absolute claim to truth and power.” In their view, the goal had to be to develop a political alternative for the country, an “ecologically oriented social democracy,” in which democracy and social justice were crucial. For a democracy, many things were indispensable, including new “associations, citizens’ initiatives, democratic movements, parties, trade unions etc.,” as well as the rule of law; strict separation

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of powers; parliamentary democracy; the welfare state; relative independence of the states, districts, cities, and municipalities; the social market economy; codetermination in the workplace; free trade unions; the right to strike; and the catalogue of general human rights. In terms of foreign policy, the call advocated, among other things, that Germany’s “two-state nature” be recognized, that special relations be established with the Federal Republic, that the GDR should be demilitarized, and that there be a Pan-European peace order. Meckel and Gutzeit had advocated that the FRG recognize GDR citizenship since the mid1980s, but for a completely different reason than the SED or political forces in the West did so. As they stated, they were convinced that the FRG’s “nonrecognition of citizenship of the GDR” de facto supported “the deprivation of civil rights in our country.”28 They believed that many GDR people lived in political passivity also because they had no opportunities to develop an identity as citizens and, in case of doubt, preferred to flee to the Federal Republic rather than advocate for political changes in their home region. Even if only a few copies of the call circulated at first, it was mainly Meckel who spread the word about it at several events. The first agency report came out on August 28 from the German Press Agency—Meckel and Gutzeit had not wanted to go public until a few days later, but Werner Fischer launched the report against their will. Later, they acknowledged that, “in hindsight, we can be grateful to him for that.”29 The two had still found only a few comrades in arms—Pastor Arndt Noack (Greifswald), a fellow student, Pastor Helmut Becker (Halle), and Manfred Böhme, whom the MfS had tasked with trying to paralyze the opposition and cause it to break up. The state authorities’ attempts to discipline Meckel, Gutzeit, and Noack failed, as did their superiors’ attempts to engage in moderating discussions with them. Gutzeit declared to Provost Furian in the consistory that he was acting as a citizen, not as a priest. Should he be arrested, the church should not behave differently than it would in any other case of political opponents being arrested. For the rest, Meckel and Gutzeit assumed that they would not be arrested. According to the experiences of 1987–88, they believed that the state could hardly be interested in creating new martyrs. The way things turned out proved them right, and this assessment is confirmed in the archives. The SED and MfS were thoroughly fed up with vigils. The taz, known for its snappy titles, wrote the following headline on August 15, 1989: “The GDR Opposition Is Going to the Starting Line.” It was right. Stephan Bickhardt, who was in West Berlin at the time, provided the background information and also the title. However, it also indicated that the opposition was lagging behind the developments practically as much as all other political actors at home and abroad. The stream of refugees was flowing, and the political opposition was still busy “gathering.” Reinhard Schult remarked with somewhat excessive self-criticism, “The opposition in the GDR today is programmatically just as pale as the party.”30 But the comparison was exaggerated: a few thousand

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compared to over two million, on the one side practically no efficient working possibilities, and on the other a huge apparatus with every conceivable possibility. In the end, the opposition benefited from the fact that, although it chased after developments like everyone else, this was less detrimental to its self-imposed task than to government representatives. For in this historical situation, the first thing one needed to do was to say a clear “no” and nothing more, while the government had to be expected to come up with clear political concepts for action that it did not have to offer. What prompted the taz report was an event with several hundred attendees on August 13, the anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, in the Treptow Confessional Parish. The group Rejection of Practice and Principle of Demarcation associated with Bickhardt, Mehlhorn, Lampe, and Fischbeck had been invited. It had expanded in the preceding months and had begun to build up working structures. In the summer of 1989, the group included Martin Böttger, Ulrike Poppe, Dorothea Höck, Martin König, Wolfgang Ullmann, and Konrad Weiß. Michael Bartoszek, Hans-Jürgen Fischbeck, and Gerhard Weigt took the floor on behalf of the group. Fischbeck and Weigt argued that, in view of the domestic political crisis, the flow of refugees, and the changes in the Eastern Bloc, it was time to “launch an oppositional rally movement for democratic renewal.”31 The MfS, in its report on the event, stated that the group was concerned with “the GDR as an absolute dictatorship” and with finding “means to fight the dictatorship.”32 Shortly afterward, the MfS also learned of plans by a group led by Bärbel Bohley, Katja Havemann, and Rolf Henrich to found a “Democratic Forum.”33 At the beginning of August, Bohley was still pessimistic about the possibility of reforms.34 She was reserved about plans for founding an SPD because, at the latest since her forced departure at the beginning of 1988, she had kept her distance from the church and no longer wanted to work with pastors. She also increasingly distanced herself from the IFM, and in September she declared that she was no longer a member. Around the spring of 1989, she began talking to Havemann and Henrich about new forms of organization for the opposition. Three points seemed particularly important: first, it needed to be a collective movement that was open and plural so that as many people as possible with very different ideas of political reform could join it and identify with it. Second, they thought it should not be a party but an association that strove to be legal from the outset. Third, the idea was not to bring about radical upheavals but rather to reform the existing system. In this respect, the initiators were pursuing a pragmatic reform project that any Realpolitiker in the West would have formulated in a similar way. On September 9, the three invited almost thirty likeminded individuals to Katja Havemann’s property in Grünheide near Berlin. Meanwhile, after the summer break, Monday prayers began again in Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche on September 4. About one thousand people took part, and about

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eight hundred tried to demonstrate afterward. Banners carried by Leipzig opposition members bore slogans including “For an open country with free people,” “Freedom of assembly—freedom of association,” and “Freedom of travel instead of mass flight.” MfS forces snatched these banners away very quickly. Meanwhile, they left a demonstration of several hundred people who wanted to leave the country heading to the nearby main station undisturbed. There, the crowd dispersed peacefully. Because of the Leipzig fair, many journalists were staying in the city; more than forty from Western countries and three from Hungary gathered at the Nikolaikirche. Jens Walther explained in the Junge Welt why his newspaper did not report on this: “Because those who then flocked together after a service (!) had not informed us, the Junge Welt, that they wanted to instigate an anti-state action against the GDR in Leipzig.” The man had a sense of humor. The security forces acted decisively, for which the young communist shouted out to them: “Thank you, comrades, for your vigilance.”35 On the same day, left-wing opposition members associated with Thomas Klein and Bernd Gehrke also met to form their own group. At first they only published information about the “Böhlen Platform,” which became known around September 17, 1989 (on a notice board in the East Berlin Environmental Library); the initiators remained unnamed.36 The aims were, on the one hand, to form a “United Left” in order to preserve socialist production and power relations in the GDR and, on the other, to represent a counterforce to the other groups that were developing—a goal they did not openly express. Word quickly got around that the meeting did not take place in Böhlen but rather conspiratorially near East Berlin. Even though the ideas hardly proved communicable outside intellectual circles, this platform also contributed to the social debate. The Vereinigte Linke (United Left) was the only newly founded group that explicitly represented socialist and communist ideas, as well as notions of a democracy based on workers’ and community councils, without any alternative. On September 7, the fourth protest demonstration against the election fraud took place in East Berlin. Once again, thousands of security forces were deployed. They arrested fifty-nine people, but not many more had participated. The MfS had previously told employees in the shops and cafés bordering Alexanderplatz that a film would be made to prevent unwelcome displays of solidarity. In fact, a film does exist—but it was recorded by the numerous surveillance cameras.37 On the weekend of September 9 and 10, the meeting with Bohley, Havemann, and Henrich took place in Grünheide. Other participants included students Michael Arnold from Leipzig, physicist Martin Böttger from Cainsdorf, physician Dr. Erika Drees from Stendal, librarian Katrin Eigenfeld and her geologist husband Dr. Frank Eigenfeld from Halle, photo lab technician Olaf Freund from Dresden, priest Alfred Hempel from Großschönau, civil engineer Martin Klähn from Schwerin, physicist Dr. Reinhard Meinel from Potsdam, woodturner

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Otmar Nickel from Dresden, physician Dr. Christine Pflugbeil and her physicist husband Sebastian Pflugbeil from East Berlin, physician Dr. Eva Reich and her molecular biologist husband Prof. Dr. Jens Reich from East Berlin, priest Hanno Schmidt from Coswig, bricklayer Reinhard Schult from East Berlin, physicians Drs. Eberhard and Jutta Seidel from East Berlin, physicist Dr. Rudolf Tschäpe from Potsdam, and priest Hans-Jochen Tschiche from Samswegen near Magdeburg. Except for Havemann, Bohley, and Henrich, no one was politically or otherwise broadly known in social circles beyond the region. All of them had been involved in opposition groups and circles—some of them for many years— but this composition was new. They represented a cross-section of society and represented many GDR regions at the same time. The list of names made a rocksolid impression due to the many academics. It was also an advantage that there were only three theologians among them. On Sunday evening, the group published the appeal “Aufbruch 89—Neues Forum” (Awakening 89—new forum). Reich and Henrich had each brought drafts to the meeting that then formed the basis of text all agreed to. Tschiche recalls that he likely suggested the name “New Forum.” The first sentence already packed a punch: “In our country, communication between state and society is obviously disturbed.”38 One reason was that the tone suggested that it was not radicals or staunch anticommunists who were speaking out but rather honestly concerned citizens who were primarily focused not on apportioning blame but on overcoming the crisis. The text then continued: The disturbed relationship between state and society paralyzes the creative potentials of our society and prevents the local and global tasks at hand from being solved. . . . In the state and the economy, the balance of interests between groups and strata of society functions only inadequately. . . . In private circles, everyone says easily what his diagnosis is and names the most important measures. But the wishes and aspirations are very different and are not rationally weighted against each other and examined for feasibility. On the one hand, we would like to see an expansion of the range of goods on offer and better provisioning, and, on the other hand, we see their social and environmental costs and advocate a move away from unrestrained growth. We want room for economic initiative but no degeneration into a society that elbows others out of the way. We want to preserve what has been tried and tested and yet make room for renewal in order to live more frugally and in a way less hostile to nature. We want orderly conditions but no paternalism. We want free, self-confident people who act in a community-aware manner. We want to be protected from violence and not have to endure a state that intimidates and spies [on its citizens]. Lazy people and people who are all talk and no action are to be driven out of their positions of influence, but we do not want any disadvantages for those who are socially weak and defenseless. We want an effective healthcare system for everyone, but no one should pretend to be sick at the expense of others. We want to participate in exports and world trade, but we do not want to become a debtor and servant of the leading industrialized countries, nor the exploiter and creditor of economically weak countries.

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This paragraph was clever in that it expressed a zeitgeist capable of winning a majority, especially in a language that could not be unfamiliar even to SED officials. Nowhere was there any talk of socialism, whether to preserve or abolish it. The passage about intimidation and spying scared some in the group, but otherwise the tone was deliberately moderate to get people to simply agree when reading. The signatories now proposed to start a “democratic dialogue” in order to find “ways out of the current crisis situation.” To this end, the New Forum was formed as “a political platform for the whole of the GDR.” The initiators would officially place and register the New Forum as an “association” on a legal basis. Although none of the signatories believed that the state would accept the application, their approach made it clear that they were not enemies of the state but citizens who wanted to contemplate changes that could be made within the system—another clever move to mobilize society. Finally, the text ended with a direct appeal: “We call upon all citizens of the GDR who want to participate in the transformation of our society to become members of the new forum. The time is ripe.” The power of the appeal lay in its naming of the problems of society as a whole that everyone knew from experience. At the same time, however, everything remained so vague and open to any sociopolitical-democratic direction that it could draw many people in—this was a further advantage. Everyone was supposed to feel directly addressed. The poet Uwe Kolbe had already proposed such a major popular debate in July—in more drastic words, but just as vague— which shows in an exemplary way that the idea of a “New Forum” could count on a broad social response. The authors themselves hoped to find a few more comrades in arms. Their second meeting was scheduled for December 2, 1989. The next day there was another Monday prayer event in Leipzig. At first it remained within the usual framework with one thousand people participating in the prayer and up to five hundred there to demonstrate. Almost one hundred people were arrested. On September 12, the ARD political television magazine Kontraste broadcast a segment that contributed significantly to the mobilization of the people. Aram Radomski secretly shot the film and Siegbert Schefke, Roland Jahn, and Peter Wensierski made sure that Kontraste was able to broadcast it. The segment was titled “How We Live Here—Frustration and Decay in Leipzig” and showed pathetically run-down districts.39 Most people had become accustomed to these conditions. But when they saw them in the middle of the crisis, almost everyone was shocked. At first, viewers pitied the people of Leipzig. But then many people came to the realization that “Leipzig is everywhere.” The state of the cities proved to be a reflection of the state of society. On the same day, the group associated with Bickhardt, Fischbeck, Lampe, and Mehlhorn published the “Aufruf zur Einmischung in eigener Sache” (Call for intervention in [one’s] own cause). This group’s diagnosis of the problem was very similar to that of the New Forum, but its suggestions for treatment

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were a little more concrete. The twelve signatories, including Ulrike Poppe, Konrad Weiß, and Wolfgang Ullmann, not only gave their addresses but also their telephone numbers, if they had one. They called for the formation of the “Citizens’ Movement ‘Democracy Now’” (Demokratie Jetzt) and in January or February 1990 invited people to attend a first “meeting of representatives.” The name came up spontaneously after a long debate that day. The term citizens’ movement, which shaped the events that followed, first appeared here. The group also attached “Theses for a Democratic Transformation in the GDR” that were similar to the call for the founding of the SPD but less radical; the theses also seemed more oriented toward grassroots democracy than parliamentary democracy. Three points clearly differed from the New Forum. First, the signatories all came from East Berlin (ten) or the surrounding area of Brandenburg (two). Second, there was talk of continuing “the socialist revolution” and making it sustainable. This could be irritating, especially since the theses and the call were diametrically opposed to the reality of the GDR. Third and finally, the signatories invited “the Germans in the Federal Republic to work toward a transformation of their society that could make possible a new unity of the German people in the community of the European peoples. Both German states should reform each other for the sake of unity.”40 At the time, this was quite a widespread attitude in some opposition circles, but it missed the point because refugees were not moving to the West en masse to demand reforms. Consequently, ideas like these already contained illusions about future paths that were interesting in theory but misguided in practice. Starting on September 12, Gutzeit, Meckel, Noack, and Böhme distributed a short version of their call for the formation of an SPD. It was only on September 18 that they decided to call the future party the Social Democratic Party in the GDR (SDP) to distinguish it from the SPD in the Federal Republic, which, for its part, remained very reserved concerning the planned new foundation in the GDR. It still relied on its contacts with the SED leadership. Finally, on September 14, Edelbert Richter, surprised by the appeal for the New Forum, announced in Bonn, where he was staying, that a group of people critical of the system was planning a meeting for the beginning of October to found a group called Democratic Awakening.41 In mid-August, Richter, Rainer Eppelmann, Friedrich Schorlemmer, Ehrhart Neubert, Rudi-Karl Pahnke, and Wolfgang Schnur, among others, had met in Dresden to prepare for this. Some had already voted to found a party at this time, but the majority was still against it. Edelbert Richter explained in an interview that the closeness to the New Forum was a given, that people knew about each other and would soon discuss concrete forms of cooperation. The democratization of the state and society as well as the strict separation of party and state were now the point. Democratic Awakening also calculated its objectives over longer periods of time and aimed to have its own candidates run in the 1991 elections to the People’s Chamber.42

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Within a few days, five new nationwide opposition groups had introduced themselves to the public with these appeals. This fragmentation of forces was hotly debated within the opposition. Some were disappointed not to have been involved in the preparations. Others found the programs too meager. Yet neither the critics nor the initiators expected rapid success. Some opposition critics even thought that these new groups were invented for the Western media to produce news. In fact, the initiators were dependent on the Western media as they themselves did not have access to the GDR media landscape and did not even have reliable communication channels within the GDR. The appeals quickly circulated around the country as they were distributed at events in churches and typed up and copied many times over. Moreover, from the middle of the month, courageous people began to illegally duplicate them with company photocopiers at great risk to themselves. Everywhere, more and more people were overcoming their fear and taking action. The MfS, which was informed of all these foundation processes via its IMs, had miscalculated. By focusing strongly on the IFM as the supposedly most dangerous group, it had hoped that fragmentation would decisively weaken the opposition, but Manfred Böhme (IM “Maximilian”) had to write to his commanding officer on September 15: “There is no reason to believe that the initiative will disintegrate or diverge.”43 The number of people joining up was initially limited. On September 14, about one hundred people had signed the appeal of the New Forum. Even if one considers that the MfS intercepted numerous letters, the number remained manageable. At the end of September, there were no more than three thousand affirmative statements or signatures, and the other groups had to make do with much smaller numbers. Admittedly, the opposition seemed peculiarly fragmented with all its various calls and appeals, and there were reasons for this in the preceding years. But contrary to how this is often interpreted, this fragmentation appeared in September to be an advantage that can hardly be overestimated. Precisely because most of the opposition members, with a few exceptions such as Bohley and Eppelmann, were largely unknown in society, this founding fever contributed considerably to the mobilization of society. This was because the rapid succession of new appeals gave the public the impression that very different people in a variety of places were no longer willing to watch the crisis in silence, instead choosing options for action other than flight. Hardly any outsider knew that the initiators of the various calls had known each other well and for long periods of time. Now there was suddenly another choice besides leaving or staying: one could also choose to remain silent or to interfere. The comprehensive coverage in the Western media played a decisive role in spreading the word about the calls, and soon all GDR citizens were asking themselves where they actually stood. As a result, from mid-September onward, the country was flooded with appeals, resolutions, open

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letters, and soon new foundings of even more associations. In mid-September “time” gradually began to take on a new quality in the GDR—a change that only grew more dramatic from mid-October onward. The resolution of September 18 was very important for this development; in it, men and women who were known and famous in the GDR expressed themselves for the first time. Bärbel Bohley and Toni Krahl (of the band City) organized a closed event in an East Berlin club where about fifty artists of different genres met to discuss the domestic political situation. The result was a declaration stating: We, the signatories of this letter, are concerned about the present state of our country, about the mass exodus of many of our contemporaries, about the crisis of meaning of this social alternative and about the intolerable ignorance of the state and party leadership, which trivializes existing contradictions and sticks to a rigid course. It’s not about ‘reforms that abolish socialism,’ but rather about reforms that make it possible for socialism to continue in this country. . . . So we have taken note of the call of the new forum and find much of what we ourselves think in the text, and even more that is worthy of discussion and exchange. . . . This country of ours must finally learn to deal with minorities who think differently, especially when they are perhaps not minorities at all. The growth of right-wing extremist and conservative-national elements, even here in Germany, and the supply of pan-German views is a result of a failure to react to accumulated contradictions and historically unprocessed facts. . . . We demand now and here immediately public dialogue with all forces. We demand an opening of the media to these problems. We demand change of the unendurable conditions. We want to confront the existing contradictions, because only by resolving them and not by trivializing them will it be possible to find a way out of this crisis. Cowardly waiting provides pan-German thinkers with arguments and preconditions. The time is ripe. If we do nothing, it will work against us!44

The letter was signed by the songwriters Gerhard Schöne and Kurt Demmler, the pop singer Frank Schöbel, musicians from the bands City, Karat, Silly, and Pankow, including the singers Herzberg, Krahl, and Danz, the jazz musicians Charlie Eitner and Conny Bauer, and the jazz singer Angelika Weiz, among others. In contrast to the resolution by writers associated with Christa Wolf and Daniela Dahn on September 14, this one signed by “rock musicians” contributed enormously to the popularity of the New Forum and to the opening up of socially critical debates because, from September 19 onward, numerous musicians and bands read the resolution and the New Forum’s call out loud at their concerts, and some distributed copies of it. Although the SED and MfS tried to intimidate the musicians by canceling concerts and sometimes even turning off the electricity, this was all in vain; they were no more intimidated than the opposition members. The sharp rejection of German unity was also a reaction to social currents in that direction that had now become openly visible. From around September 25 a flood of resolutions and appeals began in the GDR,

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and from around October 10 it spread to all regions, social groups, institutions, and businesses. The New Forum, Democratic Awakening, Democracy Now, the SDP, the United Left, and the “rock musicians” provided the impetus for this as the most important multipliers. In mid-September, the Federation of Protestant Churches in the GDR also spoke out in favor of clear reforms. Alongside the spate of resolutions, the state escalated its repression in Leipzig after September 11, no longer releasing all those who were arrested within 24 hours; in fact, nineteen received formal arrest warrants, remained in state custody, and received prison sentences.45 In addition, the state imposed fines totaling more than 60,000 marks. Among those convicted were both those who wished to leave the country and opposition members who had countered shouts of “We want out” with “We’re staying here.” In Leipzig, the Coordination Group for Intercessional Devotions was formed, which maintained a contact telephone in St. Mark’s parish. From September 14 onward, prayers of intercession for those arrested and for social change took place almost daily in Leipzig churches.46 The group used leaflets to provide information about who had been arrested and when. The minutes of the contact telephone document a dense information network within Leipzig as well as with the contact telephone group in East Berlin associated with Marianne Birthler, Reinhard Weißhuhn, Gerold Hildebrand, and Werner Fischer, with the New Forum in East Berlin, with Roland Jahn in West Berlin, with lawyer Wolfgang Schnur, and with groups and individuals in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Dresden, Zwickau, Großhennersdorf, Naumburg, and many other cities throughout the country as well as with Western media representatives.47 These activities contributed not only to the dissemination of information but also to mobilization. At the same time, however, the government measures increased the fear that the SED might resort to the “Chinese solution.” At the next Monday prayer, the number of participants had almost doubled to about eighteen hundred, and after the prayer, during which Pastor Führer reported on the events of the previous Monday and asked for solidarity with those arrested, everyone was to immediately leave the square in front of the church. It was empty within a few minutes. After a short time, the chains of police opened and about three thousand people now streamed onto the square. The police again detained thirty-one people, with eight then being formally charged and three of these receiving prison sentences. On September 19, the New Forum submitted an application for a permit to eleven of fifteen districts as well as the Ministry of the Interior. In the evening, Bärbel Bohley reported on this at an event in the East Berlin Gethsemane Church under the motto “Do we need an opposition?” Rainer Flügge introduced the crowd to the organization Democracy Now. The church only had about 250 participants. While Bohley said she had not expected so many, the permanent representative of the Federal Republic of Germany in the GDR, Franz Bertele,

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reported to the Federal Chancellery in Bonn that the event made an amateurish, helpless impression. What had he actually expected? A meeting like that of budget politicians in Bonn? Bertele had been head of the mission in East Berlin since January 1989. The working and living conditions in the zone did not yet seem quite familiar to him because he gave this somewhat unrealistic report to Bonn: “Even the simplest forms of organization had not been considered. For example, many attendees were unaware of the call to found an organization, but nor were there enough copies to distribute it.” In any case, he continued, the “‘New Forum’ . . . which gets the feeling of false strength via the Western media,” hardly contributed to the mobilization. Moreover, he added, the MfS also ensured “that the atmosphere of awakening does not turn into an actual awakening.”48 Two days later, it once again became clear that the permanent representative’s view of GDR conditions was slightly off when he stated: “The oppositional groups are composed mostly of intellectuals who have little or absolutely no political experience.”49 In his first report, Bertele had already noted that the groups’ opposition work was “far from . . . effective.”50 This not only shows a blatant ignorance of the GDR relations but also reveals what was to become manifest policy in the months and years to come. Permanent Representative Bertele and his closest associates, as well as a large number of Bonn politicians, proceeded on the basis of their own experience and with premises adequate to Western, especially West German, conditions, but which misrepresented or disregarded the realities and character of the GDR. How else can one evaluate his observation that the opposition members had no political experience? Of course they didn’t; how could they? And, of course, they had no experience whatsoever that would enable them to associate “politics” with anything like Bertele or his bosses in the chancellery. Their aim was precisely to introduce politics into the GDR and overcome administrative, ideological, and dictatorial orders and enforcement. The New Forum used the Western media with the support of Jahn and Hirsch. And it had no alternative. For example, interviews with Seidel, Eigenfeld, Schult, Tschiche, Reich, Pflugbeil, Bohley, as well as Weißhuhn (IFM) were produced for Western media on September 17 in Bohley’s studio in order to popularize the ideas.51 The previously tested idea of establishing some degree of protection by means of publicity also played a role in this choice. The Ministry of the Interior rejected the founding application and declared the “New Forum” to be an “antistate platform.” “The collection of signatures for the support of the founding of the association was not permitted and was, therefore, illegal.”52 Meanwhile, in East Berlin, Dresden, Halle, Schwedt, Quedlinburg, Altenburg, Gera, Zittau, Potsdam, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Merseburg, Eisenach, Erfurt, Greifswald, Rostock, and other cities, numerous events for intercession, information, and solidarity began—some daily. These events showed solidarity for Leipzig and the people arrested there, and at the same time they allowed the new groups to introduce themselves, for them to hang their appeals up in the churches and display their lists

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of signatures. Across the country, individuals and groups began to collect signatures in colleges, businesses, residential areas, youth clubs, cultural events, and at many other gatherings. Each individual took risks in the process. Several students at the Humboldt University, for example, were threatened with exmatriculation. The successes in collecting signatures still remained manageable and modest. But from mid-September onward, there were only four topics on everyone’s mind: How will the wave of people escaping to the West continue to develop? What do the new groups want? How will the SED leadership react? Is the country heading for the “Chinese solution”? Half of the country was now looking to Leipzig on Mondays. On September 25, two thousand to twenty-five hundred participants crowded into the Nikolaikirche before it was closed due to overcrowding. Christoph Wonneberger gave a sermon on nonviolence. Some visitors left the church singing “We shall overcome.” For the first time, four to eight thousand people marched across a part of the Leipziger Ring, shouting “Freedom,” singing the “Internationale,” and chanting “New Forum.” In the following days, the first large meetings with hundreds of participants took place in Magdeburg, Erfurt, and Weimar to show solidarity and exchange information. At this point, something must be said about the numbers given for demonstrations and rallies (and indirectly also about the numbers of signatures on the calls for action at that time). Everyone will understand that no one ever counted the people who participated. In each case, the estimates are based on media reports, eyewitness assessments, and documents from the SED, MfS, police, and other state institutions. While the state institutions tended to understate the situation, opposition members and the media tended to give maximum values. One hundred to two hundred people may still be easy to estimate, but crowds of twenty thousand, seventy thousand, or five hundred thousand can no longer be gauged. Of course, in the autumn of 1989 there were good reasons to give the highest possible numbers, including for the signatures on the New Forum, Democracy Now, and Democratic Awakening calls because high numbers tend to create the intended pull effect. Today, such statements are rarely doubted for three reasons. First—the subjective argument—at some point, it felt like “all” were there, so the numbers must have been very high. Second—the objective argument—many analysts believe that at some point, “all” were there. Third, and finally, one can hardly prove the opposite of an estimate because it has been spread for twenty or twenty-five years, and an alternative figure would be just an estimate with too many unknowns to appear serious. Therefore, I also operate with the usual numbers in the following, always bearing in mind that these are mostly exaggerations, especially concerning crowds above five thousand participants. I will use the concrete example of a famous rally in East Berlin to show why the estimates in circulation are usually exaggerations, why they were justified in the political events of the time, but also why lower estimates even gain value in historical

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analysis because revolutions are minority affairs, directed against the government and against the passive majority. Meanwhile, some “New Forum” initiators were thinking about how they could expand the group’s social base and whether they should not address “reform forces” such as Hans Modrow, Markus Wolf, Gregor Gysi, or Jürgen Kuczynski. This may sound absurd today, but in those September days, only a minority laughed about it because the aim was to forge the broadest possible alliance against the SED’s political bureaucracy. Everywhere people suspected secret reform forces, whether at universities or in party institutions. Many believed that people’s safes and private desks were filled with concepts of how the country could be reformed. It still hardly seemed possible that the SED was completely run down and could essentially lose control of the country within a few weeks. The SED and the bloc parties were also reeling. After all, its members made up a considerable part of society. Members of all parties could be found among those fleeing the country. Although about five thousand individuals committed themselves to the new groups by name by the end of September, they still only comprised a small minority. There were also quite a few among them who simultaneously professed membership in two, three, or four groups. But only very few of these public “confessors” came from within a party. Party withdrawals or exclusions were not yet significant, although it has often been claimed that they were. Beyond the general dissatisfaction, two statements from the bloc parties up to this point are worth mentioning. Manfred Gerlach, chairman of the LDPD and deputy chairman of the State Council, was the highest-ranking state functionary who called for reforms and various means of opening up society in two speeches in September.53 Formerly a staunch communist, he cast himself as a reformer practically at the last minute. On June 17, 1953, as deputy mayor of Leipzig, he had tried to stop a procession of demonstrators, who then beat him up and forced him to march at the head of the group with a banner reading “Free Elections” in his hand. Gerlach had obviously learned from this experience. He now tried to put himself at the head of the reformers. His statements may have reached his bloc party, moved some people critical of the system, and fostered the opposition’s vision of a broad political alliance at the same time, but his time was also running out. The CDU did not have a leader who sought to make a public mark. Later, the public was amazed at how many reform forces had cleverly disguised themselves within this party. Nothing of this was to be heard or perceived in the autumn. The East German CDU and SED seemed hardly distinguishable. The CDU, however, was fortunate in that on September 10, four members addressed a “Letter from Weimar to the Members and Executive Committees of the CDU.” The letter was signed by Martina Huhn, a lawyer and synodalist; Christine Lieberknecht, a pastor in Ramsla; Gottfried Müller, editor in chief of Glaube

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und Heimat (Faith and home); and Martin Kirchner, a member of the High Consistory and an important IM of the MfS. Their letter called for three important changes: the CDU had to emancipate itself from the SED and find its own profile, the media and the public had to be made more pluralistic, and freedom of travel had to be guaranteed. The letter had two effects. First, it boosted discussion within the party where it was fairly well received there in September and October. Second, the letter, which was also circulated outside the CDU, hinted that some bloc party members were willing to engage in reforms. On October 4, Winfried Wolk, a member of the East German CDU executive committee, appeared on the ZDF news program and described the wave of East German refugees as mass hysteria. At the same time, however, he criticized East German social conditions and held the SED responsible for them. He urged people not to demonstrate on October 7 to prevent violence and instead to put a candle for new hope in their windows as a sign of protest. Even so, since the East German CDU seemed to be as worn out as any other Eastern party, the letter from Weimar largely remained an internal party matter. After 1990, it served as “evidence” that the CDU was “different” from “the others.”54 While the crisis could theoretically have helped the bloc parties to build their political profiles, the SED found itself in an ideological dilemma. If it were to react politically to the crisis, admit mistakes, and change course, this would automatically strengthen the resistance because any new policy without dialogue with the opposition and society would lack credibility. The alternative was to react with massive violence, to close the borders completely, to activate the prepared isolation camps of the MfS and, according to the plans, intern eighty-six thousand people in them, and to launch a disciplinary wave within the party to make members toe the line. These alternatives were discussed within the SED apparatus as well as in the MfS. From mid-August onward, the Central Committee’s security section, which also included several generals, convened several unscheduled meetings with high-ranking representatives of the MdI and MfS to develop contingency plans. The SED Politburo itself proved largely incapable of action. Although it had held regular discussions about the situation since the end of August (Honecker was ill until September 26, with Mittag acting as his deputy), Krenz, Schabowski, Stoph, Tisch, Sindermann, and the others remained attached to their ideological perspectives. They argued that the West alone was to blame for the situation, and Mittag stated that “the main thing now is to strengthen the party’s action.” Sindermann illustrated that the Politburo utilized quite different categories: “What the West does against Erich Honecker is like in the days of the fascist Jewish pogrom agitation.”55 Apart from the scandalous comparison, this statement shows how strongly the SED Politburo was caught up in the templates and patterns of behavior from the 1930s and 1940s. There were exceptions, one of which was MfS minister Erich Mielke. To be sure, he directed his ministry

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toward crushing the opposition primarily by means of political and legal means. On September 28, criminal evaluations had been drawn up for the appeals of the New Forum, Democracy Now, the SDP, and the United Left. The signatories could be convicted under § 106 of the penal code for “subversive incitement to hatred” and the dissemination “without proof . . . of subversive aims” and punished with an administrative fine. Yet Mielke neither gave the order to activate the internment camps nor was he one of those who, in mid-September, wanted to have the police and military crush future demonstrations, although this has often been claimed. He was fully aware of the seriousness of the situation as his famous question of August 31, 1989, in the circle of the MfS General Staff underscores: “Is it true that tomorrow the 17th of June will break out?”56 Although there is no reason to reassess Mielke’s position at this point, he, unlike the other members of the Politburo, had extensive information at his disposal that revealed the full extent of the situation: it was not only about escapees and new opposition groups but about society as a whole. It became clear to him and his ministry that the mobilization of society by the opposition groups had only just begun and that there were potentially still a great many people who might join the new groups.57 Since the beginning of 1988, Mielke had also had access to internal information from individual MfS staff members who had been tasked with attending church and opposition events and reporting on them to their colleagues. What they said about these events could not be all wrong. There was no fraternization, no increased solidarity, no signs of dissolution, and only very few applications for dismissal among the operational MfS officers, but, especially in the summer of 1989, many of them increasingly had the impression that the “enemies of the state” and the “incorrigible opponents of socialism” were expressing criticism that was not unjustified. There has been no rethinking in the MfS, nor had any new concepts of the enemy been created,58 but Mielke also found out what a few of his subordinates thought. Already on June 1 Mielke had presented two extensive papers to the SED Politburo and other party and state functionaries that analyzed the intentions, aims, distribution, and leading figures of the opposition in the GDR, as well as its underground journals, from the point of view of the MfS.59 The MfS also informed the SED district and district leaders about this. Since the beginning of September, Mielke had been sending the Politburo members new information reports and situation analyses on reactions and attitudes of the population every few days. The reports covered all social groups and repeatedly emphasized that neither the bloc parties nor the SED itself were spared in the general displeasure. The reports enumerated a large number of social problems that were moving people, ranging from supply difficulties and the lack of healthcare to the lack of travel opportunities and the impossible information and media policies. In addition to these reports, Mielke’s information also formed the basis of a speech held on September 17 that was apparently intended as a statement for the Politburo.

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Krenz later claimed that he had written it himself.60 The style does not align with Mielke’s, but the content is consistent with other works from his ministry at the time. The paper addressed some of the social and political problems the country faced, noting that society on the whole was failing to reject refugees and applicants for departure to any serious degree, instead greeting them with understanding. This development seemed particularly threatening. The first sentences of the nineteen-page paper read: “The current political situation is more tense than I have ever myself experienced. Whoever one talks with, and wherever this discussion takes place, the issue is usually raised that in preparation for the XIIth Congress of the Council of Europe, a new and different approach is needed. The direction these changes should take very often remains unclear.”61 The paper was presented as a public speech, which the authors had not intended, and could have been an initial moderate response to the crisis. In order to make the political fight against the opposition more efficient, Mielke, on September 21–22, instructed the MfS regional administrations and district offices to talk to all the chairmen of the SED regional and district administrations, the heads of the police at these levels (BDVP and VPKÄ), as well as those responsible for internal affairs in the respective councils, and to tell them about the current situation so that all could work together to crush the opposition. Demonstrations and rallies were to be prevented in advance, by the police if necessary. Party officials were to inform loyal comrades about the enemy’s aims and intentions on the basis of the original documents so that powerful and uniform counterarguments could be developed in discussions in factories, offices, and universities. Existing problems and deficiencies were not to be glossed over, but they were not to be dramatized either. “Social forces” (SED, FDJ functionaries, MfS and MdI staff, etc.) were told to take part in oppositional events in churches and at other locations in order to physically fill the rooms (so they would be “closed due to overcrowding”) and to present opposing positions in discussions. Some of these plans were implemented, but they were of no use. However, in September, Mielke was the only one in the SED Politburo who displayed a willingness to take political action; all the others were paralyzed, believing that whoever moved first could be the big loser. Mielke had long since reached the top of his career ladder, but Krenz and Schabowski still hoped to rise further in the future. Having internalized the communist cadre ideology, they did not even conceive of acting independently or making proposals that could call previous policies into question. The SED Politburo thus incurred the wrath of its own party base. By the end of August, party resignations and new admissions almost balanced each other out (from January 1 to August 31, 1989, there were 31,216 new party admissions compared with 36,534 departures and exclusions, 1,900 of which were due to “agitation”) and were not statistically significant, nor was there any significant difference from previous years. But the mood of the party base had reached a

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worrying low point. In particular, the loud silence of the party leadership unsettled many members. On September 23, 1989, a small scandal broke out on live GDR television that undermined many party comrades’ spirits, but not only theirs: entertainer Helga Hahnemann, a blunt Berliner who enjoyed great popularity, hosted the one hundredth broadcast of Ein Kessel Buntes together with Dresden opera singer Gunther Emmerlich on September 23. In a sketch that had not been arranged beforehand, Hahnemann said to Emmerlich: “We are not the only ones to be miscast at this time.” Applause thundered from the audience then, and again when Frank Schöbel sang “We Don’t Need Any More Lies.” When the broadcast was rerun on television a few days later, both of these parts had been removed.

On the Eve of the GDR’s Fortieth Anniversary For one year, the SED had been preparing for the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR on October 7, plastering the country with one propaganda campaign after another.62 The country was agitated and excited, but for very different reasons, and there was a threat of demonstrations and riots. Thousands of people were stuck in the German embassy in Prague while another eight hundred were in Warsaw, and hundreds of GDR people were still fleeing day after day from Hungary via Austria into the Federal Republic. In Prague, in particular, a catastrophe was imminent, as it was almost impossible to provide for the people. On September 29, 1989, at 5 p.m., at a ceremony at the German State Opera House marking the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Erich Honecker informed the SED Politburo that in a one-off action, the people in the two embassies would be allowed to travel to the Federal Republic of Germany via GDR territory in trains operated by the Deutsche Reichsbahn.63 An offer by a lawyer named Vogel to the refugees to return to the GDR with a guarantee that they would be able to leave within six months was accepted by only seventy-two people in Prague and only one man in Warsaw. Horst Neubauer, the permanent GDR representative in Bonn, informed Chancellery Minister Rudolf Seiters of the decision. He asked for the “Berlin Solution,” that is, after the last GDR citizen departed from the embassies he wanted them to remain closed, but this did not happen. On the evening of September 30, Genscher and Seiters hurried to Prague where, from the balcony of the embassy, the federal foreign minister said his famous sentences on the imminent departure of the refugees, which were drowned out in the cheers of thousands. Even today the television pictures still give many people goosebumps and bring tears to their eyes. Originally from Halle, Genscher later explained that this was the most moving moment in his political career. Chancellor Kohl, who

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had fallen ill, had to leave this great political moment to his unloved opponent. Shortly after 7 p.m., Genscher had announced the departure. The people were brought to the station in GDR and ČSSR buses, which disturbed some people. One bus displayed the somewhat misplaced slogan “Dynamo Dresden greets its fans.” The first specially scheduled train departed between 9 and 10 p.m., followed by five more from Prague, and the last one left at 8:30 a.m. the next day. High-ranking West German officials sat in each train to reduce the travelers’ fear as they passed through the GDR. About 4,700 left the GDR from Prague and 809 from Warsaw. Contrary to the agreements, the MfS officers in the GDR only took the personal documents from the emigrants but did not give them any expatriation documents, so that the people arrived in the Federal Republic without official identification. Thousands of officers from the MfS, police, and NVA had cleared the line and stations within the GDR to prevent anyone from blocking the trains. Nevertheless, individual escapees risking their lives managed to jump onto the moving trains in the GDR. Franz Bertele described the journey from Warsaw to Helmstedt in a report: As the GDR approached, the atmosphere in the train became more tense; nervousness increased. After crossing the border to the GDR, the train stopped outside the Frankfurt/Oder station for a long time, being screened from the public by two freight trains. . . . Stasi people patrolled behind the freight trains. . . . Then we passed through the completely empty Frankfurt/Oder train station . . . , and the streets in the city center around the station were apparently closed off because . . . no one showed up on the street here either. Shortly after Frankfurt/Oder, the train was greeted for the first time from streets, yards, and houses. Obviously the train was expected by many people. Again and again . . . groups stood near the railway tracks and . . . waved at [the train] in a friendly manner. Only very few showed their rejection by gestures. . . . older women were often seen waving goodbye in tears. . . . The reception in Helmstedt by Minister President Albrecht, President of the Bundestag Süssmuth and more than 1,000 enthusiastic spectators was overwhelming. Our GDR guests, now citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany, hugged each other and us. These were moving scenes.64

There have been numerous guesses as to why Honecker let the trains pass through GDR territory. Two reasons were decisive. On the one hand, SED leaders believed it was a way of demonstrating strength. GDR citizens would thus be released from GDR citizenship in the GDR and not from within a third country. This is the usual interpretation, which is not wrong but only half right. The second, hitherto overlooked, aspect seems more important: neither the SED nor the MfS knew exactly who the 5,500 people were. They therefore promised to hand out formal expatriation documents in the GDR. They failed to do so but collected all the personal documents and were able to identify those who had left the country. At the same time, they allowed close family members to travel to the Federal Republic of Germany without delay in order to relieve public pressure and not provoke group protests by these persons. In terms of security

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policy—the SED and MfS did not see their own end in sight—this action was logical for the ruling class. Morally, it proved to be completely misguided and only prompted more people to oppose the regime. On the same evening (October 1), Ehrhart and Hildigund Neubert unofficially founded the Democratic Awakening in their East Berlin apartment. This was because a large contingent of police and security forces prevented the actual founding meeting since the approximately eighty participants did not come either to Rainer Eppelmann’s Samaritan parish, where they were to find out the address of the founding meeting, or to the Neuberts’ apartment, which was also quickly cordoned off. The official foundation then took place on October 29 and 30. Pahnke, Eppelmann, and Ehrhart Neubert, however, announced that the foundation had taken place in order to demonstrate the group’s ability to function. The group’s founding call contained the points familiar from those of Democracy Now and the New Forum, speaking out strictly against the ruling SED conditions and in favor of a clear separation of the state and “party(ies).” It was more concrete than the New Forum call and left open more than the Democracy Now call whether the Democratic Awakening would be a citizens’ movement, an association, or a party in the future. It did not even come close to the SDP in terms of sharpness and clarity. More clearly than others, the founders associated with Richter, Eppelmann, Ehrhart Neubert, Nooke, Schorlemmer, Falcke, Pahnke, and Schnur declared their support for the “socialist social order on a democratic basis” and against “capitalist conditions.”65 At first it was considered a “Pfaffenpartei” (party of clerics), which is why Wolfgang Schnur (IM “Torsten”) of all people was elected as the first chairman on December 17, 1989. The lawyer was supposed to dispel this impression. The dominance of theologians in the Democratic Awakening and in the SDP has already been historically explained as a consequence of the SED’s social policies. But even without this knowledge, critical statements on this are nonsense: they would only be relevant if it could be proved that these theologians had prevented other willing citizens from acting. However, this was not the case in September and early October. They were among the brave ones who were the first to come out of hiding, and they were among the few who could speak freely in public. On Monday, October 2, attention turned again to Leipzig, and one thousand people were again on the embassy grounds in Prague. On several occasions on the previous days, SED representatives such as Krenz and Axen had praised the Chinese for their actions against the “counterrevolutionaries.” An ADN commentary also on October 2 further fueled the heated atmosphere, noting that the people who had left the country had “trampled on moral values and excluded themselves from our society through their behavior. You shouldn’t shed a tear for that.” Most people were stunned by this coldheartedness. Almost everybody knew some people who had “disappeared” in the previous months. Young people were departing the country. In this situation, millions, including

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hundreds of thousands of party members, wondered how such sentences could have been issued as a government report. Honecker himself, it was later learned, had written the last sentence (“You shouldn’t shed a tear for that”) in the “ADN commentary.” In this context, Jan Carpentier, a television journalist for elf99, revealed himself to be a jokester when he wrote his first flyer for the Junge Welt, headlined: “To all in the GDR! Guide to action!” The short text consisted of sentences by Honecker that were supposed to show his willingness to engage in reforms. Carpentier commented: “And he did not nail his arguments to the village church door in Wandlitz. The text was printed millions of times and can therefore be read millions of times over. . . .” Carpentier noted that the opponents were Western inventions, refugees were only undignified journeymen, and the future looked rosy.66 Meanwhile, since early morning, the Ministry of the Interior had gathered an unusually large number of police and combat units in Leipzig. Riot police units came from other districts to offer their support. After the events of the previous few days, the MfS expected a higher attendance at the Monday prayer than a week earlier. About half an hour before the prayer was to start at 5 p.m., the Nikolaikirche had to be closed due to overcrowding. A second church opened its doors for the first time. About two thousand to twenty-five hundred people took part in the peace prayer in the Nikolakirche. When they came out after the event, three to four thousand more were already waiting outside. Many people were frightened by the police presence and the threatening words of the preceding days. For the first time, those shouting “We’re staying here” were significantly louder than those shouting “We want out.” The people also shouted, “Allow New Forum,” “Gorbi, Gorbi,” “Freedom for the prisoners,” and “Now or never.” Thousands of people demonstrated in the city center, with estimates fluctuating between eight and twenty-five thousand, and for the first time the police forces appeared in full combat gear with shields, batons, helmets, and dogs. With this, Leipzig experienced the largest oppositional demonstration since June 17, 1953. In the evening, a vigil for political prisoners began in East Berlin’s Gethsemane Church.67 The vigil was initiated by young men and women from different groups, some of them still adolescents, who wanted to take action. They handed out an informational leaflet whose first sentence was a Biermann quotation: “You all are extinguishing the fire with gasoline. You’re not putting the fire out anymore.” Intercessional prayers and information events also took place in many other cities, the largest one in Magdeburg with over thirteen hundred participants. Two new papers were published by the New Forum. One was concerned with organizational issues; the other was an “open catalogue of problems” intended to stimulate discussion on economic, ecological, cultural, educational, and scientific issues. The authors also addressed legal issues and proposed specifically that all political offenses be removed from the penal code so that oppositional action would “no longer be criminalized.”68

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On the evening of October 3, there were already about six thousand people in the Prague embassy and two thousand people in the immediate vicinity, plus three to four thousand people on their way to Prague.69 Egon Krenz, as the CC secretary responsible for security issues, submitted three proposals for action to Honecker on this day while noting that there was no “ideal solution”: (1) if the West German federal government would recognize GDR citizenship, the GDR could thereafter extend travel possibilities for its citizens; (2) all borders could temporarily be closed; (3) one could immediately announce that all citizens could henceforth travel wherever they wanted and reenter the GDR thereafter. Krenz did not consider the third option “expedient”; hundreds of thousands of people would immediately leave. As to the first option, he noted that it “would have a mainly propagandistic effect, but would hardly lead to a solution.” And finally, he noted that the second option “could heat up the domestic situation to the point that it could no longer be controlled. In addition, all borders would have to be sealed off (deployment of land forces and combat groups would be necessary. . . .”70 Nevertheless, Krenz recommended the second option. Was he trying to start a civil war? Did he want to put Honecker in such distress that he would be forced to resign? Had the pressure from Prague become too much, where the government was increasingly under pressure? What was going on behind those closed doors? In his autobiography, with which Krenz later sought to cast himself as a reformer, he not only left this episode unmentioned but also portrayed the events as if he had had nothing to do with them at all because he had been staying in China.71 Honecker, at any rate, signed off that same day with the remark “back to the debate,” but the ČSSR government was immediately informed that the GDR would close the common border at 5 p.m.—a move that was welcomed in Prague. Only the next morning did the SED Politburo confirm that “the border with the ČSSR and the Polish People’s Republic is to be controlled in its entirety.”72 Minister of Defence Keßler, Minister of State Security Mielke, and Minister of the Interior Dickel were responsible for this. Krenz and Honecker were trying to hermetically seal off the GDR. The people were indignant, shocked, and in disbelief. What could it all lead to? At the same time, the SED Politburo decided to let the people in the Prague embassy travel to the Federal Republic via GDR territory once again. Even on October 3, this news spread like wildfire. Then on October 4, the Dutch singer-songwriter Herman van Veen, who was extremely popular in the GDR and had released two records licensed by Amiga, gave a concert in East Berlin where he commented repeatedly on the domestic political conditions in the GDR to the thunderous applause of the approximately five thousand mainly young people in attendance. In a fictional telephone conversation, his Dutch grandmother asked him whether there was also a queen in the GDR, to which he answered, no, but a king. In the Netherlands, the queen does everything for the people; here the king does what he wants. He described a nightmare in which

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he wanted to leave the country but a policeman with a gun prevented him from doing so. Such foreign “interventions” also contributed to people thinking about what they themselves could do. What followed the SED decision on the embassies has often been described in detail. On October 3, border officials at the Bad Schandau crossing alone prevented at least fourteen hundred people from continuing their journey to Prague. The atmosphere was enormously heated. Most of them went back to Dresden to await developments there. When the news came that new special trains with refugees from Prague would arrive on October 4, first hundreds and then thousands gathered at the main station. Many believed it was the last chance to get out of the GDR. However, among the twenty thousand people (according to police estimates) who had gathered in the meantime,73 not only were there people who wished to leave the country from all over the GDR but also those from Dresden who wanted to engage in protest. Hours of battles, destruction, the use of water cannons (“workers’ washing machines”) and tear gas ensued. Modrow requested NVA forces. Since the beginning of the year, not only had the combat groups been preparing more intensively for civil war–like conditions but special units had also been trained within the army to crush insurgencies within the country. In total, there were 179 hundred-man units that had only been “re-integrated into the military structure” on November 11.74 At the beginning of October, about thirty of these hundred-man units had been assembled in each of the Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin areas, including in Plauen and Karl-Marx-Stadt. In Dresden, on the night of October 4–5, some of these irregular, voluntarily formed army task forces were deployed alongside thousands of policemen, firemen, and MfS forces.75 The result was devastating: there were injuries on an unprecedented scale, a station and the area in front of it were half destroyed, and over thirteen hundred people were detained through October 11, 428 of whom were not released until December 1989. And clashes and arrests occurred not only in Dresden but also in other cities such as Plauen, Reichenbach, Freiberg, Werdau, Bad Brambach, and Karl-Marx-Stadt. Only days later did it become known that the forces had used brutal violence and humiliation systematically against defenseless people. Dresden could no longer rest, and violent clashes and demonstrations with thousands of participants continued over the next few days. In addition, the first smaller demonstrations took place on October 5 and 6 in Magdeburg, Potsdam, and several other cities. Arrests were made almost everywhere. Meanwhile, the nineteen special trains from Prague with 8,012 passengers reached the Federal Republic of Germany on October 5 after nerve-racking delays caused by people blocking the tracks and riots in Dresden. An additional 643 people joined from Warsaw. The pictures of happy faces went around the world. The MfS, in turn, had taken the ID cards of the almost nine thousand people without issuing

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certificates of expatriation. The MfS distributed the data among the districts in order to find out the identity of those who had departed. Only a small minority were older than forty years of age, and most of them were even under thirty; the majority were well educated and earned decent money under GDR conditions, had not filed an application to leave the country, and had not attracted any “negative” political attention up until then. Two districts (Leipzig, Magdeburg) were examined to determine whether the MfS had used the opportunity to place IMs in the West or whether MfS cadres and SED functionaries were among the refugees. At least for the two districts this can be ruled out. It also seems unlikely for the other districts on account of how rapidly events unfolded. At Dresden’s main train station, the people gathered not only included those who wished to leave the country but also many who did not wish to leave. Several young men who had already been present during the protests against the hyperpure silicon plant in Dresden-Gittersee stated that they had participated in the riots in order to create “the same situation as on June 17, 1953.”76 Calls for “Germany, Germany” and “Germany flags” were a natural part of this restless night. Outside of Dresden, the events played a major role; many people were discussing them and were horrified and agitated by the brutality—on both sides. The few television pictures remained blurred; one could hardly recognize what was actually happening. The SED propaganda spread horror stories, for example, of unscrupulous mothers and fathers who had placed their baby strollers on the tracks to stop the trains so they could be taken along. Unlike those who had been arrested in Leipzig or earlier in East Berlin, no nationwide solidarity with the detainees emerged. The predominant opinion outside Dresden remained largely negative—these were “only” people who wished to leave the country. The harsh police assaults were criticized; in many churches, even outside of Dresden, people took note of eyewitness reports with dismay, but they were no less disturbed by the demonstrators, who they generally believed were there in such large numbers “only” because they wished to depart. In the evening, a leaflet was distributed in the East Berlin Gethsemane Church with the following message: “The new forum addresses itself urgently to all those who sympathize with it: Violence is not a means of political confrontation! Don’t let them provoke you! We have nothing to do with radical right-wing and anticommunist tendencies! We want calm dialogue, serious reflection on our future, not blind action. In view of the current critical situation, we call on all people in the GDR to think and act responsibly and in solidarity.”77 To this day, it is not clear who exactly circulated it, but it came from Berlin circles of the New Forum.78 The tone was irritating; the implicit claims evoking terms like right-wing radical and anticommunist frightened quite a few people. And what were “blind actions”? The leaflet not only provided some distancing from the protests but also indicated that not only church employees but also opposition members everywhere were advising against

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demonstrations and regarded street actions as pointless. Only fragments of this can be proven today. In these days, too, a lasting political rift ran through society: on the one side were the opposition members who wanted to change something in the country, and on the other were the hopeless people who only wanted to leave. Both groups insisted on respect for human rights—some wanted to fight for them, and others wanted them immediately. Both approaches were legitimate. But neither camp could publicly admit that they were actually on the same side. In all of October, 57,000 people fled, and 30,600 were officially allowed to leave.

October 7, 1989: The GDR’s Fortieth Anniversary October 7 was already of particular importance before what occurred for three reasons. The SED had prepared the celebrations for the fortieth anniversary of the GDR with great pomp. The opposition expected that the SED would then clamp down harder afterward. And October 7 coincided with the monthly election protest demonstration in East Berlin. The rumor mill was buzzing, with people enduring an almost unbearable tension. This applied to all sides. Still millions remained passive. Hundreds of thousands were ready to actively defend the system. And the number of those who openly opposed the system still proved to be small. In the megacity of East Berlin, three, four, or five thousand people came to the daily events in several churches. In the other big cities, the percentages of the population were not much higher. Dresden and Leipzig did not reflect the actual willingness to act in the country at large. In the vast majority of cities— this must not be forgotten—nothing at all had taken place up to that point. A demonstration on September 30 in the small town of Arnstadt with two to eight hundred participants probably represented the largest percentage of the local population that had participated up to that time, but outside the city it went completely unnoticed. For ten days, a single young man had distributed leaflets against the “arbitrary policy of the SED,” asking “what kind of life?” repeatedly in his longer text and calling for this demonstration. The rise of new groups was still within manageable limits. Although the figures were unique in GDR history, they were not enough to comprise a state. It cannot be repeated often enough that the figures given at that time were almost always exaggerated, and for good reason. Up until October 7, a maximum of ten thousand people had signed letters of or admitted to being a part of the New Forum, Democracy Now, Democratic Awakening, the SDP, and the United Left, the great mass of them—eight to nine thousand—to the New Forum. The advantage of the circulating much higher figures was that both the Western

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media and people in the GDR believed and disseminated them. The SED and the MfS, likewise, assumed a much higher number of active people. On October 4, the opposition’s contact group met for the first time in East Berlin; the IFM, the Group of Democratic Socialists, the Pankow Peace Circle, the New Forum, Democracy Now, Democratic Awakening, and the SDP were all represented in it. Over the next ten or twelve weeks, the contact group coordinated oppositional efforts so that they could take a unified stand in relation to the state and the party for certain strategic and tactical considerations. The first “Joint Declaration” this group made stressed their common will to “democratically transform state and society.” Two points were new. First, they declared that “the next elections should be held under UN control.” And second, they announced that they would agree on a common electoral alliance and nominate their own candidates for the next elections: “We call on all citizens of the GDR to participate in democratic renewal.”79 With this declaration, both the new and old groups publicly demonstrated that they were working together, which, in turn, meant that whoever supported the one group likewise showed solidarity with all the others. For most people, this was a matter of course in this situation anyway. The SED leadership commemorated the fortieth anniversary with the entire repertoire of festivities they liked to call upon. On the evening of October 6, about seventy-five thousand FDJ members marched past the party and state leadership with torches, as in 1949. For the last time, all the SED leaders, along with their closest friends, gathered in the stands. These friends included Todor Zhivkov from Bulgaria, Wojciech Jaruzelski from Poland, Miloš Jakeš from the ČSSR, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat, Daniel Ortega from Nicaragua, Nicolae Ceaușescu from Romania, and other close associates from Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba.80 In the run-up to the event, rumors circulated that the FDJ was having difficulties meeting the target figures. There was no sign of this on that day. Contemporary witnesses say that the guest of honor Gorbachev was repeatedly greeted with shouts of “Gorbi, Gorbi” and that he was embarrassed by it. On the morning of October 7, the usual military parade took place. Throughout the country, there were well-attended festive activities. Gorbachev spoke with the SED Politburo in confidential meetings and, as he later explained, was convinced that no one in this group had apparently recognized the seriousness of the situation or identified himself as a reformer. He gave no advice but repeatedly made ambiguous statements, saying that those who did not recognize the signs of the time would be punished. “He who is late is punished by life” was supposedly one of the most famous sentences he uttered, but he allegedly never said it. Still, this was the tenor of his remarks. In the evening, a state reception was held in the Palace of the Republic. Bishops Forck and Stier as well as Pastor Passauer were able to prevail against Bishops Leich,

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Demke, Church president Natho and Consistorial President Stolpe only by a narrow majority and decided at the Conference of Church Leaders that no representative of the federation would participate. Subsequently, Stolpe and Ziegler initiated an extraordinary meeting of the executive committee of the Conference of Church Leaders, which reversed the decision. If one wanted to stay in contact with the state, the advocates of participation argued, one could not boycott the events. Moreover, “the” church did not want a “New Forum” (Leich), and Demke remained shrewd enough to report untruthfully that a demonstration on October 5 in Magdeburg had been a “provocation of legal forces.”81 But the state and the party prepared for more than just celebrations. For months, the regional and district task forces, each of which was under the command of the highest SED functionary and involved representatives of the SED, MdI, MfS and other state agencies working together, had been making contingency plans for “internal tensions.”82 These task forces had been established after June 17, 1953. At the beginning of the year, the army had started to set up and train the abovementioned hundred-man military units to handle police duties. This happened without a fuss and was considered a secret enterprise since such efforts also met with rejection within the NVA (“A German soldier does not shoot at his own population”). In order not to jeopardize the fighting strength and operational readiness of the army, Defense Minister Keßler decided that from September 1, if there were any signs of conscientious objection to military service, the army would either issue no call-up order or withdraw one if it had already been issued.83 The training of these “combat groups” was also increasingly oriented toward civil war–like conflicts in 1989. For example, SED district leader Schabowski, in November 1988, described the tasks that these combat groups should be able to perform in the coming year as follows: “The Berlin People’s Police must ensure that the tasks in the interest of maintaining public order and security at all times, especially against subversive and counterrevolutionary machinations of the enemy, as well as within the framework of national defense, can be reliably fulfilled by the working class combat groups.”84 This orientation was no secret from the more than two hundred thousand members of the combat groups, which led to considerable unrest, especially among those who were not party members who accounted for between 20 and 40 percent of each group of one hundred. Radio Glasnost reported on this in August so that word spread among the population about what the SED leadership had ordered. There were leaks everywhere. The combat groups also lost personnel due to the wave of people fleeing the country.85 At the end of September, the riot police units housed in barracks increased their command readiness. On October 5, several additional People’s Police response units were pulled together in East Berlin. Troops of the NVA and MfS were also concentrated there. Similar things happened in Dresden, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Karl-Marx-Stadt, and other regions. The people noticed, which significantly

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contributed to their insecurity and fear that there would be a “Chinese solution.” Wild rumors were circulating. The commanders of the security forces, police, and combat groups purposefully persuaded their charges that the Brandenburg Gate and the Wall were likely to be stormed. In the run-up to the event, a flyer actually appeared that read “Storm the Berlin Wall! Freedom for the GDR.” But it was in Kraków, where a rally to show solidarity with the GDR opposition took place on the main market on October 5. What was told beyond walls of the barracks to the People’s Police, riot police, transport police, firefighters, soldiers, and officers has not yet been systematically revealed. On the one hand, individual reports testify that the officers were unable to give their crews precise information because they themselves did not have any. On the other hand, the usual propaganda machinery seems to have been running at full speed everywhere with reports that the opposition was preparing for street battles and counterrevolution, that they were prepared to use all means of violence and would stop at nothing, and that one should not be deceived by candles and peaceful faces. The opponent was the New Forum, the other groups, the churches, and the West, which was leading all this. Above all, one sentence from the call of the New Forum was repeatedly quoted at training sessions in the first days of October: “We want to be protected from violence and not have to endure a state that intimidates and spies [on its citizens].” Reactions to these briefings varied. Officers, professional soldiers, and policemen seldom voiced their disagreement; they went about their jobs and were particularly loyal to the system anyway. Nevertheless, there were several dozen of them who clearly stated in advance that they were not available for such operations against the population. The conscripts in the riot police units were under particularly high pressure. It is clear from documentation that the few who openly professed their support for the New Forum, the opposition, and/or the churches did not see action. Officers conducted individual interviews with those suspected of having such an attitude even if it could not be proven. If the assumption turned out to be true, these officers were not deployed either. Nothing else happened to any of these individuals, which, of course, was due to the historical events that happened afterward, not because of any laxity on the part of the state. The MdI and MfS had registered such solidarity for the opposition very well. If conscripts (NVA and riot police) proved unfit for duty during the events, they too were immediately removed without further consequences.86 It seems that the professional officers and noncommissioned officers were also under a lot of pressure—apparently many were extraordinarily frightened. This was evident not least by the alarming increase in alcohol consumption in the barracks of the riot police from the end of September onward as registered by the command authorities. Chilean emigrants summed up the emotional situation on October 7, which many people perceived as almost unbearable: “The view is that the situation is as

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emotionally tense as it was before the coup in Chile in 1973.”87 In East Berlin the border crossing points were not closed, as was often claimed, but more than forty-one hundred people were turned away; nine thousand got from West to East Berlin. On the days before and after, the absolute numbers were slightly lower, but the ratios were similar. In the late afternoon, dozens of young men and women gathered, watched by numerous Western camera teams and thousands of security forces, to protest against the electoral fraud, as on the seventh of every month. SED, FDJ, and MfS forces mingled among the young people on Alexanderplatz, which was filled with visitors and unsuspecting passersby. At about 5:20 p.m., some people began to move toward the nearby Palace of the Republic, where a row of leaders was just about to celebrate. Passersby quickly joined this spontaneous demonstration so that after about one thousand meters it had grown to several thousand. Shortly before the palace, a barrier chain brought the demonstrators to a halt. People shouted “Gorbi, Gorbi,” “No violence,” “Democracy—now or never,” “New Forum,” and “Freedom.” MfS troops picked out individuals. After about an hour, emergency forces pushed the crowd toward Prenzlauer Berg. At the same time there were two to three thousand people in the Gethsemane Church. The demonstration parade with a total of six to seven thousand people came to a halt several times along the way; again and again both uniformed and disguised troops picked out individuals. Meanwhile, the police, MfS forces, and combat groups surrounded the Gethsemane Church, formed several barrier chains, and almost hermetically sealed off the residential quarter. Other streets and squares in Prenzlauer Berg were also no longer accessible. In the following hours there were numerous attacks on demonstrators and churchgoers. Particularly disadvantageous for the SED, as it later turned out, was the fact that completely uninvolved passersby and residents were arrested on Alexanderplatz, in subway cars, at subway stations, and on numerous streets in Prenzlauer Berg. The police operation was carried out with great brutality. For the first time in their lives, many people saw water cannons, policemen in combat uniforms, dogs set upon people, and police trucks mounted with ploughs. The next day the events in East Berlin seemed to be repeated. Already in the early afternoon, police brutally assaulted completely uninvolved people on Alexanderplatz. In the evening a few thousand demonstrators and thousands of security forces gathered again around the Gethsemane Church. A total of twelve hundred arrests were made. In contrast to the events in other cities, the television images from East Berlin immediately went around the world. What hundreds of people reported after their release, usually within twenty-four hours, also left eager SED supporters speechless. The physical and psychological torture they experienced was so similar at the various places they were arrested that hardly anyone would believe in coincidence. And precisely because there were many uninvolved persons, residents, and even SED members among those who were arrested, hardly anyone

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doubted these individual reports, especially since the Western media was also disseminating pictures, photos, and reports. People were beaten, kicked, spat on; women and girls had to undress and “do sports”; many were denied the right to go to the toilet, and when they were allowed to go to the toilet, the door remained open, and they were subjected to observation and commentary; people had to stand facing a concrete wall for up to twelve hours without sitting down or even moving at all; many were thrown onto truck platforms; at arrest points there were rows of police with truncheons and shields through which people were pushed. And over and over again they heard this sentence: “You knew this would happen.” When asked where they were being taken, the answer was “To a dump.” No policeman or combat group member visibly refused an order, no one stepped out of line, but the horror and fear could be seen on the faces of many a conscript in the riot police, many a combat group member, and even many a student officer in the police force. Later, the SED claimed that the demonstrators had been brutal, but one can judge from the MfS reports how it really was: the comrades complained about a few torn shirts and jackets and that too few electric shock devices had been available to them. Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Berlin, in Schwante, a historic meeting of forty-two men and women was also taking place on October 7. Arranged in strict secrecy beforehand, this was the founding meeting of the SDP. Gutzeit and Meckel’s plans worked out. They had already prepared two founding documents in advance. At the last meeting of the initiating group, which took place in the night from October 1 to 2, two copies of a foundation charter were signed by twelve people, and this charter was to come into force in the event that the MfS prevented the group’s founding in Schwante. After the failed founding of the Democratic Awakening, Gutzeit and Meckel wanted to ensure their party’s founding even if they still got arrested. One copy of the charter was deposited with Pastor Peter Hilsberg. In Schwante, thirty-eight people signed the foundation charter, and Meckel gave a programmatic foundation speech based on the July paper. In terms of German policy, Meckel advocated that the allies of both German states conclude peace treaties with the two states to grant them full sovereignty. Reunification was not on the agenda and had to remain subordinate to Pan-European unification processes. The group elected Stephan Hilsberg as first speaker and Markus Meckel and Angelika Barbe as second speakers. Managing director became IM “Maximilian,” alias Manfred Böhme. Thomas Krüger took it upon himself to inform the Western media the next day that the party had been successfully founded. In the weeks that followed, the party was built up without any apparatus and associated technology. With all these startups, one must always bear in mind that they had neither their own newspapers nor other opportunities to present themselves to the public, that there were hardly any internal communication possibilities, and that communication between the regions was extremely complicated, as many did not even have a telephone. By November

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14, a total of eighty-eight contact addresses had been provided in eleven of the fifteen districts, the first points of contact for interested parties.88 As is the case with the other new groups, it is hardly possible to give precise figures of SDP membership. By November 14, the number should have been between five hundred and one thousand. Although East Berlin was the focus of media interest on that day, oppositional demonstrations were also held in other cities. But in Dresden solidarity was particularly widespread, as demonstrations with thousands of participants had been taking place there before as well. Since October 3, actors had been declaring that they were “stepping out of our roles” and reading out the calls from the oppositional groups and their catalogues of demands, exclaiming “a right to dialogue.” A symbolically significant performance of Volker Braun’s Die Übergangsgesellschaft occurred on October 7. After the performance, all the actors and employees went on stage and proposed a minute’s silence for the victims of the police operations in the preceding days. The audience stood up and joined in. In the meantime, a crowd had formed in the city center once again. For the first time there was a real demonstration. About 130 people were arrested again, and by midnight the police broke the parade with truncheons and shields. The MfS, fearing that the demonstrators might try to storm the People’s Police response units to free the detainees, triggered operational alarms and distributed live ammunition and hand grenades. In December 1989, three MfS officers testified that the order to use firearms had been verbally “passed down”: at this point, shots could have been fired if attacks on recognizable SED members had been made.89 In Leipzig, too, there was a demonstration of two to five thousand people. The police and the MfS were especially brutal there as well; they used water cannons to drive the people apart. More than two hundred people were arrested. There were protest rallies, tumults, and spontaneous demonstrations in many other cities, including Karl-Marx-Stadt, Potsdam, Halle, Jena, Magdeburg, Arnstadt, Ilmenau, Aschersleben, Crimmitschau, Dessau, Dippoldiswalde, Erfurt, Guben, Hainichen, Schwarzenberg, Prenzlau, Rosslau, Rostock, and Torgau. In some places, only dozens participated, while other places like Potsdam and Magdeburg brought out well over one thousand people. The country had never before experienced a birthday like this for the republic. In addition, throughout the entire GDR there were leaflets, slogans spray-painted on streets and walls, and repeated shouts of “New Forum,” “Freedom,” or “Democracy—now or never.” Especially in smaller towns like Aschersleben, GDR flags without a state emblem—i.e., the German flag—were flown. To be sure, there were protests and police operations in many places,90 and even though each event has its own historical significance, and one should be cautious with hierarchical evaluations, the actual earthquake did not take place on this day in East Berlin, Leipzig, or Dresden, but in Plauen (seventy-six thousand inhabitants). The city was located near the internal German border in the

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district of Karl-Marx-Stadt. Since the 1950s, this district had traditionally been one of the districts, along with Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig, where the SED, MfS, and MdI registered the greatest opposition to their policies year after year, where the most spontaneous resistance to the regime arose, and where emigrant numbers were always highest. In the capital of this district, Karl-Marx-Stadt, there had been a demonstration of about two thousand people on October 7; in Plauen, by contrast, between ten and twenty thousand people had taken part! An opposition group had been working in the city since 1988, having formed after the January events in East Berlin and the resulting declarations of solidarity for those who had been arrested; it also sought to prove the election fraud in May 1989. This group had connections to Leipzig and Königswalde. From the very beginning, it had no fear of contact with people applying to emigrate and the groups they belonged to. Superintendent Thomas Küttler belonged to another group, the group of Saxon church employees, including Steffen Heitmann and Christof Ziemer, that protested the ban on the New Forum on September 23 with a letter to the GDR Council of Ministers. On September 26, two applicants for departure applied to the People’s Police district office to be allowed to hold a demonstration for freedom of travel, democracy, and permission for the formation of the new groups on October 7. The policemen found this to be “impertinent” and threw the two out. In cooperation with the MfS, the police established that the two had been in contact with an opposition group. Küttler wrote a letter to Mayor Norbert Martin on September 29 and thanked him for the invitation to the official ceremony of the city on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. Unlike, as mentioned, Leich, Demke, Ziegler, and Stolpe from the Conference of Church Leaders, he not only declined with thanks but also declared that the fortieth year of German division could not be a cause for joy. He also remarked that the state’s handling of the escape problem and dissenters, as well as its defamation of the synod, were no cause for joy either. “Participation in this commemorative event on the founding day of the GDR would thus express a degree of problem-free agreement that does not exist in this form. In addition, the program of this festive event . . . [gives] me the impression of a party event.” Nevertheless, he expressed hoped that the opportunity for talks would still be available. When trains carrying the refugees from Prague also passed through Plauen on October 5, a small crowd of several hundred people had gathered at the station. Security forces cleared the station by force. At many companies lining the railway, staff waved to the travelers with determination as they passed. In one factory, one of the first small strikes of the autumn of 1989 took place on October 6. On the evening of October 5, about thirteen hundred people gathered in St. Mark’s Church, in front of which there were about seven hundred more. Meanwhile, an appeal was circulating to come to the centrally located Theaterplatz on October 7 at 3 p.m. to protest. Word got around fast. Only a few copies of the call were

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circulated, and only a few people knew the long version. It is a particularly valuable document of contemporary history because it contained many of the points that dominated the discussions in the GDR in the following weeks; it reflected the general anger people felt and included a summary—still largely unknown today—of what drove people onto the streets; typical of the time, it did not shy away from exaggerations but purposefully used them to help mobilize the people, and it showed why the citizens’ movements never existed in the singular but only in the plural from the beginning: Communiqué and call of the “Initiative for the Democratic Renewal of Society.” Citizens of the city of Plauen! For months the SED regime has been conducting an unprecedented smear campaign against all democratically minded forces in Europe! . . . But worst of all are the ways that the SED regime kicks its own people! On the radio, television, and in the press of the GDR we are openly declared to be immature. The SED practices unbridled incitement of the people. A worldwide scandal was the declaration of the People’s Chamber of the GDR on the events in China, which, at the same time, was intended as a threat to its own people. . . . This SED regime . . . simply puts itself on a par with such criminal governments and openly professes its support for them! . . . If we look at this development in its entirety . . . we must conclude that we Germans in the GDR have learned nothing, nothing at all, from the history of the corrupting Third Reich! Forty years after the founding of the GDR, frightening parallels can be seen. Even if it is not the intention of this state to start a war, and it will never be able to, it is still those who cry out loudest for peace and do the least for it! . . . How can the so-called NVA and the border troops of the GDR claim to be an “army of peace” when contempt for humanity, cadaver-like obedience, and fascist lack of spirit determine their character! Combat troops and riot police are already practicing in great style under the guidance of the State Security Service to suppress strikes and demonstrations—and thus the war against their own people! The entire SED regime is nothing more than a covert military dictatorship, which is now becoming more and more exposed and showing its true face! . . . For forty years the people in our state were denied any right to codetermination, they were politically and ideologically dulled, lulled, made immature and intimidated. Everywhere one feels the powerlessness of the people, the consequences of which are mostly resignation and refusal, and for many people leaving the country is the only alternative. But there is still a second alternative in which each and every one of us can make a contribution—and, indeed, must, and that is: an end to resignation and silent protest! We must finally act—offer active and energetic resistance! Changes can only be forced. What we need is a strong opposition! Or do we want to completely lose our identity as Germans by continuing to wait and see what happens and hope for help from outside? What else do we want to put up with—do we really have so much to lose? But one thing is certain—if we do not wake up immediately and free ourselves from our indifference, we will lose “face” and our dignity. It is not only about us; it is also about a united, peaceful Europe, which would not be conceivable at all with the continuation of dictatorships such as those in the GDR, the ČSSR or Romania! And finally, the unity of Germany, as a natural and undeniable wish of all Germans, is only possible when

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the European household is united and equal. The same applies to the fight against the catastrophic environmental situation. This allegedly “socialist” state called the “GDR” lacks any logic and philosophy of common sense. It is the most perfectly organized and functioning exploitation system in the history of mankind. . . . Our demands are:—right of assembly and demonstration;—right to strike;—freedom of expression and press;—admission of the opposition group “New Forum”;—free, democratic elections;—admission of independent parties and environmental groups;—freedom of travel for all. citizens! Overcome your lethargy and indifference! Our future is at stake! it’s now or never!!!91

On this day, several hundred demonstrators initially gathered on Theaterplatz, but the crowd quickly grew to several thousand. The police were overwhelmed. The professional fire brigade tried to drive the crowd apart with fire engines. Although the action remained half-hearted, many people who had not been involved but were now soaked became so angry that they joined the demonstrators. A demonstration march was formed. A police helicopter swirled menacingly over the heads of the demonstrators. The local police chief was deposed and replaced by a supervisor from the district. The crowd marched, chanted, and came back to the town hall. Superintendent Küttler succeeded in calming the crowd. At the same time the command was persuaded to withdraw the helicopter and the armed combat troops. Around 6 p.m. the crowd dispersed, and only a few hundred remained. The police, the MfS, combat troops, and the NVA hermetically sealed off the inner city. Later in the evening, about sixty people were arrested, and Küttler managed to get the mayor to agree to talk with a group of citizens in the coming days. This talk took place on October 11. Plauen was not declared a “heroic town” in 1989–90, but this was only because the events in this provincial town were not broadcast by Western television cameras. The first newspaper article about these events appeared in a smalltown Bavarian newspaper a few days later when a pensioner drove to the West and told people about them. To this day, few people are aware that this city was the first to express the will for revolution and German unity en masse on the streets. On October 7, more citizens of this city participated in protests than in any other city. The very next day, the head of the voluntary fire brigade declared that the deployment of the professional fire brigade had been illegal and had caused lasting damage to the organization’s reputation. This was an expression of solidarity, which the city also showed in other ways. In shops, service workers refused to serve officers and firefighters who had been involved in the operation. Civil disobedience spread. Even before October, the district had the highest rate of departures among the combat troops. Some individual combat units practically disintegrated. Following the events of October 7, Plauen and Karl-Marx-Stadt had the highest rates of withdrawal from the SED and the combat troops, as well as the highest number of requests for release from police service. Leipzig was

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ahead of this district in its citizens’ refusal to obey combat troops’ orders, but only because most of the people critical of the system had already left. For weeks, Plauen remained the GDR city that was one step ahead of all the others—both in terms of mass mobilization and demands. If any responsible politicians in East or West had looked at Plauen in October and perceived the city as a reflection of the GDR, they would have been visionaries who knew where and how quickly the journey would go. But Plauen did not appear on the political map. Joachim Gauck once said that the SED “used a small cast to stage the chamber play Reform of the System. Too late. The masses had been awakened by a tempest. Thanks to Plauen! They didn’t want a chamber play. They wanted the endgame. The twilight of the gods was on.”92 On the morning of Sunday, October 8, Krenz, on behalf of Honecker, sent an urgent circular to all SED district leaders, summarily pointing out the “rowdy gatherings and violent clashes” in several districts, noting that further riots were “expected” and had to be “stopped in advance.” A meeting of the district commanders was to be convened right away, and all important party, trade union, and FDJ officials, as well as employees of state organs, were to be informed immediately. Further, articles distancing the government from the events needed to be published, and reports on the situation would have to be sent to the responsible CC department by 6:00 a.m. every day.93 Minister Mielke ordered “full readiness for duty,” requiring all MfS members to either remain in the service buildings or to stay at home. From that point on, those who usually bore arms no longer went onto the streets without weapons. Agent handlers were instructed to mobilize and deploy IMs to prevent new protests. The office buildings of the MfS, the state, and the party were to be specially protected, possible attacks on arms depots were to be repelled, and “acts of terror and other acts of violence, especially against members of the SED and other progressive citizens . . . were to be consistently prevented.”94 This was not an order to use firearms, but Krenz did not rule this out either. On the evening of October 8, demonstrations and riots again occurred in several cities as in East Berlin. On this day, the first, very small, verifiable demonstration took place in front of an MfS building—forty-five young people chanted “Stasi out,” “Stasi pigs,” “Freedom,” “The wall must go,” “Gorbi, come here,” and “We’re staying here” in front of the MfS district office in Bischofswerda. The police arrested all of them.95 The most important demonstrations took place in Dresden. Again, thousands were on the streets shouting, among other things, “We’re staying here—we want reforms,” “No violence,” and “Gorbi, Gorbi.” In the late afternoon, the police and the MfS arrested about 150 people. Again and again, the police cleared the streets, and there was the threat that state violence would escalate again. Hans Modrow, who had requested NVA units for

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Dresden just a few days earlier, meanwhile openly opposed the SED leadership for the first time. At the meeting of the district commanders, he ordered that they should only use political means of persuasion and no more violence. From about 5:30 p.m., the security forces tried to surround, channel, and disperse the demonstrators, but they no longer beat protesters with truncheons or sprayed them with water cannons. In the evening, demonstrators surrounded by the police managed to speak with police leaders. Chaplain Frank Richter demanded a meeting with Mayor Berghofer. For days, Richter had been thinking that he could use a demonstration to engage in dialogue with the state. On that day, his expectation paid off. The demonstrators chose the “Group of 20” from among their ranks and determined the topics for discussion. Berghofer signaled that he would not go out onto the streets but that he was prepared to receive a delegation in his offices the next morning. Superintendent Christof Ziemer informed the crowd with a police megaphone and said that the results of the talks would be reported in several churches the following evening. Dresden was heading toward peaceful solutions. The signal spread quickly throughout the country. However, those who had been arrested also experienced excessive violence that night.

October 9, 1989—Leipzig: A Day of Decision Whoever invented the talk of the “peaceful revolution” seems to have first looked at events only on the evening of October 9. There was incredible tension on this Monday. There was only one topic at the forefront of everyone’s mind: Will the “Chinese solution” be deployed this evening in Leipzig or not? The news was unsettling. On October 5, a combat troop commander had proclaimed in the Leipziger Volkszeitung that “we” could not stand idly by and watch “our” order being threatened. One day later, Günter Lutz, also a combat troop commander, wrote: “We are ready and willing to effectively protect what we have created with our hands in order to stop the counterrevolutionary actions finally and effectively. If need be, with guns in our hands!” The demonstration on October 7 in Leipzig and the violence that state forces had used to disperse it prompted fears that something bad would happen. In the course of the day, more and more reports and rumors circulated. NVA groups had gathered in large numbers around Leipzig, as well as around Berlin, Magdeburg, and Dresden. The police, the MfS, and “social forces” were visible everywhere in Leipzig. Particularly disturbing news came from the hospitals: beds had been cleared and additional blood reserves set aside, as well as other things to indicate an expectation of bloody incidents.96 In Berlin, seventeen pastors and church employees, including Forck, Stolpe, Krusche, Eppelmann, Hülsemann, Furian, and Passauer, as well as Bernd Albani,

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Gisbert Mangliers, and Werner Widrat, distributed “Five Urgent Requests”: (1) all citizens should exercise freedom of expression without fear, (2) the state should initiate changes, (3) the police and security forces should hold back, (4) the worried people should no longer take part in any unauthorized demonstrations;97 the fifth request was forgotten in the rush, but the heading remained for the time being. In the evening, Western news broadcasts quoted the message several times. In Leipzig, state and church offices were busy all day long with negotiations and discussions. Leipzig functionaries asked several times in East Berlin what they should do. The Central Committee remained silent, as did Egon Krenz as the responsible secretary of the committee. He gave no order to strike nor an order to refrain from doing so. Mielke’s order from the day before, which was often misinterpreted, did not include an offensive destruction strategy. The MfS forces were only to strike back if needed to defend institutions and individuals. This left room for interpretation but was by no means meant as an option for an all-out attack. Leipzig opposition groups distributed a call for nonviolence. “Our future depends on it.” Of great symbolic effect was a call jointly written by three SED officials of the SED district leadership (Kurt Meyer, Jochen Pommert, Roland Wötzel) and three Leipzig celebrities (conductor Kurt Masur, theologian Peter Zimmermann, and cabaret artist Bernd-Lutz Lange). Masur insisted that the SED functionaries be included by name; otherwise, the call would not be effective. After hesitation and consultation, they agreed. Meanwhile, thousands of citizens had gathered in four Leipzig churches for Monday prayers. When they left the churches about an hour later, tens of thousands were waiting outside, with up to seventy thousand demonstrators. Shortly after 6 p.m., the signature tune of the Leipzig city radio station was heard from the loudspeakers at the Leipziger Ring. Many became afraid, fearing that a state of emergency would be declared. However, instead the aforementioned call followed, also with the names and functions of the authors being read aloud: “Our common concern and responsibility have brought us together today. We are affected by the development in our city and are looking for a solution. We all need a free exchange of views on the continuation of socialism in our country. That is why those named promise all citizens today to use all their strength and authority to ensure that this dialogue is not only conducted in the district of Leipzig but also with our government. We urge you to be level-headed so that peaceful dialogue becomes possible. This was Kurt Masure speaking.” Not only the demonstrators but also some security forces were impressed and breathed a sigh of relief. The Leipzig operations center was still waiting for an order from Krenz. Tens of thousands chanted, “We are the people!” with only a few of them knowing that they were quoting one of the most famous poems of the 1848 revolution—Ferdinand Freiligrath’s “Trotz alledem!”:

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Nur, was zerfällt, vertretet ihr! Seid Kasten nur, trotz alledem! Wir sind das Volk, die Menschheit wir, Sind ewig drum, trotz alledem! Trotz alledem und alledem: So kommt denn an, trotz alledem! Ihr hemmt uns, doch ihr zwingt uns nicht— Unser die Welt trotz alledem!98

Shortly after 6:35 p.m. it was decided that there would be no intervention if there were no attacks by the crowd. Demonstrators placed numerous burning candles in front of the MfS district administration office. Civil rights activist Karin Hattenhauer, who had been in custody since September 4, later reported: “I heard the thunder in prison and thought tanks were rolling down the streets. I couldn’t have known that the sounds were coming from the footsteps of thousands of demonstrators.”99 At 7:15 p.m. Krenz called Leipzig and retroactively approved the decision not to intervene. At 8 p.m. a concert began in the Gewandhaus under Kurt Masur’s direction. On the program was Richard Strauss’s “Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche” (Till Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks). On this day there were large meetings in churches in Magdeburg, Dresden, Jena, East Berlin, Meerane, Lindow, Merseburg, Ribnitz-Damgarten, Stralsund, Wismar, Wurzen, and Markneukirchen. Everywhere, people followed the events in Leipzig with great tension. In the East Berlin Gethsemanekirche, the trembling visitors received information about the peaceful course of the Leipzig demonstration with great relief and loud cheering. In Halle, though, there were still violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators. In Lindow, hundreds of people went to the town hall and demanded the release of political prisoners. Apparently, it remained peaceful there too. The opposition members Siegbert Schefke and Aram Radomski from East Berlin, who had long been in possession of a camera capable of recording broadcasts, secretly filmed the mass demonstration in Leipzig from a church after they were able to shake off MfS henchmen. Roland Jahn got the camera. He also organized for West German news programs to broadcast the first pictures of this demonstration from Leipzig on the next evening, October 10. The city became a beacon because of the masses and because of the television pictures broadcast worldwide. When it turned out that everything remained peaceful in Leipzig and the state withdrew its forces, the whole country was filled with joy and incredible relief: the SED did not play the feared “Chinese card.” At that moment, many people had new hope because it seemed that everything had to get better. Nobody could have guessed that this day would be of historical significance. Today we know that it was decided on that day that the revolution would be peaceful from then on, that the collapse of the regime was progressing, and that the people were closer to self-liberation than anyone realized.

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Notes 1. Karner et al., Der Kreml und die Wende, 303 (Dok. 42). 2. Andreas Oplatka, Der erste Riss in der Mauer. September 1989—Ungarn öffnet die Grenze (Vienna, 2009). 3. MfS, Bericht über eine Dienstreise in die UVR vom 12.–14. 6. 1989, 15. 6. 1989. BA, MfS, Abt. X 1634, Bl. 5. 4. MfS, Abt. X, Notiz, 13. 8. 1989. BA, MfS, Abt. X 1706, Bl. 29. 5. ND, 15. 8. 1989. 6. Jörg Kotterba, “Monatsmeinung,” Der Leichtathlet 32/89, 11. 8. 1989, 2. 7. Gyula Kurucz, ed., Das Tor zur deutschen Einheit. Grenzdurchbruch Sopron, 19. August 1989 (Berlin, 2000), 42. 8. For a detailed and informative account, see Karel Vodicka, Die Prager Botschaftsflüchtlinge 1989. Geschichte und Dokumente (Göttingen, 2014). 9. JW, 30. 8. 1989. 10. JW, 28. 8. 1989. 11. Günter Herlt, “Über Verführer und Verführte,” Deutsche Lehrerzeitung 38–39 (1989): 6. 12. Hans-Dieter Schütt, “Die Zeit heilt alle Wunder,” JW, 12. 9. 1989. 13. Klaus Höpcke, “Reden über das eigene Land,” JW, 21. 9. 1989. 14. “F[ern]S[chreiben] des Staatsekretärs Bertele an den Chef des Bundeskanzleramtes, 22. 9. 1989,” in Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik. Deutsche Einheit. Sonderedition aus den Akten des Bundeskanzleramtes 1989/90 (Munich, 1998), 413. 15. Günter Kertzscher, “Pluralismus—was ist gemeint?” ND, 23./24. 9. 1989. 16. Ernst Reuter said on September 9, 1948, in Berlin before about three hundred thousand listeners during the Soviet blockade of West Berlin in front of the Reichstag: “You peoples of the world, you peoples in America, in England, in France, in Italy! Look at this city and acknowledge that you may not relinquish this city and this people and cannot relinquish them!” 17. Heinz Kamnitzer, “Schaut auf diesen Staat . . . ,” JW, 29. 9. 1989. 18. “Ich habe erlebt, wie BRD-Bürger ‹gemacht› werden,” ND, 21. 9. 1989. 19. BA, MfS, HA XIX, AP 48344/92. 20. Printed, e.g., in Wolfgang Templin and Reinhard Weißhuhn, “Die Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte,” in Opposition in der DDR von den 70er Jahren bis zum Zusammenbruch, ed. Eberhard Kuhrt (Opladen, 1999), 201–3. 21. MfS, HA XX/5, Information, 5. 6. 1989. BA, MfS, AOP 16922/91, Bd. 11, Bl. 5. 22. Appeal in BA, MfS, Ast. Leipzig, AU 681/90, Bd. 1, Bl. 397. 23. MfS, HA XX, Lagebericht zur Aktion “Störenfried,” 9. 7. 1989. BA, MfS, HA IX 3200, Bl. 22. 24. MfS, HA XX/9, Sachstandsbericht, 4. 7. 1989. BA, MfS, AOP 1055/91, Bd. 15, Bl. 10. 25. BV Karl-Marx-Stadt, Abt. XX, Information, 27. 7. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Chemnitz, OV “Spaten II,” XIV/2214/77, Bd. III, Bl. 443–47. 26. Printed in Gerhard Rein, ed., Die Opposition in der DDR. Entwürfe für einen anderen Sozialismus (Berlin, 1989), 65–67. 27. Printed in Markus Meckel and Martin Gutzeit, Opposition in der DDR. Zehn Jahre kirchliche Friedensarbeit—kommentierte Quellentexte (Cologne, 1994), 364–68. 28. Martin Gutzeit and Markus Meckel, “Das Recht auf Staats-Bürgerschaft in der DDR (April 1987),” in ibid., 295; a similar source is Martin Gutzeit, “Zur Frage des Identitätsbewußtseins (der Christen) in beiden deutschen Staaten (Mai 1989),” in ibid., 363. 29. Martin Gutzeit and Stephan Hilsberg, “Die SDP/SPD im Herbst 1989,” in Kuhrt, Opposition in der DDR, 619. 30. Matthias Geis, “Als Reaktion auf die Ausreisewelle,” taz, 15. 8. 1989.

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31. Excerpts from these presentations are published in Ludwig Mehlhorn, “Demokratie Jetzt,” in Kuhrt, Opposition in der DDR, 589–91, quotation 590. 32. MfS, HA XX, Lagebericht zur Aktion “Störenfried,” 14. 8. 1989. BA, MfS, HA IX 3200, Bl. 44. 33. MfS, HA XX, Information, 21. 8. 1989. BA, MfS, AOP 17396/91, Bd. 8, Bl. 194–195. 34. “Interview,” taz, 9. 8. 1989. 35. Jens Walther, “Warum berichtet die Junge Welt nicht . . . ,” JW, 6. 9. 1989. 36. The taz published the paper on September 19, 1989. 37. BA, MfS, HA VIII/VI/5. 38. Printed in Sebastian Pflugbeil, “Das Neue Forum,” in Kuhrt, Opposition in der DDR, 521. 39. Kontraste: Auf den Spuren einer Diktatur, 3 DVDs (Bonn, 2005). 40. The call and theses from September 12, 1989, are printed in Rein, Die Opposition in der DDR, 59–67. 41. taz, 15. 9. 1989. 42. Interview, taz, 16. 9. 1989. 43. Bericht vom 15. 9. 1989. BA, MfS, AOP 1010/91, Bd. 29, Bl. 206. 44. Printed in Rein, Die Opposition in der DDR, 150–51. 45. Kurzinformationen über Verhaftete und Inhaftierte vom 11.9.–7. 10. 1989. ABL 1.30–1.33. 46. ABL 1.31. 47. ABL 1.28. 48. “F[ern]S[chreiben] des Staatssekretärs Bertele an den Chef des Bundeskanzleramtes, 20. 9. 1989,” in Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik, 409–10. 49. “F[ern]S[chreiben] des Staatsekretärs Bertele an den Chef des Bundeskanzleramtes, 22. 9. 1989,” in ibid., 415. 50. “F[ern]S[chreiben] des Staatssekretärs Bertele an den Chef des Bundeskanzleramtes, 20. 9. 1989,” in ibid., 410. 51. BA, MfS, AOP 1055/91, Bd. 15, Bl. 235–44 (with the interviews). 52. ND, 22. 9. 1989. 53. Contained in Manfred Gerlach, Standortbestimmung (Berlin, 1989). They were printed in the LDPD daily newspaper Der Morgen. 54. An example containing such tendencies is Ehrhart Neubert, Ein politischer Zweikampf in Deutschland. Die CDU im Visier der Stasi (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna, 2002). 55. “Verlauf der Sitzung des SED-Politbüros am 12. September 1989,” in “Vorwärts immer, rückwärts nimmer!” Interne Dokumente zum Zerfall von SED und DDR 1988/89, ed. Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan and Daniel Küchenmeister (Berlin, 1994), 148, 151. 56. “Dienstbesprechung beim Minister, 31. 8. 1989,” in “Ich liebe euch doch alle.” Befehle und Lageberichte des MfS Januar—November 1989, ed. Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle (Berlin, 1990), 125. 57. BA, MfS, Ast. Potsdam, AKG 617, Bl. 166 (26. 9. 1989). 58. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Stasi konkret. Überwachung und Repression in der DDR (Munich, 2013). 59. BA, MfS, ZAIG 3756. The first document is published without its extensive appendices in Mitter and Wolle, “Ich liebe euch doch alle,” 46–71. 60. Krenz, Herbst 89, 67–68. 61. Notizen, 17. 9. 1989. SAPMO, B-Arch DY 30 IV 2/2/2039/77, Bl. 36. Handwritten crossouts and changes may have come from Egon Krenz. 62. Nicole Völtz, Staatsjubiläum und friedliche Revolution. Planung und Scheitern des 40. Jahrestages der DDR 1989 (Leipzig, 2009). 63. Vodicka, Die Prager Botschaftsflüchtlinge 1989. 64. “ F[ern]S[chreiben] Staatssekretär Bertele an den Chef des Bundeskanzleramtes, 2. 10. 1989,” in Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik, 432.

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65. Printed in Ehrhart Neubert, “Der ‘Demokratische Aufbruch,’” in Kuhrt, Opposition in der DDR, 557–59. 66. Jan Carpentier, “An alle in der DDR! Anleitung zum Handeln!” JW, 2. 10. 1989. 67. Cornelia Kästner, ed., Wachet und betet. Herbst ‘89 in der Gethsemanekirche. 20 Jahre danach (Berlin, 2009). 68. Printed in Pflugbeil, Das Neue Forum, 525–28. Here, the impression arises that it has to do with a single paper. However, the calls were distributed separately. See also the array in Die ersten Texte des Neuen Forum. 9. 9.–18. 12. 1989 (Berlin, [January] 1990). 69. “Telefongespräch des Bundeskanzlers Kohl mit Ministerpräsident Adamec, 3. 10. 1989,” in Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik, 437. 70. Egon Krenz an Erich Honecker, 3. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 7438, Bl. 12–17; SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30 IV 2/2039/309, Bl. 141–43. 71. Krenz, Herbst 89, 74. 72. “Protokoll der Sitzung des SED-Politbüros vom 4. 10. 1989,” in Stephan and Küchenmeister, “Vorwärts immer, rückwärts nimmer!” 157. 73. MdI, Information vom 5. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 15906, Bl. 2. 74. “Aktennotiz von Friedrich Streletz für Minister Heinz Keßler, 12. 11. 1989,” in Hans-Hermann Hertle, Der Fall der Mauer. Die unbeabsichtigte Selbstauflösung des SED-Staates (Opladen, 1996), 550. 75. A former colonel of the NVA meticulously described the deployment of NVA units on the basis of documents: Wilfried Hanisch, “Die NVA während der zugespitzten Krise in der DDR im Herbst 1989. Wende, Vereinigungsprozess und Rolle der NVA,” in Was war die NVA? StudienAnalysen-Berichte zur Geschichte der NVA (Berlin, 2001), 508–26. 76. MfS, BV Dresden, Information für Hans Modrow [nach 6. 10. 1989]. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, BV, Leiter 10007, Bl. 30. 77. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 1494. 78. NF, Protokoll Treffen Berliner Kontaktadressen. RHG, NFo 222. 79. BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 157, Bl. 220. 80. This “impressive” list is printed in ND, 9. 10. 1989. 81. HA XX/AKG 829, Bl. 198–203. 82. Ast. Dresden, BV, Leiter 10006, Bl. 71–76. 83. M[inisterium für] N[ationale] V[erteidigung], Verfahrensregelungen bei Verweigerung des Wehrdienstes bzw. des Dienstes als Bausoldat zum 1. 9. 1989. BA, MfS, HA IX 532, Bl. 7–11. 84. SED-B[ezirks]L[eitung] Berlin, Aufgabenstellung an die Kommandeure der Arbeiterklasse der Hauptstadt der DDR, Berlin, für die Ausbildungsjahre 1989/90, 17. 11. 1988. 85. For a thorough account, see Tilmann Siebeneichner, Proletarischer Mythos und realer Sozialismus. Die Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse in der DDR (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2014), 399–466. 86. Before and after 2009, few contemporary witnesses reported anything different, and those explained that they had been removed from the deployments on account of insubordination or unreliability and locked up for more than ten days. I checked every single case that I came to know about, and in no case was I able to find evidence of an arrest or detainment over ten days. This may have to do with the fact that many documents from this phase were destroyed. It could, however, also simply derive from the fact that the contemporary witnesses, for whatever reason, are mistaken. Michael Richter indicates (without citing a source) that 10 percent of the conscripts were removed from deployments before they occurred: Michael Richter, Die Friedliche Revolution. Aufbruch zur Demokratie in Sachsen 1989/90 (Göttingen, 2009), 1:361. 87. Information zu aktuellen Meinungsäußerungen aus der DDR-Bevölkerung, 8. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, HA II 32903, Bl. 9. 88. Martin Gutzeit gave me access to numerous original documents from his extensive collection, including various lists of contact addresses.

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89. Volker Klemm, Korruption und Amtsmissbrauch in der DDR (Stuttgart, 1991), 40–41 (Klemm was a professor of agrarian history at the Humboldt University, an NDPD Volkskammer representative, and a member of the Volkskammer Committee on State Corruption and Abuses of Office.) 90. E.g., Matthias Ohms, Schlagstockeinsatz und Sicherheitspartnerschaft. Die Volkspolizei während der friedlichen Revolution im Herbst 1989 in Magdeburg (Halle, 2014). 91. BA, MfS, Ast. Chemnitz, XIV 102/89 OV “Lunte.” 92. Joachim Gauck, “‘Ich habe die Wahl!’ Diktaturerinnerung in der Demokratie,” in Zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Anpassung. Formen des Widerstandes und der Opposition in der DDR, ed. Ulrike Poppe, Rainer Eckert, and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk (Berlin, 1995), 405. 93. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30 IV 2/2/2039, Bl. 2–3; BA, MfS, SdM 664, Bl. 66. 94. BA, MfS, Abt. B[ewaffnung und] C[hemischer] D[ienst] (MfS) 3272, Bl. 266. 95. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, BV, Abt. IX 30112, Teil 2, Bl. 217–49. 96. These and other rumors have still not been confirmed, even though they get spread again and again. They were especially densely presented as assertions of fact in Richter, Die Friedliche Revolution, 1:360–62. When Federal President Horst Köhler gave a commemorative speech based on this in 2009 and likewise presented these as fact, there was serious criticism, and it was determined that most of these things could not be proven. 97. Cited from the original ditto print in Martin Gutzeit’s archive. It was also printed as four requests in Die Kirche, 15. 10. 1989. 98. This translation of Freiligrath’s text is my own. “You all only represent what collapses! / You all are only a box, despite everything! / We are the people, humanity we, / we’re always around, despite everything! / Despite everything and all of that: / so show up, despite everything! / You all hinder us, yet you don’t compel us— / the world is ours despite everything!” 99. Qtd. in Martin Jankowski, Der Tag, der Deutschland veränderte. 9. Oktober 1989 (Leipzig, 2007), 111.

Part 3

THE FALL OF A DICTATORSHIP

S

Chapter 10

FROM DEMONSTRATIONS TO THE FALL OF THE WALL

S The Dynamic of Events: A Necessary Caveat On Monday afternoon, October 9, 1989, the people attending the vigil in the East Berlin Gethsemanekirche spread a “call.” In it, the idea of a “round table” emerged for the first time within those days: “Now is the time for constructive discussions between all groups and forces in our country at the roundtable.”1 That evening, opposition members distributed the first issue of the telegraph in the Gethsemanekirche with a supplement on the peaceful course of the mass demonstration in Leipzig. By the end of October, six further issues with news followed. The telegraph replaced the Umweltblätter, editorially supervised by a group associated with Wolfgang Rüddenklau and Tom Sello from the UB and Peter Grimm from the IFM. Both the “round table” and the publication of a people’s newspaper could be regarded as premieres. Both the demand for “round tables” and the creation of a public press did not, however, fall from a historically dark sky in the autumn of 1989. Although it can be empirically verified that round tables and a public press existed in East Berlin on October 9, this is far from proving that nothing like these things existed anywhere in the GDR before.2 This consideration points to a fundamental problem. That is, one cannot know with certainty what was said, demanded, done, and rejected before, or where or when that might have occurred. For example, the events of Plauen have already shown that the question of German unity—frequently assumed to have initially played no role at all—is neither true nor false. In this city, as in Suhl, it was on the agenda from the beginning. Even at a meeting of the “Church from Below” on October 2, supporters of the reunification came forward.3 It is natural that Notes from this chapter begin on page 382.

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the German question moved people in the GDR, and not only from the autumn of 1989. People’s positions on it were different, but the question of whether, in view of the conditions in the GDR in September and October 1989, one should title one’s call “Unity Now!” or “Democracy Now!” only appears to be a real alternative in retrospect. In particular, the citizens’ movements at that time were shaped less by idealists than is often claimed. One could follow this through on practically any question, demand, idea, or organization. After October 9, precisely that which “democratic centralism” had always tried to prevent is what happened: the many varied branches of society revealed themselves. Every public idea and action was thenceforth always confronted with public counterideas. The demonstrations were only apparently similar. Although there were common basic patterns in the demands demonstrators made, their details were sometimes mutually exclusive. Moreover, it was not only in the citizens’ movements that the options for action diverged; the state, state parties, and state organizations also quickly lost their unity. The New Forum was different in East Berlin than in Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Erfurt, or Rostock, with different currents arising in almost every city. This finding applies not only to the new organizations and parties but also to the SED ruling apparatus. When a boiler is opened, the steam escapes in all directions. Although the boiler initially opened only slightly after October 9, it did open. The social crisis, refugees, and civil rights movement forced those in power to slowly lift the lid. There does seem to have been one continuity: almost everywhere, the initiatives came from persons and groups who had been active in the opposition even before the autumn of 1989. But even this is not absolutely true because there are counterexamples. Society had started to move, but as late as mid-October only a small minority ventured out onto the streets and into the churches, only a socially manageable group signed the calls, became members of new opposition groups and parties, sent letters and petitions, protested, and reported to state and party institutions. The television images from Leipzig, Dresden, and East Berlin do not lie, but even today they suggest that everyone was “there” and “for” the change. In truth, it had not gotten that far; it never did. The media concentration on a few large cities conveyed an image that had a mobilizing effect but did not correspond to reality. Opposition members hardly slept any more, they experienced a media presence like never before, and they came close to acquiring a significance in world history that would catapult them out of backyards and into the main news broadcasts. In all this, it was often overlooked that these were active minorities with great regional differences. Theoretically, it is always like this in revolutionary times. Even the argument about whether the downfall of the GDR was a revolution or a collapse is futile because the two always come together. Some people can no longer carry on as they have been, and others do not wish to; some cannot yet relinquish power, and others cannot yet take it over; and some are just as divided among themselves

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as they are from others. That too is banal in revolutionary theory. The events of July 14, 1789, in Paris; March 18, 1848, in Berlin; November 7, 1917, in Petrograd; and November 9, 1918, in Berlin were key events, historical caesuras. But they were always only symbolic days because the events and consequences were very different in each case. For July 14, 1789, two beautiful stories exist. In one, Louis XVI sits down at his desk in Versailles in the evening, opens his diary, ponders, and writes: “nothing.” In the other, the highest royal chamberlain, a duke, after some hesitation, visits the king in his bedchamber to report on the events in Paris. The king indignantly replies: “But, this is a revolt!” to which the duke quickly responds, “No, Sire, this is a revolution.” Both anecdotes are significant and quite instructive. They never happened as described. The king did write the famous “nothing” in his diary, but he meant the results of his hunting. And although the role of the duke is not an invention, the conversation is. Historically incorrect and yet not entirely off the mark, these anecdotes symbolize the views of contemporaries and later generations of the ancien régime and the king, beheaded in 1793. Both anecdotes reflect a variety of perspectives on a day, an event, a historical process. Diversity is virtually a prerequisite for a process of upheaval. Depending on the perspective, each event can be told, interpreted, or relived in a completely different way.4 For the revolution of 1989–90, this means that it is not only the actors, contemporary witnesses, and observers who experienced the events very differently—depending on where they lived, what they did, how they thought, and what they wanted. Rather, historians too can take very different perspectives and choose different methods, then work with similar material and arrive at different results. If one compares the events in Röbel and Plauen, in Suhl and Karl-Marx-Stadt, in Dresden and Leipzig, in Klingenthal and Wismar, one will find some similarities but also so many differences that the question inevitably arises as to whether one is not comparing apples and oranges. There are at least three methodological ways to escape this dilemma. The best and most obvious is to chronicle everything in detail and reconstruct the developments in every town and village. This takes about thirty to fifty years of work, and one must find a publisher willing to print the twentyfive-volume edition, but afterward—usually after one’s own death, students continue the mammoth task—one becomes the celebrated footnote hero of two or three subsequent generations of historians. Another method that is somewhat more strenuous but takes less time is to compare two regions, political groups, or social currents. It would be advantageous to have the aforementioned twentyfive-volume edition at hand for this, but it is not yet available. Consequently, the disadvantage of this method is self-evident: one explains something without really knowing what it meant. Wolgast and Gützkow are not even thirty kilometers apart, and the revolutionary developments that took place in them were very different, but what do they stand for? Dresden, Leipzig, East Berlin—in these cities too, events unfolded very differently, but were they really so different, and

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if so, what do they actually stand for? The third method is all that is left to us, and it is the simplest one: one takes particular actors into one’s sights, relates them to irrefutable facts, and, despite hundreds of special paths, tries to draw a clear line through the historical process that may seem straight and almost a matter of course to us today. Since historians do not think much of chroniclers but like to use their work without citation, and chroniclers are only available for a few places,5 and because the files, in turn, often draw a different picture than the chroniclers, this book logically takes the easy way out and draws a serpentine line that I hope is not wrong but can in no way be completely correct. This is because everything in Wolgast was different than in Gützkow, and everything in Suhl was different than in Putbus. Everything was different everywhere, but the result was the same everywhere.

Revolution and Counterrevolution: Reactions and Counterreactions The SED Politburo met on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 10 and 11, 1989. The most powerful men were at a loss. On the evening of October 11, the GDR news spread a statement in the usual SED German that declared, first of all, that everything had been right so far and, second, that everything would become far more right and better. One thought made people sit up and take notice: “Socialism needs everyone. It has room and perspective for everyone. It is the future of the growing generations. It is precisely for this reason that we are not indifferent to the fact that people who worked and lived here have renounced our German Democratic Republic.” This was the implicit retraction of the scandalous “You shouldn’t shed a tear” sentence of October 2. Otherwise, the SED leadership declared that it would continue to take action against counterrevolutionary efforts and would not allow itself to be blackmailed. “We will submit ourselves to the discussion. We have all the necessary forms and forums of socialist democracy for this. We call for even greater use to be made of them. But we also say openly that we are against proposals and demonstrations that are intended to mislead people and change the constitutional foundation of our state. . . . GDR, socialism and peace, democracy and freedom belong together forever. Nothing and nobody can stop us. . . . The people of the German Democratic Republic have forever chosen socialism.”6 When one reads these lines today, it takes a while to decipher the hidden messages. At that time, most people immediately understood that new trends were emerging here, even if no new policy options appeared. That was disappointing, which one can conclude without referring to oppositional statements or situation reports by the SED, MfS, and bloc parties. Deputy Construction Minister Erich Haak (SED) said that this declaration was made “very late and leaves many questions open. It raises the question of why this

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statement was read by a newsreader and not by a Politburo member himself?”7 The first change (which could not be publicly communicated because doing so would have violated the constitution since 1949), was decided by the Council of Ministers on October 12: submissions from the specialist ministries outlining “problems to be solved” were no longer to be submitted to the CC specialist departments but were now to be submitted directly “by the Secretary of State to the Council of Ministers.”8 On the one hand, the Politburo’s declaration resulted from pressure from the streets and the flow of refugees, both “voting with their feet,” and the formation of citizens’ movements that grew stronger every day. On the other hand, it resulted from hundreds of letters from SED members and entire party organizations that had reached the CC since the beginning of October whose senders expressed dissatisfaction with the regime and made many suggestions for change. Very few letters supported the SED Politburo. For example, on October 10, an unusually demanding letter signed by sixteen SED members addressed the party leadership: “Dear comrades! We demand of you: Lead the party out of the present defensive position! Let us work together for a socialism that meets the domestic developmental needs of our society and world history’s challenges to socialism!” Subsequently, they called for an end to the unspeakable media policy, an honest reappraisal of history, the establishment of intraparty democracy, greater individual responsibility for companies, the granting of a “socialist rule of law” along with the fundamental rights guaranteed in the constitution, and the introduction of a new electoral system allowing a choice between different candidates. “We must learn to seek and find the truth in debate and practical experiment.”9 Such internal party statements, which were not yet publicly visible, increased the pressure on the SED leadership. In addition, FDJ leader Eberhard Aurich was able to report the first signs of disintegration in his organization. Even the universities and colleges were reeling. On October 11, a first small rally was held at the Humboldt University with two to three hundred participants, about half of whom were delegated “social forces.” At all universities, individual students collected signatures for the New Forum and were still threatened with expulsion for this. The FDJ, SED, and MfS tried for several weeks to undermine and channel the efforts of independent student representatives, but they did not succeed in this. Instead, the SED and FDJ continued to unintentionally contribute daily to the delegitimization of their regime. First, “dialogue talks” between the party and the state, on the one hand, and churches and civil rights representatives, on the other, began in many cities and municipalities after October 12. But the SED’s strategy was to get people off the streets again. That had been the reason for the talks in Dresden and Plauen, just as it was now the motivation for the SED to engage in such talks in more and more cities and communities every day. Second, statements and events repeatedly came to light that clearly showed that the SED was far from willing to give in. Kurt Hager of all people declared on October 12

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that the SED had invented and introduced the idea of dialogue. Surely even CC employees secretly laughed about this preposterous assertion. Meanwhile, the Junge Welt began to oscillate between habitual communist disinformation and a tendency toward political openness. On Wednesday, October 11, 1989, it published a report about a meeting of musicians such as Toni Krahl, Tamara Danz, André Herzberg, and Gerhard Gundermann with FDJ leader Aurich that had taken place two days earlier. Musicians were astonished by the article, and some of them and many others were also irritated by it. A few hours after publication, the initiators of the New Forum already knew that Krahl and his comrades in arms had been betrayed. The news spread throughout the country within a few hours. The Junge Welt felt compelled to print the following counterstatement by the musicians on October 13: Outraged and disappointed, we can only regard the publication of this meeting in the Junge Welt on October 11, 1989, as a breach of trust. . . . Of course, the central point of our discussion was not the agreement on new modes of performing but the dialogue on the content and publication of our resolution. . . . It is correct that we did not sign up to the New Forum, but it is also correct that we expressly welcome the attempt by citizens of our country to get organized in a grassroots democratic manner. . . . It is correct that we find Western media unsuitable as mediators, but it is also correct that we demand that our media must fulfill this function. . . . It is true that we want to take responsibility for socialism, but it is also true that we reject violence as a means of political confrontation and fear “heavenly peace.” Should the abovementioned publication in the JW of Oct. 11, 1989, give the impression that we have left even one position of our resolution, we hereby expressly state that we and another 3,000 colleagues still stand by our resolution and press for publication.10

The Junge Welt was the first daily newspaper to lose its clear line. Days before, it had already printed a letter by Hermann Kant to editor in chief Schütt that stated, among other things: “Warn less about the swamp over there . . . take more care of your own nose.” With an explicit look at the menthol cook and waiter Ferworn, he called for “general disarmament . . . from nuclear missiles to robber guns.” Freedom, Kant wrote, existed not only beyond “the absence of unemployment, crime, social misery, and educational hardship.” Further, he claimed that the best thing about the GDR was that it existed, and the worst thing was that it existed as it did.11 Kant’s astonishing letter and the musicians’ reply were the beginning of a development that changed the media landscape within a few weeks. The media remained loyal to the SED until well into 1990, but they gradually opened up from late October and early November, with the result that daily newspapers, which had usually been available in the society of scarcity, were now also in short supply. The JW issue of October 11 demonstrated how difficult it was for the communists to accept other opinions. The deputy editor in chief Karin Retzlaff published

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a long article under the title “Henrich! Mir ‘grauts’ vor dir!” (Henrich! I’m scared of you!). This demagogic frontal attack against the book author Rolf Henrich did not refer to him alone.12 The last sentence read: “The man is one of the initiators of the ‘New Forum.’”13 Christa Wolf replied with a letter to Retzlaff on October 17, which clearly reflected the situation of critically minded communists: [I] believe . . . I have known the text of your article . . . for decades: It is the tone of demagogy. . . . More than 50,000 mostly young citizens . . . have left the GDR within a few weeks, and this . . . newspaper considers it appropriate to polemic on more than one precious page against an author who apparently . . . brings up some of the reasons for this mass exodus. The reader cannot control the quotations taken out of context because the book was not published in the GDR, the author has no possibility to reply, and it is a good thing that the “New Forum” can be devalued at the same time. But I am hypocritically (or threateningly?) asked whether I “like it” that he “refers” to me. Listen: I know neither Rolf Henrich nor—so far—his book. . . . It is very possible that I would have critical objections to some of his theses and assertions, apart from approval. Nevertheless, he should be able to represent them—after all, they do not seem to me to be suitable for driving young people out of the country.14

It was only on October 23 that the Junge Welt published Wolf’s letter. And Karin Retzlaff did not refrain from answering it: she was affected by the accusations, but she remained true to herself: “If . . . you despise me for this article, it hurts quite a bit. But I wrote it because I mean it.”15 Meanwhile, behind the scenes, SED representatives in all regions tried to influence members of the church leadership. In East Berlin there were several meetings and telephone conversations between the State Secretariat for Church Affairs, the SED district leadership, and the municipal authorities, on the one hand, and representatives of the consistory (above all Stolpe, Krusche, Forck, and Furian), on the other. Krusche and Stolpe offered to mediate but said that this would only work if the attacks on peaceful demonstrators stopped. They promised that they would do everything to get the people off the streets. Mayor Krack informed Schabowski on October 11 that, when Krusche, Forck, and Stolpe had asked him, he had agreed to hold a “citizens’ meeting” but was not prepared to meet opposition groups. Bishop Forck announced this on the same day to Prime Minister Stoph and expected that the “fearsome presence of the state security service in public would be ended,” that all who had been detained in the preceding days would be released immediately, that sentences would be revoked, and that “nobody would suffer disadvantages” for participating in the “peaceful assemblies.” Furthermore, Forck stated that all those guilty of the brutal attacks needed to immediately be held accountable.16 Simultaneously, Stolpe assured Secretary of State Kurt Löffler that he would work toward abolishing the vigil in the Gethsemane Church. However, his influence there was waning, he claimed, because he had publicly spoken out against demonstrations. In the evening, the

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SDP executive board met; its members did not know about Forck’s letter but had been informed of the meeting between state and church representatives by an official communication. Spokesman Hilsberg submitted a draft letter that was rejected by a majority of the board. Hilsberg then sent it off as a “private person” but wrote “spokesman for the SDP” on the letterhead. In this letter to Forck, Stolpe, and Krusche, he thanked them for their commitment but criticized them for agreeing to the compromise of not allowing any opposition groups to take part in the public debate. “The most prominent representatives of our population who have opted to ‘remain here’ and bring about ‘change’ are most likely to be in one or the other of these groups. They would be suitable to act as representatives of the population and have, therefore, at least moral legitimacy. I would, therefore, urge you in your discussions to repeatedly point out that the representatives of the groups should be included in the discussions. The humanitarian legitimacy of the church is beyond question. . . . Nevertheless, the church is not authorized by the population to negotiate political concerns.”17 As East Berlin, unlike other cities and regions, had no talks between state power and opposition groups, there was no channeling of power, and the opposition’s demand for a “round table” along Polish lines took on increasingly prominent and concrete forms. From October 25, the opposition contact group agreed that a “round table” should be convened, but the opposition groups on the whole rejected “sham dialogical events.” A “round table,” they held, would demonstrate from the outset that the participants did not accept the leading role of a party and would also mark the beginning of a transition toward free and democratic elections. However, the new groups had considerable difficulty in structuring their work. The first nationwide New Forum coordination meeting took place in Berlin on October 14 with 100 to 120 participants from 24 cities, agreeing to build up grassroots democratic structures. Demands for a clearer program did not find a majority, however, because participants believed such a program could only be developed within a supraregional discussion process. Nobody knew exactly how many people who had by now professed their allegiance to the New Forum were represented. By some calculations, these numbered 25,000 by mid-October and 100,000 by the end of the month, but these figures seem far too high. Probably about 25,000 to 30,000 people all over the GDR had signed the New Forum’s call by the end of October.18 One can only reconstruct in fragments what exactly took place in the power centers in those days. The MfS plans and activities are well documented: the new groups were to be infiltrated. Yet due to the New Forum’s rapid growth, this was only possible in isolated cases, even though many local groups at least had IMs. Still, the grassroots democratic character of the groups hardly allowed the IMs to effectively influence anything in them. In other groups, such as in the SDP and the Democratic Awakening, IMs played an important role even in leadership

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circles, but their possibilities for action remained limited for two reasons. For one thing, if they did not want to blow their cover, they had to represent the programmatic goals of their respective group. In addition, IMs such as Schnur (DA) and Böhme (SDP) both had a strong desire for public recognition and wanted to play an important role in the future. They provided information to their MfS superiors, but they likewise distinguished themselves in public as spokesmen for the opposition. It is also known that the FDJ started to think about the “after” period and began to develop ideas on how to save at least some of its considerable assets. Such considerations did not yet exist in the bloc parties. They struggled to find a clear position, but with the exception of the LDPD they still stuck to the SED like twins to one another. The biggest differences were between the center and the outlying areas. While the Central Committee, the Berlin SED leadership, and the East Berlin City Council were still taking a hard line (as were those in charge in Halle or Magdeburg, for example) and refusing to talk to the groups, less central places like Dresden, Leipzig, Potsdam, Plauen, Karl-Marx-Stadt, and other cities began initial talks or made concrete offers to hold. This was because the situation in Dresden, Leipzig, Plauen, and Karl-Marx-Stadt threatened to escalate at any time, and those in charge in these cities were no longer interested in dealing with it. They were closer to social developments, knew the mood on the ground and the actual situation better, knew more precisely what kind of powder keg they were sitting on, and were apparently more aware that the baton had already slipped out of their hands. East Berlin was never only half the city but always the whole center of power in the GDR. From the point of view of the SED leadership, regional representatives in Dresden, Leipzig, or Plauen could make occasional concessions, but not in East Berlin, where such a move would always have sent a signal to the whole country. Another reason was that East Berlin provided no clear instructions, as the events in Dresden, Plauen, and Leipzig clearly showed. After initial talks and state restraint in opposition demonstrations, a reversal of the new status quo would have risked provoking an escalation of violence. Around October 13 or 14, the SED leadership attempted to solidify the party with a confidential paper. The failure of this attempt was already evident in that the paper was immediately made public. All functionaries down to the lower level of party group organizers managed to get their hands on it. Several of them seem to have dispensed with the party line and passed it on to opposition members. It served as a basis for argumentation in many state institutions. Some parts of the paper were read aloud. In the barracks, “political training sessions” were hastily arranged to keep soldiers, border troops, and riot police in line, and the barracks were buzzing with rumors. In many locations, the conscripts thought to be followers of the New Forum were excluded from this “special teaching unit” because the SED, on the one hand, used this to promote a strategy it had

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advocated since 1988, but, on the other, it pursued a strategy of exclusion that was diametrically opposed to the “dialogue” it had propagated since October 11. According to this internal paper, all “expressions of opinion and proposals for an attractive socialism” were to be desired, and it was claimed that New Forum, Democratic Awakening, Democracy Now, and the SDP, together with imperialist forces, were conducting a “hateful campaign” to “defame socialism” and that the New Forum was hostile to socialism: “If they were, as they claim, really in favor of socialism and its further development, and if they were honest, then they could actively participate and change the broad spectrum of democratic organizations in our country.” Contrary to the truth, the paper also stated that the New Forum’s founding call aimed “to eliminate the state’s monopoly of power” and that the words “socialism” and “socialist” did not appear anywhere within it. “Should we provide ‘freedom of the press’ for such ideas?” The program of the SDP and the Democratic Awakening were even more “blatant in their anti-socialist and counterrevolutionary” rhetoric, the paper continued. Theoretically, the authors were right: accepting the demands of the opposition would ultimately lead to the elimination of SED socialism. Yet even many SED functionaries must have thought it felt rather false to say as the paper did that these “groups . . . avoided publicity in the GDR for good reason,” followed by a threat: “If you show them sympathy, you must know what you’re getting into.” The paper mentioned only three persons by name, all of which were particularly hated within the SED: Bärbel Bohley, Rolf Henrich, and Rainer Eppelmann. Moreover, the paper countered the SDP with a bribe-like demagogic argument. The SED, which had emerged from the forced reunification and had persecuted, expelled, and humiliated hundreds of thousands of Social Democrats after 1945, wrote: “Interestingly, more than half of its founders were representatives of church circles. This is probably not in keeping with the traditions of the revolutionary workers’ movement!” A corresponding joke on the street held that a revival of Social Democracy from working-class circles would thus have been welcomed by the SED. Finally, the paper ended by making a distinction it had been making for years between “opponents” and those who had been “misled”: “They must be helped to get back on the right track and separate themselves from the enemies of socialism.”19

The Anticipated Sensation The pressure on the regime no longer grew daily, but hourly. More and more cities and communities were affected by demonstrations; more and more people dared to take to the streets. On October 15, about twenty thousand people demonstrated in Plauen, and a similar number did so in Halle. In many small towns like Klingenthal, a large share of the population took part, even though

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many such demonstrations were attended by people from the whole region. The state attacks on peaceful demonstrators in Leipzig, Dresden, and East Berlin led to ever louder calls for independent commissions to investigate. Precisely because most of those who had been arrested had been released by October 16, the commissions’ task was now to clarify the background of the events with the aim of arresting those responsible and disclosing the systematic nature of the operations as many reports had indicated that the violence had been ordered and systematic. The more the thousands of instances of brutality and humiliation became known throughout the country, the angrier people became. Contrary to expectations, the attacks in East Berlin also played a central role in this, not because things had been more brutal there than in other cities but because the information could best make its way into the media in the GDR capital, the opposition’s public relations work looked almost professional, and the West took an interest in it. In addition, many people close to the system were indirectly affected because their children had been “arrested”—as in the case of theology professor Heinrich Fink and Christa Wolf; the Jewish singer Jalda Rebling observed the orgies of violence by the police; the MfS also received several IM reports that impressively described the fear, horror, violence, and humiliation that had occurred. On October 15, a “Concert against Violence” was held in the Berlin Church of the Redeemer with many prominent artists taking part. The attitude these musicians had in those days cannot be appreciated highly enough. Although he could not be present himself, singer-songwriter Gerhard Schöne sent greetings of solidarity and announced that he had donated all of his 20,000 marks of the GDR National Prize money he had just received—half to the reconstruction of a church in Thuringia and the other half to the victims of the attacks. The thunderous applause that ensued in the completely crowded church was not only for him but also for the victims. The musicians associated with Krahl, Danz, Herzberg, and Gundermann joined in the next day and reaffirmed that the GDR urgently needed reforms in a new declaration. On the evening of October 16, events reached a new pitch in Leipzig. After the Monday prayers, tens of thousands demonstrated, marching around the ring—estimates ranged from 100,000 to 150,000 but eventually settled on 120,000. Demonstrators repeated two chants throughout the city center: “We are the people” and—the shortest form of the Sermon on the Mount—“No violence!” Siegbert Schefke and Aram Radomski once again secretly filmed the events, West German correspondents smuggled the film across the border, and Jahn then immediately passed it on to West German stations. On this day there were demonstrations in other cities like Dresden, Halle, Magdeburg, Waren, Wurzen, Zwickau, and East Berlin. Solidarity and information events took place throughout the country, for example, in Bautzen, Forst, Gadebusch, Glauchau, Greiz, Stralsund, and Merseburg.

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One day later, however, state forces struck back. Junge Welt announced that the first three “rioters” from Dresden had been sentenced in speedy trials to prison terms of between three-and-a-half and four-and-a-half years.20 Also in that issue, a short commentary by an FDJ functionary announced that Václav Havel had received the Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association in absentia in Frankfurt am Main the day before; although she did not explain who Havel actually was, she knew that almost everyone in the GDR knew of him, so she added menacingly: “So also in the case of Havel: Tell me who praises you, and I will tell you who you are.”21 Everyone understood that through this mouthpiece, the SED was expressing its ire toward the growing civil rights movement in the ČSSR and also in the GDR. On the same day, an almost neutral ADN report was circulated for the first time, stating that there had been a demonstration in Leipzig and that it had remained peaceful thanks to the security forces and the demonstrators. There were no reports that massive groups of police, MfS, and NVA personnel had once again been assembled in and around the city. The SED’s doctrine of breaking up opposition groups if necessary still applied. The crowd of people, not democratic insights, made those responsible shy away from the order to strike. In the evening, General Prosecutor Günter Wendland made the following announcement regarding the clashes in the first days of October on the Aktuelle Kamera program: “To make this clear: The violence did not come from the police; the violence was directed against the police!” But this announcement only prompted many people to protest in writing while even more were simply horrified by these lies. Consequently, Wendland counted among those who unintentionally contributed to the delegitimization of the SED regime. Christa Wolf wrote him the next day that she would work relentlessly to expose those who stood behind the partly sadistic treatments of protestors.22 Wolf symbolized that segment of society that had adhered to communist ideas and was critically tied to the SED system but was moving further and further away from it in those October days, thus playing an important role in delegitimizing the system and mobilizing society. No one outside the actual center of SED power knew at that time that on the same day, Tuesday October 17, the SED Politburo not only met for its regular weekly session but also tried to react to events for the first time in weeks. As late as October 16, Honecker, Krenz, Mielke, Interior Minister Dickel, and Deputy Defense Minister Streletz had jointly followed the Leipzig mass demonstration via a direct connection in the Situation Center of the Ministry of the Interior. By this time, Krenz had won the support of a number of Politburo members and CC employees to be Honecker’s replacement. The initiative did not come from Krenz himself but from the central party apparatus. The broadcast of the Leipzig demonstration for Honecker in the presence of the four men who were responsible for the entire security field—Krenz, as CC secretary for security matters, was the commander of the MfS, the NVA, and the MdI—followed a scenario that

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showed Honecker his end: over one hundred thousand people were demonstrating against the SED system, and the state was not intervening. Precisely because Krenz exercised the supreme authority, the state could not take action against the demonstrations by other than peaceful means because otherwise Krenz, too, as Honecker’s heir to the throne, would have eroded his support. But Krenz was desperate for power, and everyone else wanted to keep their posts. Of the few powerful people like Krenz, Schabowski, and Stoph, it can only be said with certainty of Mielke, Schürer, and Krolikowski that they had very cautiously been suggesting a change in domestic policy for weeks. At the Politburo meeting on October 10, Honecker had made it clear that he was not even thinking of leaving his position. Like most older communists, he invoked the memories and experiences of 1953, 1956, and 1968: “Counterrevolution must be fought against.” When Krenz, the chief election official of all people, suggested that the next elections should proceed in a more correct fashion, Honecker was initially irritated by his implicit admission. Honecker’s reaction was quick-witted and power-conscious: a commission of inquiry must be set up to uncover any irregularities in the election count. This unmistakable attack on his political foster son Krenz showed that he still understood the craft of maintaining political power. But he no longer had any majorities. Within a week, the majority in the Politburo had moved away from him. We only know what happened behind the scenes during these days from the descriptions of those directly involved. On October 17, Willi Stoph, of all people, one of Honecker’s closest and oldest comrades in arms, submitted a motion to replace Honecker. The latter was particularly affected by this. Mielke was already looking to the future and thought that many things would probably have to change. He also summed up the dynamics: “While we have been sitting here, the situation has already changed.” He added at the end of his statement again: “We can’t start shooting from tanks now.” All Politburo members present spoke out, and all including Honecker finally agreed to Stoph’s motion. In the antechambers, Krenz and Mielke had posted reliable security forces to arrest Honecker’s followers and Honecker himself in the event of an unexpected counteroffensive. That did not happen. In his concluding words, Honecker formulated several insightful thoughts. Gerhard Schürer took minutes of these and edited them as late as 1995 in a way that Honecker deemed correct. According to these minutes, Honecker noted that the internal problems would not be solved by replacing individuals, but his ouster showed that the party could be blackmailed, a characteristic that was being exploited. He stood tall as he left the internal stage: “I don’t say this as a beaten man but as a comrade in full health.”23 The SED Politburo subsequently also dismissed Honecker’s two most important loyalists, Günter Mittag and Joachim Herrmann. Herrmann, the chief administrator of the media, had taken grotesqueness to its climax when he thought that “we” needed a different kind of media coverage. Mittag acted as if

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he were moved and hoped to regain the trust of the people. But this disempowerment proved to be nothing more than a palace revolt. Krenz, Schabowski, Stoph, and the others tried to save their own heads by presenting “the” three main culprits as responsible for the misery. At the same time, Krenz and Schabowski acted as though they had been subversives, which they had not been. Not only did they blame Honecker, Mittag, and Herrmann but they also began to blame the MfS and Mielke, in particular. This began—and continues to this day—with their hiding or considerably playing down Mielke’s role in Honecker’s fall, and their describing the MfS as a “state within a state,” which it never was. As Mielke’s direct superior, Krenz knew better than most that the MfS obeyed the orders of the SED headquarters and not the other way around. The CC met on October 18, and Honecker read from a statement explaining that he was resigning for health reasons and proposing Krenz as his successor. He left the boardroom with a folder under his arm. For the first time, Krenz arranged for journalists to be outside. They were as surprised as the lonely Honecker. He kept his composure, and the journalists, doing what they had always done, remained silent and did not ask him any questions. Honecker looked straight at them and, after a brief moment of mutual stiffness, said, “Well then: Goodbye.”24 Meanwhile in the boardroom, Krenz read another statement and affirmed that, “[if] the Central Committee agrees,” he would “say the same thing on television tonight,” which prompted thunderous applause among the more than two hundred people present. Hans-Joachim Hoffmann, the minister of culture, summed up the heated debate by indicating that they were in too deep to turn back and demanded that the communists take to the streets: “In Leipzig, the party must be at the top.”25 In the afternoon of October 18, the news agencies spread the word of Honecker’s resignation and the dismissal of his faithful, Mittag and Hermann. This sensation dominated news broadcasts worldwide, although it didn’t come as a surprise. Already on October 13, the Bild newspaper had announced that Honecker would step down in five days.

The Soviet Army in the GDR in the Fall of 1989 On October 21, 1989, three days after the fall of Erich Honecker, Erich Mielke summed up his relationship with his “Big Brother” in a simple and clear phrase: “Without the Soviet Union there was and is no GDR.” He continued: “At the 9th session of the Central Committee, we took the real situation as our starting point—even if it was not so clearly stated that the GDR was developing in the world as it is today, not as we would like it to be.”26 Mielke held his speech in front of seventy-four generals and colonels. Apparently, he wanted to discourage them from falling prey to the illusion that they could use force to save the disintegrating order of the SED state against Moscow’s will. He referred repeatedly

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to “prudence” and “political intelligence” without, however, showing any way that the SED could cope with the unrest in the country. What filled him and his followers with fear filled the opposition and many other people in the GDR with hope, namely, that Moscow itself would not put obstacles in the way of the emerging democratization process. After the failure of the “Chinese solution,” most people looked with gratitude toward Moscow, not East Berlin. The people who gathered at demonstrations and rallies until mid-October, despite the martial deployment of security forces, were confident that the Russians would not intervene. In Leipzig, there were rumors of Soviet checkpoints on the outskirts of the city that were supposed to prevent GDR troops from invading in an emergency, although nobody could really be sure. After all, for forty years the communist state ideology had proclaimed that every means was right in the question of power. It was one of the curiosities of the time that the population believed its own “depraved old men,” as Wolf Biermann called the circle of old men in power, would shoot at their own people but trusted the leader of the hegemonic Soviet power. The soldiers and officers of the Soviet armed forces perceived the events of the fall of 1989 in the GDR differently. In an interview, a Soviet first lieutenant who fled to the West in the summer of 1990 spoke about these events from the Soviet troop perspective. These exemplary statements are revealing because they show how a different command situation could have quickly led to “Chinese conditions.” The Soviet military and secret police had the largest concentrations of opponents of perestroika. It must be said that almost none of our soldiers understands German. That is why they had no idea what was going on in Germany, and certainly not in West Germany. They could only learn about it from Soviet newspapers or in political classes, that is, what the political officers told them. From German television they could only guess what happened from the picture. . . . Nevertheless, it was astonishing to me that in our unity in the days after the opening of the Wall practically nobody understood what had actually happened. Everyone believed—and this was also portrayed in this way on Soviet television—that it was merely a matter of making travel easier. It was only later that news approaching the truth came. Soviet television wanted to keep all this as quiet as possible. . . . In my opinion, our armed forces were in a state of complete confusion; they did not know what to do. For example, patrols were increased from two to four men, who, unlike in the past, were always armed. . . . The willingness to fight, perhaps not against the entire German people, but precisely against those who were considered fascists and neo-Nazis, was always there. . . . But if an order had come from above, then the army would have been ready to strike; it was psychologically prepared for it. The decisive factor was that this order was not given from above. . . . I was astonished at the viewpoint of many Germans that the unification of Germany could be attributed to the Soviet Army or the conduct of the Soviet side. The army did not contribute anything at all to this.27

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The SED’s Penultimate Response to the Crisis On the evening of October 18, the new SED leader Egon Krenz gave a television address. According to internal figures, the audience share was almost 40 percent. On a graded scale of 1.0 to 5.0, the speech was rejected by the second-lowest value determined, 3.6. The first sentence—“Dear Comrades!”—already showed that Krenz was not even remotely capable of adjusting appropriately to this situation. Afterward he repeated word for word what he had already read aloud to the Central Committee in the afternoon, finishing with “Thank you.” In between, he declared his support for the continuity of SED policy. He characterized the departure of so many people as a bloodletting because every person was needed for socialism. Media relations, he noted, would have to be changed, and a new travel law would have to be prepared. At the same time, however, Krenz warned that if the Federal Republic did not formally recognize the GDR and its citizens, it would remain difficult for GDR citizens to travel to the West. Without addressing the opposition directly, he declared that “our society has enough democratic forums,” thus again rejecting the New Forum. Although this speech clearly constituted a reaction to the crisis, it fell far short of expectations. At no point did Krenz clarify what would actually change. The speech remained as colorless as the lecturer himself, and reactions were what one might expect. Many people had not failed to notice that Krenz, as the party’s top secretary, had addressed the party’s people as if in a party meeting: the beginning and ending had symbolized this, and the content itself had resembled slogans of perseverance rather than an expected political offensive. Exactly one sentence was of historical importance: “With today’s meeting we will initiate a Wende [turnaround]; we will above all regain the political and ideological offensive.”28 Here, for the first time, the word Wende was used, a reinterpretation of what the society and the state experienced in those days and weeks, a reinterpretation that continues to affect policies concerning history to the present day. In Krenz, the SED leadership had chosen the boss it deserved. Hardly any other individual so strongly combined all of what the society was rebelling against. Commentators and most of the opposition agreed that Krenz was only a temporary solution. From the next day on, a broad front was formed throughout the country against Krenz, who immediately became the target of protest and ridicule, with fierce criticism of him being voiced at all demonstrations. On Monday, October 23, up to three hundred thousand people marched around the Leipziger Ring, and tens of thousands chanted slogans against Krenz. At the same time, demonstrations took place in more than twenty other cities that day. On October 24, when the People’s Chamber elected Krenz as president of the State Council with twenty-six votes against and twenty-six abstentions, twelve thousand people demonstrated in East Berlin, according to official figures. Referring to Krenz as the primary culprit of the election rigging, leaflets

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called him “Too stupid to add—but [he can] rule a whole country.” The people shouted: “People’s Chamber, what a pity,” “Junge Welt—Fake News,” “Egon Krenz, we are the competition,” “Free elections,” “Stasi into production,” “New Forum allowed,” “Schnitzler into the Muppet Show,” “Mielke into retirement,” and “Citizens, stop watching TV, come down, join in.” The SED acted publicly unimpressed by this. The Junge Welt denounced the demonstrators as driven by hate.29 On October 23, several opposition groups held a press conference at which they handed over to the public a first collection of moving memos of the police operations they had endured. In response, on October 25, the Central Committee and the East Berlin police headquarters spread the news that there had been only a few police assaults on October 7 and 8. The police also resisted and said that they could publish such memoirs of their relatives and thus prove how violent the demonstrators had been, although they acknowledged that “this would not encourage dialogue.” The police spokesmen lied that the hard core of the demonstrators had been militant and “often carried iron bars, clubs or iron fence posts,” even adding that “unfortunately . . . People’s Police were doused from windows with hot oil or boiling water.”30 A speech by Minister of the Interior Dickel to the leaders of the Regional Office of the German People’s Police on October 21, 1989, illustrates that the issuing of slogans urging perseverance, coupled with lies and distortions, was intended to mobilize violence against the revolution in the event that the SED leadership command situation should change. Dickel accused the demonstrators of massive violence, claiming that they had successfully attacked arsenals and also captured “machine guns,” with Bärbel Bohley embodying this “whole hostile spectrum” as he went on to explain: Comrades, during the demonstrations and roundups in Leipzig last Monday and even before that, there was an extensive system of strongholds. Of course, the forces that came together there were not only from Leipzig. This needs to be emphasized here. They were formed practically from the entire republic, but mainly from the central and southern districts. This was clearly established by our reconnaissance. But at points like Berlin, Potsdam, Magdeburg, Halle, people sat on the phone with a clear instruction to see what was happening in Leipzig. Will the security forces intervene and disband, also with necessary special means, that is, will the escalation that they probably had in mind occur there, will this escalation take place according to their model? If this escalation to violence takes place in Leipzig, a call should be made immediately in order to then begin actions in other districts. That was their concept.31

The “expanded information system” of the “enemy,” Dickel claimed, was characterized by contacts with Western mass media. Contradicting himself in his hate speech, Dickel stated that the peacefulness of the demonstrators aimed to put “vigilance” to sleep. But then he asked, “What shall we do? Let me ask you this rhetorical question. Shall we break it up with 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 citizens?

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Do you know what that means? We might as well use armed personnel carriers or tanks. But everyone will understand that this is impossible in the current situation and in its further development.” As already mentioned, Erich Mielke had said something similar in the SED Politburo on October 17, 1989, and confirmed it on October 21 before the leadership of his ministry,32 but he did so in a more serene and not nearly as aggressive manner as Dickel that day in front of his management crew. The minister of the interior subsequently emphasized that only the SED leadership, and not even he himself, could order the use of “special technology” to clear demonstrations. Mass arrests would also fail to have “the desired effect” because they also had a negative impact on the security force themselves. The security forces had been confronted with “unimaginable hatred,” aggression, and violence: “It should be emphasized that women and girls were particularly prominent here. They held the children out to our comrades, and one of them even managed to throw her child into the police forces there.” In his description of the demonstrators’ violence and trickery, Dickel pulled out all the stops. In this discussion, East Berlin’s police chief Friedhelm Rausch added a positive note: during the operations around October 7, the units of the MfS, the NVA, and the border troops had been subordinated to the People’s Police without any difficulty. This shows, by the way, how important it is in historical analysis not to view any institution in isolation but to understand the SED dictatorship as a complex system in which the Stasi was a central pillar, but which without other pillars would not have been able to support the party dictatorship for so long. And Rausch also knew how to stir up the mood as Dickel had: he claimed that “hot oil” was poured out of windows onto the security forces during the operations—a story that, as noted above, was distributed in the GDR media shortly thereafter.33 Although Dickel tried everything, his leading troops were not satisfied with this discussion, which was conducted with unusual openness. Obviously feeling that his honor had been violated, he continued: Let them march; do not intervene until acts of violence [happen] and organize your forces and reserves in such a way that you can intervene quickly, but only then. And that’s the mission I’ve been given. I can’t go by personal opinion right now. I’d like to go and beat the crap out of these scoundrels so badly they wouldn’t fit in any jacket. I was in charge here in Berlin in 1953. I don’t need anybody to tell me what makes the white brood do it. I went to Spain as a young communist and fought against these scoundrels, against this fascist scum. I served in the Soviet Army, from 1939 to 1946, when I returned to Germany, as a reconnaissance officer in the Red Army, in the West and in the Far East. No one has to tell me how to deal with the class enemy. I just hope you know that for sure. To go around shooting, dear comrades, and that the tanks then stand in front of the district leadership and in front of the Central Committee, that would still be the easiest thing to do. But such a complicated situation after 40 years of GDR?

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Seven weeks later, on December 4, 1989, the long-time head of the MfS regional administration in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Stasi general Siegfried Gehlert, would say the same thing to the MfS district office managers.34 These examples illustrate that it was primarily due to the indecisiveness of the SED leadership that the state security and police did not use all the means available to fight the revolution. Although Moscow’s changed attitude toward domestic crises in its satellite states and the internal erosion processes in the GDR’s apparatus of power and domination were added to this, the lack of clear guidelines from the SED leadership considerably intensified these issues. The apparatuses began to disintegrate before they were systematically dissolved. In public, however, the first thing to do was to get the police out of the line of fire of the massive criticism, which Krenz aimed to achieve with a “policy of dialogue.” Within the police force, there were quite a few voices complaining that police officers had become the “whipping boys of the nation.” If this had truly been the case already, though, police officers from all over the country replied, then at least the counterrevolution in Leipzig, Dresden, East Berlin, and elsewhere ought to have been “correctly” and “consistently” crushed and trampled underfoot. The members of the combat groups, who had been deployed thousands of times, were especially subjected to the outrage. Their work collectives did not stop the sharp criticism of the deployment behind the scenes, and even in state institutions most staff failed to understand the violence and the deployment actions. The second pillar of this “policy of dialogue” consisted of both an old and a new element. Immediately after Krenz was appointed, Politburo and CC members, members of the People’s Chamber, and other functionaries went to companies and agricultural production cooperatives and tried to lead discussions with the workers. However, they broke these off after two or three days because the SED was nowhere to be found. They supplemented this old strategy with a completely new one: After Dresden and Plauen, SED functionaries tried to get into conversation with the population in the streets and squares in more and more places. It seems to have become clear to most of them what a lost position they were really in, and the second strategy did not work either. In several cities, the SED tried to regain control of the streets by organizing counterdemonstrations and rallies at exactly the same moment as the oppositional events. It was impressive that even in cities like Schwerin and Neubrandenburg, where the SED still managed to mobilize more supporters than the opposition, the party also staged its own defeat since most of its supporters turned away from it and turned to the opposition in the course of such spectacles. The offers of talks in the form of public discussions with citizens—in Dresden alone, around one hundred thousand people took part in many such forums on October 26—also served the purpose of ending the demonstrations. Modrow and Berghofer presented themselves to the demonstrators several times, made

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concessions, and, from the middle of the month onward, set up committees throughout the district at the district council, the county councils, town councils, and municipal councils, where members of parliament and opposition members held discussions and drafted immediate catalogues of issues. Schabowski repeatedly admonished Stolpe that the churches must stop the demonstrations. Stolpe, in turn, insisted that he was making an effort but admitted on October 23, 1989, that his reach was limited, much to Schabowski’s annoyance. Finally, on October 29, he also took part for the first time in a public meeting of citizens in front of the Red City Hall in East Berlin; twenty thousand participants engaged in heated discussion with him, Krack, Police Commissioner Rausch, and others for hours. These efforts were intended, first of all, to present the SED as a “leading force” and, second, to build Egon Krenz up as the strongman for the future. In this way, he was able to stylize himself as the man who had initiated the Wende, strongly reinforced by his surroundings. Wolfgang Herger, who had been head of the CC’s Department for Security Issues since 1985 and was one of its closest collaborators, first spread the long-lived legend on October 24 that Krenz had been the peace apostle of Leipzig, claiming that it was only thanks to him that no blood was shed there on October 9 and the gatherings that followed. The SED’s attitude can be authentically reconstructed from an audio document. On October 24, when the SED party group of People’s Chamber representatives met in preparation for Krenz’s election as chairman of the State Council and held an emotional debate, a technician from the People’s Chamber secretly recorded the meeting and then passed it on to the opposition. SED members who were active as members of parliament in the SED party group all joined in this meeting. Of the 500 members of parliament, 127 belonged to the SED parliamentary group, but 276 were SED members (FDGB, FDJ, and others). On November 16, the telegraph commented on the recording that had been handed down with the words that this was a party “that was completely finished.” Some impressions from the recording include one woman assuring those gathered, “I am and remain a communist, no matter what we still face in Leipzig.”35 Bernhard Quandt, an old, very excited functionary from the north, related how he had chased away counterrevolutionaries with a pistol in 1953. A communist, he said, would not let himself be beaten to death by a counterrevolutionary, in 1953 as little as in 1989; everything that was rumored about the alleged police assaults was a horrible lie; and the demonstrators were terrible perpetrators of violence. Those present thanked him with thunderous applause. A member of parliament from Lübbenau reported untruthfully that churches in East Berlin were calling for “the communists . . . to be hanged.” This assembly of the “intellectual and political elite” found its bizarre climax with the statement of a member of parliament from Leipzig, who seriously suggested that the booklet Der erste Start (The first start), first published by a children’s book publisher in 1962, be reissued immediately so that everyone would know exactly what was

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going on: the author Klaus Hilbig had contributed a story to this book titled “Egon Prevails,” which portrayed the thirty-five-year-old FDJ and SED functionary Egon Krenz.36 The representative believed that this was the right answer to the signs of the time. However, this meeting revealed the embarrassing incompetence of more than just these SED functionaries. Schabowski also intervened in the debate, stating that one needed to react politically, which meant that one should pretend in public that the criticism was being taken seriously but in fact continue on the same course and, above all, prevent anything that would lead to undermining Krenz. He agreed with the assembly that no one should give in now and that no one should bow to the pressure from the people in the streets. One aspect of this was that no “separation of powers” was to be introduced, which the representatives understood as something different from what the people in the streets had been demanding for weeks. The SED argued that Krenz should be the SED leader and chairman of the State Council, as well as the chief of the Defense Council; the offices should not be divided among different individuals. Finally, Krenz himself had his say. He declared, to the applause of the assembly, that history had shown that attacks on the secretary-general, which he was now, were never aimed solely at that individual but always at the whole party. In his view, the party was not prepared to relinquish its leading role but merely had to perform it better than before. That evening, SED members publicly moved away from such positions for the first time. After a concert titled “Those Remaining Here for Those Remaining Here” (Hierbleiber für Hierbleiber) in the East Berlin Haus der Jungen Talente (House of Young Talents) in front of about four hundred invited guests, a discussion was held and broadcast on GDR television (elf99), with Bärbel Bohley, General Markus Wolf, Stefan Heym, Jens Reich, Christoph Hein, Michael Brie, and Secretary of State for Culture Dietmar Keller, among others. It was agreed that not words but only deeds counted. Brie conjured up a “modern socialism,” presented theses from his working group at Humboldt University and argued that a party must democratically attain the leading role; it cannot be permanently arranged. It was also the first appearance of Bohley in the GDR media. She seemed almost shy and did not have to say much because the developments spoke for themselves.

Internal Declaration of Bankruptcy The most astonishing thing about Krenz’s policies was that they did not go into effect. The Stoph government was still trying to calm people down, among other things, by declaring that the dramatically poor supply situation would be quickly improved by imports and supplies from the state reserve. For example, according

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to a decision by the Council of Ministers on October 19, vehicles for various economic sectors and other equipment and work utensils for the food industry would be made available. In addition, tropical fruits, chocolate, one million pairs of jeans from Syria, two million coffee filter bags, 100,000 fittings for sanitation equipment, batteries, car tires, 2,360 additional Trabants, 600,000 watches, crockery, 2,000 color TVs, thousands of refrigerators, washing machines, coalfired ovens, video recorders, calculators, motorcycles, glasses, and 5 million razor blades were to be supplied to the shops to calm people’s spirits. Amnesty for those arrested in the weeks before and for those convicted of “republican flight” followed on October 27. Opposition members protested. Amnesty implied mercy before the law and was an arbitrary act, they held. Consequently, the opposition continued to insist on full rehabilitation, the release of all political prisoners, and changes in penal laws and practices. On the same day, travel restrictions to the ČSSR were lifted, which led to an immediate increase of those fleeing the country. The Council of Ministers also stated that applications for permanent departure would be decided more quickly in future and that they were also working on a travel law. These attempts neither calmed things down, nor were they able to even begin to solve the existing social problems. In addition, the SED leadership sought greater economic support from Bonn. The Kohl government insisted that it was not interested in any escalation of events but made economic and financial aid dependent on genuine political and economic reforms. There was widespread agreement in the West German government that Krenz belonged to the hardliner faction of the SED, that he was only a temporary solution, and that the real reformer was still hunkered down somewhere. Nobody dared to predict how the domestic political situation in the GDR would develop, but everyone saw that, without reforms, the powder keg would explode. As long as the SED was still pursuing a policy of small steps and fine words but no real action, there would be no easing of the situation. At that time, nobody suspected what the SED Politburo had found out in a kind of oath of disclosure. A commission headed by Gerhard Schürer presented two papers on the economic and financial situation that were absolutely clearsighted. Within a few days, at Krenz’s request, they provided him with an “unvarnished picture of the economic situation.” These papers corresponded to a declaration of complete economic and financial bankruptcy.37 The GDR’s investment policy had been wrong, and the plants and facilities were hopelessly outdated. Labor productivity had been falling for years, the GDR had lost touch with world standards in almost all areas and would hardly be able to maintain its position in the midfield in the coming years. Social policy was financed by Western credits, and the population’s surplus purchasing power was dramatic. The nation’s entire economic reproduction process was ineffective. The state plans had proven to be a waste of time for years. The level of debt was so high

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that the GDR would no longer be considered internationally solvent once this information was known. Putting it in black and white, the report stated: In assessing a country’s creditworthiness, it is internationally accepted that the debt service rate—the ratio of exports to the loan repayments and interest due in the same year—should not exceed 25 percent. This means that 75 percent of exports will be available to pay for imports and other expenses. The GDR has a debt service rate of 150 percent in 1989 in relation to NSW exports.

The report’s proposals for solutions to this situation remained half-hearted. On the one hand, the authors emphasized that a fundamental economic reform had to take place, the collective combines had to operate independently, small and medium-sized enterprises had to be strengthened, and the socialist planned economy had to be organized according to the principles of a market economy. Many ideas were written down, but they all remained stuck in the previous systemic thinking. The commission did not see any way out that was politically feasible. Its members recognized that “stopping the debt alone would require a reduction in living standards by 25–30 percent in 1990” and would make the GDR ungovernable. Even if one were to impose this on the population, it would not be possible for the nation to produce “the necessary exportable end product” on the required scale to manage the debt. The only way out that Schürer’s group could envision now seems strange against the background of this declaration of bankruptcy: they proposed that the GDR work out a “constructive concept of cooperation” with the Federal Republic of Germany and other Western states, although what exactly this was supposed to entail remained nebulous; above all, their proposal did not answer the question of what interest the Western states should have in providing the GDR with such massive economic and financial support. Apparently, the commission sensed that the GDR system was dying because the end of the paper somewhat abruptly hinted that these measures could only be successful if the GDR’s entire social policy were fundamentally changed. At the same time, the report precluded “any idea of reunification with the FRG or the creation of a confederation” and highlighted the GDR’s contributions and achievements and what the FRG owed. First, the GDR had suffered a total of around 100 billion marks in losses caused by the Federal Republic of Germany before the building of the Wall in 1961, which the FRG could now repay. Second, one could check whether East and West Berlin could apply jointly to host the 2004 Olympic Games as a “sign of hope” in 1995.38 Schürer had already written before that all the information in the report must be handled with “absolute discretion” in the “interest of the need to maintain creditworthiness.” The true debt figures “thus may not be taken into consideration in the calculation of the plan’s payment balance either.”39 One can no longer determine exactly how these revelations affected SED leaders, although their continuing inability to act was certainly closely related. A

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few days later, Krenz grumbled several times in party committees that whatever one did, it would be wrong. He and his henchmen probably guessed that their time was over, as was that of the system. They were merely trying to manage the remaining time. At that time, the West German federal government did not know how drastic the GDR’s economy and finances really were. It was assumed that the crisis would continue for a long time, and no radical political change was expected so soon. Moscow had signaled several times to Bonn that it would not interfere, as it also did to the GDR. US president George H. W. Bush also assured Chancellor Kohl that he fully supported his policy toward the GDR and would help to dismantle the front against it that was gradually building up in England and France, where commentators in the major newspapers were irritated and even affronted by the increasingly central German. Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President François Mitterrand were stirring up fears about West Germany’s policy toward Eastern Europe and the GDR. It is precisely against this backdrop that the Kohl government’s restraint should be emphasized. In this situation, it would have been easy to put the SED leadership under greater pressure, but the Kohl administration only did so by the same means it had used in previous years, relying on a policy of small steps. In doing so, it emphasized even that late in the game it aimed to serve the interests of the GDR population. At the same time, in the face of increasing public debate in West Germany about how long the flow of refugees could be tolerated and whether the Federal Republic should not send people back, it remained unmoved. Unlike some segments of the SPD and the Greens, it remained committed to the Basic Law on Reunification, even in this unpredictable phase in its development.

A Country Learns How to Demonstrate Revolutions do not happen on their own. Even if the ancien régime seems to have come to its end, citizens must take political action for things to change. In the autumn, the opposition movements proved to be the force offering political options for action in the regime’s collapse. It was neither the programmatically clear words of the SDP founders nor the politically open declarations of the “New Forum” alone that mobilized the people. Probably much more significant was that courageous citizens throughout the country were able to provide alternative demands and wishes to the ruling classes’ speechlessness on behalf of the new opposition groups and, from November onward, of dozens of other newly founded groups. The public language changed within weeks. The formulaic language of SED rulers was worn out; people no longer wanted to hear it. The often simple, rarely rhetorically brilliant, but clear and unambiguous language people now used outside of churches to demand, protest, and formulate expectations

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struck a chord with many listeners. There were no showy effects, the speeches were serious, and the famous linguistic pun that was later so celebrated was still a rare exception in October. The awakening of society, clearly visible on the streets, was slower than many contemporary witnesses remember today and slower than it is often described. Until October 9, the big day in Leipzig, there were only a few mass demonstrations and rallies in Dresden, Leipzig, Plauen, and a few other smaller towns. East Berlin played a special role—because of the media coverage, because of the new formation of the opposition, and because of its function as a power and control center, which is why the state reacted particularly sensitively to public oppositional activities here. Even though demonstrations were taking place every day in new cities, it must be noted that the demonstrations and rallies only increased as the state further revealed its acute weakness. A significant rise in demonstrations was recorded in the week after Honecker resigned. Now the movement was actually spreading to large parts of the country and was taking root in more and more small towns and villages. In Zittau (38,000 inhabitants), for example, when up to 20,000 people took to the streets on October 18, the state left the security to the New Forum, withdrew, and handed over the city’s radio system to the opposition. The large demonstrations in Leipzig and Dresden now had worthy counterparts in other large cities such as Halle and Magdeburg. Only in East Berlin—where there were many demonstrations but only rarely larger ones than on October 7 and 8 or 23 and 24—were they proportionally small in relation to the total population up through early November. The population’s solidarity with the demonstrations was evident even in East Berlin. By October 27, the Gethsemane Church had collected around 150,000 marks for those who had been arrested or threatened with legal proceedings. According to preliminary surveys, there were 330 demonstrations and rallies in 171 cities throughout October, over 100 of which only held demonstrations for the first time after October 18. By far the most demonstrations and rallies (69) and also the most places (38) were in the Karl-Marx-Stadt district, followed by the districts of Erfurt (39/16), Dresden (34/14), Halle (28/13), and Neubrandenburg (25/16). The district of Frankfurt/Oder came in last with two demonstrations in two locations.40 Although this information certainly needs to be completed, it does indicate a trend. It has been argued that the SED’s partial opening up and cautious concessions increased the radicalism of the demands, and this can be proven by the demonstrations. In the first nine days of November alone, there were about as many demonstrations as in the whole of October. After November 9, the number of demonstrations and demonstration sites almost doubled. At the same time, however, these figures show something else: that the vast majority of people remained passive. The demonstrations involved about 250 cities and municipalities up to November 9 with hundreds of thousands of citizens taking

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part in them. In perhaps another 500 or 600 cities and communities, there were public oppositional debates and discussions in churches and other public buildings with tens of thousands of participants. And practically every office, company, university, agricultural production cooperative, or barracks was full of talk of nothing but the domestic political events and future developments. Still, millions publicly did nothing. Even though demonstrations and public discussions with citizens took place in all major cities and almost all major towns, there were 7,563 towns and municipalities in the GDR, only about 800 of which, according to a generous estimate, held oppositional events at the end of October or beginning of November. However, about 60 percent of the total population lived in the 224 cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, which almost all had public actions, and the 15 cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants alone housed more than 27 percent. Even if only a smaller portion of this population participated actively, the inactive majority did not remain unaffected. In addition, a new form of “political tourism” began as early as the beginning of October, and it grew steadily in the weeks leading up to the beginning of November when many people from neighboring and other districts joined the inhabitants of the cities to take part in the demonstrations. Not only did people from all parts of the country travel to Leipzig but demonstrators from the south also traveled to the north and vice versa. In this respect, the demonstrations showcased an astonishing mobility and mobilization of the population. Revolutions are never the business of a majority. Rather, a minority revolts not only against small ruling cliques, their mass of followers, and/or their claqueurs but also against the silent, passive majority. Revolutions are also a struggle to win over this majority. Those who can mobilize the majority for their own cause are usually victorious. The GDR revolution of 1989–90 is a classic example of this. The dynamics of the historical development showed up on several levels during these days and weeks. In addition to the demonstrations and rallies, public discussions with citizens began in many places. The opposition groups came forward with new demands almost daily. The establishment of independent commissions of inquiry put the SED under considerable pressure because its policy of repression was to be revealed by means of a concrete example. Of particular importance was the increasingly frequent and loud call for the installation of a “round table.” The opposition contact group agreed on October 25 to utilize the Polish strategy in the GDR and peacefully force the SED to relinquish power. On October 27, Democracy Now called for a referendum on the SED’s leadership to be held in 1990 in response to Krenz’s statements and his assumption of office. Jörg and Regine Hildebrandt coordinated the collection of signatures on behalf of the citizens’ movement. The call for a referendum stressed that “socialism does not stop with the end of such domination. It’s just getting started with living democracy.” People in the streets demanded “free elections”—there were fifty thousand in Dresden on October 20, for example—which meant that

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the SED should be democratically voted out. But the demonstrators expressed their peaceful intentions in other ways, as well. Many demonstrators marched passed the local power centers of the SED, MfS, FDGB, or FDJ. The party comrades were prepared for many things but not for candles as symbols of peaceful protests, which the demonstrators placed at many MfS and SED buildings. There is a video recording from Rostock that shows MfS employees hurrying to remove the candles in front of the building of the MfS district administration. The functionaries still pulled together police, MfS, and combat group forces in Suhl and Rostock during announced demonstrations to be able to strike if necessary. Even if government agents made wild claims about the demonstrators’ readiness to use violence, they did not want to set forces on the candleholders. They had all long since been fighting for their own political survival. At the end of October, the first functionaries began to resign in the face of their country’s ruin, and some committed suicide. Some shot themselves with their service weapons, others hanged themselves, others took tablets, and many more went down in a drunken stupor. Overall, however, the number of such suicides in 1989 and 1990—about fifty—remained relatively low. Between the end of October 1989 and the end of April 1990, three first secretaries of SED district administrations (Bautzen, Köthen, Perleberg), a combine director (Piesteritz), three heads of MfS district administrations (Suhl, Dresden, Neubrandenburg), a German Gymnastics and Sports Federation vice president, an MdI general, and deputy head of the FDGB Johanna Töpfer (on January 7) and Minister of Construction Wolfgang Junker (on April 9) killed themselves, with Töpfer and Junker being the most famous of them.41 For many years the SED and its legal successors, the PDS and then Die Linke, have been spreading the rumor that the revolution and reunification prompted waves of suicides. Though every single case is tragic and regrettable, none provides proof of this historical-political assertion. The revolution did not claim any casualties. In October, the Western media repeatedly reported that demonstrators in East Berlin or Dresden had died, but this proved to be incorrect. And the suicides of functionaries were never carried out after physical attacks. Historically, they can be interpreted as an admission of guilt and medically as a sign of depression. Since 1990, numerous documentations have shown how the demonstrations and rallies developed in many places, what the speakers demanded, and how the population reacted. Although there were considerable regional differences, the speakers had a relatively uniform catalogue of demands from the beginning of October to about the beginning of November throughout the country. These included, to name a few keywords, free elections, disclosure of electoral fraud, dissolution or dismantling of the MfS, freedom of travel, assembly and association, free media, improvement of the supply situation, replacing mandatory conscription with social service, investigation of abuse of office and corruption, environmental protection, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary,

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as well as the release of political prisoners. In addition, each region directed its protest against the local representatives of the party and state by name, and from mid-October all the districts called for the resignation of nationally known functionaries such as SED leader Krenz, FDGB leader Tisch, MfS minister Mielke, Education Minister Honecker—whose resignation in October immediately after the departure of her husband was not announced until November—chief commentator von Schnitzler, or chief ideologist Hager. Demands for German unification were rarely raised publicly until the end of October. It was only after the fall of the Wall, when the culture of demonstrating changed, that the question of German unification quickly took center stage. Economic issues played almost no role at all, which was surprising in view of the supply problems discussed everywhere, as well as of the heavily criticized environmental pollution, which had been a central starting point for the citizens’ movements. In this context, it became apparent that the opposition and the citizens’ movements lacked experts for many social issues. Experts were tied to the SED and did not find their way to the citizens’ movement; therefore, West German elites had to fill these vacancies weeks and months later. The rising calls for reunification were prompted, not least, by the fact that the majority of the population no longer trusted the GDR’s old functional elites. Although the citizens’ movements had gathered considerable moral capital, too few experts were visible in the public eye. Calls for a grassroots democracy further reinforced this dearth of experts because only a minority of intellectuals regarded this as a serious state structure, despite the widespread appeal of such ideas. As late as autumn 1989, the citizens’ movements were still confronted with an ambivalent circumstance, enjoying an extraordinarily high moral standing in society, on the one hand, while not being able to compensate for the lack of professional competence on the other. This was already evident at the end of October and rapidly gained political importance from mid-November onward. Only the SDP and Democratic Awakening offered initial programmatic responses to the crisis before November 9, calling for a clear departure from the previous social system. The proposals of the New Forum, by contrast, consisted essentially in the attempt to initiate a grassroots public debate. Andreas Schönfelder, for example, spoke on October 18 in several Zittau churches of the “grassroots democratic attempt to install an opinion research institute . . . to take stock after 40 years of the GDR.” Many people felt that such an institute was right and necessary. No one had any idea how quickly time would catch up with such considerations. Soon the focus was no longer on how society could engage in dialogue but on concrete solutions to the crisis. In his speech, Schönfelder quoted from one of New Forum’s open letters from October 1 asserting that reunification was out of the question “because we are starting from the two-state nature of Germany and are not striving for a capitalist social system. We want changes here in the GDR!” Schönfelder had

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been one of the most active opposition members for years. A founding member of the green activist group Die Arche (the Ark) and coeditor of a samizdat magazine, he had also set up an environmental library in Großhennersdorf. In his speech, he added: “I think this is clear enough, but I am aware, as individual discussions so far have shown, that this has not met with undivided approval.”42 There were already indications in mid-October that the German question could quickly divide the citizens’ movement. In fact, from the outset, German unification resonated much more strongly in the southern districts than in the north or East Berlin. There were also disagreements about the internal structures of the citizens’ movements themselves. As late as October, there were indications in both the New Forum and the Democratic Awakening that some members were more inclined toward grassroots democratic forms of association, while others were more inclined toward party structures. The SDP initially had not attracted very many members due to its clear structure and formulation of its program and conditions of entry. By mid-November, however, it had spread throughout the country and established contact persons and addresses in almost all regions. In many places where demonstrations and rallies had begun at the end of October, it became clear that the demands conveyed via Western media had not only been taken up throughout the country but also mostly radicalized. In Oschatz (nineteen thousand inhabitants), for example, one demand from the first catalogue was for parliamentary democracy. Oschatzers also demanded the dissolution of MfS and combat groups without replacement and that experts, not party officials, should initiate economic reforms. At the same time, the focus of demonstrations everywhere shifted evermore toward coming to terms with the past and reflecting on the nature of the system. The renunciation of socialism was usually associated with the rhetorical question: “What is socialism?”43 In Meiningen (twenty-five thousand inhabitants), where an opposition group had been active since 1984, the first demonstration with about one thousand participants on October 24 led straight to the MfS district office and the SED district leadership. This example shows that where opposition groups had been working for a longer period of time, they displayed greater political maturity and were more organized than in places where demonstrations spontaneously arose. The Protestant churches continued to have an important function during this phase. They opened up for democratic discussions and often became the starting point for public demonstrations. In Röbel (seven thousand inhabitants), where a small opposition group had been active for years, an event with about one thousand participants took place in St. Mary’s Church for the first time on October 19 and was repeated weekly thereafter. Pastor Gottfried Timm pointed out that this event was political rather than ecclesiastical but that it had to take place in a church for lack of other alternatives. At this event, Berndt Seite lamented that no reforms were to be expected with Egon Krenz. The following week, the number of participants had already tripled. The first demonstration moved from

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St. Mary’s Church to the marketplace, where representatives of the state now also took part in the discussion. They did not know how to persuade people, nor could they make satisfactory offers. Such events made regional and local leaders acutely aware that their time was running out. The size of the regions and districts played an important role, especially when it came to demands for a change of personnel. In the Haldensleben district, for example, the first events did not start in the district capital. Rather, although several large demonstrations had taken place in the district capital Magdeburg, the spark jumped first to smaller villages like Flechtingen (under two thousand inhabitants) and Bösdorf (about five hundred inhabitants). The first events in the churches were also attended by inhabitants of other surrounding towns as well as from Haldensleben and Magdeburg. Since the SED functionaries were personally known in these smaller towns, open hatred often prevailed toward them. This was even more pronounced in places where the two waves of agricultural collectivization in 1952/1953 and 1960/1961 had taken place and those who were directly affected by these (or their descendants) lived. It was not uncommon for old rivalries to break out immediately between old inhabitants and those who had moved in “only” after 1945 because these “new citizens”—mostly displaced persons from the former eastern territories of Germany—had often made special efforts to adapt and exercised state or party functions. Even in 1989, many old farming families rapidly pushed to restore the old village structures. The old hierarchies had often survived unofficially. In addition, waves of withdrawals from the SED, the FDGB, the FDJ, the combat groups, and other SED-related organizations began in mid-October, particularly in villages and smaller towns. This was also because the people in such places knew each other personally, so they were under greater pressure to adapt to the new society that was expected to emerge than people in the big anonymous cities. Even though many motives for joining and leaving such organizations could certainly be listed in detail, it seems that in those days, especially in villages and small towns, the original opportunism that once motivated people to join the SED or one of its organizations, including a bloc party, had yielded to the opposite opportunism to leave.

Stepping Out of Roles In autumn, two institutions alongside the citizens’ movements counted among the important motors of development. Despite all their ambivalences, the churches cannot be appreciated enough for the role they played in the events. For forty years, they had been the only major institutions that had opposed the communist claim to power and domination on principle. All the other institutions were, themselves, part of the ideological and ruling apparatus. In autumn 1989, however, a second institution crystallized alongside the churches that,

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although centrally managed, had not functioned uniformly in the spirit of the SED for years: the theaters. Famous individual writers such as Christoph Hein and Stefan Heym supported the citizens’ movement from the very beginning, and the important role of rock musicians and songwriters was discussed earlier. In contrast to these rather individual actions, however, the theaters had been reacting as institutions since the end of September. Actors from several stages in Dresden took on a pioneering role in developments, with the call “We are stepping out of our roles” by the Staatsschauspiel Dresden becoming the most famous. This company of actors had hosted discussions with the audience at their venue since October 3, and in the following days, many other stages in the GDR took up the idea too. Dozens of theaters passed resolutions that were signed by thousands of actors and theater staff. Night after night, actors in many places read these and other declarations aloud. Some theaters changed their lineup on short notice and offered plays directly referring to the social situation. The most famous ones were performed by Kurt Masur at the Leipzig Gewandhaus from October 22.44 Finally, from mid-October, respected artists went to churches for oppositional events with increased frequency. Prominent writers gathered in East Berlin’s completely overcrowded Church of the Redeemer on October 29, with some of them criticizing themselves, their long silence, and their support of the system. Such admissions significantly increased their credibility and moral integrity at the time. At the end of October, two other events whose significance is often underestimated further delegitimized the system. On October 27, Christa Wolf published a full-page article in the Wochenpost in which she described how the SED state had turned its residents into children. She not only criticized the general conditions of the state but also penetrated to the core of the problem, namely, “that our children at school are brought up to be untruthful and damaged in their character, that they are bullied, rendered incompetent and discouraged—with word- and image-rich whitewash in which pseudo-problems are served up and solved in no time at all.” Within a few weeks, she and the editorial staff had received more than three hundred letters. The majority of the senders were themselves active in public education. At first, most letter writers rejected Wolf’s statements energetically. When the Wochenpost published some of these statements three weeks later, however, it was mainly critical teachers and those affected by the national education system who spoke out and agreed with Wolf: one of the evils of GDR socialism was the national education system, which suppressed people’s free spirit and all free development. The second event was a memorable performance at the Deutsches Theater a day after Wolf’s article appeared. A few weeks earlier, Walter Janka’s book Schwierigkeiten mit der Wahrheit (Difficulties with the truth) had been published in the Federal Republic of Germany. In it, Janka, an old communist (b. 1914), described his arrest at the end of 1956 and subsequent sentencing to five years

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in prison in a show trial, despite his innocence. Janka was a small celebrity at the time as the head of the Aufbau publishing house because he edited the works of numerous great German and international writers. Anna Seghers, among others, had taken part in the show trial against him, remaining silent although she knew that Janka was innocent. All other well-known personalities in the GDR had remained silent along with her. More than thirty years later, Janka’s book broke his silence about the scandalous events and reported what had happened behind the walls of the dungeons after his arrest. The event featured actor Ulrich Mühe reading from Janka’s memoirs for two hours, after which Janka delivered a short statement. Word of the event spread quickly throughout the country. The reading was repeated and broadcast on radio and later on television, and Janka’s statement always elicited thunderous applause. Even though the opposition had demanded in the weeks immediately prior that the past be dealt with, that the “whitewashing” of history be erased, it was only when this description of inhumane prison conditions caught national notice that the demand became more general among the public. This was due not least to the fact that Janka was an unsuspicious contemporary witness and a self-confessed communist and representative of an independent but democratic GDR. This aspect was precisely what had a deep impact on the ranks of the SED. Many party members asked what kind of party it was that they belonged to if it could commit such an injustice against a party member. At the same time, many other victims of communist rule who lived in the GDR now also found the courage to speak publicly about the injustice done to them. These stories deeply moved, frightened, and even shocked many people. Although people could have known much about such injustices (after all, the Western media had reported such things again and again, many stories were whispered about behind closed doors, and the Soviet debate on history—the Sputnik ban—had not escaped notice in the GDR), many people only now began to understand that this history had more to do with the present and future of the GDR than it had seemed at first glance. The SED attempted to respond to these demands by tentatively opening its central organ Neues Deutschland to critical presentations of recent history from the end of October. At first, functionaries such as Harald Wessel and Klaus Höpcke wrote articles in which they tried to rehabilitate each other.45 But soon critical tones prevailed—initially presented by the chief historians from the Academy of Sciences and from individual university institutes. These scholars all agreed that the previous images of history needed to be revised, that “whitewashing” needed to be dealt with, and that they themselves were particularly suitable for addressing this task. Civil rights activists and historians associated with Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle complained that in making this claim, these historians were like environmental polluters now electing themselves the directors of the city sewage processing plants. Wolle argued against these historians months later, after he and Mitter had founded an independent association of historians at the

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beginning of January 1990, by saying that they appeared to him like pimps who now wanted to found a morality association. The fierce debate on communist history lasted for years, and its publicly perceived starting point was the reading of Walter Janka’s memoirs. Together with Wolfgang Harich, he was also among the first to be rehabilitated. On December 6, 1989, the Supreme Court, which had set up a special working group, received a list with twelve names of persons to be rehabilitated. These twelve included eleven individual state functionaries who had been convicted in the 1950s—including Kurt Vieweg, Helmut Brandt, Max Fechner, Georg Dertinger, Karl Hamann—as well as the journalist Karl Wilhelm Fricke, who had been abducted from West Berlin in 1955 and sentenced to four years in prison. Fricke was the only one who was still alive.46 It is unclear how the list came about. Fricke was well known in the offices of the Supreme Court—for years he had meticulously researched GDR political criminal law practices and had published several books on the subject.

November 4, 1989 Saturday, November 4, 1989—this day does not represent a caesura in the revolutionary calendar, but it changed the country. On October 15, hundreds of theater people from all over the GDR had decided to officially register a demonstration and subsequent rally for freedom of opinion, press, and assembly in East Berlin to take place on November 4.47 Although the New Forum, the SDP, and other new groups were directly involved, they held back in public and let the “cultural workers” take credit because that would make it seem less like antistate action. When the event actually took place three weeks later, the country had already begun to change to an extent that hardly anyone would have thought possible in mid-October. On October 20, the Krenz administration announced for the first time in GDR history that every person who had fled or emigrated from the GDR could return and would be welcome. On October 26, SED Politburo member Schabowski went to the trouble of receiving Jens Reich and Sebastian Pflugbeil from the New Forum. Four days later, the MdI announced on the instruction of the SED leadership that the group’s application for a permit would now be officially considered after all. In the evening, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler declared in the 1,519th broadcast of his Black Channel, which lasted only a few minutes, that he was stepping down. He went off pugnaciously with a threat: “So it takes art to make the right thing right and fast and credible. In this sense I will continue my work as a communist and journalist for the only alternative to inhumane capitalism: as a weapon in the class struggle to promote and defend my socialist fatherland. And in this spirit, my viewers, dear comrades—goodbye!” One day later, the news came that the Sputnik was back in newsstands. And from November 1,

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for practically weeks on end, every news program was full of reports of resignations of ministers, party chairmen, association and trade union officials, members of parliament, SED officials, and many other regional and local officials. SED leaders were giving in more and more every day without disclosing any possible approach to reform. On the one hand, they aimed to gain time by making personnel changes as a form of cosmetic surgery. On the other hand, they were working with the MfS and the MdI to get a foothold in the new organizations. The disadvantage of grassroots democratic approaches, namely that they could only react slowly and hesitantly to rapid developments, benefited the groups in this context because well-prepared SED cadres were unable to achieve anything through them. Egon Krenz heated up the mood again on November 1. At a press conference in Moscow—he was visiting Gorbachev for his inaugural visit—he explained that the reasons for the Wall still existed. He also claimed that all the positive developments of the recent days and weeks was a result of the work of the SED Politburo and the CC of the SED. He explained to Gorbachev that Schabowski was to appear at a rally in East Berlin on Saturday, where up to half a million people were expected, in order not to leave the field to the opposition. The rally had been announced in the GDR media in the days before. The thousands of participants came both from East Berlin and other districts. Several hundred onlookers came from West Berlin. To the displeasure of the SED, Bärbel Bohley had already invited Wolf Biermann to the event on October 26. Neues Deutschland asked, “What right does Mrs. Bohley have to invite such a thing into the GDR?” She replied that if his “old faithful enemies” wanted to make amends for the injustice they had committed in 1976, they were obliged to invite him. Biermann sent a song to his real friends on October 27, and it was immediately distributed. The lyrics were as follows: “The worst thing was not our tyrants, the whitewashed tyranny, but we ourselves, all our cowardice and servility.” And further: “We want justice and not revenge / . . . You need not, you corrupt old men / now suddenly scatter ashes on your head / Just learn to bear it when we still quietly / doubt your shift. No carrion believes, when you speak beautiful words / We give you old advice: / The words have been changed enough now / What counts is only the good deed.” On the morning of November 4, Biermann, accompanied by Ralf Hirsch, attempted to enter East Berlin via the border crossing at Friedrichstraße, but both were turned away. Biermann told the television journalists present, thus speaking on behalf of other expatriate civil rights activists such as Jahn or Fuchs, that the transformation in the GDR could only be credibly implemented if he and his friends could return to participate in the reform process. On November 17, the MfS leadership confirmed the ban on Biermann, Jahn, Fuchs, and Hirsch entering the GDR. Hirsch and Jahn had already left for East Berlin on the night the Wall fell. On December 1, Biermann gave his first concert in the GDR again—in Leipzig in front of

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several thousand enthusiastic fans. Jürgen Fuchs held the opening speech. The new Minister of Culture Dietmar Keller48 met with the two of them for a conversation beforehand. In front of the ADN building in Berlin-Mitte, tens of thousands of people gathered on the morning of November 4 and moved toward the Palace of the Republic, then from there to Alexanderplatz, where tens of thousands more had gathered. Due to the crush of people, the rally on Alexanderplatz began with a considerable delay. This demonstration attained national importance for two reasons. First, many nationally known intellectuals and artists utilized the opportunity to speak, as did several functionaries. Second, contrary to what had been planned, GDR television broadcast the event live so that millions outside Berlin were able to attend. The decision to do so was made by employees without consulting the management—further evidence of the increasing disintegration of the SED regime. The rally began with short statements from actors. Marion van de Kamp emphasized at the beginning that it was a “socialist protest demonstration.”49 Ulrich Mühe and Johanna Schall presented constitutional paragraphs as well as articles of political criminal law from the penal code. Mühe and Jan Josef Liefers added that Article 1 of the constitution, which laid down the leading role of the SED, should be deleted without replacement. Even at this point, the reactions showed that the many listeners were emotionally agitated but also joyfully going along with the proceedings. Applause, whistles, and booing were part of the almost four-hour event. The MfS and the police had been worried for days and had spread rumors accordingly, for example, that thousands were planning a border breakthrough at the Brandenburg Gate. That didn’t happen. The organizers entered into a security partnership with the police and provided hundreds of stewards, who could be identified by the “No Violence” sashes they all wore. The SED and MfS had mixed thousands of “social forces” among the demonstrators, and hundreds more were “decorated” with the sash; civil forces were also once again positioned at critical points near the Wall. Junge Welt, of all papers, wrote in the name of its editor Volker Kluge that the editorial staff was going to take part in the demonstration en bloc.50 Days later Modrow and Berghofer marched in a demonstration procession—more and more people began to ask themselves who was actually demonstrating against whom and for what. None of this was of any use to the SED inasmuch as the demonstration clearly and explicitly attacked the SED’s power monopoly, called for new state and economic structures, and took up practically the entire repertoire of demands that people had been making for weeks. Western commentators were subsequently particularly impressed by the creativity and wit of the thousands of demonstrators, as could be seen from the countless banners and slogans on the crowded Alexanderplatz and the wide streets immediately adjacent to it.51 Police officers then asked their superiors why they had to protect such an antistate gathering

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and why the SED leadership put up with speakers and demonstrators presenting and ridiculing it in this way. The first speaker was lawyer Gregor Gysi, who spoke in favor of security before the law, the rule of law, and a travel law, which elicited tremendous applause. He had to endure whistles and booing when he defended Krenz and gave him credit for the events in Leipzig having remained peaceful. Marianne Birthler, one of the few members of the opposition who stepped up to the microphone that day, reported on the clashes on October 7 and 8, read from memoranda, and set conditions for a commission of inquiry. Several singer-songwriters performed, including Kurt Demmler and Gerhard Schöne. Demmler sang that there was always a quiet policeman hiding in our midst (“irgendeiner ist immer dabei, von der ganzen leisen Polizei”) and warned that one needed “security even from security.” Of all people, MfS general Markus Wolf entered the improvised stage after Demmler, claiming that Mielke had called him a few days before and asked him if he wanted to talk at the event! Wolf was representing the MfS members, who should not all be lumped together, he stated, and he advocated a reform of SED socialism. His speech was constantly accompanied by whistles, booing, and other expressions of displeasure, such as chants of “Stop, stop.” Jens Reich spoke for the New Forum and showed that courageous men and women need not be a people’s tribunal. One could clearly see that the professor was not terribly comfortable at such mass rallies. He demanded, among other things, free newspapers, and newspapers owned by the opposition so that it could present itself authentically in the GDR. His suggestion to have Wolf Biermann perform at the next rally was well received but also elicited whistling. LDPD chairman Manfred Gerlach tried to cast himself as a reform force. He as well as other speakers of the old regime thanked the artists for this event. That was part of the strategy because the real initiators, as everyone knew, were the citizens’ movements. Gerlach admitted his membership in the People’s Chamber and the National Front, which needed to be changed, but he also demanded that the government resign. SED politburo member Schabowski, in turn, probably experienced the worst day of his career as a functionary: he hardly got a word in and tried to shout over the whistling and booing and was the only one whom Hennig Schaller, the leader of the rally, had to jump in to assist. Schaller asked the people to also let Schabowski finish, but the people continued to whistle and boo. After this appearance, Schabowski could hardly have believed that the SED would last much longer. And yet his appearance also earned the respect of his political opponents since he had faced the masses and did not present himself on November 4 as a “turncoat” like Gerlach—the word was bandied about a lot in those days. Konrad Elmer declared on behalf of the SDP that the GDR had to apologize to the Czech and Slovak people for their participation in the suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968. He got a standing ovation for it. This demand could be heard again and again throughout the entire GDR in these days. Other

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speakers included Stefan Heym, Christa Wolf, Friedrich Schorlemmer, Heiner Müller, Lothar Bisky, Christoph Hein, and Steffie Spira. Later, some joked that “the speeches they made sounded like a literature festival.”52 One must assess the historical significance of this rally on Alexanderplatz for the collapse of the SED state and the success of the revolution as very high precisely because it was broadcast and widely commented on by the GDR mass media and thus had a particularly broad effect. At the same time, the media used it as an opportunity to reflect self-critically on their activities in the SED state to date. Aktuelle Kamera broadcast a special show in the evening. One of the chief commentators declared that he no longer wanted to serve one party but the whole of society in the future. Although it still took months before the media reported in a truly free and unbiased manner, this rally and the broadcast had shifted media policy in a new direction from which there was no turning back. At first, however, it was only noticeable that the SED party badge disappeared from more and more TV journalists’ lapels. From the evening of November 4, all the news outlets in the GDR and abroad had been reporting that 500,000 people had gathered on Alexanderplatz. Soon others wrote of 750,000 or even a million people. Meanwhile, it is even said that the rally was “the largest in German history.”53 At that time, there were no reasons to verify or even doubt such figures. In this historical situation, there were many good reasons to present the number of participants as high as possible in order to emphasize that the mass of society had been mobilized and to put pressure on the SED. With historical distance, one can now soberly ask whether 500,000 or even more people would really have had room for a rally on Alexanderplatz and the directly adjacent wide streets (Karl-Marx-Allee, Grunerstrasse, Karl-LiebknechtStrasse, and Rathausstrasse). A very generous calculation that disregards the obstacles on Alexanderplatz and the adjacent streets, such as fountains, underground entrances, landscaping, etc., results in significantly less than 50,000 square meters. If one estimates that four participants would take up one square meter, this would allow for a crowd of 200,000 people. This size, too, would still count as one of the largest free rallies that took place in autumn 1989. An evaluation of many photos and the television pictures, however, casts doubt on how realistic the assumption of four people per square meter is. For a rock concert like the one with Bruce Springsteen in Berlin-Weissensee, this is a realistic assumption, especially since the photos show how densely the people were standing at the time and what a large area 160,000 to 175,000 people still required. On Alexanderplatz, though, the people were standing in a relaxed fashion, not exactly crowded together for the most part. The further away people were from the speakers, the further apart they stood. And even if one takes into account that perhaps tens of thousands went home after the demonstration from the ADN building to the Palace of the Republic and from there to Alexanderplatz because

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they saw or heard nothing, the number of participants still remains far below the claim of half a million. Moreover, half a million or more people would have paralyzed the extremely vulnerable East Berlin public transportation system, which did not occur. In any event, it seems highly unlikely that there were more than 200,000 participants in total, and the actual number was probably lower. One could speculate about why the high number is nevertheless still upheld today. Certainly, it played a role that East Berlin wanted to challenge Leipzig, the capital of the demonstrations, at least in its claim to hosting the largest event. After all, the number of participants in Leipzig had supposedly reached 300,000—a figure that seems to be clearly overstated that cannot be verified today. Another record was certainly broken on November 4. It was the day with the most demonstrations throughout the country up to that point. Demonstrations and rallies took place in more than 50 cities, including Annaberg (10,000 participants), Dahme (1,500–4,000), Egeln (200), Genthin (2,000), Heringsdorf (4000), Jena (40,000), Ludwigslust (4,000), Magdeburg (40,000–50,000), Mühlhausen (3,000), Potsdam (40,000-80,000), Sebnitz (2,000), Stollberg (8,000), and Wernigerode (5,000). In addition, there were many citizens’ forums in numerous places that Saturday. One consequence was that in the days that followed, the demonstrations and rallies, especially in the smaller and medium-sized cities, attracted ever more participants.

November 9, 1989 In any case, the social emancipation movement continued to advance. When a public residents’ meeting in Grünheide near Berlin, which was widely known as the founding site of the New Forum, held a discussion with the mayor on November 5, he was asked about the election forgeries. His secretary, of all people, proved that the mayor had been responsible for the forgeries, whereupon he tendered his resignation in response. Another curious but significant occurrence was when a residents’ meeting in Rüterberg declared the town a “Village Republic” on November 8. Rüterberg, located directly on the border to West Germany in the restricted area, was practically fenced in. The villagers declared that their small republic was no longer subject to the SED’s claim to power and that they wanted to make their own laws. Swiss village communities served as models, and master tailor Hans Rasenberger was the source of ideas. The social pressure on the SED leadership grew to such an extent that old functionaries increasingly believed that everything was much worse and more threatening than in 1953. SED leaders tried to release pressure but without even remote success. On November 8, the MdI confirmed that it would examine the New Forum’s application for a permit, thereby overturning its own reason for refusal, namely, that there was no social necessity for the group. The new groups’ formal

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permits—not the SDP, as Krenz never tired of emphasizing internally—seemed to be a matter of days. But it was no longer a sensation because many had already expected it. In this situation, many people did not even care whether the New Forum was approved by the state because society had long since recognized its value. When SED leaders reopened the borders to the ČSSR on November 1, refugees once again began to flow there. Two days later, under pressure from the Communist Party leadership, the SED Politburo decided to allow the refugees in Prague to emigrate directly to the Federal Republic, with six thousand people heading there on November 4. Word soon got around that the Wall had practically fallen for people who wished to leave the country. Although the SED announced that all applications would be examined quickly and unbureaucratically and would generally be approved in the future, people did not listen. On the weekend of November 4 and 5 alone, more than twenty-three thousand people fled, and in the three days that followed, about the same number fled again. The Wall had been opened for the second time that year—first in Hungary, now in the ČSSR, where it was not closed. Now all that was missing was the demolition of the famous but now dilapidated structure itself. On November 6, SED leaders published the draft of a travel law that had been announced—only weeks before they might have gained approval with it, but now society was deeply outraged. Even within SED circles there was strong criticism of the draft because it still contained “reasons for refusal,” limited citizens’ annual travel time, and did not explain how GDR people were supposed to pay for travel to the West. Two days later, in the evening, Christa Wolf, on behalf of intellectuals such as Braun, Hein, Heym, Masur, and Plenzdorf, but also of all opposition groups, addressed the GDR population via television and asked them to stay in the GDR: “Help us to create a truly democratic society that also preserves the vision of democratic socialism. Not a dream if you help us prevent it from being nipped in the bud again. We need you. Take confidence in yourself and in us who want to stay here.”54 On the same day, a three-day meeting of the CC of the SED began in the morning. It was to be a memorable session. First Krenz announced the resignation of the entire Politburo, only to have part of the old team get “elected” again, with a few new faces like Modrow’s added in. But not even the entire Central Committee wanted to go along with Krenz. In the afternoon, tens of thousands of SED members gathered in front of the CC building and demanded—sometimes in drastic terms—that a party conference be convened immediately. At the same time, the organizers from the Academy of Sciences demonstrated, declared their intention to show that the SED base was ready for action and was still a mass base. In the districts, the party base was also grumbling so violently that individual SED district leaders had to be recalled during the meeting and also removed from the newly elected Politburo. Krenz grumbled during the emotional meeting

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that democracy and dialogue were very exhausting. He implored the assembly not to surrender the achievements of GDR socialism. In a long lecture, he presented an SED action program that elicited sheer horror among many CC members. This was because for the first time, the Central Committee was informed of the GDR’s catastrophic economic situation. Although Krenz did not even describe the actual extent of the crisis as presented to him by the Schürer Commission and practically lied to the CC, several speakers were deeply shocked. They said they felt betrayed and lied to. Karl Kayser, the Leipzig theater director and a CC member since 1963, made a comment that was typical of many others: “We have been lied to, all the time. Everything in me is broken. My life is ruined. I believed in the party; that’s how I was brought up with my mother’s milk.” Another added: “Unfortunately, it’s not just you, but who in this room doesn’t feel the same?” Herbert Richter, general director of the gas combine Schwarze Pumpe with 34,000 employees and a CC member since 1981, put these feelings most clearly: “Comrade General Secretary! I cannot agree with what has been said. . . . Every week I stand in front of 15,000 people once or twice, get booed, have to answer politically for my actions. I am not prepared to listen to this any further because this is not economic reform, because this is the bureaucracy with which we have put our workers in a position where they are against us. I move that the discussion be terminated. I can’t listen to it anymore.” Although Richter was only responding to a CC functionary’s contribution to the discussion that was then actually aborted by a majority vote, it was also symptomatic of the entire three-day debate. The majority still sided with Krenz. These party leaders seemed to be chaotic, headless, and incapable of action, yet they nevertheless wished to flatter. They also betrayed discrepancies between Krenz and Modrow, for example. Krenz repeatedly felt driven into a corner by Modrow due less to differences in content than in questions of procedure. This also contributed to the chaos because nobody knew the CC’s procedural rules. The only rules that could be found in a hurry were those from 1953, which SED leaders no longer wished to impose on its highest executive body. Party leaders such as the writer Hermann Kant and the head of the Academy for Social Sciences at the CC of the SED, Otto Reinhold, were also sharply criticized; in their case, however, it was because they themselves had found critical words, so others sharply questioned them about why they had remained silent for so long if they now suddenly knew everything better. On the afternoon of November 9, Krenz presented a press release alongside a decree of the Stoph government to the CC assembly. For weeks the CC and the Council of Ministers had been working feverishly on a solution to the problem of people fleeing and wishing to travel. Of the three alternatives developed in August, two were still available: immediate closure of all borders, or a regulated opening. At the time, Krenz had told Honecker that there was no “ideal solution.” Now he, in turn, shared both alternatives again with the CC, adding,

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“However we do it, we will do it wrong.” Prague had pressed for an immediate solution. This time, Krenz did not opt for the kamikaze solution (closing the borders), which could have provoked civil war–like conditions even more than at the beginning of October. In essence, the decision was that until a travel law was passed, those who wished to leave the country permanently could do so from the following day onward via all GDR border crossing points to the Federal Republic of Germany and West Berlin. These were “temporary transitional arrangements for travel and permanent departures from the GDR to abroad.” The CC members took note of this information. Minister of Culture Hoffmann, Minister of the Interior Dickel, and the editor in chief of Einheit, Manfred Banaschak, made brief statements. Krenz went on to say, “Yes, I’d say the government spokesman is about to do that, yes.” Then, with the hall microphone switched off, he murmured: “That’s always a good thing to do.”55 Krenz himself gave the order that the new regulation should be announced publicly in the evening. This has since been confirmed by Horst Stechbarth, chief of the Land Forces, deputy minister of defense, and a CC member since 1976. He was standing there when Krenz handed the note to Schabowski with the words: “You can announce that. That’s the scoop.”56 The district police authorities responsible for issuing the passports received notification of the new order at around 6 p.m. in order to prepare for the expected rush the next morning. For years, historian Hans-Hermann Hertle meticulously researched how this decision was reached, what happened in Berlin and Germany from 7 p.m. onward, and how the Wall and the inner-German border fell within a few hours. A press conference began at 6 p.m. with Banaschak and Schabowski taking part. Such press conferences had only ever been held in the previous few days; on November 2 the Council of Ministers had introduced the post of government spokesman. Shortly before 7 p.m., the Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrman asked about the travel law, whereupon Schabowski made his big entrance. The whole world was supposed to believe that he was the border opener, in a way indirectly and by accident. Stuttering, looking left and right, he read out the press release and pretended not to know what he had just read out. Yet Schabowski had been present at the CC conference and also knew about the planning games from August. Which staging plan was pursued is not a matter for debate.57 It may well be that they deliberately placed the announcement of the decision at the end of the press conference, which was broadcast live on GDR television, in order to make it appear as harmless and normal as possible. It would also be conceivable that Schabowski acted without prior consultation, but this is unlikely in view of Krenz’s admission and Schabowski’s loyalty to Krenz. His appearance demonstrated that it was not a politician but an official who was taking action. He had not taken into account the consequences of his remark that the regulation would apply “with immediate effect.” In any case, it was the solution already devised in August to open the boiler, release the pressure, and then close it again.

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Schabowski’s pretended cluelessness about the significance of the decision was a great performance by a political dilettante because, of course, he had neither wanted nor foreseen the effect it would have. Nevertheless, the journalists on hand immediately understood what they had heard. At 7:01 p.m., the press conference ended, and from 7:03 p.m. the tickers were running hot. Only a few minutes later, the first people arrived at the Bornholmer Straße border crossing. This happened because, unlike other Berlin transition points, this one was on the border between the densely populated eastern districts of Prenzlauer Berg and Pankow and the western district of Wedding. Around 8:30 p.m., there were already thousands of people standing in front of the border crossing. However, it was not only in East Berlin but also in many other GDR cities, as Hertle found out, that people set out. They went to the next station and asked for tickets to the Federal Republic. Uncertainty and perplexity spread among those in charge at these locations. Nobody knew what to do; nobody had been given clear instructions. By 9 p.m., the Bornholmer Straße was hopelessly overcrowded, as were the side streets, with the backup stretching for kilometers. After consultations between border troops and the MfS, the officers opened the border after 9 p.m. At this point, they still attempted to do this in an orderly fashion. People had to show their identity cards. Most of them didn’t even notice that their identity cards were stamped as if they were leaving for good. It was the last attempt to carry out the “boiler-valve release” plan. A good hour later, around 10:30 p.m., the border guards capitulated and raised the barriers. Thousands flooded without restraint into the night of nights. Perhaps the funniest variation of the Wall’s opening that night took place at the most famous crossing, at Checkpoint Charlie. There, the pressure on the border grew more from the West than from the East. Some people began to shout “Let us in!” growing ever louder. Those on the East side shouted, “Let us out!” Shortly before midnight, after all attempts to seal off the crossing had failed, the barriers at Checkpoint Charlie were also opened so that at around midnight all border crossing points in Berlin were open.

Notes 1. BA, MfS, HA VIII 5742, Bl. 31. 2. The first edition of the “newspaper” of Democracy Now likewise was published in the first days of October; the editing deadline was September 30. It contained a text titled “Was können wir tun?” The second edition was published on October 27. 3. telegraph, 9. 10. 1989, no. 1, 7. 4. A great example is Winfried Schulze, Der 14. Juli 1789. Biographie eines Tages (Stuttgart, 1989).

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5. Nothing fundamental about this has changed in the years since 2008–2009 either. The most important exception aside from descriptions of the events in some places is the following impressive and voluminous fact-oriented work, which, however, in light of its large size also has numerous errors: Michael Richter, Die Friedliche Revolution. Aufbruch zur Demokratie in Sachsen 1989/90, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 2009). 6. ND, 12. 10. 1989. 7. MfS, HA XVIII, Information, 13. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 15844. 8. MfS, HA XVIII, Information über die Auswertung und Einschätzung des Vorsitzenden des Ministerrates zur Lage in der Sitzung am 12. 10. 1989, 14. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 15845. 9. Offener Brief an das ZK der SED, 10. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, HA XX 12214, Bl. 77–79. 10. “Im Dialog. Klarstellung zu einem Gespräch,” JW, 13. 10. 1989. 11. Hermann Kant, “Ein offener Brief an die Junge Welt,” JW, 9. 10. 1989. 12. Examples of the effects of the JW article on Rolf Henrich are also several public remarks by Kurt Masur: Thomas Ahbe, Michael Hofmann, and Volker Stiehler, eds., Redefreiheit. Öffentliche Debatten der Bevölkerung im Herbst 1989 (Leipzig, 2014), passim. 13. Karin Retzlaff, “Henrich! Mir ‘grauts’ vor dir!,” JW, 11. 10. 1989. It first appeared in the A edition on October 13, 1989 (JW and ND each printed B editions for East Berlin and A editions for the GDR districts, and the B editions had a later editing deadline, which is why differences between the two editions cropped up again and again); in the present book, the citations refer to the B edition. 14. Christa Wolf, Reden im Herbst (Berlin, Weimar, 1990), 90–91. 15. Karin Retzlaff, “Antwort,” JW, 23. 10. 1989. 16. Bischof Forck an Ministerpräsident Stoph, 13. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 14335, Bl. 2. 17. Material collection in the archive of Martin Gutzeit. 18. This is according to materials in RHG, Bestand NFo, as well as information that Irena Kukutz and Tina Krone, two of its employees, were kind enough to share with me. 19. On the New Forum and the other illegal opposition groups in the GDR, see Informationen 1989/7, 4pp. (party-internal agitation material). It was the last “information” of this sort that the SED leadership internally published within the party. 20. Sabine Sauer, “Die, die das Feuer am Brennen halten wollten,” JW, 17. 10. 1989. 21. Sabine Stefan, “Preis-Wert,” JW, 17. 10. 1989. 22. Wolf, Reden im Herbst, 92. 23. Gerhard Schürer, “Persönliche Aufzeichnungen über die Sitzung des Politbüros am 17. 10. 1989,” in Hans-Hermann Hertle, Der Fall der Mauer. Die unbeabsichtigte Selbstauflösung des SED-Staates (Opladen, 1996), 433–34, 437. 24. Gregor Gysi and Thomas Falkner, Sturm aufs Große Haus. Der Untergang der SED (Berlin, 1990), 24. 25. “9. Tagung des ZK der SED, 18. 10. 1989 (Protokoll),” in Das Ende der SED. Die letzten Tage des Zentralkomitees, 2nd ed., ed. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan (Berlin, 1997), 127, 126. 26. Referat des Gen. Ministers zur Auswertung der 9. Tagung des ZK der SED und zu den sich daraus ergebenden ersten Schlussfolgerungen für die Tätigkeit des MfS, 21. Oktober 1989. BA, MfS, MfS, ZAIG 4885. 27. Thomas Ammer, “Sowjetische Soldaten in Deutschland. Interview mit einem ehemaligen Offizier der Westgruppe der Sowjetischen Streitkräfte in Deutschland,” DA 25, no. 5 (1992): 516–17. 28. ND, 19. 10. 1989. 29. Peter Bethge and Jürgen Weidlich, “Ist das eine Einladung zum Dialog?” JW, 25. 10. 1989. 30. Peter Bethge, “Gefährliche Tendenzen. Pressekonferenz zur Berliner Demonstration am Dienstag,” JW, 26. 10. 1989.

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31. Rede von Dickel am 21. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, HA VII 1195. Cf. by contrast the description by one of the organizers of the Berlin contact telephone about October 9, 1989: Marianne Birthler, Halbes Land. Ganzes Land. Ganzes Leben (Berlin, 2014), 162–70. 32. Referat Mielkes zur Auswertung der 9. Tagung des ZK der SED und zu den sich daraus ergebenden ersten Schlussfolgerungen für die Tätigkeit des MfS, 21. 10. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 4885. 33. The way that high-ranking members of the People’s Police view and judge the deployments today is presented in Karl-Heinz Kriz and Hans-Jürgen Gräfe, eds., Mittendrin. Die Berliner Volkspolizei 1989/90 (Berlin, 2014). 34. This will be discussed further below. 35. SED-Parteigruppe der Volkskammer, Mitschnitt vom 24. 10. 1989. RHG. 36. See also “Aufbruch auf Rügen. Aus dem Alltag eines Jugendfunktionärs,” ND, 18. 6. 1960, supplement. 37. Later, experts calculated that the debt was less dramatic than the Schürer Commission had calculated: Armin Volze, “Zur Devisenverschuldung der DDR—Entstehung, Bewältigung und Folgen,” in Die Endzeit der DDR-Wirtschaft. Analysen zur Wirtschafts-, Sozial- und Umweltpolitik, ed. Eberhard Kuhrt (Opladen,1999), 151–83, esp. 162; André Steiner, Von Plan zu Plan. Eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Munich, 2004), 224–25. 38. Gerhard Schürer et al., “Analyse der ökonomischen Lage der DDR mit Schlussfolgerungen, Vorlage für das Politbüro des ZK der SED, 30. 10. 1989,” in Hertle, Der Fall der Mauer, 454, 458, 459, 460. 39. Gerhard Schürer, “Zur Zahlungsfähigkeit der DDR (Zusatzinformation zur Analyse), 27. 10. 1989,” in Hertle, Der Fall der Mauer, 462. 40. Uwe Schwabe, “Der Herbst ’89 in Zahlen—Demonstrationen und Kundgebungen vom August 1989 bis zum April 1990,” in Opposition in der DDR von den 70er Jahren bis zum Zusammenbruch, ed. Eberhard Kuhrt (Opladen, 1999), 726. 41. Udo Grashoff, “In einem Anfall von Depression . . .” Selbsttötungen in der DDR (Berlin, 2006), 243. 42. Der Sächsische Landesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssischerheitsdienstes der DDR, Umweltbibo Grosshennersdorf, Thomas Pilz et al., eds., Lausitzbotin. Das Jahr 1989 in der sächsischen Provinz im Spiegel einer Zittauer Oppositionszeitschrift (Bautzen, 1999), 108, 110. 43. Martin Kupke and Michael Richter, Der Kreis Oschatz in der friedlichen Revolution 1989/90 (Dresden, 2002), 61. 44. Ahbe, Hofmann, and Stiehler, eds., Redefreiheit. 45. ND, 28./29. 10. 1989. 46. Oberstes Gericht an Generalstaatsanwaltschaft, 6. 12. 1989. BA, DO 104/6, Bl. 122. One can discern that this was the first such list from a letter to Modrow from January 31, 1990 (ibid., Bl. 118–121). 47. Hans Rübesame, ed., Antrag auf Demonstration. Die Protestversammlung im Deutschen Theater am 15. Oktober 1989 (Berlin, 2010). 48. This cultural minister generated an interesting and self-critical account: Dietmar Keller, In den Mühlen der Ebene. Unzeitgemäße Erinnerungen (Berlin, 2012). 49. The demonstration is documented on a two-CD edition from 1999: Berlin Alexanderplatz, 4. 11.’89. Die Kundgebung am Vorabend des Mauerfalls. A written transcript can also be found in Wir treten aus unseren Rollen heraus. Dokumente des Aufbruchs ’89 (Berlin, 1990), 200–39. 50. Volker Kluge, “Lackmusprobe wird sein: Welche Werte verteidigen?,” JW, 4./5. 11. 1989. 51. These are listed over pages in Wir treten aus unseren Rollen heraus, 242–50. 52. Peter Richter, 89/90 (Munich, 2015), 190. 53. Der Spiegel, 7. 11. 1994, nos. 45, 40. 54. ND, 9. 11. 1989.

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55. Hertle and Stephan, Das Ende der SED, 422, 368–69, 305, 306. 56. “Ist das ein Befehl?” Märkische Allgemeine, 8. 11. 2014. 57. On November 3, 1989, the Moscow Politburo discussed the situation in the GDR and came to the conclusion that the GDR could no longer be kept without the assistance of the FRG. In addition, it would be better for East Germans to remove the Wall themselves: Stefan Karner et al., eds., Der Kreml und die Wende. Interne Analysen der sowjetischen Führung zum Fall der kommunistischen Regime. Dokumente (Innsbruck, Vienna, Bozen, 2014), 498 (Dok. 82).

Chapter 11

THE FALLOUT

S “Madness”: The Wall Is Gone What then followed has been described many times over. For a few days, almost everyone in both sides of Germany hugged everyone else. For weeks, the trains to the West and West Berlin were hopelessly congested. There were many touching scenes, tales of which could fill entire bookshelves. People who had not seen each other for years met once again. Expatriated opposition members simply went to the East and visited friends and relatives. Every single person has a very special story to tell about the first experiences. Perhaps one of the most moving events took place on November 11 when Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich flew from Paris, where he lived as an emigrant, to Berlin in a private jet belonging to a friend. There, the world-famous musician sat down directly at the Wall, played three pieces by Bach, and spoke a few words to commemorate the Wall’s victims. The maestro, whom hardly anyone recognized, said afterward: “I played for my heart. I had to play here. I saw the images and knew you had to go there. It was wonderful. Unique. People were very quiet.”1 Meanwhile, Germany’s neighbors to the West and East were rather skeptical about this grand German celebration of joy.2 The French and the English asked whether it would not be better to have two Germanys in Europe. The Poles feared that the Federal Republic would now pay less attention to the Polish democratization process because it would be more concerned with domestic German developments. Of the major powers, the United States was the first to signal full support and reaffirm Germans’ right to self-determination. Even if historiography that focuses on individuals always falls short and distorts the dynamic social processes at work, one can say that in the weeks and months Notes from this chapter begin on page 412.

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that followed, Chancellor Kohl achieved a true masterstroke on the international stage: Whether in talks with Moscow or Washington, Paris or Warsaw, London or The Hague, he proved himself to be a first-rate European by considering German unity, which now quickly emerged as a short-term political goal for the (still) next few years, as part of the Pan-European unification process. Above all, the governments of smaller neighboring countries such as Luxemburg, Austria, and, after the revolution, the ČSSR were less reserved and fearful of German unification than the large countries like Poland, France, and Great Britain. Hundreds of thousands have described the events in Germany with the shortest possible phrase: “insanity.” The media focused on no other topic for days, even weeks. Tens of thousands of Trabants polluted the air in the West, with Westerners retaliating by hinting at what Trabant owners should use to fill up at Western petrol pumps because the two-stroke mixture was no longer available there. The welcome money Ossis initially received began to run out, so they were showered with gifts instead, receiving many things for free for days. From then on, “Germany united fatherland” was not only a slogan at the mass rallies in the GDR; the solidarity of millions of West German citizens after the fall of the Wall left no doubt that unity should be brought about quickly. For many, things were not going fast enough; in November alone, over 133,000 people fled from East to West, almost 90,000 of them after the fall of the Wall. The stream of refugees continued. In December, more than 43,000 people left, followed by almost 73,000 in January 1990, almost 64,000 in February, 46,000 in March, and another 55,000 between April and the end of June. It was not until December 18, 1989, that the MfS leadership internally announced that its employees could enjoy general freedom of travel, but at the same time it pointed out that relatives and family members would do better to resist the pull of the West. Far too little appreciation has so far been expressed concerning how the civil service and West Berlin as a whole acted at that time. Governing Mayor Walter Momper and the borough mayors had begun in October to prepare their administrations for the fall of the Wall in December. Although they had prepared themselves thoroughly for this unspecified day X, they were not prepared for the sudden rush. And yet they coped with it uncomplainingly and largely in a friendly way. On November 26, 1989, the staff of the Friedrichstadt Palace in East Berlin thanked eighteen hundred West Berlin employees of various offices and post offices, senate administrations, district offices, and social services by giving them free tickets to the show Einfach zauberhaft. And at Christmas, GDR citizens provided free overnight accommodation for West German citizens in many towns and villages at Christmas as a thank-you. Even though Krenz and his comrades still hoped to close the borders again for a few days—they even contemplated military actions for this purpose3—the night from November 9 to 10 historically marked the final end of the SED dictatorship. The Wall had fallen, and the border could no longer be closed. For

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weeks on end, the SED made a big show of the reopening of border crossing points in Berlin and on the inner-German border. In many places in the districts of Schwerin, Magdeburg, Erfurt, Suhl, and Karl-Marx-Stadt, people forced new crossing points to be made or simply dismantled the inner-German border fortifications. Even in Berlin, something like this was still happening on June 16, 1990—219 days after the fall of the Wall. On this day, farmer Helmut Qualitz from the West Berlin district of Lübars simply broke through the Wall with his tractor, thus opening the Blankenfelder Chaussee between East and West Berlin. In Berlin, Prime Minister Modrow and Chancellor Kohl finally ceremoniously opened the particularly symbolic Brandenburg Gate on December 22, 1989, to the cheers of some one hundred thousand people. The SED had long resisted opening it up because it would amount to de facto recognition of national solidarity. Border controls were finally abolished on July 1, 1990. November 10 fell on a Friday. From midday onward, work came to a standstill not only in East Berlin but practically throughout the entire GDR. Already on this day, however, there were indications that many obstacles would have to be overcome for German unity to be established. Warning voices arose from within some opposition groups in the GDR that the GDR’s internal democratization process should not now be sacrificed to an all-German capitalism. In the evening, up to 150,000 SED supporters gathered in East Berlin’s Lustgarten, putting pressure on their party leadership to reform and demanding that an extraordinary party conference be convened immediately. On the other hand, they also insisted on a communist GDR, thus fostering the internal differentiation process of GDR society.4 In addition, some 20,000 people gathered in front of the town hall in West Berlin Schöneberg to cheer on the SPD politicians Momper and Brandt. Brandt said: “Nothing will ever be the same again. This means that we in the West too are not measured by our slogans of yesterday alone, but by what we are willing and able to do today and tomorrow, spiritually and materially. . . . The willingness not to raise an index finger, but to show solidarity, to compensate, to make a new beginning, is put to the real test. The task now is to pull ourselves together again, to keep a clear head and, as well as possible, to do what corresponds to our German interests as well as our duty to our European continent.” In an interview with Deutschlandfunk, he made his now famous statement: “Now what belongs together grows together.”5 Chancellor Kohl, who had interrupted his state visit to Poland, was mercilessly booed by most of them. This revealed three factors that politicians would have to deal with in the coming months: First, the front against the coalition in the Federal Republic was very broad, and the Kohl government seemed to be on the verge of collapse. As in 1953, the CDU government came to the rescue in the GDR in 1989/90. Many SPD and Green supporters remained skeptical and hostile toward German unity, partly because they did not want to bury their dreams of socialism and partly because they did not expect any changes in government with

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the future GDR electorate. Second, it quickly became clear that within German society the idea of German unity had remained far less vital than in the GDR. Politicians such as Oskar Lafontaine and Joseph Fischer opposed it on behalf of their party just as intensely as influential intellectuals like the writer Günter Grass and the social philosopher Jürgen Habermas.6 In their wake, quite a few warned of nationalism, neofascism, hegemonic striving, and imperialism as future characteristics of German politics and German society. Finally, among this critical mass in front of the Schöneberg town hall, there were quite a few GDR people who, as SED members, united with Western communists, Greens, and SPD members with unimaginable speed or booed everything the chancellor said on behalf of the West German establishment as an “autonomous antifa” along with their Western friends. What was grotesque about this situation was the unnoticed fact that Kohl spoke in a far more reserved and cautious tone than Momper or Brandt. He knew that he would be rejected regardless of what he did. Kohl’s rejection may be explained in historical terms. What is irritating, however, is that quite a few contemporary witnesses still uncritically justify their defensive stance at that time. For example, a history teacher who works today as a busy functionary and officially as a contemporary historian declared in a round of talks that this rejection of Kohl was right and important to make clear that this government had served its time. When asked whether this day had actually been about something completely different, he said that he did not see it that way. Rather, he saw the events in the GDR only as a vehicle for the really important developments that the citizens’ movements in the GDR had misjudged. Such narratives would be uninteresting if they did not imply consequences that shaped the process of German unification. When Brandt said “Nothing will ever be the same again,” he was right, but millions of people in both Germanys failed to realize this for years. In the West, they did not see it because they believed that unity was none of their business and had not changed their present or future. In the East, it was because millions were again hoping for a “backward-looking future.” And the unfree GDR past meanwhile now foreshadows things that are also becoming more popular in the West. In politics, more and more depends on the SED successor party. Only in exceptional cases do schools and universities deal with the communist past. The knowledge about communism (but also about everything else historical) is generally pathetic. Unreflected comparisons between democratic and totalitarian state systems are part of the dayto-day business because freedom and justice are now “confused” with grassroots democracy and equality in both East and West. Scholarship contributes to this as its business consists in continuous differentiation, which gives rise to confusing conceptual creations such as “consensus dictatorship” or “welfare dictatorship” for the SED system—terms that are neither explanatory nor logical. Why call it a “dictatorship,” one could simply ask, if everything was aimed at consensus or if this consensus prevailed?

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Even literary arts took up the fall of the Wall and its consequences. It has long been difficult to maintain an overview of all the books. Some enjoy Thomas Brussig’s successful novels Helden wie wir (1995) and Wie es leuchtet (2004) because of their wit and originality, whereas others find the sexualization in them unbearable. With Sven Regener’s works, such emotions hardly arise. Either you like the writer or you don’t. He describes the fall of the Wall in Herr Lehmann (2001) laconically, in an almost uninvolved manner (“There was no great commotion; everyone carried on as before”), which seems to aptly characterize more than just the idyllic Kreuzberg enclosure. In White Teeth (2000), British author Zadie Smith describes how older people see the end of World War II with the fall of the Wall on their televisions and how their children look on bored at the same time. Authors from African countries expressed the hope that the fall of the Berlin Wall would also mean their liberation and would serve to help tear down walls and borders worldwide. The reactions and experiences of East Germans were as varied as they were contradictory. A twenty-year-old secretary described her experiences in retrospect as follows: “It took me two years to get that smell from the supermarkets out of my nose again, three years to realize that the Bahlsen tasting rooms of my TV childhood did not really exist, and ten years to stop eating pudding.”7 Some felt like they were in an Intershop; others felt like they were in paradise; some were disappointed; most lacked Western money: “If it doesn’t come to us, let’s go to it”—this slogan was created in these days. In many West German cities, especially in West Berlin, the number of thefts rose sharply after the fall of the Wall. According to the calculations of the Frankfurter Rundschau, another offense also seemed to have had a mass character: Statistically, every GDR citizen traveling to the West had collected welcome money more than twice (one hundred deutsche marks for persons over fourteen years old, fifty deutsche marks for children). The department stores were full of people, and businesses that did not exist in the GDR, such as sex shops, posted record sales. A young man who was working as an IM in the Anklam district, IM “Uwe Berit,” told his commanding officer that “the visit to West Berlin was nothing special.” Although he had been looking forward to it, he had been disappointed because of “the feeling of begging. Wherever you want to get something, you have to beg to get it. For example, the innkeeper sold us drinks for GDR money, but he only gave us food for DM.” This IM reflected a mentality that was not just funny and certainly not singular because the supply mentality that became visible in this instance accompanied the unification process for a long time. As did the contradictoriness in people’s attitudes: only a few paragraphs later he related that he and his friends stole like ravens. “The GDR citizens had downright fool’s license.”8 Another teenage IM reported what his clique in the West wanted to experience and get on their first visit: one bought a drum revolver, another bought a switchblade, the third stole beer glasses, the fourth went to a sex cinema. According to the IM, everyone

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was currently talking “very well . . . about our country”; only the Wall had to be removed for good.9 At the demonstrations from November 12 onward, a new form of intrasocietal differentiation appeared that seemed to be familiar from the past. In Leipzig and many other places not immediately adjacent to the border, thousands complained about Berlin’s privileged status. As the Wall had separated East and West Berlin for twenty-eight years, its fall meant that East Berliners could walk and drive to the West in the morning, at noon, in the evening and at night, whereas almost all other GDR citizens had to travel by train or car, had to take a holiday, or could only breathe Western air on weekends. Outside of Berlin, this circumstance led to a radicalization of demands, and it also contributed to demands for German unification in East Berlin arising much later and remaining controversial even in the spring and summer of 1990; moreover, most public appearances by unification opponents occurred in East Berlin. However, this was also due to the fact that in the night of November 9 to 10, most Berliners immediately realized that German unity was coming because the unnatural division of the city would now inevitably be overcome. Consequently, one can explain East Berlin’s adherence to the longest visible opposition to unification in terms of the particularly large number of systemic actors living there, and also as a reactive, anticipatory moment of future problems and identity fears among the newly privileged: Berliners did not need to be pro- or anti-unification at all; they had received it practically overnight—albeit still with some difficulties. In addition, from spring 1990 on, East Berlin, with its numerous empty old buildings, became the preferred destination for German squatters and autonomists who allied themselves with the East and West Berlin scene and participated in anti-German and antiunification demonstrations for months. And since the SED remained particularly strong in East Berlin because of the concentration of the former apparatuses of power and rule, the city clearly seemed to differ from the rest of the GDR in several respects. After November 9, children and youth provided the most impressive and perhaps most honest expressions of their impressions of the events and changes. Even though some of the reports date from the summer of 1990, they still illustrate how the collapse, revolution, and fall of the Wall changed the lives of the youngest generation and how aware children and young people were of this. A thirteen-year-old girl wrote: “The Wende, this is the event of my life. It was the most breathtaking event for me. Especially because I experienced it relatively close by in the demos. Monday for Monday.” A sixteen-year-old described her first impressions of the West: “It was a different world, a completely different standard of living. If you need something, you can have it; it’s all there. I couldn’t believe that there was a lot open to us now. . . . I believe that in the future West and East Berlin will go together as Berlin. I hope peacefully and without forces from the right, radical right! When some people say: ‘Reunification, then we GDR citizens

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will be the last! Impossible, hardly imaginable,’ then I think, half a year ago the thought of the Wall being opened was also unimaginable. Now our socialism has hit rock bottom. Everything gets mixed up. Anything is possible.” In the West, the children and young people were in for a number of surprises that baffled quite a few. Some examples: “Some of the houses look like ours.” “In Kreuzberg the side streets look worse than here in Köpenick.” “People [there] don’t exactly live in paradise either.”10 Intoxicating impressions prevailed, but many a dreary façade, many a nasty pile of dirt, and many a new housing estate, whether on the outskirts or in the city center, made many wonder whether communists were also in power there or whether modernity had several sides to it, but the GDR had only got the dark sides and really only needed to be complemented with the others. It took a few more weeks, but from the beginning of 1990 the teaching and the schools in the GDR began to change as well. Pupils’ and children’s councils were formed that also functioned beyond the school setting. In the schools, the teachers initially omitted civics and history lessons altogether, and in other subjects they also refrained from political statements. School lessons on Saturdays were canceled from December 9, 1989, but for an idiosyncratic reason—because the safety of lessons on Saturdays was no longer guaranteed.11 Apparently, the Ministry of Education used this excuse to conceal the fact that people were leaving for the West on weekends. The children were pleased that clothing for the Pioneers and FDJ was no longer required, that flag roll calls were no longer held, and that the military reports at the beginning of school lessons were no longer necessary. Many teachers showed a deep sense of insecurity, and many school principals were replaced. Children in one fifth-grade class wrote: “A lot has changed. For example, we are allowed to speak our own mind and we don’t get it pumped into us. The teachers have become much nicer too.” Other children wrote: “Now we are allowed to speak our mind, e.g. Honecker is stupid” without getting carted away; “the lessons are no longer so tough, but rather nice and easy,” as well as “We have moved the tables. . . . The principal has also changed.”12 The journalist Vera-Maria Baehr, who had worked for Junge Welt until 1988, left for West Berlin in July 1989. Shortly after the fall of the Wall, she began asking young people about their experiences. In January 1990, she presented a book with the personal testimonies of thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds. This is now a source of high value because children and young people were rarely the subject of surveys and questionnaires during this period of upheaval. In the following, I have quoted longer passages from a report from this source because they so vividly show the dreams, hopes, and fears of the youth in those days. Linda was sixteen years old in 1989, had lost her father when she was ten years old, and attended an extended secondary school. “We now have a completely new perspective. In the past, everything was locked up tight. Now all of a sudden a lot of things have become uncertain. Freer. First, you realize what other interests you have. The curriculum is all wrong.” Her school had “a bit of bad

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luck with our headmistress. She’s so rotten. But . . . she always wanted what was best for the children. There’s really no denying it. Now she’s trying to change her way of thinking. But she can’t. She was never taught that.” Such thoughts were not precocious or unusual. After the fall of the Wall, many young people quickly realized that adults, especially those who had adapted to the system and were staunch supporters, would have far more difficulties in the future than young people or liberal-minded adults. The fall of the Wall changed everything: “Actually, it’s not a nice feeling when everything starts to totter. There comes a time when you wish everything would be okay. It was quite nice at first. But since November 9th, since the borders are open, you can’t do anything. You only think about the West, you get involved in a lot of things.” The pupils visited a Western school and found that the material possibilities there were much better than at the Eastern school they attended. “And then they can get copies of everything at school. None of this is available in our schools. Well, they have a much better way of working there.” Linda soon realized that she herself knew a lot about the West, had constantly occupied herself with thoughts of it, which was not the case for Westerners. Linda was unsure what the knowledge she had acquired in school was worth. “Now we have to start everything all over again. It is of course bad if you think that everything you have learned in history might be wrong. And all of it from the nineteenth century on. . . . That socialism is superior was a constant topic in civics lessons. But we didn’t believe that. . . . I believed that capitalism is an exploitative order, that there are rich and poor. But we did not believe that our social services were better, either. We saw what it looked like in the shops, in the hospitals. We always attacked the teacher and partly pitied and partly despised her. She was also just a little staunch supporter who was brought up wrong.” She now felt freed from many ideological constraints. “It was all so rigidly fixed. There was a certain pressure on everyone.” She was happy that she could now finally travel freely wherever she wanted. Nobody in her class believed in an independent GDR any more. “And most people think it doesn’t really matter where you live when everything is open.” Within a few weeks she had lost her faith. “And there’s not much to be proud of now. The people who brought about the Wende—them, yes. But then it doesn’t matter what state they live in.” Like most young people, she also touched on right-wing radicalism: “The concern that there is also a strong potential for right-wing extremism here because people are so fed up with the communists, I think that is exaggerated. There is. But not to that extent.” Like quite a few teenagers and young adults, she was skeptical of Western consumerism. “I hope I never fall into consumption. . . . The neon advertising, the oversupply bothers me. You don’t know where to look.” Despite all the euphoria, many people in the GDR found much to be critical of in West German society. The following observation was particularly popular and later became a general GDR declaration for many people: “And then I am horrified

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that some people are so cold. They don’t even look at each other. To be sure, it’s the same in the GDR, but that was probably more due to the depressed mood, that the people were so bent over. But in West Berlin they seem cool, kind of lonely. Especially on the street.” Linda took advantage of the new possibilities. She played music in the street with friends, which had also been forbidden before. No one knew exactly why. “In the old days, they used to take one’s instruments away or even take the musicians with them.” She was very happy that everything was finally over. “When Gorbachev became known, we started to think. . . . We had not been aware of any problems in the country. We also learned nothing about Stalin, except that he won the war, that is, he was our liberator. Only since Gorbachev have we really started thinking things over.”13 Such reflections were not only typical for thoughtful young people but also for many critically minded adults. The camps “for unity” and “against unity” that developed in the following weeks and months were not composed mainly of apologists for capitalism and defenders of communist ideas, as is often claimed. These people were there. And it was not only people against unity who either clung to the SED system or wanted to build a democratic, free society that they could not see in the Federal Republic. The masses of the two camps dealt differently with their own experiences and lessons learned in the GDR, on the one hand, and their observations and acquired knowledge about the Federal Republic, on the other; they processed them differently. The opponents or skeptics of unity were often simply afraid. Much of this was a conglomeration of people’s experiences, ideological indoctrinations, unfree educations, and attitudes to life, as well as their observations. They feared right-wing radicalism and neofascism, coldness in society, individuality, unemployment, drugs, homelessness, social care and healthcare, the elbow mentality, the glittering world of consumption, AIDS, and much more. In essence, quite a few people were afraid of something new; of having to make decisions independently; of having to take their fate into their own hands; of having to choose between a wide range of political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual offers; and of thinking that if they did something wrong—as many had learned—it would have incalculable consequences for their own future. Not all people released from the dictatorship saw democracy and freedom as a blessing. These things seemed less dangerous, but for all those who had adapted and taken part in the dictatorship or actively supported it, they seemed to require much more effort. The SED knew how to exploit these feelings.

Nationally Owned Enterprises Although the workers in the factories, the skilled workers in the cooperatives, and the farmers in the agricultural production cooperatives knew better than the pastors, artists, and intellectuals what the economic and environmental situation

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was truly like, and all the people could tell stories from their small working contexts that suggested that something could be wrong with the entire system, things remained relatively quiet in the factories and cooperatives until mid-November. There were two reasons for this. First, the social movements took place in public squares, streets, and churches. Most people understood that not even a powerful general director, let alone directors of smaller companies, could really change anything in the system. Second, although many ideas related to a social-ecological market economy and grassroots democratic models were circulating, along with calls for reprivatizing small and medium-sized enterprises from October on, hardly anyone seemed to want private capitalist conditions to be completely restored. Nevertheless, the companies and cooperatives also increasingly became spaces for political action.14 Initially, criticism was directed at the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), whose role as the SED “transmission belt” was no longer tolerated. Massive criticism was leveled at FDGB leader Harry Tisch, who finally resigned in early November. From the beginning of October, several strikes and threats of strikes were orchestrated, especially in the districts of Karl-Marx-Stadt, Dresden, Gera, and East Berlin. These were almost exclusively strikes with political demands. The first took place on October 2 in Pfaffenrode near Mühlhausen, where fifty-six employees of the district hospital went on strike against SED policies. The next day there were strikes in four towns in the Karl-Marx-Stadt district because of the closing of the ČSSR border, with six hundred miners in Altenberg among the participants. The SED reacted with concessions: bananas were brought into the shops, and residents were given special permits to travel to the neighboring country to the south, where they had been supplying themselves with everyday goods for years. It was not until the beginning of November that strikers gradually added internal demands, such as a fairer wage structure and associated drastic reductions in the size of the management apparatus. On November 4, Heiner Müller presented a demand at Alexanderplatz that did not bring him much applause. He read out the appeal of an initiative group for independent trade unions that had formed in East Berlin in mid-October. This was the beginning of the open declaration of war on the FDGB. After the fall of the Wall, the factories established a clearer tone. The main demands they made were for the combat groups to be dissolved, the SED to be separated from the companies, all full-time party functionaries to be dismissed from the companies, the FDGB to be transformed into an independent trade union, new trade unions to be formed, and works councils to be introduced, along with workers’ right to codetermination, as well as for the company newspapers that had previously been published by the SED party organization to be converted into employee magazines. In many companies, workers also demanded that the economic and financial situation be disclosed and that unprofitable production sectors be terminated.

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After the fall of the Wall, the political struggle between the SED and the citizens’ movement intensified considerably, with the staff of many companies and cooperatives siding with the opposition by planning several strikes, many warning strikes, and even more threats of strikes. The climax of this movement began at the end of November and lasted until the end of January 1990. Early December also saw the threat of a general political strike by representatives of the New Forum of Karl-Marx-Stadt, but they immediately denied this and declared it a solo effort. On December 29, 1989, the management of VEB Schwertransport Leipzig and its works council signed the first agreement on future cooperation. Strike threats played an important role in the dissolution of the MfS. For the self-image of the SED as a “workers’ party,” it was particularly defeating that workers wanted the SED to be separated from practically all companies, which finally took place officially in mid-December.15 In the political movement within companies, disclosure of abuse of office, corruption, and self-enrichment by functionaries of the SED, the FDGB, the bloc parties, and other mass organizations, as well as representatives of the MfS, the MdI, and councils of the regions and districts, played a special role. Every day from mid-November, new monstrous abuses and business practices came to light, such as functionaries having villas built, as well as the SED running an arms trade, selling confiscated antiques to the West, and maintaining numerous secret bank accounts and businesses in the West, all of which provoked tremendous outrage among the people. From today’s perspective, the sales volume of these shops may not appear to have been too exciting, and the villas and other advantages do not seem overly pompous, but that was not the point. Rather, it was that the SED had so clearly rejected its decades of talk of equality for all. For one thing, after all that had happened, people did not want to accept waiting in line for a long time when some top officials took what they needed without any trouble. For another, the revolution proved to be a moral enterprise in many respects, with moral arguments playing a major role in the autumn and winter of 1989. That is why the behavior of such functionaries seemed particularly reprehensible: preaching water and drinking wine—the hypocrisy upset many people. It, therefore, did not seem strange at the time when the FDJ announced on October 28 that its three top functionaries would no longer drive official cars from France “as of today” but would be chauffeured around in the Soviet Lada. The uprising in the companies had to deal with a handicap from midDecember onward. It seemed that the SED would finally abdicate soon after free elections. What was less clear, however, was what would happen to the companies and who would manage them in the future. And since the plant directors were no longer subject to SED directives of the SED while state structures functioned only rudimentarily, quite a few began to forge their own paths from December, with the number increasing from the beginning of 1990. In quite a few companies, directors tried to intimidate the workforce and threatened to

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lay off workers. Only the reunification in the autumn of 1990 prevented the GDR economy from completely disappearing into mafia-like structures such as in the Soviet Union and its successor states, but also in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. In none of these countries is it clear how the national economy could fall into the hands of oligarchs within a short period of time. In the GDR, there were also initial forays in this direction. The FDJ privatized its assets through quickly founded limited liability companies, and parts of many companies were separated from others with people who had just been party officials or plant managers suddenly functioning as managing directors or owners. The SED also tried to save its widely diversified assets. Countless small and medium-sized enterprises were started with SED capital. The SED also distributed a huge number of donations. It is obvious that it was not purely motivated by mercy but rather by ulterior motives. These themes have hardly been researched thus far.

The SED’s Final Response to the Crisis After the opening of the Wall, the fate of the SED and the independent GDR seemed to be sealed. It was only a matter of time, the tenor on the streets said, until both of them disappeared. People did not yet think this would happen within months but rather within a few years. Accordingly, the pressure from the streets, with mass demonstrations throughout the country, continued unabated and increased significantly once again. In addition, the Eastern Bloc also continued to disintegrate at a rapid pace. Poland and Hungary had practically already become independent. Bulgaria followed on November 10, where party leader Todor Zhivkov also resigned after mass protests and the Communist Party gave up its claim to leadership. The developments in the ČSSR were greatly accelerated by the events in the GDR.16 Although the communist state there tried to break up oppositional mass demonstrations on November 17—just as the communists in the GDR had done at the beginning of October—this greatly mobilized the opposition. The oppositional Civic Forum, an amalgamation of several groups, proved to be the driver of the revolution and, in Havel and Alexander Dubček, had two widely known and recognized leaders with whom the majority of society could identify in the fall and winter of 1989 to 1990. On November 24, the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia resigned; on December 28, Dubcek was appointed president of the parliament; and one day later, Havel became the president of Czechoslovakia. His first visit abroad led him to Germany. First he traveled to East Berlin, where he symbolically visited the Brandenburg Gate and met with opposition members. He then flew on to Munich. The first free elections in the ČSSR took place on July 5, 1990, confirming Havel’s claim to power. The processes in Romania unfolded even faster, where mass protests against the Ceaușescu regime began in December,

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with the dictator ordering many protesters shot. There were many dead to be mourned. A propaganda event in Bucharest that Ceaușescu himself organized turned into a counterdemonstration. The television footage of a stunned and horrified Ceaușescu went around the world at Christmas. So too did the footage of him being sentenced by a tribunal and shot together with his wife Elena shortly thereafter. In Romania, however, in contrast to other Eastern Bloc countries, no far-reaching reform subsequently took place. The communist cadres initially only changed places, and the regime remained under a sham-democratic cloak for a few more years. This example shows that the countries that woke up very late—Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania—had particularly high hurdles on the road to democracy. Yugoslavia took on a special role in many respects due to the nationalist conflicts unleashed in 1987. Poland and Hungary, on the other hand, where people had pushed for democratization and negotiated its realization for years, took a slower, but overall more stable, path.17 The ČSSR caught up within a few weeks and then also took this central Eastern European path, which remained thorny and contradictory for these three countries. Like the ČSSR, the GDR seemed to be following this path: both countries saw the beginnings of a revolution whose aim was the establishment of free and democratic elections. The GDR was a special case, in many respects, because of its character as part of the divided German nation, whose fate had been determined not only in the GDR but also in Moscow, Paris, London, Washington, and, above all, Bonn. The people were able to tear down the Wall, but they could not achieve national German unity without the approval of the Allies and without Bonn’s commitment. The rapid pace at which this was nevertheless achieved was due to Moscow’s approval, the constructive behavior of the Western allies, and, primarily, the work of the KohlGenscher administration.18 In mid-November, many things still seemed very uncertain. Day by day, the bloc parties became more and more prominent as independent subjects of political action. When lawyer Lothar de Maizière was elected the party leader on November 10, the Eastern CDU now also embarked on a course of reform. The opposition groups remained responsible for mass mobilization. It was thanks to them that the chain of mass demonstrations was not broken. At the same time, however, they failed to develop a clear political program during this phase because practically all of them were busy building up their own organizations, and their political ideas were sometimes very far apart. The opposition acted effectively on site in smaller towns and even in Dresden. Throughout the country, however, the New Forum, Democratic Awakening, Democracy Now, and the SDP rarely came together in agreement publicly. The SED tried to use this confusing situation to take the offensive itself. One must recall that it still had hundreds of thousands of members—by the end of December, about 900,000 members had left the party, but the official number was officially still 1.463

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million.19 It also controlled all GDR media, with the exception of the daily bloc party newspapers, whose reporting was largely supportive. The entire party structure, with tens of thousands of full-time functionaries as well as the nationwide infrastructure, was completely intact. The opposition groups, by contrast, had almost nothing, starting with a lack of telephones and extending beyond the lack of self-run newspapers, printing presses, etc. On November 13, a Monday, the People’s Chamber convened, marking only the eleventh session since the election in June 1986. This fact alone proves just how much importance the People’s Chamber had in the political system of the GDR—none. The meeting began with the announcement that the previous president, Horst Sindermann, and with him the entire executive committee, had resigned. Five candidates applied to succeed the president, none of whom were SED members. Günther Maleuda of the Democratic Farmers’ Party of Germany (Demokratische Bauernpartei Deutschlands, DBD), an SED offshoot, won the second round of voting. With only a few votes more than Manfred Gerlach, he managed to prevail. This was followed by a debate on the situation in the country that resulted in “strong” words. Werner Jarowinsky of the SED grandly noted that “modern socialism, which the people . . . have built together, is the alternative to capitalism on German soil.” On behalf of the DBD, Michael Koplanski advocated “that every village in our country should have its own perspective.” Christine Wieynk of the CDU, like other speakers, criticized the situation, that things had gotten to the point they had; she stood by her complicity and said: “Nothing less is in our hands than the fate of our country, of renewed socialism on German soil. We don’t have time.” Lutz Ahnfeld of the FDJ moved on to the implicit claim that the violence had emanated from the demonstrators on October 7 and 8. “We consistently reject a one-sided portrayal of events and a sweeping condemnation of the police and security forces.” As a functionary for the youth, he still believed he was allowed to speak for them. Manfred von Ardenne, on behalf of the Kulturbund, emphasized the outstanding role Egon Krenz had played in ensuring peace in Leipzig and making sure that Schnitzler disappeared from the screen. Even though one could not miss the critical tones in the speeches, it became clear that while all of the speakers wanted to preserve this GDR socialism, none were prepared to make far-reaching reforms either. They threw around buzzwords like “highly bureaucratic centralism,” “modern socialism,” “administrative socialism,” “undeserved privileges,” and “abuse of authority.” In essence, they were following a transparent strategy, namely, to direct the people’s anger at individual functionaries such as Honecker, to cover up their own complicity, and, at the same time, to stifle the fundamental social debate about the system and structural errors. Convening a temporary committee “to review cases of abuse of office, corruption, personal enrichment and other acts” was part of a strategy of shifting blame onto a few shoulders. Several members of parliament, following an old communist strategy, said that it was now up to “the further

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diligent and conscientious work of all working people” to ensure that everything would be fine. On behalf of the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (LDPD), Harry Trumpold at least proposed to take up the demand made by mass demonstrations and the opposition to suspend Article 1 of the constitution, which established the leading role of the SED. The CDU member of parliament Burkhard Schneeweiß, a physician and longtime functionary, went one step further. He cautiously criticized the China declaration of the People’s Chamber in June, admitted his complicity, and called for new elections. Not a single one of these proposals was put to a vote of the executive committee. But at least from the middle of the meeting the ministers started to answer questions. Now began a game that individual members of parliament may not have seen through to the end but that everyone took part in. Finance Minister Ernst Höfner mentioned the GDR’s debt without revealing its real dimensions. Several members of parliament were indignant that they had only now officially learned of this. Prime Minister Stoph, who had already announced the resignation of the entire government that day, declared that Honecker and Mittag were solely to blame for this. Gerhard Schürer, to the displeasure of the SED leadership, went into details concerning the catastrophe and admitted his complicity, but he also failed to clarify the level of indebtedness he had revealed to the Politburo three weeks earlier. In the middle of his speech, he referred to those convened as “comrades,” which provoked some to interject, “We are in the People’s Chamber!” All of this would have been unthinkable even a few days before. The famous highlight of the day occurred when Stasi minister Erich Mielke spoke voluntarily and without a script. The audience laughed for the first time when he confessed that his ministry has “an extraordinarily high level of contact with all working people.” Mielke showed himself to be insecure and addressed the members of parliament several times as “comrades,” as had been usual until then. Someone then whined about “procedural rules”: “In this chamber there are not only comrades sitting.” Mielke answered in a way that was historically and politically absolutely correct: “Please, this is only a formal question.” He was completely thrown off balance and said, “I love all people . . . ,” eliciting laughter. Alongside the words that Gorbachev never really said, it became the dictum of the years 1989 and 1990, and millions have been laughing about it ever since. In Mielke’s ministry, his appearance at this meeting generated sheer horror; hardly anyone wanted to have anything to do with him afterward. Little else accelerated the internal erosion of the MfS as much as this appearance of the minister. It was also the best opportunity for the SED leadership associated with Krenz and Modrow to pass the entire blame on to the MfS, as well as to Honecker. This process actually occurred somewhat differently in historical terms. Certainly, Mielke’s reaction was inadequate. Turning his work and his ministry into the ministry of love was not only laughable but also a slap in the face for hundreds of thousands. But what had Mielke actually hoped to achieve with his

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speech? He had not planned to make any declarations of love. His spontaneous exclamation, “I love all people . . . ,” was directed solely at the members of parliament and was a reaction to whether he addressed them as “comrades” or not— circumstances that are almost always overlooked. In his speech, he wanted to point out to the members of parliament, who had still been allies until a few minutes before, that his ministry had presented the SED leadership with frequent realistic analyses of the social situation during the previous months and years and had repeatedly pointed out that the system would run into existential hardship if it maintained its previous policy. “We have reported all shortcomings, sometimes from very small things only to the larger ones. We have shown all the difficulties that arise when people flee the republic, when they leave the republic.” And further: “We made suggestions at this point. . . . Believe me, we gave them. . . . The only thing is that perhaps what we reported was not always taken into account and was not assessed.”20 Now almost nobody knew what Mielke really meant. But historically, he was right. Mielke’s ministry did not want any other GDR socialism, but since 1987 the SED had pointed out dangers as never before in GDR history. Mielke did not offer any alternatives, nor was this his task. However, he repeatedly pressed for political solutions and changes, regardless of what he may have had in mind. It would be too easy to assume that Mielke had always insisted on pushing through a policy of repression. The processes of discussion and development since 1987 showed that he had, instead, pleaded for cautious changes to the system: to act relentlessly against enemies and opponents, but at the same time to aggressively present new and attractive political offers to society.21 Mielke’s appearance in the People’s Chamber turned into a farce for three reasons. First, the minister was not prepared for the changed atmosphere there. Nor could he have been because five hundred system supporters were sitting there who, without a single exception, had never before doubted or questioned a public word of the SED. Second, neither he nor his generals had any idea that the SED leadership had already made the most skillful and long-lasting move in the autumn of 1989: to make the MfS the main culprit alongside Honecker in order to ensure the party’s survival.22 Mielke’s embarrassing appearance turned out to be an unexpectedly steep drop in his standing. Third and finally, the MfS was now at a disadvantage because of its own working principles. Its workers knew only too well how hated the secret police were. A strategy geared toward its own survival would have required it to make a different public relations effort even in the preceding days. Instead, it remained the “shield and sword of the party,” even when the party raised its sword against the MfS itself. Even so, the real scandal on this day was not Mielke’s appearance but how most of the 477 party faithful present dealt with him and wanted to declare themselves “cleaners” or “purifiers.” The debate was then abandoned. The Stoph government resigned as announced. The members of the People’s Chamber appointed SED Politburo

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member Hans Modrow as the new prime minister. The basic democratic understanding of these members of parliament was revealed in their voting behavior: one person voted against Modrow, and nobody abstained. The bloc parties were still functioning, or at least the SED mass organizations were. Immediately after the People’s Chamber meeting, the CC of the SED held another meeting. The mood was edgy. The members who came from the various regions reported that the party was disintegrating: “We fight like madmen! They keep coming out.” Some demanded that the misery could not be blamed on only a few like Honecker, Mittag, and Herrmann. Someone interjected loudly that it was “worse now than in the Middle Ages!” and that the Central Committee needed to resign en masse. Krenz and Modrow successfully defended themselves against this. Another member again interjected: “I always hear who is not in charge. Who is actually in charge here?”23 The CC then decided to convene an extraordinary special party conference. Modrow also explained that new elections to the People’s Chamber had to be prevented as long as possible because the SED and the bloc parties currently had no chance of winning, and the opposition groups were not yet capable of managing the government. Even though his concern about the opposition’s ability to govern came as a surprise, he was not wrong. Before the next session of the People’s Chamber, more than two dozen deputies resigned from office, and several state councilors were recalled and replaced by new ones. Modrow made a much-anticipated government statement: he committed himself to reforms in all governmental, economic, and social areas but mostly remained vague. The ensuing debate supported him and adopted the government declaration without anyone voting against it. At Modrow’s suggestion, the People’s Chamber appointed a new government with twenty-eight members instead of forty-four, including seventeen SED representatives. Twenty of them had also already held high-ranking positions as ministers, deputy ministers, state secretaries, or SED functionaries. The biggest surprise was the appointment of de Maizière as vice president of the Council of Ministers for Church Affairs. Some appointments elicited incomprehension, such as the previous deputies Lothar Ahrendt (MdI) and Wolfgang Schwanitz (MfS) being appointed as new ministers. The former head of the Pioneer organization Wilfried Poßner was to become minister of education. He threw in the towel the very next day because he had apparently been told that nobody thought he was capable of quick change. On the whole, the new government remained very similar to the old one and hardly had anyone’s trust. Only Prime Minister Modrow himself, who was well received by parts of the population with his matter-of-fact and modest manner, enjoyed greater esteem in society.24 In the course of the following weeks, Christa Luft (SED), an economic expert, also gained approval for her work. She seemed to be a match for any functionary in language and appearance, but she proved to be an economic expert whose attitude one might not always share but could

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at least respect. This was all the more true since, during these weeks and months, many people talked about economic issues as if they had never done anything else, but very few had any economic expertise. Not only the appointment of Ahrendt and Schwanitz but also that of HansJoachim Heusinger as minister of justice elicited great incomprehension. He had been in office since 1972. Many people asked with concern how a constitutional state was to be established if one of the leaders of the unjust state continued to hold the main responsibility for justice. At the beginning of January he resigned, and Modrow appointed Kurt Wünsche of all people as his successor. Wünsche had already been the minister of justice from 1967 to 1972 as the successor to the notorious Hilde Benjamin and was among those responsible for introducing a new penal code and a new code of criminal procedure in 1968; together, these new codes provided legal protection for politically motivated criminal prosecution. After March 18, 1990, the new prime minister, de Maizière, also called for Wünsche to become minister of justice, which hardly anyone could understand at this point. Wünsche resigned in mid-August. Behind the scenes, the government initially dealt with three questions. First, the reduction in the number of departments required a restructuring of the state, which the government only managed to achieve in a rudimentary fashion during its term of office. At the same time, this restructuring jeopardized the loyalty of state employees because it prompted them to worry about retaining their jobs. At the end of December, the first layoffs occurred, although the exact number is not known. There were no statistics, and the information in the files was contradictory.25 Those who were laid off received generous severance packages to help with their transition. If they were willing to work below their level of qualification or to move their place of residence, jobs were available because of the hundreds of thousands of people who had fled the country. Second, the government had to persuade the West German federal government to provide financial support. West German chancellery minister Rudolf Seiters came to East Berlin several times, with Modrow behaving in an accommodating fashion. But the pressure from the street remained, and the Kohl government decided to support the reform process only after free elections. There were two reasons for this. On the one hand, financial support for the Modrow government might have looked like indirect support for Modrow’s election campaign. On the other hand, the Modrow government was just as lacking in legitimacy as its predecessor. Consequently, if the West German federal government were to show a keen interest in any stabilization of the system due to the debates in its own country, it would also carry the danger of prompting the SED to return to the old system and thereby provoke civil war–like conditions. Third, the Modrow government finally tried to counteract the pressure from the streets. It drew up a comprehensive work and legislative program that it intended to complete by the end of 1990. It had almost no leeway for short-term

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decisions. As late as November 17, it called for the Berlin construction program to be restricted and for some of the construction workers in East Berlin to be sent back to the districts to improve the precarious housing situation there, at least symbolically. On November 23, the Council of Ministers decided on its first considerations for the 1990 State Budget and National Economic Plan. One can clearly see from them that Modrow wanted to bring about change but lacked ideas, plans, and, above all, resources. The gigantic share of budget items for the MdI, the Ministry for National Defense, and the MfS were to be cut by less than 8 percent. The Modrow government also tried to curb the protests on the streets by making quick concessions on consumption, yet that alone was not enough. At the end of November, the government further decided to allow greater freedom of movement and action for private itinerant trade in order to alleviate the precarious supply situation. It also strengthened the position of private skilled laborers. This was followed in December by draft laws on the formation of joint ventures and the possibility of investing foreign capital in the GDR economy. It remained controversial whether the GDR should continue to own 50.1 percent thereof. One of the most politically dubious decisions that the Modrow government had already made on November 23 followed a decision by Stoph’s Council of Ministers on November 3 and 11. It was again a sign that the communists still wanted to blame others for the deep crisis. All newspapers reported on the decision the next day. From that point on, a large number of consumer goods were to be sold only when the customer presented a GDR identity card, and plainclothes civil servants and uniformed officers were to be deployed in several department stores in East Berlin and the districts of Dresden, Frankfurt/Oder, Rostock, Cottbus, and Neubrandenburg. All this aimed to combat “speculators and smugglers.” Moreover, Polish transit travelers (not others) were given a restrictive time limit for free travel between Poland and West Berlin or the Federal Republic of Germany, which made it clear which group this measure actually targeted. In addition, a separate border crossing point for Poles was set up at the Friedrichstrasse station. This was clever staging on the part of the Modrow government, suggesting that the SED was not responsible for the catastrophic supply situation but the GDR’s Polish neighbors. At the same time, it demonstrated what open borders supposedly meant for the GDR and its people: a sellout by “speculators and smugglers.” The especially clever thing about this move was that, as in the past, it exploited rampant anti-Polish feeling, so no particular protest from the GDR population was expected. For weeks the media fanned the flames of hatred against Poland on behalf of the SED. Among other things, the New Forum protested with the following words: “Don’t be taken for fools! Who created an economy in which everything collapses—supposedly because a Pole bought 10 bars of chocolate, 3 Russian pairs of shoes, a Bulgarian a moped and a Vietnamese a bicycle?

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How does West Berlin cope with millions of GDR visitors?”26 Adam Michnik asked the democratic opposition in the GDR at the beginning of December: “Why do you remain silent and not distance yourself from the expressions of hatred directed against Poland in the press, on television and in everyday life? Everyone in Poland expects you to explain your conviction of the permanence and inviolability of the Polish-German border at the Oder and Neisse Rivers. You have a right to your democratic state, and we have a right to secure borders. How are we to explain your hesitation then?”27 Ludwig Mehlhorn responded to this contribution on behalf of an East-West initiative that included Stephan Bickhardt, Guntolf Herzberg, Marieluise Lindemann, Gerd Poppe, Edelbert Richter, Christian Semler, Wolfgang Templin, Reinhard Weißhuhn, and Konrad Weiß. He said that while it was true that an intolerable anti-Polish mood prevailed in the GDR, fueled by the SED and its media, the democratic opposition vigorously resisted this, advocated the immutability of the borders, and saw through the SED’s well-known game of “scapegoat for your own bankruptcy.” But Mehlhorn asked Michnik to bear in mind that they still had no access to the media, so their initiatives and signed petitions against hate propaganda could hardly be known.28 This example also shows how hypocritical the SED propaganda against xenophobia was—because the SED’s long-standing policy of segregation and exclusion had fostered such xenophobia. The Modrow government addressed many things that were superfluous. For example, it repealed decrees on the bestowal of honors and determined what should happen to “wandering flags.” However, it only decided to end the combat groups—a constant demand—shortly before Christmas 1989; this would take effect on June 30, 1990. It seems that those in the government were more intensively concerned about what would happen to the members of the Council of Ministers after the elections. To support their reelection efforts, Modrow’s government issued a supply resolution, as well as one allowing home purchases under extremely favorable terms for tenants. The latter also benefited the old nomenklatura, who were thus able to secure property shortly before the gates closed. It also decided that the “cadre files” (personnel files) should be cleaned up, which each employee could undertake on his or her own. Finally, it coordinated the transfer of MfS employees into state structures so that a concentration of MfS employees arose in some areas, such as the post office, the municipal housing administrations, the new employment offices, customs, and many other areas directly subordinate to the Council of Ministers. None of this was suited to halting the process of disintegration of the GDR and the SED. The SED itself was the first to perceive the inactivity and halfheartedness of these efforts. On November 24, Krenz, again only following pressure from the street, finally announced that he would remove the SED’s claim to leadership from the constitution. The People’s Chamber then voted unanimously in favor of this on December 1. A CDU member of parliament also

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proposed deleting the phrase “the GDR is a socialist state” from the constitution. SED man Hermann Kant, a member of parliament for the Kulturbund, asked demagogically what the CDU had against workers and farmers, eliciting hearty applause. The proposal received only 112 votes in favor and was defeated.29 However, no one came up with the idea of also renouncing Article 3, which established the constitutional status of the “National Front.” On November 26, the SED received rather unexpected support when Christa Wolf read out the appeal “Für unser Land” (For our country) on television. This appeal made it clear that nobody wanted what the country had been so far and proposed alternatives that were just right for the SED: EITHER we demand the continued independence of the GDR. In co-operation with those states and stakeholders prepared to help we should muster all our strength to develop a society of solidarity, in which we guarantee peace and social justice, freedom of the individual, freedom of movement for all and the protection of the environment. OR we have to accept that the powerful economic forces—along with the unacceptable conditions that influential West German industrial and political figures demand in return for their support—will lead to a sell-out of our material and moral values, and, sooner or later, an assimilation of the GDR by West Germany. Let us choose the first path. We still have the chance to build a socialist alternative to West Germany, in equitable neighbourliness with the states of Europe. We have not forgotten the anti-fascist and humanist ideals with which we began.30

The list of initial signatories was bizarre. On the one hand, it included morally unsuspicious personalities such as the writers Volker Braun, Stefan Heym, and Christa Wolf; the rock singer Tamara Danz; the director Frank Beyer; the lawyer Götz Berger, who was banned from working; Bishop Christoph Demke; the opposition members Bernd Gehrke (Vereinigte Linke, or United Left), Sebastian Pflugbeil (New Forum), Friedrich Schorlemmer (Democratic Awakening), Konrad Weiß, and Ulrike Poppe (both Democracy Now); and the actress Jutta Wachowiak. On the other hand, it also included prominent bearers of the SED system, such as Dresden’s Mayor Berghofer, the director of the Institute of Military History Major General Reinhard Brühl, the SED multifunctionalist and professor for Marxism-Leninism at the Humboldt University Dieter Klein, and General Director Heinz Warzecha. Krenz, Modrow, and the other members of the Politburo immediately signed this appeal.31 People’s Chamber president Maleuda abused his office and called on the other representatives to sign the appeal.32 Within a few weeks, over 1.1 million more had signed it. No other appeal, not even that of the New Forum, accumulated so many signatures within a few weeks. It circulated in the state and party apparatus, as well as in

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the barracks of the NVA, MdI, and MfS. This once again showed how effectively one could utilize the party structures for propaganda if the SED leadership only wanted it. The appeal was reproduced on SED printing presses, all the daily newspapers published it, and the appeal’s organizers were given office space, telephone connections, and media access. These were all things that the opposition, the majority of whom opposed this appeal, still dreamed of. Two days later the political debate took a new direction. The Bundestag convened the budget debate—including discussion of the chancellery budget—a session traditionally used for general political debate. Most of the speakers commented on the events in eastern Central Europe and reaffirmed their intention of supporting these revolutionary processes. Chancellor Kohl then intervened. First, he spoke about domestic issues, and then he described Germany and European policy as the core of his current policy. Once again, he expressly thanked Poland and Hungary, without whose example the developments in the GDR would not have been possible. Then, to the surprise of all Bundestag members, including those in his own party, Kohl presented a ten-point program for overcoming the division of Germany and Europe: (1) The West German federal government would set up a foreign-exchange fund to enable GDR citizens to travel on the condition that the minimum exchange rate for West German citizens be abolished (this occurred on December 24, and the visa requirement was also abolished). (2) The infrastructure between the two countries would be improved immediately, in particular, telephone and train services. (3) Economic support would be tied to free elections, the abolition of the SED monopoly of power, and the introduction of the rule of law. A Green parliamentarian interjected, observing that Kohl was “not so fussy in Turkey!” to which he responded: “The fact that you, who have moved in here to establish signs of peace, are protesting when I speak about the release of political prisoners is in line with the development you have taken.” A further requirement was that the economic system would have to be converted to a market economy, and legal conditions for foreign investment would have to be created. (4) Taking up a suggestion by Modrow, Kohl affirmed the idea of a German-German contractual community that would create a dense network of agreements for cooperation. (5) Kohl added that the West German federal government was prepared to go further and help develop confederative structures between the two states “with the aim of creating a federation . . . in Germany.” Kohl reaffirmed that nobody then knew what a reunified Germany would look like, engendering applause from all assembled except for the Greens, and added “that unity will come when the people in Germany want it, I am sure of it.” (6) The unification of all of Germany could only take place within the framework of the Pan-European unification process and in close cooperation with Moscow. (7) The European Community would have to open up to Eastern, EastCentral, and Southeast Europe, including the GDR, and associate memberships would be conceivable. (8) The CSCE process, the “heart of this Pan-European

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architecture,” would need to continue. (9) Disarmament and arms control would now need to be advanced rapidly in Europe. (10) Reunification would remain the political goal of Kohl’s federal government. Kohl then concluded: “What could disrupt this process is not reforms but the rejection thereof. It’s not freedom that creates instability, but its suppression.” After this speech, emotions were running high. Even during the debate, Karsten Voigt had expressed support from the SPD. A few days later, however, the SPD leaders associated with Oskar Lafontaine sharply distanced themselves from Kohl’s ten-point program and reunification in general. Kohl had unofficially opened the election campaign throughout Germany. The SED rejected his plans with sharp words. The East German opposition groups also largely rejected these advances. At the same time, a clear break between the regions became apparent because many people in southern districts like Dresden, KarlMarx-Stadt, Gera, and Leipzig showed enthusiasm for Kohl’s proposals and increasingly distanced themselves from the opposition groups, and the opposition members—mainly in the south—who were themselves in favor of rapid unity, hit the pulse of the time. The German Greens opened a special chapter in their history. Their perplexity on the evening of November 9, when all in the Bundestag spontaneously stood up after 9 p.m. and sang the national anthem, was unforgettable: the Greens stood up only hesitantly and remained silent. This day marked their departure from federal politics for several years. On November 28, they protested against Kohl’s speech several times. Parliamentarian Sieglinde Frieß summed up the position of most Greens with the sarcastic remark: “All this should be done according to the motto: Via the federal German entity, the people shall recover.”33 Peter Kittelmann, a CDU representative, countered with: “Via the Greens’ entity, we would all waste away.” The attitude of the Greens was remarkable because, although they represented and formulated positions that were henceforth omnipresent in public discourse, their positions remained politically ineffective. Outside of Germany, some grumbled about a “Fourth Reich,” and one heard phrases like “Germany, shut up!” Some leftists even dreamed of a Europe in which France and Poland were neighboring countries with the Elbe as their common border. Public opposition to German unity was great in both East and West, but it achieved practically nothing, except unintentionally to further incite the will for unity among many more Germans. At the beginning of December, the SED was practically in a process of self-dissolution. The party leadership was completely incapacitated and passively watched as events unfolded. Arrests of high-ranking party officials only seemed to confirm the lack of real leadership and distracted attention from the new SED leaders. The new revelations about abuse of office and corruption, about the arms trade and covert Western business, and about the bankruptcy of the economy and secret foreign exchange accounts that occurred almost daily were considerably

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fueled by rumors about money being moved abroad and documents being destroyed. Sometimes the rumor was that an MfS man had been arrested with a suitcase full of money, whereupon he took his own life; sometimes it was said that millions were stored in Switzerland. A veritable bomb exploded when, in the night of December 2 to 3, at exactly 12:40 a.m., the SED regime’s top foreign exchange procurer,34 State Secretary Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, fled to West Berlin and surrendered to the authorities. From the beginning, he had had contact with members of the federal government, which they officially denied. His reason for fleeing was that he was afraid of being lynched. A few days later, the Federal Republic refused to extradite him. Since then, the rumors never let up that the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Chancellery, and the Ministry of the Interior covered up for him because he had secret knowledge of West German companies’ involvement in the SED regime’s illegal acquisition of foreign currency and in getting around the embargo list. Even a Bundestag investigative committee set up later was not able to settle all the accusations completely. Schalck-Golodkowski had been completely unknown before November 1989. It was only through a few television appearances that he now became known to many. Only gradually did it become apparent that the “Commercial Coordination” unit he headed was a widely diversified, internationally active business enterprise that illegally procured foreign currency. It was directly subordinate to Honecker and closely linked to the MfS. Schalck-Golodkowski was a state secretary, a member of the Central Committee, and an undercover MfS officer (OibE). His deputies were also MfS officers. His flight generated tremendous outrage in the GDR, and the SED leadership was stunned. On December 3 at 1:10 p.m. the last session of the CC of the SED began. It began by expelling Honecker, Mielke, Stoph, Tisch, Sindermann, Schalck-Golodkowski, and others from the party. Then the Politburo and the CC unanimously declared their resignations. Subsequently, a working committee was constituted to prepare the special party conference. The members of the committee included Berghofer, Bisky, Gysi, Claus, Höpcke, D. Klein, M. Wolf, and Wötzel. Modrow was withdrawn at short notice because no former Politburo members were to be part of the committee. In the meantime, the pressure from the party base had become stronger and stronger. Thousands of SED members were waiting in front of the CC building to hear concrete results. The wave of people permanently leaving the country continued unabated throughout the land. Ever more people called for the dissolution of the party. The old communist Bernhard Quandt, who had been a member of the KPD since 1923, gave the most emotional speech at this last CC meeting. The eighty-six-year-old, who had been imprisoned during most of the Nazi dictatorship in penitentiaries and concentration camps and had held many high positions in the GDR, especially in the Schwerin district, stepped up to the microphone, weeping, and spoke in a rage: “I am for it, Comrade Erich

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Honecker and Comrade Egon Krenz; we have abolished the death penalty in the State Council [1987]; I am for it to be reintroduced and for us to shoot to death all those who have brought such disgrace to our party that the whole world is facing a great scandal, one that it has never seen before.” At the very end of his speech, he explained in a veiled threat that an MfS staff member had asked him—as the People’s Chamber had demanded of all functionaries—to hand in his service weapon: “And I told him: Give Comrade Schwanitz my best regards; you’ll get your personal weapon from me in the Central Committee—(hitting the speaker’s desk several times in the process)—which I have used up to now in defense of the revolution, you’ll get delivered by me personally in the Central Committee.”35 Three days later, Krenz also resigned as chairman of the State Council, with Manfred Gerlach taking over the official duties. According to Gysi and senior staff members of the SED party archives, Krenz ordered the destruction of SED documents on November 30 to be completed by December 12, and an incalculable number of documents actually were destroyed, but the process was stopped immediately after the resignation of the party leadership. The extraordinary SED party congress met on December 8 to 9 and 16 to 17, 1989. Never before or since has the public been so interested in an SED party congress. There were four decisive results. First, the SED began its outward transformation by changing its name. Gysi suggested this in his first speech on December 8, and the party congress enacted this proposal on December 16. From that day, the party called itself the SED/PDS, and from February onward only the PDS. Second, Gysi became the new party chairman. This was the best move the party made in these weeks. During this time, Gysi was also highly esteemed by his political opponents because of his quick-wittedness, humor, and rhetorical ability, as well as, last but not least, because he differed from all his predecessors in his public remarks. Hardly anyone doubted his moral integrity; many regretted that he served the SED instead of utilizing his political talent for other groups or parties. His political past was not hidden, but it did not play a role. Still, his involvement in the SED state was not publicly known. In addition to Gysi, other people who were considered communist reformers also joined the leadership committees. These included Berghofer, Bisky, Claus, Modrow, Scherzer, and Wötzel. Quite a few of those elected, such as Höpcke, Vietze, Berghofer, Modrow, Claus, and Wötzel, had already held high party functions before the fall. Almost all of them came from the party apparatus. The third and historically most important result was that the leadership group associated with Gysi managed to avert the dissolution of the party, which some in the party base had been demanding. Gysi said right at the beginning of the congress why the party’s dissolution needed to be averted:

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In my opinion, the dissolution of the party and its refounding would be a catastrophe for the party. (Applause). We would disappoint all those who in recent weeks have been so committed across the country to the renewal of their party. They want to save our party, not any party. By what right should we all deprive ourselves of a political home? (Applause.) Moreover, a political vacuum would be created in our country that nobody can fill, which would exacerbate the crisis with unforeseeable consequences. Furthermore, I simply have to point out legal consequences. With a decision to dissolve [the party], all of the employees of the apparatus would become unemployed, and the social existence of the employees of the party-owned enterprises and institutions would be considerably endangered. The party’s property would initially be ownerless. Subsequently, several parties would certainly be formed which would enter into a legal dispute about the legal succession.

The failure to dissolve the SED—a ban on the SED was never seriously discussed, although the demand had been made several times—meant that the party was able to save some of its vast assets. It lost most of them. A commission of inquiry that also worked on this complex after German unification shed much light into the darkness but also left many questions unanswered. Officially, the total was 6 billion GDR marks. Significantly, the SED/PDS also received the remaining credit balance of the MfS in 1990—460 million marks. The party leadership set up a commission to manage the assets in December 1989. In February 1990, the party transferred 3 billion marks to the state budget for allegedly social purposes. In fact, it was used to finance covert SED/PDS companies, cultural institutions, and startups—later even with the consent of Prime Minister de Maizière. In addition, the SED/PDS generously distributed the other 3 billion marks to a large number of companies. It should have surprised no one when a PDS interest group for midsized companies was later formed in Brandenburg. Individuals received high-value “loans” with terms of up to one hundred years and interest rates that did not deserve the name. In the end, millions flowed abroad. The SED/PDS accounts were not blocked until 1991, after which several mysterious deaths occurred among those involved. Gysi, Bisky, and the others responsible for the money transfers remained stubbornly silent about this shifting of a considerable part of the national wealth. This was because the money, as was also clear to the leading comrades around Gysi and Bisky in 1990—their “donation” to the state budget also made this apparent—did not derive from party assets in the true sense of the word but constituted national wealth pressed out of the national economy. Several commissions and committees looked into these money transfers for years. Hundreds of millions of DM remained untraceable, and some of the traced money—about 1 billion DM— was later returned. The inglorious history of this money, however, also includes the sometimes strange tricks the West German federal government came up with to make this money flow into its regular state budget.

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Fourth, and finally, the party conference spawned an emotional debate about the communist past and the history of the SED. Contrary to what is often stated, the debate went on for months, and its results were not predetermined. No other old political party was subjected to such a broad discussion before about 1992. From the beginning, several different interpretations of different political wings were competing with each other. But it was only in the course of the process of German unification, when the SED/PDS became increasingly insular from 1991 onward and longings for the GDR began to be loudly articulated again, that this debate dried up for several years. Still, it never ended entirely, and within the SED/PDS there were always members who called for and pursued an open and unprejudiced reappraisal. They remained outsiders in the party and also in public perception. Gregor Gysi’s assertion of December 16, however, that the party had had a “break with Stalinism,”36 distorted the facts and was intended to cover up the real state of the party.

Notes 1. Dieter Strunz, “Ein waaahnsinniges Bach-Konzert,” Berliner Morgenpost, 28. 4. 2007. 2. There are numerous documentations of this. Soviet reactions, too, are contained, for example, in Karner et al., Der Kreml und die Wende, 514–15 (Dok. 84). 3. The exact nature is not known; in particular, the considerations within the SED political bureaucracy that I am concerned with here can hardly be reconstructed from the sources. By contrast, the military reactions have been convincingly presented in Rüdiger Wenzke, ed., “Damit hatten wir die Initiative verloren.” Zur Rolle der bewaffneten Kräfte in der DDR 1989/90 (Berlin, 2014); Wilfried Hanisch, “Zur Haltung der Soldaten der DDR bei der Grenzöffnung im November 1989,” in Was war die NVA? Studien-Analysen-Berichte zur Geschichte der NVA (Berlin, 2001), 568–80 (Hanisch was a former NVA colonel); and “Ist das ein Befehl?” (Horst Stechbarth), Märkische Allgemeine, 8. 11. 2014. 4. Bernd Florath, “Die SED im Untergang,” in Das Revolutionsjahr 1989. Die demokratische Revolution in Osteuropa als transnationale Zäsur, ed. Bernd Florath (Göttingen, 2011), 63–104. 5. Bernd Rother, “Gilt das gesprochene Wort? Wann und wo sagte Willy Brandt ‘Jetzt wächst zusammen, was zusammengehört,’” DA 33, no. 1 (2000): 92; Günter Bannas, “In der Erinnerung zusammengewachsen,” FAZ, 14. 10. 2014. 6. Egon Bahr gave his assurance in Moscow on November 21, 1989, that unification was not on the agenda: Karner et al., Der Kreml und die Wende, 515–20 (Dok. 85). 7. Sabine Krätzschmar and Thomas Spanier, Ankunft im gelobten Land. Das erste Mal im Westen (Berlin, 2004), 106. 8. MfS, KD Anklam, Tonbandabschrift, IM “Uwe Berit,” 13. 11. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Neubrandenburg, KD Anklam, 478, Bl. 29. 9. MfS, KD Anklam, Tonbandabschrift, IM “Schwede,” 15. 11. 1989. Ibid., Bl. 31. 10. Gudrun Leidecker, Dieter Kirchhöfer, and Peter Güttler, Ich weiß nicht, ob ich froh sein soll. Kinder erleben die Wende (Stuttgart, 1991), 85, 88, 89–90. 11. ND, 7. 12. 1989.

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12. Leidecker, Kirchhöfer, and Güttler, Ich weiß nicht, ob ich froh sein soll, 118. 13. Vera-Maria Baehr, Wir denken erst seit Gorbatschow. Protokolle von Jugendlichen aus der DDR (Recklinghausen, 1990), 15–25. 14. It is presented more thoroughly in Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Revolution ohne Arbeiter? Die Ereignisse 1989/90,” in Peter Hübner, Arbeit, Arbeiter und Technik in der DDR 1971 bis 1989, Geschichte der Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter, vol. 15 (Bonn, 2014), 537–610. 15. This is all described very thoroughly with many examples and statistics in ibid. 16. For a very instructive account, see Petr Pithart, “Imponderabilien mit Gewicht. Reflexionen eines Prager Oppositionellen,” in Karel Vodicka, Die Prager Botschaftsflüchtlinge 1989. Geschichte und Dokumente (Göttingen, 2014), 263–74. 17. Only when Viktor Orbán was elected prime minister in 2010 did Hungary depart from this democratic path. Since then, it has no longer been possible to characterize Hungary as a stable democracy. That the EU has allowed this to happen is remarkable and begs the question of whether it still has something to do with Hungarian politics in 1989–90 or whether the EU simply once again lacks the means to be able to react to such antidemocratic developments. 18. The literature, including editions of documents, is tremendous; for an example of various approaches, see Gerhard A. Ritter, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, das Auswärtige Amt und die deutsche Wiedervereinigung (Munich, 2013); Andreas Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland. Die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung (Munich, 2009); Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe (Princeton, Oxford, 2009); Frederic Bozo, Andreas Rödder, and Mary Elise Sarotte, eds., German Reunification: A Multinational History (New York, 2017). 19. ND, 8. 1. 1990. 20. Volkskammer der DDR. Protokoll, 9. Wahlperiode, 11. Tagung, 13. 11. 1989, p. 233, 235, 236, 244, 248 (Walther, NDPD), 249, 260, 262, 263. 21. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Stasi konkret. Überwachung und Repression in der DDR (Munich, 2013). 22. For an insider view, see “‘Wenn wir die Partei retten wollen, brauchen wir Schuldige.’ Der erzwungene Wandel der SED in der Revolution 1989/90. Interview mit Wolfgang Berghofer von Manfred Wilke,” JHK (2007): 396–421. Nevertheless, some of the temporal and factual contexts that Berghof asserted are reconstructions after the fact that some may wish to attribute to him as a participant. But the interviewer, a respected contemporary historian needed to ask further questions relating to getting at the sources and should not have presented himself merely as a stooge. 23. Hertle and Stephan, Das Ende der SED, 448, 447, 457. 24. Shortly before the elections for the People’s Chamber, on March 18, 1990, 42.5 percent of survey respondents replied to the question of who should become the prime minister of the GDR with “I don’t know.” De Maizière got the second highest value among concrete individuals with 6.8 percent, but Modrow took the top stop with 35.5 percent. Even among Alliance voters, only 15.1 percent chose de Mazière, but 18.7 percent chose Modrow. Among CDU voters, the numbers were 20.8 percent vs. 18.1 percent; among the right-wing conservative DSU voters, they were 6.0 percent vs. 18 percent); among SPD voters 39.7 percent chose the last SED prime minister, among Bündnis 90 voters 37.4 percent, among the Liberals 28.4 percent, and among the SED/PDS voters, as expected, 83.7 percent (Kowalczuk, “Revolution ohne Arbeiter?,” 596). 25. On the statistics and the development of unemployment, see Kowalczuk, “Revolution ohne Arbeiter?” 591–92, 602–4; on the development of administrative structures for the unemployed, see Gerhard A. Ritter, Der Preis der deutschen Einheit. Die Wiedervereinigung und die Krise des Sozialstaates (Munich, 2006), 179–83. 26. “Mehr Solidarität. Aufruf vom 30. 11. 1989,” in Die ersten Texte des Neuen Forum. 9. 9.–18. 12. 1989 (Berlin, [January] 1990), 25.

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

Reprinted in “Gazeta Wyborcza,” taz, 7. 12. 1989. “Gazeta Wyborcza,” taz, 9. 12. 1989. Volkskammer der DDR. Protokoll, 9. Wahlperiode, 11. Tagung, 1. 12. 1989, pp. 320–21. ND, 29. 11. 1989; translation from http://www.coldwarcultures.group.shef.ac.uk/for-our-coun try/. ND, 30. 11. 1989. Volkskammer der DDR. Protokoll, 9. Wahlperiode, 11. Tagung, 1. 12. 1989, p. 328. Deutscher Bundestag, 11. Wahlperiode, 177. Sitzung, 28. 11. 1989, p. 13511, 13512, 13513, 13514, 13542. Schalck-Golodkowski was the head of the “Kommerzielle Koordinierung” (Koko, Commercial Coordination) area, which was structurally attached to the Ministry of Foreign Trade but was directly subordinate to the SED leadership and tightly intertwined with the MfS or was controlled by it. Schalck-Golodkowski was Staatssekretär and a state secretary and “Offizier im besonderen Einsatz” (OibE, officer on special deployment) of the MfS at the same time. On “Koko,” see Matthias Judt, Der Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung. Das DDRWirtschaftsimperium des Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski—Mythos und Realität (Berlin, 2013); Reinhard Buthmann, Die Arbeitsgruppe Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung (= MfS-Handbuch) (Berlin, 2004); Frank Schumann and Heinz Wuschech, Schalck-Golodkowski—Der Mann der die DDR retten wollte (Berlin, 2012). “12. Tagung des ZK der SED, 3. 12. 1989 (Protokoll),” in Hertle and Stephan, Das Ende der SED, 469, 471. Lothar Hornbogen, Detlef Nakath, and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, eds., Außerordentlicher Parteitag der SED/PDS. Protokoll der Beratungen am 8./9. und 16./17. Dezember 1989 in Berlin (Berlin, 1999), 61, 307.

Chapter 12

FORGING A NEW PATH Elections and Reunification

S The Transfer of Power Begins Meanwhile, the situation in the country had become more acute every day. The SED leaders’ bet of putting pressure on Honecker and Mielke by opening the Wall and attempting to channel the outrage did not work out. The confusion and helplessness of those no longer capable of governing was curiously illustrated by a November 18 document from the Löbau district. A young man had called the MfS district office twice the day before and said literally: “Up against the wall, you pigs.” He was annoyed that the district office was still in operation although the opposite had been claimed in public the day before. First of all, it turns out that, contrary to public assurances by the MfS, telephone tapping systems were still operational: the young man had not introduced himself, yet the MfS tracked him down and spoke to him undercover as the criminal investigation department. He then wrote the following statement: “Today I was instructed by a member of the criminal investigation department to engage in factual dialogue.”1 Under these societal circumstances, the SED leadership, including Krenz, decided to give in on another point. Two weeks before his resignation, Krenz announced on November 22 that he would take part in a “round table.” He hoped that these talks would reassure the broader public, as well as strengthen the government and the People’s Chamber while giving them some breathing room and some time. Internally, he expressly emphasized that he was not striving for “Polish conditions,” nor did he wish to relinquish power over negotiations at the “round table.” According to Krenz, the round table would convene “occasionally . . . when the need arises.”2 Krenz claimed that the SED was issuing the invitation Notes from this chapter begin on page 451.

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to the talks. That was absurd. For weeks the opposition had been calling for a “round table,” and it had long been part of the standard repertoire of demands and speeches on the streets. As shown above, such demands already existed in the summer and became more concrete at the end of October. Democracy Now had renewed this demand on November 21. Meanwhile, the opposition contact group prepared itself for the upcoming talks with determination. At the same time, more and more groups and parties had formed, such as the Green Party in the GDR on November 16. Like other new groups, these were now mostly joint formations composed of members of the opposition and old cadres. Among the “Greens,” for example, participants included opposition members associated with Carlo Jordan, but also former FDJ functionaries. The Independent Women’s Association also arose when opposition and SED members joined forces. For the opposition groups, the convening of the “Central Round Table” did not constitute an upgrade—they no longer needed one at this stage. Even so, it did help them develop a political profile, which they sorely needed as their profile was still rather vague. Their ongoing poor working conditions and lack of free access to the media also contributed to this. The New Forum had occupied office space in East Berlin at the beginning of December, and although it had to move out of this space, it hastily received vacated office space in Berlin-Mitte on December 3 and 4. It was not until January 15, 1990, that the groups were given the first concession: the building of the SED district administration in Berlin-Mitte, located directly on Friedrichstrasse. Here they formed a “House of Democracy,” the first new symbolic site of the revolution. In Leipzig, similar groups occupied such a house at about the same time. The first national weekly newspaper that was privately owned, die andere, was published on January 26, 1990. At first, the job opportunities in the House of Democracy remained modest. Stephan Bickhardt brought the radix print shop here from his parents’ apartment so that pamphlets and appeals, at least, could be distributed, albeit under difficult circumstances. In the meantime, the print shop of the UB (Environmental Library) proved to be hopelessly overloaded. Nevertheless, the job opportunities improved considerably over the next few days, mainly due to donations from the Federal Republic of Germany. The first meeting of the “Central Round Table” took place on Thursday, December 7, in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer House. From the fourth session on December 27, it met in the Schönhausen Palace in Pankow, a government institution, and the first live television broadcast followed on January 8, 1990. There were sixteen meetings in total, with the old forces initially represented by the SED, CDU, DBD, LDPD, and NDPD with three votes each, and the opposition represented by Democratic Awakening, Democracy Now, the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights (IFM), the SDP, the United Left, and the Greens with two votes each and the New Forum with three, so that both sides had

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fifteen votes each. From the second meeting on, the Free German Trade Union Federation and the Peasants Mutual Aid Association (Vereinigung der gegenseitigen Bauernhilfe) were added for the old forces, and the Green League and the Independent Women’s Association (Unabhängiger Frauenverband, UFV) for the new ones, each with two votes. On November 24, the opposition contact group asked the Federation of Churches whether the Bonhoeffer House could be made available and, at the same time, whether the church representatives could moderate the expected talks. However, the SDP (Gutzeit) and IFM (G. Poppe), for example, assumed that church representatives would only moderate the first meeting while the groups and parties would then take turns moderating themselves thereafter. The federation agreed but decided to place the moderation in ecumenical hands: Martin Ziegler from the federation, Monsignor Karl-Heinz Ducke from the Secretariat of the Berlin Bishops’ Conference, and the Methodist pastor Martin Lange for the Working Group of Christian Churches took on this task. And that is how it remained going forward. Shortly before the first consultations began, the political balance of power shifted further. The Democratic Awakening and the SDP advocated German unification while the CDU and LDPD had separated from the National Front and were also on a unification course. In addition to the SED and DBD, which were strictly opposed to reunification, the New Forum and the United Left from the opposition contact group also spoke out strongly against reunification; the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights and Democracy Now also cautiously argued against German unity as a current political development perspective. The groups’ motivations for opposing unification were very different. While the SED and DBD held fast to the idea of an independent GDR without offering an alternative, the New Forum lacked a clear programmatic line. In each location, each forum representative—or whoever claimed to be one—could demand what he or she liked. The estrangement between the well-known East Berlin figures associated with Bohley, Reich, and Schult and the regional representatives became more visible by the day. It is true that the grassroots wing was still able to prevent the New Forum from being constituted as a party in early 1990, but at the end of January this wing suffered a bitter defeat when a majority of delegates voted in favor of German unity. Democracy Now and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, in turn, insisted that the GDR first had to be democratically reformed. They placed the constitutional discussion at the center of their deliberations in order to be able to negotiate unity on an equal footing with the Federal Republic. In the FRG, there were no active opponents of unity, but instead of unity according to Article 23 of the Basic Law (accession to the scope of application of the Basic Law), they wanted reunification according to Article 146 of the Basic Law (convocation of an all-German national assembly that would provide the constitution). Not only did they go against the will of the majority of the population, as was increasingly visible on the streets from the end of November 1989 and would ultimately

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become apparent in the elections on March 18, but they also underestimated the rapid state and economic collapse of the GDR, which from week to week left less time for experimentation. The hesitancy of some prominent representatives of the New Forum and Democracy Now and of members of the Democratic Awakening associated with Schorlemmer, Pahnke, and Neubert, who left the party in January, was prompted by something else and is difficult to grasp. For years, they had been hoping for this development, and now that it came, they didn’t want to give it up right away. Together with them, tens of thousands of others who had not exercised any state-supporting functions in the GDR, had not held any SED functions, and had not corrupted themselves morally believed that the time was ripe for a democratic, free society that was not a copy of the Federal Republic. Many of them even today have not yet realized that the German constitutional order guarantees them the freedom they wanted and that there is no paradise on earth. The SDP pressed ahead a few days before the first meeting and proposed May 6 as the election date. In the meantime, its members were sure it would have the support of its sister party so that it would have a good chance. The SDP argued that free elections should be held as soon as possible to remove the de facto power vacuum and to offer a perspective to people to stanch the flow of those still leaving the country in droves. Since 1990, an oft-voiced criticism was that the opposition only needed to take up the power from the streets. This sounds convincingly simple, but it overlooks four decisive conditions. First, the apparatus of power and domination was still functioning; at the end of November and beginning of December, especially, nobody knew how the MfS and NVA would behave and whether they themselves were working on plans for a coup. The SED itself was pitiful, but nobody really knew how things looked on the inside of the party at that time. Second, most of the opposition oriented itself on the Polish and Hungarian models, where the transfer of power had been peacefully negotiated. The round table had, thus, long been on the list of opposition imports. Third, hardly anyone showed any interest in an escalation of developments, and no one wished to jeopardize the state of nonviolence that had prevailed since October 9. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, the opposition saw itself as democratic precisely because it sought political means other than those used by its political opponents. The New Forum was the largest oppositional movement but diffuse in its rallying power, and it was not prepared to take the reins; NF representatives who displayed a will to power resigned and turned to the parties or formed the Forum Party, which was strong in the south. The other groups, such as Democratic Awakening and the SDP, were not only relatively small—Democratic Awakening had about two thousand and the SDP about ten thousand members in January—but they also relied on free elections from the outset because nobody wanted to make political power decisions in the future without democratic legitimation.

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One cannot trace the details or fully appreciate the work of the Central Round Table. Above all, the round table reflected the rapid developments between the beginning of December and mid-March, and throughout this period, it remained an expression of the communists’ will to power; they increasingly felt cornered and powerless, yet they visibly wished to hold on to their power. The opposition, however, had always remained part of the street. The demonstrations emanated primarily from the new groups. The political differences between them were part of new democratic decision-making processes. The convening of the Central Round Table meant—like the fall of the Wall— that the opposition scored a symbolic victory and that the mass demonstrations against the SED regime continued. Almost everyone understood this signal, even though many people felt that the SED’s final transfer of power was too slow in coming. At the beginning, it was clear that the Central Round Table could exercise neither parliamentary nor governmental functions. It aimed to bring about the “disclosure of the ecological, economic, and financial situation in our country” and present proposals for overcoming the crisis. As a controlling body, it demanded “that the People’s Chamber and the government be informed and involved in good time before important legal, economic, and financial policy decisions are made.” The opposition contact group had previously presented its own paper describing its self-concept, the main features of which agreed with the self-concept unanimously adopted by the Central Round Table. In conclusion, it stated that it saw “itself as a component of public control in our country” and planned “to continue its activity until free, democratic and secret elections are carried out.”3 This self-concept makes it clear that the participants were well aware that they lacked democratic legitimacy, that they could only prepare democratic elections, and that they had to carry out monitoring tasks and provide information for the public until such elections took place. Another signal sent out by the Central Round Table can also hardly be overestimated. In the following days and weeks, hundreds of cities and municipalities followed its example.4 The SED had lost not only all its previous SED regional secretaries and more than 140 district secretaries but also many other functionaries who had resigned or left the party. The mayor of Magdeburg, Werner Nothe, himself an SED member and secret MfS officer (OibE), even called on his party to stop all political activities in his city on the Elbe. On January 17, all SED council members, including the mayor, resigned from the party in Weimar, followed a week later by those in Sonnenberg. In Leipzig, as elsewhere, the city council dissolved on January 26. In mid-February 1990, hundreds of municipal councils were no longer able to work or to pass resolutions. From the beginning of December, more and more cities and municipalities followed Dresden’s example and worked closely with the opposition groups, co-opting some of them into city councils and municipal assemblies or forming joint working groups to address specific issues. The many communal round tables contributed significantly to

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the ongoing peacefulness of the transfer of power. In addition, there were almost innumerable round tables on specific issues: on foreigners’ issues, the media, environmental issues, the Academy of Sciences, and questions of equal rights for children. This development continued for several years after reunification. Municipal round tables were held on squatting, unemployment, the dissolution of military training areas, and tourism issues, among others. The Central Round Table, which had a major media impact from the outset and whose meetings were broadcast live on television from January 8, significantly helped to give the public a very accurate picture of individual political actors’ aims. The Central Round Table thus involuntarily became part of the election campaign itself. The opposition groups were always able to make it clear that the SED and the government only said and disclosed as much as they absolutely had to. This further accelerated their delegitimation, particularly in relation to the dissolution of the MfS, the investigation of corruption and abuse of power, the appeals of constitutional structures, and the preparation of elections. At the same time, the opposition only managed to establish a clear political profile in a few other areas. The Central Round Table was also a public space of learning for democracy and democratic action. For the first time, millions of television viewers were able to publicly follow democratic negotiation processes on matters relevant to them. Lengthy debates about procedural rules, job opportunities, individual formulations, and expressions of protest were all part of it. Today, the charm of these debates is hardly apparent when one watches the old recordings. If one reads the reconstructed transcripts verbatim, one often has difficulty following the discussions. Yet in the historical situation of 1989 and 1990, most people experienced these—and later the debates of the tenth People’s Chamber from April to September 1990—quite differently. But the round tables were also important spaces of learning for the actors who thereby earned their first spurs, paid their dues, and often matured into future parliamentarians and politicians themselves. The Central Round Table also helped enable the bloc parties, in particular the CDU and LDPD, to be able to distinguish themselves politically and to publicly demonstrate their withdrawal from the SED—probably contrary to the intentions of the democratic opposition. The Central Round Table did not always present an orderly picture. The three moderators honestly tried to structure the discussions and to proceed according to the rules. They were also just learning, and sometimes they contributed to the confusion and lost sight of the big picture a bit. Nevertheless, the Central Round Table also helped prevent the approaches to anarchy in the country from getting too serious. At times, the body sharply criticized how the SED, the government, and the People’s Chamber were dealing with it, but due to the lack of administrative possibilities, this often seemed like a tempest in a teapot. Like the churches in autumn, members of the Central Round Table made sure that the revolution remained peaceful in winter. This

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was due to the work of the democratic opposition members because only they had the moral integrity necessary to make the appeals for peace and nonviolence heard. No other topic dominated the sessions from the very beginning as much as dealing with the MfS. The Central Round Table fulfilled its most important function very successfully despite heated debates: free and democratic elections were held on March 18. As early as at its first meeting on December 7, 1989, the Central Round Table saw its task as drawing up a new constitution to be put to a referendum after the elections. On March 12, 1990, at its last meeting, it decided that the Working Group on the New Constitution would submit the draft to the new People’s Chamber, which it did on April 4. The working group included a number of well-known representatives of the opposition groups, including Tatjana Böhm (UFV), Bernd Gehrke (United Left), Gerd Poppe (IFM), Richard Schröder (SPD), Werner Schulz (NF), Wolfgang Templin (IFM), Wolfgang Ullmann (Democracy Now), Gerhard Weigt (Democracy Now), Klaus Wolfram (NF), and Vera Wollenberger (Green Party). The working group appointed a group of experts, including Alexander von Brünneck (Hanover), Ulrich K. Preuß (Bremen), Bernhard Schlink (Bonn), Karl-Heinz Schöneburg (Berlin), Helmut Simon (Karlsruhe), and Rosemarie Will (Berlin). The preamble was written by Christa Wolf. The draft was never seriously discussed in either the People’s Chamber or in public for one main reason: Article 132 stipulated that agreements concerning accession to the Federal Republic required a two-thirds majority of the members of the (future free) People’s Chamber and had to be confirmed by a referendum. In addition, the article provided for an all-German constituent assembly (analogous to Article 146 of the Basic Law) to be convened. Finally, all the constitutional provisions—especially those concerning social rights—and other legal provisions of the soon to be reformed GDR that were not covered by the Basic Law were to continue to apply after unification “as state law on the present territory” of the GDR. This not only denied the future all-German constituent assembly freedom of action but also violated the federal principle because it treated the future East German states as a single entity. Thus, Article 132 was likely to prevent German unification from being achieved quickly. However, no constitutional debate ever took place, mainly because the voters’ mandate was different after March 18 and because the West German federal government followed the will of the East German majority for accession according to Article 23 of the Basic Law without compromise. Many participants regarded this draft constitution as the legacy of the Central Round Table. Its symbolic effect was high. It would have been different, perhaps even easier, to discuss the mental process of establishing German unity if it had occurred via a constituent assembly. This draft constitution is one of the legacies of the revolution, which documents the democratic and constitutional will to change and, despite many other calls, impressively demonstrates at the same time

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that the will to unity was even broader than that documented by the election results of March 18. This is because even Article 132 of this draft declared support for German unity. And the preamble also laid out the will to German unity. Only—and in this the ideas of the political actors and a large part of society (about three-quarters to four-fifths of the GDR population wanted unity in the spring) differed from each other—there were different views on the right way to achieve German unity. This draft constitution bears witness to this, as does the Central Round Table itself, with its frank debates, and, later, the tenth GDR People’s Chamber. Still, the most important legacy of the round tables lay elsewhere. They became a symbol of a successful revolution, of a social democratization process, and, ultimately, of the insight that it was worthwhile to commit to democracy, even when it was not possible to foresee the end result. The round table, as an instrument, was the most important Polish import for enabling state democracy, for making society democratic, and for showing that democracy constitutes a perpetual learning process, which, in turn, is alone capable of generating and defending freedom as the highest good of human societies.

The Last Bulwark of the SED The dissolution of the MfS was one of the central events of the revolution, and the public debate on this issue still has not ceased since then. Almost all questions concerning the MfS have at some point elicited strong emotions, from political criminal justice and prison conditions to the border regime; these issues still generate anger, aggression, and consternation among some and apologetics, trivialization, a bunker mentality, and defiance among “the others.” Much has been written about the MfS over the past thirty years, with the first appearing as early as 1990: Two days before the People’s Chamber elections on March 18, 1990, the volume Ich liebe euch alle (I love you all), with situation reports from 1989, was published by the newly founded BasisDruck publishing house, prompting thousands of people to gather in front of the House of Democracy in East Berlin where the volume was being sold from the back of a truck. Although the police blocked the traffic from time to time, 12,000 copies were sold. The next day, similar scenes took place in front of the Leipzig trade fair building. Within a few weeks, 250,000 copies of this volume of sources by the two historians Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle had been sold. On March 12, 1990, MfS head Heinz Engelhardt asked Attorney General Hans-Jürgen Joseph to examine “whether the actions of the gentlemen are legal.” He stressed that “we” were “assured of an intervention.”5 A new production of history was born, which served elementary needs in times of upheaval. The one-sided focus on the MfS increasingly released the SED

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from its responsibility. The party itself contributed to this, but society was also more interested in sensations and secret police operations than in those who had hired them. This development also began in the fall of 1989. The public protests were also directed at the MfS from the beginning of October. The most famous slogan—“Stasi into production”—sounds rather harmless in view of the radicalization that began in December. When the first thousand MfS employees were actually dismissed, they could hardly find accommodation outside the SED, MdI, NVA, or adult education and state institutions. Beginning in January, more and more workforces threatened to strike if MfS members were to be employed in their company. Numerous employment contracts that had already been concluded had to be canceled. On December 15, there was even a new kind of demonstration in Neubrandenburg: about seven hundred NVA and MfS members demanded that they be reintegrated into society in order to make the slogan “Stasi into production” a reality. In fact, hardly anyone knew exactly how much MfS activity had gone on. The peacefulness of the protests corresponded to the peaceful demands. There was no public talk of revenge. Although MfS and SED offices received threatening phone calls, they numbered on average hardly more than in previous years. From mid-October onward, demonstrators increasingly passed MfS district offices and loudly demanded the end of the secret police. Between October 8 and November 20, a total of around 150 demonstrations, rallies, or other gatherings took place in front of MfS offices in 83 cities, mainly targeting district offices (in 75 towns) but only a few district administrations (four, in Leipzig, Rostock, Halle, and Potsdam). In addition, protests were held in front of a service building in the Karl-Marx-Stadt district and two recreation homes (in Heringsdorf and Bad Elster). In Naumburg, a district service manager engaged in discussions with demonstrators on November 19—probably the first time this had occurred. Only in the Schwerin district and in East Berlin were there no major gatherings in front of MfS institutions before November 20. The northern district lagged behind in almost all respects, but the delay in East Berlin had other reasons. First, the MfS headquarters, the district administration building, and the district offices were not located along the demonstration routes as in other cities (Leipzig, Rostock). Second, major protest events there took place directly at the actual power centers and other symbolic sites of the SED regime rather than at MfS offices. Third, the SED and MfS buildings in East Berlin were secured and sealed off to a much greater extent than in other cities. Fourth, and not unimportantly, well-known representatives of the citizens’ movements spoke out particularly strongly against such actions in East Berlin. They remained focused on negotiations, whereas in the “county seat” district towns, especially where clearer structures and conditions prevailed, people were far more impatient. The large demonstrations in Leipzig and Rostock initially passed the district administrations only by chance, so that these buildings turned

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out to be symbolic places of protest as if by magic. In Halle, on the other hand, on October 30, about two thousand people went to the district administration building after a mass rally, whereas these sites had initially been spared in the other district towns with mass demonstrations. In Dresden, for example, the MfS headquarters was not targeted before November 20 either. Since mid-October, the MfS had been preparing for the possible storming of its facilities. On October 21, Rostock officers wrote a text that was to be recited during a siege of their facility. This was the first such text, and by mid-November each district administration and county office had several variants of texts that were to be announced by megaphone in the event of sieges or other potentially threatening developments. Weapons were only to be used in life-threatening attacks. At the same time, the MfS tried to launch a media offensive to prove its right to exist. On November 4, MfS leaders in Rostock and Karl-Marx-Stadt published interviews for the first time in the SED district press, making such arguments. In the following days similar declarations were made in almost all other districts. On November 6, Rudi Mittig, one of Mielke’s deputies, spoke in Neues Deutschland. The tenor was always the same: the GDR was protected, there could be no talk of blanket surveillance of the population, the opponent was in the West, they wanted dialogue, and they had no objection to public parliamentary control. After the fall of the Wall, the underlying logic for the MfS’s existence had also changed. Now it pertained, first of all, to “self-security,” the protection of the service sites, housing estates, and weapons depots. The MfS triggered a special security level. At the same time, a comprehensive “argumentation aid” was worked out that would enable all senior staff to explain the necessity of the MfS in a uniform manner. Mielke’s appearance before the People’s Chamber on November 13, however, initially undermined these efforts; most MfS members were horrified and demotivated in the meantime. On November 21, Modrow rushed to the MfS headquarters to introduce Schwanitz as the new minister of the renamed Office for National Security. The MfS was rechristened to do away with the name that the population hated. Modrow explained that he had to pursue a new policy without being able to fall back on preliminary work performed by the apparatus. Like Schwanitz, he utilized old enemy images in his speeches. Schwanitz said perceptively: “There is really a lot at stake; there is our power at stake; there must be no illusions about that,” and he argued that the MfS only had a chance to survive if it changed the work that it did: “We have to part with the operational processing of dissenters. In this context, we must dissociate ourselves from such concepts as political-ideological divergence, political underground activity, political contact policy (contact activity, etc.), or these concepts must be rethought scientifically.” At the same time, these words remained hollow, because Schwanitz continued: “It is crucial to uncover unconstitutional plans and activities as early

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as possible. Operational work must be geared toward identifying enemies of the constitution. Comrades, we must reactivate our IM work in this direction. But of course with the guarantee of strictest secrecy and conspiracy. We can’t afford a single slip-up in this situation.” He underlined that it was necessary to prove the legitimacy of “an Office of National Security in public,” which required “results in fighting the enemy.”6 In the following days, Modrow’s and Schwanitz’s explanations within the MfS were presented to practically all employees. From the notes these employees took, it becomes clear that both speeches had a mobilizing effect on the apparatus and that the internal depression gave way to a new belligerence. Many believed and hoped that the secret police would have a future. Internally, the officers assumed that they could continue to use about 40 to 50 percent of the IMs. The number of full-time staff was to be reduced, the office was also to be given a new internal structure, and the district service offices were to be abolished, but the plans for the “new” office only conceived of an MfS clone.7 For this reason—as in the case of the renaming of the SED—I will continue to refer to the MfS for the remainder of this book. The SED, along with its “sword and shield,” decisively contributed to the radicalization of society against the MfS. First, accusations of abuse of authority and personal enrichment increased. SED leaders failed to persuade the public that these were exceptional individual cases because more and more people angrily asked themselves who else was living it up. This also led to debates in the MfS and, from the end of November, to (half-hearted) investigations against practically anyone with any authority. Second, the Modrow government tried to involve the MfS in its demagogic campaign against profiteering and speculation. Third, the MfS remained a spearhead in the fight against everything that came from the West in the public. Even when the slogans on the streets at the beginning of December were clearly heading toward unity, the MfS continued to agitate against the Federal Republic on behalf of the SED. Fourth, the SED and MfS never tired of presenting “evidence” of the extent to which individual communists’ lives were being threatened. They used all venues to do this—whether in the People’s Chamber, in the media, or on other occasions, they repeatedly cited examples of the brutality that reigned, almost all of which was exaggerations or simply lies. Fifth, the SED and MfS made internal strategic decisions to begin to publicly emphasize two fields of work as legitimation for the MfS: espionage as well as right-wing radicalism and neofascism. However, this did not take effect until the next phase, which began at the end of November. Meanwhile, rumors were growing day by day that the SED and MfS were destroying files and documents, and there were, indeed, orders and regulations to do so. For years, the MfS had engaged in strategy games to determine which documents should be destroyed immediately in case of mobilization. In addition, hundreds of thousands of files, mainly related to personnel, had already been

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collected before October 1989, though it remains unclear whether these collections were for archiving purposes or for deliberate destruction. At the beginning of November 1989, the order was given to clean out and destroy files and card indexes and to transfer the documents from the district offices to the district administrative centers, where they could be better protected. It is not possible to accurately state how many files were destroyed from the beginning of November. On the one hand, the files in question were in part orders, instructions, and other documents that had been reproduced and handed down multiple times, so they could not be completely destroyed, except in individual cases. On the other hand, countless operational storage units, containing material that was still needed and being processed, were completely destroyed. In addition, there were targeted destruction campaigns of files related to IMs, operations, and individual interrogations and information gathering that had already been archived. However, as the total amount of paper involved weighed thousands of tons, the destruction operations progressed more slowly than planned. The main objective was to protect and conceal IMs and the full extent of the spying and persecution endured by the population and the opposition.8 All in all, MfS employees destroyed hundreds of thousands of documents from the beginning of November. Information like that managed to spread everywhere. The issue became explosive upon the first occupation of an MfS building, which was officially not even considered to be one: In Kavelstorf near Rostock, on December 2 and 3, residents gained access to a warehouse and were stunned to discover an arms depot for the international arms trade with a total of about 80 wagonloads of arms, including 24,760 submachine guns. Few people thought the “peace state GDR” was capable of this. The hall was part of the Commercial Coordination area. This revelation, and the nationwide outrage it unleashed, prompted Schalck-Golodkowski’s escape the following night, which, when in turn revealed, further fueled the mood. Even in particularly sensitive areas such as the barracks, more and more people mutinied, especially those doing military service. On November 30, a wave of strikes and protests had also begun in the prisons.9 At noon on Sunday, December 3, hundreds of thousands of people in the GDR formed a human chain between the northern and southern borders and the eastern and western ones in order to advocate the further democratization of the country. This was called for by Aktion Sühnezeichen, the New Forum, and Protestant churches. The highly symbolic effect of this demonstration put the regime under enormous pressure. Meanwhile, opposition activists in many places tried to hold talks with SED and state functionaries in order to prevent an allegedly imminent outbreak of violence. In East Berlin, Bärbel Bohley spoke with Gregor Gysi and Markus Wolf on December 3 and 4, while other members of the opposition met Minister Schwanitz at the MfS headquarters on December 4. In the following days too, several such talks with MfS leaders took place,

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with Reich, Bohley, Ullmann, and Schult, among others, participating. Those involved believed that this would ensure that the protests would remain peaceful. The problem was that all sides constantly conjured up the danger of outbreaks of violence, but there were no serious signs of this anywhere. Even the first inspections of MfS facilities, such as the one in Kavelstorf, or that of Stasi recreation homes in Katzenstein (Suhl) and Zeughaus b. Sebnitz (Dresden) one day later, were absolutely peaceful. Representatives of the citizens’ movements allowed targeted SED reports to make them nervous and fear new forms of protest such as mass strikes or the storming of power centers. On December 3, the New Forum drafted a declaration that came out the next day in an expanded form as a call from several opposition groups. The call claimed that money was being taken abroad, files were being destroyed, and those responsible were leaving, and it called upon citizens to put a stop to this, to set up control groups, and to initiate control measures. Although the call remained relatively vague, it did not miss its mark because, unlike some of the skeptics in the East Berlin citizens’ movement, courageous citizens began taking action from December 4. That day, at about 8:30 a.m. in Rathenow, a group of men and women blocked the MfS district office and the SED district administration and the People’s Police district office, checking bags and cars to prevent documents from being squirreled away. A few minutes later, at 8:42 a.m., people began to gather in front of the MfS district administration in Erfurt on the initiative of Women for Change. Soon they had blocked the entrances with cars, the group’s leader let some people into the building, and, at noon, a truck broke through the barrier and several hundred people occupied the building. In Erfurt, about four thousand copies of the New Forum’s call had been distributed in the early morning so that the mobilization could take place quickly, especially since an emotional mass rally with about fifty thousand participants had taken place the previous evening. Erfurt was at the beginning of a veritable wave of occupations of MfS institutions throughout the country, which lasted several days. In the morning, a subordinate MfS employee admitted on Berlin Radio that files were being destroyed. In addition, rumors were circulating that the MfS was transferring documents to Romania by plane. On December 4, those in power again fanned fears of outbreaks of violence: it was a Monday, and the next mass demonstration was about to take place in Leipzig; marches typically passed the MfS district headquarters. Gysi implored Bohley to do everything possible to prevent violence. She got involved and pursued a tactic of appeasement that can only be explained by her personal fear of violent outbreaks. Bohley called the New Forum in Leipzig with an urgent plea: The House of State Security will be visited. And a few people can be part of it. . . . Now Gysi has said once again that it is a terrible responsibility that is currently weighing on you, but if violence occurs in Leipzig today, then tomorrow we will have a completely

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different government in the GDR. . . . And perhaps if you say beforehand: “They filmed there today. The shredder is secured. Nothing has been destroyed.” You’d have to go through that with these people. I imagine that’s comforting at first. . . . The problem is that of course the state security people sit in the house, afraid of being identified and then lynched afterward. So these must be people who are really trustworthy. Yes, I’ve got that with Gysi for Leipzig. . . . Yes, you know, . . . so that you can possibly say that at the beginning of the demo and say it, so one way or another, the state security is now ours as well. We have secured this and that, the shredder, so of course you have to make some demands. Perhaps that you’ll make contact again with the Interior or the Stasi, anybody. I think a sentence like “The shredder is secured” and “No data is lost and no files.” That would probably be important now.10

Even if one can understand such documents and the fear of an MfS and military coup at the time that was articulated here, and even if one allows that those involved were all in a learning process, it is clear that the “security partnerships” between the state and the citizens’ movements, which had become increasingly widespread since the beginning of November, led to a grotesque role reversal. This continued dramatically over the next days and weeks. The MfS occupations were often not occupations at all but inspections, sealing and control tours. In most cities this was done in cooperation between spontaneously founded citizens’ committees and the police and public prosecutor’s office. This essentially guaranteed that the document shredding could continue unhindered in very many places. The Modrow government also decided on December 7 to continue the large-scale destruction of documents. Although MfS head of office Engelhardt ordered a halt to the destruction on December 15, the order was just a piece of paper with few consequences. In the MfS headquarters in East Berlin, there had been only a few inspections, and various calls for demonstrations in front of the headquarters and the nearby district administration had been relatively unsuccessful. That the old MfS was still at work was also evident from a paper dated December 21, 1989, in which MfS staff members, in their usual demagogic manner, characterized the opposition representatives at the Central Round Table in writing as “enemy persons.” Apparently, they had not discontinued their operations against such persons. Moreover, on January 5, 1990, General Engelhardt still claimed that the opposition was controlled by the West. The biggest problem for the MfS, however, was that the shredders and collating systems were not adapted to the present needs. In the district offices, especially, where file destruction was not successful and the files were transported to the district administration, the MfS employees mixed the files up three times—before the transport, then when loading, and finally when unloading the trucks. At least the later reconstruction of the files would require great effort. Nevertheless, in this context the question arises as to why the index card systems in the MfS were not destroyed first. In fact, only in the district administration in Berlin was

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the “F 16” (person index) destroyed and later painstakingly reconstructed.11 A destruction of the card index systems would have made a systematic use of the Stasi files impossible for years, if not decades. There were probably two reasons for this. First, the MfS staff literally hoped and believed until the very end that their ministry would somehow continue to exist with a new name, new structure, and new tasks, and that they themselves would then need access to the old materials. Second, there was probably another factor that one would not necessarily expect of Stasi employees: those responsible for the archives and card indexes must also have had a professional ethic and pride in their work. Destroying the files themselves would have made their life’s work appear to have been irrevocably meaningless. In this respect, rational and irrational motives probably came together to prevent truly effective destruction of the Stasi’s legacy. Of the fifteen district administrations, eleven were still functioning in midDecember; only those in Leipzig, Rostock, Dresden, and Erfurt had largely been paralyzed by the opposition. The dissolution of the district offices was effective; their work was brought to a halt throughout the country by mid-December. In this first phase, women took a particularly active role in concrete actions. The example of Erfurt has already been mentioned, but women also stood out in Forst on December 6. In Gadebusch, Regine Marquardt, after receiving a call from the New Forum, went alone to the district office, where a public prosecutor was already “supervising” its dissolution. Marquardt, who later became minister of culture in the coalition government of Berndt Seite from 1994 to 1998 in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, tried to control the removal of files and employees’ personal belongings, “disarming” one employee in the process. But the comrades did not prove to be so powerless everywhere. The heads of the district offices of the Karl-Marx-Stadt district were just meeting when the news of the occupation of the district administration of Erfurt came. General Siegfried Gehlert, head of the district administration of Karl-Marx-Stadt, said: “In my opinion it is irresponsible now to give up arms. . . . We have to try to find a consensus with the opposition forces, not to give up weapons, but to tell them, so please take note that we still have weapons.” He dismissed the managers with the words: And act as if the fate of German things or things in the GDR depended on you and your actions. . . . It doesn’t matter whether we fill bottles, work as drivers, go to the justice system, to customs, to the police or we retire because we have reached the age of retirement. What is decisive, is not true, that nobody puts his party book on the table, despite all this. The important thing is that the collectives stand together now, even if they only read newspapers and still have a pad and a pencil in their hands, where it is possible, we still have to have meetings, while respecting the conspiracy, but we have to stand together, it is about our party, it is about our country, it is about socialism, it is about keeping the peace, and so I want to send you home with fighting greetings to all comrades. Good luck.12

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One day later, several service units decided to reorganize their work and to work in the future as if they were operating in the “area of operations,” that is, in the West under aggravated enemy conditions. In Schöneiche near Berlin, the MfS even attempted to defend itself on December 7 by filing a criminal complaint against the mayor, pastor, and community policeman for “unauthorized intrusion” into an MfS building. On December 9, the district administration of Gera sent out a telex to all the central GDR state authorities, calling for the immediate reestablishment of the old order.13 When the New Forum revealed this text at the meeting of the Central Round Table on January 8, it engendered fierce indignation, but this counterrevolutionary call also struck a chord with many MfS employees. They felt abandoned by their party and were afraid of the future because the opposition at the Central Round Table had demanded that the MfS be completely dissolved at the very first meeting on December 7. Many other MfS offices penned similar, if seldom so radical, letters. The question of why the MfS employees did not strike back independently is easy to answer: they were not able to do so because neither the SED leadership nor the MfS leadership gave them clear orders. At that time, it was not clear to everyone involved that the control just emerging over the MfS would change the country significantly because few understood what they had conquered. When in Dresden, following an appeal by the Group of 20 and the New Forum, some five thousand people occupied the district administration on the evening of December 5, they came across documents that indicated the extent of social infiltration by the MfS. Among other things, they found the IM file of Manfred Rinke aka Kiste aka IM “Raffelt.” A man wrote on a document of this file with a green pen: “A mess of a thousand. 5. 12. 89 first occupants of this district administration.” And on another sheet pertaining to Rinke’s release: “also known to us dissolvers—NF, from 5. 12. 89.”14 After the storming of the district office in Schmalkalden, MfS material was taken that was publicly displayed in companies over the next few days. Above all, the Central Round Table was the nationally visible place where the future of the MfS was publicly debated. Modrow’s decision to dissolve the MfS on December 14 was only a cosmetic operation, as he wanted to reduce the size of the MfS and divide it into a “constitutional protection” and an “intelligence service” branch. The MfS again tried to prove its right to exist. In mid-December and early January, the public was presented with technical devices that had been found and were attributed to US secret services. No one could have guessed that the MfS had actually tracked down the spy equipment as early as December 1988 and February 1989. Another offensive tack was more successful. On November 16, the MfS decided to focus its work more strongly on the fight against neofascism. The head of the Central Committee’s security department, Politburo member Wolfgang Herger, also received a confidential letter from Hans-Ehrenfried Stelzer on

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November 28, the director of the criminal studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, a covert MfS institution,15 and also an MfS officer. Stelzer, together with Loni Niederländer, proposed that an “antifascist coalition program” be drawn up “that would earn us respect in the country and internationally and would increase trust.”16 Neo-Nazi graffiti had hardly increased at that point, and the public appearance of right-wing extremists also remained within the bounds of recent years.17 However, unlike in the past, the GDR media now reported on such activities to such an extent that it seemed as if right-wing radicals were about to take power. This stirred up fears among many citizens who perceived a threat to their basic antifascist stance. When, at the end of December, several anticommunist and nationalist slogans were sprayed on the Soviet memorial in Berlin-Treptow and the circumstances of the act remained unknown,18 the SED interpreted the slogans as “fascist” and their authors, without knowing them, as “neo-Nazis.” Gysi and Modrow immediately demanded a united antifascist front. On January 3, according to official sources, up to 250,000 people gathered at the Treptow memorial and protested against neofascism. The speakers, above all Gysi, pulled out all the stops; tens of thousands kept shouting “protect the constitution,” and at the end the party assembly sang the “Internationale.” These blatant attempts to legitimize the MfS were protested not only by civil rights representatives at the Central Round Table but also by opposition members throughout the country. Even so, the campaign had an effect because in the following days and weeks almost no one forgot to mention that he was antifascist. Since the SED simultaneously enriched the campaign with constant revelations about neofascist activities in the Federal Republic, it intensified the fear of reunification among hundreds of thousands. But even that was of no use. The opposition insisted on the disclosure of the MfS structures and demanded that the new government and parliament only make a decision concerning the “protection of the constitution” and the “intelligence service” after the free elections on May 6. On January 8, it withdrew briefly from the Central Round Table in protest against Modrow, who continued to insist on the MfS. All over the country, demonstrators demanded more and more radically the final end of the secret police. The citizens’ committees, which convened for the first time on January 4 in Leipzig for a coordination meeting, had a lot of moral credit, whereas the government commissioners for the dissolution of the MfS had none at all. Conflicts about authority ensued, especially since the Central Round Table had set up a working group on security that also sought to address the problem. On January 11, about twenty thousand people demonstrated in front of the People’s Chamber against the MfS, and one day later the Citizens’ Committee of Erfurt organized a blockade of the People’s Chamber, with hundreds of East Berlin taxi drivers supporting the demand to dispense with building a new Office for the Protection of the Constitution with a honking concert. Many people

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were also angry that the Modrow government had also given MfS employees generous transition funds. What they did not know was that the secret police had been distributing awards very generously and far beyond the usual practice since the end of November—awards associated with cash and high-quality material prizes. Not only full-time employees but also numerous IMs benefited from this. Meanwhile, MfS members experienced disadvantages in many places: craftsmen refused to provide them with services; savings banks, especially in the south, refused to cash their checks; and quite a few innocent children of MfS officers experienced discrimination in schools, learning how hated their parents’ activities were. Even during the People’s Chamber meeting on January 12, Modrow changed his intentions and announced that nothing new would emerge until after the elections. But the secret police service was not quite at its end yet because the headquarters in East Berlin were still almost completely functional. On January 8, the New Forum called for a demonstration in front of the MfS headquarters to take place on January 15 at which the gates were to be symbolically walled up. But after January 15, it received a lot of criticism because, it was argued, the bricks for this action had set things up for violence, even though there were no outbreaks of violence and only a few broken windows and kicked-in doors. On January 15 in the late afternoon, up to one hundred thousand people had gathered in front of the headquarters. As if by magic, the gates suddenly opened, and tens of thousands of people streamed into the vast area. People argue about who opened the gates, just as they do about who was responsible for the few destructive acts. The demonstrators invaded several buildings, but hardly anyone entered a building that was very significant, which also left room for numerous speculations. The drama of the events reached its climax in these days: the Central Round Table interrupted its meeting, and Modrow drove to the headquarters in the presence of some civil rights activists to calm the people. That was very brave of him because he could have been harmed. He was insulted but not attacked. GDR television interrupted its broadcasts and issued calls for nonviolence, so that within a few hours the entire public was informed about the dramatic events. During the night, a citizens’ committee for the dissolution of the MfS was finally constituted in East Berlin, although an MfS control committee of state and opposition representatives had already been formed on December 17. What then followed is the beginning of a long history that extends far beyond March 18, 1990. Different actors blocked each other, arguing about who had authority, and all involved made mistakes. On April 4, 1990, a rather formal agreement on joint cooperation was reached between the citizens’ committee and the state committee for the dissolution of the MfS, which was created on February 8, 1990, but the mutual skepticism remained. In the case of the government commissioners and the state committee, it is quite easy to explain why they did not work effectively: both in the Modrow government and later in the de

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Maizière government, they were dominated by MfS members and SED cadres. On May 30, 261 people were working in the state committee, which had now come under the authority of Interior Minister Peter-Michael Diestel; 25 of these people had been recruited from citizens’ committees, but 73 came from the MfS. Although the working group on security had the moral integrity of the Central Round Table, it was dependent on the cooperation of the old state representatives and, therefore, made only slow progress. The citizens’ committees, in turn, worked within an unclear legal framework, were made up of diverse groups, and tried to follow agreements that were sometimes difficult to understand. Thus, some began their activities by requesting that members sign confidentiality agreements. They also had to acquire competencies and decipher the structure of the MfS. For weeks they tried to find out what actually belonged to the MfS. In terms of buildings alone, there were at least 9,200 of them, and they were dealing with a nationwide empire. There was no manual available on how to manage such a process. Again and again, they were fooled by some MfS members, but their work would not have been successful if individual MfS officers had not also supported the citizens’ committees and the dissolution process. The question of how to deal with the files in the future became the central subject of the discussions. Werner Fischer rendered outstanding services to the processes of dissolution and disclosure of the MfS on behalf of the Central Round Table. From February 8, 1990—coincidentally the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the MfS—he was vested with governmental powers in a commission of four, consisting of two Central Round Table representatives, the government commissioner, and Bishop Forck. On January 24, Fischer declared to Modrow that each person should be familiar with his own file. Citing some representatives of the church, Modrow replied that one needed to take it easy in this context.19 However, the former Stasi leadership, represented by Schwanitz and Mittig, did not wish to take it easy in relation to Modrow in a letter dated February 16. If the activities of the MfS and its attempts to completely surveil the population were disclosed, they argued, bad things would happen. After all, the Central Round Table had found out that at the end of 1988, the Stasi had slightly more than 109,000 people as unofficial employees (IMs). On January 2, 1990, an employee of the Catholic church in Schöneiche had applied in writing to gain access to “his file”—he was probably the first citizen to do so. The first individuals to receive permits for such access without having the status of a member of parliament were Ralf Hirsch on April 10, in order to ward off public slander against himself, and Wolfgang Rüddenklau and Wolfram Sello for the Environmental Library, in order to clarify the events of 1987–88. At the same time, Jahn, Fuchs, and Biermann also submitted requests for access to their files. By August 31, 1990, some 6,100 citizens had applied for personal access to their files, although there was no legal regulation for this yet. But the first person to see MfS files as an outsider was the sociologist Siegfried Grundmann from the

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Academy of Social Sciences at the CC of the SED. At the end of November 1989, he turned to Schwanitz and asked for documents on the problems of people leaving and escaping the country. The latter agreed, and Grundmann received a few selected documents on December 20, 1989. Shortly thereafter, a publication in West Berlin appeared without a correct reference.20 Several citizens’ committees (including one in Schwerin) demanded the destruction of all documents related to particular persons. They did not prevail, but these disputes continued for months. The People’s Chamber set up a special committee with Joachim Gauck as its chairman in June 1990; this committee later formed the nucleus of the authority of the special commissioner (from October 3, 1990) and the federal commissioner for the records of the State Security Service (from January 1, 1992). The People’s Chamber passed a law on Stasi documents in August 1990 that the Unification Treaty failed to incorporate against the protest of the People’s Chamber (de Maizière, Interior Minister Diestel, and State Secretary Krause were responsible for this on the GDR side). Consequently, on September 4, 1990, civil rights activists occupied the former MfS headquarters and demanded that the Unification Treaty be amended accordingly. Diestel filed a criminal complaint against them for trespassing. The West German federal government, namely Chancellor Kohl and Interior Minister Schäuble, strongly resisted open handling of the MfS documents. Finally, an additional agreement was recorded that the new Bundestag would pass a corresponding federal law on the basis of the law from the People’s Chamber.21 On January 2, 1992, Federal Commissioner Gauck opened the files in accordance with the principles of a constitutional state. The most embarrassing mistakes in the first phase of the dissolution process occurred in February 1990, when the Central Round Table supposedly approved (this too is controversial) that the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HV A, Central Reconnaissance Office) of the MfS could largely dissolve itself by June 30 and destroy its files. Two untruthful arguments have been put forward in this regard. First, the HV A was believed to have been a normal secret service like those that exist everywhere. Nobody knew yet that it had been directly involved in the persecution of and fight against political opponents. Second, SED and MfS cadres claimed that the agents who were abroad had to be recalled, secured, or repositioned so that they would not fall victim to lynch law. The extent to which large quantities of files were taken to Moscow is still unclear, as is the role of Western secret services. What is certain is that these Western secret services were “on site” from January 15, although it is not clear whether they were “confiscating” material or recruiting personnel. The CIA got hold of HV A files (“Rosewood” files), which the American secret service described as one of its greatest triumphs and HV A employees regarded as their bitterest defeat. When and how this happened is not known. The HV A, in turn, tried to build up pressure, even after the elections of March 18, and gain a new raison d’être. HV A employees

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wrote a top-secret paper dated March 26, 1990, with the intention of preparing Modrow for a meeting with the Permanent Representative Franz Bertele. First, it affirmed that German secret services were trying to poach MfS forces. Second, it contained an unequivocal threat: “In the former Office for National Security of the GDR, all information on the secret services of the FRG is prepared and available for retrieval. These findings are also stored in the minds of specialists in reconnaissance and defense. If knowledge of the secret services of the FRG is disclosed, the situation in the FRG can be expected to be destabilized and the process of Pan-European unification can be seriously disrupted.”22 This was followed by concrete information about what was known. The exact purpose of the threat remained unclear, although several possibilities are conceivable: perhaps the HV A employees wished for the MfS archives to remain closed or to be transferred in the future to federal services, for MfS employees to be exempt from punishment, for HV A activities to continue, or even for German unification to be prevented. When Modrow met with Bertele for a final conversation on March 28, he apparently made use of this paper. He suggested that experts from both states should meet and discuss what should be done with the written files and how employees with previous activity for the MfS would be affected in the future. Modrow also claimed that they had considerable information about the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or West German Federal Intelligence Service. According to a note, Bertele, in response, merely pointed out to Modrow that the GDR was responsible for the security of the files.23 The second mistake aroused more public interest. On February 19, 1990, the Central Round Table agreed to physically destroy all MfS magnetic tape storage devices. MfS general Engelhardt had already suggested this internally on December 20. Reinhard Weißhuhn (Initiative for Peace and Human Rights) asked whether it was also guaranteed that the documents were available in writing. Dankwart Brinksmeier (SPD) explained that there were affidavits for this. Konrad Weiß (Demokratie Jetzt) asked whether it was necessary to physically destroy the data storage devices. This question may seem odd, but several IT specialists had requested that data deletion be left to specialists and that the data-storage devices, which were in short supply, then be provided to the national economy. Finally, the Central Round Table agreed to the plan of the working group on security and justice, although there had been votes against it even there. A week later, the relieved Modrow government decided to destroy ten thousand magnetic tapes, five thousand floppy disks, and five hundred removable disk storage devices by March 9. The records of the destruction that have survived do not clarify whether duplicates of the destroyed files were really printed out. There were data sets for at least seven million people, but the sheer number of documents was likely many times higher. On December 22, Modrow had already agreed to the extraction of thousands of data records because the MfS hoped to be able to continue working with

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them undercover in the future. This action was completed on January 8. The destruction of the data was carried out with the official argument that nobody should be able to work with them in the future. According to this argument, all MfS documents should have been burned. Roland Jahn, who accompanied the MfS dissolution process as a journalist for the SFB television magazine Kontraste, filmed the destruction with his team. One could literally feel his distress about the process he was observing. Later on, almost all civil rights activists who supported the destruction order regretted this decision. The demise of the MfS was not only of great symbolic value. On the contrary, it finally robbed the SED regime of its power. Although there are now scholarly analyses and a tremendous number of eyewitness reports on the dissolution process, many questions have yet to be clarified. For example, it would be worth discussing why the process differed so drastically in the individual districts. It is still barely clear what role the SED and MfS cadres and IMs actually played in this and what influence they had. Also, the maneuvering of the de Maizière-Diestel government has not yet been adequately researched. The conflicts between Diestel’s Ministry of the Interior, the People’s Chamber special committee, and the citizens’ committees have yet to be thoroughly investigated. No one can estimate the extent to which documents were destroyed after January 1990. Not only were the HV A files lost but the espionage files of the NVA were also destroyed with false justifications under the responsibility of Minister Eppelmann in the summer of 1990. Little is known about the destruction of documents by the SED or state institutions, and company archives were lost on a large scale. Parts of the HA I of the MfS, which was responsible for the NVA, and of HA VII, responsible for the MdI, also escaped controlled dissolution in certain structures because they were mainly located in the barracks and other institutions that were not accessible to the occupiers. The AG XVII, in turn, resided in West Berlin and was responsible for visitor traffic. It is not known if controlled dissolutions took place there. The passport control units (HA VI) were also out of sight at the beginning; over one thousand of these MfS employees landed softly after October 3, 1990, and became employees of the Federal Border Guard, which was subordinated to the Federal Ministry of the Interior.24 The list could be continued. And how can the following numerous statements from the daily information provided by the government commissioner for the Cottbus district be interpreted? “The sorting of the written material in the district office is going according to plan” (December 15, 1989); “VEB Sero [was apparently] instructed not to destroy any paper from all state bodies and institutions. This hinders not only the dissolution of the office” (December 19, 1989); “Yesterday’s problem of secondary raw materials has been solved” (December 20, 1989); and, referring to a decision of the Modrow government of December 14, the information report stated: “What the new organs need will be sorted out and stored securely. Everything else (about 80 percent of the material) will not be further sorted but

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released for destruction” (December 21, 1989); “As jointly agreed with the citizens’ representatives, the rapid reduction of obsolete written material from the district offices is being carried out” (December 28, 1989); “Immediately destroy the OPK [Operational Person Control] files that were already sorted out previously” (January 4, 1990). After January 10, the MfS documents no longer appear in this daily information. From then on, it mainly pertained to citizens’ demands that the names of the “voluntary” MfS employees be released, sometimes combined with strike and bomb threats. More and more frequently, IMs also came forward demanding compensation payments, arguing they had been blackmailed into cooperating. Finally, however, the following statements were issued: “Today we started with the relocation of the Central Archive in former ammunition bunkers with the help of 2 representatives of the State Archive Potsdam. The security of the two bunkers was discussed with representatives of the BDVP [Regional Office of the People’s Police] . . .” (February 20, 1990); “All written and archive material is deposited in two former ammunition bunkers on the premises of the former District Office. . . . Furthermore, the final closing of the entrances to the bunkers by brick and concrete work is planned for 27 February 1990” (February 23, 1990); “The laying of the concrete will be completed tomorrow on 2 March 1990”’ (March 1, 1990).25 Even if the “dissolution” in Cottbus was a special case, this example indicates that it will not be easy to determine with certainty and in detail what happened in these weeks. Almost everyone in the country was surprised and horrified when the extent of MfS activity came to public attention in January 1990, and especially when it was revealed that there had been 109,000 IMs. Many people now wondered who the “volunteers” within their own personal and professional environments had been. When the first IMs became known—Heidelore Czerny at the round table in Wismar was probably the first26—many people were appalled because the first IMs to be unmasked were almost all people who, for years, had been politically active; many of them had been regarded as opposition members. On March 8, the secret activity of the Democratic Awakening chairman Wolfgang Schnur came to light—it took several days before he confessed. Earlier, Democratic Awakening had issued statements for Schnur, describing the rumors as political propaganda against the courageous lawyer, and the Democratic Awakening in Frankfurt/Oder together with the citizens’ committee there demanded the immediate destruction of all MfS files. Schnur made a declaration of honor, and then on March 14 confessed. On the same day, an employee of the Rostock district administration apologized to her superiors for having talked so much with the media because this had confirmed the Rostock commission of inquiry’s findings on Schnur. At that time, rumors had long been circulating about who else was involved. The next celebrity to be hit was CDU general secretary Martin Kirchner, followed by SPD chairman Manfred Böhme, and it went on like this for months and years. And always, those who were found out exhibited the same

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pattern of behavior—first stage: this is a lie; second stage: the files are forged; third stage: there were official, professional contacts; fourth stage: “But I did not harm anyone!” After weeks of wrangling, the Modrow government released all IMs from their confidentiality obligations on March 8. Hardly anyone made use of this new freedom because most of them simply kept quiet and only admitted what had been proven about them beyond a doubt. On June 30, 1990, the Ministry of State Security was officially dissolved.

The Short Path to Free Elections From the point of view of those involved, the demand for free elections could not be implemented as quickly as many people expected and hoped. Even the election date of May 6, 1990, which had been set in early December, seemed much too early for most opposition groups, with the exception of the SDP. They feared that they would not be able to build up the necessary infrastructure and skills to be eligible for election within a few months. The SED, too, wished for a later election date in the hope of then being able to present some economic and social improvements. Moreover, it feared that a quick and final transfer of power would not allow it to organize an “orderly withdrawal” or secure its widely dispersed assets. In the night of December 4–5, the governing mayor of Berlin, Walter Momper, met with several opposition representatives. Ralf Hirsch, Momper’s personal adviser, had set up the meeting. Eppelmann, Bohley, Schult, and Bartoszek were among the participants. Momper said that the power was in the streets and just needed to be absorbed. The opposition representatives rejected undemocratic takeovers of power as well as integration into the existing SED government. In two interviews on December 9 and 12, however, Eppelmann took up the proposals and now said that a transitional government with “moral legitimacy” needed to be formed. Names that were suggested to take up positions in this transitional government were de Maizière (CDU), Böhme (SDP), Schnur (Democratic Awakening), Bohley (NF), Ziegler (BEK), Stolpe (BEK), Christa Wolf (SED), Gysi (SED), Modrow (SED), Berghofer (SED), and Eppelmann (Democratic Awakening).27 The election campaign finally began on December 19. Chancellor Kohl had learned that Mitterrand would come to East Berlin for an official state visit on December 20. He did not so much intend to visit Modrow and the GDR but rather to clarify his critical attitude toward reunification. It was a demonstration of power that was directed at Kohl, who had understood perfectly that German unity was up for grabs, but at the same time Europe had to emerge from it stronger.

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Kohl hurried to Dresden on December 19 to set the political tone in the GDR before Mitterrand could. Due to status questions, he visited Dresden and not the GDR capital. On December 18, the CDU of West Germany had already declared that it would work together with the CDU in the East in the future, because the latter was the only party that was clearly on the same course. This was, to put it mildly, a slight bending of the facts, but the close cooperation between the SPD and the SDP had put West Germany’s CDU under pressure. Tens of thousands of Dresdeners received Kohl with a sea of flags.28 On December 12, Modrow had still ordered the security forces to do everything possible to prevent “nationalist demonstrations.”29 But again and again, the crowd chanted “Germany, Germany” and cheered for the chancellor. He appeared to be deeply moved and then pushed the speed of unity, also following the pressure of the people in the street. Tens of thousands of people also demonstrated in East Berlin the next day, but this time it was to protest the “threat” of reunification and Chancellor Kohl, whom opponents and critics of unity increasingly targeted. In this phase from early January 1990, the political actors began to change. The civil rights movement stood for the regime’s relinquishing of power, the fight against the SED, and the dissolution of the MfS. Even after the elections, when masses had to be mobilized against the old structures, the citizens’ movement was still successful. However, new political actors, in addition to the federal government, now came to the fore concerning political action concepts and the path to unity. Although this situation remained somewhat murky until the elections, the election results made things surprisingly clear. The opposition groups initially agreed on a joint election alliance at the beginning of January. Only a few days later, however, the United Left withdrew, and in mid-January the SPD did as well. The groups were disappointed by this, but the founders of the SDP had taken a different political path from the outset, beyond grassroots democracy. In addition, they became increasingly aware that a large proportion of civil rights representatives regarded denial of power as a moral virtue. At the same time, the East German SPD adopted a program for a faster course to reunification in mid-January, which many civil rights representatives took issue with. Merely a few days later, Democratic Awakening also departed from the alliance and shifted from the left-liberal center to the conservative camp. Meanwhile, the SED tried in vain to land another coup. On January 4, the Council of Ministers decided to create a “national citizens’ movement of the GDR” in the hope of absorbing, on a smaller scale, the nationwide structures of the surviving “National Front.” Of the existing 1,420 full-time employees, 666 were to be transferred to new positions. At the same time, this was an attempt to dominate the citizens’ committees, which had not only dissolved the MfS but in some cases were also becoming real forces in local politics, and to establish citizens’ committees under the same name. The name of the movement also indicated that the SED wished to push aside the oppositional citizens’ movement

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and confuse people by means of this conceptual fraud. But this attempt never really got off the ground. In contrast, the SED had been trying since January to involve the opposition groups in government business. On January 13, politicians in the West German government called for rapid economic and monetary union, and Modrow offered Böhme (SPD) the position as his deputy. Böhme declined with thanks. The pressure on the SED increased not only because of the MfS. The abundance of problems the party had could hardly be overlooked and certainly not overcome. For the first time, the SED had to deal with unemployment, which resulted not only from the MfS lay-offs but also from the announced de-bureaucratization and disentanglement of the SED, the government, and business. Some government decisions turned entire population groups against the SED. The first subsidies—for baby and children’s clothing, of all things—were eliminated on January 15. On January 18, Chancellor Kohl demanded that the elections move up once again, so that stable and legitimate governmental relations could be quickly established and chaos averted in the GDR. On the same day, the East German CDU began to loudly demand that the party withdraw from the Modrow government. De Maizière refused, claiming that Modrow was an “authentic democrat.” A week later, the CDU whiners nevertheless announced their withdrawal, even though it never actually happened. Meanwhile, not only did the population continue to demonstrate but on January 21, in the Catholic-influenced town of Eichsfeld, some also engaged in a symbolic protest that impressively illustrated what would happen if free elections and then unity did not come quickly: about 50,000 people walked across an internal German border with suitcases in hand, affirming that this time, however, they would come back. The wave of resignations from the SED reached a peak on this day because a first prominent member of the party leadership turned his back on the party: Berghofer. Nevertheless, the party was still able to mobilize masses, as it proved on January 14 when it organized large demonstrations and rallies throughout the country in honor of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In East Berlin, according to official figures, 250,000 people marched past their gravestones. The next day, Neues Deutschland reported that a man bearing a sign that read “Down with the SED/PDS” had protested against this. The report failed to mention that Wolfgang Templin, whose expatriation in 1988 was linked to a Luxemburg demonstration, had also protested. He had stood alone with a poster that read “SED/PDS—Hands off Luxembourg, you remain the heirs of Stalin!” on the last bridge under which the demonstration passed. Soon he was surrounded and shouted down. Several times a man shouted to the crowd: “Comrades, comrades, stay calm, this pig only wants to provoke you.” Meanwhile, Modrow continued to campaign for the opposition. On January 28, under the leadership of the moderators, all the parties and groups represented at the Central Round Table discussed the formation of a “government of national responsibility.” The meeting lasted over seven hours, during which Modrow and

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the opposition moved closer together. The prime minister painted an exaggerated horror picture of the internal situation. On several occasions, the opposition groups withdrew in order to discuss how to proceed. In the end, an agreement was reached that benefited the SED. The Modrow cabinet received a moral boost when eight new “ministers without an area of responsibility” joined the government, elected by the People’s Chamber on February 5 with sixteen votes against and seventy-three abstentions.30 These ministers now represented a policy that they were neither responsible for nor able to influence. Tatjana Böhm (Independent Women’s Association, Unabhängiger Frauenverband, UFV), Rainer Eppelmann (Democratic Awakening), Sebastian Pflugbeil (New Forum), Matthias Platzeck (Green Party of the GDR), Gerd Poppe (IFM), Walter Romberg (SPD), Klaus Schlüter (Green League), and Wolfgang Ullmann (Democracy Now) were each given office space, a company car, and limited government documents, but they remained foreign bodies in the Council of Ministers and its apparatus. Their main task was to keep an eye on the government and ensure that it cooperated with the Central Round Table. All this was only possible to a limited extent because they had little insight into internal government procedures and informal communication structures. Later, all eight new ministers expressed their appreciation of Hans Modrow, who, due to his matter-of-fact manner, was far more popular than his party among the population. For the SED, the formation of this “government of national responsibility” was linked to the sham compromise of bringing the elections forward to March 18. Even shortly before the end of the deliberations, a majority was against early elections.31 The SED and SPD, in particular, albeit with different intentions, campaigned for March 18, which was finally agreed upon by all. Ibrahim Böhme had brought in the proposal. While Modrow remembers that his friend Böhme had, to his own surprise, urged him to bring forward the date of the elections,32 representatives of the citizens’ movements report that they were equally surprised and disappointed by Böhme’s coup but that they suspected it was an agreement between Böhme and SED officials.33 However, May 6, 1990, remained election day, because one year after May 7, 1989, local elections were to be held again, but now under democratic and liberal conditions. Modrow came up with two more surprises. On January 30 he was in Moscow, where Gorbachev explained to him that none of the victorious powers of World War II doubted the Germans’ right to self-determination, and that London was also abandoning its defensive stance against German unity. After all, it was not until February 8 that Thatcher publicly stated that she had nothing against the course of history. Kohl received the green light for unity from Gorbachev during his visit to Moscow on February 10. The head of the Kremlin assured him that it was solely up to the Germans to decide whether, how, and when they would reunite. On February 13, the victorious powers agreed on the 2 + 4 talks to create the international conditions for German unification.34

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While Modrow was still in Moscow, Gorbachev had refused to provide economic aid, and Modrow declared his support for German unity. After he returned, Modrow announced this with his own, ineffective slogan: “Germany, united fatherland.” Even though the SED distanced itself from this and claimed that Modrow was acting on behalf of the government, which the latter confirmed in the People’s Chamber, this had been said not only with election campaign tactics in mind but also with a view to an imminent visit to Bonn: Modrow and his new ministers traveled to visit Kohl on February 13. They agreed to set up expert commissions to prepare for monetary union. The GDR contingent, also legitimized by the Central Round Table, additionally asked for emergency aid of 10 to 15 billion DM, which Kohl declined to provide on the grounds that it would have seemed like campaign assistance for Modrow. In the GDR delegation, only Eppelmann agreed with Kohl’s rejection. Less understandable was the chancellor’s behavior toward the opposition, which almost all GDR participants subsequently described as cold and arrogant. Given their political role in the preceding weeks and months, they felt that this treatment was somewhat inappropriate. Other members of the Kohl administration knew how to behave more honorably. These different reactions also came from beyond the administration. During this visit, Petra Kelly, a member of the Green Party, invited her friend Gerd Poppe to speak to the parliamentary faction of the Bundestag about past events and future ideas. When Poppe took the floor, for whatever reason, about half of the representatives left the chamber. Kohl’s decision was already part of the election campaign strategy. It proved to be ill advised for Modrow and his ministers to travel at all to Bonn one month before the elections and beg for billions there. On February 5, Kohl had forged the “Alliance for Germany” that was to win the People’s Chamber elections. Giving billions to political opponents would have sent the wrong signal. The “Alliance for Germany” was a heterogeneous group consisting of the CDU of the GDR, the Deutsche Soziale Union (DSU, German Social Union), and Democratic Awakening. With the CDU’s involvement, the alliance had a bloc party with nationwide structures—one that declared its commitment to unity and was massively supported by its sister party in the West. The DSU was formed in January 1990 when several conservative, liberal, and Christian groups merged. Its representatives, including Peter-Michael Diestel, Hans-Wilhelm Ebeling, Jürgen Haschke, Joachim Nowack, and Hansjoachim Walther, were largely unknown to the public. It was oriented toward the CSU and was, therefore, a welcome partner. With Democratic Awakening, in turn, the alliance was able to show that it had a member formed directly from the pre-1989 opposition that still had a number of persons of integrity such as Eppelmann, even after the left-liberal wing associated with Schorlemmer, Neubert, Nooke, and Richter departed in January 1990.

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Up to election day, it looked as if the Social Democrats would win with a strong majority. All forecasts pointed to this. The new electoral law established proportional representation without a blocking clause. However, there was an explicit ban on admitting extreme right-wing or neofascist parties and groups to the elections. The five-member executive board (including Kurt Masur and the historian Gerhard Brendler) of the central election commission decided which groups were to be classified in this way. The scheme was set up in the absence of independent legal institutions in the GDR that could have ruled on it. Various political parties, political associations, and alliances were admitted to the election. On March 9, the central election commission decided that twentyfour parties and alliances could run. The three partners of the “Alliance for Germany” campaigned separately to win votes. The New Forum, Democracy Now, and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights joined forces on February 7 to form Bündnis 90. Especially in the south, several well-known members of the New Forum transferred to the CDU or other parties in February because of the left-wing bias of Berlin’s leadership circles. The election campaign changed the GDR in a rather unexpected way: the gray walls of buildings and monotonous public squares grew colorful with the countless posters of the parties and groups. The generous support of the West CDU for the Alliance and of the West SPD for its eastern counterpart was reflected in the significantly higher number of posters these parties had, which only the SED could keep up with. Several major election campaign events were held with West German federal politicians such as Kohl, Rühe, or Waigel for some candidates and Brandt, Vogel, or Lafontaine for others, leaving no doubt in advance that these elections would decide on the path to unity. Genscher supported the Association of Free Democrats, an alliance of four liberal parties, with election campaign appearances. Only the SED managed to organize similarly large mass events without West German support, utilizing its workhorses Gysi and Modrow instead. The election campaign was dominated solely by the question of how German unity could be shaped. Practically all the parties elected on March 18 except the United Left declared their support for reunification. However, there were considerable differences in their platforms for how it would be carried out. The Alliance stood for the fastest way to unity. Its formula was: “immediate introduction of the DM.” No one could offer more than that. One persistent controversial election issue was the extent to which West German politicians should be allowed to appear during the election campaign. The SED defended itself against this practice just as vehemently as Bündnis 90 did. Yet it was of no use; the West German parties and their GDR counterparts ignored even an appeal by the Central Round Table. The appeal itself was somewhat naive: since German unification was on the agenda, most people knew

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who would have to finance it and that the GDR did not have much more to contribute on the credit side than millions of committed, well-educated people interested in rebuilding society. Although many members of the opposition repeatedly pointed out that their experiences could also be used to change things in the Federal Republic and that their own experiences showed that changes were feasible, such arguments rarely met with enthusiasm. Even so, the groups and parties that had emerged from the GDR opposition also received broad West German election campaign support. The magazine stern, for example, published a special issue at the beginning of February in which the groups introduced themselves. An edition of one million copies of this issue was distributed free of charge and failed to meet the demand. Two circumstances in the run-up to the election were peculiar but hardly noticed by the public. Delegates from all the old and new parties and groups were represented in the central election commission. When it was constituted on February 22, it elected Petra Bläss (UFV) as its chairperson. Nobody seemed to notice that she was a member of the SED. Against the backdrop of the electoral fraud of May 7, 1989, this bordered on negligence, but the public did not pick up on this. Her two deputies did not make things any better: Lutz Ahnfeld represented the FDJ, and Juliane Jürk the DBD. The press spokesman HansAndreas Schönfeldt also represented the FDJ. In an effort to correct this imbalance somewhat, the opposition sent Pastor Peter Bickhardt (Democracy Now) to the commission as an additional spokesperson. It was also astonishing that many of the approximately twenty-two thousand election committees could not find enough members. They were supposed to consist of at least seven members who nominated the parties and groups, but there were too few volunteers. This meant that a whole series of constituencies had to be merged, although this did not prevent the election from proceeding correctly. On March 12, the Central Round Table held its last meeting. Since television stations ended their live broadcast at 7 p.m., presenter Martin Ziegler gave a closing address in the middle of the session, ending with the following words: The first free, democratic elections are imminent. . . . The Round Table took responsibility for a transitional period. Now it is up to the citizens to make their decision and to elect a free parliament. . . . The time for preparing the elections was short, it was too short, so that many still ask: Who should we actually elect? But we ask the citizens not to use this as an excuse for not participating in the election. . . . We have all become reticent about big words. . . . And yet our lives would be poor if it were not for the good, big words. For they capture something of the will and the longing which, in the deepest depths . . . also inspired the many people who have worked for the good of our country with their strength, with their criticism and with their ideas, “so that the sun shines more beautifully than ever over Germany,” over a united Germany in a pacified Europe.35

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The Election Results Most contemporary witnesses in East and West would be able to state how they experienced November 9 and 10, 1989. The memories of March 18, 1990, on the other hand, have faded for many. March 18, 1990, completed what the flight movement, the mass protests, and the citizens’ movements since the late summer and early autumn of 1989 had jointly forced: free democratic elections. Great tension could be felt not only throughout the GDR on election Sunday. The entire world press was present. Although one could foresee the direction of developments, the pace remained uncertain. The outcome of the election would decide that. The People’s Chamber elections of the small GDR gained international significance because the pace of German unification would also influence the dynamics of European and global processes. The unification of Europe was no longer the precondition for German unity, but—as Polish, Czech, and Hungarian opponents had been demanding since the mid-1980s—German unity was the precondition for the unification of Europe. Globally, the outcome would be decisive for the future of the two military blocs. For a brief historic moment, it looked as if the world could become more peaceful. Perhaps this was the biggest mistake and, at the same time, the most embarrassing form of overconfidence of the year 1990. Today, there are good reasons to claim that overcoming the East-West conflict in 1989–90 was the precondition for many regional and global conflicts that arose thereafter. On March 18, 1990, no one wanted to address such gloomy prospects. The people were in a festive mood. When the first election forecasts were announced on television, the only thing that was not surprising was the high turnout.36 Of 12.4 million eligible voters, 11.6 million had participated. The district of Suhl had the highest voter turnout (95.7 percent); East Berlin had the lowest (90.8 percent). Everything else surprised election winners and losers, voters and commentators alike. The Alliance received 48 percent of the votes (5.5 million: CDU 40.8 percent/4.7 million, DSU 6.3 percent/0.7 million, Democratic Awakening 0.9 percent/0.1 million). The predicted winner of the election, the SPD, came in at just under 22 percent (slightly more than 2.5 million in absolute terms). The SED/PDS followed with 16.4 percent (just under 1.9 million). The liberal alliance received 5.3 percent (0.6 million). Bündnis 90 went down with 2.9 percent (0.34 million), as did the Green Party/UFV with just under 2 percent (0.27 million). The distribution of the initial 400 seats was as follows: Alliance 192 (CDU 163, DSU 25, DA 4), SPD 88, SED/PDS 66, Liberals 21, Bündnis 90 12, DBD 9, Green Party of the GDR/UFV 8, NDPD 2, Democratic Women’s Federation 1, VL 1. The election results turned out to be so clear because 75 percent of participants voted for the parties supported by the CDU/CSU, SPD and Free Democratic

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Party. Only the voters of the SED were regarded as the opponents of unity, which was not even true in this absolute sense. Some aspects of voting behavior were striking, such as a clear divide between North and South, urban and rural, and differences between blue- and white-collar workers. The smaller the cities and municipalities, the higher the percentage of votes for the Alliance. In 100 of 237 municipal and district councils, it received over 50 percent of the votes, most of them in the county of Heiligenstadt (district of Erfurt) with 73.4 percent. The SED, on the other hand, was punished in 35 districts (mainly the districts of Erfurt and Karl-Marx-Stadt), where it received less than 10 percent of the votes. Worbis had the worst result with 4.8 percent, whereas BerlinHohenschönhausen, where a concentration of MfS employees and SED officials lived, had the best result with 38.4 percent. But the real sensation was the analysis of the election in relation to the social composition of the electorate37: More than every second voter of the Alliance was a manual laborer—but also more than every second worker voted for the Alliance. That the Alliance turned out to be “a Party of Workers”38 was unexpected, surprising, and sensational. Practically everyone was consumed by astonished disbelief at the results. The DBD, Democratic Women’s Federation, VL, and NDPD were amazed that they had been able to mobilize anyone for them at all. Bündnis 90 had not expected mass approval in advance, but its poor showing was shocking. Its supporters and voters, especially, watched their televisions in stunned silence. The candidates, for their part, remained rather calm. Stephan Bickhardt commented, “The revolution has dismissed its children.” Konrad Weiß said, “We do not need any groups of hundreds in the People’s Chamber to present our position.”39 Jens Reich spoke of its respectable success. “We started as a small group; in a way we’ve come back to that now; but in the time in between we’ve achieved a lot: that our children can travel freely, that we can talk freely.” Werner Fischer took a similar view: “We have learned to work in the opposition. We will continue to do so now, and we will do it better than the others.” Ludwig Mehlhorn put it in a historical context: “We are the winners of this election. Election day is the end of the dictatorship.” Reinhard Schult, on the other hand, laughing and winking, said: “I have always been against elections.”40 But Bärbel Bohley was not laughing. For her, the democratization process had been interrupted by the election results. The results Bündnis 90 achieved were a sign “that really the people no longer have trust in their own power, that they are trading the guardianship of the old SED for the guardianship of the CDU and hoping not that the red state will do everything for them, but rather that the black father state will do everything for them,” Bohley said, sulking and chiding the voters for their choice.41 The big loser in the election was the SPD. Its representatives struggled very much at first to find the right words. SDP cofounder Steffen Reiche offered an assessment that was widespread in both East and West: “The citizens of the GDR chose the [West German] federal government, not a particular party.”42

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The Alliance was also aware of this that evening. The DSU leaders celebrated like great winners. DSU boss Ebeling ventured: “But we couldn’t achieve more.” Lothar de Maizière already seemed to be overwhelmed on this election night by what was to come. He did not even want to settle whether he would become the prime minister. But he knew what would be expected of one: “I hope that we can travel with real money as early as the summer.”43 Horst Korbella, the CDU vice chairman, stammered: “I’m stunned.” Despite the success of the Alliance, the Democratic Awakening did not feel any real joy in view of its own poor performance. Rainer Eppelmann also praised election day as the end of the dictatorship. Most of Democratic Awakening’s supporters thought they had been “purged,” which was inaccurate given the performance of the other new groups. Apart from the Alliance, the second big election winner was the SED. It got almost two million votes, hundreds of thousands more than it had members. The mood among Gysi, Modrow, and company was accordingly relaxed and easygoing. They had not expected this either. Gysi promised that he would provide strong opposition and not make things easy for the Kohl administration. For a few more days, Bündnis 90 hoped that the SPD would stay in the opposition with them. The SPD hesitated to do so because of the German Social Union, with whom it did not want to share power under any circumstances. At the beginning of April, it abandoned this attitude and cleared the way for a grand coalition. Jens Reich had already issued the following warning on the evening of the election: “Those who learned the recorder from Honecker cannot play first fiddle in any democracy.” Marianne Birthler made a pithy comment on the future government, whether or not the SPD would be a part of it: “Now Kohl is our boss.”44 Stefan Heym formulated the most famous short analysis on the evening of the election: “There will be no more GDR. It will be nothing but a footnote in world history.”45 Wolf Biermann was also “appalled and bitterly disappointed,” remarking that it was “a bad irony of history and almost unbelievable that of all parties the CDU of the East, which was absolutely a branch of the SED and a cretin of Stalinism, has won the election with Kohl at the top.” He quickly gave up his plans to move to East Berlin from Hamburg once again.46 The reactions of the West German federal parties turned out as one would expect. CDU/CSU representatives celebrated and praised the democratic voting behavior of the East Germans, claiming that it represented their will for freedom and unity. Margaret Thatcher congratulated Kohl on his election victory, which hit the nail on the head. Almost all Social Democrats believed that disillusionment would quickly set in with the electorate in the GDR. Egon Bahr’s comments reflected his deep disappointment. He accused the CDU/CSU of having exported “political environmental pollution” to the GDR and claimed that the “election campaign in the GDR partly had fascist features.”47 Pravda printed an interview with him in which he stated, “These were the dirtiest elections I have ever seen in my life.” He gave examples of how SPD and SED/PDS members

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had been threatened. In Suhl, he said, a man had had both legs broken because he had called for the election of the SPD. The police reports described the situation as tolerant, nonviolent, and fair. Bahr on the other hand, saw things differently: “That was pure mental terror in Goebbels’s manner. I would like to repeat that this political dirt was exported from the FRG.”48 The man knew what he was talking about. As a child, he had experienced the fall of the Weimar Republic and the election campaigns of 1930/33 firsthand. International election observers did not make such claims and spoke of fair and democratic elections. Willy Brandt, on the other hand, who was immensely popular in the GDR despite the SPD’s defeat, made a sober and realistic appearance. He remarked that German unity had been chosen “quickly and without any ifs and buts.” The comrades in the SPD party leadership, however, did not understand the message of the election day. They unanimously nominated Oskar Lafontaine as the SPD candidate for chancellor on March 19, who, for his part, said, “Now Kohl’s trapped.” It did not occur to him that lashing out and rejecting rapid unity, as well as his cronyism with Honecker, which had not been forgotten, had contributed substantially to the Eastern SPD’s electoral defeat. The SPD set the wrong course in this situation, essentially already preprogramming the party’s defeat in the first all-German election on December 2, 1990. Meanwhile, the Greens in the West claimed that their friends in the GDR from Bündnis 90 and the Green Party/Independent Women’s Association had been punished because they—the Western Greens—had not interfered in the election campaign. There was no evidence to support this, nor to support the counterargument that if they had been involved, the result would have been even lower. After the federal elections in December 1990, the Greens had to vacate their seats in parliament. In return, eight representatives of Alliance 90 joined the Bundestag with a special status—blocking clauses in accordance with separate electoral areas; these included Köppe, G. Poppe, Schulz, Ullmann, Weiß, and Wollenberger, among others. Joseph Fischer opened a book in 1993 with the sentence: “Socialism has been gone for almost four years, and the Left, at least in Germany, remains persistently and emphatically silent on this 1989 revolution.”49 That was a very good self-description of the Western Greens from the autumn of 1989. There was one thing wrong with this sentence, but the error was quite common after 1990: by Germany, Fischer meant the territory of the Federal Republic within the borders of October 2, 1990. As late as January 1, 1996, the director of ZDF, Dieter Stolte, spoke of “them” (East Germans) and “us” (West Germans) in a conversation broadcast in prime time. Meanwhile, the newly elected People’s Chamber already had a problem to deal with before it was elected and before it met for its first session on April 5. After the first revelations concerning Schnur and Kirchner as MfS employees emerged, the public’s outrage coalesced in the demand that all members of parliament be

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checked for possible MfS involvement. As late as March 22, MfS head of office Engelhardt urged acting prime minister Modrow to ensure that this would not happen using every possible means. Modrow, though, behaved correctly, pointing out that he no longer had any decision-making powers and that the new parliament would have to decide on this. This was a problem almost until the end of his term of office, which ended with German unification on October 3. There was no legal basis for checking representatives’ backgrounds; they were expected to freely declare their willingness to have this done. When the first rumors arose in March that Lothar de Maizière had also been an IM, he allowed a background check. At that time, hardly anyone realized how complicated the details of such a check could be. De Maizière called upon Manfred Stolpe and Gregor Gysi to act as his person of his trust and his legal adviser, respectively. Together with two MfS officers, as well as a representative of the GDR attorney general’s office and a member of the Citizens’ Committee who was not uncontroversial at the time, they examined the documents submitted on de Maizière. Stolpe and Gysi subsequently confirmed that de Maizière was not an IM. Stolpe had also previously looked into the files on Gysi so that “there was no concern regarding [Gysi’s] participation” in de Maizière’s background check.50 It is not known whether the three lawyers went out to celebrate afterward. After all, the People’s Chamber had 409 representatives whose average age was just under 45,51 about 250 of whom had belonged to the SED or a bloc party prior to the revolution. There was never any official announcement about how many representatives had spied for the MfS, but some information did come out. On September 20, Rainer Börner (SED), a former member of the FDJ Central Council, was the first representative to admit he had previously worked as an IM. On September 28, a tumultuous scene erupted in the People’s Chamber when some representatives demanded that the IMs be named, while others fiercely resisted. State secretary Günther Krause became hysterical. Some representatives occupied the presidium in an effort to force the names of former IMs among them to be released. Christine Grabe (Green Party) was shocked at the stalling tactics on the other side: “I don’t understand the members of this house. I find it unbearable. It’s a pathetic game. I don’t know what you’re trying to explain to people in this country.” Krause made a motion to keep this knowledge from the public, whereupon Marianne Birthler (IFM) asked him: “Are the proposers aware that if this motion finds a majority here, many of the affected persons will not have the opportunity to publicly present what they have to say about their case, which could also exonerate them?” Nevertheless, a majority opted to keep the public out. The IMs were named in a closed session. Once the public had been readmitted, several representatives and ministers then declared in sometimes grotesque performances that they could not explain themselves or that they had not done anything. Jürgen Haschke (DSU), a member of the board conducting background checks, then sarcastically summed up this whole theater:

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“I regret that the board did not recognize that the MfS was a deeply humane organization and that IMs were only recruited to avert harm from us all.”52 In the end, more than seventy representatives remained suspected of having worked for the MfS. Krause’s attempt to prevent the public reading of names was successful because half of the IM suspects were CDU members. About twenty representatives who had been IMs were later publicly identified by name. The composition of the government elected in April 1990 also proved to be politically explosive. In addition to de Maizière, it consisted of twenty-three ministers, including nine from the CDU, eight from the SPD, three from the Liberals, two from the DSU, and one from Democratic Awakening. The eleven members of the SPD, DSU, and Democratic Awakening had all been independent before the autumn of 1989, whereas the thirteen members of the CDU and Liberals had all previously been organized within the bloc parties, and nine of them had even acted as functionaries and representatives, including Wünsche as former minister of justice and Pohl (economics) and Steinberg (environment), who had been members of the People’s Chamber since 1981 and 1971, respectively. Minister of the Interior Diestel, who faced serious accusations and whose responsibility for the further dissolution of the MfS remained highly controversial, had praised the agricultural production cooperatives in 1986 in his doctoral thesis on law. In addition, five government ministers were believed to have been IMs alongside de Maizière. The composition of the People’s Chamber reflected the political circumstances. It was also characteristic that only two from the GDR opposition, Meckel and Eppelmann, were appointed ministers, along with Regine Hildebrandt to a lesser extent. In this respect, the elections to the People’s Chamber also represent the fact that the political actors changed in the spring of 1990. What had been hinted at during the election campaign was now taking shape: East German society had forced the fall of the Berlin Wall, free elections, and the rapid pace of German unification; after March 18, it was largely up to the West German federal government to determine how unity would be achieved. Consequently, the elections to the People’s Chamber were the crowning glory of a revolutionary development that now had to produce tangible results in democratically legitimized ways, such as monetary, economic, and social union and the Unification Treaty. In the research literature, the People’s Chamber has often been mocked. West German politicians referred to the body as amateur theater. Others, by contrast, see it as a high point in the German parliamentary and democratic history. It remains to be seen what future historical work will reveal; the tenth People’s Chamber has not yet been the subject of much research. Even though many people vividly remember the period up to October 3 and long after in Germany and Europe as unusual and exciting, history has now opened a new chapter.53 On October 2, 1990, the People’s Chamber held its last session, which was all about reconciliation. Each faction was given the opportunity to give a final

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speech, and the SPD passed this opportunity on to Reinhard Höppner speak on its behalf. The future prime minister of Saxony-Anhalt had acquired many merits in the previous weeks and months because, as deputy president of the People’s Chamber, he almost always kept track of things, even in the most hectic situations. The long-standing synodalist was well versed in procedural rules and became one of the best known and most popular politicians of that time. In his speech, Höppner said that he had planned a symbolic walk with his future comrades in arms in Saxony-Anhalt for the next day, October 3, 1990, to climb the Brocken (the Blocksberg), the highest peak in the Harz mountains, on the inner German border. “We will set out in the dark and together overcome our fear of the dark.” The darkness, he remarked, stood for the fears of the future that so many people had, but, he continued, “We will arrive, we will have good views, we will make it. We’re gonna get through this hunk of rock that’s in front of us. And when we get to the top, it’ll be light. We will be pleased. . . . Paths only arise when we walk them.”54

Notes 1. Stellungnahme, 18. 11. 1989. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, BV, Leiter 10793, Bl. 35. 2. Fernschreiben von Egon Krenz an SED-B[ezirks]L[eitung] und -K[reis]L[eitung], 29. 11. 1989. BA, MfS, SED-K[reis]L[eitung] 2628, Bl. 264. 3. Uwe Thaysen, ed., Der Zentrale Runde Tisch der DDR. Wortprotokoll und Dokumente (Wiesbaden, 2000), 1:62. 4. For a thorough account, see Francesca Weil, Verhandelte Demokratisierung. Die Runden Tische der Bezirke 1989/90 in der DDR (Göttingen, 2011). 5. A[mt] f[ür] N[ationale] S[icherheit] in Auflösung, Engelhardt, an Generalstaatsanwalt Joseph, 12. 3. 1990. BA, DO 104/7, Bl. 143–46. 6. Dienstbesprechung anlässlich der Einführung des Gen. Generalleutnant Schwanitz als Leiter des Amtes für Nationale Sicherheit durch den Vorsitzenden des Ministerrates der DDR, Gen. Hans Modrow, 21. 11. 1989. BA, MfS, ZAIG 4886, Bl. 33, 36, 39, 43. 7. Vorläufige Grundsätze für Aufgaben und Strukturen des AfNS, 4. 12. 1989. BA, DO 104/2, Bl. 281–309. 8. E.g., BA, MfS, HA XX/AKG 6447; Ast. Gera AG XXII 552 (Schreiben BV-Leiter mit konkreten Angaben, 28. 11. 1989.). 9. Ronny Heidenreich, Aufruhr hinter Gittern. Das “Gelbe Elend” im Herbst 1989 (Leipzig, 2009); Birger Dölling, Strafvollzug zwischen Wende und Wiedervereinigung. Kriminalpolitik und Gefangenenprotest im letzten Jahr der DDR (Berlin, 2009). 10. NF, Videoaufnahme: Bärbel Bohley am Krisentelefon am 4. 12. 1989. RHG/NFo 024. 11. MfS terms are explained in Roger Engelmann et al., eds., Das MfS-Lexikon. Begriffe, Personen und Strukturen der Staatssicherheit der DDR, 2nd rev. and exp. ed. (Berlin, 2012). 12. Tonbandmitschnitt. BA, MfS, Ast. Chemnitz, BV, Ka 1. 13. BA, MfS, Ast. Gera, AG XXII 552, Bl. 56–57. 14. BA, MfS, Ast. Dresden, AIM 254/89, Teil I, Bd. 8, Bl. 296, 302.

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15. For more details on this institution, see Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Die Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,” in Geschichte der Universität Unter den Linden, vol. 3: Sozialistisches Experiment und Erneuerung in der Demokratie—die Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 1945–2010, ed. Heinz-Elmar Tenorth (Berlin, 2012), 437–553, esp. 537–41. 16. Ehrenfried Stelzer an Wolfgang Herger, 28. 11. 1989. SAPMO B-Arch, DY 30/1361, Bl. 92. 17. Christoph Wowtscherk, Was wird, wenn die Zeitbombe hochgeht? Eine sozialgeschichtliche Analyse der fremdenfeindlichen Ausschreitungen in Hoyerswerda im September 1991 (Göttingen, 2014). One novel, presenting an interesting approach, characterizes the “right-wing radical youth culture” as an everyday occurrence that, not coincidentally, took over whole geographical areas and youth groups literally overnight (after the fall of the Wall). Peter Richter, 89/90 (Munich, 2015). 18. Walter Süß, Staatssicherheit am Ende (Berlin, 1999), 686–88. 19. Niederschrift zur Beratung des Ministerpräsidenten mit den Beauftragten des Runden Tisches zur Auflösung des ehemaligen MfS am 24. 1. 1990. BA, DO 104/1, Bl. 124. 20. Siegfried Grundmann and Ines Schmidt, “Wanderungsbewegungen in der DDR 1989,” Berliner Arbeitshefte und Berichte zur sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung 30 (1990). Zentralinstitut zur sozialwissenschaftlichen Forchung, Freie Universität Berlin. 21. This entire process remains controversial even today and, in the last several years especially, has led repeatedly to rather outlandish conspiracy theories. This will not be taken into account here. However, an indispensable edition of documents for this is Silke Schumann, Vernichten oder Offenlegen? Zur Entstehung des Stasi-Unterlagen-Gesetzes. Eine Dokumentation der öffentlichen Debatte 1990/91 (Berlin, 1995). 22. Erkenntnisse und Probleme im Zusammenhang mit Aktivitäten der Geheimdienste der BRD, 26. 3. 1990. BA, MfS, Staatliche Überlieferung zum MfS/AfNS in Auflösung 11; also BA, MfS, HV A 815. 23. “Gespräch des Staatsekretärs Bertele mit Ministerpräsident Modrow in Ost-Berlin, 28. 3. 1990,” in Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik. Deutsche Einheit. Sonderedition aus den Akten des Bundeskanzleramtes 1989/90 (Munich, 1998), 985. 24. “Von der Stasi zum BGS—Alte Schnüffler in neuen Uniformen,” an episode of Kontraste, broadcast on July 2, 1991; for a comprehensive account, see Jörn-Michael Goll, Kontrollierte Kontrolleure. Die Bedeutung der Zollverwaltung für die “politisch-operative Arbeit” des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit der DDR (Göttingen, 2011). 25. BA, MfS, Ast. Frankfurt/O., Unterlagen des Regierungsbeauftragten für den Bezirk Cottbus. 26. AfNS in Auflösung, Engelhardt, an Ministerpräsident Modrow, 15. 3. 1990. BA, DO 104/7, Bl. 167–68. 27. BA, MfS, SDM 2240, Bl. 153 (German Press Agency Announcement 12. 12. 89); JW, 9./10. 12. 1989 (Eppelmann Interview). 28. A picture that is rather different from the usual, which is precious and depressing at the same time, is painted in the novel by Richter, 89/90, 226–31. 29. Information über die Beratung bei Genossen Modrow, 12. 12. 1989, 11.00–11.30 Uhr. BA, MfS, ZKG 8899, Bl. 12. 30. Volkskammer der DDR. Protokoll, 9. Wahlperiode, 16. Tagung, 5. 2. 1990, p. 458. There were 377 representatives present (p. 457). 31. “Regierung der Nationalen Verantwortung. Beratung am 28. 1. 1990, Johannishof, Berlin (inoffizielles Protokoll von Martin Ziegler),” in Der Platz der Kirchen an den Runden Tischen (Berlin, 2000), 59–68. 32. Cf. Daniel Friedrich Sturm, Uneinig in die Einheit. Die Sozialdemokratie und die Vereinigung Deutschlands 1989/90 (Bonn, 2006), 295 (the source presents an interview the author conducted with Modrow).

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33. This is how it was described to me again and again by the many people I spoke with on the side of the civil movements. 34. For a thorough account, see, e.g., Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland; Sarotte, 1989. 35. Thaysen, Der Zentrale Runde Tisch der DDR, 4:1132. 36. All of these figures are from Wahlkommission der DDR, ed., Wahlen zur Volkskammer der DDR am 18. März 1990. Endgültiges Ergebnis (Berlin, 1990). 37. Kowalczuk, “Revolution ohne Arbeiter?” 596–98. 38. Jürgen W. Falter, “Wahlen 1990. Die demokratische Legitimation für die deutsche Einheit mit großen Überraschungen,” in Die Gestaltung der deutschen Einheit. Geschichte-Politik-Gesellschaft, ed. Eckhard Jesse and Armin Mitter (Bonn, 1992), 170. 39. taz, 19. 3. 1990. 40. taz, 20. 3. 1990. 41. taz, 21. 3. 1990. 42. taz, 19. 3. 1990. 43. taz, 20. 3. 1990. 44. taz, 19. 3. 1990. 45. Hannes Bahrmann and Christoph Links, Chronik der Wende (Berlin, 1995), 2:174. 46. taz, 20. 3. 1990. 47. Ibid. 48. ND, 20. 3. 1990. 49. Joschka Fischer, Die Linke nach dem Sozialismus (Hamburg, 1993), i. 50. ND, 31.3./1. 4. 1990. 51. One can find further details in Christopher Hausmann, Biographisches Handbuch der 10. Volkskammer der DDR (1990) (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2000). 52. Volkskammer, 10. Wahlperiode, 37. Tagung, 28. 9. 1990, p. 1824, 1827, 1842 (Haschke’s name is not in the minutes, but it can be proven by means of television recordings). 53. The introduction to this English edition includes updated references to literature on this. 54. Volkskammer, 10. Wahlperiode, 38. Tagung, 2. 10. 1990, p. 1868.

CONCLUSION The Revolution: Or Otto Schily as a Symbol

S In the introduction to this book, I wrote that I wanted to trace how the revolution of 1989 and 1990 came about: first, there were years of society standing still, and then, from the autumn of 1989, things only moved at a fast pace—that’s how many people perceived it at the time. The history leading up to “1989” was decisive in this, so I had to address it in detail. Then problems that no one foresaw or could have foreseen piled up during the unification process. However, the billions of marks and euros spent and the social developments that ensued, all of which are often referred to as the “costs of unity,” are not “costs of unity” but consequences of the communist dictatorship. There are many prophets who look to the past but few who give reliable prognoses for the future. Germany, Europe, and the world have changed dramatically since then, not least because of the European Revolution of 1989 and 1990.1 These changes led to the events of that time remaining controversial. Since 1989, the concept of “1989” has been used to pursue a politics of memory.2 This was inevitable but not new. On the contrary, reassuring ourselves by means of history has always been part of politics. The artful invention of “objective” knowledge of history and “objective” representations of history in themselves explains people’s widespread reluctance to accept that historical observations are not only tied to the present and to the location where they are made but are also oriented toward the present and the future. Dealing with “1989” is only one example of this phenomenon, but it is a particularly memorable one. “Objective knowledge of history,” as such, does not exist; at most, there are perhaps some “objective findings about history.” The subjective idiosyncrasies of each history told begin with the composition, continue through the classification, and do not end with the final assessment. This is Notes from this chapter begin on page 463.

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the last issue to address: Were the events really a revolution? And why is there so much reluctance to accept this assessment in Germany? The first question can be approached in two ways. First, one can look at contemporary documents from 1989 and 1990, in which the term revolution was almost taken for granted for the events. Although it always competed with terms like upheaval, turnaround, collapse, erosion, failure, implosion, and downfall, these various names were not yet mutually exclusive in 1989 or 1990. This makes sense because revolutions include the other processes that describe these terms. People talked about a revolution for different reasons and with very different expectations, but they largely accepted that it was a revolution at the time. Even the communists who then spoke of “counterrevolution” thus confirmed the revolutionary character of the events. However, the self-assessment of actors and contemporary witnesses is only of secondary importance when characterizing historical events. Therefore, a second option is to take a systematic approach. The issue of what really constitutes a revolution already begins with the lack of a sufficiently accepted definition thereof. Ralf Dahrendorf pointed out this lack in 1961, when he stated that there was no “historically reasonably proven, sociologically wellthought-out theory” or sound concept of revolutions.3 This statement is still valid. Nevertheless, conditions and manifestations that characterize a revolution can be identified. Thus, a political revolution can be defined as “a fundamental transformation of the political institutions with an exchange of elites. . . . The change, which is comparatively abrupt rather than gradual, can be peaceful or violent. From a certain stage onward, a broad coalition of the population is necessary for success.”4 Among the prerequisite characteristics of revolutions are: “(1) social: relatively high social dynamics with simultaneous social inequality with regard to the chances of advancing to the privileged classes on the basis of performance . . . ; (2) political: a lack of sufficient possibilities and instruments to control the emerging crisis phenomena; (3) economic: a rigid monopoly position of a thin upper class with regard to the possibility of disposing of land property and means of production; exclusion of the productive classes from a fair share of the national product. . . .”5 A revolutionary situation is thus characterized by the loss of legitimacy of the ruling classes, the presence of potential support layers, a developing sense of injustice in society about this situation, a drastic deterioration of the general circumstances, and visible insecurity among the ruling classes. The concrete processes of revolutions vary widely.6 Unrest, protests, demonstrations, and strikes emerge, and the ruling classes prove unable to cope with the crisis. They also refuse to limit their privileges and expand the opportunities for participation in society, leading revolutionaries to destroy institutions of government and take over rule. If one considers the history of events in 1989 and 1990, then it is striking how these events fulfill the prerequisites, conditions, and processes for these general statements about revolutions.

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Kurt Lenk, on the basis of complex research into revolutions, developed four goals of revolutions (and here, I purposefully cite a work he wrote prior to 1989): “(1) Dissolution of the classes and political forces that had hitherto held the leadership and a thorough change in the composition of the ruling classes through the systematic dismantling of the privileges of the old upper classes; (2) abolition of the traditional relations of domination and authority in favor of the underprivileged; (3) total reorganization of the political, economic, cultural, and social structure; (4) establishment of a new constitutional order and a new legal system to stabilize the revolutionary goals achieved.”7 If one compares these revolutionary goals to the demands and results of the events of 1989/1990, a clear congruence emerges. Yet it also becomes clear why “1989” in the GDR needed neither special intellectual-historical preparation nor special intellectual leadership: the “new revolutions,” as they took place in 1989/90 in the communist sphere of power, required neither a “universalist claim to progress” nor a “philosophical foundation.”8 They were not striving for something fundamentally new—as revolutions in the nineteenth century had— but wanted open societies like those that seemed to exist in Western democracies. Hannah Arendt observed in 1956 that no one had prepared the (failed) Hungarian revolution, nor had anyone been prepared for it. The will to freedom is decisive in revolutions.9 That is why “1989” needed mobilization elites in the form of citizens’ movements but not charismatic leadership elites. Some of the revolution’s goals were undisputed, but the paths and the form of the state were not. For even the staunchest opponents of unification within the SED/PDS oriented their search for “third ways” toward the constitutional, legal, cultural, and political structures of the Federal Republic. The greatest differences were found in considerations of property rights, not in the social-market economy. In this perspective, 1989/90 was a revolution without a utopia. The decisive factor was that, despite the insider relationships, MfS entanglements, and many other distortions that came to light after 1989 and burdened the processes of East German democratization and all-German unification, the SED system was eliminated. It did not collapse by itself. From a historical perspective, it is self-evident that many conditions needed to be met for the outbreak of the revolution. It is equally apparent that the revolution developed over time. Crane Brinton, in his classic study of the course of four great revolutions, identified one regularity as “crystal clear”: “All four revolutions began with people who were against certain taxes, organized themselves to protest against them, and finally reached a point where they acted to eliminate the existing government. This does not necessarily mean that the tax opponents wanted or foresaw a radical revolution. It means that the transition from talking about necessary changes . . . to concrete actions was made under the incentive of unpopular taxes.”10 As a mass movement, “1989” began following exactly this pattern. The revolution had its starting point in many such injustices. As Walter Benjamin argued, Marx

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saw revolutions as drivers of world history but wondered whether revolutions were not rather efforts to pull the emergency brake and stop world history.11 The emergency brake was successfully applied in 1989/90, and the fact that the events showed typical nonsimultaneity does not, as an empirical finding, prevent one from characterizing the events as a revolution. To summarize the events: the old order was incapable of action, delegitimized, and morally compromised; the values and convictions it represented were shattered; civil and mass movements opposed it and demanded new political, social, economic, and cultural structures; a new order was established; within a few months the movement eliminated old structures, values, ideas, cultures, and ruling elites; almost nothing in the public sphere was as it had been before. So what speaks against the term revolution? Nothing, really, except for Otto Schily and his banana. On the night of the election, March 18, 1990, Otto Schily, a founding member of the Greens who had recently become a member of the SPD, pushed in front of the cameras like many others. In an inimitable pose, the political chameleon commented on the outcome of the democratic elections. Asked how he viewed the elections to the People’s Chamber, he conjured a banana out of the pocket of his suit, for which an average GDR wage earner would have had to pay an estimated annual salary, and held it up in front of the cameras with a grin. On the GDR side, there were similar antidemocratic slanderers of the election results. Stefan Heym was only the spearhead of all the East German intellectuals who had already been able to help themselves in the shops of the West for years and now denigrated all those who finally wanted to do so as well. The list of travel cadres would be very long. It was not only writers, theater people, actors, rock musicians, lawyers, scientists, church figures, and SED functionaries who romped around in the West at will but also some civil rights activists, loudly opposed to unity, who had also tested the air of the West. There are several levels to the objections to and reservations about the use of the concept of revolution in relation to 1989/90, and it is precisely this complexity that shows that the rejection of the concept does not indicate a particular political stance or a specific scientific method, nor a regional origin or a specific pattern of socialization, but rather permeates the whole of society. Schily’s banana symbolizes that people wanted nothing more than to share in the blessings of the Western consumer world. That is correct, but only if one simultaneously emphasizes what they no longer wanted, namely, the political, economic, and social system that was not able to offer them the “banana.” Schily’s “banana” symbolically suppresses this fact, and what people had to do to get “bananas” unhindered. One argument against using the term revolution is that the revolution was not completed. The old system may have shattered—at least the fact that the GDR is gone seems to be unshakable, not doubted by even the most loyal GDR

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defenders—but the revolutionaries themselves wanted different results than they achieved. This is a very popular argument in both East and West. Behind this argument is a longing for utopia. However, those with this longing fail to recognize that the absolute majority of people had no sensibility for new utopias after overcoming the system, which had already been praised by those who ran it as a utopian society.12 They wanted to leave such things to future generations and longed for a recreational break in history to be able to relax in their lives without social experiments with cruel consequences. Talk of an “aborted revolution” essentially implies that the people in the GDR were willing to accept a new dictatorship and that members of the opposition were disappointed that their own ideas did not win a majority of support. At the same time, this disappointment entails blatant arrogance. It tears people’s political action out of the historical contexts in which it occurred. Many courageous actors of the new movement, many imaginative speakers at demonstrations, many courageous occupants of power centers today believe not only that they have inherited the revolution but also that they alone created the conditions for their personal commitment. The SED leadership did not come to an end because this or that happened, because this or that was said, or because this or that group was formed but because all of these things, as in the classic course of a revolution, coincided with a broad social resonance, a great willingness in society to act—even if it meant taking the risk of fleeing—along with new room to maneuver just as the SED’s ability to act was diminishing to the same extent. In other words, a revolution usually entails the dismissal of the men and women from the first phase of action; historically, it has quite often cut off their heads. The situation in Germany was special because the question arose from the beginning: was “unity through freedom” or “freedom through unity” being achieved? Historically, it is the former that seems to have happened, symbolized by the elections of March 18, 1990. But one could also claim that November 9, 1989, elevated the latter to a historical fact. As is so often the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The fall of the Wall was not an independent decision of the SED leadership but one that was socially forced. Anyone who ignores or pays little attention to the long run-up to the fall of the Wall quickly comes to the conclusion that “1989/90” was the result of government action in both East and West. In addition, a grotesque circumstance arises: the citizens’ movements are often blamed for what cannot be blamed on them in this onesidedness, namely that they were against German unity. It was the “how,” not the “whether.” But here I must stress one thing once again: the greatest resistance to unification before October 3, 1990, came from the Federal Republic, not from the GDR. In this phase, it was a historical stroke of luck to have a man like Helmut Kohl as chancellor. The idea of unity had long since been adopted by the majority of the old West German society and many of its opinion leaders before 1989.

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Those who are “romantic” about revolutions are also often disturbed by the use of the term “revolution” being used in relation to “1989.” Many often attribute meanings and contents to revolutions and take these ideas for granted, even though historically things do not really happen this way. The most famous idea is that no revolution can take place without blood, revenge, and sacrifice because that would mean that the rulers are willing to give up power or give it up on their own initiative. However, this argument overlooks the concrete historical contexts in which many revolutions occurred, good examples being the revolutions against communism. Communist apparatuses of rule were highly centralized and called for extreme obedience. Moreover, the Moscow empire had integrated various national systems, so it could not go on the offensive (without a new or clear position of command). In 1989, hardly anyone in the GDR had any idea why the credo “no violence”—which was a reaction to state violence—primarily targeted the self-protection of the demonstrators. Another idea of “revolutionary romantics” is the belief that the first phase of a revolution determines what is to become of it, as well as who is to determine the fate of the country in the future. Behind this lies the absence of legal principles and the longing for anarchy and grassroots democratic structural models. Such phenomena occurred in 1990, even after the elections. All the more bitter was the disappointment of “revolutionary romantics” when they later asked for and insisted on legality. “Revolutionary romanticism” also includes a deep skepticism toward the state, not only toward the one that a revolution overcomes but toward any state (as long as one is not in control of it oneself). Even democratic negotiation and decision-making processes that do not correspond to grassroots democratic council models are usually rejected by “revolutionary romantics.” After all, “revolutionary romanticism” includes the belief that a revolution solves all problems and does not create new ones. “Revolutionary romantics” usually confuse social justice with social equality. They cannot accept that there can be no social equality in an open society. They have zero comprehension for theories that view social inequalities as motors of social development. In essence, Marx saw things this way, but he had to deduce that these inequalities could be abolished in his social models, and revolutionary romantics do so as well. Within such a view, historical developments and change that aggravate social inequalities, as happened after 1989, cannot have been a revolution. Even so, the longing for Arcadia includes more than just the social component. It also entails assumptions directed against individual and social freedom. Thus, those who do not recognize the will to freedom as constitutive of a revolution have reservations about or reject the concept of revolution in relation to 1989; they do not see the SED regime as having been extremely restrictive, or they cannot accept that the will to freedom in 1989 was decisive in the formation of the citizens’ movements, the mass flight from the country, and the mass demonstrations. Likewise, those who claim that the SED made a contribution

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that went beyond reactive behavior devalue or reject the concept of revolution in relation to 1989. I have already mentioned the social actors involved in 1989, but not the public perception and presentation of the events in historical memory, which have predominantly been cast as state action, especially on the part of the West German federal government. Reunification also overlays the events, and Bonn did, indeed, make a decision about its form, though not its pace. But that is not all: since the early 1990s, one interpretation of events has dominated in the public perception within which the civil rights activists are portrayed as having been really courageous but unfortunately incapable of political action. Countless publications and public events describe the men and women of the citizens’ movement as “courageous,” “morally clean,” or “humanely pleasant” but always devalue them at the same time. This interpretation derives from the transfer not only of political and economic structures and legal systems to the Eastern states, which was intended, but also of cultural practices that pressured East Germans to adapt, soon provoking their reluctance and rejection. As I cannot describe this in detail here, one example must suffice: East Germans strongly approved of the restructuring and personnel renewal of the universities and research institutions. They believed that particularly ideologically burdened institutions should be rebuilt, and they attached many hopes to this process. The departments and research facilities for the field of history, in their view, were to spearhead the scholarly reappraisal of communism. Many believed that this could also help them in their search for a clear sense of identity. Never mind whether this was naive. Nor can one determine whether it would have worked because the majority of these new departments were almost demonstratively opposed to conducting historical research on the GDR and communism. Those who appointed the new personnel were ultimately responsible for this, and their hiring policy did not give lateral entrants a chance. The new hires from Munich, Cologne, Mannheim, Bielefeld, Hamburg, or Frankfurt/Main did not even think of making their chairs and departments centers of such scholarly research. Almost all impulses for coming to terms with the GDR came from nonuniversity research institutions, mostly even from nonacademic ones. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the most important impulses came from East Germans who did not have the statewide networks, the supportive groups of likeminded scholars who often cited one another, or the acceptance of guild spokespeople. Thus, to this day, established German historiography has not yet discovered the first successful German revolution as a subject of historical research.13 Consequently, German historiography itself likewise contributed to the rampant and terrifying ignorance about the GDR and the revolution because when future history teachers hardly have any opportunities to deal with GDR history during their university studies, they will later reflect this in their profession. All current surveys provide disturbing evidence of what young people in East and West know—or better: do not know—about the GDR

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today, and especially about 1989. The GDR revolution only exists as part of the German and European culture of memory in Sunday speeches. In reference to 1989, the assumption that everything began with Gorbachev and was due to him still dominates. I have written a great deal about this in this book but wish to repeat two aspects here that stand for all of Eastern Europe: Gorbachev’s seizure of power was already the result of a deep crisis, on the one hand, and a social resistance movement that began in Poland, on the other. The GDR only joined in later, which is why the pace of development was much faster there than in Poland or Hungary. As a result, as Timothy Garton Ash put it, there was more of a revolution in Poland and Hungary, a mixture of reform and revolution. In the GDR and ČSSR, on the other hand, revolutions broke out precisely because those in power only began to negotiate when it was too late. The GDR revolution cannot be explained without the international context, but this does not mean that the events cannot be called a revolution, as some claim. Gorbachev is part of this international context, as is Moscow’s special role as the guarantor and guardian of the GDR. Anyone who wanted to explain the 1848 revolutions, the Russian February Revolution and the Bolshevik coup in 1917, or the German November Revolution of 1918 would not get very far without including the obvious international connections either, and they would likely earn a very poor grade in their course, even from those who argue precisely against the use of the term revolution in relation to the events in the GDR in 1989. It must also be said that many powerful people and opinion leaders who speak out against using the term revolution in relation to the GDR often have no real knowledge of the historical events, at least not knowledge that can be empirically proven. This results from contemporary historians largely claiming to know what they wish they had seen. This starts with the popular claim that Charta 77 played a far greater, more socially visible role in the ČSSR than the opposition in the GDR did. To be sure, Charta 77 had many prominent members, but its social impact was neither greater nor smaller before 1989 than that of the GDR opposition. The assessment of the events in the GDR also suffers from the fact that for 1989–90, it remained mostly oriented toward East Berlin and Leipzig, the New Forum, and a few prominent figures such as Bärbel Bohley, Jens Reich, Rainer Eppelmann, Joachim Gauck, Ulrike Poppe, Friedrich Schorlemmer, Marianne Birthler, Markus Meckel, and Christian Führer. At the same time, those assessing the events pay too little attention to the political tactics of the opposition movements as evident, for example, in the way they handled the concept of socialism. But since this political maneuvering cannot be reconstructed from media reports or published statements, it becomes very easy not to regard the fall of the Wall on November 9 as an objective of the revolution but to claim that the “real revolutionaries” were ousted in favor of national objectives. And that is why it is not historically correct to declare that only the programs of the well-known civil movements were revolutionary goals. The confusing thing about this revolution—as

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the example of Plauen shows—was that demands for freedom and unity were articulated from the very beginning and regional differences emerged very quickly. At the time, the actors were not aware of this, and it was not reflected in the media coverage. One can even analyze the mass demand for freedom of travel from that time and ask whether there could have been a GDR with open borders at all and, if so, whether people would have known. Historians are not bound to the selfinterpretations of the actors and certainly not to the reports of the journalists who observed the events. In addition, the character of the events was not determined by participants’ attitude toward the German question but by the question of how society was to deal with the SED system in the future. And in respect to that, refugees, demonstrators, and citizens’ movements were all of one mind. By the way, “revolutionary envy” also exists and affects the assessment of the events of 1989, though few talk about it. Bringing this up here is not about following a current fashion and attacking the “68ers” in their alleged influence on public opinion or making them responsible for everything worth criticizing in the present. But, of course, one has to ask how those who had dreamed of a revolution for years in the Federal Republic reacted when one suddenly took place on their doorstep. They simply ignored it, as Joseph Fischer’s remark on the silence of the Left exemplifies, or mocked it, as Schily did with his banana. Fischer once expressed his feelings in a significant way in a discussion with members of Bündnis 90. He said that if “we” had done it, “we” would have done it right. Revolution envy also feeds on the fear some have that their own political biographies in the West—characterized by courage, resistance, and political farsightedness—would be devalued by 1989–90, because courage and resistance were now attributed to quite different things. Describing the downfall of the GDR as a revolution would also have to entail admitting that the communist dictatorships had long since ceased to be perceived as truly communist, because only if they were undemocratic, unfree, dictatorial states would a revolution make historical sense. Therefore, it is often only a short step from the rejection of the concept of revolution to the trivialization of the GDR’s political system. In the end, the self-evidence of the events being perceived in the East as a revolution, as described above, was quickly and permanently lost. Above all, political actors from the citizens’ movements insist on the term, which one could, of course, also construe as their attempt to increase the value of their own actions and to counteract the devaluation thereof by others. Revolutions in themselves enjoy a good reputation in Germany precisely because there have been so few of them. In turn, with this being the case, many who see themselves as losers in reunification no longer describe the events as a revolution because their hopes and wishes, no matter how realistic they were, were not fulfilled. Many say that, had the revolution been “real,” they would have had a different fate. And this assertion runs up against other sensibilities because many intellectuals and opinion leaders of the old Federal Republic are not hostile to revolutions—quite the

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contrary. They could not forgive themselves for having slept through a revolution on their own doorstep. So they simply continue to ignore it, which now has far more devastating consequences. These various reservations about the concept of revolution often overlap, although some are also mutually exclusive. This is not a contradiction because the defensive attitude has many causes and is not rooted in one social group alone. In history books, revolutions stand as prominent fixed points of historical developments, which at the same time mark a gradual new beginning. In cultural and everyday history, on the other hand, historical caesuras, which include successful revolutions, are usually only reflected in the medium or long term. People’s lives go on somehow; they personally preserve more than they give up. A quote attributed to Karl Marx in a letter to his friend Friedrich Engels of January 24, 1852, figuratively sums up this problem nicely: “This time the hemorrhoids attacked me more than the French Revolution.”14 In this respect, my account ends optimistically with the confidence that future researchers and interpreters will be surprised at how difficult it was in German society and historiography to characterize the events of 1989–90 as a revolution. This final section is itself an example of this simply because I thought I had to write it. Revolutions have their meaning in their negation of what came before, and in the restart they provoke, and in their search for new things. Successful revolutions definitely precipitate an ending and, at the same time, illustrate that history, even in apparent stability, never stops moving forward. But this also means that we can only comprehend our narrow present through our past—interpreted as history—without having knowledge of the future at the same time. What is certain is that history will always go on, just as it always has. The many end-times moods in history themselves, from the turn of the millennium a thousand years ago to the societies that seemed to shut down under communism, even prove, in retrospect, to have been drivers of historical development—drivers, of course, that not only escaped the awareness of contemporaries but also often ripped their heads off. Our today is gone tomorrow. Our house, too, is constantly changing, although we do not always notice. That is why an external view of the house is needed to trace the progress of history. The future remains exciting, its history no less so.

Notes 1. On the meaning of the cipher “1989,” see Ralf Dahrendorf, Der Wiederbeginn der Geschichte. Vom Fall der Mauer zum Krieg im Irak (Munich, 2004); for a discussion of this, see IlkoSascha Kowalczuk, “1989 in Perspektive: Ralf Dahrendorfs Antiutopismus,” Merkur 59, no. 669 (2005): 65–69.

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2. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “Qualmende Vergangenheit. Zur Debatte um die SED-Diktatur,” Vorgänge 45, no. 176 (2006): 108–25. 3. Ralf Dahrendorf, “Über einige Probleme der soziologischen Theorie der Revolution,” in Revolution und Theorie I. Materialien zum bürgerlichen Revolutionsverständnis, ed. Urs Jaeggi and Sven Papcke (Frankfurt/M., 1974), 169. 4. Ulrich Weiß, “Revolutionen/Revolutionstheorien,” in Lexikon der Politik, vol. 7: Politische Begriffe, ed. Dieter Nohlen, Rainer-Olaf Schultze, and Suzanne S. Schüttemeyer (Munich, 1998), 563. 5. Kurt Lenk, “Revolution,” in Handlexikon zur Politikwissenschaft, ed. Wolfgang W. Mickel (Bonn, 1986), 446. 6. Charles Tilly, European Revolution, 1492–1992 (Oxford, Cambridge, MA, 1993). 7. Lenk, “Revolution,” 447. 8. Weiß, “Revolutionen/Revolutionstheorien,” 564. 9. Hannah Arendt, Die Ungarische Revolution und der totalitäre Imperialismus (Munich, 1958), 11–12; Hannah Arendt, Über die Revolution (Munich, 1974), 184. 10. Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) (New York, 1957), 118–19. 11. Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Walter Benjamin, Allegorien kultureller Erfahrung. Ausgewählte Schriften 1920–1940 (Leipzig, 1984), 168. 12. Well worth reading is Joachim Fest, “Schweigende Wortführer. Überlegungen am Ende des Jahres 1989” in Joachim Fest, Fremdheit und Nähe. Von der Gegenwart des Gewesenen (Stuttgart, 1996), 211–19 (first published in FAZ, 30 Dec. 1989). 13. This point is made forcefully in Alexander Cammann, “1989—die ignorierte Revolution,” Ästhetik & Kommunikation 34, nos. 122/123 (2003): 123–29. 14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (Berlin, 1970), 28:12.

AFTERWORD TO THE 2022 EDITION From the Revolution in the GDR in 1989 to Eastern Germany in the Twenty-First Century

S The Revolution as a Photograph Worldwide, there are few events that bring people together. But there are some: 9/11, the moon landing, Kennedy’s assassination, Mandela’s release from prison, or even the fall of the Berlin Wall. TV, radio, photographs, videos, and, at least in recent years, the internet and social media make this possible. And such events inevitably make their way into popular culture as well. In her worldwide bestseller White Teeth (2000), British author Zadie Smith, for example, described how older people, captivated, watched the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, while their children looked on, bored. Authors from African countries expressed the hope that the fall of the Berlin Wall would also mean their own liberation and would contribute to the tearing down of walls and borders all around the world. And images of the fall of the Wall became icons burned into the world’s collective memory. The Brandenburg Gate, part of the Berlin Wall, was flooded with people on the night of November 9–10, 1989. One photograph is particularly famous: it depicts young people sitting on the Wall behind the gate, celebrating. There are several photos of this scene, and celebrants are bound to see at least one of these when the anniversary of the fall of the Wall is commemorated every year. While these images are touching, they likewise represent the suggestive power of photos, because these photos almost always show West Berliners, not East Berliners, on the Wall. That’s not a problem, of course, because West Berliners, too, had plenty of reasons to celebrate. But they were not liberated from the dictatorship, nor did they liberate themselves. It was not the Notes from this chapter begin on page 491.

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fall of the Wall but a breakthrough of the Wall that had been achieved jointly by the societies in Poland, Hungary, and the GDR. But these photos are supposed to symbolize East Berliners celebrating their accomplishment. Is it by chance that the photos depict West Berliners instead? Yes, often. Mostly it is merely a result of ignorance—it doesn’t matter. This is also true of a very famous photo of jubilant people opening a bottle of champagne on the night of all nights at the Berlin-Friedrichstrasse border station. Who can be seen? Young people from the left-wing alternative tageszeitung (taz) from Berlin-Kreuzberg, that is, from West Berlin. It’s nice that they’re happy, but the caption never states who they are. Of course, such symbolic photos show the mood that prevailed. But they do not always show what we think we see. The power of the photos often leads to assumptions that are not historically correct. The photo icons of the popular uprising on June 17, 1953, in East Berlin and the GDR are famous for this. Again and again, photos are reproduced that show Soviet tanks and stone-throwing youths trying to defend themselves from the tanks. Though both existed, they were not typical at all, even though they suggest as much up to today. The photos of October 9, 1989, in Leipzig similarly misrepresent what happened. It was the day of decision: would the SED use tanks against the peaceful demonstrators like their communist comrades in arms in China had? People were afraid of the “Chinese solution,” they were tense, fearful—and yet up to seventy thousand people flocked to downtown Leipzig to wrest freedom from the communists. Civil rights activists secretly filmed the mass demonstration from the church tower. The film, like the photographs, was smuggled out of the country and broadcast the next evening on the Tagesthemen, a mainstream (then West) German news program. This contributed enormously to mobilization. But they also suggest something that is still spread as a subtext about “1989” in many narratives today—that everyone was there, and everyone was for it. The question is, if “everyone” was there and everyone was “against” the system, why did they have to fight it? There was a heated debate about this in Germany a few years ago: who made the revolution happen, and who didn’t?1 In the photos, the state is almost always conspicuous by its absence, the superior power against which the people were trying to defend themselves. The narrative claiming that “everyone” was there also supports this. Yet revolutions, including the one in 1989, always involve minorities rising up against a minority with a monopoly of power in an effort to gain some of that power. The mass of society stands between these two poles, behind the curtain, and waits. It has always been this way in every revolution in the history of the world. But pictures fail to tell this story. There are no pictures of this overwhelming majority waiting in the wings. The present book is my effort to reconstruct the story behind the photos, a story that has almost no photos or film recordings to support it except for a few decisive moments filmed by courageous people, which then contributed enormously to mass mobilization.

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Freedom, Freedom, Freedom The first edition of this book was published in 2009 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the revolution against communism and for freedom. Not only was I involved from the start of the revolution, but, as someone born in East Berlin, I was also a contemporary witness and a political actor. For me, all that mattered was freedom, freedom, freedom. At last, it had arrived. I had won it myself, not received it as a gift. It was the most profound feeling of happiness I had ever had, the freedom I had won in 1989–90, “the wonderful year of anarchy,” as one book title sums up the attitude to life that many people, especially younger ones, had at that time.2 I could finally take off for far-flung places; I was young; the world was my oyster. I had suffered from the communist dictatorship—as a child, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I had been caught up in the wheels of the dictatorship, not because I was particularly conspicuous but because I just didn’t want to do things the way the communists wanted. In my mother’s presence, SED and state security agents told me at age fifteen that my best days were behind me. That was in 1982. My future did not look rosy. I had dropped out and did not march in step with them. That was a bad time for me. I became a bricklayer and worked as a porter; I was not allowed to study, not even to earn a normal high school diploma. Yes, I had a lot of hatred. But the country was not only the country of the communists—it was also my country. I didn’t necessarily hope to experience the fall of the Wall myself, but, I thought, you can’t make it that easy for them either. I was not afraid. That was my advantage. What else could I lose? I couldn’t lose anything more than my future. And I was lucky. Friends were in prison, one of whom is mentioned in this book, Martin Rohde, one of the last political prisoners convicted in the GDR. Some of them couldn’t stand it, escaped, and went to the West. But most of my friends stayed. We were young and having fun in a country that neither liked nor encouraged fun but rather always eyed it with suspicion. And then the Wall fell. No, rather, it was broken through by the brave people in Warsaw and Riga, Budapest and Prague, Moscow and Bucharest, Vilnius and Tallinn, and, of course, in East Berlin and Leipzig, Plauen and Dresden, Magdeburg and Halle. The powerful people in Moscow and Bonn, Washington and London, Paris and Rome may have watched events more intensively than usual, but no one had suspected it, and no one could do anything about it directly. People broke through the Wall, fought for their freedom—and the political West was just as overrun and surprised as the falling communist guard in the East. Nothing seemed impossible. It was just glorious for me and my friends who lived in East Berlin, and we felt it was natural for none of the old country to remain. What would be the point? The old country was no good. And the people? For us, it was all about the old elites, the former upper and middle managers in the state, the economy and society. To be sure, they had to go, all of them. I left

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no doubt in my public statements at the university and in the media from 1990 to 1992 that a tabula rasa was best for everyone. For everyone? Well, maybe not for the old elites. But I didn’t care about them. People like me hadn’t cared about them in the past either. I thought our oh-so-peaceful revolution would benefit from a little Jacobinism. Later generations, I believed, would ask us why we had been so soft and pliable. My anger, which I had pent up for many years, took a while to cool down, along with the moral rigorism it had provoked. I became a historian after 1990 and was one of the first to look into the archives of the SED and the Stasi, the communist mass organizations, and the state that we had fought so hard to make freely available. I studied too little ancient history or the history of Mesopotamia and took too little time studying the history of Venezuela, Mali, or New Zealand. Indeed, I am a very incomplete historian, but I had the chance to become an actor in an archival revolution. I wrote many books, some of which triggered debates in Germany. My specialty was actually the postwar period and the period up to the building of the Wall in 1961. For obvious reasons, I also did a lot of research on the opposition of the 1980s. So it was somehow obvious that I should write a book about the events on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Freedom Revolution. It literally flowed from my pen—I didn’t have to do much more than pour my knowledge into meaningful sentences. In just a few weeks, I had written the manuscript I had been working on my entire life. I think this much should be obvious. I am very pleased that this book is now also available in English. Although it was first published more than ten years ago, it is not outdated or obsolete. I have neither revised it for translation nor added to it. There is a very simple reason for this: the research situation has not changed since then. Many new studies may have appeared that describe particular regional events in more depth or more precisely, but the broad lines I traced in this book have hardly been questioned since then. However, I would not end the book with the first free elections on March 18, 1990, today. I explain why I originally did that in this book. But why would I not do so today?

Caesuras as Crutches Over thirty years of revolution for freedom against the communist dictatorship; over thirty years of democratic German unity: two historical periods that have engendered a great deal of discussion and debate. Only the events within these time frames ended the postwar period in Germany, they made the new Europe possible, but we do not yet know how they will be classified around the globe. We do not yet know whether 1989/91 (revolutions against communism and the fall/dissolution of the Soviet Union) or 1973 (oil price shock) or 2001

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(terrorist attacks on the United States) will come to be regarded as global caesuras or merely as defining caesuras in Europe, or perhaps some other event not named here will prevail instead. Caesuras are aids for mapping history, ordering it, structuring stories of the past. Rough caesuras such as 1989/91, 1973, or 2001 only provide a framework, which in itself is often made plausible by means of internal caesuras, depending on one’s research question and methodological approach. “Major caesuras” follow considerations of political history; at the same time, they are “permeable” because such caesuras almost never have an immediate impact on economic, cultural, psychological, and social structures, processes, and phenomena. Societies are often far too languid to follow the caesura-forming events adequately. This only happens in exceptional cases. Even in Germany, the caesuras of 1945, 1933, and 1918 were not definitively perceived as such at the time by everyone. For the caesura of 1989–90, historical research has not yet even problematized it. Yet it seems obvious that the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989, and, even more, the monetary union on July 1, 1990, had profound impacts on the lives of every East German. Thus, the caesura-forming character of both events is readily apparent. In Germany, the view of the country has changed considerably in recent years. The global financial and banking crisis of 2007 startled many who had long since reconciled themselves to capitalism. Wasn’t this the financial capitalism that leftists had always warned us about? The sociopolitical problems, social injustice, and poverty in the rich countries of the West showed how little capitalism had won just because communism had lost. The people fleeing to Europe and especially Germany provoked an identity crisis—not a so-called refugee crisis—in Europe. The division of society became apparent to all. And now eastern Germany, the area of the former GDR, came into focus. Why did radical right-wing, antisemitic, nationalist, fascist movements and ideas resonate more there?3 Was eastern Germany something like the melting pot of global problems?4

The Celebration Was Canceled Unified Germany devoted little discussion to the thirtieth anniversary of the East German revolution in 2019 or the thirtieth year of German unity in 2020. Although Chancellor Angela Merkel had appointed a government commission consisting of politicians and experts, of which I was a member, the results and proposals themselves were hardly debated publicly.5 To be sure, Covid-19 played a role in this, but a lack of celebratory spirit was even more decisive. In fact, a critical public debated the transformation of eastern Germany more intensively than ever before. The balance of power in Germany between East and West is as crooked as it has ever been—more than a generation after unification.

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The 1990 Campaign Promise Most East Germans had little to do directly with the breaching of the Wall. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of East Germans welcomed the monetary union on July 1, 1990, as they had the breach. The People’s Chamber elections on March 18, 1990, set the precedent for the fastest path to unity; the logical narrative is that about three-quarters of East Germans voted for monetary, economic, and social union with the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as the introduction of the West German constitutional system, including representative democracy. But this majority could not have known the dramatic consequences this decision would have. After the fall of the Wall, the fate of the SED and the GDR was sealed. The GDR was only conceivable as a political, economic, and social alternative to the Federal Republic. The election campaign was dominated solely by the question of how German unity could be shaped. The Alliance for Germany (a coalition of the CDU, DSU, and Democratic Awakening) stood for the fastest way to unity. Their slogan was: “Immediate introduction of the DM.” No one could offer more. The elections on March 18, 1990, were unambiguous: 75 percent of East German voters favored the parties supported by the West German CDU/ CSU, SPD, and FDP. British prime minister Margret Thatcher congratulated Chancellor Kohl on his election victory, which hit the nail on the head. The election outcome meant that a political, economic, and sociopolitical decision about the direction of the country had been made. The treaties that ushered in economic, monetary, and social union on July 1, 1990, accelerated this process, and the Unification Treaty reinforced it. The revolution had found its institutional corset. At the beginning of August 1990, Chairman Heinz-Werner Meyer of the German Trade Union Federation summed up what had been happening in the GDR since July 1: it seemed to him as if people were trying to change tires on a car speeding down the road.6 In 1989, the GDR had 9.7 million employees; by the end of 1993, that number had dropped to 6.2 million. Skilled workers accounted for about two-thirds of the unemployed, and about 20 percent were unskilled or semiskilled workers. More than half of the unemployed were female; during 1991, the proportion began to reach two-thirds. That is, female workers were the losers. In addition, the statistically calculated unemployment rate for the period 1990–94 only inadequately captures real unemployment in sociohistorical terms. Yet this was decisive for East German perceptions of the unification process. On the one hand, it put the working population under considerable stress because unemployment hovered over everyone as a threat. On the other hand, job creation and retraining measures and short-time work (which usually meant having zero hours until 1994) in the first half of the 1990s often meant nothing other than being or becoming unemployed in real terms. The measures often brought nothing and only frustrated job seekers even more;

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hundreds of thousands went through several “job creation measures” or retraining only to become finally and now officially unemployed after the “subsidies” expired. Short-time work was usually nothing more than a cipher for current “job loss” and future unemployment. Special forms of unemployment, which are usually underestimated for the mental process of unification, do not even find their way into the statistics: early retirement schemes, for example, took entire cohorts over age fifty-five out of the labor force so that they do not appear in the official unemployment statistics. In addition, the training market in the East collapsed dramatically as early as 1990, leaving a portion of youths and young adults with no prospects who are, likewise, not counted in the statistics. In other words, the unemployment statistics reflect only part of the problematic situation that is crucial for conducting a sociopsychological analysis of the transformation process. The social structure of eastern Germany changed fundamentally as Rainer Geißler described: After unification, the growth of the tertiary sector [services] continued at the expense of the secondary sector [industry and crafts] and the primary sector [agriculture], which had already shrunk considerably. The GDR’s considerable tertiarization gap— it lagged behind the Federal Republic by about 25 years—was eliminated virtually overnight. In the wake of the painful crises in East German industry and agriculture, a development that had taken 25 years in West Germany was made up for within three years.7

In 1989–90, about half of all employees in East Germany counted as “workers.” Soon it was less than a quarter. This development corresponded to a trend in Western industrial societies and was radically accelerated by the transformation process in a way that was atypical in the Western world at that time. Only years later would it become apparent that East Germany’s pace of change had not been unique but was to become generally typical in the age of globalization and digitization in the catch-up modernization trend. In a televised speech on the occasion of monetary, economic, and social union on July 1, 1990, Kohl expressed confidence that no one would be worse off than before and that “flourishing landscapes” would emerge everywhere. This is exactly what the vast majority of people in the East had thought, which had led them to make their electoral decision on March 18, 1990. They had had enough of experiments and looking at shop windows; now they wanted to live in the shop window themselves. The election results on March 18, 1990, indicated how willing East Germans were to trade dictatorship for new promises of salvation. Obviously, the East was fed up with the future. Hardly anyone wanted to wait for “someday” again. The future was supposed to begin now. For most people, freedom and democracy meant having “real money.” In principle, this was a situation in which Kohl needed to behave like the new patriarch, even if he did

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not want to. The election promises and the election behavior would be called populism today. Indeed, both were very popular.

Deceptions and Disappointments Most East Germans had entered 1989 with no hope that anything would change soon. Only a small minority was committed to change. A larger minority was so hopeless that they left, fled, and took great risks with their own lives. The widespread feeling was that one could expect nothing from this state. At the end of the year, the surprise and joy all felt, whether they participated actively or passively, was almost boundless; hopelessness had turned into pure happiness, though the absolute majority had not made this happen. Accordingly, in sharp contrast to 1989, East Germans went into 1990 and the subsequent reunification with very, very high expectations fed by a traditional belief in the state. This new state then also promised to bring them heaven: the glossy catalogs of mail-order companies and Western television advertising no longer seemed to be mere shop window promises but soon the reality of life. The West German state would see to that. Everything had changed for East Germans. Their nearly boundless hopes already contained a very high potential for disappointment because many were under the illusion that the state would take care of things. For many East Germans, merging with the West actually did lead to their happiness, their success, a life in freedom and prosperity that they had dreamed of or at least expected. But for many others, this did not happen. They were deeply disappointed not only because they had harbored exaggerated expectations but also because they did not get the chance to develop a life beyond state aid. Eastern Germany now appears to be a highly fragmented, deeply divided, internally fractured and disunited society, just as East Germany was before 1989. The example of East Germany exposes Germany and Europe’s greatest political error: assuming that those who are socially pacified and content would support democracy, freedom, and the rule of law—that is, Western values. This proved to be incorrect. To the extent that East Germans had arrived socially in the West, they began to distance themselves from it. Initially in the early 2000s, one-third to one-half of society used the PDS/Left, which had emerged from the SED, and other populists for this purpose; in the mid-2010s, they shifted to the AfD and its entourage. This reaction pattern is not unique to eastern Germany but can be observed in many regions of the world. Acknowledgment and disregard go hand in hand. When people do not feel acknowledged, they perceive this as disrespect. Acknowledgment is a prerequistie for self-acknowledgment. Acknowledgment is an often-underestimated precondition for living in freedom. All over the world, we see large social groups that feel unacknowledged, that perceive themselves as disadvantaged, that describe themselves as marginalized. The

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issue is not whether or not this is so—most of the time it is true—because the power of emotions is, in fact, more effective than any social statistics. Emotions connect; statistics leave people cold. Eastern Germany has fought a futile battle for self-acknowledgment to this day. In 1989–90, the division of GDR society seemed to have briefly been lifted, but this was an illusion. Even in 1990, the old political division became public, rapidly expanding and solidifying as new divisive tendencies emerged due to sociopolitical developments. For this reason, one cannot explain the situation today in eastern Germany beginning in 1990. One’s space of experience in eastern Germany in the twentieth century has depended on where one stood in the various state systems. The transformation process reinforced these divisions because the new leaders from the West, with their different experiences, attitudes, ideas, and approaches, set the pace and direction. There was no “mixing” of East and West; “Westerners” consistently appeared as superiors. “Easterners” perceived themselves as inferior, outclassed, and subaltern.8

Who Are “East(ern) Germans”? To distinguish the geographical area formerly known as the “GDR,” it is called eastern Germany in English today. Fewer people now live in this space (12.6 million) than in North Rhine–Westphalia (18 million), Bavaria (13 million), and only slightly more than in Baden-Württemberg (11 million). Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg together are somewhat as large as eastern Germany. But where do we count the 3.6 million registered residents of Berlin? In the former eastern part of the city (about 404 square kilometers), there are 1.5 million registered residents, whereas the western part (480 square kilometers) has about 2 million. Berlin illustrates the general problem in reflecting on whom to classify as east(ern) German: East Berlin belongs to east(ern) Germany, but at the same time Berlin has always occupied a special position, even since 1990. Many East Berliners moved to West Berlin districts after 1990. Even more people from former West Germany migrated to former East Berlin boroughs over the last decades. Residence as a criterion is ruled out due to intra-German migration: millions of former East Germans live in western states; hundreds of thousands of “West Germans” in eastern states. Migration inevitably leads to the next categorization problem: If place of residence cannot be a criterion, what about one’s origins despite place of residence? What if one’s parent or parents migrated to this place of residence? Specifically, what about western German couples whose children were born and raised in eastern Germany? What about those of their eastern German counterparts in the West? And finally, what about the children of couples where one parent has an eastern background and the other a western background? These questions do

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not even address “where to” then with all those who themselves or whose parents were born outside Germany. What about the women and men who went from the West to the East when they were perhaps twenty-five, thirty, or thirty-five years old in order to work in the eastern states after reunification and have lived there ever since? Are they still western Germans or not rather eastern Germans or the famous Wossis (Wessi + Ossi = Wossi)? Conversely, this would also apply to eastern Germans who live in the West. These questions pertain to categorization, not to sensitivities or personal experiences. I see no other solution than to “construct” “East Germans” as a category on the basis of common spaces of experience. Every kind of belonging to a social group is a construction. So what common spaces of experience might make someone seem East German? For people who grew up and lived in the GDR, this is quite simple. The standards of the state and society in which they were raised permeated everyday life: kindergartens, schools, apprenticeships, studies, businesses, income, consumption, culture, pension, language, media, tourism. Although individuals had a wide range of possibilities to escape the compulsion toward unity, all these and many other spaces of experience were very similar for everyone in the GDR. No one could escape the state’s desired uniformity; even the dropout knew it and dropped out precisely because of it. The limitation of experiential spaces constructed social positions that many did not like or even love, but from which they could not escape, not even by fleeing the country. “Guard and prisoner,” “master and servant” are key pairs in the story, chained together, much to the chagrin of those who are guarded or imprisoned. If the forced relationship breaks apart, as it did, for example, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the one side is still not rid of the other. This experience remains imprinted in one’s psyche. Even radical plans for a counter lifestyle arise from such an experience. And such experiences are passed on to those born later, whether or not one talks about them. In addition, East Germans’ common spaces of experience took on new contours after 1989–90: Even though everyone may have hoped and dreamed for something different, everyone collectively experienced having changed and even ended a state of affairs that had been considered unchangeable. Completely new, unexpected experiences were gained in this space and connected to the construction of the “East German” identity. In other words, people who had moved to eastern Germany do not count in this group because they did not share this experience. People have long been arguing about whether the time before or after 1989 was more formative. The effects of history do not align with caesuras in the way we would like to believe. For “East Germans,” reunification and thirty years of German unity comprise part of the experiences that shaped them. This space also contains many different, often contradictory experiences that did not necessarily have to be gained in eastern Germany either. One characteristic of East Germans was having to justify being East German. There were two common strategies: denying one’s origins or talking about them

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incessantly. “East German” is an attribution. It can appear as a self-description as well as a foreign description. Both have their justification because without groupings and attributions we cannot put the world in order. “East German” is an origin, a social place, an experience, for some even “home.” It represents an excluding demarcation. Many say that the distinction between East(ern) German and West(ern) German is superfluous. In principle, that’s true. More deeply rooted people who have lived in the district in which they were born since birth (50 percent of all people in Germany), will see things somewhat differently. They feel themselves to be Frisians, Sauerlanders, Lower Bavarians, Franconians, Hessians, Thuringians, Saxons or Anhaltinians, Dortmunders, Bochumers, Munichers, Berliners, or Rostockers. Sense of belonging usually increases with the specificity of a region but also—at least in the East—among East Germans. All opinion polls confirm this. Why is that so? It has to do with the common spaces of experience that East Germans shared and continue to share. And newcomers, often as superiors, do not get into these spaces. “East German” is not a matter of will, nor is it something that can be discarded. This has not stopped with those born after 1990. In this respect, insisting that the distinction has long since ceased to matter is a good indication of where the insister is from—almost never from East Germany. What is not regarded in this discussion is the fact—which is, however, discussed in scholarship—that “East German” is a construction, an “othering” that follows a logic of power and domination inherent in all societies and especially those in transition: in order to enforce a certain exogenous paradigm, cultural “justifications” are needed, and from there it is only a logical step to “othering.” I argue for a concept of “East German” that is based on social practice as a cultural space of experience, according to which “being East German” is determined by socialization through East German experiential practices that are closely tied to the years up to 1989 and the first ten to twenty years of transformation. For the future, I do think that the construction “East German” ought to be dissolved—eastern German is perhaps an effort to replace it, focusing on a stronger regionalization of experiential spaces that is no longer oriented toward the old system boundaries. Regionalization in globalization is a general phenomenon we can observe anyway.

No Farewell to the Federal Republic The revolution and reunification were not only constitutive of “East Germans.” The year 1990 also reinvented the Federal Republic, at least in its history, because Rhenish capitalists and Hamburg anti-capitalists suddenly found themselves on the same side of the barricade when it came to their spaces of experience and

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their attitudes toward the “old” Federal Republic. East Germans incidentally and unintentionally brought “West Germans” closer together in the 1990s. In the 1980s, the term “reunification” had become a lifelong lie of the Federal Republic. In almost every respect, the historical events caught the West completely unprepared. Social theorist Niklas Luhmann put it succinctly: “Reunification ended the idyll that was the Federal Republic.”9 His intellectual counterpart Jürgen Habermas had a similar view: “It’s not as if even one of our systemically generated problems was solved by the fall of the Wall.”10 When the FRG and the GDR united in 1990, there was a great deal of talk about a new Germany. In fact, hardly anyone between Flensburg and GarmischPatenkirchen thought that it was also time to say farewell to the Federal Republic as it had existed up to then. No one saw any reason to do so. Communism disappeared, Germany grew larger, and freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and capitalism had triumphed. What else was supposed to happen? What was supposed to change? You don’t change anything after a victory! That’s roughly what German soccer coach Joachim Löw thought after his team’s 2014 World Cup triumph in Brazil.

West German Self-Images Reflected in East German Constructions Arnulf Baring, a political scientist who was one of the most important public intellectuals in the Federal Republic for decades, warned in a bestseller in 1991 that the Federal Republic should be on guard against its “eastification,” as well as against “neglect” and “proletarianization.”11 In the East, he said, people did not know “single-minded, hard and proactive work.” No one remained in the GDR who was “energetic, determined, full of initiative,”12 he said, adding that the “regime dwarfed people for almost half a century, messed up their education, their training.” He then took the rhetoric up a notch, claiming that the GDR regime had wanted to educate “brainless cogs in the wheel, . . . assistants without will,” and felt that it had succeeded completely: “We can forgive the sins of those whose politics and character are burdened, forgive everything and forget. It won’t do any good; because many people are no longer usable because of their lack of expertise.”13 In other words, they are rejects! Arnulf Baring was not some crank or outsider; he spoke from the center of West German society; he virtually embodied it.

The Demand: “Adaptation” One could endlessly list examples of such generalizations and scandalizations. They confirm just how many influential West Germans were working on a construction called “East Germans.” The subtext of the “unification process” lies in

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such revelations. “West Germans” were essentially saying to “East Germans” that we, the Westerners, have a victorious system that is superior in every respect—in economic, political, and cultural terms, and even in terms of the people. You can’t help it, you were forced to become so “dwarfed,” in Baring’s term, and now we have to reeducate you. This was not called reeducation, of course; the catchword of the hour, day, and year, and of all the years since 1990, was “adaptation.” It was not exactly a pleasant euphemism for what happened in the following years and what was demanded of East Germans. Adaptation as a forced and desired process was nothing but a tacit reeducation program. Adaptation meant that East Germans had to become like West Germans. In fact, studies conducted during the transition period showed that East Germans’ values concerning love, family, discipline, honesty, and reliability did not differ significantly from West Germans’. They were even more traditional and reminiscent of the 1950s. Of course, there is no question that the East could not have pulled itself out of the muck on its own without the West and many West Germans in the East. In particular, the entire civil service at all levels could only have been installed so quickly and smoothly with West German experience. The issue here is not whether but only how. With the fall of communism, the West felt so emboldened in its being and essence that it believed its mission was now logically to mold the rest—or at least East Germany and Eastern Europe—in its image. Many West Germans who now came to work in the East still talk about it much like colonial adventure writers previously wrote about societies new to them: they were curious, condescending, and patriarchal. Fittingly, the West German civil servants and employees who worked in the East from 1990 onward called their salary increase a “bush allowance.” In general, West Germans marked almost everything that happened in the East as “different” and never pretended that what was “different” had equal value.

The Representation Problem The fact that the state and party apparatuses, the army and police, and the judiciary lost their top leaders was a logical consequence of the revolution. However, hardly anyone expected things to go much further in 1990. In fact, though, there was a very large-scale exchange of leaders, the likes of which no peacetime society in Europe had ever experienced. Three problems precipitated personnel changes: some of the executives in the technocratic leadership had, indeed, been politically discredited; in addition, the GDR’s entire public administration had been completely overstaffed; finally, reconstruction required employees who had internalized the West German legal, social, and economic order, making “reconstruction helpers” from the West indispensable. For many years, the availability

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of such helpers was seen as a clear locational advantage for Germany. Yet no one expected the East to become a career paradise for West Germans. Immediately after 1990, one of the most important tasks the state faced was rebuilding the public administration and the judiciary—two cornerstones of a liberal democracy. It was advantageous that the West German system simply needed to be transferred. Everything had to be rebuilt—from functioning labor and social welfare offices to municipal administration and a judicial system committed to the rule of law. In the East, there were no administrators or lawyers who could have shaped this setup. Elite recruitment is one of the most complicated and enduring chapters in eastern Germany’s transformation process. The East was in urgent need of these elites, without whose commitment reconstruction would have been impossible. And at the same time, these elites, not individually but as a closed group, posed one of the biggest problems; one could only gain access according to strict rules and selection criteria. They came not as equals among equals but consistently as superiors. For years, the authorities and public institutions at the state and federal levels in eastern Germany resembled a pyramid: the higher the posts in an institutional hierarchy, the less chance there was of meeting “East Germans.” Even today, it is said that there was hardly any alternative, especially by those who were at the top of the hierarchies. This may have been true for the judiciary and the police, but was it for technocratic offices as well? By 1995, municipalities, states, and the federal government had sent some thirty-five thousand West German civil servants to the East, either temporarily or permanently.14 Some were brought out of retirement, and some settled permanently in the East. Richard Schröder pointed out that the need for Western professionals cannot be lamented as disenfranchisement of East Germans because “no one . . . likes to sit in an airplane when he is told that the pilot is still learning.”15 While that was true, it was not true that there were no “pilots” at all in the East—that is, no potential leaders outside of political elective offices. Moreover, the West Germans sent there needed to learn, just as their East German counterparts did. But to deny Easterners the opportunity to do so is probably not what was theoretically meant by “at eye level” in the 1990s. It was a question of power, which, as Hannah Arendt has said, is either acquired or transferred. The Western experts sent to the East, who were called Aufbauhelfer Ost (reconstruction helpers for the East), were regarded as special “development aid workers.” These terms unmistakably express the superiority of the persons. Constitution or no constitution, the Aufbauhelfer Ost cemented the cultural and mental divides between “helpers” and “people in need of help” into the categories of Easterners and Westerners. This occurred for structural reasons. If those of “one heritage” constantly explain to those of the “other heritage” how things are done, this does not necessarily result in the “master/servant” pair but very much the “superior/inferior” pair, a patriarchal service relationship that cannot

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not be eluded. Even today, “reconstruction helpers” will relate that the stories they hear from “East Germans” “sound like robber pistols from another, an invented world.”16 Thus, even acknowledgment of the other comes across as part of a ritual of subjugation or simply as bombastic humiliation. That the arrival of these “reconstruction helpers for the East” often contributed to cementing prejudices—not universally, of course—is merely a marginal note in view of the inequality of life trajectories this practice structurally caused. “Reconstruction helpers” are an interesting Western category. They help out elsewhere so that “elsewhere” becomes just like what they know and already have at home—just as popular tourist destinations try to make people feel at home. This is exactly what the West German reconstruction helpers complained about: they did not feel at home. As noted, the reconstruction of the East was not possible without such helpers. Yet could politics have promoted a different mentality, a different culture of interaction? That’s difficult to answer, but in at least one crucial area, politics could have sent a clear signal that West and East now formed a new community for all Germans based upon the first all-German constitution, as the fathers and mothers of the Basic Law had intended in 1949 with Article 146. Even more necessary, of course, were career paths other than those hitherto known in the West being explicitly included as alternatives. This did not happen. The replacement of the functional elite, in some cases including midlevel management, was not a one-time event. Apart from the fact that no “natural” intermixing occurred in western Germany, the proportion of eastern Germans among executives actually fell. While eastern Germans consistently have remained significantly underrepresented at the top of government, business, and society since the 1990s,17 they have also steadily declined since then among upper and middle managers.18 In the top echelons, eastern Germans, who comprise about 17 percent of the population, are significantly underrepresented at 1 to 4 percent. But even in the upper and middle management groups in public administration, scientific institutions, universities and colleges, and the judiciary in the eastern states, the proportion of eastern Germans is barely a third on average in institutions in the East.19 The idea of reconstruction was not supposed to exclude East Germans from leadership positions, but, in the end, this is largely what happened. Angela Merkel, Joachim Gauck, Matthias Platzeck (head of the SPD in 2005/6), Johanna Wanka (the first East German to serve as a minister in a West German state, 2010 to 2013 in Lower Saxony), Erika Franke (general in the Bundeswehr), Karola Wille (MDR director), and Kathrin Menges and Hauke Stars (board members of DAX companies) are rare exceptions in top offices. The federal chancellor and the federal president even unintentionally contributed to the concealment of the problem because people pointed to them to emphasize that one could make things work after all if one “made an effort.”

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This strict replacement of the entire East German elite, the functionary and service class, the executives—not only of the top leaders of these groups—contributed significantly to the humiliation of some East Germans, including many not directly affected. It has been repeatedly pointed out in a positive light20 that many former GDR executives found jobs in the real estate, insurance, and finance industries, yet this does not even marginally touch on the problem of the exchange of East German elites. The argument is even cynical, especially since it was precisely in these areas that former SED cadres were sought in large-scale advertising campaigns at the beginning of the 1990s because employers were counting on their proven loyalty. It is particularly absurd and consequential that East Germans are not even represented among the elites engaged in the interpretation of things concerned with the East. “West Germans” argued about “East Germany” because only “West Germans” held positions of academic power that allowed them to be accepted as participants in the discourse (for example, there is no chair for GDR or communist history in Germany, and no research institute relevant to contemporary history has ever been headed by an East German since 1990). East Germans were (and remain) fence-sitters in academic debates about their own past because they hold at best low-level positions in academia. Even in fundamental debates about interpretive sovereignty, public influence, and, ultimately, financial resources, East German scholars were almost never involved because their sphere of action was not where sovereignty and influence were negotiated and listened to by others. The West German leadership mentality surprised East Germans. Some jokes reflected the displeasure and resistance of the “little people,” including the saying, “The Ossi is smart but plays dumb, while the Wessi has it the other way around,” which suggested an injured sense of East German self-confidence. Some even used now-discarded cultural capital and acquired knowledge for such jokes, like a German phrase in Cyrillic letters that decoded as, “Anyone who can read this is not a stupid Wessi!” These were desperate gestures that no one took seriously, although they deserved attention. To be sure, there was a clear call for West German elites and high executives to come to East Germany in 1990,21 but no one had asked them to come as fishermen dragging their nets behind them, covering every bit of East Germany. Their networks remained dominated by West Germans. As elites recruit from within, it proved impossible to break through their homogeneity to gain entry, and it remains so to this day. It is not a matter of individual failure. Within the career culture, it was simply clear that an eastern origin prevented acceptance. Of course, this was not because someone declared that East Germans should be marginalized. But East Germans were simply not represented in the spaces where elites recruited in private schools, business and entrepreneurial associations, carnival and high-income clubs, etc., because the Westerners who were there

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recruited those they already knew. In academia, East Germans were not part of the networks of West German professors. Almost all newly appointed professors brought their assistants from the West with them to the East. This had dire consequences. Elites and leaders are among those who interpret and provide meaning and explain and create identity. They play these roles regardless of where they come from. They set the pace, the direction, the volume; cohesion and cooperation depend decisively on them. They are the motivator or the killer of motivation. That’s why it’s part of any corporate culture not only to constantly train leaders but also to recruit them according to principles that do the most good for the community. In the East, these rules have been overridden. This was related to one circumstance in particular: recruitment took place exclusively according to criteria that had been applied in the West and recognized as successful; therefore, only Westerners were eligible because Easterners could not possibly meet the criteria. It is a misconception that it is a matter of effort. The elite problem is dire because, when it is analyzed, one finds not only that Westerners constantly explained to East Germans how things should be done but also that they explained East Germans’ own history to them. Two things come together in the East to make right-wing populism particularly aggressive there: its irreconcilable criticism of the “detached elites”22 and its equally relentless criticism of the West. AfD and Pegida do not have to point in two directions to point at the enemy there because the elite embodies both enemy images equally.

The Economic Takeover of East Germany In all written records of human history, we can read that our wise ancestors had nothing against change but always advised that it should not be excessive to avoid overwhelming people. According to the Athenian politician Solon in the seventh to sixth centuries bc, reforms need to be conceived of from their end, their effects. The new must be based on what society can endure and tolerate. Such considerations can be found again and again, whether in Max Weber’s ethics of responsibility or in the fundamental considerations of ordoliberalism, upon which Ludwig Erhard based the concept of the social-market economy. Social interests, he claimed, had to be weighed and balanced. Balanced politics avoids too much or too little change, seeking instead the middle ground. Such considerations played no role for East Germany after 1990. The model was simple: the East German economy would undergo a radical transformation and be made fit for the market economy, letting the chips fall where they may. The welfare state would absorb and cushion those adversely affected. The GDR economy was subjected to the most radical shock therapy in postcommunist Europe. The economic crash was immense. By October 1990, industrial production in East Germany had dropped to half over the previous year.

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From July 1, 1990, ten thousand jobs were lost every day. Everything collapsed in the East, while the West experienced an economic upswing—bad conditions for the mentality of unification and for stopping the East-West migration. The East German banks and savings and loan associations were all sold for far below their value to West German financiers (e.g., Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank). In total, West German banks spent 412 million euros buying GDR banks, acquiring old debt claims amounting to 22.25 billion euros in the process. This was one of the most lucrative deals because the banks not only bought the structures (buildings, land, customer records) for far below value, they also received the debts and credit claims. The profits piled up to many, many billions in this context. Just as the CDU and banks appropriated existing structures in the East more or less at prices that were politically and financially quite a bargain, so too did the major insurance companies (e.g., Allianz): they bought up the East German insurance industry dirt cheap and raked in corporate profits at entirely unprecedented levels. The same was done with the power grids, which were sold off to German corporations (e.g., Preussen Elektra, RWE, Bayernwerk), and also with the GDR’s daily newspapers. The chapter on unification-related crime, a term that was practically part of the name of a police agency from 1991 to 2000 (Zentrale Ermittlungsstelle Regierungs- und Vereinigungskriminalität, ZERV), has not yet been written. This remains a largely uncharted research field for historians. The gap between East and West has persisted for all the intervening years. The East’s process of catching up stagnated; since the mid-1990s, the East has been stuck at an economic output of about two-thirds that of the West; for some years now, it has even logged a slight decline in output. The governments that oversaw this rightly pointed to the incredible funds that had been made available, to the high transfer payments, and to how pretty eastern Germany began to look between the Baltic coast and the Ore Mountains. One can hardly contradict their most important argument—that living conditions were “equivalent”—when looking at the relevant statistics. However, this required an amendment to the Basic Law. Until 1994, Article 72 spoke of the “uniformity of living conditions”; only since then has the term “equivalence” been used. But the fact that in over thirty years of German reunification, eastern Germany has only come within 22 percent of western Germany’s economic performance and consistently remains at about two-thirds the level of productivity is quickly lost in these calculations. The reasons for this are complex. High social transfer payments were accompanied by ruthless privatization and a widespread renunciation of subsidies and state intervention. Global pressure made eastern Germany, with its high labor costs, unattractive to international investors. The western German economy saw only one sales market in eastern Germany. The effects of the booming construction industry were not sustainable. Nothing illustrates the tremendous gain in

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quality of life more than the modernized and restored cities, the recultivated countryside, and the ultramodern infrastructure of eastern Germany. That makes the economic situation all the more unnerving. The main reason for this probably lies elsewhere: eastern Germany’s economy has not received the hoped-for boost from a new middle class, and it operates predominantly as a site for outsourcing production tasks. No relevant corporate headquarters, no parent companies in large numbers, and hardly any industry-owned research and development centers are located in eastern Germany. Of the five hundred most important German companies, only seven are located in eastern Germany.

The Collapse of the Labor Society German unification is often portrayed as a technocratic process that consumed money above all. The total “transfer payments” since 1991 are valued at between one and two trillion euros. This is such an incredibly high sum that it seems almost irrelevant how high it really was. The GDR was a labor society, organized as an all-around care system, from the cradle to the grave. The complete collapse of East Germany’s labor society from one day to the next could only have devastating consequences. From this perspective, it is no longer the peacefulness of the 1989–90 revolution that seems miraculous but rather the region’s transformation process from 1990 to 2005. People lost not only their jobs but also social relationships and social cohesion that had largely been created and consolidated through work. Almost no aspect of GDR life was not closely related to work: income, leisure time, vacations, healthcare, care for the sick, pensions, children, friendships, love and sexuality, celebration culture, and high culture. The culture of values was essentially shaped from the sphere of work. Not only was this world completely foreign to the West Germans when they helped the East Germans arrive in the West from 1990 onward but, for the most part, it was impossible for them to perceive it at all. Indeed, they could not perceive it because it was institutionally destroyed before they experienced it. I am not idealizing these conditions—I hated them and withdrew from them in my youth, as far as the system allowed—but one must acknowledge them to understand what millions lost. Many people, myself included, regard the gain in freedom, the rule of law, and democracy as unreservedly positive, associated with no losses. Only a minority saw and still sees it that way. The vast majority saw these gains offset by losses. By this I do not mean the group of staunch SED communists, whatever their real number. This group is negligible in terms of social statistics. What I mean is the vast majority of GDR people who had settled in whatever form, who had been socialized in the system over years and decades, enjoying the pleasant aspects with them and tolerating the annoying ones. In

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1989–90, these annoying aspects were stripped away without this majority having taken action. From 1990 on, the pleasant aspects were also lost. The collective disintegrated, and individuals tried to reinvent themselves socially, which was difficult because there were no points of orientation or support. Not even the way to the doctor was the same. First, one had to choose the right insurance from among a dizzying array of options, and no one helped. Everything was disorienting and overwhelming. In such a situation, people look around and ask themselves what it was like in the past. Unsurprisingly, many now found that it used to be simpler, clearer, more nurturing.

The Lack of Understanding for East Germany In addition, many Westerners and some East Germans like me were uncomprehending and dismissive of this recollection. Ignorantly and arrogantly, they disregarded the fact that, with the demise of the GDR’s labor society, East Germans had also lost a large part of their life contexts and forms of organization—that is, their culture and quality of life. Scholars, politicians, and journalists almost universally measure quality of life in terms of key indicators: How technically equipped are households? What is the relationship between income and expenditures? Is there capital accumulation, and if so, how? Where do people travel? Such questions are important because they are important to most people, and such indicators can show well how many cannot participate. People in the East caught up insanely fast in consumption—in 1992, eastern German living rooms looked basically the same as western German ones, if perhaps a touch more modern because everything had just been purchased. The problem was that once people had everything they thought they needed, they were not any happier because they forgot the previous state faster than the new appliances broke or became obsolete—and as we all know, this happens pretty quickly.

Mobility as a Problem The mobility demanded of eastern Germans from 1990 represented a radical sociocultural break with previous, entirely immobile development. The incredibly fast pace of events in 1989–90 was seamlessly replaced by an equally fast pace of change and transformation. At the same time, there was one continuity that shaped eastern Germany quite decisively: departure. After 1990, eastern Germany lost hundreds of thousands of people, mainly young ones, which other regions of Germany benefited from. It seems indisputable that their absence is felt in many respects. From 1949 to June 30, 1990, more than five million East Germans left for West Germany. This corresponds

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to the population size of Norway, Ireland, or Finland. Intra-German migration did not end with state unification; by 1997, about 1.5 million more had moved. Despite immigration from the old Federal Republic, eastern Germany (excluding Berlin) had a total population of about two million fewer in 2017 than in 1991. Two demographic factors reinforce the pessimistic outlook for the future of eastern Germany in particular. The first is that rural exodus is on the rise—a typical trend for western societies that is particularly dramatic in eastern Germany. Second, chronic shortage of medical care is just one of many negative side effects. Moreover, the society overall is growing older here as in almost all of Europe, with only the (very special) population of Monaco older than that of Germany. The age pyramid of society puts a lot of pressure on the welfare state in Germany and much of Europe, and eastern Germany, in turn, is particularly affected due to mass migration after 1990. In all of the eastern German states, isolated areas with severely overaged populations are a normal part of social reality. This is not peculiar to eastern Germany either but a normal circumstance in the West of modernity. The radical nature of the development and the enormous speed at which it happened is, however, specific to eastern Germany, where the void appeared almost overnight.

What Next? East Germans carry around a heavy historical weight. Unlike West Germans, they had no collective experience of democracy and freedom before 1990. But longing for freedom and democracy does not mean knowing how they actually work and how arduous they are—far more arduous and exhausting than any other social form of communal life. If one has not learned this, it is difficult to accept the state that guarantees this form of life. One must also want to learn it. There was no democratization process in East Germany before 1990. What turned out to be even more fatal was that until the downfall in 1989–90, the communists constantly used terms like democracy, freedom, legal security, parties, and social security to explain, defend, and legitimize their system. No one could escape the perpetual ideological bombardment. A dictatorship, unlike a democracy, is not based on trust; it does not even need it. Democracy requires trust. If one has not learned this, it becomes difficult to accept democracy and to think or live democratically. Traditions and discourses have the peculiar property that they work and are powerful without our knowing them, recognizing them, or having to learn about them. Three such traditional strands of discourse—all closely related—appear to be particularly pervasive in eastern Germany: illiberal thinking, nationalism, and racism. They find expression in the call for a strong state and the longing for a “homogeneous society,” in the exclusion of ways of life that deviate from those that allegedly

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correspond to one’s own tradition. The vision of the future in these discourses refers to a homogeneous, intact, warm, and supportive society; it is not exposed to the distortions of the present, which, in the “vision,” already existed in all countries in the recent past. The call forward is deliberately presented as a step (or several steps) back. At present, it seems that eastern Germany’s path will culminate in authoritarian populism. As always in history, there are plenty of reasons for hope, because even in eastern Germany the majority has not yet firmly decided to defect to the populists but instead still clings to democracy and freedom. Nevertheless, a further shift to the right in eastern German society is likely. The biggest problem at present is that in many respects, when one looks at the way political actors have behaved and society has reacted, eastern Germany has always been only a few steps ahead of developments in western Germany and other parts of Europe. Above all, in its political development, eastern Germany appears to be a model of modernity and a laboratory of globalization that those who value democracy should take seriously. They must learn from this to prevent far more than “just” eastern Germany from floundering.

The Perspectives of Research More than thirty years after reunification, historical research into this event is facing a paradigm shift. The public view of a happy German reunification is changing. It is no longer solely about structural, economic, financial, and social data, as it was for more than three decades, but instead increasingly focuses on the cultural consequences of the reunification and transformation processes. This irritates actors, not least because “soft interpretations” and “hard data” often stand in an almost irresolvable conflict with each other. Up to now, those who participated in the unification process exercised interpretive sovereignty and were not prone to excessive criticism of their own affairs. For almost thirty years, anyone who criticized the consequences of German unification was regarded to be trivializing the SED dictatorship. This nonsensical reflex still exists, but to a lesser extent because the protagonists of unity quite naturally (and painfully) had to gradually hand over their interpretive sovereignty to the following generations. Another reason is that the technocratic calculations that politicians and conservative journalists like to make—namely, citing how many billions (trillions) were transferred from West to East in the course of the transformation process—no longer dominate as narratives and explanations (for what, really, apart from the effort to comply with the norms laid down in the Basic Law). And likewise, explaining eastern Germany’s economic weakness as a consequence of SED economic policy and the campaign of destruction against the middle class does not really hold water. This is no longer convincing, even

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if the structural and psychological consequences of the SED dictatorship cannot be ignored. This is exactly what recent research on East Germany tries to do: to put the period from 1970 to the present in context, which brings us back to my opening reflections on caesura questions. The balance after over thirty years of research on East Germany is ambivalent. For this research too, one observes what Voltaire noted in 1737: “If you speak to a Dutch mayor about the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, it is an unwise arbitrary rule; if you question a minister of the French court, it is wise politics.”23 Currently, in the scholarly community, we see that a new generation of researchers is entering the discourse space and setting new accents. Whereas historiography was previously criticized for the dominance of political history over all other methodological approaches, today one could object that political history hardly comes up in relation to the period from 1970 to 2021. For some years now, approaches based on nonwritten sources have been dominant, especially life history interviews. Studies along these lines not only focus on experiential spaces and mentalities but increasingly use interviews conducted “today” as sources for the reconstruction of historical lifestyles, ideas, and developments. This kind of positivism is irritating (especially to me as a historian), as much as a trivial display of plaster egg cups alongside plastic ones in a museum. Behind this lies an apparently newly assumed openness of the historical process after the local, regional, national, and global experiences of the last three decades. In this openness, the Western social order is no longer regarded as without alternatives and, above all, as more contradictory and futureless than it advertised and understood itself to be after 1989–90. In the search for alternatives, the GDR does not appear to be desirable, but “democratic socialism” certainly is. This would be understandable if it were not for the fact that some recent researchers have tried to uncover models for emancipation and alternatives, buried potentials, in both the political and social history of the GDR with which they seek to justify the very “democratic socialism” for which advocates in the GDR were locked up in prisons for years or chased out of the country. This tendency can be observed especially in recent research on East Germany since 1990. This newer field of research has hardly arrived in the field of history but is still dominated by the social sciences, with studies that take a critical view of the transformation process after 1990 predominating. From a historiographical perspective, one should note that very few researchers succeed in presenting and analyzing the developments and processes from both before and after 1989 equally convincingly. In the future, it will probably be even more important to take up the first available studies and to question the rigid caesuras in political history that have largely mapped history so far. For example, perhaps the caesura of 1973 (the oil price shock) might in the end be perceived as more decisive on a global scale than 1989. Of course, caesuras are also always defined on the basis of researchers’ concrete questions; the history of a baseball association will

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require different caesuras than the history of the spoon on Lake Erie. But both considerations, to the extent that they claim to have scholarly knowledge that is relevant beyond their subject matter, will embed the concrete developments and processes in larger contexts and orient themselves in relation to recognized caesuras. These are dynamic. Of course, 1989 will remain a central landmark in national, transnational, and global history, but it will also be relativized insofar as a narrow view is broadened, insofar as the national is abolished and the local and regional are situated within the global. Today I would say that the global caesura of “9/11” has long overshadowed “1989,” but “9/11” cannot be explained or understood without “1989.” Such caesura questions will have to occupy researchers in the future much more than they already have. Another field is comparisons, which are often demanded but only rarely presented synthetically rather than statically. History does not take place in a sealed-off space anywhere. No wall, no matter how high, can do that. It develops within contexts and dependencies. Even today, far too little attention is paid to the question of what influences the GDR and East Germany actually exerted on other areas. In relation to the Federal Republic, for example, it would be appropriate to ask to what extent the GDR challenged and influenced West German social policy. Although it is generally undisputed that the Federal Republic performed a showcase function for GDR society, it is necessary to examine what effects the existence of the communist state had on the Federal Republic in the “system competition.” In other words, how justified is (was) the talk of “system competition” actually? The broad field of social policy was particularly suited to this purpose. And this then led to the compelling question of what the transformation process in the East actually “did” in the West, what changes it brought about. It is obvious that there have been mutual convergence processes, for example, in electoral behavior or in the practice of religion. In addition to hard data, soft factors and questions of social culture are of particular interest. In this context, it would be a good idea to stop taking a foil (West) and to measure the adopted child (East) by how far it is now integrated, how assimilated its representatives are. It is about finally analyzing Germany as a unity in diversity, as a differentiated society beyond only East-West categories. Another research question that is obvious but has hardly been explored so far is, which traditions have continued to have an effect across epochs and system boundaries? This can be applied to practically any subject area, but a concrete example would be the history of the German Communist Party (KPD) and its surviving functionaries. The experiential space of Weimar has not yet been considered and analyzed as a prerequisite for the forms and methods of SED rule in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. In principle, one could hypothesize that the communists after 1945, in accordance with their sphere of experience,

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attempted not only to transfer structures, procedures, and mechanisms that the KPD had tested up to 1933 to the SED—this was obvious and has been suggested in some studies—but also to shape an entire state and society in accordance with these experiences. Did they not, as in the Soviet Union, transfer the party structures they were familiar with to the state and, above all (and a new consideration), to society? This raises completely new research questions, especially for the period since 1990, because such traditions do not break off “only” because of a political caesura; it broadens the possibilities of knowledge and perhaps even allows for (largely unpopular) counterfactual questions in German historiography. For these and other reasons, research on the period since 1990 could be freed by a new generation of researchers from the narrow corset of the history of the GDR, East Germany, and the history of its transformation after 1990, and could be made not only connectable to other historical phenomena but also exemplary in terms of method, theory, and content.

Concluding Remarks In this afterword, I have tried to show why I would now no longer let my book End Game end on March 18, 1990. I wrote a separate book about the thirty years after 1989 that had six print runs within a few weeks, indicating the need for discussion.24 On the other hand, March 18, 1990, was a well-chosen point for a caesura: something new really began afterward, politically, sociopolitically, socially, economically, culturally. My book End Game relates to how communism fell in Germany. My own joy about freedom has not been damaged at all. But many of my compatriots in the East have despised “freedom” like a worthless gift. They are not solely to blame for this because they were not revolutionaries. The West presented itself as the victor although it had not fought for the freedom of those subjugated under communism. Reunification then followed the classic pattern of othering. There was one dominant space, the Federal Republic, where the norms were set and cast as universal. And these norms and values had to be transformed and transported into the “empty space” of East Germany. Although this space was not empty, of course, it was treated as if it had been, which only works if one reconstructs what existed there before. One homogenizes the space, pretending that everything in that space—from north to south, from east to west—is uniform. Out of this, two groups are construed: there are those who resisted this system until 1989, who are used as legitimators of the new, and there are those who represented the old system and now continue to cling to it. These latter are cast as the living proof of the necessary delegitimization of the whole, and the masses in between are simply

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homogenized. This is exactly what happened. The drawing boards of power generated a homogenized space of East Germany and a homogenized population of the East Germans. While they gained freedom, they lost social and cultural positions. No one was ever able to give these back to them—a loss that still feels like a phantom pain today. The Westerners who first came to the East all came as superiors. From general business research, we know very well what such power relationships mean and do. The culture of growing together generally meant that one side should become like the other already was, or at least believed it was. Politically, this may be explainable, but culturally, such an approach is a disaster. This is also reflected in the completely naive demand (which is interesting from a discursive perspective) that has been made for three decades: “We have to tell each other our biographies.” In fact, behind this is not the demand that every person from Wanne-Eickel in the West tell me his story in East Berlin. Rather, behind it is the demand that the person who has moved to the West—that is, the East German—tell his story to the majority society in the West. But that should also be the case in reverse when a Westerner moves East. But when this did happen, it was not the newcomer who had to explain himself but the long-established person who had to tell his story to the Westerner so that the latter would accept it. The reverse was not true; it did not even matter. The West, the majority society, listens to the story, takes note of it benevolently, and approves or disapproves of it. In other words, the majority society decides who is accepted and who is not. This is why the biographies are to be told. It is not about a mutual understanding and getting to know each other; it was a one-way street, which was the case from the very beginning. Of course, that sounds like a master plan, but there was no such thing. These are social and cultural production processes that simply take place in such powerful discourses and ultimately power relationships. The processes we observe in East Germany but also elsewhere in the former communist Eastern Bloc by no means happen there in isolation; we can observe them all over the world. We also see them in Denmark, the Netherlands, England, Brazil, the United States, Spain, Italy, and France. More and more, people seem to be realizing that “catch-up modernization,” as Habermas called it, in East Germany and Eastern Europe may have prompted a precipitous radicalization. A close look at the East could have an anticipatory effect, perhaps to prevent the East from conquering the West. The East could still be subjected to a process of Westernization, but this would only be positive if the West were to begin to self-critically weigh its past as an imperial hegemon, as a colonialist and racist nation, and as a standard-setter against the scales of a complex present, as well as against its ideals of freedom, the rule of law, and democracy. To strengthen the latter, it must radically overcome the former—in the East it could try this out, just as it tried out other things after 1990.

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Notes 1. This debate is documented at https://www.havemann-gesellschaft.de/themen-dossiers/streitum-die-revolution-von-1989/. 2. Christoph Links, Sibylle Nitsche, and Antje Taffelt, eds., Das wunderbare Jahr der Anarchie. Von der Kraft des zivilen Ungehorsams 1989/90 (Berlin, 2009). 3. Christian Bangel, Baseballschlägerjahre, https://www.zeit.de/2019/46/neonazis-jugend-nach wendejahre-ostdeutschland-mauerfall (2019). 4. See, for example, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Die Übernahme. Wie Ostdeutschland Teil der Bundesrepublik wurde, 6th ed. (Munich, 2019); Steffen Mau, Lütten Klein. Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft (Berlin, 2019); Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Frank Ebert, and Holger Kulick, eds., (Ost)Deutschlands Weg. 45 Studien & Essays zur Lage des Landes. Teil I—1989 bis heute (Berlin, Bonn, 2021); Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Frank Ebert, and Holger Kulick, eds., (Ost)Deutschlands Weg. 35 weitere Studien, Prognosen & Interviews. Teil II—Gegenwart und Zukunft (Berlin, Bonn, 2021); Judith C. Enders, Raj Kollmorgen, and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, eds., Deutschland ist eins: vieles. Bilanz und Perspektiven von Vereinigung und Transformation (Frankfurt/M., New York, 2021); Thomas Großbölting, Wiedervereinigungsgesellschaft. Aufbruch und Entgrenzung in Deutschland seit 1989/90 (Bonn, 2020); Everhard Holtmann, ed., Die Umdeutung der Demokratie. Politische Partizipation in Ost- und Westdeutschland (Frankfurt/M., New York, 2019); Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, Das Licht, das erlosch. Eine Abrechnung (Berlin, 2019); Philipp Ther, Die neue Ordnung auf dem alten Kontinent. Eine Geschichte des neoliberalen Europa. Aktualisierte Ausgabe (Berlin, 2016); Marcus Böick, Die Treuhand. Idee—Praxis—Erfahrung, 1990–1994 (Göttingen, 2018); Philipp Ther et al., eds., Jahrbuch Deutsche Einheit (Berlin, 2020); Kerstin Brückweh et al., eds., Die lange Geschichte der “Wende.” Geschichtswissenschaft im Dialog (Berlin, 2020). 5. The final report can be found at https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/downloads/DE/veroef fentlichungen/2020/abschlussbericht-kommission-30-jahre.html. 6. Qtd. in Ulrike Füssel, “Ein Reifenwechsel in voller Fahrt. Die Lage in den DDR-Betrieben ist schlimmer als befürchtet,” Frankfurter Rundschau, August 8, 1990. 7. Rainer Geißler, Die Sozialstruktur Deutschlands. Aktuelle Entwicklungen und theoretische Erklärungsmodelle (Bonn, 2010), 16. 8. For details, see Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Die Übernahme. Wie Ostdeutschland Teil der Bundesrepublik wurde, 6th ed. (Munich, 2019). 9. Niklas Luhmann, “Immer noch Bundesrepublik? Das Erbe und die Zukunft,” in BRD ade! Vierzig Jahre in Rück-Ansichten von Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaftlern, ed. Otthein Rammstedt and Gert Schmidt (Frankfurt/M., 1992), 99. 10. Jürgen Habermas, “Nachholende Revolution und linker Revisionsbedarf. Was heißt Sozialismus heute?” in Jürgen Habermas, Die nachholende Revolution. Kleine politische Schriften VII (Frankfurt/M., 1990), 197. 11. Arnulf Baring, Deutschland, was nun? Ein Gespräch mit Dirk Rumberg und Wolf Jobst Siedler (Berlin, 1991), 50–51. 12. Ibid., 55. 13. Ibid., 59. 14. Deutscher Bundestag, 13. WP, Materialien zur Deutschen Einheit und zum Aufbau in den neuen Bundesländern, Drucksache 13/2280 vom 8. 9. 1995, p. 65. 15. Richard Schröder, Irrtümer über die deutsche Einheit, exp. and rev. ed. (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna, 2014), 191. 16. Claus Peter Müller, “Wartburg mit Chauffeur,” FAZ, October 2, 2010. 17. For details, see Raj Kollmorgen, “Aus dem Osten an die Spitze? Ostdeutsche in den bundesdeutschen Eliten,” Berliner Debatte Initial 26, no. 2 (2015): 17–33; expanded and updated,

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Raj Kollmorgen, “Außenseiter der Macht. Ostdeutsche in der bundesdeutschen Elite,” in Ein Vierteljahrhundert Deutsche Einheit. Facetten einer unvollendeten Integration, ed. Ulrich Busch and Michael Thomas (Berlin, 2015), 189–220. Jürgen Angelow, Entsorgt und ausgeblendet. Elitenwechsel und Meinungsführerschaft in Ostdeutschland, 2nd exp. ed. (Potsdam, 2017), 83. For a persuasive account, also concerning the question of empirical validity, see Raj Kollmorgen, “Die falsche Therapien,” ZEIT im Osten, no. 16/2019, 11 April 2019 (https://www.zeit .de/2019/16/ost-quote-fuehrungspositionen-ostdeutsche-herkunft-chancengleichheit). Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2014), 1156. Siegfried Grundmann, “Zur Akzeptanz und Integration von Beamten aus den alten in den neunen Bundesländern,” Deutschland Archiv 27, no. 1 (1994), esp. the tables on pp. 35–37. Michael Hartmann, Die Abgehobenen. Wie die Eliten die Demokratie gefährden (Frankfurt/M., New York, 2018), 26. Voltaire, “Über die Geschichte. Ratschläge an einen Journalisten (1737),” in Moderne Historiker. Klassische Texte von Voltaire bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Fritz Stern and Jürgen Osterhammel (Munich, 2011), 70. Kowalczuk, Die Übernahme.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY The following bibliography does not begin to reflect the state of research, nor does it come close to including all the primary and secondary literature I drew upon in preparing this account. If one wanted to also consider syntheses, regional studies, eyewitness accounts, memoirs, document editions, and the work on the international framework, as well as to incorporate in a balanced way works on topics such as the MfS, the opposition and resistance, culture, or economics, even such a selection would quickly have to include hundreds of titles. And if one wanted to further include scholarly journals and periodicals of the reappraisal landscape, one would generate a bibliography that would probably surpass the present book in scope. In the following, I have limited myself to a few books that seem to me to be suitable for deepening individual facets of this historical era. An outstanding bibliography on the topic: Eckert, Rainer. SED-Diktatur und Erinnerungsarbeit im vereinten Deutschland. Eine Auswahlbibliographie. Halle/Saale, 2019.

Select Bibliography Ahbe, Thomas, Michael Hofmann, and Volker Stiehler, eds. Redefreiheit. Öffentliche Debatten der Bevölkerung im Herbst 1989. Leipzig, 2014. Ash, Timothy Garton. The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe. London, 1991. ———. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague. New York, 1993. ———. In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent. New York, 1994. Auerbach, Thomas. Vorbereitung auf den Tag X. Die geplanten Isolierungslager des MfS. 3rd ed. Berlin, 2000. Bickhardt, Stephan, ed. In der Wahrheit leben. Texte von und über Ludwig Mehlhorn. Leipzig, 2012. Birthler, Marianne. Halbes Land. Ganzes Land. Ganzes Leben: Erinnerungen. Berlin, 2014. Bohley, Bärbel. Englisches Tagebuch 1988. Berlin, 2011. Boyer, Christoph, ed. Geschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutschland seit 1945. Vol. 10: 1971– 1989. DDR: Bewegung in der Sozialpolitik, Erstarrung und Niedergang. Baden-Baden, 2008. Bozo, Frederic, Andreas Rödder, and Mary Elise Sarotte, eds. German Reunification: A Multinational History. New York, 2017. Brauhnert, Paul, Ilja Hübner, and Arno Polzin, eds. Der DDR-Militärstrafvollzug und die Disziplinareinheit in Schwedt (1968–1990). Zeitzeugen brechen ihr Schweigen. Berlin, 2013.

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Camarade, Hélène, and Sibylle Goepper, eds. Résistance, dissidence et opposition en RDA 1949– 1990. Histoire et civilisations. Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2016. Dahrendorf, Ralf. Der Wiederbeginn der Geschichte. Vom Fall der Mauer zum Krieg im Irak. Munich, 2004. Dalos, György. Der Vorhang geht auf. Das Ende der Diktaturen in Osteuropa. Munich, 2009. Dietrich, Christian, and Uwe Schwabe, eds. Freunde und Feinde. Friedensgebete in Leipzig zwischen 1981 und dem 9. Oktober 1989. Leipzig, 1994. Ebert, Frank, and Anja Schröter, eds. Gegenentwurf. Ausschnitte deutscher Demokratiegeschichte. Berlin, 2020. Eckert, Rainer. Opposition, Widerstand und Revolution. Widerständiges Verhalten in Leipzig im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Halle, 2014. ———. Revolution in Potsdam. Eine Stadt zwischen Lethargie, Revolte und Freiheit (1989/1990). Leipzig, 2017. Eichwede, Wolfgang, and Jan Pauer, eds. Ringen um Autonomie. Dissidentendiskurse in Mittelund Osteuropa. Berlin, Münster, 2017. Eisenfeld, Bernd, and Peter Schicketanz. Bausoldaten in der DDR. Die “Zusammenführung feindlich-negativer Kräfte” in der NVA. Berlin, 2011. Engelmann, Roger, et al., eds. Das MfS-Lexikon. Begriffe, Personen und Strukturen der Staatssicherheit der DDR. 4th updated ed. Berlin, 2021. Findeis, Hagen, and Detlef Pollack, eds. Selbstbewahrung oder Selbstverlust. Bischöfe und Repräsentanten der evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR über ihr Leben. 17 Interviews. Berlin, 1999. Fischer, Ilse, ed. “Die Einheit sozial gestalten.” Dokumente aus den Akten der SPD-Führung 1989/90. Bonn, 2009. Florath, Bernd, ed. Das Revolutionsjahr 1989. Die demokratische Revolution in Osteuropa als transnationale Zäsur. Göttingen, 2011. Fricke, Karl Wilhelm. Der Wahrheit verpflichtet. Texte aus fünf Jahrzehnten zur Geschichte der DDR. Berlin, 2000. Führer, Christian. Und wir sind dabei gewesen. Die Revolution, die aus der Kirche kam. Berlin, 2009. Galenza, Ronald, and Heinz Havemeister, eds. Wir wollen immer artig sein . . . Punk, New Wave, HipHop, Independent-Szene in der DDR 1980–1990. 2nd ed. Berlin, 1999. Galkin, Alexsandr, and Anatolij Tschernjajew, eds. Michail Gorbatschow und die deutsche Frage. Sowjetische Dokumente 1986–1991. Munich, 2011. Gieseke, Jens. Mielke-Konzern. Die Geschichte der Stasi 1945–1990. 3rd ed. Munich, 2011. Göbel, Jana, and Matthias Meisner, eds. Ständige Ausreise. Schwierige Wege aus der DDR. Berlin, 2019. Gransow, Volker, and Konrad H. Jarausch, eds. Uniting Germany: Documents and Debates, 1944–1993. New York, 1994. Großbölting, Thomas. Wiedervereinigungsgesellschaft. Aufbruch und Entgrenzung in Deutschland seit 1989/90. Bonn, 2020. Großmann, Thomas. Fernsehen, Revolution und das Ende der DDR. Göttingen, 2015. Gutzeit, Martin, Helge Heidemeyer, and Bettina Tüffers, eds. Opposition und SED in der Friedlichen Revolution. Organisationsgeschichte der alten und neuen Gruppen 1989/90. Düsseldorf, 2011. Halbrock, Christian. “Freiheit heißt, die Angst verlieren.” Verweigerung, Widerstand und Opposition in der DDR: Der Ostseebezirk Rostock. Göttingen, 2014.

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———. Weggesprengt. Die Versöhnungskirche im Todesstreifen der Berliner Mauer 1961–1985. Berlin, 2008. Hauswald, Harald, and Lutz Rathenow. Ost-Berlin. Leben vor dem Mauerfall. With an introduction by Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk. 8th rev. and exp. ed. Berlin, 2019. Henke, Klaus-Dietmar, ed. Revolution und Vereinigung 1989/90. Als in Deutschland die Realität die Phantasie überholte. Munich, 2009. ———, ed. Die Mauer. Errichtung, Überwindung, Erinnerung. Munich, 2011. Hertle, Hans-Hermann. Der Fall der Mauer. Die unbeabsichtigte Selbstauflösung des SEDStaates. Opladen, 1996. Hertle, Hans-Hermann, and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, eds. Das Ende der SED. Die letzten Tage des Zentralkomitees. 6th updated ed. Berlin, 2014. Hilger, Andreas, ed. Diplomatie für die deutsche Einheit. Dokumente des Auswärtigen Amtes zu den deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen 1989/90. Munich, 2011. Hoffmann, Ruth. Stasi-Kinder. Aufwachsen im Überwachungsstaat. Berlin, 2012. Hollitzer, Tobias, and Sven Sachenbacher, eds. Die Friedliche Revolution in Leipzig. Bilder, Dokumente und Objekte. 2 vols. Leipzig, 2012. Hollitzer, Tobias, and Reinhard Bohse, eds. Heute vor 10 Jahren. Leipzig auf dem Weg zur Friedlichen Revolution. Bonn, 2000. Hübner, Peter. Arbeit, Arbeiter und Technik in der DDR 1971 bis 1989. Mit einem Essay von Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk über die Arbeiter in der Revolution 1989/1990. Geschichte der Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts 15, edited by Gerhard A. Ritter, Bonn, 2014. Huff, Thomas. Natur und Industrie im Sozialismus. Eine Umweltgeschichte der DDR. Göttingen, 2015. Hürtgen, Renate. Ausreise per Antrag: Der lange Weg nach drüben. Eine Studie über Herrschaft und Alltag in der DDR-Provinz. Göttingen, 2014. Jäger, Wolfgang. Die Überwindung der Teilung. Der innerdeutsche Prozess der Vereinigung 1989/90. Geschichte der deutschen Einheit in vier Bänden, vol. 3. Stuttgart, 1998. Jäger, Wolfgang, and Ingeborg Villinger. Die Intellektuellen und die deutsche Einheit. 2nd ed. Freiburg i. B., 1997. Jankowski, Martin. Der Tag, der Deutschland veränderte. 9. Oktober 1989. Leipzig, 2007. Jarausch, Konrad H., and Martin Sabrow, eds. Weg in den Untergang. Der innere Zerfall der DDR. Göttingen, 1999. Jaskulowski, Tytus, ed. Nachrichten aus einem Land, das doch existierte. Lageberichte aus den Bezirken für die letzte DDR-Regierung 1990. Berlin, 2012. Joestel, Frank, ed. Die DDR im Blick der Stasi 1988. Die geheimen Berichte an die SED-Führung. Göttingen, 2010. Judt, Matthias, ed. DDR-Geschichte in Dokumenten. Beschlüße, Berichte, interne Materialien und Alltagszeugnisse. Berlin, 1997. Karner, Stefan, et al., eds. Der Kreml und die Wende. Interne Analysen der sowjetischen Führung zum Fall der kommunistischen Regime. Dokumente. Innsbruck, Vienna, Bolzano, 2014. Kästner, Cornelia, ed. Wachet und betet. Herbst ’89 in der Gethsemanekirche. 20 Jahre danach. Berlin, 2009. Klein, Thomas. “Frieden und Gerechtigkeit.” Die Politisierung der Unabhängigen Friedensbewegung in Ost-Berlin während der 80er Jahre. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2007. Klier, Freya. Abreiß-Kalender. Versuch eines Tagebuchs. Munich, 1988.

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Kloth, Hans-Michael. Vom “Zettelfalten” zum freien Wählen. Die Demokratisierung der DDR 1989/90 und die “Wahlfrage.” Berlin, 2000. Kneipp, Danuta. Im Abseits. Berufliche Diskriminierung und politische Dissidenz in der HoneckerDDR. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2009. Kobylinski, Alexander. Der verratene Verräter. Wolfgang Schnur: Bürgerrechtsanwalt und Spitzenspitzel. Halle, 2015. Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha. Stasi konkret. Überwachung und Repression in der DDR. Munich, 2013. ———. “‘It’s Only Rock’n’Roll’? The Rolling Stones und der SED-Staat.” In Gefängnis statt Rolling Stones. Ein Gerücht, die Stasi und die Folgen, edited by BstU, 5–15. Berlin, 2014. ———. Die Übernahme. Wie Ostdeutschland Teil der Bundesrepublik wurde. 6th ed. Munich, 2019. ———. “Bemerkungen zur Zukunft der Historischen Kommunismusforschung in Deutschland.” Forum. Das Fachmagazin des Bundesarchivs (2020): 53–67. Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha, ed. Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit. Politischer Samisdat in der DDR 1985 bis 1989. Berlin, 2002. Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha, Frank Ebert, and Holger Kulick, eds. (Ost)Deutschlands Weg. 45 Studien & Essays zur Lage des Landes. Teil I—1989 bis heute. Berlin, Bonn, 2021. ———, eds. (Ost)Deutschlands Weg. 35 weitere Studien, Prognosen & Interviews. Teil II— Gegenwart und Zukunft. Berlin, Bonn, 2021. Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha, Judith C. Enders, and Raj Kollmorgen, eds. Deutschland ist eins: vieles. Bilanz und Perspektiven von Vereinigung und Transformation. Frankfurt/M., New York, 2021. Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha, and Arno Polzin. Fasse Dich kurz! Der grenzüberschreitende Telefonverkehr der Opposition in den 1980er Jahren und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. Göttingen, 2014. Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha, and Tom Sello, eds. “Für ein freies Land mit freien Menschen.” Opposition und Widerstand in Biographien und Fotos. Berlin, 2006. Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha, and Stefan Wolle. Roter Stern über Deutschland. Sowjetische Truppen in der DDR. 2nd rev. ed. Berlin, 2010. Krawczyk, Stephan. Der Himmel fiel aus allen Wolken. Eine deutsch-deutsche Zeitreise. Leipzig, 2009. Krone, Tina, ed. “Sie haben so lange das Sagen, wie wir das dulden.” Briefe an das Neue Forum September 1989–März 1990. Berlin, 1999. Küchenmeister, Daniel, ed. Honecker—Gorbatschow. Vieraugengespräche. Berlin, 1993. Kucher, Katharina, Gregor Thum, and Sören Urbansky, eds. Stille Revolutionen. Die Neuformierung der Welt seit 1989. Frankfurt/M., New York, 2013. Kuczynski, Ernest, ed. Im Dialog mit der Wirklichkeit. Annäherungen an Leben und Werk von Jürgen Fuchs. Halle, 2014. Kuhrt, Eberhard, ed. Die wirtschaftliche und ökologische Situation der DDR in den achtziger Jahren. Opladen, 1996. ———, ed. Die Endzeit der DDR-Wirtschaft. Analysen zur Wirtschafts-, Sozial- und Umweltpolitik. Opladen, 1999. ———, ed. Opposition in der DDR von den 70er Jahren bis zum Zusammenbruch. Opladen, 1999. Kukutz, Irena. Chronik der Bürgerbewegung Neues Forum 1989–1990. Berlin, 2009.

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INDEX

1 FC Union (soccer), 12, 169 9/11, 465, 468–469, 488 Abuladze, Tengis, 53–54, 62 Achmatowa, Anna A., 117 Adams, Bryan, 129–130 Addis Abeba, 63 Adenauer, Konrad, 68 Adorno, Theodor W., 113 Afghanistan, 15, 21, 321 agriculture, 90 Ahnfeld, Lutz, 399, 444 Ahrendt, Lothar, 402–403 Aitmatov, Tschingis, 112 Albani, Bernd, 331 Albania, 398 Albrecht, Ernst, 314 alcoholism, 140 Alliance for Germany, 442–443, 445–447, 470 Allianz, 482 Altefähr, 266 Altenberg, 395 Altenburg, 271, 307 Altentreptow, 125 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 472, 481 Anderson, Sascha, 211, 219, 233 Andreyeva, Nina, 61–62 Andropov, Juri V., 17 Anger (band), 125 Angola, 89 Angry (band), 125 Anklam, 267 Annaberg, 378 antifascism, 36–39, 241, 355, 431 antisemitism, 132–134, 136, 469 Anti-Trott (band), 125 Antonescu, Ion, 52 Apfeld, Wolfgang, 263 Armenia, 71, 275

army. See Nationale Volksarmee Arafat, Yasser, 321 Arbeiter- und Bauerninspektionen, 31 Arbeitsgruppe Staatsbürgerschaftsrecht der DDR, 213 Arbeitskreis Solidarische Kirche, 196–197, 205, 210, 216, 228–229, 254, 261, 266, 280 Ardenne, Manfred von, 399 Arendt, Hannah, 197, 456, 478 Arnold, Michael, 254, 266, 296, 300 Arnstadt, 320, 326 Aschersleben, 326 Ash, Timothy Garton, 6, 22, 105, 234, 461 Aue, 11, 13 Auerbach, Thomas, 164 Aurich, Eberhard, 130, 244, 345–346 Auschwitz, 134–135, 294 Austria, 64, 268, 288, 291–292, 313, 387 Autumn in Beijing (band), 125, 279–280 Axen, Hermann, 203, 275, 315 Azerbaijan, 71, 275 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 386 Bad Brambach, 318 Bad Elster, 423 Bad Schandau, 318 Bad Wilsnack, 227 Baden-Württemberg, 473 Baehr, Vera-Maria, 392 Baez, Joan, 218 Bahr, Egon, 15, 72–73, 80, 85, 178, 447–448 Bahro, Rudolf, 114, 261 Banaschak, Manfred, 381 BAP (band), 129, 217 Barbe, Angelika, 325 Barcelona, 12 Barclay James Harvest, 129 Baring, Arnulf, 476–477

502 | Index

Barth, 127 Barth, Bernd-Rainer, 203 Bartoszek, Michael, 299, 438 Bassarak, Gerhard, 226 Bastian, Gert, 201 Bauer, Conny, 305 Baum, Karl-Heinz, 269 Bautzen, 156, 159, 254, 351, 367 Bavaria, 68, 78, 473, 475 Bebel, August, 290 Becher, Johannes R., 116 Becker, Boris, 145 Becker, Helmut, 298 Beckett, Samuel, 119 Beckmann, Lukas, 201 Beijing, 277–279, 282–283 Beleites, Michael, 195 Belgium, 64 Belgrade, 63 Bender, Peter, 68–69, 72 Bengsch, Alfred, 171 Benjamin, Hilde, 403 Benjamin, Walter, 456 Bergen, 95 Berger, Götz, 406 Berghofer, Wolfgang, 27, 274, 331, 359, 375, 406, 409–410, 438, 440 Berija, Lawrenti P., 54 Berlin, 1, 3, 8, 11–14, 24, 45, 49, 53, 57–59, 61, 63–67, 69, 74–75, 78, 96, 98, 104, 106–107, 120, 123– 124, 127–128, 131–132, 134–135, 146, 148–152, 155–156, 160–161, 163–165, 167–168, 171, 175–178, 181–182, 191, 193, 195–198, 201–203, 206–213, 216–217, 219, 227–229, 231–232, 234, 240–245, 249–251, 253–254, 256, 259, 262–266, 269, 271–272, 275, 277, 279, 281, 282–283, 288, 292, 294–296, 298–301, 303, 306–308, 313, 315, 317–321, 324, 326–327, 331, 333, 341–343, 347–349, 351, 355–357, 359–361, 363, 365, 367, 369, 371, 373–374, 378, 381–382, 386–388, 390–391, 394–395, 397, 403–405, 409, 416–417, 421–422,

426–428, 430–432, 434, 438, 445, 447, 465–467, 473, 475, 490 Berlin-Alt-Lichtenberg, 195 Berlin-Alt-Pankow, 227 Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, 171, 195 Berlin-Friedrichshagen, 282 Berlin-Friedrichshain, 250, 270, 280, 315 Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, 156, 446 Berlin-Kaulsdorf, 198 Berlin-Köpenick, 12, 169, 392 Berlin-Kreuzberg, 206, 390, 392, 466 Berlin-Lichtenberg, 432 Berlin-Lübars, 388 Berlin-Marzahn, 156, 158 Berlin-Mitte, 134, 138, 155, 182, 196, 201, 206–212, 215, 228, 241, 269– 270, 273, 280, 300, 324, 360–361, 374–375, 377, 382, 387–388, 395, 397, 416, 422, 431, 465–466 Berlin-Pankow, 1, 240–245, 280, 382, 416 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, 120, 126, 156, 178, 196, 200, 228, 234, 242, 263, 271, 281, 316, 319, 324, 333, 341, 347, 365, 382 Berlin-Schöneberg, 388 Berlin-Schöneweide, 89 Berlin-Tempelhof, 67 Berlin-Treptow, 431 Berlin-Wedding, 382 Berlin-Weißensee, 129–130, 171, 269–270, 272, 377 Berlin Wall, 1–2, 4–6, 35, 37, 64, 66–67, 70, 76, 80, 98, 106, 128–131, 150, 155–156, 177, 180–181, 197–198, 250–251, 283, 288–290, 299, 323, 330, 355, 368, 374, 379, 381–382, 386–393, 395–397, 458, 461, 465, 467–468 Bernau, 1 Bertele, Franz, 306–307, 314, 435 Bettler, Karl, 268 Beyer, Frank, 406 Beyer, Udo, 291 Bickhardt, Peter, 198, 444 Bickhardt, Stephan, 164, 197–199, 250, 263, 270, 296–299, 302, 405, 416, 446 Bielefeld, 460

Index | 503

Biermann, Wolf, 3, 8, 34, 112, 114, 121, 129, 164, 191, 204, 217, 316, 355, 374, 376, 433, 447 Biermann, Wolfgang, 88 Birnbaum, Norbert, 218 Birthler, Marianne, 216, 228, 244, 266, 297, 306, 447, 449, 461 Bischofswerda, 330 Bisky, Lothar, 145, 264, 377, 409–411 Bismarck, Otto von, 115 Bitterfeld, 98, 117, 195 Blank, Konrad, 198 Blaschke, Karlheinz, 296 Bläss, Petra, 444 Bochum, 475 Böhlen, 300 Böhlener Plattform, 300 Bohley, Bärbel, 192–193, 202, 208, 210, 214, 216–217, 219–221, 224, 227–228, 233–234, 256, 261, 296, 299–300, 304–307, 350, 357, 361, 374, 417, 426–428, 438, 446, 461 Böhm, Tatjana, 421, 441 Böhme, Manfred “Ibrahim,” 232–233, 298, 304, 325, 349, 437–438, 440–441 Bolshevik Kurkapelle, 125 Bondör, Christine, 56 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 174–175 Bonn, 13, 64, 68, 76, 78, 149, 203, 260, 292, 307, 313, 362, 364, 398, 421, 460, 467 Bordeaux, 11–12 Börner, Hans-Jürgen, 217 Börner, Rainer, 449 Bösdorf, 370 Böttcher, Till, 215 Böttger, Antje, 202 Böttger, Martin, 202, 205, 208, 214, 227, 230, 263, 297, 299–300 Bowie, David, 128 Braecklein, Ingo, 170 Bragg, Billy, 129 Brandenburg (state), 109, 162, 166, 168, 174–175, 177, 191, 197, 204, 212, 225–226, 228, 303, 411 Brandenburg (town), 178, 200, 280 Brandt, Helmut, 373

Brandt, Willy, 68–69, 388–389, 443, 448 Bratislava, 122 Braun, Matthias, 114, 117, 119 Braun, Volker, 116, 326, 379, 406 Braune, Werner, 171 Braunsdorf, 163–165, 193, 210, 218 Brazil, 476, 490 Brecht, Bertolt, 36 Bremen, 421 Brendler, Gerhard, 442 Bretschneider, Harald, 165 Brezhnev, Leonid I., 15, 17, 19, 21, 53, 97, 277 Brie, André 258, 260 Brie, Michael, 258, 260, 361 Brinksmeier, Dankwart, 435 Brinton, Crane, 456 Brno, 122 Brühl, Reinhard, 406 Brun, Marcel, 268 Brünneck, Alexander von, 421 Brussig, Thomas, 390 Bruyn, Günter de, 117 Bucharest, 52, 277, 398, 467 Budapest, 13, 122, 150, 276, 289, 292, 294, 467 Bulgaria, 50–51, 122, 147, 150, 277, 321, 397–398 Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), 435 Bündnis 90 (union, party), 413, 443, 445–448, 462 Burke, Solomon, 129 Burkhardt, Frieder, 164 Bush, George H.W., 364 caesuras, 468–469, 487–488 Cainsdorf, 300 Cambodia, 321 Cambridge, 245 Canada, 218 Carow, Heiner, 121 Carpentier, Jan, 316 cars, 99–104, 292, 362, 387, 396 Castro, Raul, 275 Ceauşescu, Elena, 52, 398 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, 51–52, 59–60, 278, 321, 397–398

504 | Index

Celan, Paul, 198 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 49, 234, 434 Československá socialistická republika/ Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic (ČSSR), 20–21, 42, 51, 60, 64, 145, 147, 150, 191, 203, 213, 256, 277, 292–293, 314, 317, 328, 352, 362, 376, 379, 387, 395, 397–398, 445, 461 Chamier, Georgia von, 242 Chapman, Roger, 129 Charta 77 (group), 191, 193, 201–202, 277, 461 Chemnitz, 107, 152, 156, 264–265, 306–307, 318, 322, 326–327, 329, 342–343, 349, 359, 365, 388, 395–396, 408, 423–424, 429, 446 Chernenko, Konstantin U., 17, 19 Chernobyl, 97, 117, 193, 195 Chile, 203, 323–324 China, 277–281, 313, 315, 317, 323, 328, 331, 333, 355, 400, 466 Chirac, Jacques, 64 Christlich-Demokratische Union (CDU East), 29–30, 56, 158, 208, 226, 309–310, 398–400, 406, 413, 416, 417, 420, 437–439, 442, 445–447, 450, 470 Christlich-Demokratische Union (CDU West), 69, 71, 73, 78, 99, 202–203, 207, 388, 408, 439, 443, 447, 470, 482 Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern, 69, 203, 442, 447, 470 Church from Below. See Kirche von Unten churches, 122–123, 134–136, 139, 150– 151, 154–185, 191–192, 196–198, 200, 206–214, 216, 218–221, 225–227, 244, 254–257, 265–266, 270, 280, 296, 299–300, 306, 316, 319, 321–324, 327, 331–332, 347, 351, 365, 369–371, 417, 426, 433, 438, 451 Cibulka, Hanns, 117 City (band), 131–132, 305 Claus, Roland, 409–410

Claußnitz, 265 Cocker, Joe, 129 Cologne, 3, 145, 460 Comecon (RGW), 49–50, 100, 107 Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), 39, 63, 74, 77, 107, 151, 182, 203, 250, 256 Coswig, 262–263, 270, 301 Cottbus, 132, 170, 229, 284, 404, 436–437 Crimmitschau, 326 Cuba, 133, 147, 275, 321 Cyrus, Gerhard, 165 Czechoslovakia. See Československá socialistická republika/ Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic (ČSSR) Czerny, Heidelore, 437 Dahme, 378 Dahn, Daniela, 305 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 6, 276, 455 Dalos, György, 104 Danger Zone (band), 125 Danz, Tamara, 132, 305, 346, 351, 406 Dargun, 268 Decay (band), 125 DekaDance (band), 125 Demke, Christoph, 175, 321–322, 327, 406 Demmler, Kurt, 305, 376 Democratic Consumption (band), 125 Democratic Initiative—Initiative for the Democratic Renewal of Society, 228, 255, 266, 296 demographics, 485 Demokratie Jetzt/Democracy Now, 302– 303, 306, 308, 311, 315, 320–321, 350, 398, 406, 416–418, 421, 435, 441, 443–444 Demokratische Bauernpartei Deutschlands (DBD), 29, 399, 416–417, 444, 446 Demokratischer Aufbruch/Democratic Awakening, 303, 306, 308, 311, 315, 320–321, 325, 348–350, 368– 369, 398, 406, 416–418, 437–438, 441–442, 445, 447, 450, 470 Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands (DFD), 31, 207, 445–446

Index | 505

Denmark, 106, 490 Depeche Mode (band), 130 Dersekow, 264 Dertinger, Georg, 373 Dessau, 156, 326 Dessau, Paul, 36 Deutsche Film AG (DEFA), 120–121 Deutsche Soziale Union (DSU)/German Social Union, 413, 442, 445, 447, 449–450, 470 Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund/German Trade Union Federation, 470 Dibelius, Otto, 174–175 Die Ärzte (band), 132 Die Firma (band), 134 Die Toten Hosen (band), 132 Dickel, Friedrich, 317, 352, 357–358, 381 Diepgen, Eberhard, 67, 178 Diestel, Peter-Michael, 433–434, 436, 442, 450 Dietrich, Christian, 164 Dietrich, Reiner, 209, 233 Dippoldiswalde, 326 Djilas, Milovan, 25 Dönhoff, Marion Gräfin, 68 Donndorf, 156 Dornbusch, Wolfgang, 58 Dorndorf, 280 Dortmund, 475 Drees, Erika, 184, 261, 300 Dresden, 11–13, 27, 56, 96, 107, 118–119, 124, 127, 132, 137, 151–152, 155, 158, 182, 184, 192–194, 200, 203, 209–210, 217, 222, 231–232, 244, 254, 259, 262, 264–265, 269, 272, 274, 280, 300–301, 306–307, 313–314, 318–320, 322, 326–327, 330–331, 333, 342–343, 345, 349, 351–352, 359, 365–367, 371, 395, 398, 404, 406, 408, 424, 427, 429–430, 439, 467 Drees, Ludwig, 261 Dubček, Alexander, 397 Ducke, Karl-Heinz, 417 Dylan, Bob, 129 East Germans, 473–475

Eastern Front (band), 125 Ebeling, Hans-Wilhelm, 442, 447 Eckert, Rainer, 199 economy, 84–91, 99–104, 146–147, 394–397, 404, 407, 481–483 education system, 59–60, 123–124, 159, 240–245, 253, 258, 264, 271–272, 280–281, 308, 345, 361, 392–394, 431, 460 Egeln, 378 Eggert, Hans, 223 Ehrmann, Riccardo, 381 Eichmann, Adolf, 134 Eichsfeld, 440 Eigenfeld, Frank, 300 Eigenfeld, Katrin, 209, 300, 307 Eilenburg, 270 Eisenach, 100, 156, 307 Eisenhüttenstadt, 156, 261 Eisfeld, 151 Eisleben, 222 Eisler, Hanns, 36 Eitner, Charly, 305 elections, 262–274, 300, 303, 321, 366–367, 397–398, 418, 422, 434, 438–451, 457–458, 468, 470–471 Element of Crime (band), 134 elite, 477–481 Elmer, Konrad, 376 Emmerlich, Gunter, 313 Engelhardt, Heinz, 422, 428, 435 Engels, Friedrich, 2, 36, 41, 99, 463 Engerling (band), 131 environment, 97–99 Environmental Library. See Umweltbibliothek environmental movement, 194–196 Eppelmann, Rainer, 34, 67, 164–167, 170, 179–180, 191, 198, 201–205, 208, 220, 230, 232, 234, 270, 273–274, 280, 303–304, 315, 331, 350, 436, 438, 441–442, 447, 450, 461 Eppendorf, 107 Eppler, Erhard, 72–74, 79–80, 85, 178–180 Erfurt, 163, 167, 180, 209–210, 218, 231, 254, 307–308, 326, 342, 365, 388, 427, 429, 431, 446

506 | Index

Erhard, Ludwig, 481 escape movement, 148–154, 183, 288–294, 313–314, 317–318, 320, 362, 379, 387, 485–486 Espenhain, 194 Estonia, 21, 71, 79, 122, 203, 275 Ethiopian, 48, 278 Eulitz, Renate, 241 everyday life, 84–97, 99–104, 137–140, 483–484 Expander of Progress (band), 125 Falcke, Heino, 163, 173, 180, 184, 198, 315 FDJ, 30–31, 52, 54, 85, 123, 125, 128–129, 131, 137, 139, 200, 222, 242–243, 252, 264, 275, 282–283, 312, 321, 324, 345–346, 349, 352, 360, 367–368, 370, 392, 396–397, 399, 416, 444, 449 FDP, 69, 470 Fechner, Max, 373 Feeling B (band), 126–127 Fehér, Ferenc and Heller, 276 Feller, Kai, 241–243 Ferworn, Helmut, 294 Fichtelberg (East), 30 Fink, Heinrich, 163, 351 Finland, 64, 485 Fischbeck, Hans-Jürgen, 197, 250, 263, 270, 297, 299, 302 Fischer, Joseph “Joschka,” 389, 448, 462 Fischer, Oskar, 68, 203, 256, 279, 292 Fischer, Ulrich, 201 Fischer, Werner, 193, 208, 210, 214, 217, 219–221, 224, 227, 256, 266, 297–298, 306, 433, 446 Flade, Hermann-Joseph, 263 Flechtingen, 370 Flensburg, 476 Flügge, Rainer, 263, 306 Forck, Gottfried, 67, 163, 166, 171, 178, 180–181, 183, 197, 227, 243–244, 281, 321, 331, 347–348, 433 Forner, Rainer, 241, 244–245 Forst, 351, 429 France, 42, 64, 105, 112, 119, 249, 364, 386–387, 396, 408, 490

Franconia, 475 Franke, Erika, 479 Fränkel, Hans-Joachim, 163, 174 Frankfurt/Main, 8, 352, 460 Frankfurt/Oder, 8, 132, 156, 261, 271, 283–284, 314, 365, 404, 437 Frauen für den Frieden/Women for Peace, 192, 210 Free German Trade Union Federation. See Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund freedom, 15, 35, 42, 65, 73, 76–77, 122, 126, 128, 130, 147, 159–163, 176, 181–182, 197, 199, 203–204, 212–213, 218, 222, 227, 249, 255, 283, 292, 300, 308, 323–324, 326, 329–330, 344, 373, 406, 408, 422, 447, 456, 458–459, 462, 467–468, 471–472, 485–486, 489–490 Freethinkers League, 251–254 Freiberg, 271, 318 Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund/Free German Trade Union Federation, 30–31, 137, 181, 264, 268, 360, 367, 370, 395–396, 417 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 332–333 Freital, 271 Frenzel, Michael, 244 Freud, Siegmund, 42 Freudenberg, 78 Freudenberg, Winfried, 251 Freund, Olaf, 300 Freygang (band), 125 Fricke, Karl Wilhelm, 6, 71, 77, 373 Frieden konkret, 192, 228–229 Friedrich II, 115 Friedrichsfelder Feuermelder (samizdat), 193, 203–204, 210, 230, 244 Frieß, Sieglinde, 408 Frisia, 475 Frömmstedt, 156 Fuchs, Jürgen, 34, 58–59, 78–79, 114, 201–202, 205, 210–211, 219–220, 224, 261, 374–375, 433 Fühmann, Franz, 43, 113 Führer, Christian, 255, 257, 306, 461 Furet, François, 249 Furian, Hans-Otto, 175, 331, 347

Index | 507

Gadebusch, 351, 429 Gans, Eduard, 138 Garmisch-Patenkirchen, 476 Garstecki, Joachim, 253 Gartenschläger, Gottfried, 171 Gauck, Joachim, 178–179, 330, 434, 461, 479 Gegenstimmen (group), 193, 203–204, 210, 215–216 Gehlert, Siegfried, 359, 429 Gehrke, Bernd, 300, 406, 421 Geißler, Erhard, 114–115 Geißler, Heiner, 73 Geißler, Rainer, 471 Geneva, 288 Genin, Salomea, 136 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 68, 256, 282, 292, 313–314, 398, 443 Genthin, 378 Georgia, 71, 275 Gera, 132, 307, 395, 408 Gerlach, Manfred, 309, 376, 399, 410 Germ Time (band), 125 German Gymnastics and Sports Federation, 30 German Social Union. See Deutsche Soziale Union German Trade Union Federation. See Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund Gesellschaft für Deutsch-sowjetische Freundschaft/Society for GermanSoviet Friendship, 30–31, 56–58 Gesellschaft für Sport und Technologie. See Society for Sport and Technology Gienke, Horst, 163, 281–282 Gießen, 227 glasnost, 14–22, 53–62 Gläßner, Ludwig, 209 Glauchau, 271, 351 Glazkov, Nikolai I., 205 Glöckner, Reinhard, 281 Glowe, 266 Göda, 159 Goebbels, Joseph, 18, 70–71, 448 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 18, 119 Gorbachev, Mikhail S., 3, 5, 13, 15, 17–22, 24, 53, 56, 59, 61–62, 67, 70–71,

75, 85, 97, 162, 255, 258–260, 262, 265, 275, 277–278, 287, 321, 374, 394, 400, 441–442, 461 Gorky, 20 Görlitz, 163, 177, 184, 198, 271 Gossel, 156 Gotha, 156 Götting, Gerald, 30 Grabe, Christine, 449 Graf, Stefanie, 145 Grass, Günter, 217, 389 Greece, 64 Green League. See Grüne Liga Green Party in the GDR, 201, 416, 421, 441, 445, 448–449 Greens, The, 73–74, 78, 97, 198, 201–202, 364, 388, 407–408, 442, 448, 457 Greifswald, 88, 95, 163, 170, 177, 193, 264–265, 281, 298, 307 Greiz, 351 Grenzfall (samizdat), 78, 193, 195–196, 203, 205, 208–209, 212, 214, 224, 226 Griebenow, Elise, 268 Grimm, Peter, 193, 208–209, 214, 227, 341 Grimmen, 218 Grönemeyer, Herbert, 217 Großenhain, 57 Großhennersdorf, 306, 369 Groß-Lübbenau, 156 Großmann, Ernst, 37 Großmann, Werner, 33 Großschönau, 300 Grundmann, Siegfried, 433–434 Grün-ökologisches Netzwerk Arche, 196, 203, 228, 369 Grüne Liga/Green League, 417, 441 Grünheide, 191, 299–300, 378 Guben, 326 Gueffroy, Chris, 251 Gundermann, Gerhard, 346, 351 Günther, Rolf-Dieter, 170 Güstrow, 208 Gutzeit, Martin, 164, 229, 232, 297–298, 325, 417 Gützkow, 343–344

508 | Index

Gysi, Gregor, 153, 220, 227, 243–244, 309, 376, 409–412, 426–428, 431, 438, 443, 447, 449 Gysi, Klaus, 203, 226 Haak, Erich, 344 Haase, Jeannine, 242 Habermas, Jürgen, 389, 476, 490 Haeger, Monika, 233–234 Hager, Kurt, 1–4, 54, 57, 79, 130, 135, 283, 345–346, 368 Hague, The, 387 Hahn, Erich, 79 Hahnemann, Helga, 313 Hainichen, 326 Halberstadt, 96, 156 Halbrock, Christian, 196, 234 Haldensleben, 370 Halle, 98, 107, 124, 152, 156, 158, 161, 164, 182–183, 193, 203, 209–210, 218, 244, 264, 298, 300, 307, 313, 326, 333, 349–351, 357, 365, 423–424, 467 Hamann, Karl, 373 Hamburg, 3–4, 149, 261, 447, 460, 475 Hamel, Mario, 233 Hammer, Detlev, 171 Hanover, 421 Harder, Hans-Martin, 170 Harich, Wolfgang, 115–116, 373 Hartfield, Jürgen, 56 Hartz, Frank, 233 Harwich, 245 Haschke, Jürgen, 442, 449 Hasselmann, Silke, 56 Hattenhauer, Karin, 333 Havana, 64 Havel, Václav, 21–22, 114, 277, 352, 397 Havemann, Annedore (Katja), 208, 233, 261, 299–300 Havemann, Robert, 114, 191, 204 healthcare system, 88, 93–96 Heiligenstadt, 446 Hein, Christoph, 104, 112–113, 117–119, 244, 277, 361, 371, 377, 379 Heitmann, Steffen, 327 Helbig, Jan, 279

Heller, Agnes, 276 Helmstedt, 314 Helsinki, 63 Hempel, Alfred, 300 Hempel, Johannes, 163, 175, 180, 257 Hempel, Wolfgang, 11 Henrich, Rolf, 261–262, 299–300, 347, 350 Herger, Wolfgang, 360, 430 Heringsdorf, 378, 423 Herlt, Günter, 78, 105, 293 Hermlin, Stephan, 244, 277 Herrmann, Joachim, 28, 57, 260, 353–354, 402 Herrnhut, 165 Hertle, Hans-Hermann, 6, 381 Herzberg, André 132, 305, 346, 351 Herzberg, Guntolf, 405 Hessen, 475 Heusinger, Hans-Joachim, 403 Heym, Stefan, 112, 138, 361, 371, 377, 379, 406, 447, 457 Hilbig, Klaus, 361 Hildburghausen, 151 Hildebrand, Gerold, 306 Hildebrandt, Dieter, 217 Hildebrandt, Johannes, 183 Hildebrandt, Jörg, 366 Hildebrandt, Regine, 366, 450 Hilker, Hans, 198 Hilsberg, Peter, 263, 325 Hilsberg, Stephan, 325, 348 Hiroshima, 115 Hirsch, Ralf, 67, 165, 193, 205, 208–210, 214, 216–217, 219–221, 224, 231, 307, 374, 433, 438 Hirschfelde, 265 Hirschluch, 170 history as legitimation, 43–45 Hitler, Adolf, 37, 54, 56–57, 62, 68, 294 Höck, Dorothea, 299 Hoffmann, Hans-Joachim, 118, 132, 354, 381 Hoffmann, Heinz, 166 Hofmann, Joachim, 45 Höfner, Ernst, 400 Hohenlobbese, 268 Hohnkirchen, 24

Index | 509

Hollywood, 120 Holocaust, 134 Holwas, Günter, 165 Holzweißig, Gunter, 105 Homann, Heinrich, 37 Honecker, Erich, 3, 5, 14–15, 23, 25–26, 28–30, 33, 39, 43–44, 48, 53–54, 57, 59–66, 68, 70, 73–78, 85–86, 88, 90–92, 95–96, 104, 106, 121, 139, 149, 158, 173, 179, 200–201, 209, 212, 215, 225, 228, 241, 244, 249–251, 256, 258–260, 277–278, 281, 290, 310, 313–314, 316–317, 330, 352–355, 365, 380, 392, 399– 400, 402, 409–410, 415, 447–448 Honecker, Margot, 3, 23, 131, 241–244, 279, 368 Hönn, Carola, 199 Höpcke, Klaus, 113–114, 293–294, 372, 409–410 Höppner, Reinhard, 451 Horkheimer, Max, 113 Horn, Gyula, 288, 292 Hoyerswerda, 156 Huhn, Martina, 309 Hülsemann, Wolfram, 135, 200, 331 Hungary, 3, 21, 49–52, 54, 60, 64, 79, 85, 112, 133, 147, 150, 191, 202–203, 213, 249–251, 258, 262, 275–277, 288–293, 296, 300, 313, 379, 397–398, 407, 413, 418, 445, 456, 461, 466 Huxley, Aldous, 113 Ihle, Katja, 242–243 Ilmenau, 281, 326 Initiative Absage an Prinzip und Praxis der Abgrenzung, 197–198, 250, 299 Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte (IFM), 78, 193–194, 196–198, 201–204, 206–214, 216, 219, 223, 226–228, 230, 233, 261, 280, 295, 299, 304, 307, 321, 341, 416–417, 421, 435, 441, 443, 449 Initiative Group Life, 228 Internationale Müllstation, 232 Ireland, 485

Israel, 64 Italy, 42, 64, 201, 490 Jahn, Roland, 34, 78–79, 128, 192, 195, 198, 201–202, 205–206, 208, 210–211, 214, 219–221, 224, 231, 234–235, 243, 302, 306–307, 333, 351, 374, 433, 436 Jakeš, Milouš 321 Janka, Walter, 371–373 Japan, 64, 89, 105 Jarowinsky, Werner, 225–226, 399 Jaruzełski, Wojciech, 15, 75, 321 Jauer, Joachim, 52 Jena, 12, 88, 99, 164, 182, 217, 231, 244, 254, 272, 281, 326, 333, 378 Jenaer Friedensgemeinschaft, 192 Jericho, 227 Jethro Tull, 122 jokes, 12, 17, 29, 43, 65, 84, 88, 93, 139, 147, 149–150, 152 Jonas, Bruno, 217 Jordan, Carlo, 126, 196, 203, 416 Joseph, Hans-Jürgen, 422 June 17, 1953, 37, 79, 92, 111, 138, 309, 311, 316, 319, 322, 358, 466 Junker, Wolfgang, 367 Jürk, Juliane, 444 Kádár, János, 13, 275–276 Kahlbaum, Hans-Karl, 263 Kähler, Christoph, 186 Kalex, Johanna, 209 Kalex, Roman, 209 Kalk, Andreas, 215 Kamnitzer, Heinz, 221–222, 294 Kamp, Marion van de, 375 Kania, Karin, 273 Kant, Hermann, 112, 211, 346, 380, 406 Kap Arkona, 30 Kapuściński, Ryszard, 16 Karat (band), 131, 305 Karl-Marx-Stadt. See Chemnitz Karlsruhe, 421 Katzenstein, 427 Kavelstorf, 426–427 Kayser, Karl, 380

510 | Index

Keller, Dietmar, 361, 375 Kelly, Petra, 201–202, 442 Kennedy, John. F., 465 Kerouac, Jack, 122 Kertzscher, Günter, 294 Keßler, Heinz, 317, 322 Khrushchev, Nikita S., 116 Kim Il Sung, 130 Kirche von Unten (KvU)/Church from Below, 169, 197, 203–204, 206, 210, 215–216, 234, 269, 341 Kirchner, Dankwart, 228 Kirchner, Martin, 151, 310, 437, 448 Kittelmann, Peter, 408 Klähn, Martin, 300 Klein, Dieter, 258, 406, 409 Klein, Helmut, 253–254 Klein, Thomas, 193, 204, 300 Klemm, Volker, 337 Klemperer, Victor, 139 Klier, Freya, 208, 215–221, 224, 227 Klingenthal, 343, 350 Klohr, Olof, 160 Kluge, Volker, 375 Knabe, Wilhelm, 201 Kohl, Helmut, 18, 67–71, 76–78, 85, 155, 179, 265, 282, 292, 313, 362, 364, 387–389, 398, 407–408, 434, 438–441, 443, 447–448, 458, 471 Köhler, Horst, 83 Kolbe, Uwe, 302 König, Martin, 299 Königswalde, 200, 296, 327 Koplanski, Michael, 399 Köppe, Ingrid, 448 Korbella, Horst, 447 Kossok, Manfred, 249 Köthen, 367 Kotterba, Jörg, 291 Kowasch, Fred, 255 Krack, Erhard, 178, 347, 360 Kraft, Dieter, 226 Krahl, Toni, 131–132, 305, 346, 351 Kraków, 122, 323 Krause, Günther, 434, 449–450 Krawczyk, Stephan, 206, 208, 215–221, 223–224, 230–231

Krenz, Carsten, 241 Krenz, Egon, 54, 57, 209, 215, 228, 241, 251, 259, 269, 272, 275, 279, 310, 312, 315, 317, 330, 332–333, 352–354, 356–357, 359–362, 364, 368–369, 373–374, 379–381, 387, 399–400, 402, 405–406, 410, 415 Kreyssig, Lothar, 135 Krohn, Alexander, 241–243 Krolikowski, Werner, 353 Krüger, Thomas, 227, 269–270, 325 Krusche, Günter, 163, 167–168, 182, 210, 226–227, 331, 347–348 Kruse, Martin, 197 Kubina, Michael, 263 Kuczynski, Jürgen, 207, 244, 309 Kühlungsborn, 114 Kühn, Hartmut, 203 Kukliński, Ryszard, 49 Kukutz, Irena, 233 Kulisch, Uwe, 165, 209, 214, 216, 231 Kundera, Milan, 7 Kunert, Günter, 217 Kunze, Reiner, 217 Kusmin, Iwan N., 81 Küttler, Thomas, 327, 329 labor society, 483–484 Lafontaine, Oskar, 73, 76, 389, 408, 443, 448 Lage, Klaus, 129 Lampe, Reinhard, 180–181, 197–198, 263, 297, 299, 302 Land, Rainer, 258 Landers, Paul, 126 Lange, Bernd-Lutz, 332 Lange, Martin, 417 Language, 138–139 Laos, 321 Laschitza, Annelies, 221–222 Latvia, 21, 71, 79, 122, 203, 275 Lebanon, 281 Lee, Alvin, 215 Leich, Werner, 171, 176, 181, 183, 225–226, 321–322, 327 Leipzig, 3, 5, 11–12, 56, 80, 96, 98, 107, 124, 127, 132, 151–152, 155, 161, 164, 182, 194, 200, 203, 209,

Index | 511

216–217, 228, 244, 254–257, 262, 264–266, 269–272, 274, 281, 289, 295–296, 299–300, 302, 306–309, 315–316, 318–320, 322, 326–327, 329, 331–333, 341–343, 349, 351– 352, 354–357, 359–360, 365–366, 371, 374, 378, 380, 391, 396, 399, 408, 416, 419, 423, 427–429, 431, 466–467 Lengsfeld, Phillip, 240–245 Lengsfeld, Vera, 193, 210, 215, 218–220, 224, 226–227, 230, 241, 243, 245, 421, 448 Lenin, Vladimir I., 19, 28, 36, 41 Leningrad. See St. Petersburg Lenk, Kurt, 456 Leonhard, Wolfgang, 41 Leonhardt, Rudolf Walter, 68 Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands/ Liberal Democratic Party of Germany, 29, 309, 349, 376, 400, 416–417, 420 Liberals, 413, 443, 445, 450 Libya, 321 Lieberknecht, Christine, 309 Liebknecht, Karl, 212, 215, 221–223, 255 Liefers, Jan Josef, 375 Lietz, Heiko, 164, 179, 208 Lindemann, Marie-Luise, 201, 405 Lindenberg, Udo, 1, 75, 129, 217 Lindner, Benjamin, 240–243 Lindner, Günther, 120 Lindow, 333 Lipiński, Edward, 201 literature, 112–118 Lithuania, 21, 71, 79, 122, 203, 275 Löbau, 107, 415 Loest, Erich, 217 Löffler, Kurt, 347 London, 12–13, 17, 63, 277, 387, 398, 467 Lorenz, Christian “Flake,” 126 Loriot, 120, 178 Louis XVI, 343 Löw, Joachim, 476 Lower Saxony, 479 Lübbenau, 360 Lucia, Paco de, 129

Ludwigslust, 251, 378 Luft, Christa, 402 Luhmann, Niklas, 476 Lukács, Georg, 115 Luther, Horst, 214 Luther, Martin, 115, 250 Lutz, Günter, 331 Luxemburg, 387 Luxemburg, Rosa, 36, 212, 215, 218, 221–223, 255, 440 Maaz, Hans-Joachim, 123, 138, 261 Madrid, 63–64 Maffay, Peter, 129, 217 Magas, László 291–292 Magdeburg, 12, 124, 132, 155, 171, 184, 192–193, 209, 244, 261, 265, 281, 301, 308, 316, 318, 322, 326, 331, 333, 349, 351, 357, 365, 370, 378, 388, 419, 467 Magirius, Friedrich, 254 Mainz, 53 Maizière, Lothar de, 220, 398, 402–403, 413, 433–434, 436, 438, 447, 449–450 Maleuda, Günther, 399, 406 Mali, 468 Malia, Martin, 18 Malmö, 291 Managua, 63 Mandela, Nelson, 465 Mangliers, Gisbert, 332 Mannheim, 460 Maputo, 63 Marienberg, 107 Markneukirchen, 333 Maron, Monika, 117 Marquardt, Regine, 429 Marseille, 11 Martin, Norbert, 327 Marx, Karl, 2, 36, 41, 99, 154, 161, 456, 459, 463 Marxism-Leninism, 40–42, 222 mass media, 104–108, 145–146, 205–206, 302, 304, 307, 333, 342, 351, 354, 356, 361, 365, 367, 369, 375, 377, 398, 405, 432, 436, 448, 466, 479

512 | Index

Masur, Kurt, 332–333, 371, 379, 442 Mayall, John, 129 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 276 McGuinn, Roger, 129 McLaughlin, John, 129 Meadow, Dennis L., 109 Meadow, Donella, 109 Mechtersheimer, Alfred, 198 Meckel, Markus, 164, 200–201, 209, 229, 232, 297–298, 325, 450, 461 Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 99, 109, 177, 181, 429 Meerane, 333 Mehlhorn, Ludwig, 197–199, 203, 250, 263, 270, 297, 299, 302, 405, 446 Meinecke, Ulla, 217 Meinel, Reinhard, 300 Meiningen, 369 Meisner, Joachim, 171, 176–177, 219, 221 Menges, Kathrin, 479 Mengistu Haile Mariam, 278 Merkel, Angela, 202, 469, 479 Merseburg, 307, 333, 351 Mesopotamia, 468 Meyer, Heinz-Werner, 470 Meyer, Kurt, 332 Meyer, Thomas, 74, 78 Michnik, Adam, 18, 21, 405 Mielke, Erich, 3, 23, 28, 33, 57, 60–61, 206, 209, 212, 224–225, 251, 256, 259, 270, 310, 312, 317, 330, 332, 352–355, 357–358, 368, 376, 400–401, 409, 415, 424 Miłosz, Czesław, 117 Ministerium des Innern (MdI), 32, 106– 107, 125, 136, 280, 290, 306–307, 310, 312, 316–317, 322–323, 327, 352, 367, 373–375, 378, 396, 402, 404, 406, 423 Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), 23, 32–35, 48–49, 53–54, 56–57, 60, 67, 73–75, 77–79, 95, 106–107, 113, 125, 133–136, 139, 146, 148, 151–153, 158, 161, 163–164, 166, 169–172, 176, 180–181, 183, 198, 206–217, 219–226, 230–234, 238, 242–244, 253–256, 261–263, 265,

267–268, 270–271, 273–274, 278, 280–281, 283, 288–290, 294–295, 298–300, 303–304, 310–312, 314–316, 318–319, 321–327, 329–332, 344–345, 348–349, 352, 354, 358–359, 367–369, 374–375– 376, 382, 387, 390, 396, 400–402, 404–405, 407, 409–411, 415, 418–439, 446, 448–450 Misselwitz, Ruth, 227 Mißlitz, Frank-Herbert, 214–215, 231 Mittag, Günter, 28, 86, 91, 259, 310, 353–354, 400, 402 Mitter, Armin, 6, 372, 422 Mitterand, François, 64, 75, 364, 438–439 Mittig, Rudi, 176, 212, 424, 433 mobility, 484–485 Mock, Alois, 288 Modrow, 118, 137, 259–260, 274, 279, 309, 318, 330–331, 359, 375, 379–380, 388, 400, 402–407, 409–410, 413, 424–425, 428, 430–433, 435–436, 438, 440–443, 447, 449 Momper, Walter, 387–389, 438 Monaco, 485 monetary union, 470 Mongolia, 147, 321 Moritzburg, 160 Moscow, 5, 11, 13–15, 17, 20–22, 49–54, 61, 64, 67, 72, 75, 220, 260, 275, 282–283, 288, 354–355, 359, 364, 374, 387, 398, 434, 441–442, 459, 461, 467 movies, 118–121 Mozambique, 89, 133, 268 Mühe, Ulrich, 119, 372, 375 Mühlen, Patrik von zur, 6 Mühlhausen, 378, 395 Müller, Bruno, 226 Müller, Gottfried, 309 Müller, Hanfried, 163, 174, 226 Müller, Heiner, 96, 116–117, 119–120, 377, 395 Müller, Rainer, 266 Müller, Silvia, 193 Müller-Streisand, Rosemarie, 226

Index | 513

Müller-Westernhagen, Marius, 217 Müncheberg, 265 Munich, 397, 460, 475 Münster, 227 Müntzer, Thomas, 249–250 Nagasaki, 115 Nagorski, Lutz, 233 Nagy, Imre, 276 Namibia, 274 Nantes, 487 Natho, Eberhard, 163, 321 National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (NDPD), 29, 416, 446 Nationale Volksarmee/People’s Army (NVA), 32, 49, 54, 106, 123–124, 241–242, 273, 314, 318, 322–323, 328–331, 352, 358, 382, 404, 406, 418, 423, 436 Nau, Stefan, 167 Naumburg, 160–161, 193, 209, 306, 423 Németh, Miklos, 292 neofascism, 132–137, 162, 355, 430–431, 469 Netherlands, 64, 201, 317, 490 Neubauer, Horst, 313 Neubert, Ehrhart, 6, 253, 303, 315, 418, 442 Neubert, Hildigund, 315 Neubrandenburg, 152, 265, 268, 291, 359, 365, 367, 404 Neues Forum/New Forum, 299–309, 311, 315–316, 319–322–324, 326–327, 342, 345–350, 356–357, 364–365, 368–369, 373, 376, 378–379, 396, 398, 404, 406, 416–418, 421, 426–427, 430, 432, 441, 443, 461 Neuglobsow, 266 Neumann, Gert, 280 Neunkirchen, 64 Neutsch, Erik, 112 New Forum. See Neues Forum New Thinking group, 228 New York, 165 New Zealand, 468 Nicaragua, 48, 130, 275, 321

Nickel, Otmar, 301 Niebling, Gerhard, 288 Niederlag, Wolfram, 231 Niederländer, Loni, 125, 431 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 115–116 Nizhny Novgorod, 20 Noack, Arndt, 298 Nooke, Günter, 80, 315, 442 North Korea, 63, 130, 147, 274–275, 278, 321 North Rhine-Westphalia, 473 North Yemen, 321 Norway, 485 Nothe, Werner, 419 Nowack, Joachim, 442 Oberthür, Peter, 280 Ohrdruf, 156 oil price shock, 468–469, 487 Oktoberklub (band), 222 Oltmanns, Gesine, 254, 266 Omsk, 16 opposition, 123, 128, 135, 139, 159, 162, 168–169, 182, 190–245, 254–257, 262–263, 268–270, 272–273, 277, 289–290, 295–305, 307, 315–316, 320, 323, 327–329, 333, 365–366, 369, 379, 398, 416, 450 Oranienburg, 200 Orbán, Viktor, 413 Ortega, Daniel, 321 Ortmann, Michael, 293 Orwell, George, 43, 113–114, 138 Oschatz, 369 Ossietzky Secondary School, 240–245 Ossietzky, Carl von, 245 Ostrowski, Christine, 27 othering, 475, 489–490 the others (band), 125 Pahnke, Rudi-Karl, 164–165, 204, 303, 315, 418 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 321 Pallagi, Ferenc, 276, 288 Palme, Olof, 199, 211 Pankow (band), 123, 131–132, 305

514 | Index

Pankower Friedenskreis, 202, 227, 321 Parchim, 181, 267 Paris, 13, 63–64, 119, 210, 343, 386–387, 398, 467 Partei des Demokratischen Sozialisumus (PDS), 410, 412–413, 440, 445, 447, 456, 472 Parthey, Knuth, 267 Pasewalk, 156, 254 Passauer, Martin-Michael, 165, 170, 175, 321, 331 Pawliczak, Lothar, 233 peace rhetoric, 38–39 Peasants Mutual Aid Association. See Vereinigung der gegenseitiger Bauernhilfe Pech, Cyrill, 158, 163, 214, 226 Pegida, 481 Pehnert, Horst, 55 People’s Army. See Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) People’s Chamber. See Volkskammer People’s Police. See Volkspolizei Pepperle, Heinz, 115–116 perestroika, 14–22, 53–62 Perleberg, 367 Petrograd. See St. Petersburg Petty, Tom, 129 Pfaffenrode, 395 Pflugbeil, Christine, 301 Pflugbeil, Sebastian, 301, 307, 373, 406, 441 Pfuhl, Erich, 170 Piesteritz, 367 Pietsch, Karl, 159 Pink Extra (band), 125 Pink Floyd, 290 Pirna, 156, 182 Plath, Siegfried, 170 Platzeck, Matthias, 441, 479 Plauen, 262, 271, 318, 326–330, 341, 343, 345, 349–350, 359, 365, 462, 467 Pleitgen, Fritz, 52 Plenzdorf, Ulrich, 39, 379 Pohl, Gerhard, 450 Poland, 5, 14–15, 18, 42, 50, 60, 64, 76–77, 79, 85, 100, 112, 133, 135,

147, 191, 202–203, 213, 218, 249–251, 256, 262, 275–277, 296, 317, 321, 386–387, 397–398, 404–405, 407–408, 415, 418, 422, 445, 461, 466 Pommer, Dietmar, 251 Pommert, Jochen, 332 Pope John Paul II, 14–15, 52, 64 Poppe, Gerd, 193–194, 202–205, 208, 214, 223, 226–228, 232–233, 280, 405, 417, 421, 441–442, 448 Poppe, Ulrike, 79, 192–193, 202, 205, 208, 210, 214, 227–228, 232–233, 263, 280, 299, 303, 406, 461 Poßner, Wilfried, 402 Postler, Lorenz, 165 Potsdam, 58, 96, 124, 132, 145, 151, 155–156, 160, 165, 244, 261, 264, 268, 270–271, 273, 280, 300–301, 307, 318, 326, 349, 357, 378, 423, 437 Poznań, 122 Prag, Joachim, 274 Prague, 8, 21, 122, 131, 150, 227, 241, 258, 277, 289–290, 292–293, 313–315, 317–318, 327, 376, 381, 467 Prenzlau, 191, 268, 326 Preuß, Ulrich K., 421 Pritzwalk, 150 Przybylski, Peter, 221 Puhdys (band), 131 punks, 122–127, 130, 132, 134, 232 Putbus, 344 Puttkammer, Joachim, 281 Pyongyang, 63 Qualitz, Helmut, 388 Quandt, Bernhard, 360, 409–410 Quedlinburg, 307 Querfurt, 201 racism, 132–135, 485 Radebeul, 218 Radio DT 64, 126, 130–131, 135, 273–274 Radio Glasnost, 206, 261, 322 Radio in the American Sector (RIAS), 120, 127

Index | 515

Radix-blätter (samizdat), 198–199, 205 Radomski, Aram, 279–280, 302, 333, 351 Ragwitz, Ursula, 118 Rahn, Helmut, 11 Rammstein (band), 126 Ramsla, 309 Rasenberger, Hans, 378 Rat für gegenseitige Wirtschaftshilfe (RGW). See Comecon Rathenow, 427 Rathenow, Lutz, 58, 120, 204 Rathke, Heinrich, 166 Rausch, Friedhelm, 358, 360 Ravensbrück, 200 Reagan, Ronald, 55, 66–67, 75–76, 85, 128 Rebling, Jalda, 351 Reder, Hans, 150–151 Regener, Sven, 390 Reich, Eva, 301 Reich, Jens, 245, 301, 307, 361, 373, 376, 417, 427, 446–447, 461 Reiche, Steffen, 446 Reichenbach, 318 Rein, Gerhard, 216, 252 Reinbek, 261 Reinhold, Otto, 74, 144, 380 Reiser, Rio, 130–131, 217 Reißig, Rolf, 74, 78–79 representation, 477–481 Retzlaff, Karin, 131, 346–347 Reuter, Ernst, 294 revolution, assessment of the events, 454–463 Reykjavik, 11 Ribnitz-Damgarten, 333 Richter, Edelbert, 209, 303, 315, 405, 442 Richter, Frank, 331 Richter, Herbert, 380 Richter, Michael, 7 Richter, Reinhard, 170 Richter, Wolfram, 241–242 Riesa, 182, 200 Riga, 275, 467 right-wing radicalism, 132–137, 469 Rinke, Manfred, 231–232, 430 Ritter, Gerhard A., 7 Röbel, 99, 343, 369

Rochau, Lothar, 164 rock, 124–132, 305, 346 Rockhaus (band), 131 Röder, Günter, 214 Rohde, Martin, 282–284, 467 Rölle, Peter, 208–209, 214 Rolling Stones, The, 129 Romania, 20, 51, 54, 60, 100, 122, 147, 150, 156, 276–278, 281, 288, 321, 328, 397–398 Romberg, Walter, 441 Rome, 12, 64, 467 Rompe, Aljoscha, 126 Rompe, Robert, 126 Roolf, Benn, 80 Rösch, Peter “Blase,” 201 Rosenthal, Rüdiger, 205, 211, 219, 243 Rosslau, 326 Rostock, 12, 107, 155–156, 178–179, 208, 264–265, 272, 281, 307, 326, 342, 367, 404, 423–424, 426, 429, 437, 475 Rostropowitsch, Mstislaw, 386 Rötha, 194 round table, 276, 297, 341, 348, 366, 416–422, 428, 430–435, 437, 440–444 Rüddenklau, Wolfgang, 59, 196, 204, 209–211, 214, 216, 341, 433 Rudolph, Thomas, 228, 256, 266 Rudolstadt, 164–165 Rügen, 95, 266 Rühe, Volker, 443 rumors, 139 Russia, 386 Rüterberg, 378 Saalfeld, 183, 200, 210 Saarbrücken, 64 Saarland, 66, 75–76 Sachsenhausen b. Oranienburg, 200 Sacrow, 155 Sakharov, Andrej D., 20–21 Salzgitter, 73–74 samizdat, 59, 78, 126, 136, 193, 198–199, 203, 205, 208–209, 212, 214, 224, 226, 230, 244, 270, 341, 360

516 | Index

Samswegen, 261, 301 Sanders, Herbert, 165 Sandow, 130 Santana, Carlos, 129 Särchen, Günter, 203 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 113 Sauerland, 475 Sauermann, Dirk, 198 Saxony, 109, 164, 177, 180, 259, 280, 475 Saxony-Anhalt, 163, 177, 451, 475 Schabowski, Günter, 24, 27, 33, 57, 209, 215, 241, 259, 263, 279, 310, 312, 322, 347, 353–354, 360–361, 376, 381–382 Schalck-Golodkowski, Alexander, 49, 409, 426 Schall, Johanna, 375 Schaller, Hennig, 376 Schatta, Mario, 270, 272–273 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 179, 434 Schefke, Siegbert, 280, 302, 333, 351 Scherndorf, 156 Scherzer, Landolf, 410 Schilling, Walter, 163–166 Schily, Otto, 454, 457, 462 Schinck, Eberhard, 253 Schlegel, Bert, 209–211, 215, 218 Schlink, Bernhard, 421 Schlüter, Klaus, 441 Schmalkalden, 430 Schmidt, Hanno, 301 Schmidt, Helmut, 68, 178–179, 202 Schmidt, Jochen, 26 Schneeweiß, Burkhard, 400 Schneider, Rolf, 277 Schnitzler, Karl-Eduard von, 3, 357, 368, 373, 399 Schnur, Wolfgang, 211, 218, 220, 232, 303, 306, 315, 349, 437–438, 448 Schöbel, Frank, 305, 313 Schön, Lieselotte, 274 Schöne, Gerhard, 305, 351, 376 Schöneburg, Karl-Heinz, 421 Schöneiche, 430, 433 Schönfeld, Sinico, 233 Schönfelder, Andreas, 368–369 Schönfeldt, Hans-Andreas, 444

Schönherr, Albrecht, 173–174 Schorlemmer, Friedrich, 166–167, 175, 183, 296, 303, 315, 377, 406, 418, 442, 461 Schottlaender, Rudolf, 116 Schottstädt, Bruno, 226 Schramm, Martin, 216 Schramm, Walter, 216 Schröder, Bernd, 165 Schröder, Gerhard, 73, 202 Schröder, Richard, 7, 176, 229, 421 Schubert, Helga, 58 Schult, Reinhard, 193, 204–206, 209, 214, 216, 230, 233, 298, 301, 307, 417, 427, 438, 446 Schulz, Werner, 251, 421, 448 Schulze, Rudolph, 56 Schürer, Gerhard, 91, 353, 362–363, 380, 400 Schütt, Hans-Dieter, 11, 54, 62, 125, 135, 293, 346 Schwabe, Uwe, 254, 266 Schwabe, Willi, 104 Schwan, Gesine, 73 Schwanitz, Wolfgang, 402–403, 410, 424–426, 433–434 Schwante, 325 Schwarze, Hanns Werner, 69 Schwarze Pumpe, 380 Schwarzenberg, 326 Schwedt, 271, 307 Schwerin, 57, 123, 152, 154, 156, 195, 254, 265, 300, 359, 388, 423 Sebnitz, 218, 378, 427 Seelig, Marion, 196, 216 Seelig, Roland, 216 Seelow, 271 Segert, Dieter, 258 Seghers, Anna, 36, 372 Seidel, Bernd, 274 Seidel, Eberhard, 301 Seidel, Jutta, 301, 307 Seidenschnur, Heinz-Otto, 165 Seidl, Anni, 214 Seite, Berndt, 99, 369, 429 Seiters, Rudolf, 313, 403 Sello, Wolfram (Tom), 341, 433

Index | 517

Semler, Christian, 405 Shebarshin, Leonid V., 60 Shultz, George, 256 Sietzsch, 156 Silly (band), 131–132, 305 Simon, Hans, 210 Simon, Helmut, 421 Sindermann, Horst, 23, 28, 57, 156, 310, 399, 409 Singelnstein, Christoph, 228 Sinn und Form (magazine), 114–117 Sitz, Hans-Karl, 274 Skeptics (band), 125 skinheads, 123–125, 134, 136 Slimegerm (band), 125 Smith, Zadie, 390, 465 Smolensk, 16 soccer, 11–13, 132–133, 145, 169, 476 social policy, 91–97 Society for German-Soviet Friendship. See Gesellschaft für Deutsch-sowjetische Freundshaft Society for Sport and Technology, 31 Solidarność 13, 15, 52, 76, 191, 228, 276 Solon, 481 Solter, Friedo, 119 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 114 Sommer, Theo, 68 Sömmerda, 156 Sonneberg, 419 Sopron, 288, 291 South Africa, 203, 281 Soviet Union, 14–22, 24, 28, 33, 42, 50, 53–54, 60–61, 66, 71, 87, 97, 100, 113, 133, 138, 147, 156, 202, 250, 262, 265, 268, 275, 354–355, 396–397, 468, 489 Sozialdemokratische Partei in der DDR (SDP), 230, 297–299, 303, 306, 311, 315, 320–321, 325–326, 348–350, 364, 368–369, 373, 376, 379, 398, 413, 416–418, 421, 435, 437–442, 445–448, 450–451 Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), 22–29, 31–32, 35, 39, 41, 44–45, 48, 53–62, 66, 68, 72–74, 78–80, 85–96, 104–105–107, 111,

113, 118, 123–125, 128, 133–134, 139, 144, 148, 152–153, 156–157, 166, 172–173, 193, 200, 202–203, 206–212, 217–219, 221–226, 240–245, 252–254, 257–262, 264, 266–271, 273–274, 277–278, 290, 293–295, 302, 309–315, 317–322, 324–325, 327, 329–330, 332, 344–346, 349–350, 352–353–363, 367–368, 370, 373–374, 379–380, 388, 395–398, 400–402, 405–406, 408–413, 415–416, 418–420, 423, 430–431, 438–441, 445–447, 449, 456, 458, 472, 488–489, 479 Spain, 64, 112, 358, 490 SPD (West), 68, 71–74, 76, 78–80, 85, 202, 234, 364, 388, 408, 439, 443, 447–448, 457, 470 Spira, Steffie, 3, 377 Springsteen, Bruce, 130, 377 Sputnik (magazine), 55–62, 240, 255, 373 St. Petersburg, 53, 343 Stalin, Josef W., 19, 24, 54, 56–57, 60–62, 116, 440 Stalingrad (Wolgograd), 133 Stappenbeck, Christian, 226 Stars, Hauke, 479 Stasi. See Ministerium für Staatssicherheit Stechbarth, Horst, 381 Steglich, Margarete, 23–24 Steinberg, Karl-Hermann, 450 Steiner, André 7 Stelzer, Hans-Ehrenfried, 430–431 Stendal, 193, 195, 300 Stevens, Shakin, 129 Stier, Christoph, 166, 179, 321 Stockholm, 199 Stockmann, Ulrich, 216 Stollberg, 378 Stolpe, Manfred, 162–163, 166, 170–171, 175, 179, 183, 220, 222, 228, 244, 251–252, 322, 327, 331, 347–348, 360, 438, 449 Stolte, Dieter, 448 Stoph, Willi, 23, 57, 277, 310, 347, 353– 354, 361, 380, 400–401, 404, 409 Storkow, 170

518 | Index

Störtebeker, Klaus, 126 Stralsund, 95–96, 200, 254, 265, 333, 351 Stranka, Erwin, 121 Strausberg, 265 Strauß, Franz-Josef, 65, 69, 78 Strauss, Richard, 333 Streletz, Fritz, 251, 352 Suhl, 12, 152, 341, 343–344, 367, 388, 427, 445, 448 Suhr, Heinz, 198, 201 Süssmuth, Rita, 314 Sweden, 64, 105, 199 Switzerland, 268, 284, 409 Syria, 321, 362 Tajikistan, 71, 122 Tallig, Jürgen, 254–255 Tallinn, 275, 467 Tangerine Dream (band), 129 Tannert, Christoph, 126 Tbilisi, 275 telegraph (samizdat), 341, 360 Templin (Weis), Regina, 210, 213–215, 217, 219–221, 224, 226, 243 Templin, Wolfgang, 78, 128, 193, 202–203, 208, 213–215, 217, 219–221, 224, 231, 234, 243, 405, 421, 440 Ten Years After (band), 215 Thatcher, Margaret, 17–18, 75, 364, 441, 447, 470 Theater o. N., 120 theater, 118–120, 370–372 Theuer, Werner, 119 Thielmann, Klaus, 139 Thierse, Irmtraud, 120 Thierse, Wolfgang, 120 Thomas, Rüdiger, 69 Thuringia, 177, 475 Timm, Ernst, 278 Timm, Gottfried, 369 Timmer, Karsten, 7 Tisch, Harry, 23, 310, 368, 395, 409 Tokyo, 64 Ton, Steine, Scherben (band), 130–131 Töpfer, Johanna, 367 Torgau, 200, 326 Trabant. See cars

traveling, 147–149 Trotta, Margarethe von, 221 Trumpold, Harry, 400 Tschäpe, Rudolf, 301 Tschiche, Hans-Jochen, 192, 209, 229, 301, 307 Turek, Rolf-Michael, 228, 257 Turkey, 407 Tvardovsky, Alexander T., 117 Uerdingen, 12 Ukraine, 21, 97, 112 Ulaanbaatar, 63 Ulbricht, Walter, 14, 35, 39, 43–44, 65–66, 125 Ullmann, Wolfgang, 263, 297, 299, 303, 421, 427, 441, 448 Umweltbibliothek/Environmental Library, 195–197, 203–212, 214–215–216, 218, 226, 234, 244, 270, 282, 300, 416, 433 Umweltblätter (samizdat), 59, 136, 196, 208–209, 214, 224, 341 Unabhängiger Frauenverband (UFV), 416–417, 421, 441, 444–445, 448 unemployment, 470–471 Unger, Walter, 214 United Kingdom, 64, 112, 201, 219, 224, 228, 245, 364, 386–387, 490 United Left. See Vereinigte Linke United Nations Organization (UN), 107, 151, 165, 205, 274, 321 United States of America (USA), 55, 64, 66, 112, 130, 203, 218, 234, 250, 256, 364, 386, 490 unity, 5, 68, 76–77, 80, 137, 145, 176–178, 180, 303, 328–329, 341–342, 355, 387–389, 391, 394, 407–408, 411–412, 417, 420–422, 434, 439, 441–445, 450–451, 456, 458, 460, 465–490 Uschner, Manfred, 234 Useless (band), 125 USSR. See Soviet Union Vaatz, Arnold, 71 Valletta, 66

Index | 519

Vancouver, 184 Veen, Herman van, 317 Vehra, 156 Venezuela, 468 Vereinigte Linke/United Left, 300, 306, 311, 320, 406, 416–417, 421, 439, 443, 446 Vereinigung der gegenseitigen Bauernhilfe/ Peasants Mutual Aid Association, 417 Verner, Paul, 157 Versailles, 343 Vesper, Karlen, 250 Vienna, 63–64, 151, 203, 250, 256, 294 Vietnam, 89, 133, 147, 268, 321 Vietze, Heinz, 410 Vieweg, Kurt, 373 Villain, Jean. See Brun, Marcel Vilnius, 275, 467 Vipperow, 200–201, 209 Vogel, Hans-Jochen, 73, 443 Vogel, Wolfgang, 220, 313 Voigt, Birgit, 201 Voigt, Karsten D., 73, 234, 408 Volkskammer/People’s Chamber, 29, 360, 399–402, 405, 410, 415, 419–420, 422, 424–425, 431–432, 434, 436, 441–442, 448–449, 451, 470 Volkspolizei/People’s Police, 31–32, 66, 152, 166, 181, 289, 306, 312, 314, 322–323, 325–327, 329, 331, 357–358, 360, 427, 437 Volkssolidarität (organization), 31 Voltaire, 487 Waalkes, Otto, 120 Wachowiak, Jutta, 406 Wagner, Bernd, 136 Waigel, Theo, 443 Wałęsa, Lech, 55 Walther, Hansjoachim, 442 Walther, Jens, 223, 300 Wandel, Paul, 41–42 Wandlitz, 1–3, 28, 33, 241 Wanka, Johanna, 479 Wanne-Eickel, 490 Waren, 351

Warnecke, Lothar, 121 Warnemünde, 186 Warsaw, 8, 13, 150, 251, 277, 292, 313–314, 387, 467 Wartburg. See cars Warzecha, Heinz, 406 Washington, 13, 63, 68, 387, 398, 467 Weber, Elisabeth, 201 Weber, Max, 42, 481 Wecker, Konstantin, 128, 217 Weigel, Hansjörg, 296 Weigt, Gerhard, 299, 421 Weimar, 150–151, 156, 200, 210, 218, 272, 308, 310, 419 Weiß, Konrad, 135–136, 297, 299, 303, 405–406, 435, 446, 448 Weißenberg, 107 Weißhuhn, Reinhard, 193, 203, 216, 227–228, 280, 306–307, 405, 435 Weiz, Angelika, 305 Wendland, Günter, 352 Wensierski, Peter, 302 Werdau, 318 Werneuchen, 265 Wernigerode, 378 Wessel, Harald, 54, 372 Wetzky, Mario, 233 Widrat, Werner, 332 Wiegand, Joachim, 253 Wiens, Shenja-Paul, 240–244 Wieynk, Christine, 399 Will, Rosemarie, 258, 421 Wille, Karola, 479 Wilms, Dorothee, 68, 78 Winkler, Eberhard, 158 Wishbone Ash (band), 129 Wismar, 155–156, 210, 244, 280, 333, 343, 437 Witt, Katarina, 130, 142, 145 Wittenberg, 167, 175, 183, 194 Wizisla, Claus-Jürgen, 164 Wöhlbier, Uwe, 222 Wojtyła, Karol, 14 Wolf, Christa, 117, 305, 347, 351–352, 371, 377, 379, 406, 421, 438 Wolf, Markus, 33, 309, 361, 376, 409, 426 Wolf, Rainer, 233

520 | Index

Wolf, Wolfgang, 230, 233 Wolfram, Klaus, 421 Wolfspelz, 192, 232 Wolgast, 95, 343–344 Wolk, Winfried, 310 Wolle, Stefan, 7, 372, 422 Wollenberger, Knud, 220 Wollenberger, Vera. See Lengsfeld, Vera Women for Peace. See Frauen für den Frieden Wonneberger, Christoph, 80, 164, 209, 228, 255, 257, 308 Woodstock, 215 Worbis, 446 Working Group on Justice, 228 Working Group on the Citizenship Law of the GDR. See Arbeitsgruppe Staatsbürgerschaftsrecht der DDR Working Group on the Human Rights Situation in the GDR, 228 Woronowicz, Ulrich, 227 Wötzel, Roland, 332, 409–410 Wünsche, Kurt, 403, 450

Wuppertal, 75 Wurzen, 333, 351 Wusterhusen, 265 Yalta, 63 Yeltsin, Boris N., 20 Yugoslavia, 147, 398 youth cultures, 121–137 Zerv, 482 Zeughaus, 427 Zhivkov, Todor, 321, 397 Ziegler, Martin, 171, 226, 322, 327, 417, 438, 444 Ziemer, Christof, 184, 327, 331 Zimmermann, Falk, 233 Zimmermann, Peter, 332 Zinnober (theater), 120 Zittau, 270, 307, 365, 368 Zossen, 281 Zschoche, Herrmann, 121 Zupke, Evelyn, 270 Zwickau, 254, 306, 351