The Berlin Wall
part of the Iron Curtain that cut Europe in two.
Beyond the wire,
armed force had always held down the peoples of the Communist world.
In 1989,
the Wall was still intact,
but there was a new mood in Moscow.
The use of force had discredited itself completely.
It was no longer possible to stabilize the world by military methods.
We saw a real opportunity, because of this...
recognition on the part of the Soviet Union,
that they weren't going to win an arms race.
They weren't going to, quote, 'Bury you,' unquote.
We were the beneficiaries of this.
December 1988.
Gorbachev met George Bush and outgoing President Ronald Reagan.
Gorbachev had decided that the Cold War must be brought to an end.
The Americans remained cautious.
There were pressures...
on Mr. Gorbachev from his right, if you want to call it that,
from his military, God knows from who else,
who didn't want to see the rapidity of this change.
By 1989, Gorbachev was determined to loosen Soviet control
over the nations in the Communist bloc.
Gorbachev told the peoples of Eastern Europe
that they had the right to choose their own futures.
But his listeners wondered what would happen if non-Communists won power.
Would the Soviet Union really stand aside?
Gorbachev was convinced that when these countries got their freedom,
they would choose socialism with a human face.
He believed they would not turn away from Moscow, nor run off to the West.
He thought they would be grateful to Moscow
and keep up ties of friendship with the Soviet Union.
But not everybody wanted freedom from Moscow.
Communist leaders like East Germany's Erich Honecker
relied on Soviet support to stay in power.
To imagine that the Soviet Union, after 40 years of alliances,
would leave every socialist country to fend for itself
and turn its back on them, as if there had never been a brotherly community
this was unheard of.
Hungary 1956.
Soviet tanks smashed the Hungarian attempt
to win democracy and independence.
Imre Nagy and the other leaders of the uprising were executed.
Economic reforms improved life for a while, then hit disaster.
By 1989, the Communist government was losing control.
But Soviet troops remained in the land.
The Hungarian people were growing angry again.
Fear drove the regime to promise political changes,
and more democracy.
The country was in a... close to an abyss,
close to a... total crisis situation.
Economically... we accumulated by that time a huge debt.
Politically... all the key players within the country
realized that... there is no way
to get a better life via reforming the socialist model.
In March 1989, Prime Minister Nemeth visited Moscow.
The Hungarian leaders were planning free multi-party elections.
But would this be too much for Gorbachev?
I said, 'I don't know as of this moment
when we will have the first elections.
But knowing that you stationing...
in the territory of the country roughly 80,000 soldiers,
and having in mind the experience of '56,
when your tanks crushed... the...
...revolutionaries and all the forces
who fought at that time for freedom,
will you repeat...
the '56, er... exercise or not?'
And Gorbachev without hesitation
responded quite clearly to me, 'I don't agree...
with the... multi-party system...
the introduction of the multi-party system in Hungary,
but that's not my responsibility, that's your responsibility.
There will be no instruction or order by us to crush it down.'
So that was quite important message.
A nameless grave in Budapest hid the murdered leaders of the 1956 uprising.
Now the government agreed to rehabilitate them,
the dead and the living.
Erzsebet Hrozova was 18 when she fought in the uprising.
She spent 12 years in prison.
I felt as you do when a plaster is removed
and at last you can breathe freely.
You don't have to lower your head any more.
I felt I could breathe again.
Imre Nagy and his comrades were given a public funeral.
The government declared that the 1956 revolution was justified.
The crowd listened to the names of the martyrs.
I was stunned to see that er...
on that list...
young boys when they imprisoned them, arrested them, they were...
14... 16 years old...
and... they waited till they celebrated their 18th birthday.
And next morning they killed... some of them.
The reburial meant to us
a reconciliation with our past and history.
It meant a new start, a fresh start,
especially in the political side of our life
and a renewal.
A month before, the Cold War had lost a symbol.
The Hungarian government took down the barbed wire
on its border with Austria and the West.
The Soviet Union did nothing.
Although travel was still not completely free,
the Iron Curtain was starting to unravel.
I refused to give to the Home Minister...
...money in that year's budget
for the renewal or the refurbishment of the old,
old barbed wire system.
They said that the Iron Curtain was technically obsolete
it didn't work as a barrier any more.
They should not maintain a construction that endangered people's lives.
Hungary's boldness alarmed the hard-line Warsaw Pact leaders.
None was more shocked than the East German ruler, Erich Honecker.
His state formed the Soviet empire's frontier with the West.
Honecker's first reaction
was to send the minister of foreign affairs to Moscow
to protest against this decision.
Moscow's answer was:
'We can't do anything about it.'
This was unique.
It was the first time that Moscow had said anything like this to us.
The Poles, like the Hungarians, were breaking with the communist system.
Faced with a wave of political strikes,
led by the opposition movement Solidarity,
the regime had given way.
I knew that the communist system was finished.
The only problem was, what would be the best way to get rid of communism.
In 1981, with Soviet approval,
Solidarity had been crushed by the Polish army.
Its leaders were imprisoned.
Now, in early 1989,
the government opened round-table talks with Solidarity.
The Polish Communists were prepared to share power,
to discuss a shift towards democracy.
Democratic institutions were being formed.
They were substitutes for a full democracy,
but we were different compared to the other countries of the bloc.
We were in a way a heretical island.
In June, elections were held.
"Solidarnosc."
They produced a stunning defeat for the Communists.
Solidarity won 99 out of 100 seats in the Senate.
Within weeks the first anti-communist
prime minister in the Soviet bloc took office.
When we knew that Gorbachev was thinking about reform,
we saw he would not oppose our reforms,
and that was important to us.
At the Warsaw Pact Summit, the leaders were divided.
Honecker, like Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu,
was alarmed by what was happening in Poland and Hungary.
Honecker and particularly Ceausescu were against our reforms.
On one occasion we were having a meeting with him
in his residence on the outskirts of Bucharest.
He and his wife, Raisa and myself, were having a discussion.
Our passions really ran high.
We spoke in such loud voices
that we had to remove all our security people
so that they wouldn't hear us.
We heard that Ceausescu of Romania, Jakes of Czechoslovakia and Honecker
were organizing some sort of conspiracy.
They wanted to talk Gorbachev into intervention against Poland
and Hungary.
They said that these nations had already passed the limits
of what was acceptable in socialist countries.
When I heard the first proposal from Ceausescu on this,
I looked at... look at the other side of the table
at the Soviet delegation was...
seated... and our eyes crossed each other's eyes.
He was signaling to me that, 'OK,
don't argue against it.' So in other words he send me...
by... by his eyes an important message: that you don't have to say a word.
It will not happen.
And it did not.
In July, President Bush visited Poland and Hungary.
The West gave them moral support for democratic change, but little more.
We did have some modest economic packages
for both countries, but really...
we did not want to kind of pump money down a rat hole either.
We wanted to be sure
that the economic reforms, the moves towards free markets - those things
were for real, that they were going to continue.
In Hungary, Bush was presented with a piece of barbed wire,
a souvenir of Hungary's dismantled Iron Curtain.
...We believe that the artificial, physical
and spiritual wall still existing in the world some day
shall collapse everywhere. And that is just beautiful. Thank you, sir.
I don't know I'm kind of an emotional sort of person anyway.
I cry too easily. I did then. I do now,
and I had tears in my eyes when I... when I... was given this symbol
of the end of the Cold War.
On his Wyoming ranch, James Baker, Bush's secretary of state,
discovered a real friendship for Eduard Shevardnadze,
the Soviet foreign minister.
"Excuse me, I'm from the Park Service. Do you guys have a fishing license?"
"Absolutely... Two of them!"
Baker confirmed to Shevardnadze that the United States
would tread carefully in Eastern Europe
and would not exploit Soviet problems there.
What was achieved at Jackson Hole was, I think, a new atmosphere of trust.
Everyone on the American side, as a matter of fact, felt it was
very important that we...
assist Gorbachev and Shevardnadze
and the reformers in the Soviet Union in any way we could
to arrive at a soft landing.
The Cold War didn't have to end with a whimper
it could have gone out with a bang.
Already, in communist China,
a surge of demands for human rights and democracy
had ended in tragedy.
On Tiananmen Square, in Beijing,
tanks and troops had attacked peaceful demonstrators
and slaughtered them.
The world shuddered.
Would reform in Eastern Europe end like this?
Erich Honecker, in East Germany,
admired the Chinese solution to political protest.
Honecker refused to admit that anything was wrong with his own system.
I told them that they were responsible
for the situation in their own countries
'You decide what reforms you need.
We need perestroika.
Whether you need perestroika is up to you.'
Honecker said, 'We've done our perestroika,
we have nothing to restructure.'
But in reality, East Germany was rotting away.
Pollution, poisoned air and water;
the economy was running down;
the police state stifled all initiative.
There was apathy in public,
daydreams in private.
Most people in the GDR withdrew into their private lives.
You went to your job,
saw to it that your private life was protected from harm.
Then you withdrew into your home, with your friends,
in your own private world.
You criticized society at home,
but only among people you trusted.
There was a video camera installed in the building
opposite us which was trained on our window.
Every private word we said,
every dispute about who had to do the dishes,
every argument with the children was listened to and noted down.
Everyone who entered our house was videotaped.
That summer, East Germans rushed to take holidays in Hungary.
There was an escape hatch;
Hungary's border with the West was weakening.
In Budapest, East Germans besieged the West German Embassy,
demanding help to emigrate.
It was known that every German from the GDR
who chose to live in freedom and democracy
would get all possible support from us.
The West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl
had confidence in Gorbachev.
Kohl planned to rescue the Hungarian economy
if the East Germans were allowed to go West.
He trusted Gorbachev not to block the deal with the Hungarians.
The Hungarians agreed to let the East Germans cross to the West.
Honecker called the refugees moral outcasts.
I believe he felt a mixture of anger and utter contempt
for these masses of people
these ungrateful people
who had run over to the 'other side.'
The refugees had been traveling from East Germany to Hungary
in the hope of getting to the West.
Now East Germany blocked travel to Hungary.
Desperate, the fleeing East Germans turned to Czechoslovakia.
They gathered at the West German Embassy in Prague.
We had no prospects.
I didn't want my child to grow up under that repression.
It wasn't just that we couldn't travel; it was small everyday things.
When the embassy was full, the refugees climbed into the garden.
We didn't know what was going to happen to us.
We knew there were many people inside waiting,
but we weren't sure whether there would be police inside
or even the state security police, the Stasi.
We walked fearfully along the fence
and then people from inside the embassy came up and said:
'Don't you want to come in?'
We were astonished and said 'Yes.'
'Wait,' they said, 'we'll get a ladder.'
We climbed the fence and were inside.
At first we saw just people.
It was frightening. People everywhere.
More and more refugees crammed themselves into the embassy
and refused to leave.
The Czech police made futile attempts to stop the inrush.
Inside the embassy, the overcrowding and squalor grew worse day by day.
Both German governments, East and West, were at their wits' end.
West Germany's foreign minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, came to Prague.
Under Soviet and West German pressure,
Honecker had consented to a face-saving deal.
The refugees could go to West Germany,
but only if their train crossed East German territory first.
Then Honecker could claim that he had expelled them
and canceled their citizenship.
The train stopped. Two men opened the doors.
'Good day, we are from the state security
and will collect your identity cards now.'
And I will never forget how they had to bend down to collect these documents,
because the people threw their identity cards at their feet.
The feeling was, 'There's your card, you can't threaten me anymore.'
It was very satisfying.
Back in Prague, a new wave of refugees stormed the embassy fence.
Their last chance of reaching the West seemed to be vanishing.
Within a few days,
another 7,000 people had scrambled into the embassy gardens.
Some East Germans chose to stay and protest.
The Lutheran churches were sheltering an opposition movement.
Inspired by Gorbachev,
the protesters dreamed of turning East Germany into a democracy.
Gorbachev gave us great hope.
First of all, he tried to change his country
in the same way as we wanted to change our country,
through perestroika
a gradual liberalization.
In Leipzig, the police struck back.
On September 4, Western journalists filmed
plainclothes security men
as they attacked the demonstrators.
Soon came a new chant of defiance:
We are staying here!
We are staying here' was a protest against what the GDR had done
namely to drive young people to leave the country
because they had no prospects.
That was a turning point, and people said, 'We still have hope.'
Every Monday in Leipzig, there were demonstrations at the Nikolai church.
They swelled into mass protests.
The police tried to stop them.
But the government was losing its nerve.
In short, we were speechless because we were helpless.
Because this country and this leadership
never before experienced a conflict
which was so openly expressed.
Only Honecker seemed to notice nothing amiss.
On the eve of East Germany's 40th anniversary that October,
he was confident as he waited with his colleague Egon Krenz
to greet his senior guest,
Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Soviet delegation already knew
that the East German regime was tottering.
The outward show of victorious celebration went ahead.
Then, at the torchlight parade of Communist youth,
the marchers dropped their rehearsed slogans.
They began to chant another name
"Gorby!"
Honecker pretended not to notice.
These were specially chosen young people,
strong and good-looking.
They were in a cheerful mood,
but they started chanting slogans
'Gorby help us!
Gorby stay here!'
Rakowski the Polish leader came up to us and said,
'Do you understand German?' I said, 'I do, a little bit.'
'Can you hear?' I said, 'I can.'
He said, 'This is the end.'
And that was the end: The regime was doomed.
This was a vote of no confidence against us.
'Gorby, Gorby' did not mean,
do it exactly as it was done in the Soviet Union.
'Gorby, Gorby' meant, we need change here in the GDR.
In a series of increasingly surreal meetings,
Gorbachev tried to inject a sense of reality.
Honecker and I spent about three hours talking.
He couldn't understand why I wanted a meeting.
But we had a serious discussion.
I told him what we were doing.
He told me what they were doing.
He described it all as one victory after another.
But I said,
'He who lags behind events, loses.'
It was absolutely clear to me that both sides
spoke about two completely different things.
They did not try to meet in the middle.
During the whole conversation they did not agree on a single thing.
As the leaders met at the closing reception,
a plot was hatching against Erich Honecker.
A group in the East German Politburo had decided to try and get rid of him.
We could no longer afford to hesitate in removing Honecker.
We had to act fast.
You could see that he did not understand what was going on.
He had an autocratic approach to what was happening around him.
He couldn't cope with the situation.
At dinner with Gorbachev and the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries,
Honecker was a complacent host.
Meanwhile, a hostile crowd was gathering outside.
Gorby Help Us! Gorby Help Us!
Honecker was planning to stamp out the new opposition.
No one was sure how far he would go.
There was a permanent fear
that there might be a 'Chinese solution' to the problem
and that weapons might be used.
We could never ignore this possibility.
Sometimes we even thought that Soviet tanks might appear.
That evening the demonstrations in Berlin continued.
Pig! Pig! Pig!...
In Leipzig earlier that day,
the authorities made ready to meet the demonstrations with armed force.
On the afternoon of October 7,
the entire square was cordoned off by the police.
It was the first time I saw the power of the police.
They stood in a phalanx with their helmets and shields and face masks.
And standing there right up to them we felt their force and violence.
That night, the police charged and scattered the demonstrators.
But an even larger protest rally was called for two days later.
The army was on standby.
They realized that they could no longer control the events
with the police alone.
They wanted to use us to increase the pressure on the situation.
Almost all paramilitary brigades were mobilized.
The voluntary police force were out in strength.
More than 8,000 men were armed and sent with their equipment to Leipzig.
We were issued with twice as much ammunition as normal.
Usually we had 60 rounds. Now they gave us 120 rounds.
One of us had a friend at the hospital
and he'd heard that blood reserves had been ordered
and spare beds were to be kept free on that day.
The city was in a state of emergency.
Shops had to close at 5 o'clock
we felt very intimidated.
At work, people warned each other, 'Don't go into town tonight.
Who knows what's going to happen?'
As the Leipzig demonstration moved off,
the local Communist Party leaders realized that 70,000 people
were already on the streets.
Alarmed, the Soviet ambassador
telephoned the commander of Soviet forces in the region.
'I urge you to immediately order the troops to go back to the barracks.
That's the first thing.
Secondly, stop all maneuvers.
Third. Stop all flights of military planes.
And under no circumstances interfere in the developments.'
The Leipzig Communists begged the opposition to talk with them.
Then, without higher orders,
they pulled back the East German police and troops.
The demonstration went off peacefully.
For East Germans, this was the turning point.
People almost fell into each other's arms and said,
'Oh my goodness,
now something is happening,
and now finally we're starting to talk to each other.
And if we talk to each other we won't shoot at each other.
Now Honecker's allies deserted him.
He was voted out of power by Egon Krenz
and the entire Politburo on October 17.
It was high time for him to go.
It would have been impossible for us to get out of this deep valley
with him at the top,
even if he had mustered all his authority for change.
Now Egon Krenz was in charge. He promised democratic reforms.
He assured the people that he would make it easier
for East Germans to travel West
the issue which had set off the whole crisis.
Of course we felt under tremendous pressure
it was non-stop.
We had to make a move.
On November 1, Krenz visited Gorbachev in Moscow.
We talked very openly about the question of free travel.
And he said to me,
'If you don't find a new formula which allows the GDR citizens to travel,
then things won't look good for you.'
Egon Krenz was unfortunately devoid of any charismatic qualities.
He wasn't accepted by the people; he wasn't attractive to the masses.
He couldn't find the words to speak to people
because he only spoke the old party jargon.
By '89 many people, myself included,
were no longer prepared to look for dialogue.
I remember that we said, 'Now our readiness for dialogue has expired
now it's confrontation.'
In vain, Krenz offered new freedoms.
The street demonstrations grew bigger, and asked for more.
In East Berlin on November 4, a crowd of half a million people gathered.
If you live in a system that is suppressive,
you don't walk upright, you always go this way,
with your head...
down,
and now was a chance to walk upright and to show your face
and to show the power of the people.
On November 9th, 1989, Gunter Schabowski told journalists in Berlin
that restrictions on travel to the West would be lifted.
The government meant the change to start next day.
But Schabowski mistook the timing.
The news flashed round the city.
East Berliners rushed to see if the checkpoints in the Wall
were really opening.
"We'll be coming back!" "We'll be coming back!"
The border guards were baffled.
We didn't get any instructions from our superiors, none.
Only: Observe the situation.
We tried many times to speak to our superiors,
but nobody got back to us.
You have to bear in mind that our soldiers were fully armed on this day
as always.
And they had one order.
That order was to stop anyone trying to escape,
but the crowds were huge now.
Suddenly the guards gave in.
They opened the barriers.
They opened the borders and didn't take any countermeasures.
They didn't consult me or get my approval.
I found myself in a group of people who were applauding.
I didn't understand right away why.
Then I realized. I really was in West Berlin,
and West Berliners had come to the border and they were applauding us.
We were all crying and embracing each other.
Even now when I think about it, my heart is racing.
It was so moving.
West Berliners arrived from the other direction.
They began to demolish the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
There was a common idea. Now we have to get rid of the Wall.
Everybody had different reasons.
For me it was that I had relatives on the other side who couldn't come over.
When I remembered my aunt, and how I couldn't see her
before she died, it made me so angry.
It was liberating to do something against the Wall.
It was emotional for me, but I must confess
that I had in mind not overreacting.
The stupidest thing...
that any president could have done then
would have been going over there, danced on the Berlin Wall,
and stick his fingers right into the eyes
of the Soviet military and of Gorbachev.
Who knows how they would have had to react?
Next morning I got a phone call. They told me what had happened.
I said, 'You made the right decision,'
because how could you shoot at Germans
who walk across the border to meet other Germans on the other side.
So the policy had to change.
Across this Wall, two worlds had faced each other in arms.
Now their enmity was dumped into history.
Germany would be reunited.
But Europe's revolution against communism
was not yet done.
Subtitles by Juan Claudio Epsteyn
E-mail: epsteyn@hotmail.com