Berlin полностью

The largest protest demonstrations were in Dresden and Leipzig, not in East Berlin. Reflecting its status as a bastion of SED loyalty, the East German capital had so far failed to generate large-scale displays of civil courage like the Monday night vigils in Leipzig, where on October 2 over 10,000 citizens demonstrated for freedom. A visitor to the GDR who stayed only in East Berlin might well have agreed with Honecker when he bragged that the Berlin Wall would stand for another one hundred years.

Even Honecker, however, worried that his capital might not put on a properly loyal face during the upcoming anniversary celebration, scheduled for October 6–7. Gorbachev would be the chief guest of honor, and there was reason to fear that his presence might ignite efforts to turn the birthday party into a riotous confrontation with the authorities. The SED chief could imagine a local version of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square protests, which, in Honecker’s view, the Chinese comrades had let go on for far too long before cracking down. To ensure that his capital remained tranquil during the anniversary celebration he brought in thousands of extra police and Stasi agents; army units were also moved into the city. East Berlin had never been short on signs of official vigilance, but now it resembled a high-security prison, with armed guards on every corner. Surveying the scene on the eve of the anniversary, G. Jonathan Greenwald, political counselor in the American embassy in East Berlin, observed: “There is a body politic odor of nervousness, uncertainty, even fear.”

Gorbachev flew in on the morning of the sixth. In order to reduce the size and spontaneity of the welcome, his arrival and schedule were not announced. Only a few shouts of “Gorby! Gorby!” went up as his motorcade proceeded down Unter den Linden. At an official reception one man blurted out “Gorby, help us!”, to which the Soviet leader reportedly replied, “Don’t panic.” Throughout the two-day affair, the police and Stasi managed to prevent significant disruptions, but this required a liberal use of force. In the late afternoon of October 7, about 400 young people gathered in the Alexanderplatz shouting “Gorbachev! Freedom!” When the crowd moved toward the Palace of the Republic, where the final reception was in progress, the police herded the marchers into side streets and made arrests by the score. On the night of October 8 hundreds of people gathered in the streets around the Gethsemane Church in Prenzlauer Berg. They waved pictures of Gorbachev and called for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. The police closed off the area and attacked the demonstrators with clubs, which succeeded only in making the demonstrators more resolute. As one protester recalled: “I never knew how hard a billy-club was. And in that moment I thought, ‘It’s right for me to be here.’” For another demonstrator, the police behavior made what the regime called Staatsfeindlichkeit—being an enemy of the state—“not just a question of political temperament, but a matter of morality.”

The authorities’ ready use of force stood in stark contrast to the nonviolent tactics of the protesters. A visitor from West Berlin, an aging ’68er, scoffed to Counselor Greenwald about the passivity and small size of the East Berlin demonstrations compared to the legendary anti-Shah riot in West Berlin in June 1967. What would the East Berlin “pigs” have done, the West Berliner wondered, if they had been faced with the large numbers and tough tactics that his generation had employed? Greenwald, who actually knew something about the East German authorities, was understandably irritated by such puffed-up naïveté. “These police are not like those you played against as students,” he replied. “There is a chance for real change here, but if the old men feel their state’s existence and their own power is at stake, there could be a bloodbath.”

Gorbachev, the man whose name was so often invoked by the protesters, was careful throughout the fortieth anniversary celebration not to embarrass his hosts by openly upbraiding them for their lack of reforming zeal. Honecker was not so considerate in return. In a private meeting with the Soviet leader he reminded him that living standards in the USSR were lower than in the GDR. “Your problems are worse than ours,” he insisted. Such talk could hardly have endeared Honecker to the Russian, and in a meeting with the Politbüro Gorbachev signaled his irritation by warning that “life punishes those who come too late.” At least two Politbüro members, Egon Krenz and Günther Schabowski, got the impression that Gorbachev believed that Honecker ought to be ousted in the near future, a conclusion that they had already reached themselves.