04 September 2009
“Those Were The Days, My Friend”
This article is excerpted from The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 2.53 MB).
By: Anna Husarska
“Your point of view depends on your viewpoint” goes an old Polish saying, and the way we, in Eastern Europe, saw the coming down of the Berlin Wall is a perfect illustration of this proverb. Here is my view — one shaped by a sympathetic understanding of the Polish historical experience.
First: What was the Berlin Wall?
Among other things, it was a metaphor. The difference between what one saw from either side of the physical structure tells us much about a Europe divided into Soviet and non-Soviet zones, a fate sealed at the Yalta Conference in 1945.
From the West you could come up to the wall, you could touch it, scrawl graffiti on it, watch “the East” from an elevated platform. The Berlin Wall was a stage for American presidents: John F. Kennedy proclaiming his solidarity with the encircled city, “Ich bin ein Berliner”; Ronald Reagan pounding at the Soviet leader, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
From the East, the Wall was gray and depressing. We knew (but could not see) that behind the concrete structure topped with barbed and razor wire was the seven-meter-wide post way of raked gravel and — so we were told — a minefield.
And while the Wall was an enclosure around West Berlin (the French, British, and American sectors), metaphorically it encircled and enslaved half the continent.
For us in Eastern Europe, perhaps the most oppressive and difficult indignity was the wall of denials:
The wall of communist laws forbidding free travel to the democratic part of the world collectively (still today!) called “the West” — lest we see through the regime’s lies.
The wall of communist censorship making it nearly impossible to read anything other than propaganda — lest we be infected by bourgeois, capitalist ideology. (Uncensored books, magazines, and newspapers had to be smuggled in, but we devoured them when we could.)
The wall of communist “jamming” of foreign radio stations, such as BBC, Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America, with a persistent buzzing noise — lest we hear the truth about events in the world and in our own country.
But even worse was the wall inside each of us, the one that made us live a schizophrenic existence in two worlds — homes and company of family or friends where one could be oneself and a second world, false but increasingly familiar, in which we would wear a mask of obedience. The apprenticeship into this double life started early, around kindergarten, where we learned political slogans while reading Winnie the Pooh and made hammer-and-sickle paper cuts while playing with teddy bears.
Second, the date — or dates — the Wall fell also contributes to our understanding.
November 9, 1989, is the date most potently associated with the end of the unjust oppression of half of Europe. But the Wall began to crack back in 1980 when the Polish trade union Solidarity was created at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk and it won the right to strike. Also one might conclude that only with the 2004 admission of eight East European countries into the European Union was the Europe created at Yalta truly undone, although not just yet if one lives in Belarus.
Even within the annus mirabilis 1989, many East European events competed for attention and significance: the first talks between a communist regime and its political opposition (April, in Poland); the first semi-free elections (June 4, in Poland, eclipsed by the tanks crushing the dreams in Tiananmen Square that same day), the historical rehabilitation of Imre Nagy and his companions from the 1956 Budapest uprising (June 16, in Hungary); the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, itself grounded in the Charter 77 movement 12 years earlier, began in earnest that November. A month later, the former dissident writer Václav Havel was president. Finally, Romania — until then seemingly the most solid communist regime — proved the bloodiest in its sudden fall, also in 1989.
Meanwhile, that year’s German history can be framed within characteristically orderly brackets: a January 19 pronouncement by East German leader Erich Honecker that “The Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not yet removed,” and an improvised speech by West German head Helmut Kohl to the citizens of the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR) gathered in Dresden on December 19 as the crowd shouted, “Germany, Germany” and “We are one people.”
Third, the actual, physical crumbling.
The Wall was not merely 106 kilometers of concrete elements and 68 kilometers of metal lattice fence with 302 watchtowers bisecting a German city. It was instead the most conspicuous part of the physical and metaphorical Iron Curtain dividing free and unfree Europe.
When exactly did this Curtain come down? Cracks appeared when Hungarian officers removed the barbed wire on their border with Austria. This was in May 1989. That summer thousands of East Germans drove their tell-tale Trabants (a notoriously unreliable, locally manufactured East German car made, some alleged, of cardboard) to Warsaw and Prague and from there to Budapest, hoping to make it to “the West.” And so when on September 11, 1989, the Hungarians opened their border for citizens of the GDR to exit freely, some 15,000 Germans voted with their feet. That was one dent in the dam-like Berlin Wall, and a big one. Three weeks later, citing “humanitarian reasons,” the GDR authorities allowed a special train to leave Warsaw with almost a thousand East German refugees, transit the GDR, and continue on to the Federal Republic of Germany. More such trains left soon from Poland, carrying a total of 7,600 refugees. By November 3, 40,000 East German refugees had left for West Germany via Czechoslovakia. Now the dam really was leaking. The Wall looked far less sturdy.
Given the precise procedural formalism and stiffness of the GDR, the ultimate irony of November 9, 1989, was how the Wall at last opened that day: It was a bureaucratic screw-up. Not having been properly briefed, Communist Party leader Günter Schabowski famously announced in a live, televised press conference that all rules for traveling abroad were lifted. When pressed by journalists, he stated that it was “immediately,” not for the next day as it was planned. As for the rest, well, we all saw it.
No, I was not in Berlin the night the Wall fell. On November 9, 1989, I was in the editorial offices of The New York Times. The editor, Max Frankel, had granted me a short-term internship. I would acquire some experience about independent newspapers and apply it in the newly democratized Eastern Europe, where I had a journalist job waiting for me. That such a position was even possible in Poland tells us much about the rush of events.
A few days before the Wall came down a Polish actress declared on the TV news, referring to our semi-free elections: “Ladies and gentlemen, on June 4, 1989, communism ended in Poland.” It did. And the Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Gazette) daily newspaper, created as part of the decision to hold those elections, was, as the saying went, “the first free newspaper between Berlin and Vladivostok.”
I came back to Poland in the spring of 1989, after 15 years of living abroad, to join the editorial staff of that daily. I found the newly secured freedoms almost unbelievable, but my colleagues not only knew it was for real, they also expected a domino effect soon would bring the crumbling of the entire Soviet bloc. Surely, they argued, the Poles could take the credit for that? The patriot in me agreed.
The reporter in me wanted to see it all. In 1989, the Gazeta Wyborcza foreign desk was as privileged a seat as they come to observe the demise of communism.
For the rest of 1989 and well into 1990, I reported for Gazeta as the domino pieces fell: from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Nicaragua, then — writing for a newly created weekly — from Albania and from the Baltic States. Having participated in the Solidarity movement, I had very high expectations for the other movements across Eastern Europe.
Reporting from Czechoslovakia was probably the most exciting. It was the cleanest, smoothest, and most elegant of the “revolutions.” It was also a swift one. Graffiti in Prague that winter featured this simple list:
Poland, 10 years.
Hungary, 10 months.
East Germany, 10 weeks.
Czechoslovakia, 10 days.
It took a little bit longer than 10 days, but still it was a time when everything seemed possible, when we Eastern Europeans thought, as the song went, “We’d live the life we choose, we’d fight and never lose.”
Moving almost directly from reporting on the “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia to Romania’s “bloody revolution,” took me from the seventh cloud of heaven to hell on earth.
In my notebooks from that time I find these entries:
Dec 12, 1989, Prague:
People on Václavské náměstí square dance and sing “For Christmas we want Havel president” and they stick flowers in the barrels of the rifles of the puzzled policemen.
Dec 25, 1989, Bucharest:
Palace Square smells of wet ashes from the burnt out building of Communist Party and people repeat “Today is Christmas, the madman is gone” as they watch the replay of the execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu.
Dec 28, 1989, Bucharest:
State Romanian television broadcasts a film with Charlie Chaplin, that was forbidden until now… “The Great Dictator.”
“Oh, yes, those were the days…”
Anna Husarska worked as an editor and translator in the office of Solidarity abroad (Paris) and was a journalist at the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. In the U.S. she was staff writer at The New Republic and The New Yorker magazines reporting from conflict and post-conflict situations, Senior Political Analyst at the International Crisis Group and is currently Senior Policy Adviser at the International Rescue Committee. The opinions expressed here are her own.
