04 September 2009
“I Will Remember That Day All My Life”
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: Adam Michnik
In 1989 nobody anticipated the fall of the communist regime — no one in the world. When U.S. President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) called in West Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” people took it as an echo of Cold War rhetoric and not as a realistic political project.
And yet, the Wall was torn down.
I will remember that day for the rest of my life. It was during an official visit of the leaders of the Federal Republic of [West] Germany to Poland, which was already governed by the cabinet of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first noncommunist prime minister in the Soviet bloc. It was in the afternoon. I had been invited for a talk with the West German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher. We were discussing the prospects for the next few months. During our conversation an aide entered the room and handed the minister a piece of paper. Genscher read it, looked at me, and said: “The border crossing in the Berlin Wall has been opened.” That was the conclusion of our interesting conversation. I ran to the office of Gazeta Wyborcza [the democratic newspaper founded by Michnik and other journalists and political activists — Ed.] and penned a few sentences of commentary to be published on the first page. I wrote it was a great holiday: In the perennial struggle between man and barbed wire, today man triumphed and the barbed wire was defeated.
I was under the impression that all of Poland was rooting for the Germans, who were walking towards freedom. We kept repeating: "Ich bin Berliner… Ich bin Berliner.”
In all appearance, East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) was a communist state, and yet it was somehow unique. It had a typically incompetent government run by a party nomenclature, corruption, ubiquitous police surveillance, and a deepening economic crisis. What was atypical, however, was the existence of the other — democratic and rich — German state and the presence of Soviet garrisons on the GDR’s territory. It used to be said about Prussia that it was not a country that had an army, but an army that had a country. The GDR was not a country with Soviet garrisons; it was a country for Soviet garrisons. That was the reason for and the guarantee of the GDR’s very being.
In 1989 the Soviet garrisons, which in 1953 had saved the GDR regime by suppressing a workers uprising, received new instructions. The new rulers in the Kremlin had launched the policy of perestroika, in fact a retreat in internal and foreign policy from the logic of the Cold War. GDR leader Erich Honecker refused to accept this new policy. His cronies used to say: “Should we have to change the wallpaper in our home only because our neighbor changes his?”
But East Germans also did not like the old wallpaper. When on June 20, 1989, Hungarian foreign Minister Gyula Horn, together with his Austrian counterpart, cut the barbed wire on the border between their two countries, East Germans began pouring through Hungary into Austria. A little later, those who did not want to emigrate started to demonstrate in the streets of East Germany — the new policies of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev emboldened people, and Lutheran churches in the GDR served as meeting places for the protesters. West German President Richard von Weizsaecker accurately defined the two sources of the demise of Honecker’s regime: Gorbachev and churches.
During Gorbachev’s visit to Berlin in October 1989, people shouted “Gorby!” and chanted, “We are the nation!” Later, the slogan changed into “We are one nation!”
The Berlin Wall thus fell in the German people’s minds even before the actual event, which followed soon thereafter. On October 22, 1989, Erich Honecker was deposed and on November 9 Gunter Schabowski, the chief of propaganda and member of the Politburo of the SED, the East German ruling communist party, said in a press conference: “Today we reached a decision to issue an ordinance that allows every citizen of the GDR to leave the country through any border crossing.” After a moment, he added that the ordinance is effective “immediately.”
If Schabowski misspoke, it was the most important and most beautiful slip of the tongue in the history of Germany. Right after the announcement, Berliners armed with mallets and chisels set about to dismantle the Wall. What was unimaginable became real. The German circle was squared.
The fall of the Berlin Wall contributed greatly to the downfall of the communist system in the whole bloc, but it was not the first decisive event. The process — as seen from Warsaw — had started in a big way in August 1980, when a large strike in the Gdansk shipyard delegitimized the dictatorship of the communist party, which claimed to be the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It was an exceptional event — the proletariat issued a stern warning to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was the utmost moral defeat of communism. The real dismantling of the Berlin Wall began right there, right then. The Polish Round Table compromise and the subsequent semi-free elections in June 1989 were themselves heavy hammer blows against the Wall.
Other events contributed. The policy of U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), who put human rights on his banner and sought “détente with a human face,” started a confrontation the Soviet Union could not win. Neither could it prevail against the policy of President Reagan, who challenged the “evil empire,” engaging the Soviets in an arms race they could not win. The pontificate of John Paul II also played an immense role, with the pontiff setting the Christian message of human freedom and dignity against a communist doctrine based on violence and lies. The whole sequence of events — as well as the Soviet failure to keep up technologically with the United States and the misadventure in Afghanistan — led to Gorbachev’s new policy, one in which Soviet troops no longer would prop up the communist GDR regime. Probably no one did so much for the world as the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, although abolishing communism was certainly not part of his plan.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of post-Yalta Europe; it marked the end of faith in the communist utopia and in the perpetuity of the Soviet regime; it marked the end of the punishment imposed on the Germans for unleashing Nazism and starting the war; it also marked the end of humiliation for democratic Europe, which tolerated the image of a great city tortured day after day with barbed wire and border towers.
But the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism had more than one facet. Just as the massacre in the Square of Heavenly Peace in Beijing counterpoised the Polish elections of June 1989, which brought the defeat of the communists, the velvet revolutions in Central Europe had their darker parallel in the bloody events in Romania and the long war in the former Yugoslavia. The velvet was stained with blood. The smell of this blood still lingers in Europe. I felt it in many places — for example, in the refugee houses set aflame in several German cities. Those houses burned after the fall of the Wall. A whole library was written about the paradoxes of German unification and I can add little to the subject. But I remember an anecdote I once heard from one of my German friends. Shortly after the unification, an Ossie and a Weissie meet in Berlin. The Ossie says, “Welcome! We are one nation.” The Weissie replies laughing, “We too!”
Although I am a Pole free of Germanophobia, this laughter still rings in my ears, especially when I observe how numerous German politicians and intellectuals abandon critical reflection on German history and choose preoccupation with harm done to Germans, usually accompanied by a morally relativistic view of the harm done by Germans to Poles. The ease with which some see a symmetry between the expulsion of Poles and Jews from their homes and their cities after the aggression on Poland in 1939 and the expulsion of Germans decreed by the Allies after Germany lost the war both worries and saddens. The embarrassing opportunism and conformism of some German elites that accompanies this mental shift saddens, too.
I notice similar phenomena in other European countries, including my own. But nowhere are they as dangerous as in Germany.
To put it differently, although Europe changed a lot — and for the better — after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, it did not become an Arcadia of flourishing tolerance, respect for the dignity of others, and unfettered love of one’s neighbor. Our continent is still full of minefields, booby traps, and threats with which we must reckon.
And yet — after those 20 years — I remain an optimist. Why? Because I have no other option.
Adam Michnik is the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest Polish daily. In 1968-1989 he was one of the leading organizers of the democratic opposition in Poland. Historian, essayist and political publicist, he was the editor of several underground “samizdat” periodicals and was arrested and imprisoned several times for his pro-democratic activities. In 1980-1989, he was an adviser to the independent trade union Solidarity and its leader, Lech Walesa. In 1989 he participated in the Round Table Talks that brought about the end of the communist system in Poland. Michnik is the author of several books, including Letters from Freedom, The Church and the Left, and Letters from Prison and Other Essays.
