Voices in a Revolution

The Collapse of East German Communism

Melvin J. Lasky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351299824
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Afeatured article in Die Zeit, the leading German weekly, begins with "Melvin, du hast gewonnen"--Mel, you have won! In his extraordinary account of the final days of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) we see the reckoning of a regime, and also the vindication of a life-long devotee of European democracy. It is unlikely that any comparable memoir will be written, since Lasky's career spanned the entire history of wartime and postwar Germany, especially in divided and Wall-torn Berlin.Voices in a Revolution, now in paperback, offers an in-depth portrayal of the Communist police state before the breakdown, followed by a blow-by-blow account of the drama of breakdown and regime transformation. Characters in the everyday cultural world of Germany come alive as harbingers and heralds of the end of the old and the necessity of the new.Lasky understands the role of accident as well as of necessity. The West Germans had all but abandoned the slogan of One People, One Nation when they were faced with the immense task of supervising just such a reintegration. The work ends with the awakening conscience at the very point that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. This is a memorable work--one likely to sear the conscience of lovers of freedom and analysts of tyranny alike.

1

Before the Breakdown

“There are times, men, and events about which only
history can pass a final judgment; contemporaries
and individual observers may write only
what they have seen and heard.”

Livy

The last time I saw the DDR in full flower, or rather in blighted bloom, was in its last summer. It was in those final months before the October crisis and the November crack-up of 1989 – ironically, those very months so sacred in the revolutionary calendar, and they turned history upside-down. I had completed an academic term in West Berlin, and a farewell journey in nostalgia seemed appropriate and, probably, even safe. I had seen Leipzig and Weimar in the early post-War days and had never had the courage to revisit. A few incautious remarks about the nature of the Soviet-German régime in the late 1940s had made me persona non grata, and when one of Walter Ulbricht’s ministers remembered the misdemeanour – as he said, years later, “We should have boiled him in oil!” – I took the hint and was effectively warned off.

But that was a long time ago and, possibly, in a different country. The German Democratic Republic had now found world-wide recognition, and was considered a proper and powerful state (“the 11th strongest industrial society on earth“, in the agitprop cliché of the day). Its leader, Erich Honecker, had been given the red-carpet, state-visit treatment by the West German Federal Government in Bonn. Even the Social Democratic opposition – which, under Dr. Kurt Schumacher and Mayor Ernest Reuter, had been ferociously hostile to SED – Stalinism and the East German totalitarian régime – had long since reconciled itself to the permanent two-State partition of the former Reich. Western socialists began to call Eastern Communists “Comrades (Genossen)” once again, and made earnest intellectual efforts to work out “a common programme” of shared Left principles.

The old Cold War seemed to be over long since. True, there was still the ugliness of the Berlin Wall and a vast artificial frontier, manned by death-strip marksmen. And there was the notable altercation between a Kremlin spokesman who ventured the Glasnost notion that the Wall’s days might be “numbered”, and Erich Honecker who reassured both Moscow and Bonn that the number in question was “a hundred years”. For the rest the DDR radiated peace and confidence, went quietly about celebrating its 40th anniversary, and positively ignored little signs of dissidence and public discontent – not even getting excited enough to blame a leaflet here and a church meeting there on the instigation of foreign agents and agitators.

The time seemed right for a sentimental journey, sans politics or journalism, sans everything. Only some kind of a Faustian longing for Weimar remained. I booked a hotel room at The Elephant (which Goethe and then Thomas Mann had once made famous), and casually obtained a tourist visa from a local travel agency to cross Checkpoint Charlie or Dreilinden, or wherever, in order to reach my prepaid (D-Mark West) overnight accommodation as per the official colour brochure: “See Our Culture & Our Progress….”

My companion was an old Social Democrat friend in Berlin. When he and I were young correspondents we had watched the tragic consolidation of tyrannical power in the East. And, in our outrage, touched more by idealism than prudence, we had vowed to try to keep the ideal of a liberal, open society alive. For many years, armed to the teeth with leaflets (and some books and magazines), we appealed to “hearts and minds” behind the then Iron Curtain; alas, a few readers of our venturesome lending-library were arrested. In the end, my companion H.H. published a scholarly sociological study of “a secret readership” which was resisting Marxist-Leninist Gleichschaltung.

Apart from such exercises in remembrance of things past, the journey was relatively uneventful. We placed a number of red roses on the graves of Goethe and Schiller, and also on Melanchthon’s (“gentle Philipp”, as Erasmus had called him) in Luther’s historic Church in Wittenberg. We refrained from arguing with the museum guides about dubious practices in exhibiting period pieces. (Why not own up to the fact that the pictures on the wall and the books on the shelves in Goethe’s library were not actually Goethe’s own?) Generally, we kept our voices low and, for old cold warriors whose passions were not quite spent, discreet.

I am afraid I exploded once, in the University of Halle, when on the general academic bulletin-board one could find nothing but pages of the day’s Party newspaper, Neues Deutschland, spread – eagled across the wall and full of marching slogans. Also, in an arid local bookshop, I lost a little patience with the calculated insipidity and the odious censorship of Big Brother’s hidden hand. Oh yes, and finally, in the streets beyond the enchanting cathedral buildings in Naumburg, where one emerged to find shabby little shopping streets with nothing to buy or sell, issuing on rubble-strewn alley-ways where not a rock had been touched since the end of the War. On one comer, I vowed to beg, borrow or steal a couple of earth-moving tractors from Krupp or Mannesmann A.G. and do the job myself. At a crossroads nearby, I burst into a fanciful bit of old imprudence by offering “to privatise” each of the four street comers: and in the aftermath of the desolate State Trading Organisation, the so-called HO, there would come the full shelf-life of Bolle, Meyer, Tenglemann, and Safeway. An unthinkable consumers’ revolution, but subversive for all that.

No, we sensed nothing of the insurgence and revolt that was imminent. I, for one, still had something of my old political emotion that actuated the philosophes of two centuries ago: Ecrasez l’infâme … and for that redundant libertarianism I had become almost isolated in indigenous intellectual circles. When the Wall would come down, and under what circumstances simple human rights would be restored to this wasteland, no man could tell.¹ But that this was “devoutly to be wished” had, alas, become an anachronism in the East-West politics of the last 25 years.

The nostalgia which overcame me on the return-trip to West Berlin had, to be sure, little to do with the restoration (not too bad) of Goethe’s house on the Frauenplan, nor of the haunting wooden 15th-century Saxon madonnas, nor of the old oak door in Wittenberg where Luther had pinned his theses, nor the sight of the handwritten manuscripts of Schiller and Herder. These were the ostensible motives of the journey; but coming back we became rather agitated, like bees before an electrical storm.

I thought of a brief excursion into Mark Brandenburg which I had made in the company of Ambassador Günter Gaus (and thus under some diplomatic protection). That had been ten years earlier, and the life-denying greyness was similarly dispiriting. I ventured no comment to the Ambassador (like most diplomats, tempted to defend his assignment like his own native land). He had told me that the Stasi had always managed to bug his official Mercedes, and that Bonn was weary of clearing the infernal devices, so we didn’t talk – at least nothing buggably “embarrassing”. I kept my eyes closed. When I opened them at one point to ask where we were, I was told by the chauffeur “Ulbricht Strasse, comer Wilhelm Pieck Allee, entering the Klement Gottwald roundabout….” Dashing electronic caution to the winds, I shouted “Damned villains!” and couldn’t care less who recorded it.

I don’t suppose these street names still exist in the newly-reconstituted state of Brandenburg, and I was elated to learn recently that there is a little official committee, newly appointed and currently at work, to suggest decent alternatives for such nauseous urban traditions. Not even a thousand more streets named after Goethe and Schiller can distress me now.

One of its subcommittees in the East Berlin borough of Hohenschönhausen has come up with an interim report, estimating the cost of doing new street-signs for even the shortest of metropolitan avenues (roughly 20,000 DM), and also revealing that it had received some 1,676 suggestions from citizens for urgent changes. Leading the so-called “Hit-Liste” was Ho-Chi-Minh-Strasse, followed by Lenin-Allee and a side-street named after the famed French Comintern leader, Jacques Duclos. There are indications that the avenues named after Otto Grotewohl, Klement Gottwald, and Georg Dimitroff will also soon be disappearing from the borough maps. Some of the worst examples of nomenclatural self-aggrandizement, of a narrow-spirited street-comer propaganda, have already been removed in Berlin-Mitte. Flagrant misnomers “honoring” Johannes Dieckmann, Otto Nuschke, and Wilhelm Külz – all redolent of that opportunist collaborationism which bolstered the old régime – have now been consigned to oblivion. The old Berlin street names, a stone’s throw from the Brandenburg Tor, have been restored: respectively, Taubenstrasse, Jägerstrasse, Markgrafenstrasse.

Local officials were proud that their revolution had prevented an Erich-Honecker-Strasse.

One final reminiscence before the frontier crossing at Dreilinden, and then Nikolaussee, Schlachtensee, Halensee, and home again.

I thought of Ernst Reuter, that giant of a man who had the manifest destiny to become Mayor of a small town, and rump West Berlin was that in 1947, at the moment when it became central to the global Cold War conflict. He played the role to the hilt, as if Hegel’s Berlin lectures on the World Spirit of Universal History were still in the air. We were neighbours for many years in the borough of Zehlendorf, and one evening I told him of a Soviet Russian officer who had defected (one of the very few, at least the only one who had “surfaced”). Major Gregory Klimow’s life-story, truth to tell, was not very interesting; but there it was, living testimony that there was, or could be, “another Russia”. I persuaded him to write the preface to Klimow’s book – and in 1952 Ernst Reuter made the point that, in the long perspective of Middle-European history, the prospect of German unity, and thus the establishment of a régime of liberty and law where Stalinist terror raged, would depend on a turning-point in Moscow. No small deals or rearrangements, even if they were possible, or negotiable, could be decisive. When the Soviet Empire, in crisis or disarray, began (in the old euphemism) “to shorten its lines of communication”, then East European freedom – and German unity – would be on the order of the day.

Smaller spirits, of lesser character and insight, nowadays think that their chatter about détente, or Co-Existence, or Mutual Friendship, or Confidence-Building, or the “small steps” of Ostpolitik, contributed something to turning the trick of history. Ernst Reuter saw – in the year of his death in 1953 – where the fulcrum of the moving events would be: at the centre not at the periphery. And his moral intransigence as the greatest of the European cold warriors fed his confidence. Did anyone else think it would take only a few decades for Stalin’s Empire to decline and fall – that “the masses” would be spiritually ready if only we in the West did not abandon their cause? He used the word “masses” with an ironic movement of his bushy eyebrows; after all, he had once, in his youth, been a Commissar in Lenin’s government and thereafter General-Secretary of the German Communist Party…. And the political ideals which would move them, Poles and Czechs and East Germans together – this was a central article of faith of Ernst Reuter’s cold war against totalitarianism – would be the values of a liberal, humane order of law and openness. Reuter was a prophet of the post-Communist society. He even had hopes for a post-Bolshevik Russia.

But we stopped talking of this, and anything else, as we approached the Dreilinden check-point, putting on for the Eastern control officers of the feared Volksarmee a twee look of feigned innocence which they scrutinised systematically with four intense glances (a curious technique, this), quartering your face from left ear to right eye, from hair-line to jaw-bone.

In a last act of pique, I asked where I could sell back the equipment they had forced me to buy, for hard cash, when I came in – an emergency first-aid kit, an illuminated triangle for accident warning, and a number of other expensive items “just in case”.

“Just in case of breakdown”, they had said.

But we didn’t have a breakdown. Could they take it all back, der ganze Plunder?

“We don’t need it, we don’t break down.”

Whereupon I said – I think I said it, I wanted to say it, maybe sotto voce – “Dein Wort in Gottes Ohr … your word in God’s ear.”

Break down they did. some say it was no accident.

Note

1.  Except for gypsies and Irishmen, I have already referred to the eerie pixillated prediction of my Berlin friend, James P. O’Donnell (whose visionary article was published in a dozen international editions of the Reader’s Digest in 1979):

“The Year was 1989. The Wall was coming down. All along its hideous 165 kilometers East and West Berliners were pouring out to dismantle it…. Canny merchants were weaving through the happy crowd selling souvenir bricks.”

See my obituary of O’Donnell, “A Foreign Correspondent”, in Encounter, September 1990, pp. 70-72. See, also, Keith Botsford, “Buoyant Future for Prophets”, in The Independent (London), 13 January 1990.

On the Old Firing Line

Today’s paper has an account of the views of “a grand old man” of Stalin’s secret services; a German veteran of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War; an underground courier in Hitler’s Reich; a Stasi – and KGB – operative in Belgium and Holland. He is almost 80 and is, of course, retired now (with a Red Army Colonel’s rank); and his name, Willi Rom, struck a bell with me, for I can remember hearing of his sub rosa adventures in the Paris studio of George K. Glaser. Glaser split with Willi Rom, his boyhood comrade from Frankfurt, and turned from politics to art. Even in his atelier off the Rue St. André des Arts, when he was telling the story of “secrecy and violence“, he kept, I recall, hammering away on some pieces of stone or sheet metal, as he spun his tales of romantic revolution. (I later published them in Der Monat, and the whole memoir subsequently became a best-selling book entitled Geheimnis und Gewalt.) George defected, Willi remained a life-long true believer.

“Our DDR is breaking up”? argues Willi Rom in disbelief. “Sez you. You can’t decide things like that.”

“Who can?”

“We can.”

“Who’s we?“

“We, the Party. It’s still there, has survived all the class struggles, and will never be defeated, will never give up! Those who are hoping for ‘the end of Communism’ will hope in vain… Sure, Stalin and some other comrades made a few mistakes. Such things happen when the Cause is fighting for its life. It’s what I learned in Spain. When you’re on the front you keep on firing straight ahead at anything that moves. How can a bullet on the firing-line be guilty or not guilty?…”

2

Inside the Police State

“… Was it only a few months ago? No, a mere week, a single night,
plunged...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. Before the Breakdown
• 2. Inside the Police State
• 3. The Ornithology of Revolution
• 4. Reiner Kunze & the Unlovely Years
• 5. Wolf Biermann & His Guitar
• 6. An Anatomy of a Wayward Intelligentsia
• 7. A Lost Nation?
• 8. Günter Grass & a Hollow Tin Drum
• 9. Janka, or Difficulties with the Truth
• 10. Coda