James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

As Reagan spoke, several hundred East Berlin residents gathered on the other side of the wall, trying to hear or at least see what was happening. They knew from West German television and radio that the American president would be speaking at 2 p.m. In the hour beforehand, they had strolled in groups down Unter den Linden, the main boulevard of East Berlin that runs to the Brandenburg Gate. When they reached Pariser Platz, the open square connecting the boulevard and the gate, they found that it had been sealed off. Many East Berliners congregated just to the east of this new barrier, listening to the music that preceded Reagan’s speech. East German police, the Volkspolizei, arrived.

At 1:58 p.m. a loudspeaker warned, “You are asked to continue on your way. Do not remain standing.” The message was repeated. Police officers wandered into the crowd, urging people to leave the area and, in one case, asking several young people for their papers. But most of the crowd stayed put; several people told the police officers they didn’t understand why they had to leave.

The East German authorities were not eager for a confrontation. The crowd had assembled in virtually the same location where the clashes had broken out the previous weekend as East Berliners gathered to hear the rock concerts on the other side of the wall. Those earlier protests had attracted international press coverage, and Honecker’s regime was reluctant to call attention to itself by cracking down once again. The police took no further action.

For the following hour, while Reagan was speaking, the East German crowd stood there, in a strange, silent tableau. They could not hear the speech; the barrier erected at Pariser Platz put them too far away. Through the arches of the Brandenburg Gate, they could see in the distance, from time to time, the American flags being waved during Reagan’s speech. Some peered through binoculars toward the West, and others put children on their shoulders to see the flags. After an hour, as they saw the crowds in West Berlin beginning to disperse, the East Berlin onlookers began to wander off too. 7

Some of the residents of West Berlin were not nearly as subdued. West Berlin officials put ten thousand policemen on the streets to help keep the city quiet during Reagan’s visit. Nevertheless, both before Reagan’s speech and in the hours after it, there were violent street battles between protesters and the police. Young West Berlin residents, wearing masks, threw paving stones at the police and smashed the windows of banks and department stores. Police cordoned off Kreuzberg, the area of the city where most of the demonstrations took place. The final words of Reagan’s speech—“if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they’re doing again”—were a hastily added reaction to the intensity of these West Berlin demonstrations.

Reagan left for Tempelhof Airport, where he took part in the event that had first prompted his visit to the city: an American-sponsored birthday party, complete with cake, in honor of the 750th anniversary of the founding of Berlin. He was following President François Mitterrand and Queen Elizabeth, who had already taken part in similar anniversary celebrations during the previous month. The American president viewed a display of the Berlin Airlift, shaking hands with three U.S. Air Force pilots who had taken part in the operation nearly four decades earlier.

The Reagans flew on Air Force One to Bonn, carrying Helmut Kohl and his wife along with them. The stopover was a formality: Bonn was the West German capital and the American president needed to put in an appearance there. It lasted only about ninety minutes, and Reagan did not leave the airport grounds. He stood with Kohl for the playing of national anthems, reviewed the troops, and talked with the German chancellor for about forty-five minutes in a room at the airport. Then he returned to his airplane for the long trip back across the Atlantic. At 9:47 p.m. Washington time, Reagan was back inside the White House. He was never to return to Berlin for the remainder of his presidency. He had said what he wanted to say.

Reagan’s appeal to tear down the wall had little impact in East Germany, at least at the time. Quite a few East Germans knew what he had said—they had heard the speech on West German radio and television—but nobody thought it would lead to any change. “No one believed that the wall would come down any time soon,” Bettina Urbanski, a journalist in East Berlin, remembered many years later. “Young people couldn’t even remember the time before the wall existed.” 1

Ordinary East Germans were isolated. West Berlin, so close by, played no role in their lives. Even the television and radio broadcasts originating in West Berlin seemed as though they came from some distant place. “The weather reports for West Berlin were the same as for us, but the news was like the news from Brazil or Angola,” recalled Maritta Adam-Tkalec, then a young newspaper editor. “I remember the Reagan speech. I thought, ‘Crazy man.’” 2

“I think I said, ‘He’s crazy,’” said Jörg Halthöfer, who was then a Communist Party official serving in East Germany’s trade ministry. Halthöfer was by his own subsequent admission an opportunist, one who had joined the party to advance his own career, and he had learned enough to be cynical. “I knew Neues Deutschland [East Germany’s Communist Party newspaper] was lying, so I assumed that the Western television was lying, too,” he said. Halthöfer thought the idea of tearing down the Berlin Wall was unrealistic because he knew that East Germany’s Communist regime couldn’t survive without the wall. “Opening the gate was the same as ending the German Democratic Republic,” he said. “It wasn’t possible to make another system alongside the capitalist system without a wall.” 3

East Germany’s news agency, also controlled by the Communist Party, reported that Ronald Reagan had called for destroying the “border security installations,” its customary euphemism for the Berlin Wall. The American president’s performance was aimed merely at “show effects,” said the news agency. Reagan “could not hide his regret that the preponderance of Europe, which is socialist, wants no part of Western freedom, which is expressed particularly in the large army of the unemployed.” 4

At the highest levels of the East German leadership, there was less bravado. Egon Krenz, a Politburo member and Honecker’s eventual successor, recalled many years later that Reagan’s speech had taken the East German regime by surprise and had produced an internal debate. “The majority, including me, thought that President Reagan simply intended to provoke,” Krenz said. “We thought that the U.S. authorities were testing the waters to see how far they could go with the new Soviet government, because Gorbachev had been in office for only two years.” 5

Honecker, however, took a more conspiratorial view. According to Krenz, Honecker suspected that the Berlin Wall speech was the result of secret collusion between the United States and the Soviet Union. The East German leader thought that Reagan’s words, and his appearance in front of the Brandenburg Gate, reflected a larger strategic understanding with Gorbachev under which the Soviet Union seemed to be ready to give up East Germany, step by step. After Honecker fell from power in 1989, he believed even more strongly that the two superpowers had been collaborating with each other for several years, and that Reagan’s visit to Berlin had been merely one part of the larger pattern. 6

Recently declassified material shows that Honecker was especially unnerved by the key line in Reagan’s speech. He was upset by the wording: the American president had urged Mr. Gorbachev, not Mr. Honecker, to tear down the wall. In a formal sense, it was East Germany’s wall. Indeed, the East German authorities—Honecker and his boss, Communist Party leader Walter Ulbricht—had played the leading roles in building the wall in 1961, despite the Soviet Union’s initial reluctance. 7Yet Reagan, in addressing his appeal to Gorbachev, had succeeded in conveying the larger underlying reality: that East Germany would never have existed without Soviet support and Soviet troops. The American president had found a new way of reminding the world that Honecker was insignificant in the larger scheme of things, merely the leader of a satellite regime.