Kristina Spohr - Post Wall, Post Square

And so, each in his own way, these two communist leaders were hanging on to the past. Gorbachev adhered to existing geopolitical realities, despite the cracks opening up in the Iron Curtain. Honecker clung to the illusion that East Germany remained a socialist nation, united by adherence to the doctrines of the party.

The intransigence of the GDR regime during the celebrations, and the growing social unrest of recent weeks, made for a potentially explosive mix. Within less than two weeks Honecker had been ousted. And only a month after the GDR’s fortieth-birthday party, on 9 November, the Berlin Wall fell without a fight. The Wall had been the prime symbol of the Cold War, the barrier that contained the East German population and the structure that held the whole bloc together. The party of 7 October proved to be a theatre of illusions. Yet there was nothing inevitable about what came next.

The 9th of November 1989. Helmut Kohl was beside himself. Here he was, sitting at a grand banquet in the Radziwill Palace in Warsaw with the new leaders of Poland – Mazowiecki, Jaruzelski and Wałęsa – in a wonderfully festive atmosphere, together with a delegation of seventy, including Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and six other ministers of his Cabinet. But all around him people were murmuring ‘ Die Mauer ist gefallen! ’ (‘The Wall has fallen!’). Throughout that Thursday evening, as the chancellor tried to make polite chit-chat with his hosts, he kept being interrupted – receiving updates on little slips of paper and being called out to take phone calls from Bonn. All the while Kohl was desperately trying to think.[1] He was in the wrong place at the right time – the most dramatic moment of his chancellorship, perhaps of his whole life. What should he do?

Moment of reconciliation: Kohl, Mazowiecki and Genscher in Warsaw

Kohl’s mood had been very different when the dinner started. His five-day visit, in the planning for months, was intended as a milestone in West Germany’s relations with one of its most sensitive neighbours. History hung heavy in 1989. This was fifty years after Hitler’s brutal invasion of Poland, beginning a war that led to the extermination of 6 million Polish citizens (half of them Jewish), the obliteration of the city of Warsaw after the abortive rising of 1944, and the absorption of Poland into the Soviet bloc in 1945. Germany had a lot to answer for, and the process of reconciliation by Bonn had been long and painful. It had been an SPD chancellor, Willy Brandt, who made the first and more dramatic move in December 1970, dropping to his knees in silent remorse at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. Kohl’s trip was the first time a Christian Democrat chancellor had visited Poland. But he was not simply catching up with his political rivals and trying to redress the past; he also wanted to make a statement about the future, about the Federal Republic’s commitment to Poland’s resurrection as a free country in its post-communist incarnation. So the German chancellor had been delighted to sit down at the banquet that evening. Delighted, that is, until he got the news from Berlin.[2]

As soon as the dinner was over, the Germans held a crisis meeting over coffee. The situation was extremely delicate. The Polish leadership wanted to stop Kohl from going to Berlin, warning that this would be taken as a blatant snub. Horst Teltschik, the chancellor’s top foreign-policy adviser, was also hesitant. ‘Too much has been invested in this trip to Warsaw,’ he warned, ‘too much hangs on it for the future of German–Polish relations.’ Among the events on Kohl’s itinerary were a visit to Auschwitz – as an act of penitence for the Holocaust, preceded only once, by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (also SPD) in 1977 – and a bilingual Catholic Mass in Lower Silesia shared with Mazowiecki, set up as an act of reconciliation with the Poles. The mass was to be held in a place – the Kreisau estate of Graf von Moltke, one of the July 1944 Christian conservative plotters against Hitler – that symbolised a ‘better Germany in the darkest part of our history’, as the chancellor later put it. Kohl giving the kiss of peace to Mazowiecki linked up with his other iconic act of reconciliation: holding hands with Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984. But this gesture in Silesia was also intended to speak, at home, to the Vertriebene – the ever-prickly members on the right of his own party who had been expelled from the eastern German territories when these were absorbed into the new Poland (and the Soviet Union) after 1945.[3]

Upon leaving the Radziwill Palace, Kohl rushed to the city’s Marriott Hotel, where the West German press corps was staying, to answer their questions. And he remained for several hours because only in a Western hotel was it possible to see the news on German TV and to access a sufficient number of international phone lines. At midnight, when he spoke once more to the Chancellery, staff there confirmed that the crossing points in Berlin were opened. They also conveyed a sense of the massive flows of people and the joyous atmosphere in the once-divided city. Putting down the phone, the chancellor – pumped up with adrenalin – told the journalists that ‘world history is being written … the wheel of history is spinning faster’.[4]

Kohl decided to return to Bonn as soon as diplomatically feasible. ‘We cannot abort the trip,’ he observed, ‘but an interruption is possible.’ Next morning, 10 November, he placated his Polish hosts with a Brandt-style visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and a promise that he would be back within twenty-four hours. By the time he left Poland together with Genscher and a handful of journalists at 2.30 p.m., his destination had changed. While at the Ghetto Memorial, Kohl had received more disturbing news. Walter Momper, the SPD mayor of West Berlin, was organising a major press event, featuring his fellow socialist and former chancellor Willy Brandt, on the steps of the city hall (Schöneberger Rathaus) at 4.30 p.m. that very day. Brandt – the mayor of West Berlin when the Wall went up in August 1961 and then the celebrated chancellor of Ostpolitik – was now going to hog the limelight as the Wall came down. With barely a year to go before the next Federal elections, Kohl could not afford to be upstaged – especially when an earlier CDU chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had been conspicuously absent from Berlin during those fateful days in 1961 when the eastern half of the city was walled in.

It was all very well to want to go to Berlin. But getting there in November 1989 was no simple business. West German aircraft were not permitted to fly across GDR territory or land in West Berlin because of the Allied four-power rights – another legacy of Hitler’s war. So Kohl and Genscher flew circuitously through Swedish and Danish airspace to Hamburg before boarding a plane specially provided by the US Air Force for the flight to Berlin. Both men used the journey to frantically scribble their speeches. As much as they were partners, they were in the end also political rivals jockeying for position. After this humiliating diversion, they landed at Tempelhof, right in the centre of the city, just as the celebration at the Schöneberger Rathaus was about to begin. Sharing the spotlight with Brandt, they addressed a crowd of 20,000 and world media on the very steps from which, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy had declared ‘ Ich bin ein Berliner .’[5]

That evening, three key figures of FRG politics each put his own spin on the momentous events of the last twenty-four hours. Brandt, in keeping with his Ostpolitik strategy of ‘small steps’, talked of the ‘moving together of the German states’, emphasising that ‘no one should act as if he knows in which concrete form the people in these two states will find a new relationship’. Genscher opened his address by emotionally recalling his roots in East Germany, from which he fled after the war: ‘My most hearty greetings go to the people of my homeland.’ He was much more emphatic than Brandt about the underlying fact of national unity. ‘What we are witnessing in the streets of Berlin in these hours is that forty years of division have not created two nations out of one. There is no capitalist and there is no socialist Germany, but only one German nation in unity and peace.’ But, as foreign minister, he was anxious to reassure Germany’s neighbours, not least the Poles. ‘No people on this earth, no people in Europe have to fear if the gates are opened now between East and West.’[6]