Erich Honecker wanted no part of Gorbachev’s reforms. He instinctively distrusted openness, and he considered economic restructuring unnecessary in his country, which after all was the most prosperous in the East bloc. He believed that the Soviet leader, rather than handing out advice, should be taking pointers from him, the “elder statesman” of European communism. The East German leader was confident that he could withstand the challenge from Moscow because he continued to get crucial support from West Germany in the form of loans, trade subsidies, and “buyouts” of political prisoners. Prominent West German politicians, including Franz Josef Strauss, Lower Saxony minister-president Ernst Albrecht, and West Berlin mayor Walter Momper, paid him court. Chancellor Helmut Kohl lent him credibility by welcoming him in Bonn in 1987 as the first chief of the GDR to pay an official visit to the West German capital. Honecker took this opportunity to speak of “the reality . . . of two sovereign German states, independent of each other, with a different social order and opposing alliances.”
Gorbachev in East Berlin during the GDR’s fortieth anniversary celebration, October 6, 1989
In addition to financial help from the other German state, Honecker had the advantage of a relatively weak domestic opposition. Unlike some of his Eastern European counterparts, he did not face serious questioning of his party’s right to rule. As the self-proclaimed legatee of Germany’s leftist resistance to Hitler, the SED stood on a pedestal of historical virtue. Various dissidents might criticize this or that party policy, but they rarely contested the validity of Communist authority. Critics who did go too far, of course, could be sold off to the Federal Republic at a handsome profit to the regime. In the mid-1980s, of all the communist governments ordained by Stalin in the years after World War II, the one in East Germany seemed the most solid.
Nonetheless, Honecker’s confidence that East Germany could remain largely unaffected by the new developments in Moscow soon proved illusory. East Germans began demonstrating for reforms similar to those being undertaken in the Soviet Union; when challenged by the police they flashed Soviet badges and pictures of Gorbachev. GDR authorities found themselves in the awkward position of trying to curtail contacts between East German citizens and the mother country of communism. When the Soviet leader visited East Berlin in 1986, the route he took to his official reception was swept clear of would-be greeters. The regime took the extraordinary step of banning notable works of the Soviet reform culture, such as the anti-Stalinist film Repentance. The magazines Sputnik and Ogonyok, which championed liberalization, disappeared from East German newsstands. It was now easier to get contemporary Soviet publications in West Berlin than in East Berlin. All the efforts at repression, however, could not wipe out the “subversion” from the East nor stem the growing popular conviction that the new spirit in Moscow constituted a license to demand similar changes at home.
East German dissidents learned to raise their unwelcome demands at embarrassing moments for the regime. On January 17, 1988, as Honecker and company were reviewing the annual parade in commemoration of the martyrdom of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, a group of protesters broke into the ranks of the Free German Youth marchers and unfurled banners bearing Luxemburg’s dictum: “True Freedom is Always the Freedom of the Non-conformists!” Viewers of the parade were treated to the sight of Stasi agents beating and arresting citizens for brandishing a slogan penned by one of the martyrs being honored. Among those arrested were the dissident artists Bärbel Bohley, Vera Wollenberger, and Werner Fischer. Given the choice of prison or exile abroad, they chose the latter, finding temporary sanctuary in England under the auspices of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The irony of the exiles’ situation was not lost on Bohley, who declared later: “Thousands of East Germans were aching for the chance to travel, and here we were, being offered a long holiday in the West by the regime.”
As the Honecker government struggled to show that with “real, existing socialism,” the GDR had no need to take any reform lessons from Moscow, the nation’s Protestant churches emerged as crucial forums for critical debate on the future of the country. The churches played such a central role because they constituted virtually the only public venue—aside from sanctioned state functions or sporting events—where large groups of citizens could congregate. Recognizing this, the Stasi had been careful to infiltrate all the parishes and to enlist some of the clergy as “informal collaborators.” Increasingly, however, pastors began using the pulpit to admonish the government to respect basic political and civil rights. During a sermon at East Berlin’s Gethsemane Church, Gottfried Forck, the Protestant Bishop of Berlin, pleaded for the release of the over 200 people arrested in connection with the Luxemburg demonstration. In May 1989 Pastor Rainer Eppelmann of the Samaritan parish in East Berlin accused the government of falsifying the results of that month’s elections in order to gain its usual near-universal popular endorsement. The pastor proceeded to turn his church into a sanctuary for conscientious objectors and other political dissidents. Tellingly, rather than arresting Eppelmann and throwing him in jail, the regime merely subjected him to increased surveillance. The most important center of Protestant dissidence, however, was not East Berlin but Leipzig, where the congregation of the Nikolaikirche held “prayers for peace” each Monday, followed by silent, candlelit marches through the city. On the night of March 13 the police broke up one of these vigils, but on the next Monday the marchers were back again, and this time they refused to disperse.
While these voices of protest certainly represented a challenge to the Honecker regime, the government probably could have contained the dissension had not a more pressing threat emerged from one of the GDR’s “socialist brother states,” Hungary. On May 2, 1989, the new reform Communist government of Karoly Grosz in Budapest dismantled the barbed-wire fence on its border with Austria. Budapest assured East Berlin that, for the time being, Hungarian border police would still require East Germans to show GDR exit visas to pass into Austria. Yet this did not prevent thousands of East Germans from heading for the Hungarian-Austrian border in hopes of crossing to the West. When guards turned them back at the regular checkpoints, many simply abandoned their cars in the woods and walked into Austria. Others moved into the West German embassy in Budapest, refusing to leave without a laissez-passer to the West. Tiring of maintaining a “second wall” for a state that seemed incapable of holding the loyalty of its own citizens, the Hungarian government on September 11 formally opened its border with Austria and turned a blind eye when thousands of East Germans poured across the frontier. Honecker’s government screamed foul and turned to Moscow for help. The Soviets, however, had gone out of the business of policing their shaky Eastern European empire, and Gorbachev was more interested in fostering good relations with West Germany than in bailing out the GDR. As he told his ambassador to East Berlin: “We support the GDR, but not at the cost of our interests in West Germany and Europe as a whole.”