Our programme included a trip on the yacht of Hamburg’s governing Senate but, just as we were due to go on board, there was a great flurry of large wet snowflakes. This was promising to be some lake trip! Raisa made what might have seemed a rather sensible suggestion: ‘Perhaps we should cancel it?’ ‘Absolutely impossible’, she was told. At every pier on the lake and the adjoining canal we were to sail past, already, in defiance of the weather, many people had gathered to greet us. It really was out of the question to let them down.
The previous day, after meetings in the city hall and a speech I had given, there was a grand reception in Grüner and Jahr’s huge House of the Press, built in exuberant accordance with the norms of modernist architecture. At the end, there was a short concert, the highlight of which was a performance by Wolf Biermann and Nina Hagen. Nina Hagen was a young actress and singer, the daughter of Eva-Maria Hagen, a famous actress in the days of the German Democratic Republic. Wolf Biermann was a man with a guitar, what in Russia we call a bard, and he too had lived almost his entire life in the GDR. He sang barbed protest songs, for which he had constantly been subjected to such restrictions as house arrest.
He and Nina Hagen surprised us by performing in German and Russian something I had never heard before: ‘A Song about Gorbachev’. We were given a Russian translation of the text, and Wolf gave us a note of how it had come to be written. It read:
Dear Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev,
Four years ago, Mirra Slawutzkaja, a German Jew who had worked in the Comintern for Dimitrov and Togliatti, and then from 1936 to 1956 continued her education for 20 years in the Far East Academy of Social Sciences [by which I took Wolf to be referring to the Gulag. – MG], brought with her from Poland a cheery song about Gorbachev. Nina Hagen asked me to translate it, but to be honest, I thought the words were rather silly, so I wrote completely new German words and new music, which you can hear on a record called Gut Kirschenessen (Good to Know).
We have performed the song at hundreds of concerts to thousands of people in Germany, including the former GDR. Most of them liked it. They like the fact that, when singing of the world today, we do not only complain and whinge, but say there is a man we praise who did a little to save it. Whether it was enough, whether it was done in time or too late, time will tell, but that is up to us.
In May, I shall be singing in Moscow for the first time. If you can find the time and have the inclination, you will be able to hear a few of my other songs and compare them with those of Okudzhava and Vysotsky.
The song is quite long, so I will not quote it in full. Like much else, it is symptomatic of the times. From Biermann’s letter it would seem to have been written in 1989 or thereabouts and reflects the euphoria, the doubts and anxieties of that time:
On a solid foundation
‘Europe, Germany and Russia between the Past and the Future.’ This was the title I gave to my speech in Frankfurt-on-Main at the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of German reunification. The first thing I said, after congratulating the Germans on this occasion, was: ‘You have done yourselves proud. The commitments that you, the German nation, undertook you have successfully fulfilled. You are an example to all countries following the path of democracy or seeking it.’
For all that to come about, much had had to change in the world, with huge changes in Soviet society and among the peoples of the Soviet Union. At the same time there had had to be changes in international relations, the end of the Cold War, and changes in the two German states. For us, the leaders of that generation – George Bush, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl – Germany presented a major challenge. For many years it had been an acute European and global problem, a bare nerve in international politics, I said.
I recalled the milestones along the way that led to the historic threshold crossed when Konrad Adenauer visited Moscow in the mid-1950s and the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and West Germany, the Eastern Policy of Willy Brandt and Leonid Brezhnev’s meetings with Helmut Schmidt. I spoke of the role of the German Democratic Republic in overcoming the hatred of Germany left by the war in the hearts of many Soviet people, especially those who had fought in the war. As late as June 1989, Helmut Kohl and I were agreeing that reunification of Germany would be a matter for the twenty-first century, I recalled.
But within a few months, in November, the Berlin Wall came down. It is not that we were mediocre prophets. No, the people expressed their will loudly and clearly. The citizens of the GDR took to the streets to demand reunification without delay. They had the support of the entire population of West Germany: ‘We are one people!’ was the slogan of the hour.
This was particularly evident during a torchlight procession on the occasion of the German Democratic Republic’s 40th anniversary. Representatives of all the regions of the GDR came together in Berlin. Together with the country’s leaders and other guests, I was standing on the podium. I saw the faces of thousands of young people and sensed their mood. One of the slogans they were shouting was: ‘Gorbachev, stay here another month!’ People were openly chanting in support of reunification. I was standing next to Wojciech Jaruzelski and the Polish prime minister Mieczysław Rakowski. Mieczysław turned to me and said, ‘You do know this is the end?’ I replied: ‘Yes, I understand what is happening.’
No one can ignore such determination on the part of the people, and we recognized it. If we had embarked on democratic change to give people freedom in our own country, we could not refuse it to citizens of the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and could not deny the German people the right to reunification. In my Frankfurt speech, I repeated words I had said many times before:
When people ask me who was the main protagonist of reunification, I say, the people. Two peoples. The Germans who resolutely and peacefully expressed their will to reunite, and the Russians, who showed understanding of their aspirations and believed that today’s Germany is radically different from the Germany of the past, and supported the will of the German people. Without that, the Soviet government could never have acted as it did.