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.7 Yet 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.
Declassified State Department cables show that on June 18, 1987, less than a week after Reagan returned from Berlin, an East German diplomat in Washington invited a State Department official to lunch and proceeded to ask the meaning of the speech at the Brandenburg Gate. “He asked plaintively whether Reagan’s call to Gorbachev [rather than Honecker] to tear down the Wall was prompted by U.S. policy toward Berlin, or simply done to snub the GDR [East German] government,” the official reported.
In short, Honecker wasn’t willing to tear down the wall—but he would at least have liked to be asked.8
The idea of a Soviet-American conspiracy was entirely in Honecker’s imagination. To be sure, by mid-1987, Gorbachev’s foreign policy was beginning to change; the best evidence had been the defense-oriented military doctrine announced at the Warsaw Pact session two weeks before Reagan’s visit. Gorbachev was also trying to forge a new relationship with West Germany as part of a larger effort to court Western Europe. Less than a month after Reagan’s trip to Berlin, Gorbachev played host to Richard von Weizsäcker, the West German president, on a visit to Moscow.
Yet none of these developments in mid-1987 amounted to a Soviet-American conspiracy against the East German regime. When Ronald Reagan called for the destruction of the Berlin Wall, Soviet officials and the Soviet press promptly condemned his speech in the same fashion as the East German regime did, calling Reagan’s words a return to the rhetoric of the Cold War. “West Berlin is a bad place for muscle-flexing,” said Valentin Falin, a leading Soviet expert on Germany. Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, accused Reagan of crying “crocodile tears” and said the Western allies had, through their own hostile actions, made it necessary for East Germany to build the Berlin Wall. Izvestia, the official Soviet newspaper, reminded its readers that a year earlier, Gorbachev had signed a guest book at the Brandenburg Gate praising the East German border guards.9 Another Izvestia column warned that the existing division of Germany had helped to prevent military conflict between East and West. “While the German question remains open, the question of war in Europe also remains open,” he said.10 When von Weizsäcker visited Moscow, Gorbachev even refused to allow publication of the West German president’s comments about the Berlin Wall or about a divided Germany. The Soviet leader wanted to be tough, not conciliatory. “The Germans have to be treated this way,” Gorbachev told an aide. They respect firmness—ordnung [order].”11
Although the Soviet Union itself still lined up behind Honecker, some of its Eastern European neighbors did not. On June 14, two days after Reagan’s speech, Hungarian television stations carried footage of the American president’s appearance at the Brandenburg Gate, including his appeal to tear down the Berlin Wall. Hungarian TV had also shown, a few days earlier, a report about East German protests during the rock concerts in West Berlin. One Hungarian explained at the time that Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost provided enough latitude for the government of Hungary to take occasional swipes at the aging leaders of East Germany and Czechoslovakia.12 Reagan’s Berlin speech wasn’t the cause of these divisions within Eastern Europe, but by reminding everyone of the wall, it exacerbated the underlying tensions and helped to bring them into the open.
For West Germans, Reagan’s speech was unsettling. German chancellor Helmut Kohl quickly endorsed Reagan’s speech, but other West German officials were less enthusiastic. “At the time, people [in West Germany] thought that Reagan was not supporting Gorbachev as much as he should,” asserted Karsten D. Voigt, a German specialist on the United States. “Americans all kept appealing to freedom, but we felt it’d be stronger if they had cooperated more with Gorbachev.”13