Three months earlier, on the night of February 5-6, Chris Gueffroy, a twenty-year-old waiter in East Berlin, attempted to flee with a friend to West Berlin by crossing a canal and dashing across a section of the Berlin Wall. Gueffroy guessed that since Cold War tensions were easing, the shoot-to-kill order issued to East German border guards would no longer be enforced. He was wrong. The border guards shot him ten times, and he died immediately. The friend was also shot, but survived; he was arrested and jailed.
The East German authorities, however, could not so easily control events in the neighboring countries of Eastern Europe. Throughout the spring and summer of 1989, spurred on by Gorbachev’s encouragement of “freedom of choice” for the Soviet Union’s allies, Hungary and Poland embarked upon political and social changes so far-reaching that they called into question the fundamental arrangements that had prevailed in Europe since the beginning of the Cold War.
In May, Hungary took the first step by opening up its border with Austria, removing the fences and barbed wire that blocked free exit from its territory. “Hungarian glasnost has many faces, and one of them is the world passport which moved Hungary closer to Western Europe,” explained Andras Koevari, Hungary’s interior minister. Hungarian officials said the new travel freedom would legally apply only to Hungarians, not to residents of other Eastern European countries. However, each year more than a million East Germans were allowed to spend their vacations in Hungary, more than in any other country. In the summer of 1989, many of these East Germans made one-way trips across Czechoslovakia to Hungary and crossed, without permission, through the woods or open fields into Austria. Some made it. Others stayed on in Hungary or in Czechoslovakia, hoping to find some other way to make the final step—in some cases squatting in West Germany’s embassies in Budapest or Prague.
On June 4, Poland’s government held open parliamentary elections, the first of their kind in more than four decades. The goal was to win public support for a program of economic reforms that might be supported not just by Wojciech Jaruzelski’s Communist Party but by Lech Walesa’s opposition Solidarity movement, which, it was thought, might gain a minority of seats in the legislature. Instead, surpassing all predictions, the Solidarity candidates won virtually everything, including ninety-nine out of one hundred seats in the Senate.
Ronald Reagan, in the unaccustomed role of ex-president, quickly seized upon these changes in Hungary and Poland, urging the new Bush administration to stop being so aloof toward Mikhail Gorbachev. “Amazing things are afoot in the world this spring,” said Reagan, speaking in London nine days after the vote in Poland. “It is true that the West could stand pat while this is happening…. But it is exactly when you are strong and comfortable that you should take risks.” In particular, said Reagan, the United States and its allies should “take the risk that the Soviets are serious in their efforts to reach genuine arms reductions with the West.”
As he had in the White House, Reagan emphasized the significance of Gorbachev’s personal role as Soviet leader, repeating the arguments he had made while in the White House. Senior officials of the new George H. W. Bush administration, such as Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates, had been arguing that American policy should not be centered on Gorbachev. Reagan argued precisely to the contrary. “I believe Mikhail Gorbachev is the Soviets’ best and probably only hope to turn things around,” Reagan said.2
Gorbachev and Eastern European leaders gathered for a summit meeting of the Warsaw Pact in early July. The Soviet leader made it clear he would do nothing to reverse the political changes in Hungary and Poland, and that other Communist leaders could not rely on the Soviet Union to send in troops. Gorbachev’s rhetoric was lofty. “We are talking about the end of a period that has lasted over forty years, about the beginning of a transition to a new international order,” Gorbachev said. In a response, Honecker was less sanguine. “Looking at the state of international affairs, we cannot say that there has been a fundamental change for the better,” he told Gorbachev and the assembled Communist Party leaders. (A few weeks earlier, Honecker’s wife, Margot, had been overheard wondering aloud: “Who would ever have dreamed that the counterrevolution would come at us from the Soviet Union?”)3
In late August, Poland formed a new coalition government led by Solidarity. Throughout the summer, Poland’s Communist Party leaders had resisted, but Gorbachev had finally helped persuade them to give way for the first non-Communist government in the Warsaw Pact. Within days, Hungary dropped the next shoe: its government announced that starting on September 11, it would lift restrictions on travel by East Germans to Austria. As a result, the exodus of East Germans became larger and more frenetic. In Czechoslovakia the crowds of East Germans at the West German embassy in Prague were swelling out of control. Each day, new entrants climbed the walls into the building and squatted inside, begging for beds, water, and bathrooms.
By September 1989, the sense of change was exhilarating. “The Poles toppled their Communist government. And in Hungary, you could just feel it, that the Communists were changing in the leadership,” recalled Helmut Kohl, then West Germany’s chancellor, in an interview many years later. West Germany was quietly granting credits and other financial benefits to encourage the reforms. “We had a simple strategy, that we have to support the Poles, we have to support the Hungarians, that means economic support, political support, whatever they want,” said Kohl’s principal foreign-policy adviser, Horst Teltschik. Born in the Sudetenland, the western part of Czechoslovakia, Teltschik played the leading role in West Germany’s relations with Eastern Europe. In August, Teltschik arranged for Hungary’s President Miklos Nemeth to meet secretly in West Germany with Kohl. At the end of September, shortly after dropping its travel restrictions, Hungary obtained loan credits of 500 million marks (about $250 million) from the West German government.4
East Germany was a more complicated problem. Kohl’s government was cautious: eager to use its financial leverage, but reluctant to do anything that would create turmoil or a counterreaction. In late September, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher negotiated a delicate agreement with Honecker’s government: several thousand East Germans camped out in Prague would be permitted to leave for West Germany, but only in special locked trains that would pass through East German territory. That arrangement allowed Honecker to save some face by claiming that those who were leaving his country had been expelled.
The refugees in Prague had been reluctant to get on the trains, afraid that they were being deceived and would be detained during the crossing through East Germany. As a result, West Germany agreed to place its own officials on the trains as guarantors of the agreement and the refugees’ safety. Walter Ischinger, then a young official of the German Foreign Ministry, was sent to Prague to ride one of the trains. It was unheated and damp, with no food. When the train passed through East Germany, other East Germans had to be blocked from trying to jump on. In the predawn hours, the train finally crossed into the West German town of Hof in Bavaria. The East German passengers, starving and cold, began to shout, “Freiheit, freiheit (‘Freedom, freedom’).”5
Their success prompted other East Germans to leave or at least think about leaving. Freedom to travel had been the single preoccupying political issue in East Germany. Restricting emigration lay at the core of Honecker’s repressive apparatus; it was, after all, the reason for the Berlin Wall. “If there was one mass grievance [among East Germans], it was the inability to go abroad,” wrote the historian Charles S. Maier. Now, thanks to East Germany’s neighbors, the system of controls on travel was unraveling.