The Visit

Magazine Article

By: Timothy Garton Ash

Date: 1993

Source: Ash, Timothy Garton. "The Visit." Granta 43: Gazza Agnosties. London.: Granta, Fall 1993.

About the Author: Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eight books of political writing or what he terms "history of the present," which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last twenty-five years. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Director of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books and he has a weekly column in the Guardian which is syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

INTRODUCTION

The German Democratic Republic (commonly known as East Germany or GDR) was a socialist state that existed between 1949 and 1990 in the former Soviet controlled zone of Germany. The state was declared in 1949, some five months after West Germany, and it was proclaimed fully sovereign in 1954, although Soviet troops remained there throughout its history, ostensibly as a counterbalance to NATO's (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) presence in West Germany.

With its capital, Berlin, cut in two by a great wall and a West Berlin marooned in the country's heart, East Germany was a strange part of Soviet-occupied Europe. On the one hand, its geography and history should have made it more open and receptive to outside influences, yet its leaders vigorously upheld their socialist principles and were arguably closer and more loyal to Moscow than other Soviet satellite nations. Indeed, of all the members of the Warsaw Pact—the name given to the Soviet military alliance designed as a counterbalance to NATO—East Germany was arguably the most repressive and authoritarian.

Amongst East Germany's dominant political influences, Erich Honecker stands tall. He was a classic communist party apparatchik, whose dedication to Moscow and the Soviet cause stifled progress and debate in East Germany and ultimately led to the country's fall. Born into a politically militant coal mining family in August 1912, Honecker was politically active from his early teens, joining the German Communist Party's (KPD) youth leagues and the party itself at the age of seventeen. As with many young socialists of the era, he was invited to Moscow to study communist doctrine and spent his late teens there. He returned to Germany in 1931 and was active in the KPD's unsuccessful political battles with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party. Two years after Hitler took power, in 1935, Honecker was arrested and remained in prison until the end of the Second World War.

Liberated by Soviet troops in 1945, Honecker was thrust into mainstream politics in the political chaos that ensued in Germany's liberated sectors. When East Germany was proclaimed a nation in 1949, he became a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee [essentially East Germany's ruling council] and during the 1950s rose through its ranks. In 1961, he was charged with responsibility of building the Berlin Wall, the most famous symbol not just of East Germany, but the entire Soviet era. In 1971, Honecker became General Secretary of the Central Committee. Honecker became East Germany's President in 1976.

East Germany under Honecker initially experienced some improvements in its living standards and economic condition as he embraced a program of "consumer socialism"—which saw limited market reforms and some trade with the west (bringing in some much desired consumer goods). There was also recognition for the first time of West Germany, although its people could still not usually pass between the two. Increasingly, East Germany became a police state, with its secret police force, the Stasi, gaining in power and influence throughout the nation. When limited debate on political reforms and civil rights was permitted in Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the 1980s, such talk was prohibited in East Germany. Even when the USSR under President Mikhail Gorbachev began to initiate political and economic reform under his program of perestroika, or "change." Honecker famously refused to follow, claiming East Germany had already done "its pere-stroika" in the 1970s.

Of all of Gorbachev's reforms, however, it was the abandonment of the "Brezhnev Doctrine" that had the widest implications. Under the terms of this doctrine, the USSR would intervene in Warsaw Pact coun-tries—as it had done in Czechoslovakia in 1968—to uphold communist rule where necessary. By discarding it, client states were able to discuss and initiate reforms without threat of Soviet military intervention. Poland and Hungary led the way during 1989. In August 1989, Hungary removed its border restrictions, briefly allowing several thousand East Germans to flee over the Hungarian border and then onto Austria and West Germany.

Taking inspiration from this and of news of peaceful demonstrations elsewhere in eastern Europe, East Germans took to the streets over the fall of 1989 in a number of peaceful demonstrations. With power quickly slipping away, East Germany's politburo chiefs initiated a political coup on October 18, which forced Honecker's resignation and his replacement by his deputy Egon Krenz. This, however, was regarded as a mere sop, and three weeks later, on November 9, during demonstrations in East Berlin, border guards abandoned their posts and thousands began spilling over into the West. Most symbolically, demonstrators began hacking away at the Berlin Wall with pick axes and hammers. East Germany had collapsed; within a year Germany was reunified.

Honecker had spent much of this time in a Soviet military hospital outside Berlin. Then, when calls for his arrest came, he fled to Moscow. However, he was extradited to Germany in 1992 to face trial for an array of Cold War crimes, specifically for the deaths of 192 people who had been killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall into the West. The writer and academic Timothy Garton Ash visited Honecker whilst he awaited trial in Berlin's Moabit Prison in 1992.

PRIMARY SOURCE

"Are you bringing any laundry?" asks the porter at the fortified entrance to Moabit prison.

When I laugh, he says defensively, "I was only asking," and grimly stamps my permit to visit remand prisoner Honecker, Rich.

Into a waiting-room full of chain-smoking wives and spivs in black leather jackets. Wait for your number to be called from a loudspeaker. Through an automatic barrier. Empty your pockets and put everything in a locker. Body search. Another automatic barrier. Unsmiling guards, barked orders. Moment! Kommen Sie mit! Then you've come to the wrong place. Collect all your belongings again. Pack up. Walk around the red-brick fortress to another gate. Unpack. Sign this, take that. Another huge metal door. The clash of bolts. A courtyard, then the corridor to the prison hospital, bare but clean.

Somehow all this seems increasingly familiar. I have been here before. But where and when? Then I remember. It's like crossing through the Friedrichstrasse underground frontier station into East Berlin, in the bad old days. West Germany has given Honecker back his Berlin Wall.

Inside it is warm and safe. There is food to eat; plain fare, to be sure, but regular and ample. There is basic, free medical care for all. Good books are to be had from the library, and there is guaranteed employment for men and women alike. And life is, of course, very secure. Just like East Germany.

The first time I saw, at close quarters, the Chairman of the Council of State of the German Democratic Republic and General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Erich Honecker, was at the Leipzig trade fair in 1980. A horde of plains-clothes Stasi men heralded the arrival of the leader. Eastern functionaries, West German businessmen, British diplomats—all flapped and fluttered, bowed and scraped, as if at the Sublime Porte of Suleimana the Great. His every move, every tiny gesture, was studied and minutely interpreted, with all the arcane science of Sovietology. Significantly, graciously, the Chairman and General Secretary stopped at the Afghan stand, which displayed rungs and nuts. "And those are peanuts and those are salted peanuts …' came the breathless commentary of the rattled Afghan salesman. Graciously, significantly, the Chairman and General Secretary clapped him on the shoulder and said: "We regard your revolution as a decisive contribution to détente. All the best for your struggle!" Ah, happy days, the old style.

Now the door opens and there he stands in a tiny corner room, sandwiched between the doctor's washbasin and a table. He is very small, his face pallid and sweaty, but he still stands bold upright. "Bodily contacts are not permitted," says my permit. But he extends his hand—graciously, significantly—and I shake it. He is clad in khaki prison pyjamas, which remind me of a Mao suit. But on his feet he still wears, incongruously, those fine, black leather slip-on shoes in which he used to tread all the red carpets, not just in Moscow and Prague but in Madrid, in Paris and in Bonn. "Fraternal greetings, Comrade Leonid Hyitch,' and a smacking kiss on each cheek. "how do you do, Mr. President." Guten Tag, Herr Bundeskanzler. We sit down, our knees almost touching in the cramped room, and the accompanying warder wedges himself into a corner. All my notes and papers have been impounded at the gate, but fortunately the doctor has left some spare sheets of lined paper and a pencil. Fixing me with his tiny, intense eyes—always his most striking feature—Honecker concentrates on answering my questions. He talks at length about his relations with Moscow, his friendship with Brezhnev, his arguments with Chernenko and then Gorbachev. Even under Gorbachev, he says, the Soviet Union never ceased to intervene in East Germany. The Soviet embassy's consular officials behaved, he says, like provincial governors. So much for the sovereignty of the GDR that he himself had so long trumpeted! At one point he shows staggering (and I think genuine) economic naivete, arguing that East Germany's hard currency debt, in Deutschmarks, has to be set against its surplus in transferable rubles.

His language is a little stiff, polit-bureaucratic, but very far from being just ideological gobbledygook. Through it come glimpses of a real political intelligence, a man who knows about power. Was it his conscious decision to allow many more ordinary East Germans to travel to the West in the second half of the 1980s? Yes, definitely, a conscious decision. He thought it would make people more satisfied. But did it? Nee, he says, offenischtlich nicht. Nope, obviously not.

With the tiny pupils of his eyes boring into mine, he speaks with what seems like real, almost fanatical convic-tion—or at least with a real will to convince. This is somehow more, not less, impressive because of the humiliating prison surroundings, and because of the obvious physical effort it costs him. (He has cancer of the liver. The doctors give him only months to live.) Once he has to excuse himself to go to the lavatory, accompanied by the warder. "you noticed I was getting a little restless," he says apologetically on his return.

Then he resumed his defiant refrain. East Germany, he insists, was "to the end the only socialist country in which you could always go into a shop and buy bread, butter, sausage etc." Yet people wanted more? Yes, but now they regret it. Look at the unemployment in the former GDR! Look how few apartments are being built! He gets hundreds of letters from people in the east. They say they lived more quietly in the old days: sie haben ruhiger gelebt.

And look what's happening in the streets now, the racist attacks, the fascists. It reminds him of 1933. Really? 1933? Well, he concedes, perhaps 1923. Hitler's first attempt was also a flop. But look what happened then. He's warning us. We've been here before. At least: he's been here before. Which, indeed, he has: held as a remand prisoner in this very prison in the years 1935–37, after being caught working for the Communist resistance.

And now he is here again. West Germany's leaders denounce him as a criminal. Yet only yesterday those same politicians were competing for the privilege of being received in audience by him. Oh, the tales he could tell! His talks with West German Social Democrats were, he says, "comradely". Some other West German politicians were more reserved. He had great respect of Franz Joseph Strauss. Helmut Schmidt was the most reliable and punctilious partner. But he also got on well with Helmut Kohl. He had often talked on the telephone to Chancellor Schmidt, and to Chancellor Kohl. Why, he had even dialed the number himself.

Then the former Chairman of the council of State of the former German Democratic Republic and former General Secretary of the former Socialist Unity Party of Germany pulls out of the pocket of his prison pyjamas a slightly dog-eared card on which his former secretary had typed the direct telephone number to the Chancellor in Bonn. He places it before me, urges me to copy the number down. 0649 (West Germany) 228 9Bonn 562001.

A quarter-century of divided Germany's tragic, complex history is, it seems to me, concentrated in this one pathetic moment: the defiant, mortally sick old man in his prison pyjamas, the dog-eared card with the direct number to Chancellor Kohl.

What would happen, I wonder, if he rang that number now? Would it, perhaps, give the standard German recorded message for a defunct number: no Anschluss on this number? (The word Anschluss means simply connection, as well as territorial incorporation.) But no, I try it later, and it still takes you straight through to the Chancellor's office in Bonn.

The warder clears his throat and looks at his watch. Our time is up. Honecker rises, again standing almost to attention. A formal farewell. Then the bare corridors, the clashing gates, the unsmiling guards, the belongings from the locker, the fortified entrance. But now I am carrying laundry. Scribbled in pencil on a doctor's notepad: the dirty linen of history.

SIGNIFICANCE

Honecker's incarceration was unusually divisive for one who had ruled with such an iron fist. On the one hand, there was a feeling that he should pay for holding East Germany back; for the crimes of the Stasi; and for suffocating his people's liberty. On the other, there was a sense that the charges he faced—mostly concerning the deaths of those who had tried to violate the East-West Berlin border as a result of his shoot-to-kill policy—were wrong and punitive. It was pointed out that he had relinquished power to prevent East Germany from descending into violent revolution, as Romania did just weeks later. From a moral perspective, the righteousness of incarcerating an eighty year-old man who was by then ravaged by liver cancer was also called into question.

In the event, a Berlin court ruled in January 1993 that making Honecker stand trial would be in "violation of his human rights." He was freed and allowed to join his wife Margot Feist (who had been an East German education minister for twenty-six years) in exile in Chile. He died in Santiago of liver cancer in May 1994.

Honecker's successor Egon Krenz was sentenced to six-and-a-half years imprisonment in 1997 for electoral fraud and for the deaths of those who had tried to illegally cross the border into West Berlin. He served three years of his sentence from 2000 after losing an appeal, but was not alone in dismissing his punishment as a 'victors justice' in a 'Cold War court.'.

The most open wound following the collapse of East Germany remains that of the role of the Stasi. It directly employed up to 150,000 people (nearly one percent of East Germany's population) and during its history is believed to have held files on up to one third of the population. A substantial proportion of the East German population have also been implicated as direct or indirect informants. The Stasi was central to the suppression of democratic and opposition movements and implicated in tens of thousands of human rights violations, including imprisonment without trial, secret killings, spying on civilians and torture. Attempts to bring former Stasi members to justice have been slow and replete with controversy.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Funder, Anna. Stasiland. London: Granta, 2004.

Crampton, R J. Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II. London: Routledge, 1997.

Rothschild, Joseph. and Nancy M. Wingfield. Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II. Oxford University Press, 2000.