How Communism Lost in East Germany

The Times, The Times October 19, 2009

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Minette Marrin

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The German Democratic Republic (GDR) had only three leaders in its 40-year history. The last was Egon Krenz. He succeeded Erich Honecker 20 years ago this weekend. Three weeks later the most visible symbol of communist repression — the prison wall dividing Berlin — came tumbling down. With it fell Mr Krenz’s hopes for a reformed East German socialism. The costs and economic dislocation of a united Germany were huge, but the popular will could not be thwarted.

Recalling these events in an interview with The Times, Mr Krenz insists that his role in the transition was noble. He countermanded Honecker’s orders for police to fire on demonstrators. Unsurprisingly, he believes that the financial crisis of the Western economies shows that capitalism cannot be the last word in human affairs.

Mr Krenz, now 72, cuts a diminished and impoverished figure. His account of the dying days of communism is valuable, but it should be tested unsparingly against what is known. Mr Krenz played a bit part in a great drama. He concedes that he was late in perceiving the end of the GDR, but his error was not primarily a political judgment. It was a moral one: he fundamentally misunderstood the illegitimacy, as well as the impermanence, of a regime that owed its founding to the Soviet Army and its continued existence to the threat of force.

The principal heroes of the fall of the regime were not Mr Krenz and the Politburo but the ordinary East Germans who had taken heart from the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev earlier in October 1989. Some 200,000 protesters assembled in Leipzig to demand free elections. They stretched banners declaring “No Violence” across the entrance to the Stasi building. There was no violence, in part because Mr Gorbachev had already made clear that the Soviet troops stationed in the GDR would not act in defence of a decrepit regime. There would be no repetition of the brutal suppression by Soviet tanks of the Berlin uprising of 1953.

The transition from communism throughout eastern Europe has been chequered. And the social problems and periodic recessions of market economies long provided the impetus and intellectual rationale for communism. But the revolutions of 1989 demonstrated that the least of communism’s failings was that all of these problems were replicated in the Eastern bloc. The GDR was long regarded as the relative success among Soviet satellites. It was instead a state founded on suspicion, surveillance and relentless repression. Krenz’s predecessors, Walter Ulbricht and Honecker, were Stalinist ideologues of thoroughgoing mediocrity. Their refusal to countenance openness and reform made the GDR a peculiarly despised regime.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall was a cause of widespread astonishment, no less than celebration. Communism’s crimes and failures had long been obvious to all but the most ideologically obdurate or soft-headed, but its fragility had been perceived by few. President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher were among them. Mr Krenz was not. “Communism had never conceived of any other tribunal than that of history,” observed François Furet, the French historian. “And here it was, condemned by history to vanish from the face of the earth.”

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