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Tumbling Down: The Fall of the Berlin Wall

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  • Tumbling Down: The Fall of the Berlin Wall

    May 24, 2004, 2:29 p.m.
    Tumbling Down
    The Fall of the Berlin Wall


    EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first installment in a five-part series
    excerpted from William F. Buckley Jr.'s The Fall of the Berlin Wall.

    Introduction

    I came to Berlin as a city that figured in any direct way in my life
    late, in 1983, when I undertook to write a novel about the rise of
    the wall. In the book, I took a few liberties with history but none
    that got in the way of the basic drama of the day in August 1961 when
    the wall started growing up as if it had for one thousand years been
    fed by geological and vegetable growths now bursting forth. That,
    looking back, is what the wall seemed: an outcropping of parthenogenic
    substance, just -- rising, a fortress to keep East Germany's legions
    in the fold.

    Of course the wall was very much man-made, and the details are all in
    this book. The critical detail for my novel (The Story of Henri Tod)
    was the warning given by First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev to Walter
    Ulbricht, the ruler of the German Democratic Republic. What Khrushchev
    said was: We Soviets are willing to risk giving the impression that
    we are prepared to use force against the West; what we are not
    willing to risk is a major engagement with the West. This meant,
    in the view of some who studied the rise of the wall, that if a show
    of U.S. tanks had challenged the wall-builders -- had run down the
    barbed-wire stakeouts -- Soviet tanks would not have moved forward to
    counter this assertion of joint occupation rights in Berlin. Henri
    Tod, the heroic resistance leader in my novel, was all set to do
    exactly that: move forward a couple of U.S. tanks, diverted from
    the armory by young German patriot engineers. But reality moved in,
    aborting the enterprise while my CIA agent, Blackford Oakes, was tied
    up in a cellar. What a fancy! But the best fancies work -- would have
    worked, if you had just closed your eyes for a minute and let truth
    and justice and liberty move the chess pieces.

    Well, the wall went up, and, as history shows, the reaction of the
    West was pretty dead, acquiescent. We came to know that John Kennedy
    and Harold Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle were actually relieved. They
    had feared that Khrushchev's bluster, which had been raging all that
    year, threatened something worse than merely closing down traffic from
    East Berlin to West Berlin. They feared the Soviets would threaten
    West Berlin itself.

    The suspense one might then have anticipated -- How long will the wall
    last? -- was itself deadened. There was little life in the movement
    to free East Berlin. I attended occasional gatherings of the Captive
    Nations organization in New York City, which would now and then bring
    in a man or woman from Europe to remind as many Americans as could
    be got to hear the story about life in Berlin, like life elsewhere
    in Eastern Europe. The talk was vivid of the privations of Berliners,
    but not of any forthcoming relief.

    In 1970 I found myself with credentials sufficient to effect a visit
    and presented myself at Checkpoint Charlie. I had been appointed
    to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information with warrants to go
    anywhere I wished to go, in fulfillment of obligations to advise the
    United States Information Agency. I submitted to the formalities
    of passage. My diplomatic passport was useful, but the Vopos (the
    East German police) stalled me for a full twenty minutes in the
    little compound, a way of saying that although formal diplomatic
    concessions were being made, there was no reason for the visitor
    not to feel the heavy heel of the commanding entity, the German
    Democratic Republic. I don't conceal that I thought the Germans who
    were enforcing the laws appeared especially well qualified to do so,
    in the square-set resolution of their heads, the grimness of their
    expressions, and their disembodied attention to bureaucratic duty. I
    never met a live Nazi, but I was experiencing treatment by sons of
    Nazis who had been very much alive 25 years earlier.

    I wrote about my visit to Berlin and from time to time about Berlin
    as what always seemed a very conspicuous linchpin to that enslaved
    region of the postwar world. What I never did was reason fruitfully
    to what exactly would be required to bring the wall down. I am glad
    I did not attempt to do this, because I would not have been able to
    write with anything like the authority now made possible, thanks to the
    work of so many historians and journalists and diplomats who have told
    their stories. I write that the Berlin Wall came down owing to the
    finally undeniable spirit of East German dissenters. That's true. But
    they were helped along by the final, liberating equivocation of the
    Communist overlords. No doubt there are still last-ditch East Berlin
    Communists, in their fifties and sixties and seventies, who nourish
    their own forlorn fancies, notably that if Moscow had not lost its will
    . . . Yes, and if the dissenters had been more forcefully contained,
    not only in Berlin, but also in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia. The
    fall of the wall was a vindication also of the West, especially of
    such Westerners as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, because the
    West maintained an iron echelon, way back then, that the Kremlin
    could not ignore in devising workable strategic movements.

    In my novel, the young protagonist actually works for Walter Ulbricht,
    because he is a 21-year-old nephew for whose orphanage Ulbricht had
    direct responsibility. Young Caspar and his girlfriend, Claudia,
    happen on a deserted railroad car in the forest of abandoned cars in
    a mammoth Berlin train station. This one, unrecognized by the guards
    on routine duty in the great yard, was special. It was Adolf Hitler's
    private railroad car, and in it Caspar and Claudia nurse the wounded
    Henri Tod. And there they plot the diversion of three U.S. tanks for
    the Sunday the wall will go up, the date and hour known to the nephew
    of Walter Ulbricht, who clocks in every day to do his clerical work.

    Less than one hour after midnight on August 13, 1961, cross-border
    traffic is halted, the East German army rolls down Unter den Linden,
    and the young plotters are bloodily executed. They would sleep 28
    years before the wall came down, rising then with so many others in
    the community of the dead, to take heart that history had turned,
    finally, in their favor. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote that when all the world
    is surfaced over in concrete, one day a blade of grass will sprout
    up. This happened in Berlin on November 9, 1989. -- WFB, Stamford,
    Connecticut, June 20, 2003

    The Wall Came Tumbling Down

    A generation had elapsed between President Kennedy's "Ich bin ein
    Berliner" in 1963 and President Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this
    wall" in 1987. One year and a half after Reagan made his mythogenic
    plea, he left office, and the wall was still standing. The day before
    George H. W. Bush's inauguration, East German Secretary-General
    Erich Honecker reaffirmed his commitment to the wall. Outgoing
    Secretary of State George Shultz had designated the wall as the "acid
    test" of Eastern Europe's progress toward human rights. Honecker
    defiantly replied: "It will stand in fifty or a hundred years."
    Bravado notwithstanding, the Iron Curtain was fraying. In the spring
    of 1988, Janos Kadar had been forced to resign as general secretary
    of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' (i.e., Communist) Party, although
    he had sponsored liberal reforms. The new general secretary, Karoly
    Grosz, shot ahead, permitting opposition groups to operate openly
    and exploring the possibility of multi-party elections.

    In November 1988, Margaret Thatcher visited Warsaw. Poland was still
    under martial law, and Solidarity still illegal. When Mrs. Thatcher,
    at a state dinner, called for "personal and political liberty" as
    the only way to solve Poland's economic problems, President Wojciech
    Jaruzelski reacted sharply. "Words," he said, "are the cheapest goods
    on the world market." But his representatives were already meeting
    with Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders.

    In East Germany itself, there was little liberalization and little
    popular ferment. To be sure, there were traces of moderation. In
    November 1987, the regime rescinded the Grepos' (border guards')
    shoot-to-kill orders (orders the regime had denied were ever
    issued). But there was nothing in the way of organic reform -- Honecker
    scorned perestroika, insisting that it would be counterproductive in
    the Democratic Republic of Germany.

    As for the citizens of East Germany, they made do with what was called
    "nightly emigration." West German television broadcasts could be
    seen nearly everywhere in the GDR, giving viewers a familiarity with
    Western news, habits, and diversions that was almost unique behind the
    Iron Curtain. But vicarious participation in the affairs of the West
    served as a political sedative rather than a stimulant. Honecker's
    citizenry remained among the most docile in the satellite world, more
    like the servile Bulgaria and Romania than like the restive Poland,
    Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

    * * *

    While Moscow's Eastern European empire destabilized, Mikhail Gorbachev
    had plenty to worry about at home. He had known when he came to
    power, in March 1985, that he was inheriting an economy that was no
    better off than it had been 21 years before, when Nikita Khrushchev
    was ousted. Gorbachev was also inheriting the Soviet occupation
    of Afghanistan. Casualties there were heavy, and popular morale
    was eroding.

    The Reagan Administration's efforts, under National Security Decision
    Directive 75, to develop an anti-missile program had been scoffed at
    -- "Star Wars" was not a friendly nickname. But the program had been
    launched, and Gorbachev was hard-pressed. He couldn't simply ignore
    it. So he took it on with his own anti-missile defense program, in what
    quickly became a huge state enterprise, threatening to bankrupt the
    Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In December 1987, he signed the
    Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Reagan, an effort
    at cutting the costs of the arms race. In the last year of the Reagan
    Administration, Gorbachev attempted to capitalize on the relaxations
    generated by that treaty, calling for a "common European home."

    At a state dinner in Yugoslavia in March 1988, he laid out his vision
    of a new Europe: "I have said it once and I will say it again. We are
    interested in eliminating the divisions of Europe. What we need is
    an honest and effective policy of good-neighborliness. . . . Economic
    alliances and cooperation and the gradual advancement towards a common
    European market are the vital prerequisites for the peaceful future
    of Europe." (Mrs. Thatcher would reply on her visit to Warsaw eight
    months later, nicely exploiting the wall: "President Gorbachev had
    spoken of building a common European house. But the only wall so far
    erected is the Berlin Wall, which divides and separates.")

    On top of his other problems, Gorbachev faced outbreaks of nationalism
    within the Soviet Union itself. In June 1988, Christian Armenians
    living in Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave within the Muslim-dominated
    Azerbaizhani Republic, complained to the Kremlin of ill treatment by
    the local government. The adjoining Armenian Republic proposed nothing
    less than an annexation of the enclave. This was the very first time,
    Western observers clucked, that there had been an open territorial
    dispute between two Soviet republics. But it was only the first of many
    unprecedented events that summer. A month later in Lithuania, a group
    calling itself the Initiative Group in Support of Perestroika held
    a rally at which speakers called, no less, for a popular referendum
    in Nagorno-Karabakh. The People's Front of Estonia, a nationalist
    political group, was suddenly accorded official recognition by the
    Estonian Republic, with Moscow's tacit acceptance. And in the third
    of the Baltic nations, Latvia, the writers' union asked that the
    republic be declared a "sovereign state." Never mind the paradox,
    a sovereign state within a sovereign state: it was the first time an
    official organization in a Soviet republic had made such a licentious
    call. As the dispute between the Armenians and the Azerbaizhanis
    erupted into violent clashes, the Supreme Soviet approved a decree
    giving the security forces broad authority to suppress demonstrations
    and to arrest suspected agitators. There was nothing unexpected in
    the decree itself. But it was breathtaking to learn that 31 members of
    the 1,500-man Supreme Soviet had voted nay and 26 had abstained. This
    was the first time that a decree of that body was other than unanimous.

    In May, Gorbachev had announced that a special Party conference would
    take place the following month. On June 28 the All-Union Conference
    of the Soviet Communist Party convened in Moscow, the first such
    conference with representatives from every part of the country since
    1941. Gorbachev's three-and-a-half-hour opening address ranged from
    his program for economic reform to the need for religious freedom
    and equality for women. But the most striking passage was his call
    for a radical restructuring of the central government, with a strong
    president and a Congress of People's Deputies. Gorbachev declared:
    "The people demand total democracy, full-blooded democracy with no
    reservations. There can be no compromise." Granted, by "democracy"
    he didn't mean anything recognizable as that in the West. Only the
    Communist Party would be permitted to participate in elections,
    Gorbachev explained, and only Party members would be eligible to
    run for the new Congress. "A multi-party system -- two parties,
    three parties -- it is all rubbish," he would later tell a Kremlin
    gathering. "At first [it is] one or two parties on class grounds,
    then 120 on national grounds, then international. All that is thrown
    at us by irresponsible people." But there was progress. His plan
    called for 1,500 of the Congress's 2,250 seats to be filled through
    secret-ballot voting by ordinary citizens; the rest of the deputies
    would be appointed by local trade unions and Party organizations. None
    of them would be appointed by the Kremlin.

    The enthusiasm of Gorbachev's colleagues, at home and in Eastern
    Europe, was not unqualified. Of the satellite regimes, Hungary alone
    responded positively. The GDR's news agency concentrated on the
    economic aspects of the speech, arguing that Gorbachev had nothing to
    teach East Germany, whose economy was the healthiest in the Eastern
    Bloc. Yes, but an ice age behind West Germany's.

    In December 1988, the Supreme Soviet voted to go ahead with this
    stage of Gorbachev's perestroika.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200405241429.asp
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