Europe's Revolution - 20 years on

Monday 9 November was the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the outstanding event in the wave of changes which swept Eastern Europe in 1989, and which triggered the collapse of Communism and the ending of the Cold War.

To mark the anniversary, RTÉ Europe Correspondent Tony Connelly embarked on a train journey through the key capitals of the old Eastern Europe to recall the spectacular changes of 1989 and to reflect on what independence means to the people of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany.

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9 November - Berlin, Germany

By August 1989 Hungary was taking decisions about its own sovereignty which would have been unthinkable a decade before.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, the most critical steps were along the Iron Curtain itself, the 350km border with Austria. As restrictions were relaxed, and the border fence de-electrified, the population which saw the changes as a fast-track ticket to the west were not so much the Hungarians themselves, but the East Germans.

East Germany and Hungary may have been fraternal members of the Warsaw Pact, but by summer's end, 120,000 East Germans had applied to leave their country and most would take the route through Hungary and enter West Germany through Austria.

While the Hungarian regime was still a signed up member of the Communist Bloc, it was seeing events more and more in terms of national sovereignty. The signals from Moscow were that, under the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev, the Kremlin would not intervene.

This made for an awkward confrontation between Hungary and the hardline East German regime of Eric Honecker. The East Germans would not give the Hungarians a guarantee that, if Budapest sent the refugees back, they would be allowed to leave East Germany legally.

In a stunning put-down during talks between the two governments, the Hungarian foreign minister bluntly told his counterpart that the UN convention on the free passage of refugees through a third country (ie Hungary) overrode the 1969 agreement between Budapest and Berlin to turn East Germans back from the Austrian border.

This was heresy according to the doctrine of fraternal duty which bound the Warsaw Pact countries together under Moscow's gaze.

On 11 September 1989, Hungary duly opened the border to Austria. Within hours 20,000 East Germans had cross to the West. Honecker later called it 'a betrayal.'*

East Germany appeared to be a special case in the Soviet Bloc. Its governing elite often clung to Stalinist ideals long after the Russian dictator died in 1953.

The other unique thing about East Germany was the question of guilt. The communists saw the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as it was called, as the guilt-free Germany, since the communists had suffered appallingly under Hitler. Keeping this guilt-free country alive was to be achieved at all costs. That too meant that East German dissidents, such as they were, could not fall back on a nationalist sentiment the way dissidents had in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Its western border was the Iron Curtain itself, but also a border which separated it from its capitalist twin, West Germany. East German citizens obviously felt a natural inclination to join their cultural and linguistic cousins across the border since 3.5 million citizens (20% of the population) had fled in that direction before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.

By the late 1980s the East Berlin regime had to act further to reduce the desire to flee to the West. Paradoxically they felt that if they let more people visit West Germany on temporary passes, the desire to leave permanently would diminish. The idea failed spectacularly.

Some 1.2 million East Germans applied for a temporary pass, while tens of thousands more drained through West German embassies in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Hundreds of better skilled East Germans were 'bought' by the West German government under an agreement with the Communists.

So throughout its life, East Germany coped with the magnetic pull of the West through the more rigorous application of repression. The state security service, the Securitate, reached into every corner of life. It was 85,000 strong and had a further 109,000 informants.

On the physical security front they built the infamous Berlin Wall in 1961. Under Stalin's orders the East German regime had already strengthened the internal border which demarcated East and West Germany, but controls in Berlin - which had been divided into four allied zones after the Second World War - were more lax. That meant East Germans trying to flee to the West were using Berlin as the escape route.

On 12 August 1961, the regime of Walter Ulbricht signed the order to close the borders inside Berlin and to erect physical barriers preventing any movement westwards. These barriers became the outline for the wall that was to be constructed shortly afterwards.

Over four separate phases and construction designs, ending in 1980, the Berlin Wall evolved. It was 172km long and was flanked by 'death strips', open gravel-covered spaces which gave guards in watch towers a clear field of fire to shoot anyone trying to cross.

On the night of 26 July 1975, Herbert Kiebler, a 23-year-old from the district of Mahlow, told his 15-year-old sister in a letter that he was fed up and wanted to cross the Wall into the West. His sister tried to convince him otherwise, but, she later told her family, he ran off.

On Saturday morning I went with Herbert's sister-in-law Monika to a gently wooded park on the edge of Berlin. Along the pathway were random cyclists and joggers; golden leaves wafted like confetti from beech trees. At a certain spot on the path we stopped, and Monika and her family knelt to lay flowers at a new memorial composed of two upright shafts with two photographs and an inscription in English and German.

There is no wall here now - it was furiously torn down in 1989. There are no watch towers, no gravel margins, or death-strips. The place has been comprehensively reclaimed by nature.

The photograph is of the 23-year-old Herbert Kiebler, an intense but good-looking young man who only dreamed and spoke of going to the West. The night he ran off he scaled a fence before finding himself in the death-strip just yards from the Wall. Two border guards opened fire. He was killed instantly.

'We had gone home and lay down to sleep when we heard gunshots,' recalls Monika. 'My husband [Herbert's brother] said, they've shot Herbert. I said, it's not possible.'

Herbert Kiebler was by no means the first to die trying to escape East Berlin. Most accounts put the numbers of dead at 136. They were either shot by guards, or killed accidently in pursuit of freedom. The numbers who committed suicide through despair is unknown.

Despite the official policy to shoot escapees, the authorities appear to have made a humiliating mess of the Kiebler case. 'A couple of days later the police arrived,' says Monika. 'I was there because both my sister-in-law and mother-in-law were so distraught they had a fever and couldn't leave their beds.

'They told us Herbert had killed himself in Potsdam, that he had stabbed himself. We didn't believe it. We went to the place they said it had happened, a wood, but no one had seen anything happen there. There was no police report, nothing. Then we went to the prosecutor's office and asked again. They sent us back to the police and we demanded to see the photographs.

'They didn't want to show us. It was internal affairs, none of our business,' recalls Monika.

Eventually the body was brought to Mahlow from Postdam and the family could inspect him. 'My husband and brother opened his clothes and saw the bullet holes which were covered by some kind of paste so you couldn't see a lot. But he had been shot.'

The authorities maintained that Herbert Kiebler had committed suicide until they finally admitted the truth a few months after the Wall came down, in 1990. Two former border guards were found guilty of manslaughter, but served only two years in prison.

Today Berlin is trying to come to terms with the legacy of the Wall, 20 years on. While the immediate instinct was to tear it down and erase its memory, there has recently been a conscious decision to acknowledge its role in the city's history, and to give those who died trying to scale it more official recognition.

Much of the outline of the Wall is a cycle path, but the simple, elegant memorials - such as that dedicated to Herbert Kiebler - are now appearing along its route.

'When the Wall came down,' says Monika Kiebler, 'my first thought was for the ones who didn't make it, who couldn't see this happening, those who died by the Wall. I also had the freedom to suddenly go to all the relatives of my husband. I had never been to the west, and it was a special experience for me. It was moving, really moving, but we thought it's a shame that Herbert can't see this happening.'

Today, 20 years later, Monika and her sisters and children bow their heads before Herbert's memorial. 'This is also a memory for the ones who shot him,' she says finally. 'They will always be reminded every time they go past here. They'll have to live with their conscience. People who didn't live through it will also say, look, what happened here? It means he'll never be forgotten. It bears witness to the Cold War.'

Part 1 2 3 4 5

Tony Connelly

* Taken from The Patriot's Revolution: How East Europe Won its Freedom, by Mark Frankland, Sinclair-Stevenson.

'Don't Mention The Wars: A Journey Through European Steretoypes,' by Tony Connelly is published this month by New Island Books.