Eyewitness account

Interview with Jeffrey Kopstein

Watching the Wall fall

By Kazi Stastna, CBC News

East German border guards look through a hole in the Berlin Wall after demonstrators pulled down a section near Brandenburg Gate on Nov. 11, 1989. 'It was the world's largest open-air street party,' says University of Toronto political science professor Jeffrey Kopstein, who witnessed the dismantling of the Wall. (Lionel Cironneau/Associated Press)

In 1989, Jeffrey Kopstein was a Canadian graduate student from University of California, Berkeley studying the East German economy, traveling back and forth between West and East Berlin and in other parts of East Germany. In the summer of that year, as he was visiting an archive in Moscow, things started falling apart in the Communist world. Hungary began dismantling its border with Austria, and East Germans streamed into the country, hoping to flee to the West. By the fall, several hundred of them had also holed up in the West German Embassy in Prague, demanding asylum. Kopstein realized Germany was where the action was and high-tailed it back to West Berlin, where that November, he witnessed the fall of the Wall. The PhD thesis he was working on at the time turned into his first book, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945-1989. He has written several others since then and today, is a professor of political science and director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto. CBCNews.ca's Kazi Stastna spoke to him about his time in East Germany and his experience of the fall of the Wall.

Take me back to the night the Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989 – had there been rumblings of something happening in the days prior to that?

The big event which really triggers things is, they finally settle the problem of what to do with all these hundreds and hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people who were in the West German Embassy in Prague. The East German government said [in late September 1989], OK, they're allowed to leave, but they have to leave on a train that departs Prague and goes through East Germany. So, you have this spectacle of the special train going through East Germany with all of these East Germans, and the whole thing is being broadcast on television.

A Communist-era train like the special ones that transported East German asylum-seekers from Prague to West Germany in late September early October 1989, parked at the main train station in Prague on Oct. 1, 2009, as part of 20th anniversary celebrations marking the trip. (Petr David Josek/Associated Press)

The media plays a huge role in 1989, because it all gets broadcast on West German television, and, of course, all East Germans watch West German television [which ceased to be illegal in the 1970s] – it's a very important part of all of this.… The West Germans were reporting assiduously on all of this: … the flight, the collapse of the border. They reported on everything that had been happening in the Communist world: the rise of Gorbachev since 1985, the return of Solidarity in the spring of 1989, the election of the first non-Communist prime minister of Poland [in June 1989].

And the East Germans were watching all of this?

The East Germans were watching the collapse of the Communist world everywhere except their own country. They knew that this was going on.

So, this sense we have in North America that the fall of the Wall began it all is not really accurate?

In many ways, the Wall is kind of the final chapter. The final chapter comes, of course, later in December, when the Romanian leaders are killed, [but] in many ways, the Wall is the end of all this. And how it actually fell is interesting, and it's not clear to today whether it was done on purpose or by accident.

What happened is in fall of 1989, even before the Wall opens, the old East German leader Erich Honecker resigns because there were these demonstrations throughout October — over working conditions, the right to travel, the lack of freedom, over elections in June '89 that had been falsified … and the closing of the border into Czechoslovakia on Oct. 6.

Hard-line East German leader Erich Honecker was pushed out in October 1989 by a younger, more reformist faction of the Communist Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the face of mounting demonstrations over a lack of freedom and right to travel. But the party waited too late to institute the kind of internal reforms other East Bloc countries had made and within weeks, the regime collapsed. (Lutz Schmidt/Reuters)

He's replaced with a kind of second-tier leadership … [headed by] Egon Krenz … and … Guenter Schabowski. The night the Wall opens, Schabowski holds a press conference … and the basic questions are: OK, so what's going to happen next? Are you going to have freedoms? Are you going to have the right to travel? And this Italian journalist asks him point blank: 'So, when are East Germans going to travel?'

And Schabowski essentially says, 'Well, we've already discussed this, and we've decided that there's going to be a new regulation, and the new regulation says the East Germans are going to be able to travel when they want.' … And they ask him … 'When does that go into effect?' And he looks around, and he says, 'As far as I know, it goes into effect immediately, right now.' And everybody looks at him, and no one knows how to interpret all of that. And people have watched this [on TV], and they immediately start streaming to the Wall.

They realized right away that this meant the border was open?

Immediately — within hours. Within hours, the Wall was crowded with people.

So did Schabowski kind of stumble into that by accident?

Ahh… there's been so many theories of all of this. They apparently hadn't discussed the roll-out of this new program. Now, that's hard to believe, I realize that – the most important policy change in the history of East Germany since the Wall had been erected in 1961.

And then there's been a recent theory that … somebody in the East German regime had been talking to this Italian journalist and had told him to ask that question, which leads you to believe that if they planted that question … they had this idea that they would open the Wall, and it would all be done peacefully and very gradually. But, of course, that's not how it works at all; the whole of East Berlin streams to the opening.…

It was the world's largest open-air street party. … This giant street party occurs, and in many ways as a Canadian, … I felt like an intruder in some way. This was kind of a meeting where the East and West Germans got together.

Had you been watching it on TV as well?

I was in my apartment, and I went out. Within days after that, the Wall is basically officially open. They cut giant holes in the Wall and have several crossing points, and people start actually going up the Wall. In Berlin, it's actually two walls. It's a giant 11- or 12-foot concrete barrier – two of them separated by this no man's land several hundred metres long. On the Western side, people start taking chisels [to the Wall], and I did, too, even though I was a student – I was supposed to be observing all this dispassionately. I got caught up in it.

Berliners celebrate on top of the Wall as East Germans flood through the dismantled Berlin Wall into West Berlin at Potsdamer Platz in this Nov. 12, 1989, file photo. Jeffrey Kopstein couldn't help but get caught up in the excitement, even though as a student, he was supposed to be 'observing all this dispassionately.' (Lionel Cironneau/Associated Press, file)

I saw people streaming over to the West. … One of the famous shortages that East Germany had in the economy was, they didn't have bananas, and … a lot of East Germans went and bought bananas, because that's something that with 50 bucks [of "greeting money" each East German who made it West got] you could buy. … But it was, of course, much more important than that. Everybody understood that this was a genie that could not be put back in the bottle.

Up to that night, the border guards had been quite severe, so why wasn't their immediate reaction to shoot?

Because you had thousands and thousands of people at the Wall. They would have to kill them all.

As this is all happening, are the leaders of East and West Germany talking to each other?

Not quite yet. Some interesting changes happen: those mean border guards, they start getting nice, and you can talk to them. I had some great conversations with them. … I would sit in West Berlin cafes at the Wall – at Checkpoint Charlie, the famous border crossing that you saw in a 1,001 spy movies – and I would just watch. These guys were nasty; they would kill you for nothing. But all sudden, they became very friendly. I would ask them, 'Do you have to serve at the Wall? Did you feel bad about shooting people?'

You could tell things loosened up very, very quickly. To put it bluntly: the East German state lost control – over everything, very quickly. And at that point, the conversation between the leaders starts, and it also moves very quickly. Within weeks, the West German government starts talking about confederative structures.

Did the first East Germans who went over the Wall think it was a temporary opening and grab their stuff and run for it or just curiously wander over for a peak?

Both. The vast majority of people went back because they knew this regime wouldn't turn back again. … The Soviets had declared that they were not going to protect these regimes any more … That had been declared years before – that if these regimes couldn't stand on their own, they wouldn't stand. So, the people understood that the Soviets weren't going to be there, and if the vast majority of East Germans weren't going to be intimidated — as, clearly, they were not — they were going to get to go over as many times as they want, and that's, in essence, what happened.

The vast majority of people went home — but not everybody, and that becomes the key for unification itself, because enough people were leaving that the East German economy was being bled – their labour force was being bled. The people who could get good jobs in the West were leaving … That quickly turned the conversation in West Germany to unification.…

That period between November and March [1990, when the first free elections are held] is really determinative. In that period, the West Germans basically said to the East Germans, … 'Look, we should just do unification. No more socialist experiments. If you vote for any other parties except for the parties that want to unify, you're voting for complete lunatics who want to try some other version of an economy, and what you really should do is have our economy. We're rich. You guys are stupid if you don't go for this, because you've won the lottery of history. You get to join the wealthiest country in all of Europe, and you get to be just like us.'

Did you get a chance to speak to East Germans as they came over the Wall on the night of Nov. 9?

I knew lots of people in East Germany. I went to a bar with my friends, and we talked. Nobody could really believe it. Everybody acts cool, but nobody could believe it, and everybody was amazingly friendly. Germans are kind of stand-offish. They're not naturally effusive people, but everybody was so happy. I've never seen spontaneously happier people in my life — on both sides.

The West Berliners were thrilled to see them – because in many ways, West Berlin was also a weird environment. It was this artificially pumped-up showcase of the West — in the middle of East Germany. And you were stuck there.… Leaving West Berlin was a big deal. You had to go through East Germany..…

There were three official air, land and rail corridors — one in the north, one in central East Germany and one in the south — and they all had to follow that way.… You had to pay a fee to cross East Germany, a transit visa … You had to stay on that highway, and if you left that highway, they'd immediately catch you, and every gas station was packed full of secret police agents.

It was a weird, capitalist, rich bubble that they were living in. West Germans wanted to make sure that West Berlin would always stay there, that West Germans wouldn't leave West Berlin, so they subsidized housing – rent was cheaper, food was cheaper, everything was cheaper.

In terms of the urban landscape of Berlin, did the Wall feature prominently on the West side also?

Even more so – because on the West Berlin side, people painted it and drew on it. There was graffiti all over it. On my parents' mantelpiece is a picture of me hammering out a piece of the Wall, and it's all painted blue. … There was a whole kind of urban graffiti culture of the Wall.

So, most of the Wall graffiti we see is from the West side?

Only on the West side. There was nothing on the east side – it was either white or grey.

Because you couldn't get close enough on the East side?

You'd last 10 seconds. You'd go up to the Wall, you'd start painting, and you'd get arrested. This was what they considered their state border; they took it seriously.

[The Wall] would come up in the strangest places. You'd be walking, and you'd forget where you were in West Berlin, and you'd come to the end of an alleyway, and there would be this giant wall in front of you, and then you'd look in either direction, and you'd realize you were at the Wall; it wasn't a building.

There was a wall in the East and a wall in the West. … In some places, there was only one wall because there are canals in Berlin — the topography is somewhat complicated — but for the most part, there were these two walls and in between, was this very large strip of land. You couldn't run across. You wouldn't make it. Nobody really knew at the time how dangerous it was, but there were the automatic shooting devices, lots of dogs.

Guard towers, a deadly and several hundred metre-wide no man's land and shoot-to-kill orders meant escapes over the Berlin Wall, as well as at other East German borders, were rare. (Associated Press file photo)

For all intents and purposes, you couldn't do it. First of all, to get over the wall, just to get over one of them, you'd need grappling hooks. It wasn't that simple. It was intimidating. It's not the kind of thing you would do. You'd have to be pretty desperate to do that.

[There were] guard towers every so many metres, and there were people in them, and they could shoot – they were given shoot-to-kill orders. Several of the border guards were tried and several of the people who gave the orders were tried after the Wall fell.

The West thinks of the Wall as this powerful symbol of the Cold War, but was it all that significant in the daily lives of East Germans or just another border crossing?

The Wall itself as a symbol – it was always there. It was an ugly, horrible thing running through the city, but, of course, people can get used to anything. They were used to it. … I was there in June of '89 … and people really wanted to be allowed to travel, and they understood that they were kind of walled-in, eingemauert was the expression they used. And they experienced this as a kind of humiliation. The regime was treating them like children. And this was a big mistake on the regime's part. It's not that Communism would have lasted, but the regime had the opportunity to have a more elegant exit from power than they took – the Hungarian or Polish way. Instead, it was much more the Czech model – they hung on until the very end.…

The Wall was an ugly symbol, and everybody knew it.

So, even if you lived outside Berlin, in another part of East Germany, you felt the presence of the Wall?

You definitely felt it. … You really have to understand it in terms of the historical period. The West was booming in 1989. … The middle class had grown very large in the West; people traveled a lot. Where could East Germans go?

They could go to Hungary; they could go to Czechoslovakia; they could go to Bulgaria — while their West German counterparts were headed off in the winter to Majorca … and to the United States and France. And you say to yourself, 'I'm a German. My cousin across the border there gets to go to Paris, and I get to go to Sofia, Bulgaria.'

And this was experienced in 1989 not simply as material deprivation but as a kind of a moral lesion. It was simply not acceptable any more to be treated that way.

Was there any back and forth between the East and the West at all before 1989?

Some. … Anybody over 65 the regime allowed to travel, because, hopefully, they would leave and then the East German regime wouldn't have to pay their pension. The second thing was that West and East Germans would secretly agree to meet in third countries – in Czechoslovakia, especially. Families would have picnic days where they would agree to meet … [in] Czechoslovakia and Hungary, primarily, or you could meet on the beach in Bulgaria.

Very few East Germans who were under 65 could travel to the West. That was a specially designated category called a traveling cadre, and there, you had to be vetted by the secret police, and they watched you carefully. … The vast majority of East Berliners … they never thought it would be within their lifetime that they would have the possibility of visiting the West. This was just outside the realm of the possible.

Why had the East Germans kept the Berlin border open for so long after the Second World War in the first place when they closed borders elsewhere?

Technically, Berlin had been an occupied city, although East Berlin declared itself to be the capital of the German Democratic Republic, and in public discourse, that's how it was always referred to … But, in fact, the Americans, the French and the British … did not recognize that border. They claimed the right at any time to be able to cross over into East Berlin as their military rights allowed them to do, just as Russians could come into West Berlin. At the border, once in a while, you'd see these American jeeps … [with] 18-year-old boys, muscle-bound, … armed to the teeth, hanging off the side zipping right through the East Berlin border guards and flipping them the finger.…

The East German regime and the Soviets did not feel they wanted to go to a showdown with the West over shutting the borders.

The Wall itself was initially not a wall. It was just a series of barbed-wire fences. And eventually … — once they realize the West isn't going to go to war over this — they construct the Wall. And they construct the Wall initially because they're losing people. It's the same dynamic that picks up again after 1989. It was, in many ways, a purely economic decision – they were losing too many of their best people.…

The Wall started out as a series of barbed-wire fences and eventually turned into two concrete barriers more than three metres high separated by a no-man's land of several hundred metres. This photo shows workers building the Wall on Oct. 7, 1961, two months after construction began. (Associated Press)

And in '61, there is a series of back and forth exchanges between the East German leader and [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev, and the East German leader says, 'Look, you gotta help us out here. We need to close this border because we're losing too many people.' …

After the Wall is closed in 1961, that leads to a great period of stability in East Germany. Things stabilize because people aren't leaving, or at least they're not leaving in the same numbers. It goes to a trickle. Between 1961 and 1989, there was not one significant event of demonstration – anything – in East Germany. It really was very quiet. In that sense, the Wall worked.

And there wasn't any other viable option to leave?

No. There was no way you could get out of that country. That was the Cold War border. That was the border not just between East and West Germany but between the West and the East – between the Americans and the Soviets, who were kind of toe to toe, with thousands of tanks facing each other.

There are these incredible stories of people getting out, but it's a trickle. People got out with hot air balloons, with weird little contraptions that they went under rivers with. … There was a famous tunnel [in Berlin] where several hundred people got out.

So, it was rare for people to escape from East Germany?

It was rare and spectacular and always made the news. … It would, of course, be highly embarrassing to the East Germans. When I was living in West Berlin, the last East German to be shot at the Wall [was killed]. As a trickle of people escaped, a trickle of people also got killed escaping. And that happened until 1989 – quite shocking.

A few people escaped through the barbed-wire installations between East and West Germany not East and West Berlin, and those were especially harrowing stories – across minefields and this kind of thing. It really tells you this was not a good regime; the East German regime was a very bad regime. It treated its people terribly. It was willing to use brutality in order to stay in power, and it was willing to use brutality to keep its people in the country.

While doing your PhD research on the economy before the fall of the Wall, you got to travel through East Germany — what would people tell you?

What really bothered them was that I was a student at a university in the West, and I could just come over there – and who gave me permission to do that? Well, I didn't need permission; I just did it. And why couldn't they do that?

It was such a big deal for them to do anything, to go anywhere, and our lives in the West seemed so casual and easy … Even though they weren't starving, they lived drab, shabby lives, and they wanted it to be more exciting, more open-ended, and that was really the Achilles heel of the system. It wasn't that they were starving to death – it wasn't Africa. In some ways, it was worse – it was humiliating. It was more humiliating than poverty. Poverty's understandable. This wasn't understandable. They were people who should be living middle class lifestyles, who weren't.

One of the guys who picked me up [hitchhiking] was the manager of an eyeglass enterprise.… He had this great joke – he said, 'Capitalism is extremely simple, brutal, and it works. Communism is very complicated, completely humane and doesn't work at all.' That summarized a whole lot.

Was the East German regime more repressive than those of other East Bloc countries?

Much more so. I think in some ways, it was the tightest dictatorship in the history of the world.

So why was it there that Communism crumbled in such a spectacular way?

I wouldn't cast the Germans as the great heroes in this. They weren't the first. I think the Poles, in many ways, were the first. It's when Gorbachev goes and visits [Tadeusz] Mazowiecki [in June 1989] and actually addresses an East Europen leader as Mr. [instead of Comrade]. This was really quite something, and it was clear these regimes were on their own. What was surprising was that the East German regime gave up so easily. They seemed pretty committed – until they weren't.

Nobody predicted it. I didn't predict it. This whole thing about, the Sovietologists should be ashamed of themselves that they couldn't predict it – that's nonsense. You can't predict this kind of thing. You could predict that there were problems, but you can't say when someone's just going to give up. And that was really what it was. It wasn't so much that the people revolted. They did revolt, and that's important, and they're brave for doing so, because they could have been shot. But the regime didn't shoot – who could have predicted that? They'd shot several times before. Why in 1989 did these guys just say, 'We don't want to do this anymore'?

Can you speak a bit about the so-called Monday demonstrations in Leipzig.

Those Monday demonstrations were actually very important – they preceded the unrest in Berlin that led to the fall of the Wall. So, those went on not only before but they continued after the fall of the Wall. Leipzig was really the home of the civic East German opposition – the equivalent of the Czech Civic Forum. It was called New Forum. They started in churches. Every Monday, they would spontaneously gather. It started off with dozens, then hundreds, then thousands [of people].

They were led by people who actually were not in favour of unification initially, the intellectuals of East Germany. They did not want to get rid of East Germany. They were socialists, and they wanted to hold on to some version of a better East Germany. But as the demonstrations grew, they were joined by people who did not want to have an East Germany, so the initial intellectuals were pushed aside.…

Demonstrators demanding democracy, free unions and honest government stand in front of the East German emblem on the balcony of the Palace of the Republic in Alexanderplatz, East Berlin's main square on Nov.4, 1989, five days before the Wall fell. One of the signs refers to the New Forum, the name of the civic opposition movement that began in Leipzig with the so-called Monday demonstrations. (Diether Endlicher/Associated Press)

The whole question became, if there wasn't going to be a Communist East Germany, why should there be an East Germany at all? And the East German intellectuals were never able to answer that question intelligently. … They couldn't articulate a vision: What would [a new East Germany] look like? Would you have elections? Would you have private property? What's the system going to look like afterwards? And they couldn't really answer that question effectively.

Did the recent German elections in September still show a divide between the eastern and western parts of the country?

Absolutely. It's been present in every election. Basically, they're dealing with two totally different party systems in some way. The former Communist party, called the Left party, is much stronger in East Germany than in West Germany.

Do post-89 problems such as high unemployment still persist in the east?

Yes, still high unemployment. They're still losing people.… There are these whole areas of East Germany that are going to go back to being sparsely populated. The East German Communist regime spent an awful lot of money trying to industrialize and populate the poor northeast part of the country — only moderately successfully — but it's been reversed since then. It's going back to being a poor, sparsely populated area. You have whole areas of the former East Germany now where you have empty housing or schools don't have enough kids to keep on going.

There are some areas of East Germany that are doing very well — Dresden in the south — but the northern part of East Germany is doing very poorly: high unemployment, declining population, especially women leaving – educated women leaving the country.

So, was reunification a failure?

It's not a failure. Failure in terms of what? What were the alternatives? To continue with East Germany — that wasn't possible either. The promise was that they would rise up to the level of West Germans within a decade, and that promise was not held. What is true is that East German wages are now about 80 per cent of West German wages. They have much better health care; they have much better vacations. To the extent that some East Germans whine about reunification, I'd put it this way: they're crying all the way to Majorca.…

In many ways, you've got to look at it regionally. The original West German constitution calls for relative equality of development between regions, and the old West Germany was pretty good at doing that. What reunification has meant is that they're not so good at doing that any more, and that they'll be much more regional differentiation today than there was before 1989. And that's going to go on into the future.