Undivided: Encounters with America
Transcript
July 1, 2009
J.D. Bindenagel, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in East Berlin from 1988-1990
[00:10] Video
President George H W Bush had just come into office and we were all looking at the policy review, what could happen. We were coming up with "status quota plus" -- things that would change. And we were looking at the East Germans, thinking that they would have a party congress and that the question of Honecker's succession would be in the issue.
Election on May 7, 1989 Video
[00:33]
And then something very interesting happened on the night of May 6. I was invited to what the Germans called a conspiratorial apartment. And I went in to talk to these young East Germans. There was a fascinating... It was a very casual gathering and people were just enjoying themselves. They actually had many SED Communist "wards" and they were showing them and they were being disdainful but really what they were doing (and Thomas Kluger was among the people at that dinner; he later became a figure in the revolution), what they were doing was they were organizing for the next day. Communal elections were to be held the next day and the next day's elections they wanted to cover with poll watchers, as many people as they could.
So the next day, after hearing what they were organizing, seeing what they were doing, the next day which was a Sunday, I had gone to church in East Berlin in the Platanenstrasse. We wandered back to the polling place near our house; it was in the Blumenthalstrasse and it was a kindergarten. I came with my family, that is, my wife and my two children. We walked in and announced who we were and said, "How do you vote? Tell us." And they were taken a little bit aback but they went through the process. They showed us the registration books. Like in the United States, you got registered and you showed your ID, you got this one-page paper - the national list. Then you walked to the table where you could change the people, you could "x" people out, or you could add people in, but you had to walk across the judges, if you will, the six or so of your neighbors who knew you. And what you were really supposed to do was just fold the ballot and put it in the ballot box. Or if you wanted, you could change things and you could go to another little table. There was a little table that had a sawed-off door around it, so it was private. Nobody could see what you were doing. You could "x" out people but obviously you were changing the ballot. So then you would fold the ballot and put it in. Then these poll-watchers from the night before covered many, and in some districts all of the polling places, because at the end of the day, in good transparent fashion, each polling place announced the polling results. And so, these people that I had met in the apartment collected these numbers and went back to their conspiratorial apartment and wrote them down. The next day, the GDR announced the results and it was something like 98+ percent. And these people announced that, no, it wasn't 98 percent; it was only 96, or something to that effect; in effect saying that they had lied. And there began the process of remembrance on the 7th of each month of this election that was falsified. So on the 7th of June, shortly after Tiananmen Square, there was a Sophienkirche demonstration. And each month, leading to the 7th of October, when Gorbachev came, was a movement that had begun to commemorate the illegitimacy of the GDR. It was very fascinating.
[End: 3:49]
The Night the Wall Came Down Video
[Start: 4:00]
On the night the Wall came down, it was a very fascinating time. The night the Wall came down, I was at a reception in West Berlin at the Aspen Institute for Hildegard Buchsard who the new deputy director to David Anderson. The three Western military commanders were there; both of the mayors - of East and West Berlin - were there; and Wolfgang Vogel, Honecker's lawyer, was there. It was a nice reception. It ended early, 6:30 or so, and Wolfgang Vogel's car was parked in West Berlin and he asked if I could give him a lift and so I said, "Absolutely." We had also worked on the asylees who had sat in at the Embassy just a month before. So we had a nice conversation on the way down. He said that they had met, that the lawyers had met and they had met with the Politbuero and there would be a new announcement to a travel law, one that had been changed on November 6th would then again be changed shortly. This was really exciting.
So I ran into the Embassy. I dropped him off at his car. I drove to the embassy. I came and I found Jon Greenwald, the political counselor, and I said, "Jon, I have this great news." He said, "No, no, listen to what was on Heute Magazin on West German television, and there we saw Mr. Shabowksi giving a statement which we really couldn't understand. And so for the next hour and a half, we tried to find out what had been done. We sent Heather Traubman, a political officer, down to Checkpoint Charlie to see what was happening. Elmer Lipping went over to the ADN where the press conference was to see if he could get a text. And parallel to what we were doing in the Embassy, trying to find out the facts and getting that reported to Washington and letting the Situation Room and the Operations Center at the the State Department know; parallel to that, Tom Brokaw who had been at the meeting, went back to the Brandenburg Gate and on his rather cumbersome cell phone called Garrick Utley in New York, the anchorman, and said, "I have this story. The Berlin Wall is open." Garrick Utley normally would ask for a second opinion but apparently Tom Brokaw had convinced him that he was at the meeting and he had spoken to Schabowski himself - and it was a real story. So for the next hour and a half, Tom Brokaw and NBC News was announcing to the world that the Berlin Wall was open while the rest of us at the Embassy, we were trying to find out what was really going on, what the facts were, what the text was, what was going on. And finally we found the text. And we reported to Washington, of course. We talked to Harry Gilmore who was the Minister in West Berlin and told him there would be a lot of people travelling as soon as they could get a visa because the statement was that if you want to travel, you could get a visa; and if you wanted to emigrate, there would be a possibility for emigration at some new office they would set up immediately. Well, people heard "travel immediately" and they started storming the place. But we thought, you know, they are Germans and they are orderly and this will be okay; they are not violent. Then I drove home. It was about 10:00 at night and I drove home, Schonhauser Allee towards Platanenstrasse where I lived in Niederschoenhausen. And as I passed Bornholmerstrasse where my children went to school every day, I saw a crowd at the gate and knowing that there was a shoot-to-kill order for anybody attacking the crossing-point, I turned and drove down towards the gate and I saw on the other side of the bridge, the S-Bahn bridge, a TV camera with its lights because they knew something was happening because they had heard Schabowkski. And I saw a confrontation. I saw cameras; and I thought I must go watch this on television. So I went home and turned on the television. My wife said, "The children are sleeping." I said, ""No, no, we have to work. Something is going to happen. We don't know what it is. Something is going to happen." I called Ambassador Barkley. I called Jon Greenwald. I called Harry Gilmore and said we would like to revise what we were saying earlier. It looked like the visitors would be coming soon, rather than tomorrow. We got a hold of Washington. And you could then see for the next few hours the drama unfolding. At Bornholmerstrasse, they crossed; they went into the cameras. Lights in the neighborhood came up. People were coming everywhere; and by early morning, when our two children were to be picked up for school, chaos was reigning. We didn't know what was going on. The rules hadn't been established. My kids were picked up to be taken to the Kennedy Schule in West Berlin; and so I followed them in my private car. We got to Bornholmerstrasse. The people were very friendly. They saw this car and they let it through the gate. Radio DDR1 was reporting that the visa requirement would be imposed at 8:00. And so, it was 7:00 or 7:15 in the morning, I waited; and then people were trying to get back from West Berlin. Some people who had just woken up decided they needed to get to West Berlin, and there was chaos. I started to drive to the Embassy. By the time I got there, the GDR said the visa requirement was at noon. And at noon, they said Monday. This was a Friday, November 10th. For a political scientist, for those of analyzing what was happening, we saw the power of the SED shift from Krenz to the street. Krenz, then, of course, tried to re-gain that control but there was a lingering question. What happened? Where was the shoot-to-kill order? Nobody carried it out. That was amazing.
About two months later, I was having coffee with some friends of ours who went to the same church we did, East Germans. I said, "I don't understand. There is something more to this story." There was. Uwe Gersten, who was the person I was talking to, said, "My brother-in-law will tell you. He was there that night." And so, he asked him to come down. He brought his GDR Ausweis, his ID card. He opened it up and you could see on the ID card that the picture had a visa stamp on it, invalidating the ID card. That is, the first 100 people were thrown out. They were thrown out and the gate was closed. There was only one problem. They were on television. Nobody knew what the story was, except Tom Brokaw was saying. The wall was open - and here they are, they are coming through. And so, the breach of the fall of the wall was done in that manner. It was breached, and then the GDR lost control. The rest of the story moves into a whole new phase of the decline of the GDR. What we were trying to do at the Embassy to track it, to make sure that the questions later of civil war were not addressed and that the roundtables that had been so well-practiced in Poland were done. We began to be very, very busy. We were like a video, fast forward. [11:09]
Coming to the GDR Video
[11:20]
I came to the GDR in March of 1989 as Deputy Chief of Mission for Richard Barkley. It was actually a very interesting time. I was his candidate, and he said to me, "You know, it will be okay, because it will be the most boring place in the world. Nothing will happen." So my first image of the GDR: it was nice to be DCM, but it was going to be the most boring place in the world. But it was Berlin and it was interesting; and I thought that would be fun. The issues that came out of that time drove the experience. So the images that we have, the first one you have, is of very little light, no street markings and the pungent smell of brown coal. You could always smell the lignite - everywhere. In fact, at one point, we tried to prevail upon the State Department to give us a compensation for that because one of our other agencies had a 10% differential; and the rest of the State Department did not. That only resulted in the 10% differential being taken away from my colleagues which didn't endear me to those people. Those are the... It was boring, drab, ugly - and yet there was something very interesting happening. We didn't know what it was; and anybody who says they did know what it was, are probably making it up or saying something that they aspirationally believed.
Through the summer of 1989, events began to pile up. But into August, my recollection is that the Washington Post ran an article saying that the Soviets would intervene anywhere to protect their interests, it would be in the GDR. So we were very cautious in what we were trying to say. And yet, we fmet East Germans and they would talk on the streets. They wouldn't talk in their apartments. You would walk by them and they would stop talking. So we knew something was happening. We also knew some people from our time earlier in Washington in the late eighties who had been associated with the church.
Congressional Delegation (see later excerpt) Video
[13:44]
Another fascinating incident at the time was on December 3rd. We had a congressional delegation visiting us in East Berlin. Ambassador Barkley invited them to a dinner, along with many of the revolutionaries, if you will, Schorlemmer and Bärbel Bohley and some others. That night, the Communists didn't show up. That was the night the Communists SED met and they changed the constitution, taking out the monopoly power of the SED. The next morning, we met with the congressional delegation and took them through East Berlin.
[14:25]
Images of the DDR Video
My images were of the Gethsamane Church, where on October 7th there was a huge demonstration and thousands of people were arrested and taken to, held overnight in various camps. Then we had gone through Alexanderplatz where the demonstrations had moved from Alexanderplatz to the Lustgarten and sat down in front of the Stadtratsvorsitzenden, the Council of Ministers meeting, and prevented the crowd from going towards the Brandenburg Gate where the police and the border police were there waiting for this confrontation.
So there began to be many things: the demonstration on November 4th, it was a huge demonstration; on October 7th, backwards, the visit by Gorbachev was seen as the order for glasnost and perestroika to happen. Honecker had to go. Modrow had to come. And it was unleashing the fight between Gorbachev and the Ligachevs of the world who were fighting his policies. So there were many, many incidents - little ones, big ones that left this as a very uncertain time, what would happen. They were still armed very heavily on both sides of the Berlin Wall. We didn't know, we were very uncertain about what would happen, so when the Wall came down on November 9th, we sighed a sigh of relief. And it was a chance to step back and to see where we might go.
[16:04]
Then things began to change in a different way. Roundtables were established. The pace of the revolution was breathtaking but there was an order to it. The roundtables took over cities and villages and they made decisions and they governed. The garbage was still picked up. And the demonstrations still continued. And then we could see the shift of the debate. From the revolution - and there were three things that were important.
One, was the revolution itself, October 7th in Leipzig, I am sorry, October 9th in Leipzig to November 9th in Berlin - the active revolution when people went to the streets and brought down the government.
The second was March 18th; March 18th, after Secretary Baker came to visit us on December 12th and 13th in 1989. He met with Mr. Modrow and with the church and in those meetings, there were two subjects. The Communists were talking about implementing perestroika and joint ventures would be offered for 49% ownership. Mr Baker had given his famous speech of the four conditions for German unification which he told them. But Modrow said, "We are not talking about unification of Germany." He then met with Manfred Stolpe and a couple of church leaders at the Lutheran church in Nikolaikirche and told them essentially the same thing: "I have given this speech in Berlin in West Berlin. We have these four points on unification. I hope you continue to be peacefully demonstrating. We don't want any escalation." And the answer was: "We are fighting for the renewal of the GDR. We are not talking about unification." This is in December. But throughout December things began to change and by January, Mr. Modrow, who by then was Prime Minister, decided that he would re-create the Stasi in form of the Office for National Security. He undercut all of his credibility. The election that he was planning to have in May was moved to March and the Communists knew that they would lose. March 18th is the democratic act of the election of the Volkskammer that was given a mandate for unification. The Two Plus Four Agreement discussions began in February. They began then in parallel to then switch from the revolution to the negotiations. So when the negotiations came to East Berlin, the Embassy was very much involved in June of 1990 at the Schloss Niederschonhausen; we obviously contributed to them. But if you want an image, you have Mr. Kohl, a very big man, standing next to Mr. de Maizière, a very small man, and there was relative power distribution in the Two Plus Four negotiations.
But the third act - I mentioned the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolution on October 9thand November 9th, the election on March 18th - the third act was an act for the East Germans to make, and that was to accede to the constitution under Article 23. During the election, and in fact I think it was the Bundnis 90 had a wonderful campaign poster; and the campaign poster was "Kein Anschluss unter diese Nummer"- Article 23. That's the telephone answering call when you don't have a connection. "Kein Anschluss unter diese Nummer" with the emphasis of course on Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Hitler in 1938. So it was a fascinating campaign but the decision was taken. Now I must admit that Chancellor Kohl had two options that he could do for unification in the Two Plus Four talks. They could have done Article 146 at the time, which would be writing a new constitution; or they could, or the West Germans would encourage the East Germans to accede to the constitution under Article 23. As you could hear from this discussion, the events were going very, very quickly and they were not to be stopped. People were still escaping. The Soviet Union was falling apart. The decision was to support the idea of unification under Article 23. And then the terms of the Two Plus Four negotiation - very well negotiated, very solidly supported by the United States; and eventually with winning over the support of President Mitterand and Maggie Thatcher.
[20:40]
Bravery of the People Involved in the Revolution Video
[21:18]
There is something I am very attached to in the GDR and that is the bravery of the people - and there are not many. Anybody who says a revolution is run by more than a handful of people is crazy. And that handful of people - not the famous ones, the Bärbel Bohley or the Schorlemmers, but those other people who were among the crowd, who went out and... Well, I could say Christian Führer at the Nikolaikirche; a very smart man, very bitter at this point, but okay. DeMaiziere. I mean, individuals who gave their careers. I mean nobody was really killed, but who have their careers and lives to make this happen. That's what I really do miss and I think that they are the people that made it happen. And like all revolutions, things happen afterwards and they are kind of shunted aside and nobody knows...[22:18]
[22:20]
Ruth Misselwitz, I knew from her husband who was a pastor in Washington for a year on an exchange in 1988. Ruth came to a reception that I had for Don Kirsch, who was the Economics Minister in the Embassy in Bonn. And during that reception - this was the end of November - she told me that they were planning an action, a nation-wide action, a human chain, kind of like what was done for Mutlangen in West Berlin when I was there for the deployment of the Pershing missiles. ("Now that's fascinating, how does that work?" [22:57])
Congressional delegation Video
[23:01]
I mentioned earlier that on December 3rd we had this congressional delegation, the Senate Arms Control observer group, who came - Senator Pell and others. They wanted to see sites so we had gone to Alexanderplatz and the Gethsamane Kirche and we were driving... They wanted to see the Capitulation in Marzahn. So that was part of the tour. It was an army bus. We were driving up Karl Marx Strasse and we came to this intersection and the policeman stopped us. I didn't see anything. I looked around. There was no traffic. There was nothing happening. So I got out of the bus and I went over to the Volkspolizisten and said, "You know I got this VIP delegation here. I am from the American Embassy. You know, we are trying to go up to the place of the Capitulation. Why are you stopping us?" And a fascinating thing happened at that point. He said, "It's not my fault. It's not my fault." I said, "What do you mean? It's not your fault. It's your country. You are in charge here. What's going on?" And then it was noon and out of the underpasses, all these people came out. It was just amazing - all of these people lined up across the street. It dawned on me that this was the human chain that Ruth Misselwitz said they had organized. Remember they didn't have cell phones then; and they didn't dare use their phones. So suddenly all these people. So I went back to the bus and I said, "Come off. You have got to see this. This is a demonstration. This is the revolution continuing." So these congressmen and senators got off; they just loved it; they got their pictures taken. These poor people, nervous, shaking, holding their candles, not speaking English, fascinating. They got lots of pictures. 12:15, they disappear. It was totally magic. I mean, you knew that at that point, the few people leading the revolution had lots of support.
And that was December. Baker came later. Kohl went to see Gorbachev and said, you know, the GDR is "zahlungsunfahig." In 24 hours, it's going to be bankrupt in 24 hours. Do you want to be, do you want to support them or do you want to have us as a good friend? And the rest is, as you say, history.