I was the man from Spekta

7 November 2009

Timothy Garton Ash was a student in Berlin when The Spectator asked him to cover what turned out to be the fall of communism. He looks back on the adventure of a lifetime

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was strictly optional. Most of the heroes of 1989 were middle-aged. The leaders of the velvet revolutions, the Vaclav Havels and Lech Walesas, had been through prison, tough times and many a defeat before this incredible victory. Sure, there were often students in the front line — blithe, unattached, unafraid; but what was most moving to me, as I talked to people in the crowds in Leipzig, Gdansk or Prague, were the older men and women who had endured so much and never believed they would see this day. Women who for 28 years had never even set foot on the other end of their own street, because the Berlin Wall cut across it. Men like the East Berlin porter who told me: ‘Now people are standing up straight... I think the sick will get up from their hospital beds.’

A few weeks earlier, these so-called ‘ordinary’ men and women had still been very afraid — and yet they had put on their coats and scarves, closed the front door of their small flats behind them, and taken the long, nervous walk down to the local square or the Leipzig ring road. When they left home that first time, they did not know they would not be beaten up by the police, and persecuted by the Stasi, as so many had been before, for so many years. Only when they got to the ring road or the square did they discover how many of their fellow citizens had done the same. At a few crucial moments — in Poland’s Solidarity, in Berlin on the night of the fall of the Wall — the sheer gentle force of numbers made all the difference.

Today, it all looks inevitable. It seems to us, with the burden of hindsight, that what actually happened had to happen. But it did not look that way at the time. Every night when I went to bed in some battered old central European hotel, giddy with a mixture of elation, exhaustion and vodka, I had no idea what was going to happen tomorrow. A violent reversal always seemed possible. A ghost stalked central Europe throughout the second half of 1989; it was the ghost of Tiananmen. The East German communist leader Erich Honecker had talked approvingly of ‘the Chinese solution’. And we now know, from the archives, that at several points — for example, on 9 October in Leipzig, when 8,000 armed security forces were mobilised, doctors’ leave cancelled, extra hospital beds and blood reserves prepared — we did come to the very brink of violence.

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Adrian Sells

November 5th, 2009 2:20pm Report this comment

So, instead of only the people of the former communist states living under the rule of unelected, bureaucratic elites, we now all get to live that way.
Why can't the Euro-amorous Mr Garton Ash see that?

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