In Europe

an additional billion Deutschmarks. In1988, Politburo member Günter Mittag warned his colleagues that the DDR's finances were on the point of ‘capsizing’.
    This financial crisis was kept a deep secret, but the outside world was not blind to major problems facing the country. ‘There were too many things happening all around us that were quite simply impossible economically,’ said my old acquaintance Inge Winkler, who worked as a paediatrician in the east of the DDR at the time. ‘People who did nothing all day, factories that stopped working because there were no more raw materials. It was perfectly clear to all of us that things could not go on the way they had in the past.’
    Wolf Jobst Siedler travelled regularly from West Berlin through the Eastern Bloc, and its problems were clear to him as well: ‘There were gigantic fleets being built, but the government was unable to repair the potholes in the streets. Helmut Schmidt once referred to the Soviet Union as “a developing country with a hydrogen bomb”, and of course he was right.’
    His friend Richard von Weizsäcker: ‘Obviously, none of us knew that the wall would open up on Thursday, 9 November, 1989 at 9 p.m., no one knew that.’ Weizsäcker was president of West Germany at the time, and even at the highest levels of government there was no indication that matters would accelerate so quickly. As late as July 1987, Gorbachev had personally told Weizsäcker that German reunification could very well take another hundred years or more, and definitely no less than fifty. Weizsäcker himself was convinced that the wall was, by definition, a temporary matter. ‘My only doubt was whether I would be around to see it fall.’
    Hans Krijt in Prague: ‘You could see the old system crumbling, in that last year, but we were simply expecting it to transform itself into capitalism with a human face. In early October 1989 the West German embassy in Prague was suddenly stormed by thousands of East Germans seeking asylum in its grounds. The Iron Curtain there was no higher than a garden wall with a fence on top, and rumour had it that you could reach the West via that escape route. In the end, it turned out to be true. We lived quite close to the embassy, and when we went for a walk in the evening we would see the streets full of abandoned Wartburgs and Trabants, prams, even suitcases that had turned out to be too big to drag along. I looked into one of those abandoned cars: there was a teddy bear on the backseat, forgotten in the rush. I thought about the panic that child must have felt.’
    Richard von Weizsäcker: ‘And then, in autumn 1989, things started going very fast. On 9 October, after a church service, 300,000 people took part in a silent demonstration in Leipzig. The Russian soldiers remained in their barracks. One month later, on 4 November, at least 600,000 demonstrators gathered on Alexanderplatz. It was an incredible mix of political and other figures, from the writer Christa Wolf to the top officials of the SED. But even at that point I still had absolutely no idea that the wall would fall within five days, and without bloodshed.
    ‘The day after it collapsed, on Friday, 10 November, the mayor of Berlin and I were the first to make a ritual crossing of the Glienicke Bridge. But after that I couldn't stop, I walked all over town, everyone was flabbergasted. Finally I ended up at Potsdamer Platz. Today it's been completely built up, but back then it was still a vacant lot with the border running through it. There was a little group of people standing on the western side, they were wondering whether you could cross, and I said: “I want to see for myself!” So I walked across the open ground until I got to the barracks of the DDR border guards. A lieutenant from the
Volkspolizei
came out, recognised me, saluted and said calmly: “Mr President, I would like to report that there is nothing special to report.”’
    1989 was one of those moments when everything seems to happen at once, an
annus mirabilis
. Within two years, nine communist dictatorships collapsed, including that of the Soviet Union itself. In January 1989 the Polish independent trade union Solidarity was granted official status: for the first time, legal opposition became possible in the Eastern Bloc. Lech Walşesa, the great trade union leader, signed the agreement with a pen bearing the portrait of Karol Wojtyla, a tribute to the Polish Pope John Paul II who played a seminal