The makeshift refugee camp outside the West German
embassy in Prague, August-September 1989

PRAGUE MEANS MANY THINGS to many people. It is the site of the infamous “defenestration” of 1618, which marked the beginning of the Thirty Years War. It is the home of Alfons Maria Mucha and the decadent, absinth-crazed dreamers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s delicious fin-de-siècle. It is the mist-shrouded metropolis of Rabbi Loew and Franz Kafka. It is the seat of “Reich Protector” Reinhard Heydrich, psychopath extraordinaire. To today's young backpackers it is the party capital of Europe. But for anyone living in Central Europe in those years, the Prague of September 30, 1989 represents a historical turning point none of us will ever forget.

Rigged elections and "Chinese solutions"

Erich Honecker and his communist German Democratic Republic were living on borrowed time. Encouraged by the growing success of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland and by democratic reforms recently introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, East Germany’s Protestant churches and underground opposition groups finally took heart in the summer of 1988 . In church gatherings and in small private meetings they called upon their own members and GDR citizens as a whole to ensure that the local elections scheduled for May 7, 1989 be conducted on a democratic basis. As a rule, elections in communist countries are a mere formality – public acclamations of the status quo – and voters stay away from the polls at their own risk. But this time, a new generation of activists were urging their fellow citizens to make use of the limited democratic structures included in the East German constitution by demanding reforms and also by nominating candidates of their own choosing. After the authorities banned these activities, new grassroots civil rights groups asked citizens to vote “no” (i.e. by crossing out all the names on the pre-printed ballots) or else to take part in a nationwide election boycott – an outrageously provocative and downright “counterrevolutionary” action in this authoritarian police state.

The election duly took place on May 7 and Politburo member Egon Krenz, who served as head of the central election commission, proclaimed that the candidates of the National Front (i.e. the Socialist Unity Party and its satellite organizations) had won the election with 98.5% of the vote – not just 98.5% of the votes cast, mind you, but of the entire eligible population. However, the unofficial observers who kept an eye on 200 polling places in East Berlin noted that turnout there was only 70-85% and that between 7% and 8% of those voters who bowed to state pressure and turned up at the polls crossed out their ballots. The fraud of “socialism” was obvious as never before. The police and Stasi countered the subsequent public protests and petitions with arrests and prison sentences.

Politburo member Egon Krenz:
"Restoring order"

But these heavy-handed tactics no longer packed the punch they once did in Stalin’s and Brezhnev's day. In 1989 the entire communist world was seething with protest. Within a month, up to 3,000 protesters lay dead on Tienanmen Square in Beijing, a massacre that Egon Krenz approvingly described as “doing something to restore order.” The threat to the GDR’s citizens could not have been more blatant. Dissidents – many of whom still supported the basic notion of socialism, albeit “with a human face” – reacted in outrage at the media’s frequent mention of “the Chinese solution,” which could all too easily have turned into a “German solution” any day.

The "Chinese solution":
Tiananmen Square, June 1989

Why wait around to get massacred? More and more East Germans applied for permission to leave the GDR for the West. Between December 1988 and September 1989 the authorities approved an unprecedented 86,150 such applications in a desperate effort to relieve the internal pressure. But as Alexis de Tocqueville once noted, “The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.” The jump in exit visas did not ease the pressure but merely highlighted the regime’s growing vulnerability.

Hungary leaves the fold

On May 2, Hungary’s communist regime began removing its fortifications along the border with Austria. The new reformist government in Budapest undertook this move as a goodwill gesture towards the West and as a message to the world that it was unilaterally ending the Cold War and damn the consequences. At a ceremony held on June 27, Austrian foreign minister Alois Mock and his Hungarian counterpart Gyula Horn formally cut the barbed wire in the presence of the international press. As word of this spread, up to 150,000 East Germans flooded into Hungary before the Czechs finally sealed its border with that turncoat nation. The Hungarians made no effort to stop the Germans and actually started setting up refugee camps. Hundreds made their way across the laxly guarded border. On August 19 some 600 GDR citizens dashed over the line into Austria during a border-opening ceremony near the town of Sopron. Then, on September 11, the Hungarians simply opened the barriers. 18,000 flooded westward over the first three days.

From then on there was no stopping the flow of refugees. Starting in August, East Germans began seeking refuge in the West German embassy in Poland and in the “Permanent Mission,” West Germany’s quasi embassy in East Berlin. But no embassy proved as desirable a destination as the West German mission in Prague. Czechoslovakia was now the only country East Germans could travel to without a visa. By early September, over 4,000 desperate souls were camping out in the lake of mud that had once been the embassy gardens.

Conditions in Prague were appalling, as East Germans continued to clamber over the fence into an uncertain future. The Czech authorities were of no help - they had their hands full with their own "Velvet Revolution." The GDR now saw itself faced with a complete meltdown of its painstakingly constructed international image. Gone were the photos of proud Olympic gold medalists and buzzing factories. TV networks were filming every detail of the embassy occupation and broadcasting it by satellite into living rooms across the planet. At the same time, the regime was preparing a triumphant celebration of its fortieth anniversary on October 7. Bloody corpses on the streets of Prague and East Berlin would have looked very unpleasant on the world's television screens. As Lenin once asked, "what is to be done?"

West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher

Freedom trains

East German foreign minister Oskar Fischer contacted West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and both discussed the matter with Gorbachev’s reformist foreign minister Edvard Shevardnadse. Genscher had himself escaped from his eastern hometown of Halle to West Germany in 1952 and knew better than anyone else what was at stake. Together the three men came up with a face-saving solution. Special trains would spirit the embassy refugees to freedom in West Germany, but with a bizarre condition: they would first have to make an immense detour and pass through East German territory in order to keep up the illusion of GDR sovereignty. Genscher reluctantly agreed.

On the evening of September 30, Genscher flew to Prague and stepped onto the embassy balcony. “Dear fellow Germans,” Genscher told his captive audience. “We have come to you today to tell you that your departure is now possible.” The applause was deafening. But when Genscher told them that the trains – the first of which would leave that same night – would first pass through East Germany, the crowed turned against him. “Never!” they shouted. How could they ever trust Honecker and his henchmen? “I once left the GDR myself,” Genscher replied, “and I give you my personal guarantee that nothing will happen to you.”

A freedom train reaches West German soil

Genscher kept his word. The first "freedom train" did indeed depart Prague that same evening, filled with mothers and small children. Over the following days, one train after another ferried some 17,000 East Germans from Prague to the Bavarian border town of Hof – for once word got out, the embassy just kept on filling up with refugees. On September 3 the East German regime finally closed the border to Czechoslovakia. The next day thousands of desperate East Germans tried to storm the freedom trains as they raced through Dresden. The GDR police used water cannons and tear gas to drive their citizens out of the station. Now the fiasco was complete. The police and Stasi probably would have adopted the “Chinese solution” as well if the upcoming festivities had not made such an option politically impossible.

Another brick from the Wall

The Prague embassy drama of September 30 was not nearly as dramatic an event as the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9. But it nevertheless marked the start of the GDR’s death watch, which would only end with the extinction of the German Democratic Republic and the reunification of Germany on October 4, 1990. Those among us who still believe that the collapse of the inhuman oppression system called communism was the work of clueless western politicians like Ronald Reagan or of bigger and better nuclear weapons could learn a lot from this event. As Genscher himself recalls*, the Prague experience “was a decisive blow against the Wall. It was the refugees, who wanted nothing else but to live according to their own desires, who made it happen. (…) The Wall was brought down from the eastern side. This was a genuine referendum – this was democracy from the bottom up.”