Joyous celebration at the wall, November 1989

The Fall of the Berlin Wall
By William F Buckley Jr
John Wiley & Sons £13.50, 212 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.80

Behind the Berlin Wall
By Patrick Major
OUP £60, 352 pages

The Year that Changed the World
By Michael Meyer
Simon and Schuster £16.99, 272 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

1989: The Struggle to Create Postwar Europe
By Mary Elise Sarotte
Princeton University Press, £20.95, 244 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16.76

The Berlin Wall
By Frederick Taylor
Bloomsbury £9.99, 752 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.99

We can still rejoice in good faith for the events of 1989, when the Berlin wall came down after dividing East and West Germany for 28 years. Following that momentous period, nearly all the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact states have since been absorbed into the European Union, together with the three former Soviet Baltic states.

This process has not been without its painful moments, and there will be more to come. But the enlargement of Europe remains the most obvious consequence of the fall in November 1989. Looked at from the point of view of those former Soviet states that still yearn to breathe free of Russian hegemony, such as Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, this enlargement is both seductive and incomplete.

A flood of new books marks 20 years since the fall of the wall, and of communism itself in Europe. That sense of excitement is easy to defend. As a reporter for the FT in central and eastern Europe, I witnessed “1989” in its gestation, its moment and its aftermath. Like many of my colleagues, I was deeply under the spell of that excitement, to the point of including in a report from East Berlin a chunk of Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy”: “Your magic reunites those/Whom stern custom has parted”. So unconfined was the joy that the editor of the day allowed it.

Each book, in varying degrees of detail, considers the logic of the wall, both before and after it was built. The lead-up to its construction was slow. Unrest in the newly formed communist states had been growing since the early 1950s – Hungary erupted and was suppressed by Soviet troops in 1956, for example. Many of those states, which had been liberated by the Red Army in the decade after the war and dragooned into a communist mould, were beginning to realise how grim the future looked. Some tried to leave, particularly East Germans who saw prosperity growing in the west.

For Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and his East German counterpart Walter Ulbricht, East Germany’s relatively open border to the west during the 1950s was a daily demonstration of the inferiority of the communist system. Their growing sense of insecurity was felt across the world. In The Berlin Wall, Frederick Taylor quotes President John Kennedy in conversation with an aide in July 1961: “Khrushchev is losing East Germany ... he cannot let that happen ... he will have to do something to stop the flow of refugees ... perhaps a wall.”

The wall was viewed as an inevitable step by Khrushchev and Ulbricht. Its basic construction was achieved in one night, over August 12/13 1961. Once it was built, Ulbricht hoped the German Democratic Republic (GDR) would be a protected space within which socialism could flourish, free from the baubles dangling in the shops of West Berlin.

Patrick Major, a professor at Reading University who specialises in the division of Germany, is author of Behind the Berlin Wall, the most detailed and thorough examination of social and economic life in the GDR of all the books reviewed here. Major notes that enforcing the party’s rule meant making the party responsible for everything. Yet that was impossible – some notice had to be taken of public opinion. The freedom of the early 1960s was reversed, including a crackdown on western rock music, but was then grudgingly relaxed again. As Major writes, the party became “the prisoner of its own logic that, in an enclosed GDR, it would be able to build a more humane form of socialism, but also became the prisoner of its own unkept promises”. The wall did keep East Germans in but its effect was that of a slow pressure cooker.

Frederick Taylor, novelist and author of a work on the 1945 bombing of Dresden, has been fascinated with East Germany since he visited Berlin as a schoolboy. In The Berlin Wall, a mix of reportage and memoir, the picture he draws of East Germany is bleak: “Brother was encouraged to betray brother, husband betray wife”. Life under the cold eyes of the various KGB equivalents, “was composed of a hundred thousand tiny betrayals”, he writes.

During long research trips, and in his contact with East Germans in pubs and cafés, he noticed what he describes here as a “slightly narrowed-down gaze into the middle distance”, the look of one cautious not to say anything incriminating about “big” politics, particularly to a foreigner.

Michael Meyer’s The Year that Changed the World also relies on the observed vignette, but has the more practised smoothness of a news magazine writer (Meyer was central European bureau chief for Newsweek between 1988 and 1992). His accounts of his experiences as a visiting correspondent in the period immediately before the fall evoke a dulled authoritarianism. He recounts a conversation with three young musicians in an East Berlin bar, who were chafing against their confinement in a small country. When two men sat down at a table close to the musicians, they suddenly changed their demeanour, saying “socialism must be preserved” and “Honecker [the East German Communist party leader] is right”.

Both Taylor and Meyer were familiar with the enforced servility and resentment of life in East Berlin. When protests and mass defections began in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Berlin in 1988, spurred by the evident weakening of the will by Moscow to enforce obedience, they, along with many others, were incredulous and excited.

Citizens were swept up in a wave of disgust against a failing “system”. It was a revulsion felt, or at least claimed, even by those who had adapted their lives to the communist system, satisfied with a society in which personal responsibility and its attendant hard choices could be largely renounced. Journalists, scrabbling about as the wall fell on a few hours’ notice, were infected by the people.

It took years to decide to build the Berlin wall but its destruction was shockingly casual. As Meyer tells it, the end came almost accidentally. Exhausted from sleepless nights, the regime’s spokesman Günter Schabowski received an inadequate briefing from East Germany’s new party secretary Egon Krenz before facing a big international press conference on November 9.

Krenz, faced with the inevitable flight of East Germans through Hungary’s recently opened borders, had convinced the politburo that travel restrictions should be relaxed in an orderly fashion, beginning the next day. Schabowski understood him to mean immediately. In fact, Krenz was planning to open the wall in orderly stages. Within an hour of his speech, the streets of East Berlin began filling with people wondering, “Can we go?” “How can we go?” “Do you know anything?”

As I made my way, late at night, to the section of the wall near the Brandenburg Gate, I saw unfolding around me what the Czech dissident and later President Václav Havel called the “power of the powerless”. In the face of a regime that had given up, the people spoke and did what President Reagan, in a speech in Berlin two and a half years before, had exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to do: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

William F Buckley, who died last year, was one of the US’s doughtiest anti- communists for half a century. He founded the National Review in 1955 as an attempt to fuse the conservative and libertarian movements of the right, and used it to defend the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy. By the time of the events of 1989, his euphoria had been waiting a long time for release, though he had anticipated the fall by a steady faith in the human wish for freedom.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall, first published in 2004 and re-issued this year, was, perhaps fittingly, one of his last major works. Its tone is one of restrained exultation: this was the end of an enemy whose commitment to the control of its citizens and the remoulding of human instincts he had spent much of his early career denouncing. He quotes, ironically, Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg: “When all the world is surfaced over with concrete, one day a blade of grass will spring up.” The collapse of the concrete wall was not what Ehrenburg had in mind but the thought remains a good one.

These books, though long on joy and short on regret, reflect only a little of the disappointments and setbacks that have followed the fall. Buckley quotes Radek Sikorski, later Poland’s foreign minister, who described the escape from communism in 1989 as “like dropping some weight from a heavy rucksack on a long slog towards elusive highlands”.

It is heartening to be reminded of the euphoria. Mary Elise Sarotte, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, gives a more measured view. In 1989, she questions the settlement that followed the wall’s fall and articulates what she sees as the west’s failure to construct a new international order from the crumbling of communism.

The tragic hero of 1989, for Sarotte, is Gorbachev. He was, and is still seen by many Russians as a King Lear figure: a man prepared to give away what he should have retained to a west bent on extracting as much as possible from the Soviet collapse – under the cover of honeyed words and rhetoric of a new age.

The wall was the most visible symbol, not just of oppression, but of the two world systems: liberal capitalism and state socialism. The latter simply could not keep up with technological advances, rapidly rising living standards and the explosion of cultural freedoms and lifestyles after the 1960s. Gorbachev saw this and sought to reshape communism, politically and economically, by emulating western success. His failure succeeded in one thing: convincing the satellite states, the rulers and the ruled, that the game was up.

Sarotte stresses the extraordinary insouciance of Gorbachev before the collapse of the wall. The former Soviet leader, she says, seems to have seen the events in Germany almost as a sideshow. He refused to accept his more hawkish advisers’ point that, if there was to be a new order in Europe, he should bargain harder for the best deal he could get. This, they said, should include no advance eastwards of Nato and a generous economic aid package to shore up the desperate Soviet economy.

The US, facing a weakening economy, was in no mood for big aid. Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor who oversaw unification, tried hard to secure a big aid package but also failed. Fellow European leaders Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand were horrified by the fall of the wall because they feared a resurgent Germany, though Mitterrand skipped nimbly on to the side of unfolding history, leaving Thatcher impotent. Moscow’s inaction was at the core, Sarotte writes: “Gorbachev and his advisers did not comprehend the chance that had opened up, and the necessity of moving quickly to seize it.”

“The west”, concludes Sarotte, “should have thought harder ... about how it felt, longer term, to live in a once-great country [Russia] that had to bring its soldiers home for lack of money.” Those of us who live in the once-great imperial power Great Britain, which faced something of the same quandary – though over a much longer time frame – might say: get over it. And Russia may, but only with time, and certainly with difficulty, which it will make sure is widely shared.

John Lloyd is an FT contributing editor