Last dictator defends communist dream to end
Oliver Moody
Egon Krenz is not blind to the failings of the dictatorial order he fought so long and so hard to preserve but he cannot bring himself to believe that it all counted for nothing,
writes.
With hindsight, one of the most remarkable features of the fall of the Berlin Wall is what did not happen on the night of November 9, 1989: no-one was killed.
The East German state, which had for decades gunned down its own fugitive citizens, bludgeoned them with iron bars and laid land mines and other vicious booby traps for them along the ‘‘death strip’’, stayed its hand at the moment when it mattered most.
Egon Krenz would like some credit. In the dying days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), its last leader issued Order 11/89, forbidding the security forces to use their firearms against the avalanche of protests. Without this command, the peaceful revolution might have been a bloodbath.
‘‘No-one in the GDR considered breaking up the demonstrations with violence – no-one,’’ Krenz told The Times. ‘‘It was simply a myth attributed to the GDR that things were to be resolved by force. There were GDR citizens out on the streets, not the mob, and so the use of violence never came into question for us.’’
Krenz, now 82 and a prolific author of history books justifying the actions of his government, cuts a lonely figure in his semi-retirement.
On the one side, many of his old East German comrades blame him for the turmoil of his 46 days in power and the collapse of the system on his watch. Days after his regime inadvertently opened the border through a bizarre concatenation of Chinese whispers, he was deposed and ultimately expelled from the party to which he had given his adult life.
On the other, he is widely reviled as the last figurehead of a merciless dictatorship. In 1997 Krenz was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six and a half years in prison for his part in the deaths of four East Germans who were shot as they tried to escape over the Wall.
He retains an implacable belief in his innocence and the rectitude of the GDR’s aims, if not the means by which it pursued them. His latest book, Wir und die Russen (We and the Russians), is an exhaustive account of what he regards as his country’s betrayal by Mikhail Gorbachev and its attempts to shore up one of the last strongholds of true socialism in Europe.
Sitting in the book-lined office of his Berlin publisher, beneath the headquarters of Neues Deutschland, a leftist newspaper that was once the chief organ of East German propaganda, Krenz is affable and unprepossessing, but with a strong inclination to historical revisionism and a tendency to bristle visibly at the faintest suggestion of criticism.
The window looks out across the Torstrasse on to the Berlin branch of Soho House, a fashionable private members’ club for the cosmopolitan elite and a totem of modern hipster capitalism.
It is an odd vantage point from which to contemplate the putative triumph of Karl Marx’s ideals. But Krenz is convinced that the demise of the eastern bloc was a setback, not a death blow. ‘‘I don’t think capitalism is the last word in the story, nor should it be,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve just come back from China and for me it is a great hope that socialism is still very much alive.’’
When the Red Army swept into Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, Krenz was eight years old, living with his parents in the town of Ribnitz-Damgarten, on the Baltic coast.
It was a time of indiscriminate reprisals, rape and pillage as Soviet soldiers ran amok, seeking revenge for the deaths of 26 million of their compatriots.
But the boy saw a different side of the Russian occupiers. Even today, Krenz remembers only their kindness.
‘‘The Russians wanted – and this conviction passed deep into my flesh and blood during my childhood – they wanted only to build a state in the heart of Europe that was free from war and Nazis. That was their goal,’’ he said. ‘‘That things turned out differently has something to do with your compatriot Churchill, who declared a Cold War.
‘‘I have to say that my childhood memories are intimately bound up with the Russian words for bread, for sugar, for meat – in short, for the food they shared with me, without which I would probably have starved. That was how it was. Since then my emotional connection with the Russians has flourished to this day.’’
At 16 Krenz joined the FDJ, the East German youth organisation. Two years later he signed up to the ruling Socialist Unity (SED) party.
Identified early on as a future leader, he was sent to the Communist party’s staff school in Moscow for three years. He rose irresistibly through the ranks, reaching the SED’s central committee in 1973 and becoming the youngest member of the Politburo in 1983. At the age of 47 he was the second most powerful man in the state, the master of its internal security and the heir apparent to its increasingly capricious dictator, Erich Honecker.
By this point, however, the GDR was already in its death throes. Its fantastically uncompetitive economy, running largely on industrial equipment fashioned before WWII, and bent beneath an iron necklace of debts to foreign creditors, was sustained only by fraudulent accounting.
Its opposition movements, long held in check by a secret police force that had one in seven citizens on its books as informants, were growing in numbers and confidence.
The ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev marked the beginning of the end. No help was forthcoming from Moscow. In 1989, as first Hungary and then Poland began to turn towards the West, East Berlin found itself an isolated redoubt of old-school communism, more Soviet than the Soviets.
Krenz feels that Gorbachev’s actions amounted to nothing less than treachery. ‘‘I trusted him for the longest time and . . . I believed, even in November 1989, that we could maintain the situation . . . with his help and his support.
‘‘But I must also say that he did a lot behind our backs [in concert] with West Germany, and left us believing that German reunification was not on the agenda while he was at the same time sending emissaries to Bonn to find out how much the Federal Republic would pay to unify the country.’’
On October 19, 1989, three weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Krenz led a surgically executed putsch against Honecker in the Politburo. Yet he had clambered to the pinnacle of the East German state just as its architecture was crumbling to dust beneath his feet.
The protest movement swelled in spite of Krenz’s promises of reform. Dissidents brandished placards mocking Krenz as ‘‘horse face’’ and the wolf from Little Red Riding
Hood, ineptly disguised as a friendly grandmother.
Confronted with the largest demonstration in the country’s history, as half a million people gathered in the Alexanderplatz, he sought to salvage the regime with further concessions. The most notable was a liberalisation of the state’s travel laws, which would have made it substantially easier for East Germans to visit the West with the appropriate papers.
This was the undoing of Krenz, the GDR and ultimately the entire Soviet bloc. The announcement was fatally garbled, triggering a wave of self-fulfilling reports in the western media that the border controls had been lifted with immediate effect. That night the GDR began to fade from the maps and pass into history.
Krenz is not blind to the failings of the dictatorial order he fought so long and so hard to preserve. Yet he cannot bring himself to believe that it all counted for nothing.
‘‘Despite its defeat,’’ he writes in his new book, ‘‘the GDR leaves a message for future generations: it is possible to live without capitalism and to forge a society free from exploitation.’’
Asked what he meant by this, he looks suddenly weary.
‘‘It’s not that I praise the GDR to the skies,’’ he said.
‘‘You will find plenty of critical remarks in my book. It’s more that the downfall of the GDR does not mean that socialism has now finally vanished.
‘‘Please don’t understand this as gushing adulation for the GDR, but rather as my optimism, my belief in a humane society in which man is a friend to his fellow men, not a wolf.’’ – The Times
‘‘No-one in the GDR considered breaking up the demonstrations with violence – noone.’’