The local PBS television station ran an old documentary tonight, In Their Own Voice, an hour long discussion on the rist of Angela Merkel. Born in Hamburg, Fed. Rep. of Germany (West Germany) around 1954, her father, a Lutheran pastor was asked to take a church in the German Dem. Rep. (East Germany). The baby Angela naturally accompanied her parents. My point here is not to restate her schooling and her career as a physicist in the DDR.
My shock with the program is something passed over quickly. 15 April 1989 to mourn the death of a reformist leader of the Chinese Communist Party, students began to gather in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Days passed and symbols of dissent appeared, such as a small statue of liberty, and signs urging reform. On the night of 3 June the first reports of shooting, and the following day troops from the Peoples; Liberation Army began the crackdown on dissent, wounding and killing. The Beijing spring was over, and the CCP asserted total control of the nation.
On 4 September 1989 Monday demonstrations for peace (and reform) began at the Nikolai Church in Leipzig, DDR, and though the authorities certainly were aware, and the usual police took notice, still, there seemed to be no consequences. The following Monday, more demonstrators; and the Monday after that. Hungary had opened its border to the West, and some DDR citizens had walked right through. The Leipzig demos kept growing too, reaching 70,000 in early October. Just down the street from the Nikolai Church was the famous Thomas Church, where Johann S. Bach had been choir director for 27 years. And nearby was Auerbach's Keller where Faust had begun to seal a deal with Mephistopheles.
On 18 October 1989 Eric Honecker, leader of the DDR and the ruling Socialist Unity Party resigned. Was he deemed too soft to crack down, or to rigid? The leaders of the DDR now seemed unsure of what to do.
On 9 November 1989, allegedly because of confusing announcements people began to rush the check points in the wall, hoping they would be open. Finally, one did open and the wall was considered open thereafter.
I do not think either the Chinese crack down, or the DDR;s crack up were inevitable. People made decisions, and German police and the NVA had cracked down on the East Berlin protests of 1963. Why not in 1989? An old German friend just wrote me to say I made a mistake. He says the NVA was not created until 1955, and the Vopos (Peoples; Police remained in their barracks. Instead Walter Ulbricht, then leading the DDR, called upon his Soviet allies for help, and it is they who crushed the protests of 1953 in East Berlin. In time, however, the NVA and Vopos gained reputations of following the orders of the DDR leadership.
One could ascribe the contrast between Beijing and Leipzig by saying China was a huge, rich nation, and it could crack down and tell the rest of the world, f u. But China was not so rich in 1989, it was NOT the industrial giant we know today. It was behind Japan and other Asian nations having suffered the Cultural Revolution and other "experiments" that usually did not work. The DDR was never as rich as West Germany - while America's Marshall Plan helped rebuild the West, the Soviets, who had lost so much from Hitler's invasion, began by plundering what they could from what would become the DDR. But the DDR had built up over the years; not as rich as its Western cousins, but high on the East European scale. Why not shoot the peace demos in Leipzig? Or open up to the West? I do not think it was an easy decision for leaders of the DDR, certainly NOT inevitable. To skip over this very important decision I find remarkable. And I am here to criticize the failure to discuss the people who had to choose, to shoot or not to shoot, that was the question. A most important one, and with an answer quite different from the one in Beijing just a few months earlier. NEITHER THE DECISION IN BEIJING NOR IN LEIPZIG WAS INEVITABLE. People make history; it is not an automatic setting of a clock. And ignoring that decision, even if the theme of the program was Merkel, is unfair to history.
From April until November 1989 protests in 2 major nations occurred putting the leaders of those nations on the spot. Each nation was led by communist parties, each had cracked down on dissent before. The issue came before them again. What would they do? China cracked down; the DDR cracked up. Each might have gone the other way. The decisions of that year changed the world. Hugh Murray
(On a personal note - I had taught in Leipzig a few years prior to the Monday demonstrations. The uni. had a Sprachlager, a camp where students were to use English as much as possible, as it was not easy for DDR students to visit Britain. One exercise for the students, they were to compose a poem akin to the limerick poems, popular is schools and in pubs. As my German language was wanting, my British colleagues then demanded that I do like our German students, and compose a Limerick, but in German. I went along with their demand. I recall most of my poem - "Da war die Studenten aus Leipzig. sie waren nicht faul, sondern fleissig, da la ti da, da la ti do (I forgot those lines, ending, Sie fordert die Wahrheit, nicht scheissig." In English, There were the students from Leipzig, they were not lazy, but hardworking. la ti da, la ti da, They demanded the truth, not BS". They liked my poem very much. - Hugh)
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