On November 10, 1989, many West Berlin citizens climbed the Berlin Wall in front of Brandenburg. Photo/Visual China
Text/Yang Chengxu
On the night of November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall, which had existed for 28 years, 2 months and 27 days, was declared open in an inexplicable and inexplicable way.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990, it took just over three hundred days. Germany became the first country to move towards reunification peacefully after World War II.
I started studying German in middle school and entered Fudan University in Shanghai to study German literature after liberation. In the 1970s and 1980s, I worked for almost 15 years at the Chinese Embassy in West Germany, the Embassy in East Germany, and the German-speaking Austrian Embassy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in order to study the issue of German reunification, I was ordered by the State Council to lead a research team to investigate the two Germanys. It can be said that the division and unification of Germany and the construction and collapse of the Berlin Wall are inextricably linked to my personal work and life experience.
First sight of Berlin
In 1956, Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the East German Party and the first secretary of the German Socialist United Party, was invited to attend the Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, after which he and his wife visited Shanghai and Hangzhou. At that time, I was working in the Foreign Affairs Office in Shanghai and was ordered to work as an interpreter for him.
The cautious Ulbricht left me with the impression that he had some reservations about China's domestic and foreign policies at that time. In Shanghai, when he visited the Shenxin Ninth Factory, the capitalists of the factory said that they enthusiastically supported and actively responded to the public-private partnership proposal put forward by the Communist Party of China, and with the approval of the state, they became the first batch of public-private joint ventures in New China. As he listened to the introduction, Ulbricht whispered to me, "Don't believe what the capitalists say. At that time, zeng Yongquan, the Chinese ambassador to East Germany who accompanied the visit, thought that Ulbricht wanted to speak, and asked him ahead, and Ulbricht said that he did not want to speak. Then he whispered to me, "That's just for you." ”
In October 1958, my first trip abroad was to accompany Shi Shaohua, president of the China Photographers Association and vice president of Xinhua News Agency, to the International Photographers' Conference in East Berlin and work as an interpreter for him. When I first entered a foreign country, I observed everything with curiosity.
In the city of Berlin, I was impressed by car tour of the cityscape as being much more modern than In Beijing, with clean houses and almost no places where the poor lived. In Alexanderplatz in the heart of the city, the goods in the state-run department store look much better than the quality of our country. Chinese are most willing to buy goods such as cameras, sewing machines and household knives.
We walked along the Unter den Linden Street in the city center towards the Brandenburg Gate. Beyond the Brandenburg Gate is West Berlin. We watched carefully not to wander into West Berlin carelessly.
At that time, people in East and West Germany could not communicate with each other without permission, but in East and West Berlin, people could move freely. More and more East Germans went out through Berlin and found better-paying jobs in West Germany. As the gap between East and West Germany's economic development level widened, more and more East Germans fled to West Germany. According to incomplete statistics, 3 million East Germans fled to West Germany through the East-West Berlin Passage in the 1950s and 1960s.
It was this Ulbricht who decided to build the Berlin Wall in 1961.
After careful planning, the East German government built the Berlin Wall, a concrete wall with barbed barbed wire on august 13, 1961, overnight. The construction of the Berlin Wall became an important historical symbol of the division of Germany and the Cold War after World War II.
During this period, in addition to building the Berlin Wall and preventing East German residents from fleeing, the East German government also stipulated that overseas travel was limited to socialist countries.
Embassy in West Germany
In the early 1960s, the sino-Soviet divide intensified, and the relations between East Germany and China, which had always supported the Soviet Union, became increasingly distant. With Nixon's visit to China, relations between China and the West eased. In 1972, China established diplomatic relations with West Germany.
In early 1973, I was transferred to the Chinese Embassy in West Germany.
When I first arrived in West Germany, the gap in living standards in East and West Germany had a deep visual impact on me, which I still remember vividly.
I flew directly from Beijing to West Germany. It was a sunny day and planes were slowly descending in Frankfurt. Through the cabin window, I saw small towns around the city, small red buildings nestled in the green woods.
At that time, the capital of West Germany, Bonn, was only a small city with a population of more than 300,000. The Chinese embassy is located in a small village on the outskirts of Bonn.
I often walk around the embassy and talk to the residents of the village. Most of them are middle- and lower-class people such as workers and clerks. A small clerk sometimes invited me to sit at his house, drink coffee, and chat. I learned that the people of West Germany in the early post-war period also experienced a difficult and difficult life. After nearly 30 years of construction, West Germany had developed into a prosperous and powerful Western industrial power.
During my 8 years at the West German Embassy, I have seen ordinary people buy land and build houses here, and watch their houses "grow". The customary practice of the West Germans was to build a floor first, and then add another floor when they had money. A typical West German house is a neat little building with a small yard with trees and a small lawn. This is almost the "German dream" of ordinary People in West Germany.
Six months after I arrived in West Germany, in July 1973, the East German party leader Ubrich died of a stroke.
In May 1971, Ulbricht resigned as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the United Socialist Party of Germany, holding only the honorary position of Chairman. Erich Honecker became Ulbricht's successor.
During my time in Bonn, I often had the opportunity to travel to East Berlin on business, to the border posts in East and West Berlin. At night, West Berlin is illuminated with bright lights and the commercial streets are bustling with people; in contrast, the lights in East Berlin are much dimmer.
At the beginning of the founding of the country, the balance of strength between East and West Germany was already very different. For 30 years, West Germany has faced strong challenges from the United States, Japan, Britain, France and other countries in the global economic competition, and its economy has been full of vitality; while East Germany is an industrial power in the socialist camp, and its products have always been unsatisfactory, so there is no pressure to innovate.
When I first arrived in West Berlin in the early 1970s, I was impressed by Volkswagen's advertisements selling Beetle cars, saying that they were the last. In those years, the three major car companies of West Germany, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW continued to introduce new cars, while East Germany continued to produce "Trabun" cars since the founding of the People's Republic of China, until there were no new products before the reunification of germany.
Before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall
In the early 1980s, I was transferred back to the Foreign Office from the West German Embassy as Head of the German Section of the Western European Division. In 1982, he was transferred to East Germany as Minister Counsellor. In 1985, I was transferred to the Chinese Ambassador to Austria.
On 3 May 1989, Hungary and Austria began to dismantle barriers in the border area. On 28 July, Hungarian Foreign Minister Horn gyula and Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mok symbolically cut the barbed wire and declared that their borders would henceforth be opened. At the time, the news didn't get me particular attention.
The Chinese Embassy in Austria and the West German Embassy in Austria are both on Metternichstraße in Vienna, and the two are neighbors to each other. At twelve o'clock in the middle of the night, three or four hundred East German tourists crowded in front of the West German embassy, so noisy that I almost did not sleep well all night. The next day, I asked about the West German ambassador and read the media reports, only to learn that there were East German tourists who knew that the Hungarian-Austrian border was open, and immediately entered Austria through the Hungarian-Austrian border and came to the West German Embassy in Austria to apply for a visa to enter West Germany.
On 20 August, 1,400 East German citizens obtained visas to enter West Germany. It was the largest number of exoduses in East Germany since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
Hungary's approach is undoubtedly a countermeasure that has been secretly negotiated and determined with West Germany. German Chancellor Kohl revealed in his book "I Want German Reunification" that nemet Mikloš, chairman of the Hungarian Council of Ministers, has repeatedly requested an absolutely secret meeting with Kohl.
When Nemet met with Kohl in Bonn on 25 August, he stressed that Hungary would always open its borders to East Germany. Cole repeatedly asked Nemet whether Hungary expected Germany to reciprocate, and each time Nemet waved his hand in denial, saying, "Hungary is not a human trafficker." In the end, the West German government promised Hungary a loan of 500 million Deutsche Marks (the two countries have been negotiating this loan for a long time), exempting Hungarians from visas to enter Germany, and guaranteeing support when the country applies for membership in the European Community.
It was precisely because Hungary opened its borders that caused a chain reaction that more and more East Germans demanded to go to West Germany. In the worst case, 70,000 or 80,000 East German civilians were crowded inside and outside the West German Embassy in the Czech Republic. The East Germans released them in the name of deportation.
It is estimated that in 1989, the number of civilians who went to West Germany was as high as 340,000.
At the same time, demonstrations broke out in Leipzig, Dresden, Erfurt and other major cities in East Germany, strongly demanding that restrictions on the exit of ordinary East Germans be relaxed.
October 7 of that year marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of The People's Republic of East Germany. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was invited to the ceremony, said in conversation with East German leader Honecker that in the face of current reforms, "whoever acts late will be punished by life."
As soon as Gorbachev's words came out, they immediately aroused a strong reaction from the people of East Germany. Huge protests and demonstrations broke out in major cities in East Germany, demanding the early reunification of Germany.
In the face of this grim situation, the divisions within the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany have been intensifying. On 18 October, at the Ninth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the German Socialist Party, Honecker was announced to resign "for health reasons" and be replaced by Krrenz, who was in charge of security and youth work.
On November 11, 1989, the public participated in the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Photo/Visual China
On November 9, Schabovsky, secretary of the Berlin Municipal Party of the Socialist Union, held a press conference at the Foreign Office, promising that all East German residents could apply for departure and that the government would approve it. At this point, he received a small note, which he read on the spot, saying that the Central Committee of the German United Socialist Party had decided to open the Berlin Wall. A reporter asked, when will it be open? He muttered, "Let's start now!"
As soon as these words came out, thousands of people rushed to the Berlin Wall and demolished a section of it. East and West Berliners rushed to each other, celebrating revelry and staying up all night.
Led the research team to visit Germany
In March 1990, when the process of German reunification was accelerating, I was ordered by the State Council to lead a six-member research team to East Germany to understand the real situation. At that time, I had been transferred back from the Austrian Ambassador to the post of Deputy Director general of the Western European Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (in June of that year I was transferred to the director of the Policy Research Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Other members of the group came from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Central Liaison Department, Xinhua News Agency and other units.
As soon as the research group arrived in East Berlin, East German Deputy Foreign Minister Bayrogovsky immediately met with me and proposed that China, as one of the five victorious powers of The Second World War, should put forward its views at the 2+4 (two Germanys, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France) conference on the issue of German reunification. For various reasons, I reject this.
When we first arrived in East Berlin, we had extensive contact with government officials, academics and some old friends. I remember Jia Side, a sinologist who studied at Peking University. It can be felt that their mood at this time is very contradictory: on the one hand, they believe that Germany will achieve reunification sooner or later; on the other hand, they believe that in order to safeguard the interests of East Germany, it is necessary to consider the long term and not be optimistic about early reunification. Most of them believe that negotiations will be a protracted affair.
The survey in East Berlin did not seem to get the gist. We went to West Berlin again to have a discussion with experts from an economic research institute. They are enlightened to say that Kohl's proposal in the "Ten Point Plan" for German reunification is exchanged for the East-West German Mark at a 1:1 ratio, and the consequences are endless. In East Germany, the price of an electron tube TELEVISION was 600 East Marks, while in West Germany, a high-quality semiconductor TV was only priced at 500 West Marks, and East German products were difficult to compete with West Germany. After the reunification of Germany, East German enterprises were bound to close down in large numbers.
Later, we decided that everyone should visit an East German city and live in a house so that they could really understand public opinion.
I went to Dresden. Walking out of the train station, I found an advertisement for renting a house on a telephone pole. The owner of this house is a diesel engine installer, who often travels abroad for business, and is resting at home these days, seeing a Chinese who speaks German is very interested, and constantly chats with me. He said that he was living a good life and was satisfied, that he had many relatives and friends in West Germany, and that he often watched West German television. Compared with West Germany, East Germany is still much worse, and he hopes that it will be better to reunify as soon as possible.
Everywhere the other members of the group went, they felt that the people were very enthusiastic about reunification, especially the young people were in high emotions, particularly interested in the 1:1 exchange rate of the East-West Mark, and hoped that the reunification would be achieved as soon as possible and that they could travel around the world.
Our group did not pay much attention to the reports of the East German media. Seeing with our own eyes the reaction of the people of East Germany, we made our own judgment in the report to the Central Committee: the reunification of Germany will soon come.
On November 12, 1989, people ran to the Berlin Wall to celebrate the demolition. Figure/IC
The facts have proved our judgment. On October 3 of that year, Germany declared its reunification and designated this day as Germany's National Day.
For the German government, although it had made careful arrangements in advance, unpredictable things were still emerging. Due to the differences in the political systems of the two German countries, the huge gap in the level of economic development, especially the difference in income levels, the East Germans felt that they had become second-class citizens. According to the University of Berlin, the economic cost of German reunification is about 1.5 trillion euros, more than the national national debt.
As the West Berlin Economic Institute predicts, the exchange rate of the East-West Mark is unrealistic. After reunification, the uncompetitive East German economy collapsed, with factories closing down and unemployment reaching 20 percent. For a long time, eastern Germany needed a subsidy of one hundred billion euros per year.
To this day, the people in the east, especially the young people, are most dissatisfied with the traditional German big parties, the CDU and the Social Democratic Party. It is no accident that the far-right populist AfD originated in the east. Recently, state parliament elections were held in the eastern German states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia. In these three oblasts (five in the east), the votes of the German Chosen Party have increased significantly, and the vote rate is second.
According to The German newspaper Bild, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is still a huge gap between the east and west of Germany. The rise of AfD is a reaction to the frustration, anger and disappointment of many in the east.