The German open

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall. By Mary Elise Sarotte. Basic Books; 291 pages; $27.99 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

OUTSIDERS seem to think that “it was the opening of the wall that brought us our freedom,” says Marianne Birthler in Mary Elise Sarotte’s new book, “The Collapse”. Ms Birthler, who spent 11 years investigating the crimes of the Stasi, the East German secret police, disagrees. “It was the other way around,” she says. “First we fought for our freedom; and then, because of that, the wall fell.”

A widespread misconception of how and why the Berlin Wall came down was one reason why Ms Sarotte, a history professor at the University of Southern California, decided to write this book. After the publication of her previous work, an account of the high politics and diplomacy that followed the fall of the wall, people frequently asked her why she spoke about the wall’s “unexpected” opening. Many Americans, in particular, appeared to be under the impression that Ronald Reagan set an inevitable process in motion with the exhortation he made to the leader of the Soviet Union in 1987: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” What happened had to happen, they seemed to think: the East German regime was weakened by glasnost and perestroika, the political opening and economic reforms that preceded the dissolution of the Soviet empire, as well as by its own ineptitude and the increasing number of protesters longing for the freedom and comforts of the West.

The reality was quite different, as Ms Sarotte shows in her meticulous account of what she calls the “accidental and contingent” nature of the opening of the wall and her portraits of many local activists. Whereas the larger context of perestroika and the attractions of the West played an important role, the decisive factor was the conduct of provincial actors—information smugglers, pastors, artists, students, journalists and housewives who met every week mostly at churches, and slowly undermined the regime.

Ms Sarotte also debunks the myth that the East Germans’ protest was bound to be peaceful. The risk of a German Tiananmen Square, along the lines of the massacre in Beijing four months earlier, was very real in early October 1989. In preparation for the weekly demonstration in Leipzig, 200km (124 miles) south-west of Berlin, on October 9th, the regime positioned a sizeable contingent of its 600,000 strong army in and around the city. Some 3,000 police officers were on duty, as well as 600 members of the Communist Party’s paramilitary organisation, equipped with heavy machineguns and tear gas. Western journalists were barred from reporting from the city and hospitals were put on alert.

The party predicted that there would be 50,000 marchers at most. But more than double that number turned out, flooding the road around the city centre for a couple of hours. Why the local party leadership decided to disregard orders to stop the march is not clear: it seems to have been because of a mixture of surprise about its size, party rifts and a sense that East Germany’s longtime dictator, Erich Honecker, would soon be replaced by the seemingly more moderate Egon Krenz.

By early November Honecker had indeed been ousted and Mr Krenz’s Politburo tried to save the bankrupt regime by selling the opening of the wall. It asked the West Germans for a credit of 10 billion Deutschmarks ($5.7 billion) in the next two years and then 2-3 billion more per year, every year, in return for freedom of travel, but the government in Bonn refused the offer.

Ms Sarotte’s book gradually focuses in on the events on the streets of East Berlin during the night of November 9th. At an otherwise dull press conference that day, Günter Schabowski, the spokesman of the central committee, said that a new law permitting East Germans more freedom to travel would, as far as he knew, go into effect “right away”. He had not been fully briefed, but as soon as this mumbled announcement was broadcast on radio and television, tens of thousands of East Germans started to gather at the wall and its checkpoints, demanding that the border guards open the gates. Faced with an ever larger and louder crowd, guards at the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing yielded in the late evening. Guards at other crossings soon followed suit.

Ms Sarotte covers familiar ground, in particular for German readers, but the story has not previously been told in English so vividly and comprehensively. She brings those dramatic days to life through interviews with provincial officials, such as Harald Jäger, the senior officer in charge of the checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse, Siggi Schefke and Aram Radomski, who secretly filmed the demonstrations in Leipzig and smuggled them to the West, and Karin Gueffroy, whose son was the last person killed by border guards in 1989 when he tried to cross over the wall.

In the run-up to the book’s publication, Ms Sarotte received her first-ever call from a Hollywood agent. The events she describes are at times so unlikely and unfold so quickly that her plot would probably have been rejected in Tinseltown had she offered it during the cold war. It is only with hindsight that it all seems to make sense.