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responsible in the Politburo after Gorbachev had demoted this hard
line opponent of glasnost and perestroika. Among the GDR’s neighbours,
only the Czechoslovak communist leadership still supported
the old men in East Berlin. But they would be swept away by the
Velvet Revolution in mid November 1989, at the very moment when
demonstrators in East Germany stopped proclaiming that they were
the people (‘Wir sind das Volk’) who wanted to reform the GDR, and
started proclaiming that Germans in East and West were one people
(‘Wir sind ein Volk’) whose ambition was early unification.
Unification. The Prelude: April to (8) November 1989
German Unification takes up the story in April when two new German
ambassadors arrived in London as neighbours in Belgrave Square.
Neither Joachim Mitdank nor Hermann von Richthofen expected
that within a matter of months the GDR would be faced with an existential
crisis. Nor did Sir Nigel Broomfield, the British ambassador in
East Berlin, although his despatch of 20 April records most of the factors
that were about to unleash it: the ring of democracies that might
be completed by Czechoslovakia; the popular desire for unity with
West Germany; the impossibility of using nationalism to hold the
GDR together; economic weakness; and the tremendous desire for
free travel which had been stimulated greatly by the concessions
wrung out of Honecker during his visit to the FRG in 1987. 14 The em -
bassy underestimated—and would continue to underestimate until
late September 1989—the ability of an indigenous East German re -
form movement to put pressure on the regime. The embassy judged
that the long-standing practice of deporting dissidents to West
Germany combined with the efficiency and omnipresence of state
security would enable the regime to retain control; a judgement that
seemed to have been confirmed by the relatively muted public
response to blatant fraud at local elections in early May. Sir Nigel did
speculate on an ‘Austrian’ solution, but only in the distant future,
because it seemed inconceivable that the Soviet Union would soon
cease to regard the existence of the GDR in the Warsaw Pact as a
strategic necessity.
14 Ibid. no. 2.
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