The Year 1989 – A European Repository of Memory
The year 1989 – a Central European ‘Autumn of Nations’ – fundamentally changed the continent of Europe. In our perception, however, the events which took place in the autumn of that year are more like the end of an epoch than the beginning of a new era.
On July 6, 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech in Strasbourg to the Council of Europe during which he informed his audience that the Soviet Union would not oppose reforms in Eastern Europe. After such a public declaration from the heart of an empire that it would not, and could not, cling to the peripheral regions of its sphere of influence – an announcement which was greeted with great acclaim all over the world – it was only a matter of time until the proconsuls of the Russian empire in Warsaw, Budapest, East Berlin, Prague und Bucharest fell.
But it remained open as to how and where they would fall. What was also unclear was whether Jaruzelski, Honecker, Jakeš, Ceauşescu and Kádár would make use of those means of coercion which they so amply possessed. Just how serious the consequences of such a violent scenario might be was made quite clear to Central Europeans on June 4, 1989, the day when China’s communist rulers ordered the shooting of hundreds of peaceful protestors demonstrating in Tiananmen Square. This occurred on precisely the same day as the first semi-free elections were held in Poland. Not least because of the chilling example set by Tiananmen Square, the men and women opposing the communist regimes in Europe in 1989 deliberately avoided the use of violence. During the decades of their rule, the communist regimes had, by threat and force, squandered all their standing. But despite all the weapons these regimes had at their disposal, they unintentionally taught their citizens how ineffectual the use of violence was.
In 1989 the communist state parties in Central Europe still commanded the necessary weaponry and instruments of power, but they lacked a strong leadership. Only a leadership which did not shrink from spilling blood could have deployed those means the regimes still had of enforcing their will. In 1989 the leaders of the communist parties in the “Eastern Bloc” were no longer sure of their party base, of their cause and, above all, of themselves, and they had nothing with which to counter the revolutionary revolt of the populations in their countries. An antipathy to violence was the only thing many revolutionaries of 1989 had in common commocomm. The revolutionaries were an unusually diverse group. It was not uncommon for reformists to include reform communists, social democrats, liberal intellectuals, nationalists, supporters of a free market economy, church activists, trade unionists, pacifists, a few traditional Trotskyites and many others besides. This diversity was part of their strength and was poison for the one-party state.[1]
The ideological similarities between the countries in the Soviet sphere of influence meant that a threat to or collapse of the communist leadership in one country inevitably weakened the legitimacy of the rest. One characteristic of revolutions appears to be that they erode the legitimacy of the ruling power through cumulative examples. What was new in 1989 was the speed of events. The mass media contributed to the acceleration and the irreversible nature of events. The Hungarians and Czechs, in particular, were able to watch the gradual unfolding of their own revolutions in the news every evening on television. As East Germans sat back to enjoy their daily evening dose of West German television, they were no longer motivated by a wish to emigrate; instead the feeling crept over them that they themselves were the actors of events, whether fuelled by the pictures of the exhumation and reburial of Imre Nágy on June 16, 1989, of the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig on October 9, 1989, or by the pictures of students demonstrating in Prague on November 17, 1989.
This exalted feeling, the experience of recovering their own dignity, which the Poles had known in 1980 and had enthusiastically celebrated, now became comprehensible to and reproducible for Czechs, Slovakians, Hungarians, and in a special fashion for East Germans. Within days, the communist regimes had lost something they had previously carefully guarded by repeated sanctions: their monopoly on the flow of information. The fear of standing alone which, particularly in the GDR and in Czechoslovakia, made any involvement in oppositional activities an uncertain and nerve-racking undertaking had disappeared for good.
However in Poland the changes which took place in 1989 have not become a repository of memory which elicits heartfelt joy and deep emotions. In the “Round Table Talks” held between representatives of the majority of oppositional groups and the ruling elite the question was no longer whether the latter would cede or share power, but – in view of the disastrous economic situation – about the manner how this would occur. Practicality and negotiating skills were therefore more in demand than revolutionary fervour.
The “Round Table Talks”, considered a Polish invention, were watched with great interest by oppositional groups in the GDR who considered it an example well worth emulating – a fact which has been largely blanked out in Poland. The “Round Table Talks” in Poland were and are controversial. Representatives of radical oppositional groups have criticised that the Round Table signified an unacceptable arrangement with the enemy. This criticism is repeated regularly and has been reiterated with even greater vehemence over the past few years.
Any description of the year 1989 would be incomplete without a look at the reunification of Germany and the impact on ingrained international perceptions and habits. That year of revolutions strongly challenged those habits and perceptions, a challenge which was far from welcome to many European governments. What had happened? Prior to 1989 there was a general consensus in Western Europe that the German question would only arise when the political conditions were there, that is, when there was a European framework for a lasting peace. The reality looked very different.
France and Great Britain were alarmed by the rise of a supposedly unchecked nation with an 80 million-strong population. For the newly elected government of Mazowiecki, German reunification offered the opportunity to cautiously replace the old obligations of the Warsaw Pact with sovereign relationships and new partnerships forged with the West. The sympathy of the new Polish government for the democratically legitimised Federal Republic of Germany was severely tested by Helmut Kohl’s ten-point plan for reunification presented in December 1989 as it did not address the question of the Oder-Neisse border. The agreement of 1970 only held good for the old Federal Republic of Germany, not for a united Germany.
Gorbachev’s consent to a reunified Germany and its NATO membership was essentially based on the consideration that it would be necessary to give up the GDR and Central Europe in order to focus on rebuilding the Soviet Union and it would be important to obtain the help of the West for that. What remains is his courage and strategic achievement.
Up to now those epoch-making changes which took place in the “Autumn of Nations’ have not become a founding myth – neither for a reunified Germany nor for the 3rd Polish Republic, nor even for the newly expanded Europe. Jürgen Habermas once described the events of 1989 as “catch-up revolutions”, that is, attempts to catch up and secure those social and constitutional achievements which had long since been attained in the West. This institutional point-of-view fails to appreciate the often different memories, experiences and socialisations in Central and Western Europe, their emancipatory achievements – from the national uprising of 17 June 1953 to Solidarność in 1980/81 – as well as the innumerable testimonies by individual persons and small groups, all of them examples of self-assertion, of freedom of conscience wrested from the state, of hard-won human rights und civil liberties, and of social self-organisation outside the power structures of the single party state.
Even if politically the order of Yalta which divided Europe after the Second World War into a dictatorial East and a democratic West has now been swept away, the memorial cultures of Eastern and Western Europe continue alongside each other, often even in opposition to each other, as if the impositions of a life lived behind the Iron Curtain had carved themselves even deeper into the memory of Central Europeans than was considered possible in the capital cities of western Europe. According to Ralf Dahrendorf, German intellectuals view the year “1989” neither as a deep and decisive break – the way it is perceived by the rest of Europe – nor as a moment in which to rejoice at the triumph of an open society. In contrast to their view Dahrendorf considers “1989” to be not merely a global break, he also believes that “1989” could serve as a founding myth for a new Europe.[2]
The actions of the Central European men and women in 1989 deserve to be included in a European history of freedom where they can serve as an instrumental example of how a civil society can be achieved. The year “1989” should be anchored as a firm repository of memory in a European culture of memory alongside other events. “1989” stands for a revolutionary grass-roots movement for a democratic and constitutional state. It aimed at overcoming borders and demonstrated that, always and everywhere, the dignity and the freedom of individuals are worth asserting and defending. The year 1989 is a European repository of memory because it is what made Europe possible in its present form.
translated from German by Helen Schoop
[1] Cf. Peter Bender, Deutschlands Wiederkehr. Eine ungeteilte Nachkriegsgeschichte 1945–1990, Stuttgart 2007, p. 229 f.
[2] Ralf Dahrendorf, Der Wiederbeginn der Geschichte. Vom Fall der Mauer zum Krieg im Irak. Reden und Aufsätze, München 2004, p. 213.
Burkhard Olschowsky PhD (born 1969 in Berlin)- studied history and history of Eastern Europe in Göttingen, Warsaw and Berlin. In 2002 received doctor’s degree in Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2003-2005 worked as contractual lecturer of contemporary history and politics in Humboldt University. In 2004-2005 worked in Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Housing. Since May 2005 research worker in Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2010 research worker in Secretariat of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity.