'LAST QUESTION'
Daniel Johnson reveals
his role in the dismantling of the Berlin Wall
THE Berlin Wall vanished from the calcu- lus of world politics, to become little more than a quarry for souvenir hunters, at 6.55 p.m. on 9 November. It was a curiously inadvertent announcement. The East Ger- man Politburo member responsible for propaganda, Giinter Schabowski, had just told a roomful of bored Western journal- ists in the characterless International Press Centre in East Berlin that restrictions on travel by East German citizens along the whole length of the country's western borders were to be lifted forthwith. Of course, everyone would need to apply for an exit visa at a police station, but they would not reasonably be refused.
Schabowski's astonishing aside — while it electrified those of us who were still listening — came quite casually at the end of an uneventful press conference about that day's Central Committee meeting. The Berlin party boss has a gangster's mean countenance which can at times assume a mournful expression closely re- sembling that of a great, white, deep-sea fish. As he broke the news, he tried to disarm us by pretending that this was by no means new information: 'You will, of course, already be aware', etc, etc.
Somebody asked whether this included Berlin. Yes, said Schabowski: he meant all crossing-points, without exception. His `I remember when all this was environment.' mournfulness deepened and he began to gather his papers to leave, 'Last question,' he said.
By this time the hubbub was mounting, but we could not quite believe what we were hearing. Finding myself holding a microphone, I blurted out the question which West German television — watched, of course, by millions of East Germans that night — called the 'question of the even- ing'.
`What will become of the Berlin Wall?' I asked.
Schabowski's face broke all records on the misery scale. He waffled about how the Wall would still have a function, it would on no account be demolished immediately, there would be negotiations with Nato. It was lame stuff. The cat was out of the bag.
He closed the news conference amid uproar. Those who could still not believe it stayed to besiege Schabowski. I ran through the crisp moonlit evening back to my hotel. After filing my story I wandered through the street. The word was out, and two girls embraced me, one of them having dared the other to kiss the first man they met after hearing the momentous news.
Later I saw the bedlam which had broken out at Checkpoint Invalidenstrasse. I climbed onto a sentry's but to survey the tens of thousands on either side of the crossing point. Schabowski's talk of visas had by midnight become irrelevant.
What had become of the Wall? Where were the guards who earlier this year had dragged a young man by his hair from the River Spree even though he had already reached the bank which marks the edge of the British sector? In a few hours, a fiendish enclave of horror and death, which almost invariably evoked a shudder from visitors, had shrunk to the propor- tions of a stage prop in a farce.
Part of the charm of Hans Christian Andersen's story of the emperor who had no clothes is that the little boy whose question exposed the poor naked potentate to ridicule had no idea what he was doing. By asking a similar sort of question — to which the answer given was an admission that the game was up — I was lucky enough to make a minuscule contribution to exposing the nakedness tyranny.
It is part of the vanity of journalists to imagine that we are influencing the events by our fearless investigations, when in fact we are no less often mere playthings in the the Berlin Wall the role of the media was small indeed, compared to that of the people. But in our blundering way, I suppose we did help to articulate what might otherwise have taken until next day to sink in. By then the authorities might have pulled themselves together. It would have been an orderly change of travel regulations. And then the impact would have been very different.
Daniel Johnson is Eastern European cor- respondent of the Daily Telegraph.
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