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As East Germans flooded into Hungary by the thousands, tensions between the two supposedly "fraternal" governments came into the open. Invoking a bilateral agreement, the East Berlin regime demanded that Budapest return the refugees. The Hungarians refused, allowing 15,000 East Germans in three days to go to West Germany, where they received automatic citizenship. East Germany halted travel to Hungary. Would-be immigrants then poured into Czechoslovakia to take refuge in the West German embassy there.
The German Democratic Republic was losing its best, brightest, most promising citizens, precisely those people who socialist propaganda said were going to build a better future. They were, but not in the G.D.R. Arriving in the West, many of them explained that they had left the East not because their lives were uncomfortable, but because they were unfree.
Heading Off Bloodshed
Then in October the revolution came home to East Germany. It started with freedom marches in Leipzig. For a long moment, it looked as though there might be another Tiananmen after all. On Oct. 9 the 77-year-old party boss Erich Honecker ordered the police to use "all available force" to clear the streets, but Egon Krenz, then in charge of security, persuaded him to rescind the order. Each week the Monday demonstrations grew, to 200,000 on Oct. 23, to 480,000 on Nov. 6. The marches, always peaceful and sober, increasingly impressive, spread throughout East Germany.
Gorbachev had played a pivotal role in heading off bloodshed. Visiting East Berlin on Oct. 7, the 40th anniversary of the communist state, Gorbachev cautioned the leaders that they could not count on Soviet support if they used force to crack down, and advised them to launch their own perestroika: "Life itself punishes those who delay." Eleven days later, Honecker was forced out and replaced by Krenz, who immediately sought to appease the marching crowds and the demands from his party for faster reform. His tenure was brief but memorable, if only because he ordered the opening of the Berlin Wall, the ultimate symbol of the Iron Curtain.
On Dec. 3 the entire party leadership resigned under public pressure. A caretaker regime has set free elections for May 6. No matter how the Communist Party reorganizes or renames itself, it is finished as a significant factor in East German politics. Up to 1 million of its 2.3 million members have already turned in their party cards.
An Autumn Thaw
Shibboleths in the West were evaporating almost as fast as regimes in the East. It had long been a tenet of conventional wisdom that Czechoslovakia, the homeland of the Good Soldier Schweik, would be one of the last nations to join the march of freedom. Maybe, just maybe there would be another Prague Spring in 1990. But the thaw came in the fall instead. Demonstrations began in mid- November. The first was a legal assembly of students sponsored by the communist-dominated Socialist Union of Youth. But that organization was seething with discontent, and 3,000 of the marchers moved toward Prague's Wenceslas Square. Riot police attacked and beat them. Again there were apprehensive memories of what had happened in Beijing a few months before. The following day tens of thousands of ordinary citizens massed in the square to shout to their temporary rulers "The game is over!"