large, free, or rich as its West German brother, it counted for something in
Europe: it was the closest thing to a success story in the still nearly monolithic
Communist East, one of the world's ten largest industrial economies, the
Soviet Union's most powerful ally, a cornerstone of the armed but apparently
stable security order that had grown up in the aftermath of the Second World
War.

I was the political counselor, the third-ranking officer, in the American
Embassy to the GDR. My job was to explain the dynamics of East German
society to Washington and thereby assist in the development of U.S. policy.
It was certain to be fascinating and important. The regime's unlovely nature,
the physical fact of the grotesque Berlin Wall, caused most Americans to pay
it little attention. The diplomatic relations established in 1974 were our least
developed anywhere in Europe. American business traded less only with
Albania. But, a colleague who had served there in the 1970s emphasized to
me as we packed, the GDR was stirring not far below its tightly controlled,
deceptively placid surface. The month before our arrival, young East
Germans, frustrated at being kept from a rock concert in front of the
Reichstag a few hundred yards the other side of the Wall in West Berlin, had
demonstrated on Unter den Linden. Their "Gorby, Gorby" shouts before
they were dispersed by police showed that the personality and reforms of the
new Soviet leader were electrifying East Germans, as they were Poles and
Hungarians.

I anticipated spending three or four years awakening Washington's interest
in important developments along Europe's most sensitive frontier. I expected
to chronicle a new, more fluid, and unpredictable stage in the inner-
German and East-West rapprochements that had been under way for two
decades, but it was signs of evolution, not revolution, I initially searched for.
Like everyone, I was surprised at the pace of events, at the East Germans'
increasing boldness and the Soviet Union's willingness to accept liquidation
of a nearly half-century-old security policy. I had no forewarning that by my
tour's end the slogan "Come together -- Try the West" would be on billboards
all over East Germany, as an advertisement for a cheap cigarette and as a
symbol of the materialistic side of a unification that would already be fact.

In mid-summer 1988, I wrote a provocative dispatch that asked "Will the
GDR become reformist?" My thesis was that reform was brewing within the
ruling Communist Party -- the SED -- just beneath the top leadership level
and within the society at large; Honecker might adjust to it, but if he did
not, the question of his successor would arise, and within a year or two
significant reform could well begin to be introduced from above. Frank

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