I’ve been watching the news from Iran and thinking about East Germany, where in 1953, workers rose up in a popular rebellion that was rapidly and violently suppressed. Afterward, the head of the East German authors’ guild reprimanded the East German people for losing the government’s confidence. In response, poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht famously wrote, “Would it not be easier…for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
It’s amazing how well Brecht’s words could be applied to Iran’s leaders today.
The 1953 uprising failed, but in 1989 (twenty years ago this year) East Germans—along with people all over Eastern Europe—successfully took to the streets and brought down their leaders and a whole system. While living in West Berlin and working with East German dissidents in the two years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was able to share some of the excitement of those days, so at least some of what’s happening in Iran feels familiar.
Of course, Iran isn’t Eastern Europe and comparisons are facile. But dictatorial regimes share many features—not least of which is discomfort, even shock, when their citizens begin to show signs of independent thought. Condescending paternalism is a common trait of leaders who believe they know what’s best for their unruly children.
Part of that shock comes from finding their own words used against them. The Iranian regime, like East Germany’s government, supports its claim to power with the language of popular revolution (more credible in Iran than in Germany, where the popular revolution never actually happened, but was nevertheless part of the Soviet-imported mythology). People have grown up hearing the slogans of revolution, have watched them be perverted, sometimes even cynically have used them to get what they want, and are now learning to turn the catch-phrases around to their own purposes.
In East Germany, demonstrators took up the chant “We are the people!” echoing and inverting the government’s constant invocation of the will of “the people.” In the same way, Iranian demonstrators have co-opted revolutionary slogans and behavior, like nighttime chanting from the rooftops and the color green.
It’s hard for a regime to claim that protesters using its own symbols and slogans are counter-revolutionaries or traitors. And it also reflects the fact that, at least at first, most demonstrators are not trying to change the system, but to force it to adhere to its own promises. It was not until the Wall fell that the tenor of the demands of East Germany’s protesters changed, from reforming the East German system to reunification with the West (at which point, the slogan changed to “We are one people!”).
For now, most Iranians aren’t demanding a fundamental change of system, but the right to have their ballots counted. But the language and symbols come later. First, people have to come together.
An Iranian student writing in The New York Times referred to another phenomenon that sounded very familiar: “Everyone watched everyone else and we wondered how all of this could be happening. Who were all of these people? Where did they come from? These were the same people we pass by unknowingly every day. We saw one another, it feels, for the first time.”
Before 1989, when I spoke to East Germans (active dissidents or not), their evaluation of their fellow citizens was invariably the same: I may disagree with the regime, they would say, but I’m an exception. Most East Germans just go along; they would never go out on the streets for anything. Then, suddenly, the demonstrations began, and people discovered, exhilaratingly, that they weren’t alone.
In the summer of 1989, an East German friend and I joined a small environmental demonstration in Warsaw, Poland, where reforms were already in full swing. I will never forget my friend’s shock—a jolting reminder of how different our experiences were—that such a demonstration was allowed to take place openly, without even a police presence. He despaired that anything similar seemed impossible in East Germany. Only a few months later, I was with the same friend when the first street protests broke out in East Berlin on October 7, 1989—the fortieth anniversary of the East German state and the day Gorbachev visited the city—and shared his disbelief and joy as groups of demonstrators streamed by, shouting “Join us!”
Dictatorships do their best to sabotage communication between individuals so as to leave them feeling isolated, alone, and dependent on the government. But once that isolation breaks down, it’s almost impossible to sever those bonds. And once it happens, as East Germans proved and Iranians are proving again, people will find each other with or without technology. East Germans barely had normal telephones, let alone Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging, and Iranians are still able to find each other despite the government’s sabotage of communication technologies.
But Iran is not Eastern Europe and there’s no Mikhail Gorbachev, whose unwillingness to back the East German government reduced the likelihood of violence. Yet no dictator gives in easily.
In January 1989, less than a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German head of state Erich Honecker was still insisting that “The Wall will still exist in 50 and 100 years.” Tiananmen Square happened that summer; East German newspapers praised the Chinese government’s bloody crackdown and government officials met with Chinese leaders. East Germans, who had watched closely the events in China via West German television, wondered if the government was getting pointers on how to orchestrate repression.
When street protests began in East Berlin on October 7, 1989, police attacked, beat, and detained demonstrators. The tension and nervousness were palpable. People reckoned seriously with the possibility of a “China solution.” Two days later, on October 9, when 70,000 people marched in Leipzig, many were terrified; rumor had it that hospitals were preparing for casualties and trucks full of riot police lined the side streets.
As in Iran, everyone who decided to participate in that demonstration had to make the conscious decision to take a great risk, possibly putting their lives on the line. It was an enormously courageous decision.
East Germans were fortunate. The timing was right; with Gorbachev’s help, the communist empire was already crumbling. The split in the ranks of East German officialdom was enough to prevent a violent response, which at that point, with Soviet support gone, would have been foolish and pointless in any case. From the vantage point of the outside observers and journalists on the scene, it seemed clear that October 1989 was the beginning of the end. And in retrospect, the demonstration in Leipzig, with its peaceful outcome, did prove to be the turning point.
But none of this was obvious to the people from all walks of life who took to the streets that evening in October. Like the Iranian demonstrators, they were facing the full might of their state with no guarantee of a favorable outcome, and with little more than a belief that they had the right to decide their own future. They were making an emphatic statement that is, really, the essence of democracy: they were not wayward children, but adults capable of making their own choices.
Iranians are making the same statement and facing a government that, like Brecht’s East Germany, still seems to wish it could choose a more obedient population.
Belinda Cooper, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and co-founder of its Citizenship and Security Program, is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and the editor of War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg, teaches and lectures on human rights, international law, and the “war on terror.”