The plain viewing room of a microchip factory in Erfurt in August, behind him a wide glass wall to a clean room in amber light with furnace tubes, in the foreground standing in the room the man, a gaunt man of seventy-seven with thin white hair and large dark-rimmed glasses, in a light grey suit and dark tie, plain lapels, his face turned toward the camera, serious and alert, alone, holding in both hands a small open case of blue velvet holding a few square grey ceramic chips.
Who
Erich Honecker (1912–1994) was the most powerful man in East Germany from 1971 to 1989. Born on 25 August 1912 in Neunkirchen in the Saar, the son of a miner, he became a communist early and worked underground after 1933. In 1937 the Nazi People's Court sentenced him to ten years' imprisonment, which he served until 1945 in Brandenburg-Görden prison. After the war he built up the Free German Youth and led it until 1955. As party secretary for security he directed the preparations for building the Berlin Wall in 1961, which he defended until his death; at least 140 people lost their lives at it. In 1971 he succeeded Walter Ulbricht at the head of the ruling SED, and in 1976 he also became chairman of the Council of State. He expanded the surveillance state, kept the GDR apart from West Germany and rejected Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. In October 1989 the Politburo forced him to resign. In 1992 he was charged over the shootings at the border; the case was dropped in 1993 because of his cancer. He died in Santiago de Chile on 29 May 1994.
The moment
In the summer of 1989 Honecker was seriously ill; since returning on 7 July from the summit in Bucharest he had hardly been seen. On 14 August he visited the Karl Marx microelectronics combine in Erfurt and received samples of the GDR's first 32-bit microprocessor, the U 80701. The chip, with some 130,000 transistors, corresponded to the MicroVAX processor of the American firm DEC; the combine, Robotron and the Academy of Sciences had worked on it since 1986. It was to go into new computers of East Germany's own making and free the country from dependence on the West. Honecker called it "a worthy contribution to the anniversary of the republic", the GDR's 40th birthday in October. Then he spoke of the "triumphant clamour of Western media" over the failure of socialism and said: "Neither ox nor donkey can halt socialism in its course." The picture shows him with a small case of chips before the clean room, around him managers and women workers seen from behind.
The other side
A year earlier, at the handover of the first megabit memory chip, Honecker himself had said that 14 billion marks had so far gone into the GDR's microelectronics. That memory arrived when 4-megabit chips were already in series production in the West; the yield was about one in five, and it never went into series production. One of its developers said later that they had not thought about the fact that the money might be missing elsewhere in the economy. On the day of the Erfurt visit, the West German embassy in Budapest closed its doors with 180 refugees from the GDR inside. Nine weeks later Honecker had to resign, and on 9 November 1989 the GDR opened its border.
What the sources leave open: Day, place, handover and sentence are documented; the speech printed in Neues Deutschland on 15 August 1989 was consulted only through later quotations. What the room looked like, whether Honecker stood at the clean room, what he wore and how the samples were packed is not recorded and is typified in the picture. The face follows a public-domain 1987 photograph from the Nationaal Archief; everyone else is seen from behind.