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Desperate for credibility with the citizenry, the SED now changed its name to Partei des demokratischen Sozialismus (Party of Democratic Socialism—PDS). The party’s young and media-savvy leader, Gregor Gysi, offered a new face as well. But altered initials and a fresher look did not really add up to a new and more credible party. In its efforts to halt unification, moreover, the PDS could no longer count on help from Moscow, because by the beginning of 1990 the Soviets had reluctantly come to the conclusion that German unity was inevitable. Their primary goal now was to exert some influence on the unification process and, if possible, to profit from it. At the very least, they hoped to keep a united Germany out of NATO. If they could do this, the Atlantic alliance’s eastern border would actually be shifted farther away from Moscow. The Soviets’ new line on German unity was confirmed by Gorbachev on February 10, 1990, during a visit by Chancellor Kohl to Moscow. “Between the Soviet Union, the FRG, and the GDR, there are no differences of opinion about reunification and the people’s right to strive for it,” Gorbachev announced. Of course this was not quite correct, at least with respect to the GDR, but since when did the GDR have the right to define its own destiny?

Against a backdrop of economic implosion, erosion of public authority, and continuing depopulation (another 50,000 East Germans checked out in January), Prime Minister Modrow decided to move up the promised free elections to March 1990; that way, there might still be somebody around to vote. The main bloc parties—GDU, SPD, and FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei or Free Democratic Party)—entered the race with financial and logistical support from the West. The PDS, unlike the old SED, could no longer control the process from beginning to end. This meant that the end, for the first time in GDR history, was not predetermined.

The most aggressive campaigner turned out to be Helmut Kohl. Determined to achieve a victory for the East-CDU, which would amount to a victory for unification, Kohl stumped the GDR, promising “blooming landscapes” and “prosperity for all.” Later, when things did not pan out as he had promised, he was accused of deliberately hoodwinking the credulous East Germans. It is more likely, however, that he was swept up in the euphoria of the moment. Interestingly, not one of his six campaign swings through East Germany included East Berlin. The East-SPD also campaigned hard, bringing in big guns from the West like Willy Brandt, Hans-Jochen Vogel, and Oskar Lafontaine. Unlike Kohl, they spent a great deal of time in East Berlin, the old SPD Hochburg. The Socialists were hindered, however, by divisions on the unity question: Brandt passionately favored it; Lafontaine did not.

When the East Germans went to the polls on March 18 they had an amazing twenty-four parties to choose from, ranging from the PDS on the left to the Kohl-backed “Alliance for Germany” on the right. There was even a Beer Drinkers’ Union, which promised to protect eastern Germany’s beer culture against imports from the West. The results of the voting confounded the pundits, most of whom had predicted an SPD win. Instead, the Alliance for Germany came out on top, winning almost an absolute majority. Obviously, many voters bought Kohl’s promise of better times, expecting him, as one GDU partisan put it, “to help us quickly out of our mess.” Apart from the SPD, the big losers were the small reform parties that had done so much to make this election possible; the Bündnis 90, for example, garnered only 2.9 percent of the vote. Bärbel Bohley, one of that party’s candidates, complained bitterly that her countrymen had passed up the chance to create something new, opting instead for “money and bananas.”

East Berlin did not contribute significantly to the victory for Kohl. The Alliance for Germany won only 21.6 percent of the vote there, compared to 35 percent for the SPD and 30 percent for the PDS. These results reflected the strength of the Communist establishment and the old socialist movement in the eastern half of the Spree metropolis. For pro-unity East Germans in other parts of the country, the vote in East Berlin confirmed their image of the GDR capital as a pampered, parasitic town, whose fat-bottomed Bonzen put their own interest above that of ordinary people and the nation as a whole.