The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  The chance of a generously unitary political capital in Berlin has thus been refused, in favour of a reduced precinct in the West and the updating of sinister mausolea in the East. This bureaucratic option is defended on two grounds. Firstly, that any attempt to build an integrated government district might be seen as a dangerous hubris or arrogant over-statement by the German nation within Europe; and secondly, that Germans need constant remembrance of the darkness of their own past. Evident is an ideological will to fix civic memory on images stamped by guilt or nostalgia—the element of guilt mostly coming from the West, the element of nostalgia (for the Palace of the Republic, etc.) from the East. The result is a kind of an antiquarian masochism—a clinging to what is aesthetically ugly, often because it was also morally and politically ugly, in the name of truth to history.

  Such mortification betrays a deep intellectual confusion. For public buildings are not documents, but monuments. A historical document is a text that can be studied, in an archive or library, when a researcher needs to consult it—otherwise it does not impose itself on anyone. An urban monument, by contrast, is an unavoidable daily sight imposed on all who pass by or use it. You cannot put a public building away in a file. Such structures must be judged in the first place on aesthetic grounds. The political or ideological functions they may, or may not, have served can change over time, but are never decisive for political reality, which has its own arena and dynamic, built not out of bricks but social relations. Italian Fascism was capable in its day of pleasing or striking buildings, which have continued to be used, indeed enjoyed: no one has ever thought of blowing up the railway station in Florence. Nazi edifices like the Reichsbank or Luftwaffe HQ should have been demolished not so much because of their associations, but because they are brutal and forbidding as architecture.

  The idea that Germans need such buildings as perpetual hair-shirts, to earn the trust of their neighbours, is not just a misconception. For Europeans do not on the whole fear the ghosts of Bismarck, Hitler or Honecker: neither Wilhelmine Imperialism, nor Nazism, nor Stalinism, are serious threats today. A constant preoccupation with them can easily become a screen for more pressing issues, as in Freudian terms an obsession with imaginary dangers typically functions as a displacement—that is, repression—of quite other, real problems. So it is that Europe has some reason for misgivings about a reunited Germany. But its rational fears relate to contemporary institutions: not the legacies of Ludendorff or Speer, but the overweening reach of the Bundesbank, as the most powerful institution in the country, over the lives and jobs of millions of Europeans—a hegemony now entrenched in the design and personnel of the European Central Bank. It is the fanatical cult of sound money, the insistence on arbitrary and anti-social criteria for convergence in the Treaty of Maastricht, the relentless pressure for a ‘Stability Pact’ after it, which a self-critical German public should have been concerned about. But, with few exceptions—Helmut Schmidt the most eloquent—here national complacency has been virtually boundless. Hans Tietmeyer and Otmar Issing have exercised their enormous, continent-wide power from the most inconspicuous and modest of buildings in Frankfurt. What nicer symbol of German good conscience?

  A better relationship between aesthetics and politics would reverse these morbid terms. There should have been no inhibition in Berlin about erecting the finest—the most delicate or the most magnificent—buildings that any contemporary architect can design: the more, and the more integrated, the better. That would have been not just a contribution to a real annealing of the city, but a gift to European unity as well. When we go to Paris, or to Rome, or to Barcelona—cities built with a generous sense of splendour—we do not think of them as exclusively French, or Italian, or Catalan possessions. They are sources of a common delight. It is in that confident spirit, for which sensuous beauty—not sheer utility, and still less self-flagellating memory—is the highest urban value, that the rest of Europe must hope Berlin can still in some measure be rebuilt.

  As for ‘historical documents’, for those who want them, there is a perfect solution. Lying underground—like an archive, where only the interested need go—are Hitler’s bunker and the far larger subterranean lair built for his government, just south of Unter den Linden, which the Russians lacked the technology to destroy. Officially, the authorities have not yet admitted the existence of these potent remnants of the Third Reich. Why not restore these for reflective viewing? The question embarrasses the loyal functionaries of the Denkmalschutz, who off the record reply: it would be wrong to erase them and it would be wrong to restore them—it is best they remain hidden, abandoned to the natural processes of time. Overground, meanwhile, pedestrians can suffer the Air Ministry. Amid such confusions the one true resolution of the problems of historical memory, in their gravest sense, stands out: Daniel Libeskind’s—all but literally—fulgurating museum of Jewish history, a zinc-clad masterpiece in which the past is represented with awesome power in its rightful place.

  If the economic prospects of Berlin remain precarious, and its political function guarantees only that MPs and civil servants will reside there, what of its cultural role? In many ways, this is the decisive question for the future of the city, since not only does political life quicken if there is a real cultural tissue around it, but the level of economic activity is likely to depend critically on the specific weight of the communications industry in the capital. Everyone remembers the extraordinary cultural vitality of Berlin in Weimar days. Could something of that return? During the Cold War, both parts of the city maintained, heavily subsidized for reasons of prestige, complexes of great distinction in the worlds of theatre and music. DDR writers tended to be concentrated in East Berlin, with fewer counterparts across the Wall. An extensive bohemia—the ‘alternative scene’: the term Szene is used much more freely and indiscriminately in German than English—flourished in the West, where there was exemption from national service, and by the end there was even a modest pendant to it in the East. The end of the Cold War hit all this hard. The virtual collapse of the Berliner Ensemble suggests the general trend. Music survived much better than drama; Berlin offers perhaps still the best repertoire of any big European city. No doubt theatre will recover too. The nineties have been a strange time in limbo for Berlin, no longer the spoilt child of inter-bloc rivalry and not yet the capital of a reunited country. The real question, however, is whether the arrival of government will eventually attract those elements of a metropolitan culture the city lacked even at its heyday as the front-line of the Cold War.

  In the Bonn Republic, Cologne and Düsseldorf became the centre of the art world; Munich got the film industry; television was based in Mainz and Cologne; the most influential newspaper and publishing houses were in Frankfurt; the leading weeklies came out of Hamburg; the two major media empires—Holtzbrinck and Bertelsmann—have their headquarters in Stuttgart and the miniscule company town of Gütersloh. In the Weimar period, by contrast, most of this range of activities was concentrated in Berlin, with the art galleries of Cassirer, the UEFA film studios in Babelsberg, the Ullstein and Mosse publishing empires.11 Today, there are signs that younger artists are coming back to the city, but the Rhenish grip on the art market remains unshaken. Modernization of the traditional complex in Babelsberg—technically in Potsdam—where DEFA made its name under the DDR, probably ensures that the cinema will become an important industry again. Nor is it difficult to imagine Berlin becoming once more the literary capital of the nation: already the German novelist most recently admired abroad, detective-story writer Bernhard Schlink, teaches constitutional law at the Free University; the most gifted literary critic of the younger generation, Michael Maar, has just moved to the city; the leading intellectual journal in the country, Merkur, has relocated to Berlin, even if its animating iconoclast and aesthetician, Karl-Heinz Bohrer, edits it—a nice European touch—long-distance from Paris.

  But the pièces de resistance of today’s culture industry are missing: television, press, publishing
. Not a single TV station of moment operates in Berlin. The big West German publishing houses—many of them originally from Berlin—have not budged from Frankfurt, Hamburg or Munich, at most setting up secondary offices in the city. Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck have bought up the two leading dailies, Tagesspiegel and Berliner Zeitung, with respective readerships in the West and East, and are battling it out with heavy investment in a circulation war. But neither paper has any national weight, or approaches the Frankfurter Allgemeine or the Süddeutsche Zeitung in resources or quality. If matters continue as they are, the paradoxical prospect is of a major capital city without any newspaper of authority. The tabloid monopoly of Springer’s Bild-Zeitung remains—in the circumstances, perhaps fortunately—in Hamburg. It is hard to imagine this constellation persisting once the federal government and diplomatic corps are truly back in the centre of Berlin. But for the moment the signs are not encouraging.

  This is the view from above, where money shapes a culture. What of the impulses below? In the twentieth century, the creativity of a metropolis has nearly always been linked with its capacity to attract immigrants. Here Berlin should in principle enjoy a privileged position. It is often thought, not least by Germans themselves, that the city already harbours the highest concentration of foreigners in the Federal Republic. This is an illusion. In fact, the proportion is lower than in any major city of the West: 12 per cent, as against 21 in Munich, 24 in Stuttgart, 28 in Frankfurt—a graphic reflection of relative employment opportunities.12 Much the largest immigrant community in Germany is, of course, the Turks. Their lack of political or cultural integration into German society, by comparison with immigrant groups in Britain or France, is usually—and not without substantial reason—attributed to the Federal Republic’s iniquitous citizenship laws, based essentially on blood-line. But it is also true that Germany’s lack of a colonial past has contributed to the difficulties: there was no empire to equip new entrants with the elements of a common language, which certainly facilitated integration of arrivals from the Caribbean or Maghreb. If anything, the boot of an imperial past was on the other foot—Ottoman domains far exceeding Hohenzollern. In France, Turkish immigrants have proved the most closed of all immigrant groups, with lower rates of exogamy—the surest mechanism of assimilation—than any other. Predictably, their contribution to the diversification of German culture at any level, from letters to sport, has so far been very limited. The change of laws and official climate promised by the new government may start to change this.

  But beyond its Turkish enclaves, what Berlin can in particular expect are major waves of immigrants from Poland, Russia and the Baltic region—its traditional hinterlands. The building-trades are already largely Polish. The Russian community—artists, gangsters, students, merchants, claimants of Jewish origin—is rising daily: an impressive spectacle of social mixture at any Orthodox service. It is now common to hear Russian spoken all over Germany, but this startling change is due to the exodus of Volksdeutsche from Kazakhstan. The catchment in Berlin comes more largely from classical streams. Out of all this, a metropolis that is cosmopolitan in a stronger sense than anything Germany has known hitherto is likely to emerge.

  Logically, the counter-cultural Left has sought to make the most of the newcomers, as a glance at the pages of the Tageszeitung, Berlin’s counterpart to Libération in Paris or Il Manifesto in Rome (naturally no equivalent in England), makes clear. The taz has the least national audience of this trio of dailies that are offspring of ’68, but thanks to the value of the building it owns, is financially the most secure.13 Theoretically, it should benefit from a large student population—the city has three major universities—that showed its mettle last winter in prolonged demonstrations against its deteriorating conditions of study, blocking the Brandenburger Tor at all hours. In practice, the German university system is now so institutionally waterlogged that it offers little impetus to any wider culture. Here the legacy of ’68 has been at its most equivocal, failing to abolish the archaism of too many features of German academic life, while superadding dubiously populist ones to them. The result has been an intellectual stalemate, identified with a generation of placeholders, that has triggered powerful reactions elsewhere.

  By the eighties, talent had passed to the right—typically out of the campus and into the world of belles lettres and critical journalism. Bohrer pioneered this turn when he was editor of the literary pages of the FAZ. Here was where younger spirits could make stylish sorties against received social-liberal wisdom, and test unconventional ideas without too much worthy inhibition. Today the liveliest publicists are still to be found in this—by German standards—somewhat rakehell atmosphere rather than in the stodgier pages of Die Zeit. So it is with the newer generations at large. The enormous international prestige of Habermas is misleading. Thirty-year-olds, even of impeccably progressive outlook, can often be heard expressing more admiration for the brio of Jünger or Schmitt. Social Democracy has come to power without much depth of direct support in intellectual opinion. At this level, the trend—first with the radicalization to the left of the sixties, then with the opposite swing of recent years—has gone against it. If by the end the Kohl regime had few sympathizers, Schröder cannot count on any prior groundswell in his favour.

  3

  In Berlin, the ingredients of a classic modern capital lie scattered or incomplete. Perhaps they will never become a coherent whole, of the kind we know or remember elsewhere, and the city will offer instead only the image of a post-modern dyslexia. Many Germans hope so. For the new government, however, more is at stake than simply the fate of the city. The larger meaning of the move to Berlin was always to bring East Germany back into the centre of national life, as an equal part of the country. Potentially, the transfer of supreme political power into the midst of the former DDR should have far-reaching compensatory effects—psychological and practical—for its population. But the inordinate delay over the move, and the Western bias in its implementation, have weakened expectations. In many ways, despite massive federal investment, the gulf between the two parts of Germany remains as deep as ever. Western largesse and contempt have gone together. In 1990 no attempt was made to write a Constitution in common for a united Germany, as the Grundgesetz had laid down should be done. The DDR was simply annexed, and Western codes imposed down to the smallest regulations. Felicity and prosperity for all were promised in exchange. Ten years later, unemployment is officially running at 18 per cent, but more tough-minded economists reckon the real rate is closer to 40 per cent. Two-thirds of the Eastern population tell pollsters they do not feel full citizens in their own country.

  Ideally, what the ‘new Bundesländer’ needed after unification was an indigenous political movement capable of expressing the common experience of a humiliated people, and forging a powerful regional identity out of it—something like an Eastern equivalent of the CSU, the hugely successful party that has ruled Bavaria without interruption since the fifties, while never ceasing to be an important player in federal politics. In East Germany, of course, the sociological lay of the land would have situated such a regional party on the left, rather than right, end of the spectrum. But such a movement was never in the cards, because of the divisions within Eastern society itself. Some of these were interprovincial. Saxons, Thuringians, Brandenburgers, Pomeranians each had their own pre-Communist histories, and none any liking for East Berlin, whose privileges under the DDR were as much resented as those of West Berlin in the Federal Republic.

  But more deeply, the Eastern population was split by the Communist experience itself, between those who suffered and those who subsisted. By the standards of Yezhov or Ceaus¸escu, or even Gottwald, the DDR was a mild regime—the execution count was low, and the labour camp absent. But it was also a staggeringly invasive one, whose systems of surveillance and delation honeycombed society to a degree never reached, if only for reasons of technology, even in the Russia of the thirties.14 Levels of repression and fear were quite sufficient t
o create a large permanently embittered minority of the population, and leave unhappy memories in many more. At the same time, the regime assured a secure and orderly existence for those who did not step out of line; decent unpolitical lives could be led; there was little material misery, even some scope for a residual idealism. Post-Communist attitudes are thus polarized sharply, between a vengeful minority on one side, a majority with more mixed feelings about its experience of the two systems, and a minority on the other side attached to much of what it recalls of the old order and hostile to what it has encountered in the new.

  Only the last has found stable political expression. The PDS, as successor organization to the SED that ran East Germany, was often dismissed in the early years after unification as simply the party of ‘Ostalgie’—a crypto-Stalinist throw-back to the DDR, dependent on the ageing functionaries and accomplices of a police state. In fact, more than any other post-Communist party in Eastern Europe, the PDS has evolved into a lively radical movement of the Left. Much of the credit for this transformation is due to its leader Gregor Gysi, the only Jewish politician of note—not by accident from the East—in today’s Germany, whose quick wits, imaginative flair and irreverent sense of fun reverse every stereotype, to the point of making most Western parliamentarians look like heavy apparatchiks. Together with a handful of colleagues—Chairman Lothar Bisky, a former scientist, is the most important—he rejuvenated the ranks of the party and widened its support. At first confined mainly to the north of the old DDR, and very reliant on SED veterans, this year it scored over 20 per cent evenly throughout East Germany, with its strongest vote coming from younger, well-educated women, who now often provide its personable representatives in Länder institutions. The appeal of the PDS reaches to an even newer generation: enthusiastic teenage campaigners thronged headquarters on election night. Numerically, with over ninety thousand members, this is much the largest party in East Germany. The bureaucratic weight of the past is still visible in the internal structures of the PDS, especially as it tries to gain a foot-hold in the unfamiliar ground of the West German Left, but it is diminishing.