The front page of El País of November 12, 2011 (“Italy ends the Berlusconi era with revisions dictated by European Union”) presents a peculiar photograph: three men dressed in black, including Venizelos, the burly Greek finance minister. The outstretched fingers of their right hands resting between two candles on a table, they are apparently swearing an oath. Another three men stand opposite them, all bearded, attired in gold and wearing strange headgear. On the same front page is a report that one might think was unrelated, but that would be a mistake. It explains that the autonomous Spanish region of La Rioja is refusing to treat any more Basque patients, as the autonomous Spanish “nations” are practically bankrupt and, unable to appeal to the Spanish government for help, every region has to put itself first, even though the Basques are still Spaniards, just like the inhabitants of La Rioja—and they are neighbors to boot. The atmosphere is becoming acrimonious, because the crisis is real, and its presence can be felt all over, not only in those pessimistic predictions, but in all areas of everyday life, some more apparent than others. The misery of some household on the bottom rungs of society happens to be less obvious than the cancellation of French and German at the University of Leiden or the death knell of a library or a chamber choir.
One thing is certain: this crisis has its own iconography, both in photographs and in caricatures. Merkel with a Prussian helmet and an Iron Cross, with a Hitler moustache and other vile symbols that Germany would prefer to forget; Merkel with a huge European bull on her shoulders; Merkel alongside the tricky gentlemen of her difficult coalition, to show that she is fighting not only an external battle, but also an internal one; Merkel with politicians from the other parties standing around Gauck, who was not yet president and looks like the prisoner of Zenda, a foreign body, out of place among this company; Merkel flying through the air with Sarkozy; and then Merkel on her own again, in black, making her apologies to the families of Turkish-German citizens who were murdered by neo-Nazis.
It is astounding how quickly some icons have fallen into disuse: stamps that are no longer good for anything; the erased Berlusconi, the deleted Zapatero, the dissolved Papandreou—three kings who cannot find their way back to the stable, with all the appeal of bit players with no role in the next act. And Merkel appears yet again, almost jabbing her finger into Cameron’s stomach, and Sarkozy, borrowing the vocabulary of the angry Right in his attempt to defeat Hollande, and becoming increasingly Gallic and rooster-like in his caricatures, the countertenor of La Grande Nation, crowing on a large, empty stage where an unpleasant draught blows.
More than twenty years ago, when the euro was still in prenatal darkness and we had no inkling that all of this would happen, I said farewell to Berlin and Germany for a while. I had been invited to Los Angeles by the Getty Institute for the Humanities, where I was given a year to work on my book All Souls’ Day,1 a novel about people in Berlin who, like me, had lived through the Wende, the huge shift that would dramatically tip the balance so painfully imposed upon Europe at Yalta. Far away from those developments, in the bright and distant California, I wrote a book about a harsh Berlin winter in the snow, a book that still exists in Germany but sank like a stone in England. My farewell was a wistful one, and not without rhetoric. I had come to love that country, had made friends there, and had closely followed the turbulent events, creating my own daily chronicle.
On one of the last days before my departure, I went for a long walk through the somber gardens of Sanssouci in Potsdam, amidst the faded splendor of Frederick the Great, which had now also become the faded glory of the D.D.R., and I had plenty to think about. The Russians were taking their troops home, Europe was facing a new reality and, like me, people in many different capital cities were probably wondering what Germany was going to do when it was reunited. It was a legitimate question, the result of three wars and millions of victims. Yet again in that fateful century, Europeans were forced to reflect upon history, and the role that a large Germany had played in it, and would now be able to play again. At the time, I formulated my thoughts as follows: “But do we know Germany? Does Germany know itself? Does this country know what it wants to be when it is big?”
And now, twenty-two years later? Is there a satisfactory answer to that question? Yes, some Greeks, Italians and Portuguese will say. But what do the Finns think, the Poles and the Czechs?
And do right-wing populist party leaders in Finland and the Netherlands know exactly what this new Germany will mean for them? Will it help or hinder their cause? And more importantly, do the Germans themselves know? If there is one word that has been bandied about lately, it is Steuerzahler, Taxpayer, an already mythical figure who surely deserves a capital letter, that hard-pressed citizen who is going to have to foot the bill for everything the politicians have cooked up so far and all the ideas they will concoct in the future. The word echoes around the media; no one knows this Taxpayer, but everyone is scared of him. Does he actually grasp what European unity signifies for Germany? Is he aware that, as far as such a thing is possible, it means a wicked past can now be buried away in a form of forgetfulness? That it also suggests peace? And does the Taxpayer know that if he does not fully appreciate the value of those higher European ideals, he may be undermining his own best interests? In order to drive this message home, doomsday scenarios abound. From one summit to the next, the hour of truth is postponed. When will the financial firewall be high enough? And at what point will the Taxpayer, with the fear of Versailles and humiliating devaluation tucked away deep in his bitter memory, but never entirely forgotten, refuse to contribute to the further construction of that wall? What will happen then? Is this simply a more elevated form of poker, and do Schäuble and Merkel know exactly what they are doing, even if Obama and Lagarde have their own ideas on the subject? Should the masters of Germany, as they impose their financial diktat on the chaotic and undisciplined south, keep looking over their own shoulders to make sure their regiments are still following them? In the Frankfurter Allgemeine (March 28, 2012), that south is referred to as “die Europeriferie”; one does not need to be a philologist to sense the contempt in such an expression.
I have spent the past three months in what the French charmingly describe as l’Allemagne profonde, on an isolated country estate among woods and meadows in the south of Baden-Württemberg. During my stay in Germany, I have spent a week in Munich and a week in Berlin, and whenever I returned to that silence it struck me how many different countries make up Germany. Different accents, different tempos, different characters. From that place within the silence, I was better able to perceive the distant commotion. For a moment, it seemed as though the European storm had abated, the money was sleeping, spring had arrived on the stock markets, the great predator appeared to have retracted its claws, at least temporarily, and perhaps a solution would be found, will be found, but no one can be certain. At home, within the country’s own borders, huge dramas were unfolding, which have at least distracted the Taxpayer for the time being. For a while, the unpredictable world outside Germany, with its towering, ever-expanding debt, a debt that the Taxpayer was supposed to settle, ceased to exist. That large country, where inequality has constantly increased over the past ten years, now focused inward, with the aim of performing a grand ritual of guilt and atonement and demonstrating the meaning of integrity to those corrupt countries beyond its borders. A president who, in his five hundred days, had spoken some unexpected but welcome words (“Islam is part of Germany”) was made to disappear for reasons that would at most damage presidents in other countries, but a media witch hunt centerd upon this man, creating the impression that an entire nation had erupted in moral indignation. Apparently some miracle along the lines of an Immaculate Conception was expected, which this president and his young wife were unable to provide. Talk shows, columns, editorials, the entire arsenal of the orchestrated holiness and hypocrisy of All against One was repeated over and over, until finally the man and his wife were driven out of their palace. Just a few days befo
re, together with his Italian counterpart, a former Communist, he had been permitted to review the honor guard in Rome, where Berlusconi had recently been ejected, and for infinitely better reasons.
So, was he innocent? Heaven only knows, but perhaps his actions were not entirely above board. There was a judicial inquiry that had not yet reached its conclusion, but the suspicion alone was sufficient reason to deprive this man without power of his powerless position. This much is clear: when it comes to German presidents, it is not about power, but about something else, something that the new president must be sure to deliver. It is all about the preaching the Word. This is a task that a Lutheran pastor who stood firm under East German dictatorship should be able to handle. However, it remains to be seen whether the same politicians will be as happy with the situation in a year’s time.
What does he look like, this Taxpayer who will soon determine the fate of Europe and play a part in providing the answers to the questions I asked back in 1991? It is a mystery; he is invisible. Right now, he is on strike. The union is demanding 6.5 percent and the employers are offering 3.3. There is nothing new about that. If he receives more, he will also contribute more in taxes, but that too is all part of normality; the great secret of peacetime is normality, a state we long for when peace is absent.
When the Wall came down and when the Russian troops withdrew from East Germany a few years later, it looked like History. Nouns always have a capital letter in German, but I feel the need to use one here in other languages too, so as to lend more weight to my next question: why is it that these wage negotiations do not look like History? Does it mean that they are not? Are they not just as important as the “real” historical events?
Will they not have an influence on the coming elections, which may result in a new coalition that will determine the fate of Europe just as Merkel does now? Or perhaps she does not, because everything, done or not done, bears the hallmark of impermanence, as she dances her complicated duet with Christine Lagarde. Is this all part of the game of poker, with the financial collapse of Greece and the ensuing chaos already factored in? Or is it just a waiting game, a form of floating on the stream of “rapidly ageing” time that will later be referred to as history? In the past we had philosophies such as Marxism or Edmund Burke’s conservatism to provide answers, but now all we have is politics.
“Europe’s reluctant Goliath is hiding its true strength,” wrote the Guardian on Saturday, 18 March, and that same Saturday the Neue Zürcher Zeitung led with the following headline: “Zahlmeister in Zugzwang,” paymaster in zugzwang, in a tight spot. The word “Zahlmeister” conceals the same verb that gets the Steuerzahler, the Taxpayer, so excited: zahlen, to pay, because he or she is the one who will have to do just that. How are you supposed to do that when you belong to the large section of the population that has to live on, below or just above the poverty line? And how should impoverished local authorities react when they can no longer make ends meet and cannot go to the State for help either, as the State needs to reserve its money for the firewall?
And yet, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 21, 2012, the German citizen is still dedicated to the idea of Europe: 61 percent of Germans believe that Europeans belong together, in spite of all their problems, and 57 percent think that Europe is “our future.”
Such figures are unlikely to be found among those who vote for the P.V.V., Geert Wilders’ party in the Netherlands, and certainly not in Britain, which is probably why many Europeans feel that country does not actually belong, because Britain has to some extent left the production of things to the Germans, living instead on the alchemy that transforms the froth of the markets into gold. In the latest issue of Lettre, Marcel Hénaff refers to the conjurers who devote their lives to this pursuit as the “dandies of the apocalypse.”
Anyone who has travelled widely throughout the three “big” countries of Europe over the past fifty years cannot help but realize that they do not really know one another. This of course does not apply to the minority that travels, reads foreign newspapers and speaks different languages, but how the locals “tick” in the part of Germany where I am currently living must be a mystery to most British people, and vice versa. For a sense of this, you only have to read what the British popular press has to say about both the French and the Germans: ancient prejudices, traditional insults so eager to be repeated, deliberate or feigned ignorance, and a fundamental aversion to Europe that extends into the highest spheres, based partly on the transparent and imaginary special relationship with an America that is increasingly looking over the Pacific.
What about France? When the trumpet fanfare of La Grande Nation sounds in those election speeches, it is more than just a rhetorical gimmick; beneath it, there is always the same fear, a fear that holds sway not only in France. It is the fear of losing sovereignty, which is in fact the cause of the crisis that is now making its way across Europe. When it really mattered, no one wanted to submit to a foreign power that was aiming to unite Europe’s fiscal and financial fate under one roof. Who would those national politicians be if they handed over not only the appearance of their power, but also the actual control of the national coffers to an entity such as Brussels? This response can even be seen in a small country like the Netherlands; people are certainly keen to discuss the issue, but they do not want to think about it happening. If I were the infinitely patient leader of more than one and a half billion Chinese people, pursuing a policy designed to create hegemony, how would I feel about fragmentation in a Europe that has a large, ageing population and, within the foreseeable future, will no longer be able to support itself? While Europe concentrates on Europe, and the individual countries turn inward and America wears itself out in uncontrollable and distant wars, China is scouring the earth in search of raw materials.
Eighteen months ago, Chancellor Merkel went on a tour of China, followed by Russia and Kazakhstan. I saw her on television with Hu Jintao, and then with Medvedev and the oil-rich leader of Kazakhstan. The day after her return from this exhausting journey, I was invited, along with a number of other, mostly German authors and literary agents, to the Bundeskanzleramt, a building that I had previously seen only as a fata morgana in the distance, with one exception, when Chancellor Schröder had invited a number of East European authors and essayists so that he could question us about the attitude to German reunification in the different countries. He knew that I spend part of the year in Spain and he wanted me to tell him how the Spanish were reacting to the sudden shift of Europe’s center to the East. But this time it was Merkel, and what struck me was how fresh she looked after her tiring journey, and how different it feels when someone you have only ever seen on the television is suddenly standing only a meter away. The weather was fine and we chatted on the balcony before heading inside to eat. It was clear from the outset that the conversation would not be about politics. She wanted to talk about agents, about fixed book prices, about V.A.T., e-books, foreign rights; in short, everything that writers should be interested in—unless they think they have a chance to cast a curious glance into the center of power from close up. But she had done her homework and was extremely well informed, an academic, almost a literary trade unionist, and she kept on asking questions. I was sitting on her right and I tentatively enquired how things had gone in China, by which I mean that I started by asking her about interpreters, and how it feels when languages are inherently incompatible, so that conversations can never be direct but always have to travel via the interchange of one or more translators. I remember her answer, which of course revealed nothing about the essence of those conversations; she mentioned a “murmuring” in Chinese and then in German going on behind you, often out of sight, a buzz of incomprehensible sounds that suddenly turns into your own language and conveys a political truth, or at least a message. What has stayed with me about Merkel is a kind of calmness, her persistence in keeping to the literary theme, an academic approach that focused on other people’s problems; in short, ge
nuine professionalism. But the question remains: do those shifting policies involve calculated moves, or is it simply drifting with the weather system of the political moment?
And now? Yet again, I am leaving Germany. In the twenty years since that first departure, a great deal has changed. This country, whose relative density weighs so heavily on neighbors both near and far, borders on nine other lands. It is rich and powerful, and even now continues to perform its politics with a great caution that is prompted by its troubled and increasingly distant past, but when everyone is trying to guess your next move, how carefully can you wield the power that you find at your disposal?
In the part of Germany where I am now, the people are calm and cautious. Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland are not far away. The regional government is Green, and the peaceful landscape is green and rolling, full of large farms. Along the roadside are crucifixes and chapels dedicated to the Virgin Mary, while in the small country pubs calm men very slowly drain large glasses of beer. I listen in on the conversations they have in their Swabian dialect; the financial crisis rarely comes up. How much does Britain understand about this place? How much do France, Spain and the other European countries know about this land that will play an important part in determining their own fate? Europe’s problem is the mutual ignorance of the countries, which is not helped by a lack of language skills.
Roads to Berlin Page 33
