Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  In Djilas’s view, the Western “satanization” of Serbia has also enabled Croatians and the Bosnian Muslims to lay claim to the role of blameless victim. Sanctions against Serbia were unavoidable, he admits, given the siege of Sarajevo, the occupation of a quarter of Croatia, and the concentration camps for Muslims. But this only convinces Croats and Muslims that they will not receive international sanctions for acts of revenge against the Serbs.

  Djilas views this all with the Olympian detachment of an old man, but there is one moment in our conversation when his detachment breaks down. “We must be the only country in Europe,” he says with cold contempt, “actively rehabilitating fascist collaborators.” He means the Croatian Ustashe, but also Serbian collaborators, the Chetniks, who fought with the Germans. The thought that everything he fought for has collapsed and everything he fought against fifty years ago has been restored to public honor momentarily clouds his face. He looks tired and dispirited. “The Second World War is not over, not here anyway,” he says with a sigh.

  TITO’S GRAVE

  He liked greenhouses. So he built himself a greenhouse. He used to rest there, among the poinsettias and the cactuses, like an old lizard in the sun. Now they have buried him in the greenhouse, in front of his residence in Belgrade. There is a large white marble slab, with bronze lettering that reads “Josip Broz Tito, 1892–1980.”

  No one much visits anymore, and the place is neglected. On the day I visit, it is raining, and rain is dripping from a broken skylight onto the Marshal’s grave. Nobody cares.

  On his birthday in 1945, some teenagers ran a relay race from Kragujevac to Belgrade and presented him with a baton. Every year of his reign, the “youth” of Yugoslavia repeated that race, and at the end of it they presented the old dictator with the relay batons. His birthday became “Youth Day.” Twenty thousand batons are kept in the museum next to his grave. Nobody visits the batons anymore.

  How quickly the legitimacy of power drains away. The batons were not ridiculous twenty years ago. The relay race meant something to people. Now its seems to belong to the rites of some vanished tribe.

  What does one conclude? Dictators have no successors. Charisma is the most unstable of legitimacies. That much is obvious. But what about democracy? Was there ever, really, a chance of democracy here? The old lizard himself would have said: Never, they will only tear themselves apart if you let them. From the hell where dead tyrants are sent, he would be surveying the inferno that followed his reign and he would be saying: I told you so. There must be a rule of iron. I was right. Djilas was wrong. After me came the deluge.

  But nothing in what happened proves the dictator right. What was needed was more time—time for a people to forget, for old men to die, and for their memories and their shame to die with them. Time for vengeance to seem ridiculous. Time for hatred to seem stupid. Time for the politics of honor and memory to be replaced by the politics of interest. Time, in other words, for what the dictator spent his life opposing: the banality of bourgeois politics.

  In a culture that never had the time to experience the banality of bourgeois politics, nationalism became the vernacular in which democracy came to the ruins of Yugoslavia. Not real democracy, of course, but the manipulated plebiscitary democracy that ratifies one-man rule. In that kind of democracy, nationalism offers the immense appeal of a politics of permanent fever, of eternal exaltation.Instead of the banal politics of the real, instead of a political world that confronts the facts—the poverty, backwardness, stubborn second-rateness of ordinary Balkan existence— nationalism directs the mind to higher things. It offers the glorious politics of identity and self-affirmation. Instead of the interminable politics of interest and conciliation, there are enemies within and without to defeat; there is the immortal cause, the martyrs of the past and the present, to keep faith with. And it does not escape the attention of cynics and criminals that in this state of organized and permanent exaltation, there is no cynicism, no crime, no large or small brutality, that cannot be justified if the words “nation,” “people,” “rights,” and “freedom” are suavely sprinkled over them.

  And what about us?

  Standing back from the disaster, one begins to see that Western failures to act in time were caused by something deeper than inattention, misinformation, or misguided good intentions. The very principles behind our policies were in contradiction. In the light-headed euphoria of 1989, we announced our support for the right of national self-determination and for the territorial integrity of existing states, without realizing that the first principle contradicted the second. We insisted on the inviolability of frontiers, without being clear whether we also meant the frontiers within federal states like Yugoslavia.

  Most of all, we allowed guilt over our imperial pasts to lead us to evade our responsibilities to define the terms of a post-imperial peace. Post-imperial societies felt guilty about condemning the nationalism of peoples who have been kept under imperial control. When the “captive nations”—from the Baltic to the Balkans—asserted their freedom, we did not stop to consider the consequences. After Versailles, after Yalta, the collapse of the last empire in Europe offered us a third opportunity to define a durable peace and create a new order of nations in Europe. We could have ended the Cold War with a comprehensive territorial settlement, defining borders, guaranteeing minority rights and adjudicating among rival claims to self-determination. So concerned were we to avoid playing the imperial policeman, so self-absorbed were we in the frantic late-1980s boom, that we allowed every local post-Communist demagogue to exploit the rhetoric of self-determination and national rights to his own ends. The terrible new order of ethnically cleansed states in the former Yugoslavia is the monument to our follies as much as it is to theirs.

  AN OLD MAN’S WALLET

  I am standing directly in front of the Moscow Hotel in downtown Belgrade in the middle of a listless, slowly disintegrating demonstration against the Milošević regime. A crowd of several hundred people has been there all morning and is slowly discovering that it is too small to make anything happen. In the middle of the crowd is an old man wearing a Chetnik hat. I go up and talk to him. He is in his seventies and he fought with Milošević against Tito during the Second World War. Does he have sons, I ask him, and if so, have they seen fighting this time?

  Calmly, he takes out his wallet and shows me three passport-size color pictures: each of his sons, all young men in their twenties. Two are dead, killed on the front during the Croatian war. The third is in prison. Why? Because, the old man says with grim satisfaction, he took his vengeance.He found the killer of one of his brothers, and killed him. Then he takes out a small folded news clipping from a Croatian newspaper, and there is a passport-size photo of another young man’s face. “The bastard who killed my son. But we got him. We got him,” he says, neatly folding the picture of his son’s assassin back into the wallet with the pictures of his sons.

  From father to son, from son to son, there is no end to it, this form of love, this keeping faith between generations which is vengeance. In this village war where everyone knows each other, where an old man keeps the picture of his son’s killer beside the picture of the son who avenged them both. There is no end, for when he dies, this old man knows, and it gives him grim satisfaction, there will be someone to do vengeance for him, too.

  CHAPTER 2

  GERMANY

  EXPERIMENTS

  A pair of twins is separated at birth. One is sent to a wealthy and permissive family; the other is raised in a poor, disciplinarian household. After forty-five years, the richer brother manages to trace his poorer sibling and invites him over to his suburban home. At first, they are delighted to be in each other’s company and to rediscover, as it were, their lost half. Within an hour or so, however, they find each other’s company irritating. The poor brother is aggravated by his rich brother’s boisterous and aggressive laughter; the rich one is irritated by his brother’s resigned and resentful silences. When the rich brother tells
his version of why their parents abandoned them, the poorer brother, who had been told a different story, angrily denies it. Soon they are sitting in silence, both thinking it would have been better if they had never met. Beyond the accident of having the same neglectful parents, they seem to have nothing in common.

  Then the wife of the rich man comes out onto the lawn of the splendid suburban house and offers her poor brother-inlaw a drink. He observes that she has red hair like his own wife, and the same taste for pumps that display her brightly painted red toenails. Then he notices that, although his own garden is much smaller, there is a fountain, exactly like his, spilling water from the lips of a cupid into a shell-shaped basin. More confused than ever, he notices that his brother, lying back in a lawn chair drinking a beer, parts his thinning, sandy-colored hair in exactly the same way as he does, from the left ear over to the right. Finally, when the rich brother’s son comes out to borrow the keys to the car, the poor brother discovers that he and his rich brother have chosen the same name for their sons.

  Take a nation and divide it into two separate states. Ensure that these states embody opposing philosophies and forms of social organization. Attempt to guarantee that the inhabitants of the nation are told, repeatedly, that this experiment will be permanent. Place a wall between the two states and prevent, as far as possible, any communication between them. After forty-five years, remove the wall. Inform the population that the experiment is concluded and that henceforth they are a single nation once again. Will they still be one nation?

  The question such an experiment is designed to answer— does the nation make the state, or does the state make the nation?— is like the question about the relative importance of environment and heredity in the making of individuals. It should be possible to ask people who have been subjected to the experiment—as one would ask twins, separated at birth—whether they still recognize each other as brothers. They should be able to tell you. The experiment should be conclusive.

  IN NOVEMBER 1989, the German filmmaker Wim Wenders was in the Australian desert, at a place called Turkey Creek, when word reached him that the Berlin Wall had come down. At first he did not believe the news. Then he felt anxiety. Would the tanks roll back in? Finally he felt it was all unreal. He had to get some tangible proof that it was actually happening. Being a film director, he had to see some pictures.

  The flying doctor in Turkey Creek happened to have a fax machine, and Wenders asked a friend in Berlin to send him all the pictures he could cut out of the newspapers. Soon the pictures began rolling off the fax machine, curling into the film director’s hands. His being so far away in the Australian outback seemed to make these images more meaningful. They made him think of his father, who had died only a month before and who had thus been cheated of a moment that seemed to reconcile two German generations. The film director remembers that he shed tears, something he had not done for a very long time. Something wrong with the world was put together, he remembers thinking. Something wrong inside myself was put together.

  All these faces of the people on top of the wall, tearing it down. They were so remarkable. They seemed more real than our faces; they seemed like faces from the films of the 1940s and 1950s. Why more real? I don’t know exactly. Suffering makes people real. Maybe that is what it was. These people had been through more than we had, and that made them more real.

  —Volker Schlöndorff, German filmmaker, 1989

  I grew up being ashamed of Germany. But this was a time when I could feel something different. The simple fact is that there have not been many times in the last hundred years when Germans risked something for the sake of freedom and liberty.

  —Peter Schneider, German writer, 1989

  In all the years of the Cold War, in all the years of cynicism and bitterness that have followed, there was only one night of unambiguous joy—when the Wall came down, and people streamed through, not daring to believe it, wondering whether they were dreaming and discovering that they were not. There was just that one night of pure happiness in the whole postwar history of Europe.

  Nothing since has turned out as we hoped, and we have begun rewriting the history of our own emotions. We have all but forgotten that night, and if it still returns to our memories we ask ourselves why we could have ever treated ourselves to even one night of illusion. Why should we have had any hope at all? What fools we were.

  THE PHOTO ALBUM

  The German revolution of 1989 was centered in Leipzig, a city of 2 million people in Saxony, in the southeastern corner of the DDR, the German Democratic Republic. That was where the biggest demonstrations against the old regime were held. They were silent, orderly affairs, begun at night, after everyone had finished work. Hundreds of thousands of people assembled and took up the whole of the avenues, making their way toward Karl Marx Platz and the opera house. At first, in late September 1989, the placards demanded only “Press Freedom” and “Visa Freedom.” There were also timid banners that read “Gorbi, help us!”

  In late September, the regime met the demonstrations with water cannons, massed police lines, shields, truncheons, and dogs. Marchers were frog-marched away, their arms twisted behind their backs, and were tossed into the backs of the Volkspolizei wagons. But the demonstrations continued and the slogans began to move beyond the cautious demands formulated by the Lutheran opposition in the crypt of the Nikolaikirche. By mid-October, the banners were reading “We want reform!” “We are the people!”

  Since the regime had lasted by convincing individuals that they were alone, these demonstrations were an exercise in collective self-discovery. Night after night, the crowds would gather, and people would look around and discover how many people there were like them, stretching from one side of the street to the other, and as far back and as far ahead as one could see. And at last there were leaders prepared to risk something: the director of the Leipzig Opera, some Lutheran pastors, and a comedian at the local cabaret. Other cities followed Leipzig’s example and their citizens came out into the streets. The old regime wheedled, cajoled, barked, and hectored, but nothing seemed to work anymore. Obedience and resignation were mysteriously ebbing away. After the regime appealed for order on television, more placards would appear in the crowd, saying “No more speeches!” “No more blah-blah blah!” “No more cosmetics!” “It’s time for surgery!”

  It rained in October, but the people kept parading under umbrellas. They held vigils for reform and placed candles by the thousands at the walls of churches so that their wax ran together, fusing into translucent pools on the pavement. Meanwhile, photographers noticed that the expression on policemen’s faces had changed. They posed for pictures in front of their squad cars and kept their batons in their belts, and as every day passed, it became less and less clear who was in charge. At schools around Leipzig, teachers would tell students not to go to the demonstrations, and when students went anyway they would discover their own teachers marching beside them. Next morning, they would wink at each other in class.

  By late October, the placards in Karl Marx Platz were reading “The DDR belongs to the people, not the party.” And then, when the Wall came down on November 9, the demonstrators discovered to their immense surprise that they had brought about a revolution without the loss of a single life. It was a revolution whose symbol, appropriately enough, was that eerie flag you saw in the crowds in Bulgaria and Romania, too, with the hammer and sickle cut out of it, as one cuts holes for eyes in a bedsheet to make a ghost costume for children.

  A state that has a flag with a hole in it is a state that no longer knows what it is. Some who waved that flag hoped that it would remain true to the color red; others simply did not know what else to wave. But there were a few who began waving the flag of the other Germany, the one across the Wall.

  A month after the Wall came down, there appeared in Karl Marx Platz a new slogan, first on one hand-scribbled banner, then on a dozen, then on a thousand: “Deutschland, einig Vaterland.” Germany, one fatherland. In the s
pace of six weeks, the cry of “We are the people!” had turned into the chant “We are one people!”

  Germany, one fatherland. The slogan now seems genuinely mysterious. One fatherland. What could this mean, after all? Is it a statement of fact? An expression of a wish? Or a puzzled question?

  IN A SHOP in the arcade beneath the old Rathaus in Leipzig, you can buy a photo album that records nearly every day of that period from September to December 1989. The most remarkable faces in the book are the ones that stare out of the crowds at the camera. In every single case, their faces are tight with fear. The fear has broken their smiles in half; it has stopped words halfway out of their mouths; it has snapped their gestures of defiance in two.

  The fear is more than fear of arrest; more than the suspicion that the photographers are working for the police. It is historical fear, of the kind one might have seen on the barricades of Europe in 1848, the anxiety of a people who have taken a step into the unknown and do not know what will happen next. If all revolutions begin with that mysterious step into the unknown, the fear you see on these faces makes one wonder how they ever dared to take that first step. Yet, as you turn the pages of the album, as the demonstrations move into their second, third, fourth week, you can see this fear slowly begin to disappear. Faces unclench, gestures acquire defiance, laughter becomes full-throated. By November, the crowd no longer wonders what it has got itself into. Now it believes that history is marching alongside it. In their thousands, the people of Leipzig pour up the streets into Karl Marx Platz, laughing and waving at the cameras.