Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  “I was proud to be a citizen of the DDR and I was proud of my fatherland and we always associated fatherland with the DDR—there was no ‘Germany.’”

  Herr Börner had said much the same. “Germany” was a discredited phantom for anyone who grew up in the DDR, a figure of speech used only—or so the DDR television said— in revanchist rants in Bavarian beer halls. In any event, the old Germany of 1939—the one that stretched far into present-day Poland and had swallowed up Czechoslovakia—had been smashed by the heroic Soviet army. It was gone forever, buried beneath the joint Allied-Soviet occupation. A socialist state would create a German whose attachment was to socialism itself, to the institutions of the workers’ movement, to its symbols, that sharp and cold scientist’s protractor.

  It did not escape the elite, however, that loyalty to the state could be enriched if certain national symbols were revived and refurbished. In the 1970s, its Propaganda Ministry organized a carefully circumscribed appropriation of traditional German heroes. The Luther who had defied the German princes was allowed into the pantheon, while the Luther who had screamed for the German princes to put down the peasants’ revolt of 1525 was carefully airbrushed out of the picture. The military martinet Frederick the Great received official veneration from a regime now more interested in being martinets than in being socialists. As with Milošević of Serbia, Ceauçescu in Romania, or Husák of Czechoslovakia, Honecker in Germany turned to nationalism to mask the senility of his regime.

  Too late, too late. In November of 1989, the people decided that they, not the state, were the true nation.

  So what is a seventeen-year-old East German to make now of the concept of the German nation? Martin thinks for a long time and then says softly, “If you say you’re a nationalist now, then it’s clear—at least for me—that you’re saying you’re proud of your country—which in itself is not a bad thing. The problem is that it doesn’t stop there. It goes on so far that some people around here say the reunification is not complete—the Polish territories in the east and the Sudentenland are still waiting. That sounds an alarm bell inside me.”

  He thinks some more, and then says, “It all comes down to violence. If someone says he is proud of Germany and persuades me without violence, that’s fine. Unfortunately, that is rare nowadays in Germany.”

  MARTIN AND I are crossing a narrow footbridge over a canal at dusk on the outskirts of Leipzig. I suddenly notice dark men passing us on the bridge, North Africans, Pakistanis, Somalis, in pairs, with plastic shopping bags in their hands, their jacket collars pulled up against the cold. They are the first nonwhite faces I have seen in Leipzig. Like most of Eastern Europe, East Germany is overwhelmingly white. Of all the surprises of reunification, from the East German point of view, the most considerable is racial. Cities like Frankfurt are 30 percent foreign-born. In every crowd, there is a sea of faces such as these. In Leipzig, they are novel, strange, alien. They are on the bridge because it is the way home, and home is an asylum hostel, a cluster of Portakabins, set down behind a thin wire fence in a gravel yard adjacent to the Berlin-Leipzig expressway.

  We get talking in French to some young Algerians. They have bounced around Europe, looking for work, and they’ve applied for asylum here, and are waiting to have their applications processed. But it’s a miserable wait. The Portakabins, they say, are cold and drafty; and at night they lie on their bunks, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the Nazis to attack.

  Martin nods agreement. They are not exaggerating. He was there, with a friend from school, two weeks before, when skinheads first appeared on the bridge and marched on the hostel. They had knives and baseball bats, and the police sitting in a Volkswagen bus on the other side of the bridge did nothing to stop them. So Martin and his friend tried to prevent the skins from crossing the bridge. They did their best, these two decent teenage boys, who hadn’t thought to carry any arms, who hadn’t the first idea how to fight, and who thought that, just by standing bravely, they could turn a pack of skinheads around.

  Martin smiles ruefully, like someone rubbing an old bruise. “We were kicked and beaten up and they tried to chuck us in the canal,” but the police finally jumped out of their cars and chased the skins away. Martin leans on the railing of the bridge and looks across at the Portakabins. I ask him why he thought he should get involved. The skins mean business, they are armed, it’s no place for a teenager. He thinks about this, and says that he knows—because his father told him—about the Weimar days of the 1920s when a cycle of violence between left and right escalated until it got completely out of hand. Then he says, staring at the dark figures sitting in the open doorways of the Portakabins, smoking cigarettes, “Look, I just wanted to show that there are still some people who stand up for them around here.” He thinks some more, and then he says, “I wanted the skins to know that if they came for these people again, they would have to get past a German.”

  LEO AND THE LEECH

  Leo has a fresh scar, running across his forehead and down his right cheek, from a fight at a taxi stand a few nights before, and some other scars, at his hairline and on his arms, from his years in East German children’s homes and prisons. He had the word “Skinhead” in English tattooed along one forearm, and on the other arm a tattoo of an Iron Cross and a map of the Germany of 1937. His sweatshirt reads “FAP”: Frei Arbeiter Partei. “They’re the only party that sticks up for workers,” he says. “All the rest of the parties are shit.”

  Leo isn’t unemployed, and he would be contemptuous if I were to say that neo-Nazism is created by unemployment in East Germany. For Leo, neo-Nazism is a creed and a way of life, perfectly compatible with a steady job. After all, the best thing about Germans, he says, is that they know how to work. He is such a good German he has let his hair grow to a respectable brush cut in order to keep his job as an assembler of flat-pack furniture kits for a small West German firm. Today is his day off, and he and his friend, a jug-eared sixteen-year-old secondary school student named Leech, are drinking “diesels,” pints of beer mixed with cherry liqueur, in Leo’s flat in a working-class block in north Leipzig.

  What is happening here—a foreign writer talking to neo-Nazis—is a well-worn ritual. I provide them with the oxygen of publicity. They provide me with vivid and unpleasant copy. I ask them the standard questions and they provide the standard snarls in reply. Auschwitz? Never happened. Just a lie to blacken Germany’s name. “All that crap about gassing people. It never happened.” They told us about it in school, but you were a mug if you believed anything teachers told you. Is there nothing about Germany that makes you feel ashamed? Nothing. Nations start wars, nations lose them. So what? Ritual completed, I am supposed to say that people like him represent the cancer eating away at the heart of a fragile German democracy.

  This is true enough. But there is more to say. For a start, take Leech’s braces. They are decorated with Union Jacks. It is something of an embarrassment to good Germans like Leo and Leech to admit how much they owe to the Brits. But that is how it is. Neo-Nazism may be waning in Britain, but skin culture—the racism, the haircut, the music—is sweeping from the Polish-German border of old DDR right through to Frankfurt. Skin culture may just be Britain’s most enduring contribution to Germany and the new Europe.

  Listening to Leo, I try to figure out why he is the only German I’ve met in Leipzig who is fiercely proud of his country. That is what makes him alarming to me, not his scars, not his macho talk, not the blackjack he keeps by the door. If you see the world from his point of view, he comes from the only country in Europe that isn’t allowed to feel good about itself. In the DDR they taught him nationalism equals fascism. In West Germany they said the nation must atone for its sins and they set about building a post-nationalist identity based on the deutsche mark. Leo may just be what a country gets when it loses peaceful ways of being proud about itself, when the language of national pride is forced underground, when patriotism is hijacked by criminals.

  Leo also represents the r
eturn of the repressed. In West Germany most people are reconciled to the borders imposed on them by defeat in 1945. Not so in East Germany. Leo’s mother was born in Upper Silesia, in a German province of what is now Poland. Leo’s father had a farm, “an estate,” so he says, in Upper Silesia. Leo grew up hearing the story of how the family were dive-bombed by the Russians and flung themselves into ditches to survive, as the Russians drove them into Leipzig in the spring of 1945. When I ask Leo whether he wants to go back to Upper Silesia to visit, he says, “Not as a tourist, never. Only with a German flag.”

  But didn’t Kohl sign a treaty accepting the border with Poland? Leo takes a contemptuous pull on his Marlboro. No politician can swindle the Germans out of their land, he says.

  Had he not grown up being lied to by a workers’ state, Leo might have been a good socialist. He is fiercely proud of being a worker, and what he hated most about the old days was the way the Party bosses made the language of class solidarity into a sick justification of their privilege. Being a skin in Honecker’s regime was not just a badge of nationalist defiance. It was also a way of fighting, he says fiercely, for real German workers.

  Leo did two years—“my wasted years”—in one of Honecker’s prisons for trying to escape to the West. After reunification, Leo claimed compensation as a political prisoner. Giving ten thousand marks in compensation to a skinhead who’d cheerfully set the constitution alight is another irony of Germany’s well-meaning democracy. But gestures like that have no chance of winning Leo over. For democracy is not a value to him, just another regime, like Honecker’s, like Hitler’s before him. He lived “under” socialism, and he will live “under” democracy, and he respects neither.

  Under socialism, at least there was comradeship. “Under Communism, well, perhaps there were thirty or forty skins here in Leipzig, and we all stuck together, and if one of us didn’t have any money, like, then that wasn’t important, the others helped out so’s we could all drink, and now, well, we’re all counting every penny. It’s terrible.”

  It isn’t a justification of Leo to say he is in revolt against the mental residue of passivity and lies left behind in people’s heads by a corrupted workers’ state, or that the new unification has left him more homeless than ever. Explaining Leo isn’t justifying him. It is just that he looks out of his window at the crumbling flats, at the rusting Trabis, at his wasted, ruined homeland, and he wants to smash someone’s face in. “Home,” he says, bitterly. “This isn’t home, this is just misery.”

  If he were in Los Angeles or Liverpool, he would be just another teenage gang leader. The nightmare of the new Germany is that its teenage gangs talk politics. It may be reassuring that they have invented so little, that their rhetoric and political imagination are so derivative. Hitler was dangerous because he appeared to be new. These teenagers, wearing “Hitler: The European Tour” T-shirts, lack their own Goebbels, their own Riefenstahl or Speer. No middle-class postmodern smoothies in ponytails and double-breasted suits have attached themselves to these gangs to work on the marketing or the image. Without marketing, without the glamour of which middle-class nihilists are the masters, Leo can be contained. Poor Leo, he is so much a worker that he despises me and middle-class smoothies of all kinds. If he were more ingratiating, he might know how to use me. If he were more cynical, he might be truly dangerous.

  As it is, he is dangerous enough. Leo knows that when he and Leech torch an asylum hostel they have more leverage over German politics than a hundred speeches in Parliament. His contempt for these speeches—appealing for tolerance, condemning violence, preaching reconciliation—is entirely understandable. He knows weakness when he sees it.

  What is German democracy doing about Leo? Besides official rallies against racism, and courses on multiculturalism in the schools, throughout the former East Germany, the government is spending money on a public-relations campaign. The central image is a poster showing a sea of red, gold, and black German flags, with the caption: “This is the color of tolerance and respect for human dignity.” This remains the burden of being German: you still have to remind people that being proud of yourself doesn’t require you to hate others. The poster fights for visibility among the ads for cars and beer. For all its surface gloss and sophistication, the poster amounts to a cry for help. And what does Leo think? He smiles contemptuously and shakes his head. He knows the poster is saying: Right now, Leo is winning.

  INTERLUDE ON THE HISTORY OF GERMAN NATIONALISM

  Ethnic nationalism was the invention of the German Romantic intelligentsia during the period of the Napoleonic invasion of the German princedoms, between 1792 and 1813. The German intellectuals rose up against the French Enlightenment’s vision of political society as a society of contractual equals, and they exalted Germanness as the universal culture of feeling against the cold and mechanical individualism of the French. In so doing, figures like Novalis, Schiller, Fichte, and Müller self-consciously constituted themselves as the true voice of the nation. Yet their nationalist creed, intended to defend the established order against the French, then unleashed aspirations for unification and change that dissolved the status hierarchy and the German princedoms.

  For the Romantics, the new principle of social authority was to be the Volk, a highly romanticized and abstract image of the German people. The Volk was the decisive ethnic twist, given to the French idea of la nation. This Volk— simple, clean, pure, ardently communitarian—was the happy projection of an unhappy intelligentsia, seeking the emotional belonging denied them in real life.

  In France, Britain, and America, nationalism served as a modernizing ideology. Among the Romantics, it became an antimodernist creed, expressing their envy and resentment at the emergence of a secular democracy in France. Romantic nationalism became a flight from individualism and from individual rights, toward a vision of society in which the individual achieved inner freedom through an intense experience of belonging to the Volk.

  It is a convention of German historiography to trace the malignant German nationalism of Hitler to the apparently innocent emotionalism of the German Romantics—yet how, exactly, does one derive Hitler from Herder? At least from the Herder who famously remarked, “So at bottom all comparison is out of place. Every nation has its center of happiness within itself”? Hitler’s expansionary and aggressive nationalism was a universalizing creed. Germany was to be the standard of comparison for all. This is exactly what Herder’s historicizing and relativizing idea of national consciousness denied.

  Nor should the genocidal results under Hitler lead us to rewrite the history of Volkisch nationalism backward, as an obsessional attempt to define the Volk in excluding the Jew. In fact, anti-Semitism did not become central to German nationalism until after 1871, and when it did so, the influence of Anglo-Saxon anti-Semitism (Houston, Stewart, Chamberlain), French eugenics, and American neo-Darwinism was just as important as native German currents of opinion.

  Moreover, the Jews are only one of the groups that German nationalism seized upon as its defining Other. After the French Revolution, it was the French. After 1871, it was the Slavs.

  The Germans had always been preoccupied by their eastern border with the Slavic nations. The huge eastward migration of Germans to the Slavic border marches of the Holy Roman Empire left Germans convinced of their own ethnic distinctiveness. The large German communities in the East retained their language, religion, and culture, and while in practice much Slavic-German assimilation did take place, the decisive fact for national self-understanding was the assimilation that did not occur. The Slavic borderlands to the east led the German heartland to define itself as an ethnically distinct frontier state, in a way that has no parallel in France.

  As the Slavs themselves learned ethnic nationalism from the Germans, the Germans in turn took fright at the projects of national unification—Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians—on their eastern borders. Such fears of the East were containable only so long as the two German empires, Hohenzollern and Habsburg,
kept the emerging Slavic nations in check. Once these empires disintegrated in 1918 and a new Slavic empire, led by Lenin and then by Stalin, emerged on the borders of a weakened Germany, the old German fear of Slavic barbarism revived. These fears were adroitly articulated by Hitler, a man who had grown up in the multi-ethnic melting pot of imperial Vienna, and who had come to loathe its dense multi-ethnicity as an affront to the natural superiority of the German people.

  Even when one has drawn attention to the millennial German fear of the Slavs and the deeply imbedded hatred of the Jews, it is a form of kitsch to claim, as some recent historians have done, that “Germany was ready for the Holocaust from the moment German national identity existed.” This has no more content than the proposition that from the moment modernity existed, with its railways and gas ovens, the Holocaust was ready to happen.

  The real problem is how to explain why an ethnic definition of the German nation withstood all available competition. For competition there always was. The Frankfurt Parliament, convened after the 1848 revolution that swept away the German princelings, even went so far as to accord German citizenship, not merely to those who were ethnically German, but “to all those living in Germany … even if they are not so by birth or language.” It was to such traditions, even though they were swept away, that postwar Germany turned in trying to define an acceptable image of itself.

  Besides an explicitly liberal and civic tradition, there was also what might be called “state nationalism.” This form of nationalism provided the ideological impetus for the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia after the Napoleonic defeats, and then for the unification project of Bismarck which culminated in 1871. Unlike the reactionary ethnic nationalism of the Romantics, “state nationalism” had a strongly modernizing impetus. It sought above all to forge a nation-state, not by calling up the romance of the Volk, but by creating collective civic attachment to the institutions of the Reich. Hitler’s demonic achievement was to force together Reichsnational and Volksnational consciousness into the ideology of German totalitarianism.