Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  The other competition to ethnic nationalism was provided by German social democracy, the strongest workers’ movement in Europe before 1914, and one marked by a strongly internationalist and anti-nationalist consciousness. The social democratic tradition was persistently, if unsuccessfully, opposed to ethnic particularism, and its residue remained alive in the socialist ideology of the DDR.

  On the one hand, the parties with workers’ support refused to speak the language of the nation, believing it to be chauvinist, bourgeois, and reactionary. On the other hand, traditional German conservatism failed to create support for constitutional nationalism among the German workers. Into this void stepped Hitler. The disastrous failure of both the left and the right to anchor support for constitutional, civic nationalism among the German working class left the way open for Hitler to wean them onto ethnic nationalism of an especially virulent kind. He was the first German politician to turn nationalism into a popular mass movement. His politics of resentment, directed at the victorious Allies held responsible for the punitive Peace of Versailles and at the Jewish conspiracy held responsible for the Great Depression, shrewdly categorized the Volk as noble victim. A disoriented and defeated people turned to Hitler because his nationalism flattered them, caressed their uncertainties away, and made them believe someone else was to blame for their sufferings. Nationalism offered Party believers a politics of intoxication, a heady state of permanent indignation, exaltation, and occasional violence that offered escape from the normal tedium of ordinary life.

  Neither German liberalism nor German social democracy proved strong enough to stop Hitler, but if one writes them out of the story, the history of German nationalism becomes one long, grim, and featureless march toward him. Moreover, if you exclude the German liberal and social democratic traditions from the story, you cannot explain the postwar revival of a liberal and social democratic conscience. You cannot explain, in other words, the very fact of forty-five years of democracy in the Federal Republic. What is the moral of this story? German history is not its fate. The future is not the prisoner of the past. Only nationalists believe so.

  THE MEDUSA RESTAURANT AND THE CAFÉ VOLTAIRE

  Leipzig and Frankfurt airports are only forty-five minutes’ flying time apart. The cities are of roughly the same size; both have huge international trade fairs; they are twinned with each other, which means that, since unification, Frankfurt officials travel to Leipzig to tell them how to run their city. But if they are twins, you cannot tell it from their airports. In Leipzig, there are two gates, three planes, a bar, a couple of ticket counters, a rent-a-car agency, and that’s it. In Frankfurt Airport, I lose count of the number of gates at 100. I lose count of the bars, restaurants, clothes shops, porn cinemas, newsagents, bookstores, rent-a-car agencies. It is not so much an airport as a marble-and-glass souk at the hub of the new Europe. Huge aircraft nose up to the windows of the departure lounges and peer in upon the waiting passengers like whales in an aquarium. You can imagine what impression Frankfurt Airport must have made upon Frau Schindler, Herr Börner, or Herr Böhnke when they arrived with their cardboard suitcases off the plane from Leipzig for the first time. The stewardesses with clipboards under their arms click by on the marble; businessmen with suitbags on their backs dash past, heading for the taxi rank; in the blur of movement, you can sometimes make out a small island of stillness: an East German couple, holding on to their children, gazing about them, baffled, motionless, and unnoticed. Around them, the cash registers ping, tills open and slam, cameras and computers, personal organizers, and Walkmen slowly rotate on the turning stands inside their glass cases, enticing and out of reach.

  In fifteen years, will it still be possible to tell an East German and a West German apart? Will each be tanned, speak the same American English, wear the same crushed-linen suits, look as tired and harassed as these German businessmen running to the taxi stand after a week on the road? Will the market end up making one nation out of two states? Perhaps. But memory is stubborn and unreconciled. There may be one Germany in fifteen years, but there will be two German memories for much longer than that.

  ON A WALL-MOUNTED TELEVISION in the bar of my hotel in Frankfurt, I catch the eight o’clock news.

  Caption: “Three Deaths in Arson Attack.

  Violent extremists who apparently emanate from the right-wing extremist scene killed three people in the night. The criminals set fire to two houses in Mölln, in Schleswig-Holstein, which were occupied mainly by Turkish families. One woman and two girls died as a result of the flames.

  “In two telephone calls to the police, the arsonist signed off with ‘Heil Hitler.’”

  On the screen, I see dazed firefighters, their yellow jackets wet with water and their eyes red with smoke, leaving the gutted two-story brick house, carrying a small, shiny green coffin.

  “One of those who died was a ten-year-old girl. The mother had been living in Mölln for more than twenty years. Her ten-year-old daughter was actually born there.”

  On the screen I hear Chancellor Kohl say, “What is manifesting itself here is a kind of brutality which is totally incomprehensible for any human sensibility.” Then he says something strange. “I should also like at this moment to express most particularly my sympathy for our Turkish fellow citizens, both male and female, who have been living among us for many years.”

  Fellow citizens. It is a curious lapse. Everyone knows that Turks may be born in West Germany, work there all their lives, pay taxes, but they cannot become citizens.

  AT THE MEDUSA, in Frankfurt’s Sachsenhausen district, the Turkish musicians are picking out melodies on a lute, tambourine, lyre, and zither. Men are dancing with men, women with women, weaving among the tables, into the passages of this whitewashed labyrinth below the streets, while the waiters ford the seething dance floor, carrying trays of beer and kebab and Turkish salad.

  Huseyn and Zu, in their twenties, both speak faultless German. They came here from Turkey as children. Germany is all they know. Zu could, as they say, “pass for German”: she has teased blond hair and light skin, and having worked for American Express, she speaks that strange American English which is the second language of Frankfurt, that English which actually declares, “I’m not just a German. I’m a European.”

  Huseyn holds her hand; she strokes his cheek at his beard line. I can tell they’d rather not talk about the Nazi attack at Mölln. They’d like to push it away, for another night, so that they can listen to the zither and dance and forget about how it really is, out there in the streets. For the real issue for them is not anger or fear—though there is that in abundance. “When I hear Kohl express his regrets, it’s enough to make me explode,” Huseyn mutters. The real issue is where they belong now, whether they can belong anywhere. “I don’t know where to go,” Huseyn says. “I grew up here, I speak German. I love Turkey, but I’m not at home there anymore.” Then he adds, “But I’m always thinking about going back.” He reaches over and takes Zu’s hand again.

  In Germany, they can be seen together in the street. They can’t live together, because their parents won’t allow it, but an understanding uncle sometimes lets them use his place for the night. Huseyn and Zu smile bashfully. Now, in Turkey, Zu says, playing with her beer mat, “that would be out of the question for me. Not for him, but for me.”

  Even if Huseyn does get citizenship here eventually, he doubts that it will make much difference. “What am I supposed to do with a passport?” he says bitterly. “Hang it around my neck?” Will a passport make people stop calling him a dirty Turk? Will a passport make German workers share a cigarette with him on the factory floor? He has a Turkish face, and the formal rights conferred by a passport will not change the looks he gets from Germans. One day, Huseyn might belong to the German state, but never to the German nation.

  THE NEXT MORNING it is raining in the playground of a local Frankfurt school. The children and their parents are kneeling on the pavement finishing their signs, which are running a bit
in the rim. The signs and placards have been written by the children and they say things like “The Foreigners are my Friends” and “We are all Turks.” There are perhaps 150 teachers, parents, and children, and they set off from the playground for a march through their neighborhood.

  We are making a gesture, I tell myself, as I join in the march through the rainy streets of this suburb, beside all these children, with their hopeful, innocent faces, holding up these rain-streaked placards with their decent sentiments. We will not count ourselves among the silent majority. We will not be counted among those who did nothing. The question, of course, is not whether decent Germans are prepared to stand up. In these weeks and months, millions stand up and march. But what exactly does it signify, this innocent and honorable form of moral narcissism? It says: I am ashamed of my country, but I am not responsible for its worst acts. So as we march, we dissociate ourselves from Mölln, from Rostock, from Solingen, from the list of towns that now have acquired their association with flames in the night, with torches, with flick knives and screams, and the stamp of boots.

  In the crowd I fall in with a middle-aged, balding engineer walking hand in hand with his daughter. I tell him I’ve just been in Leipzig. “Just back from the East, are you? I was there for six months myself. What a shithouse. Hopeless. Nobody does a decent day’s work. We’re going to have to start again. They’re shiftless, hopeless. Never stop whining.” He shudders. “Glad to be home,” he says, squeezing his daughter’s hand. Of course, he would never think of saying about the Turks what he says so casually about his fellow Germans. Curious people, who like each other so little.

  As the little demonstration wends its way through the streets, past silent spectators whose faces do not register what they think of the banners, I get to talking to a young woman, named Sabine, whose children, she explains, are as yet too young to attend the school. So why is she here, then? She has a long, tanned, beautiful face and sharp blue eyes, and wears her hair in an auburn and golden braid down her back. She has a delicate, mournful distance to her as she speaks. “I’m not sure. Just to be here. Just so I’m not sitting at home.” Then she pulls her long black coat around her shoulders and shivers. “There is so much ugliness in this society now. So much hatred.” And then, with anguish in her voice, she says, “I cannot keep it away from my children. I want to. But I cannot.” We walk for a long time in silence, and then she stops and strokes rain from her hair, and says, as if finding the words for why she is here at last, “I’m afraid. For the first time in Germany, I am afraid.”

  ONE-THIRD OF THE POPULATION of Frankfurt is foreign-born: Yugoslavs, Turks, Spaniards, Greeks, Italians, and 140 smaller nationalities. They have no citizenship rights: they cannot vote or hold civil service jobs, and their status—even if they happen to be born in Germany—is always temporary.

  Rosa Wolf explains these facts to me in the bar at the Café Voltaire, in downtown Frankfurt. She works for the city government’s multiculturalism bureau, and she is not sure whether anything her office has done is capable of stemming the rising tide of xenophobia in her city. Moreover, if the right wing wins the next local elections, they are likely to close down her office. Already, a local Christian Democratic politician has written an article linking asylum seekers with drug pushing and welfare fraud. She called publicly for him to be charged with racial incitement, and the mayor disciplined her for violating her civil servant’s political neutrality. Rosa is cheerful, undogmatic, and unrepentant.

  We turn out to have a lot in common. Both of us are children of the 1960s who have lived long enough to see the icons of our youth turned into museum pieces. The Café Voltaire was once a center of Frankfurt’s left-wing counterculture. Now it hosts book launches for Frankfurt publishers. Then it was where the feverish demonstrations against American bases were planned. Now the painted mural of Rosa Luxemburg and Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, behind us on the bar, seems a vaguely pathetic monument to lost illusion.

  “We wanted to change German society,” she says, with a rueful look, as if aware how odd such thoughts must seem now. “We wanted to make it less obedient. The trouble was that we succeeded.” In wry detail, she catalogues her own difficulties with her children. Parents from 1968 often find their words coming back to haunt them: I had heard nothing about this revolt against obedience in Leipzig, of course. It is another part of postwar German history that the two Germanys never actually shared.

  “We denounced our parents as fascists. We moved out of the house. It was very painful, but we thought, in spite of everything, we would create a new kind of identity for ourselves.”

  The revolt against obedience, she goes on, was all very well. The problem was that it led, in the 1970s, to the dismantling of the old system of juvenile punishment. “So now these sixteen-year-olds in Mölln, Rostock, and Solingen firebomb an asylum hostel or an immigrant’s house and there’s no punishment. They just laugh at the police.”

  She is ruefully aware, now, that the revolt against obedience was a revolt against the German past, but not a real encounter with it. “We were too optimistic. We didn’t work on the past.”

  We both ponder in silence what it might mean to “work on” the past. Freud says somewhere that there is knowing and there is knowing and they are not the same. Meaning: you can confront something in your head without confronting it in your heart, your guts. Working through something is what therapy is all about: moving knowledge from your head to your body, from intention to action. But no one knows what the equivalent of therapy for a nation might be. No one knows how a nation works its way toward that deeper knowing.

  What Rosa realizes is that reunification marked the end of something much more than a beginning, and that the whole of German society is still struggling to come to terms with this ending.

  “Anyone who grew up after the war thought this life would go on forever. You know, that clean, organized Germany, that Germany which believed that everything could be organized. Since 1989, we have entered the real world. We are coming to the end of the growth of our economy. With the Wall coming down, we are coming to the end of feeling secure in our little garden. We know something has ended for good.”

  With something ending, the past returns, but not as one might expect or wish. Rosa throws her arms up in a gesture of amused irritation. “There are all these Germans now who say, ‘For forty years we had to be quiet. For forty years we had to make a humble impression. Now at least we can say we’re Germans.’ And then they say, ‘And besides, we were born too late. We have nothing to hide?’” She laughs, at them, at herself for ever believing that the “revolt against obedience” would silence that old Germany forever.

  “We made a mistake,” she says suddenly. “We never talked about the nation. We thought we were beyond the nation.” And she gestures ironically at the mural of Rosa and Karl and Friedrich behind her. “We were internationalists, remember?

  “You made a mistake too,” meaning Germany’s neighbors. “We were not allowed to work on our past, to come to terms with it, as a nation should.”

  I say, “What you mean is that the rest of the world never allowed Germans to be proud of what they could be proud of.”

  “Exactly,” she says, surprised that, twenty-five years after the revolution against obedience, twenty-five years after thinking the “nation” was a category for fools and revanchists, she has come to such a conclusion.

  HERR K.’S WHITE HORSE

  The key task should be to regain one’s self-confidence. I define this population as a wounded nation … My feeling is that this population will be at ease only when it has regained its natural self-esteem as a nation. When you take away an individual’s self-esteem, he is deeply damaged, and this is likely to be true of nations.

  —Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, public-opinion researcher, Germany,1992

  “Why are we the only people in Europe that cannot be allowed to be proud of ourselves?” Herr K. asks me bitterly. The question—I have heard it a dozen times a
round Frankfurt already—hangs in the air between us. We are in his bungalow in a village outside Frankfurt, and he glares at me, as if I am to blame for his feeling that he is not allowed to be proud to be German. The trouble is, I haven’t said a word.

  Then he gets up and says brightly, “Would you like to see my horse?” Herr K. loves his horse, a white Arabian stallion he keeps in a paddock behind his house in a dormitory village north of Frankfurt. His love for his horse—romantic, extreme, and innocent—is rather like his love of Germany.

  He mounts his steed bareback and tells me how he grew up reading Karl May’s pulp fiction about German-speaking cowboys riding the range. “My horse,” he says, “is my dream come true,” and then he gallops away. He would like to be a cowboy and he would like this to be a German-speaking Wild West. Unfortunately, he is a balding fifty-three-year-old, a retired prison officer, and this is a small muddy field fenced on all sides. Instead of galloping off into the sunset, he rides disconsolately back to talk to me.

  Like most Germans his age, he tells me proudly that he belongs to the first German generation lucky enough to have been born too late. Too late for what? I ask. Too late to be guilty of anything, he replies, with a mirthless chuckle.

  He just remembers the red glow of burning Berlin in the winter of 1945. As the Russians moved into the city, he and his mother fled to this village in the verdant hills north of Frankfurt. Now, after twenty-five years in the prison service, he is standing as a candidate for the right-wing Republikaners in the round of municipal elections to be held in Hesse. German politics is being driven rightward, and the people driving it in that direction are men like Herr K. He knows he will be elected: he is a good politician, he can feel the wind turning his way.

  “Ignatieff, Ignatieff,” he muses, as we sit together over a beer in his village restaurant. “What kind of name is that?” I tell him what kind of name it is. No offense, he goes on, but Slavs just don’t know how to work. Look at the disaster they’ve made of Russia. Was it the people or was it the system? I counter. Definitely the people, he replies. If only they had the German virtues.