Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  “We are a clean people, a self-respecting and independent people,” he says, and he is rightly proud of the suburban bungalow he and his wife have built with their own hands. The house, with its heavy nature paintings on the walls (“from my ancestors,” he says), and its Brockhaus encyclopedia and collected works of Schiller and Goethe in the bookcases, is a humble bourgeois monument to a certain idea of Germany.

  Ten kilometers away from Herr K.’s immaculate villa is a tent city for asylum seekers. He drives there, and we stand outside the fence and look at the rows of tents, the board-walks in the mud, and a pair of sad Africans giving each other a haircut in the rain. Herr K. particularly wants me to know that German women, in need of pin money, come here to do the cleaning. Can you imagine it? he says. A black man knocking his cigarette ash on the floor and a German woman on her knees sweeping it up. No, this cannot go on.

  Then his bonhomie returns and his shoulders shake with his strange mirthless laughter, and he says that the asylum law is a “typical piece of German megalomania.” What other country would dream of making itself the world’s welfare officer?

  He is remarkably cheerful for someone who believes the German way of life is under attack. He should be, for he knows his party cannot lose. The constitutional right of asylum has been abridged, and the Republikaners have taken the credit for saying out loud what other parties only said under their breath.

  Yet tightening up the asylum process, Herr K. says, will not get to the root of the problem. The real issue is that Germans no longer feel at home in their own country. Thirty percent of the population of Frankfurt is foreign. Why do you think I live in the countryside, he says.

  Multiculturalism is the problem. We will have no culture at all if we go on “in this way.”

  But Turks in your country speak German, live in a German way. Why can’t you admit them as citizens?

  “We are Germans. They are Turks.”

  Racism is too simple a word for Herr K.’s view of the world. A racist usually has some fantasy about the way “they” smell, or the way “they” cook. Herr K. doesn’t seem prey to any phobias. Ethnic essentialism is a fancier term for his position, and perhaps more accurate. He believes that being German defines the limits of what he can possibly know, understand, or sympathize with. Herr K. is hardly alone. All week long, I met liberal Germans who would not be seen dead with the likes of Herr K., for mixed reasons of social snobbery and political conviction, who nevertheless spoke Herr K.’s language. They all feel that the liberal German conscience has reached its hour of truth with the asylum crisis. “This cannot go on,” they all said to me. “We will end up not knowing who we are.”

  Herr K. will not allow me to suggest that the Republikaners have been assiduously fanning the flames of a violence they are then at pains to condemn. Blame the violence on the movies and video culture, on the loss of moral values in our youth. Don’t blame it on me. Or on my history.

  Why should Germans take the blame for these attacks? Why can’t you let us be at peace with ourselves, Herr K. asks me again, as if I am the source of his guilt or the means of his absolution.

  It strikes me that it would be nice for Germans to like themselves and like their nation, so long as they accept the Germany that actually exists, the Germany of the post-1945 borders, the Germany that is home to millions of foreigners. The problem with Herr K. is not that he is nationalist but that he is a German nationalist who actually despises the Germany he lives in.

  He wants a Germany for the Germans, when there are already 6 million foreigners here. He wants a Germany that is law-abiding, clean, orderly, where women stay at home, where the television does not preach sex and violence to its adolescents. It is a Germany, in other words, in which not just the 1930s, but the 1960s, never happened. It is a Germany, he keeps saying, that is at home with itself, at peace with itself. (“How do you say it in English?” He searches for the word. “Ah, yes, ‘serene.’”)

  A serene Germany is a fantasy land out of the Karl May stories he read in his childhood. In his political daydreams, he is riding his white stallion through the pure and empty fields of a Germany which, if it ever existed, does not exist now, and cannot be brought into existence except at the price of other people’s liberties and some Turkish blood.

  HEIMAT

  Every night at Frankfurt Airport, you can watch them coming off the flight from Moscow and taking their first dazed steps into the promised land. The stout, impassive women wear sturdy winter boots and floral head scarves. If they smile, you see two rows of brass teeth. The men in sheepskin hats and winter coats busy themselves with their bundles and look as if they need a vodka. Pale children, in shell suits and cheap anoraks, cling anxiously to their mothers. As the West German businessmen elbow past them, these families walk into what they are told is freedom with the stunned gait of sleepwalkers.

  As they board the buses taking them to transit camps, the language you hear them whisper to each other is Russian. But if you approach them, the embarrassed ones lapse into silence and the canny ones tell you loudly, “Ich bin Deutsch.” Even though safely through passport control, they half suspect you must be some kind of cop about to bundle them back on the plane for not being as German as they claim to be.

  These families are among the most puzzling of the many streams of migration pouring through the gates of Europe. They are ethnic Germans flooding back—at a rate of 100,000 a year—from every quarter of the ruined empire in the East.

  Germany is one of only two modern states that allow their scattered tribes a right of return. The other state, of course, is Israel. Two nations who believe that nationality is in the blood are in the process of discovering that the blood tie can be thin indeed.

  “They have to be taught to flush the toilet,” a German social worker told me in a settlement house for Russian Germans in the Frankfurt suburbs. Families who have never known indoor toilets, showers, or private baths have to be gently reintroduced to the classical North German Protestant equation between cleanliness and virtue.

  In the dining hall of the settlement house, I watched a traffic policeman patiently telling a group of sixty-to-seventy-year-olds how to cross the street at the traffic lights. They listened as impassively as if they were still at a Party or factory lecture. The policeman got them to their feet, and they practiced moving their heads left, then right, then left again, so that when they cross the street they will not be mowed down by the BMWs of their prosperous hosts.

  Such a scene brings you face-to-face with the mystery of ethnicity. These people look Russian, and their habits and mentality are Soviet. Their ancestors left Germany three hundred years ago to settle and colonize the eastern Slavic border regions beyond the then Holy Roman Empire. Intermarriage has thinned the tie that binds to a vanishing point. Yet if you ask them where their Heimat is, they look around the cramped rooms of their Frankfurt hostel, and they say proudly, “Here.” For the eldest among them, they are coming home to die.

  “It was always my dream to die here,” Olga Oschetzki says, her big Russian peasant’s hands folded on the linoleum tablecloth in front of her. The German she speaks is a beautiful antique. It has been preserved in her family like an ancestral line tablecloth. She is proud that she never lost her language, even though Stalin shot all the German schoolteachers in the Zhitomir district of Ukraine in 1937 and deported her to Siberia after the war for having collaborated with the Wehrmacht. When I venture to suggest that some might think her more Russian than German, she flashes angry blue eyes at me. “I know who I am,” she says.

  The return of the ethnic Germans is one of those rare migrations where grandparents are leading their children and grandchildren home. The grandparents have kept their German, but their children have lost it. Most Germans probably wish their Russian brethren had stayed where they were, but they also know that, if they had not allowed them to come, there might, in another generation, be no Germans left to bring home.

  The Heimat Ogla and her daugh
ter dreamed of bears no relation to the one they are venturing out to explore. They are surprised by everything, by the twenty kinds of soap in the stores, for example, and by the brutal speed of the traffic. Most of all, they are surprised by all the foreigners. “I thought I was coming to Germany,” said Olga’s daughter. “Instead, it’s Turkey,” she says, wrinkling her nose in dismay. She says this in Russian because she speaks no German.

  FINAL THOUGHTS

  In guilt and reparation for its ethnic nationalist past, the German constitution enshrined a commitment to grant asylum to all victims of political persecution, only to find it could not keep its promise to its own conscience. It is not the number of asylum seekers that constitutes the problem. It is also that postwar liberal Germany saw itself so much as a post-nationalist or even anti-nationalist state that it found itself incapable of defining clear national interests in relation to international migration. Thus, for German liberals like Rosa Wolf, the asylum crisis is the first moment in the postwar period when they feel forced to renounce the utopia of a post-nationalist state and think more soberly of Germany’s national interest. Even for liberals, in other words, some nationalist discourse is unavoidable. They have to talk about quotas, limits, repatriations, putting the German unemployed first. All of this would be natural enough, were such a language not disgraced by its associations with the right.

  Yet the times are no less disobliging to the German right. The arrival of a multicultural society in Germany’s cities makes it absurd to think of the Germans as a mono-ethnic Volk, and the persistent divide between East and West Germans must make anyone wonder just what the identity of the Volk actually consists in.

  Despite these violent incursions of reality into the fantasy of German identity, the legal instruments that define German identity remain defined by the ethnic nationalist past. The criterion of citizenship remains one of ethnic descent on the basis of jus sanguinis. The resulting contradiction between reality and ethnic fantasy produces manifest unreason. To most outsiders, and to many Germans, it seems absurd that a Turk, born and brought up in Germany, should be unable to become a citizen, while a German from Siberia, with no history of residence in the country and little language competence, should be entitled to citizenship and to extensive settlement assistance.

  The absurdity of German citizenship law is forcing conservative Germans to confront the incoherence, in a modern multicultural world, of grounding national identity in the Volk. At the same time, liberal Germans are discovering that a post-national identity built on guilt and reparation is not enough. It is as if both sides are slowly being pushed, by the force of reality, into abandoning a utopia, in the one case, of a Germany for the Germans, in the other, of a Germany open to the whole world.

  At the same time, Germany is at last, with unification, passing from the stage of being a hungry nation to being a sated one. Its borders are settled; its lost peoples are coming home. Its task now is not, as some liberals suppose, to pass beyond nationalism altogether and move into bland Europeanism but instead to move from the ethnic nationalism of its past to the civic nationalism of a possible future. This could be the moment, in other words, to bury the idea of the German Volk forever. In practical terms, this would mean moving away from identification with the nation toward identification with the state, i.e., away from a citizenship based on the fiction of ethnic identity toward one based on allegiance to the values of democracy.

  The chief obstacle to this enterprise lies, not with the ethnic minorities themselves, but with conservatives who dream of a Germany that has never existed and with liberals who suppose that patriotism is for fools.

  The result is an impasse, a political and cultural void where a believable image of Germany ought to be found. In this void where a nation ought to be, there is only the state, and it lacks the will to do what any state must do, which is to conserve its monopoly of the means of violence. Every day that this impasse persists, every day that the state’s authority weakens, Leo, Leech and their friends grow stronger.

  I BOARD MY PLANE for London wondering at the irony that the Germans, who invented the idea of ethnic nationalism, should actually like themselves so little. What would it be like, I wonder, for a German to be genuinely at peace with his nation? To love it for what it is, not for what it might be, to love it with all its history, all its tragedy, all its violence? What might that nationalism be like? Is such a love possible?

  CHAPTER 3

  UKRAINE

  WINE BOTTLES AND SOAP

  On the flight from Vienna to Kiev, I find myself examining a small plastic bottle of Austrian table wine served with my airline meal. Archaeologists say you can infer the shape of a whole civilization from the smallest trinket. My little wine bottle is capitalism epitomized: efficient, cosmopolitan, without distinction.

  Beneath me the rug of the Hungarian plain crumples up into the Carpathian mountains and we enter Ukrainian airspace. I have been across the border many times. My sudden attention to the flotsam of capitalist life is a sign that I am reluctant to leave this world behind.

  What will I choose as the tiny symbol that stands for the whole magnificent, dreadful, failed attempt to imagine an alternative to capitalism?

  As we begin our descent into Kiev, I decide it will be the soap: the tiny pink bars with crenellations that await me in what I know will be the dank, evil-smelling bathroom of my Kiev hotel room, lit by the smeared light of a forty-watt bulb. This soap, which appears to be made from the renderings of some animal, which has no odor and no discernible cleansing power, is produced in hundreds of millions of bars, all the same, for every dreary hotel room on every interminable echoing corridor of every hotel in a once vast, now collapsed empire. A civilization’s largest yearnings are expressed in those little bars of soap: for equality; for an end to a society where some have fragrant soaps in sculpted soap dishes and others have no soap at all; for a ban on pleasure, on the very possibility of idle soaping in a foamy bath. But, finally, there is the ridiculous inefficiency—this hard, plain little bar of soap never in fact cleans you.

  Thinking about soap bars and plastic wine bottles, I decamp from the plane and join the double lines of men in suits and briefcases queuing up for Ukrainian visas. Every single person in the line is male, everyone is on business. These are the new post-imperial type you see everywhere in Eastern Europe, who all speak such a strange English Esperanto to each other that you wonder whether they have a native tongue of their own. The man ahead of me turns out to be a Russian émigré based in Vienna who works for an American chemical company. Which one? Dow Chemical. A name to conjure with. The makers of napalm. I once sat in on the steps of the university job center to prevent Dow Chemical from recruiting young men like this to join their company as sales reps. What is he selling? Fertilizers. To whom? He smiles. In the old days of the empire, he explains, all our business was through Moscow,and we had one purchaser. You wined him, you dined him, and at the end of the bargaining you got your price. Now—he smiles again—we have to do business, republic by republic. There are a lot more people to entertain. I wonder—a lot more to bribe? Do you have any small customers here? Yes, a few farmers. A few collective farms. They have assets—and I think of the vast flat black-soil country I have seen south of Kiev—but they are all so short of foreign exchange. A British businessman, a sharp customer with seven suitcases of soccer kit he hopes to unload before his return flight tomorrow night, overhears us and agrees. Plenty of business opportunities, provided you bribe everyone you come near.

  Throughout Eastern Europe, these are the men of whom everyday miracles are expected. They are the ones who will provide soap that smells decent and actually cleans you. These are the ones who will make the phones work, who will market wine in the small plastic flat-sided bottles. Everything else has been tried: the command economy’s armory of terror and menaces is bare; social democracy is too Swedish, too distant, to be plausible. There is no one else to turn to but these men with briefcases.

&
nbsp; Each well-dressed, well-coiffed male disappears through passport control and dissolves into the mass of people in the airport lobby, like sharp drops of ink dispersing in a large tank of water. In the next three weeks, I see Western businessmen in only two of the biggest Kiev hotels. Hundreds of them arrive daily, yet such is the size of the country, and of its problems, that they seem to vanish leaving scarcely a trace behind.

  The customs declaration, I notice, is the same old Soviet form. I declare how much currency I am carrying, “in figures and in numbers,” whether I am carrying weapons, “objects of art,” books, or medicines. The new nation hasn’t got around to printing new forms, so, in the meantime, the dull momentum of imperial bureaucracy continues to grind on.

  By peeking over someone’s shoulder, I discover that even the Ukrainian passport is the old Soviet document with “Ukrainian” in a ragged ink stamp on the spot reserved for Nationality. Ukrainians have been told they will have their own passport and their own money. Till then, they make do with a transitional nonconvertible currency called the kupon, still pegged to the Russian ruble, and like the ruble depreciating at something like 20 percent a month. Like all the countries of Eastern Europe, the whole society is engaged in a frantic search for hard, convertible currencies as a hedge against the slow collapse of their own. At the visa window, Ukrainian officials are writing out visa forms as quickly as they can manage, palming businessmen’s fifty-dollar bills into cashboxes. All around me, the first impressions of Ukrainian independence are of decline and decay, broken panes of glass, smeared windows, cigarette butts all over the floor, a dim half-light from low-wattage bulbs, policemen in new green uniforms, smoking, fingering Kalashnikovs. What, I ask myself, am I doing in this godforsaken place?