Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  KARL MARX PLATZ

  A streetcar drops me at Karl Marx Platz. A road sweeper scratches in the gutters. Rain lashes the rearing copper horses in the empty fountain. All around me, empty, rainswept pavement. In the old newsreels of this square there were more fountains, with gaslights and a massive opera house with a Corinthian portico beneath which the horse-drawn carriages would draw up. In the newsreels, men in felt hats with newspapers under their arms saunter up and down at the very streetcar stop where I am standing; a small girl sells violets; there is an organ-grinder, a bearded beggar holds out his hand to passersby, and a man behind a barrow holds out a cone of newspaper filled with sunflower seeds. You can almost hear the rustle of the women’s long dresses on the pavement. It is April 1913.

  In the Leipzig bookshops, they sell a book of portraits of Leipzigers in year zero, 1945. The Allies had bombed the city, and acres of rubble stretched out on every side of Karl Marx Platz. From the photographs, they stare out at you, the “rubble women” from the work details who cleared the square of debris and stacked the bricks in neat, hatched rows. Their aprons are torn; their hair is thick with dust; they wear overalls and work boots. There are coiled plaits behind their ears, and their raw hands hold bricks and hammers. They stare out at the future, as if they can see it more clearly than we can. Perhaps that was the moment—at the very beginning, in year zero—when the workers’ state did seem like a wonderful dream.

  It seems astonishing now that there should ever have been a dream here and that anyone should ever have believed in it. The workers’ state sent Soviet tanks against the workers of Berlin as early as 1953. Even then it was obvious what this state really was. But there were rubble women and returning soldiers who wanted to keep faith with something, even when their leaders did not, and they did so until the end because it was too painful or too ridiculous to entertain the suspicion that your whole life could have been in vain.

  The unbelievers and the disillusioned left for the West, and their departure left behind only a silence without an echo. Most of those who stayed did so without illusion, consoling themselves with the thought that, if it was bad in the DDR, it was worse in Poland, worse in Hungary, infinitely worse in Russia. The regime’s legitimacy depended upon the reassurance offered by negative comparison.

  In the 1960s, the DDR regime rebuilt the square in the concrete brutalism that so suited their political style. It dynamited a three-hundred-year-old Baroque church in one corner of the square and built a thirty-story steel skyscraper on the ruins.

  Karl Marx Platz still survives as the public desert at the heart of a vanished regime. It is a monument to the DDR’s terror of public space and human spontaneity—the sausage sellers, pamphlet hawkers, artists, whores, teenage rebels—who might have spilled over it if given half a chance. But people do resign themselves to life in the desert. They are efficient with unfulfilled wishes: they simply strangle them. There were good concerts in the modern concert hall at one end of the Platz, and decent productions in the opera house, and you could tell yourself that you lived in a state which, whatever the coldness at its heart, did encourage a certain moral and aesthetic seriousness.

  The glacier action of time was slowly creating two nations out of two states. Of course, there was the Wall, and there were the images of West Germany that reached you on the television screen. But by the late 1980s, if you had not already left, you had pushed the memory of your twin brother and sister from your mind.

  ‘A vast structure of necessity—the imperial division of Europe—made this forgetting quite easy. In time, the division of Germany came to seem eternal. Indeed, two generations grew up on either side of the Wall who actually feared what their nation might become if it were ever allowed to unite. The dream of a united Germany was not merely renounced; it was officially anathematized by the Ostpolitik pursued by both sides.

  So when that great structure of imperial necessity began to tremble and shake above their heads, and the people of Leipzig took to the streets, they never imagined, for a second, that they would end up bringing down a state and bringing about the reunification of a nation. They never suspected that if they leaned, all together, against the locked door, it might suddenly swing open and tumble them into a strange new world.

  AFTER 1989, Karl Marx Platz was restored to its pre-1914 name of Augustus Platz. The cold blue neon circle of Mercedes-Benz now floats above the insurance building opposite. There are even plans to dynamite the skyscraper and rebuild the vanished Baroque church stone by stone, from old photographs and ground plans. But some malignant shadow continues to set these plans at naught. Everywhere else old Leipzig is being tossed into a builder’s trash bin, while Karl Marx Platz remains stubbornly unchanged. It is as if historical memory falters before the task of reclaiming such a desert. Karl Marx, a huge shaggy buffalo’s head in soot-blackened bronze, continues to stare down at the square from the middle of a bas-relief of ardent workers over the entrance to the university building. Somehow he remains the presiding genius of this windswept place. He ceded his authority when the marchers filled it with their chants and banners, cries and hopes. Now it is a desert again. It is as if his ghost has reclaimed it.

  CABARET

  “It was great. It was a revolution. For one month, the revolution was in the hands of the Leipzigers. Then it was over. And now the people who made it don’t have any power. But they are still there—the shop assistant, the librarian, the professor. They still want what I believe in.” Herr Böhnke pauses, looks embarrassed, rubs his thick hand over his forehead and down over his drooping mustache. “It’s a bit pathetic now, talking about what you believe. But I mean a Germany for the people.”

  I’d found Gunther Böhnke drinking a beer at a round table at the back of the bar in a basement cabaret, down a narrow cobblestoned street leading off the Karl Marx Platz. He is the star of Academixer cabaret, and he talks to me in the methodical and precise English of the Cold War zones of Eastern Europe, an English untouched by vernacular contact, a language mastered entirely from a tape. By day, he translated children’s books in a publishing house. By night, he was a cabaret artist. In the old days, cabaret artists were the licensed fools of an authoritarian state. Cabaret was where the whispered and unsaid could be spoken, fifteen meters underground, on a tiny stage in front of a faded gray velour curtain. In the old days, the theater was sold out for ten years in advance. A cabaret artist used his own allocation of tickets as money: so many seats for so many sausages from his butcher. Nowadays, the tickets are too expensive for the locals; the seats are filled with parties of West Germans who come to laugh, uneasily, at jokes about themselves. Böhnke personifies the Ossi—the East German—and satirizes the type. He is small and bald; wears an ill-fitting tweed jacket and an outsized East-bloc tie. His stomach sticks out through his shirt buttons and his melancholy face is a mixture of resignation and cunning.

  His routine onstage is about the poor dumb East German who goes for a job interview with a West German personnel director. The Ossi blurts out that he never joined the Party, thinking this is what is wanted, only to hear the Wessi reply, “What was the matter with you? Where was your motivation?” All his jokes are like that, bitter reflections on a divide that ought not to be there: one people, one language, one nation, yet, after forty-five years in different states, barely able to recognize each other.

  “They are nice people,” the new West German owner of Leipzig’s oldest restaurant had told me over dinner before the cabaret. “Nice people. Only they don’t know how to work. I swear to you. I have had to start all over again. Teaching them to show up on time, ring up customers’ bills properly, keep their hands out of the soup. I’m not in the restaurant business. I’m a social worker.” He had talked about his fellow Germans with the same affectionate condescension British colonial administrators used to adopt when discussing Tanganyikans.

  Unification has not been the disquieting reunion of two lost twins on a suburban lawn but a colonial occupation. The so
und you hear when you wake up in Leipzig in the guts of old buildings—lath, plaster, nails, window frames, boards— being tossed down those long, echoing plastic chutes into builders’ trash bins. The façades are retained—there must be something to pin the Benetton sign on—but the guts of the city are being removed.

  It is only to be expected, Böhnke thinks, that when a social system collapses, those who were mostly its victims should be blamed for its failure. It is just the way of the world that a people who actually brought the regime down should now be dismissed as whining scroungers by the same West Germans who once sat in front of their television sets and applauded their civic courage.

  As the writer Peter Schneider used to say, the Wall was a mirror. Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, the West Germans asked, who is the fairest one of all? And the Mirror unfailingly replied: You are. For forty-five years, the division of a nation into two states offered both sides the necessary negative image of each other. Why should this end just because the Wall has come down? Why should this end just because everyone now lives in the same nation?

  But something has changed in this game of mirrors. Before the revolution, the negative image in West Germany was the DDR, the state itself and its odious institutions. Now the negative image is the nation, the people themselves: their whining passivity. Now that the state has vanished, the people itself—the nation—is blamed for its ever having existed.

  The blame, curiously enough, is often apportioned from the East German side. There is no shortage of former East Germans doing well in the West by loathing their former brothers and sisters. Thus the former DDR novelist Monika Maron: “What I like least about my fellow ex-DDR citizens is their belief that the whole world owes them something, and that it particularly owes them their dignity. They seem to have forgotten that until three years ago they had not exactly looked after that dignity.” Hans Joachim Maatz, an East German psychiatrist, has written a book that tells the German public that forty-five years of totalitarianism produced an East German personality structure characterized by “repressed emotion, insecurity, and latent aggression.” He goes on:

  The basic human rights to be oneself, to have an opinion, to be understood and accepted as an individual were secured, nowhere in that society … Only those could live safely in this system who adjusted and sacrificed their spontaneous liveliness, their honesty, their ability to criticize, to the dull but relatively danger-free life of a subordinate.

  Like all forms of psychological triteness, this must be true of someone. But then how did those insecure, neurotic, subordinated individuals—people like poor Gunther Böhnke— find the nerve to bring down a whole regime? The negative image of the East German certainly flatters the narcissism of the West Germans, but it renders the history of unification incomprehensible.

  Böhnke is detached about the bitter comedy of his country’s fate since 1989. “After the Wall came down, our people went West and they came back with incredible stories. Over there, you could buy fresh lettuce and tomatoes in January. Can you imagine? And now that the supermarkets have arrived here, so can we. Only we can’t afford them and our rents have gone up five times.”

  He shrugs and smiles. “When we walked around Leipzig in the rain in October, all we wanted was a little more democracy, a little more decency. Nobody wanted to be unificated.”

  Unificated.

  Nobody wanted cabaret to die, either, but now, says Böhnke, you can see everything on German television. The satire there is sharper, the timing is faster. Who needs cabaret now? Böhnke took his show on the road to the West and it did not do well. Too local, too Saxon, too provincial. He doesn’t want the old days back, but as he looks about the dark, nicotine-stained walls of the bar where he has spent the best years of his life, at the posters of the old shows, at the chandelier above the table where the old Stasi microphone used to be hidden—“Can you hear me, Boris? Am I speaking loud enough?”—it seems clear that the bell jar of the dissident culture inside which his life once made sense, inside which, once upon a time, you could trade cabaret tickets for sausage from your butcher—all this is being “unificated,” too.

  ACADEMIXER was where it used to happen in the 1980s. Now, in the 1990s, it happens at U-2, a discotheque in the basement of a gray office slab nearby. The music is from Munich; the beer is from Munich; the disc jockey is from Munich; so are the pinball machines and the dry ice. It’s a low-ceilinged place, and the sound ricochets off the walls and the rhythm comes up through the soles of your feet, and you find yourself slipping into a state of torpor. Girls dance alone on top of the amplifiers: toss, shake, thrust, toss, shake, thrust, their eyes closed, alone in the cavern of sound. Boys wander from pinball machine to pinball machine, from video game to video game, eyeing the girls. It’s any discotheque, anywhere in the world, except that this low basement used to house the interrogation cellars of the secret police. Everyone knows this. It is no dark secret. The girls behind the bar will tell you about it and even point to some murals on the walls painted by former prisoners. Three years ago, it was an irresistible combination: the sadistic glamour of the Stasi meets the erotic glamour of the Munich discotheque. Getting into U-2 once gave entry into two forbidden worlds for the price of one. But the glamour of the forbidden is all gone: now it’s just a disco, like any other. “Alles ist cool,” the girl at the bar shouts in my ear, as the rhythm shakes the floor and the strobe lights turn her clear white face into a butterfly mask that dances up and floats away into the air.

  In the DDR as a whole, there were half a million informers for the Stasi. The files that once were lodged in buildings like this contained billions of pieces of paper: whispered denunciations in cafés, hearsay in buses, cutting remarks from colleagues—a minutely indexed library of a whole society’s malice and spite. But what could people do? If they didn’t contribute their quota of vicious gossip, they might find themselves down in the cells. The circle of incrimination became so wide that it is a wonder anyone was capable of recovering his civic courage. But some did. Those who didn’t now keep making the same tired, self-exculpating gesture with their hands: “It was my world. It was all I knew.”

  What, exactly, is one to make of the fact that an interrogation center has been turned into a discotheque? Should there be a memorial here, or a museum instead? The music is so loud that it wears down your middle-aged interiority and fills up every empty space inside.

  “Coming to terms with the past” does not imply a serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness. It suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it from memory.

  —Theodor Adorno

  “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” (1959)

  Ask yourself what the girl at the bar, mixing a daiquiri, or the boy with wet-look hair, wearing a Benetton “Colors of the World” T-shirt, is supposed to make of the fact that people were beaten and interrogated here. Pull a solemn face? Is solemnity any more genuine a “coming to terms with the past” than a fervent desire to forget about it altogether? I cannot ask such questions of the pair beside me at the bar, their faces a pair of dancing discs in the strobe light. How could they be expected to know what I was talking about? Honecker is already ancient history to them. This girl and boy were thirteen, maybe less, when his regime collapsed. “It’s not my problem,” I can hear them say. “It’s not my past.”

  THE BATTLE OF NATIONS MEMORIAL

  It resembles a vast Teutonic funeral pyre in soot-blackened granite, so that as the rough-cut stones rise into the air, they seem to be offering the body of some mighty warrior to the flames, except that on the flat bier at the very top of the monument there is nothing—no body to be committed to the sky—just a view from all sides of the city that has grown up around it. It is so large that it outranks any war memorial in Europe: a glowering pile of Wilhelmine stone, set off by itself, like the family’s difficult relative, in a park on the outskirts of Leipzig. It is altogether an embarrassm
ent, in its truculent bad taste, its stolid, vulgar monumentality. The rain streaks its heavy flanks and it seems to sneer: Come on, try and dynamite me, you will fail. I am too large, I have been here too long. I will survive you all.

  It was begun, soon after the unification of Germany in 1871, to commemorate the Battle of Nations in 1813, when a million soldiers, from Russia, Austria, Britain, France, Germany, and Poland, fought for a day and decided the fate of Europe. Napoleon’s defeat at day’s end signaled the beginning of the end of his empire. It was the first time that Germans from the different princedoms had stood and fought together as Germans, and even though some Germans also fought on Napoleon’s side, this battlefield can claim to be one of the places where the German nation was born. And it is this which was commemorated when Kaiser Wilhelm II presided over the monument’s final unveiling on the hundredth anniversary of the battle, in 1913.

  One can imagine the flag-decked reviewing stand, the forest of imperial plumes, the glinting breastplates, the tight leggings flowing into high cavalry boots; the swords clinking against thighs, the hard imperial faces, the heels that click together in greeting, the helmeted heads that curtly nod to each other—all these marionettes conscious of being at the acme of a glory symbolized by the almighty pile that rose above their heads.

  The sculptor who decorated the monument chose to flatter the Wilhelmine grandees by imagining them as Teutonic warriors. There is one such master image, in the frieze at the base of the monument, of Saint Michael as German knight, with a helmet that curves down to his cheekbones and eyes that stare into the predestined greatness of the German future. Around him writhe the symbols of the natural world: lions, tigers, and dragons, all subdued to his will, and a long spotted snake that hisses and smiles. These creatures are charged with ambivalence: are they inner demons or the forces of evil? They seem to be both, because his gaze manages to be both haunted and resolute, both anguished and determined. To the left of Saint Michael, like leering monkeys, a pair of grinning death’s-heads mock his solemn gaze.