Blood and Belonging (12 page)

This effacement of the DDR, Börner knows, is very German. Every fifty years, the nation's past is rewritten, and the lives that were lived under other conditions are suddenly stripped of all their sense. As it was with Börner's father—a schoolteacher under the Nazis—so it will be with Börner himself. It is only human, he says, for people to want to repress thc past. “It's the same perhaps as in private life— when something has gone wrong—where you have been very disappointed, you want to shut it off, draw a line under it and not be reminded of it.” Very human indeed, although one wonders whether nations should allow themselves the forgetting that individuals do.

Börner is resigned to losing his job when the purification of Party members like himself reaches the dusty corner office of the museum where he works. In the new conditions, he imagines he will live much as he has always done, by trusting only “a few people in one's most intimate circles on whom one can depend—with whom one can be happy.” East Germans ceaselessly lament the privatization of life that has arrived with capitalism (“All anybody buys these days is locks for their front doors”). The truth is, it will only reinforce the existing privatization of life under socialism.

Börner also knows that what will happen to him will be mild compared to what happened to his father. In 1945, thousands of Nazis were tried by Soviet court-martial and shot. His own father did four years in a Soviet camp and considered himself lucky to have escaped alive. Since the revolution of 1989, the purification of the past has not cost a single life. That is something, Herr Börner says. We Germans do not always have to repeat our mistakes.

What puzzles him most is why he allowed himself to
believe that the risks of thinking for himself were so much greater than they actually were. That is what he most regrets. “I certainly could have been braver, because we certainly were afraid, had fears, which it turns out today were unfounded. We had imposed a form of self-censorship on ourselves that needn't have been so.” When he says this, the reflection of his face in the glass cabinets of uniforms, muskets, ambulance wagons, drums, and little watercolors suddenly looks mournful and perplexed, as if he had stumbled, too late, on the secret of the regime that held him so easily in its grip.

He shows me out of the museum, and we stand with the shadow of the Battle of Nations monument slanting over both of us. I ask him whether it doesn't symbolize a certain idea of Germany. He laughs. “We didn't speak of Germany in the DDR.” Germany was the forbidden subject. Identification was with the state, with socialism, with fraternity toward the great Soviet motherland, but not with Deutschland, not with the Volk, not with the ancestral memories—those reactionary capitalist fabrications—symbolized by the brooding Teutonic Saint Michael.

Then Börner smiles and makes a little joke. “I'm glad,” he says, “that the DDR never built its own Battle of Nations memorial, never tried to build its idea of Germany in stone.”

“Why not?”

“Can you imagine what it would have been like?” he says, suddenly venturing out into the bright light of a free thought. “It would have been a concrete bunker.” He laughs again. “Yes, a concrete bunker. That's all the DDR would have left behind.”

LIVING UNDER DEMOCRACY

In the old days, the relative well-being of the East Germans under socialism provided West Germans with an opportunity for German narcissism. The fact that East Germany was the most successful socialist economy seemed to prove that the German virtues could even prevail over Bolshevik nonsense like the planned economy. Nation, in other words, was stronger than state.

Down came the Wall, in came the West German industrialists. They toured the East German factories; looked carefully at the machines, made inventories of plants, buildings, raw materials; logged worker productivity per hour, and so on. They returned to their head offices in Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Munich with worried faces. The East was a disaster zone.

There seemed only one thing to do: blow it all up and start over again. And that included the workers. They would have to relearn all the German virtues: good timekeeping, cleanliness, application, hard work. Moral of the story? States make nations; socialism deforms national character; regimes can ruin a people, even the Germans.

K
ARLA SCHINDLER
wears her brown hair cut in a short, mannish bob, which shows off her stylish hoop earrings. She is in her early fifties, and she remembers the day she joined the Leipzig Cotton Spinning Factory: September 1, 1953. Just like her mother before her and her daughter after her. What she has to show for forty years' work is a pair of certificates, from a grateful socialist management, decorated with that symbol of the DDR, the hammer, the sickle, and, coldest of all, the scientific protractor. She also has a stubborn and persistent cough, brought on by forty years of working on the
cotton machines, breathing in a haze of cotton filaments so dense that sometimes she couldn't see the worker next to her.

She ought to hate this vast, ramshackle, nineteenth-century warren of barracks and sheds, yet she bustles around it, chatting to the man on the forklift, kidding about with the night watchman, sharing a confidence with one of the machine-room girls. “Why should I hate this? It was my life. It still is.” Frau Schindler is the factory representative on the Treuhand—the organization that is privatizing or shutting down the East German industrial sector. The West Germans want to close the factory down. Frau Schindler is fighting to save it. “There was a Jewish gentleman from the family who used to own it in the old days. He is interested in it,” she says hopefully, as she shows me into the first machine room. It's an old industrial inferno, and everything in it—the walls, the turquoise-blue machines, the cages full of bales of cotton—is encrusted with white cotton filaments. The air is a dark brown suspension of cotton filaments and dust lit by thin bars of light from the smeared windows. One old man is feeding raw cotton into a separator, which pulls it apart into skeins. Frau Schindler digs her hands disparagingly into a bale. “From Uzbekistan. Soviet. Hopeless.” That was how it was here: cheap, poor-quality cotton from the Asian provinces of the Soviet empire was sent to be transformed, by industrious Germans, into cheap spun cotton for the poor housewives of Cracow, or Budapest, or Leipzig. It can't go on, and Frau Schindler knows it. Without decent raw materials and new machines, this old man will be out of a job in months.

Leipziger Spinnerei is a monument to a certain utopia of labor, a certain belonging and comradeship, which, whatever else was false about socialism, was true enough for someone like Frau Schindler. Not that she ever believed all of it.
There was a brigade system, and brigades were supposed to compete with each other to fulfill the production norms. At one door to the spinning rooms, we come across an old sign that reads: “The Friendship between Peoples Brigade.” Meaning, of course, the eternal socialist friendship between the Russian and German peoples. “What about this?” I ask her, and she raises an eyebrow, as if to say, Are you kidding?

In the spinning rooms, two or three perspiring girls in light, see-through frocks that reveal their white underwear beneath slap to and fro in thongs, tossing full bobbins into waist-high red bins, putting fresh bobbins on, retying the thread. Frau Schindler leans in close to hear their complaints about a new type of linen thread that is giving them trouble. She doesn't need to tell them their jobs hang by threads as thin as the ones they cut with their teeth. Room after room, floor after floor of the old mill are now shut, the machines covered with plastic, dust gathering on the floor.

Upstairs, in the union office, with its straggly potted plant and its faded poster depicting the tourist delights of Bulgarian beaches, she tells me the Treuhand puts her between the devil and the deep blue sea. They tell her they are going to try to save the factory. In return, she has to fire most of the people.

Still, she insists, things are better now. She can earn deutsche marks, she can travel to West Germany. “It's amazing,” she says wistfully, as if talking about some island like Tahiti, “how clean the air is over there.”

I tell her I've been hearing a curious phrase from people I talk to. We used to live under fascism, they say, then we lived under Communism, and now, they say, we live “under” democracy. Isn't that an odd way to talk about democracy, as if it were just another regime you had to submit to?

She smiles and shrugs. “In the old days, the director used to preach socialism in a big way. It was brigades this and brigades that. And now it's the Free Market Economy. He's gone the whole 180 degrees.” But she isn't surprised or indignant about this. “We used to call it swimming along with the tide.”

“And now,” I say, “you're learning to swim on your own.”

“Yes, now I'm learning to swim on my own.” Then she blushes. “I talk in public now. Yes, I do.” She was at a conference about the future of her industry. “I heard our Minister President here in Saxony going on and on about the textile industry this and the textile industry that, and I thought to myself, I ought to make him see what things really are like in the works.” So in the break after his speech, she had a couple of brandies, and then, when the conference reconvened, she stood up and spoke her mind. “That was the first time I had ever been brave enough to speak.” She looks over at me, smiles bashfully, and shrugs again, surprised at what has happened to her. “Now I speak anywhere, even in the Market Square.” Frau Schindler, at least, is not living under democracy, but in it for the first time.

BEING A GOOD GERMAN

In the old days it was called the Dimitrov school, after the Bulgarian Communist who was one of those tried for the 1933 Reichstag fire. There was even one of those socialist realist statues of Dimitrov in the school yard, but it has been toppled and nothing has been put in its place. Since the revolution, it has been renamed Reklamschule, after Reklam, a free-thinking publishing house suppressed both by the Nazis and by the DDR.

I am in the students' room in the basement, new since the revolution, on one wall of which is daubed, in English, “Hey, teacher! Leave those kids alone!” Martin Moschek is seventeen, and he is telling me what the lessons used to be like in the old days.

“For example, in math we had to work out things like: Cuba is attacked by the imperialists and five men are stationed at an anti-aircraft rocket station. We had to figure out the parabola of the missile's trajectory if it was going to hit the imperialists. That kind of thing.” He shakes his mop of curly hair at the thought of it. “At the time, we didn't notice anything strange.”

Martin's father was a Lutheran pastor, and so Martin grew up halfway inside the ideological bell jar of the regime, halfway out. Looking back, he cannot tell how many of his fellow students believed what they were told, or just went into silent internal emigration. It does seem unbelievable to him, looking back, that students were so obedient. He smiles cheerfully, and says in his quiet, formal, slightly pedantic way, “It is recognized a bit more that school can't be school without the pupils.” Hence the wit and wisdom of a British rock-and-roll band daubed on the wall behind him.

Martin has a smooth, angelic face framed by curls, as in a drawing by Dürer, with the deep inwardness of German Lutherans in his soft, thoughtful way of speaking. I ask him what nationalism meant in the old days.

“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.”

M
ARTIN 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.