Blood and Belonging (15 page)

“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 around 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.

“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.