Blood and Belonging Read online

  There is a famous poster from the 1930s of the Führer clad as a Teutonic warrior, in a shining breastplate, with a sword and helmet, astride a horse, raising high a blood-red banner. I had always supposed that Hitler and Goebbels had shown some inventiveness in their appropriation of the figures and images of German nationalism. I had always supposed, in fact, that this artistic inventiveness—to which Albert Speer contributed his monuments and Leni Riefenstahl her films— helps to explain the extraordinary enthusiasm the Nazis managed to generate in the population. Besides awe and fear, there was the shiver of being in the presence of the new.

  But as artists of politics, they invented less than I had supposed. The entire erotic paraphernalia of Nazi appeal is already there in the Leipzig monument: the same helmets, the same snakes, the same Teutonic ardor, the same ludicrous cult of masculine hardness; the same erotically charged confusion about nature—is it to be life-giving force or carnal malignity? It is all there. Hitler was no artist of the political, simply an adept connoisseur of kitsch.

  There is no nationalist art that is not kitsch, no patriotic creation that does not pantomime emotional sincerity. Why? Perhaps no art that is not personal can ever be genuinely sincere, and nationalist art, by definition, cannot be personal. Perhaps also a nationalist art cannot invent the new. It is chained to available tradition, or, failing that, chained to kitsch, in this case the dark Germanic forests of the Teutonic knights.

  Hitler’s appropriation of the Teutonic past merely exploited the fervent emotional insincerity of a nineteenth-century medieval pastiche. Both the original and the copy, therefore, imply a form of nationalism which, as Adorno puts it, cannot entirely believe in itself. The sheer massiveness of the monument is a confession of doubt, Hitler’s imitation likewise. Both must intimidate in order to convince.

  This bombastic imitation of the iconography of kitsch did not end with Hitler. The Hitler Youth, in neck scarves and lederhosen, used to hold torchlight parades to the monument, ending with a service of dedication to the Reich. In the photographs you can see the torches flickering in the reflection of the ornamental lake and the smoke rising in the fiery air. The DDR insisted that it had broken with the fascist and capitalist pasts alike. Yet the neck scarves and shorts of the Free German Youth told a different story, and the adolescent rite of passage, called Youth Consecration, in which massed voices shouted their allegiance to the new state, even copied the old sub-Wagnerian decor of torches, fiery smoke in the air, and eerie reflections in the ornamental pool.

  “BUT WHAT ELSE do you expect?” Helmut Börner says, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose in a gesture that suggests that he is both cornered and angry. “This was our world. This was all we knew.” Börner is the curator of the museum next door to the monument. Does he think it odd that the DDR should have copied the scarves of the Hitler Youth? No, he says, I have got this wrong. “In the case of the Pioneers, in my time, I had a blue neckerchief. My father in his time had a black neckerchief.”

  “But,” I say, “they were still the same neckerchief.”

  “Ah,” says Börner, slipping away from me behind the glass cases that hold the French cuirassier’s uniform, and the handful of grapeshot from the cannons, and the old muskets and a drum. “It’s a case of new wine in old bottles. The old bottles were perfectly good. My parents didn’t chuck them away. They just changed the white wine for red.” He thinks about that for a moment. “Yes, perhaps that’s how it was.”

  “But didn’t the new wine get corrupted by the old bottles?”

  He squints through his thick glasses, scratches his short red beard, and retreats farther behind another glass case in his museum. Then he asks me whether I have ever left my family and tried to start a new one. I say I haven’t. “Well, when you do, you don’t tear down your old. You try to lead a new life, a different one, better in all ways from the old marriage that has failed.”

  He points at a small watercolor in a frame inside one of the glass cases. It depicts a group of Leipzig women helping to load wounded soldiers onto a cart after the battle. “It didn’t matter at all whether they were French or Saxons or Prussians—or Swedes or Austrians or Russians—they looked after them all,” he says quietly. “Of course, you can’t compare the kind of care they gave to what is available today. Thousands of them died, of typhoid, of nerve and wound fever, amputations were carried out, so terrible we can’t imagine it.”

  Börner would be much happier to spend the rest of his days in the year 1813. It would be much simpler, and I can sympathize with him. Who wants to explain how a Party member copes with the collapse of his world?

  “I am one month older than the republic,” he says, in his quiet, musing, indirect way. “I was born in September 1949. So I grew up in this period, this country, in this society. It was my world.” The regime let him burrow into the safety of the distant past and insisted only that his exhibits emphasize the historic friendship of the Russian and German troops, forged at Leipzig. This was easy to do, because they had fought on the same side. There were some display cases of Soviet uniforms to bring this point home to the present, but they took up too much space, and he got permission in 1988 to do away with them. He sees no reason to pretend that he was not in the Party. He still hopes that history will judge the DDR kindly. It was more equal than the society that is taking shape around him. And it lived in peace. No troops from the DDR ever took part in combat. Not even in Czechoslovakia, in 1968? I ask. No, no, he insists, logistical support perhaps, but combat troops never.

  He wishes history would judge the DDR dispassionately. But he knows that history judges no one. There will be no reckoning at all. What will happen has already begun—every single trace of the DDR regime is being shoveled into a trash bin, so that in ten years a new generation will scarcely believe it ever existed.

  I find myself thinking that there ought to be a museum to the DDR, full of Trabis and Wartburg cars, hammers and sickles cut down from the pediments of buildings, photographs of the sporting heroes, Erich Honecker’s trilby, some Stasi files; hidden microphones; re-created interrogation cells; a full-scale Party hunting lodge. I say as much; Börner smiles. Museums are always archives of success, he says, shrines to victors. But there should be museums of error, I say, especially to errors that ruined lives. The trouble is, he says, who would want to visit one?

  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.

  KARLA 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 topple
d 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.