Blood and Belonging (10 page)

It rained in October, but the people kept parading under umbrellas. They held vigils for reform and placed candles by the thousands at the walls of churches so that their wax ran together, fusing into translucent pools on the pavement. Meanwhile, photographers noticed that the expression on policemen's faces had changed. They posed for pictures in front of their squad cars and kept their batons in their belts, and as every day passed, it became less and less clear who was in charge. At schools around Leipzig, teachers would tell students not to go to the demonstrations, and when students went anyway they would discover their own teachers marching beside them. Next morning, they would wink at each other in class.

By late October, the placards in Karl Marx Platz were reading “The DDR belongs to the people, not the party.” And then, when the Wall came down on November 9, the demonstrators discovered to their immense surprise that they had brought about a revolution without the loss of a single life. It was a revolution whose symbol, appropriately enough, was that eerie flag you saw in the crowds in Bulgaria and Romania, too, with the hammer and sickle cut out of it, as one cuts holes for eyes in a bedsheet to make a ghost costume for children.

A state that has a flag with a hole in it is a state that no longer knows what it is. Some who waved that flag hoped that it would remain true to the color red; others simply did not know what else to wave. But there were a few who began waving the flag of the other Germany, the one across the Wall.

A month after the Wall came down, there appeared in Karl Marx Platz a new slogan, first on one hand-scribbled banner, then on a dozen, then on a thousand:
“Deutschland, einig Vaterland.”
Germany, one fatherland. In the space of six weeks, the cry of “We are the people!” had turned into the chant “We are one people!”

Germany, one fatherland. The slogan now seems genuinely mysterious. One fatherland. What could this mean, after all? Is it a statement of fact? An expression of a wish? Or a puzzled question?

I
N A SHOP
in the arcade beneath the old Rathaus in Leipzig, you can buy a photo album that records nearly every day of that period from September to December 1989. The most remarkable faces in the book are the ones that stare out of the crowds at the camera. In every single case, their faces are tight with fear. The fear has broken their smiles in half; it has stopped words halfway out of their mouths; it has snapped their gestures of defiance in two.

The fear is more than fear of arrest; more than the suspicion that the photographers are working for the police. It is historical fear, of the kind one might have seen on the barricades of Europe in 1848, the anxiety of a people who have taken a step into the unknown and do not know what will happen next. If all revolutions begin with that mysterious step into the unknown, the fear you see on these faces makes one wonder how they ever dared to take that first step. Yet, as you turn the pages of the album, as the demonstrations move into their second, third, fourth week, you can see this fear slowly begin to disappear. Faces unclench, gestures acquire defiance, laughter becomes full-throated. By November, the crowd no longer wonders what it has got itself
into. Now it believes that history is marching alongside it. In their thousands, the people of Leipzig pour up the streets into Karl Marx Platz, laughing and waving at the cameras.

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.

A
FTER 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
sound 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.