Blood and Belonging (14 page)

The real problem is how to explain why an ethnic definition of the German nation withstood all available competition. For competition there always was. The Frankfurt Parliament, convened after the 1848 revolution that swept away the German princelings, even went so far as to accord German citizenship, not merely to those who were ethnically German, but “to all those living in Germany … even if they are not so by birth or language.” It was to such traditions, even though they were swept away, that postwar Germany turned in trying to define an acceptable image of itself.

Besides an explicitly liberal and civic tradition, there was also what might be called “state nationalism.” This form of nationalism provided the ideological impetus for the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia after the Napoleonic defeats, and then for the unification project of Bismarck which culminated in 1871. Unlike the reactionary ethnic nationalism of the Romantics, “state nationalism” had a strongly modernizing impetus. It sought above all to forge a nation-state, not by calling up the romance of the Volk, but by creating collective civic attachment to the institutions of the Reich. Hitler's demonic achievement was to force together Reichsnational and Volksnational consciousness into the ideology of German totalitarianism.

The other competition to ethnic nationalism was provided by German social democracy, the strongest workers' movement in Europe before 1914, and one marked by a strongly internationalist and anti-nationalist consciousness. The social democratic tradition was persistently, if unsuccessfully, opposed to ethnic particularism, and its residue remained alive in the socialist ideology of the DDR.

On the one hand, the parties with workers' support refused to speak the language of the nation, believing it to
be chauvinist, bourgeois, and reactionary. On the other hand, traditional German conservatism failed to create support for constitutional nationalism among the German workers. Into this void stepped Hitler. The disastrous failure of both the left and the right to anchor support for constitutional, civic nationalism among the German working class left the way open for Hitler to wean them onto ethnic nationalism of an especially virulent kind. He was the first German politician to turn nationalism into a popular mass movement. His politics of resentment, directed at the victorious Allies held responsible for the punitive Peace of Versailles and at the Jewish conspiracy held responsible for the Great Depression, shrewdly categorized the Volk as noble victim. A disoriented and defeated people turned to Hitler because his nationalism flattered them, caressed their uncertainties away, and made them believe someone else was to blame for their sufferings. Nationalism offered Party believers a politics of intoxication, a heady state of permanent indignation, exaltation, and occasional violence that offered escape from the normal tedium of ordinary life.

Neither German liberalism nor German social democracy proved strong enough to stop Hitler, but if one writes them out of the story, the history of German nationalism becomes one long, grim, and featureless march toward him. Moreover, if you exclude the German liberal and social democratic traditions from the story, you cannot explain the postwar revival of a liberal and social democratic conscience. You cannot explain, in other words, the very fact of forty-five years of democracy in the Federal Republic. What is the moral of this story? German history is not its fate. The future is not the prisoner of the past. Only nationalists believe so.

THE MEDUSA RESTAURANT AND THE CAFÉ VOLTAIRE

Leipzig and Frankfurt airports are only forty-five minutes' flying time apart. The cities are of roughly the same size; both have huge international trade fairs; they are twinned with each other, which means that, since unification, Frankfurt officials travel to Leipzig to tell them how to run their city. But if they are twins, you cannot tell it from their airports. In Leipzig, there are two gates, three planes, a bar, a couple of ticket counters, a rent-a-car agency, and that's it. In Frankfurt Airport, I lose count of the number of gates at 100. I lose count of the bars, restaurants, clothes shops, porn cinemas, newsagents, bookstores, rent-a-car agencies. It is not so much an airport as a marble-and-glass souk at the hub of the new Europe. Huge aircraft nose up to the windows of the departure lounges and peer in upon the waiting passengers like whales in an aquarium. You can imagine what impression Frankfurt Airport must have made upon Frau Schindler, Herr Börner, or Herr Böhnke when they arrived with their cardboard suitcases off the plane from Leipzig for the first time. The stewardesses with clipboards under their arms click by on the marble; businessmen with suitbags on their backs dash past, heading for the taxi rank; in the blur of movement, you can sometimes make out a small island of stillness: an East German couple, holding on to their children, gazing about them, baffled, motionless, and unnoticed. Around them, the cash registers ping, tills open and slam, cameras and computers, personal organizers, and Walkmen slowly rotate on the turning stands inside their glass cases, enticing and out of reach.

In fifteen years, will it still be possible to tell an East German and a West German apart? Will each be tanned,
speak the same American English, wear the same crushed-linen suits, look as tired and harassed as these German businessmen running to the taxi stand after a week on the road? Will the market end up making one nation out of two states? Perhaps. But memory is stubborn and unreconciled. There may be one Germany in fifteen years, but there will be two German memories for much longer than that.

O
N A WALL-MOUNTED TELEVISION
in the bar of my hotel in Frankfurt, I catch the eight o'clock news.

Caption: “Three Deaths in Arson Attack.

Violent extremists who apparently emanate from the right-wing extremist scene killed three people in the night. The criminals set fire to two houses in Mölln, in Schleswig-Holstein, which were occupied mainly by Turkish families. One woman and two girls died as a result of the flames.

“In two telephone calls to the police, the arsonist signed off with ‘Heil Hitler.'”

On the screen, I see dazed firefighters, their yellow jackets wet with water and their eyes red with smoke, leaving the gutted two-story brick house, carrying a small, shiny green coffin.

“One of those who died was a ten-year-old girl. The mother had been living in Mölln for more than twenty years. Her ten-year-old daughter was actually born there.”

On the screen I hear Chancellor Kohl say, “What is manifesting itself here is a kind of brutality which is totally incomprehensible for any human sensibility.” Then he says something strange. “I should also like at this moment to express most particularly my sympathy for our Turkish fellow citizens, both male and female, who have been living among us for many years.”

Fellow citizens. It is a curious lapse. Everyone knows that Turks may be born in West Germany, work there all their lives, pay taxes, but they cannot become citizens.

A
T THE MEDUSA,
in Frankfurt's Sachsenhausen district, the Turkish musicians are picking out melodies on a lute, tambourine, lyre, and zither. Men are dancing with men, women with women, weaving among the tables, into the passages of this whitewashed labyrinth below the streets, while the waiters ford the seething dance floor, carrying trays of beer and kebab and Turkish salad.

Huseyn and Zu, in their twenties, both speak faultless German. They came here from Turkey as children. Germany is all they know. Zu could, as they say, “pass for German”: she has teased blond hair and light skin, and having worked for American Express, she speaks that strange American English which is the second language of Frankfurt, that English which actually declares, “I'm not just a German. I'm a European.”

Huseyn holds her hand; she strokes his cheek at his beard line. I can tell they'd rather not talk about the Nazi attack at Mölln. They'd like to push it away, for another night, so that they can listen to the zither and dance and forget about how it really is, out there in the streets. For the real issue for them is not anger or fear—though there is that in abundance. “When I hear Kohl express his regrets, it's enough to make me explode,” Huseyn mutters. The real issue is where they belong now, whether they can belong anywhere. “I don't know where to go,” Huseyn says. “I grew up here, I speak German. I love Turkey, but I'm not at home there anymore.” Then he adds, “But I'm always thinking about going back.” He reaches over and takes Zu's hand again.

In Germany, they can be seen together in the street. They can't live together, because their parents won't allow it, but an understanding uncle sometimes lets them use his place for the night. Huseyn and Zu smile bashfully. Now, in Turkey, Zu says, playing with her beer mat, “that would be out of the question for me. Not for him, but for me.”

Even if Huseyn does get citizenship here eventually, he doubts that it will make much difference. “What am I supposed to do with a passport?” he says bitterly. “Hang it around my neck?” Will a passport make people stop calling him a dirty Turk? Will a passport make German workers share a cigarette with him on the factory floor? He has a Turkish face, and the formal rights conferred by a passport will not change the looks he gets from Germans. One day, Huseyn might belong to the German state, but never to the German nation.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
it is raining in the playground of a local Frankfurt school. The children and their parents are kneeling on the pavement finishing their signs, which are running a bit in the rim. The signs and placards have been written by the children and they say things like “The Foreigners are my Friends” and “We are all Turks.” There are perhaps 150 teachers, parents, and children, and they set off from the playground for a march through their neighborhood.

We are making a gesture, I tell myself, as I join in the march through the rainy streets of this suburb, beside all these children, with their hopeful, innocent faces, holding up these rain-streaked placards with their decent sentiments. We will not count ourselves among the silent majority. We will not be counted among those who did nothing. The question, of course, is not whether decent Germans are prepared
to stand up. In these weeks and months, millions stand up and march. But what exactly does it signify, this innocent and honorable form of moral narcissism? It says: I am ashamed of my country, but I am not responsible for its worst acts. So as we march, we dissociate ourselves from Mölln, from Rostock, from Solingen, from the list of towns that now have acquired their association with flames in the night, with torches, with flick knives and screams, and the stamp of boots.

In the crowd I fall in with a middle-aged, balding engineer walking hand in hand with his daughter. I tell him I've just been in Leipzig. “Just back from the East, are you? I was there for six months myself. What a shithouse. Hopeless. Nobody does a decent day's work. We're going to have to start again. They're shiftless, hopeless. Never stop whining.” He shudders. “Glad to be home,” he says, squeezing his daughter's hand. Of course, he would never think of saying about the Turks what he says so casually about his fellow Germans. Curious people, who like each other so little.

As the little demonstration wends its way through the streets, past silent spectators whose faces do not register what they think of the banners, I get to talking to a young woman, named Sabine, whose children, she explains, are as yet too young to attend the school. So why is she here, then? She has a long, tanned, beautiful face and sharp blue eyes, and wears her hair in an auburn and golden braid down her back. She has a delicate, mournful distance to her as she speaks. “I'm not sure. Just to be here. Just so I'm not sitting at home.” Then she pulls her long black coat around her shoulders and shivers. “There is so much ugliness in this society now. So much hatred.” And then, with anguish in her voice, she says, “I cannot keep it away from my children. I want to. But I cannot.” We walk for a long time in silence,
and then she stops and strokes rain from her hair, and says, as if finding the words for why she is here at last, “I'm afraid. For the first time in Germany, I am afraid.”

O
NE-THIRD OF THE POPULATION
of Frankfurt is foreign-born: Yugoslavs, Turks, Spaniards, Greeks, Italians, and 140 smaller nationalities. They have no citizenship rights: they cannot vote or hold civil service jobs, and their status—even if they happen to be born in Germany—is always temporary.

Rosa Wolf explains these facts to me in the bar at the Café Voltaire, in downtown Frankfurt. She works for the city government's multiculturalism bureau, and she is not sure whether anything her office has done is capable of stemming the rising tide of xenophobia in her city. Moreover, if the right wing wins the next local elections, they are likely to close down her office. Already, a local Christian Democratic politician has written an article linking asylum seekers with drug pushing and welfare fraud. She called publicly for him to be charged with racial incitement, and the mayor disciplined her for violating her civil servant's political neutrality. Rosa is cheerful, undogmatic, and unrepentant.

We turn out to have a lot in common. Both of us are children of the 1960s who have lived long enough to see the icons of our youth turned into museum pieces. The Café Voltaire was once a center of Frankfurt's left-wing counterculture. Now it hosts book launches for Frankfurt publishers. Then it was where the feverish demonstrations against American bases were planned. Now the painted mural of Rosa Luxemburg and Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, behind us on the bar, seems a vaguely pathetic monument to lost illusion.

“We wanted to change German society,” she says, with a rueful look, as if aware how odd such thoughts must seem
now. “We wanted to make it less obedient. The trouble was that we succeeded.” In wry detail, she catalogues her own difficulties with her children. Parents from 1968 often find their words coming back to haunt them: I had heard nothing about this revolt against obedience in Leipzig, of course. It is another part of postwar German history that the two Germanys never actually shared.