Blood and Belonging (11 page)

Like all forms of psychological triteness, this must be true of someone. But then how did those insecure, neurotic, subordinated individuals—people like poor Gunther Böhnke— find the nerve to bring down a whole regime? The negative image of the East German certainly flatters the narcissism of the West Germans, but it renders the history of unification incomprehensible.

Böhnke is detached about the bitter comedy of his country's fate since 1989. “After the Wall came down, our people went West and they came back with incredible stories. Over there, you could buy fresh lettuce and tomatoes in January. Can you imagine? And now that the supermarkets have arrived here, so can we. Only we can't afford them and
our rents have gone up five times.”

He shrugs and smiles. “When we walked around Leipzig in the rain in October, all we wanted was a little more democracy, a little more decency. Nobody wanted to be unificated.”

Unificated.

Nobody wanted cabaret to die, either, but now, says Böhnke, you can see everything on German television. The satire there is sharper, the timing is faster. Who needs cabaret now? Böhnke took his show on the road to the West and it did not do well. Too local, too Saxon, too provincial. He doesn't want the old days back, but as he looks about the dark, nicotine-stained walls of the bar where he has spent the best years of his life, at the posters of the old shows, at the chandelier above the table where the old Stasi microphone used to be hidden—“Can you hear me, Boris? Am I speaking loud enough?”—it seems clear that the bell jar of the dissident culture inside which his life once made sense, inside which, once upon a time, you could trade cabaret tickets for sausage from your butcher—all this is being “unificated,” too.

A
CADEMIXER
was where it used to happen in the 1980s. Now, in the 1990s, it happens at U-2, a discotheque in the basement of a gray office slab nearby. The music is from Munich; the beer is from Munich; the disc jockey is from Munich; so are the pinball machines and the dry ice. It's a low-ceilinged place, and the sound ricochets off the walls and the rhythm comes up through the soles of your feet, and you find yourself slipping into a state of torpor. Girls dance alone on top of the amplifiers: toss, shake, thrust, toss, shake, thrust, their eyes closed, alone in the cavern of sound. Boys wander from pinball machine to pinball machine, from video
game to video game, eyeing the girls. It's any discotheque, anywhere in the world, except that this low basement used to house the interrogation cellars of the secret police. Everyone knows this. It is no dark secret. The girls behind the bar will tell you about it and even point to some murals on the walls painted by former prisoners. Three years ago, it was an irresistible combination: the sadistic glamour of the Stasi meets the erotic glamour of the Munich discotheque. Getting into U-2 once gave entry into two forbidden worlds for the price of one. But the glamour of the forbidden is all gone: now it's just a disco, like any other.
“Alles ist cool,”
the girl at the bar shouts in my ear, as the rhythm shakes the floor and the strobe lights turn her clear white face into a butterfly mask that dances up and floats away into the air.

In the DDR as a whole, there were half a million informers for the Stasi. The files that once were lodged in buildings like this contained billions of pieces of paper: whispered denunciations in cafés, hearsay in buses, cutting remarks from colleagues—a minutely indexed library of a whole society's malice and spite. But what could people do? If they didn't contribute their quota of vicious gossip, they might find themselves down in the cells. The circle of incrimination became so wide that it is a wonder anyone was capable of recovering his civic courage. But some did. Those who didn't now keep making the same tired, self-exculpating gesture with their hands: “It was my world. It was all I knew.”

What, exactly, is one to make of the fact that an interrogation center has been turned into a discotheque? Should there be a memorial here, or a museum instead? The music is so loud that it wears down your middle-aged interiority and fills up every empty space inside.

“Coming to terms with the past” does not imply a serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness. It suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it from memory.

—Theodor Adorno

“What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” (1959)

Ask yourself what the girl at the bar, mixing a daiquiri, or the boy with wet-look hair, wearing a Benetton “Colors of the World” T-shirt, is supposed to make of the fact that people were beaten and interrogated here. Pull a solemn face? Is solemnity any more genuine a “coming to terms with the past” than a fervent desire to forget about it altogether? I cannot ask such questions of the pair beside me at the bar, their faces a pair of dancing discs in the strobe light. How could they be expected to know what I was talking about? Honecker is already ancient history to them. This girl and boy were thirteen, maybe less, when his regime collapsed. “It's not my problem,” I can hear them say. “It's not
my
past.”

THE BATTLE OF NATIONS MEMORIAL

It resembles a vast Teutonic funeral pyre in soot-blackened granite, so that as the rough-cut stones rise into the air, they seem to be offering the body of some mighty warrior to the flames, except that on the flat bier at the very top of the monument there is nothing—no body to be committed to the sky—just a view from all sides of the city that has grown up around it. It is so large that it outranks any war memorial in Europe: a glowering pile of Wilhelmine stone, set off by
itself, like the family's difficult relative, in a park on the outskirts of Leipzig. It is altogether an embarrassment, in its truculent bad taste, its stolid, vulgar monumentality. The rain streaks its heavy flanks and it seems to sneer: Come on, try and dynamite me, you will fail. I am too large, I have been here too long. I will survive you all.

It was begun, soon after the unification of Germany in 1871, to commemorate the Battle of Nations in 1813, when a million soldiers, from Russia, Austria, Britain, France, Germany, and Poland, fought for a day and decided the fate of Europe. Napoleon's defeat at day's end signaled the beginning of the end of his empire. It was the first time that Germans from the different princedoms had stood and fought together as Germans, and even though some Germans also fought on Napoleon's side, this battlefield can claim to be one of the places where the German nation was born. And it is this which was commemorated when Kaiser Wilhelm II presided over the monument's final unveiling on the hundredth anniversary of the battle, in 1913.

One can imagine the flag-decked reviewing stand, the forest of imperial plumes, the glinting breastplates, the tight leggings flowing into high cavalry boots; the swords clinking against thighs, the hard imperial faces, the heels that click together in greeting, the helmeted heads that curtly nod to each other—all these marionettes conscious of being at the acme of a glory symbolized by the almighty pile that rose above their heads.

The sculptor who decorated the monument chose to flatter the Wilhelmine grandees by imagining them as Teutonic warriors. There is one such master image, in the frieze at the base of the monument, of Saint Michael as German knight, with a helmet that curves down to his
cheekbones and eyes that stare into the predestined greatness of the German future. Around him writhe the symbols of the natural world: lions, tigers, and dragons, all subdued to his will, and a long spotted snake that hisses and smiles. These creatures are charged with ambivalence: are they inner demons or the forces of evil? They seem to be both, because his gaze manages to be both haunted and resolute, both anguished and determined. To the left of Saint Michael, like leering monkeys, a pair of grinning death's-heads mock his solemn gaze.

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.

“
B
UT 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?