The New Old World (43 page)

But the
pièces de resistance
of today's culture industry are missing: television, press, publishing. Not a single TV station of moment operates in Berlin. The big West German publishing houses—many of them originally from Berlin—have not budged from Frankfurt, Hamburg or Munich, at most setting up secondary
offices in the city. Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck have bought up the two leading dailies,
Tagesspiegel
and
Berliner Zeitung
, with respective readerships in the West and East, and are battling it out with heavy investment in a circulation war. But neither paper has any national weight, or approaches the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
or the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
in resources or quality. If matters continue as they are, the paradoxical prospect is of a major capital city without any newspaper of authority. The tabloid monopoly of Springer's
Bild-Zeitung
remains—in the circumstances, perhaps fortunately—in Hamburg. It is hard to imagine this constellation persisting once the federal government and diplomatic corps are truly back in the centre of Berlin. But for the moment the signs are not encouraging.

This is the view from above, where money shapes a culture. What of the impulses below? In the twentieth century, the creativity of a metropolis has nearly always been linked with its capacity to attract immigrants. Here Berlin should in principle enjoy a privileged position. It is often thought, not least by Germans themselves, that the city already harbours the highest concentration of foreigners in the Federal Republic. This is an illusion. In fact, the proportion is lower than in any major city of the West: 12 per cent, as against 21 in Munich, 24 in Stuttgart, 28 in Frankfurt—a graphic reflection of relative employment opportunities.
¹²
Much the largest immigrant community in Germany is, of course, the Turks. Their lack of political or cultural integration into German society, by comparison with immigrant groups in Britain or France, is usually—and not without substantial reason—attributed to the Federal Republic's iniquitous citizenship laws, based essentially on blood-line. But it is also true that Germany's lack of a colonial past has contributed to the difficulties: there was no empire to equip new entrants with the elements of a common language, which certainly facilitated integration of arrivals from the Caribbean or Maghreb. If anything, the boot of an imperial past was on the other foot—Ottoman domains far exceeding Hohenzollern. In France, Turkish immigrants have proved the most closed of all immigrant groups, with lower rates of exogamy—the surest mechanism of assimilation—than any other. Predictably, their contribution to the diversification of German culture at any level, from letters to sport, has so far been very limited. The change of
laws and official climate promised by the new government may start to change this.

But beyond its Turkish enclaves, what Berlin can in particular expect are major waves of immigrants from Poland, Russia and the Baltic region—its traditional hinterlands. The building-trades are already largely Polish. The Russian community—artists, gangsters, students, merchants, claimants of Jewish origin—is rising daily: an impressive spectacle of social mixture at any Orthodox service. It is now common to hear Russian spoken all over Germany, but this startling change is due to the exodus of
Volksdeutsche
from Kazakhstan. The catchment in Berlin comes more largely from classical streams. Out of all this, a metropolis that is cosmopolitan in a stronger sense than anything Germany has known hitherto is likely to emerge.

Logically, the counter-cultural Left has sought to make the most of the newcomers, as a glance at the pages of the
Tageszeitung
, Berlin's counterpart to
Libération
in Paris or
Il Manifesto
in Rome (naturally no equivalent in England), makes clear. The
taz
has the least national audience of this trio of dailies that are offspring of '68, but thanks to the value of the building it owns, is financially the most secure.
¹³
Theoretically, it should benefit from a large student population—the city has three major universities—that showed its mettle last winter in prolonged demonstrations against its deteriorating conditions of study, blocking the Brandenburger Tor at all hours. In practice, the German university system is now so institutionally waterlogged that it offers little impetus to any wider culture. Here the legacy of '68 has been at its most equivocal, failing to abolish the archaism of too many features of German academic life, while superadding dubiously populist ones to them. The result has been an intellectual stalemate, identified with a generation of placeholders, that has triggered powerful reactions elsewhere.

By the eighties, talent had passed to the right—typically out of the campus and into the world of
belles lettres
and critical journalism. Bohrer pioneered this turn when he was editor of the literary pages of the
FAZ
. Here was where younger spirits could make stylish sorties against received social-liberal wisdom, and
test unconventional ideas without too much worthy inhibition. Today the liveliest publicists are still to be found in this—by German standards—somewhat rakehell atmosphere rather than in the stodgier pages of
Die Zeit
. So it is with the newer generations at large. The enormous international prestige of Habermas is misleading. Thirty-year-olds, even of impeccably progressive outlook, can often be heard expressing more admiration for the brio of Jünger or Schmitt. Social Democracy has come to power without much depth of direct support in intellectual opinion. At this level, the trend—first with the radicalization to the left of the sixties, then with the opposite swing of recent years—has gone against it. If by the end the Kohl regime had few sympathizers, Schröder cannot count on any prior groundswell in his favour.

In Berlin, the ingredients of a classic modern capital lie scattered or incomplete. Perhaps they will never become a coherent whole, of the kind we know or remember elsewhere, and the city will offer instead only the image of a post-modern dyslexia. Many Germans hope so. For the new government, however, more is at stake than simply the fate of the city. The larger meaning of the move to Berlin was always to bring East Germany back into the centre of national life, as an equal part of the country. Potentially, the transfer of supreme political power into the midst of the former DDR should have far-reaching compensatory effects—psychological and practical—for its population. But the inordinate delay over the move, and the Western bias in its implementation, have weakened expectations. In many ways, despite massive federal investment, the gulf between the two parts of Germany remains as deep as ever. Western largesse and contempt have gone together. In 1990 no attempt was made to write a Constitution in common for a united Germany, as the
Grundgesetz
had laid down should be done. The DDR was simply annexed, and Western codes imposed down to the smallest regulations. Felicity and prosperity for all were promised in exchange. Ten years later, unemployment is officially running at 18 per cent, but more tough-minded economists reckon the real rate is closer to 40 per cent. Two-thirds of the Eastern population tell pollsters they do not feel full citizens in their own country.

Ideally, what the ‘new
Bundesländer
' needed after unification was an indigenous political movement capable of expressing
the common experience of a humiliated people, and forging a powerful regional identity out of it—something like an Eastern equivalent of the CSU, the hugely successful party that has ruled Bavaria without interruption since the fifties, while never ceasing to be an important player in federal politics. In East Germany, of course, the sociological lay of the land would have situated such a regional party on the left, rather than right, end of the spectrum. But such a movement was never in the cards, because of the divisions within Eastern society itself. Some of these were interprovincial. Saxons, Thuringians, Brandenburgers, Pomeranians each had their own pre-Communist histories, and none any liking for East Berlin, whose privileges under the DDR were as much resented as those of West Berlin in the Federal Republic.

But more deeply, the Eastern population was split by the Communist experience itself, between those who suffered and those who subsisted. By the standards of Yezhov or Ceaus¸escu, or even Gottwald, the DDR was a mild regime—the execution count was low, and the labour camp absent. But it was also a staggeringly invasive one, whose systems of surveillance and delation honeycombed society to a degree never reached, if only for reasons of technology, even in the Russia of the thirties.
¹⁴
Levels of repression and fear were quite sufficient to create a large permanently embittered minority of the population, and leave unhappy memories in many more. At the same time, the regime assured a secure and orderly existence for those who did not step out of line; decent unpolitical lives could be led; there was little material misery, even some scope for a residual idealism. Post-Communist attitudes are thus polarized sharply, between a vengeful minority on one side, a majority with more mixed feelings about its experience of the two systems, and a minority on the other side attached to much of what it recalls of the old order and hostile to what it has encountered in the new.

Only the last has found stable political expression. The PDS, as successor organization to the SED that ran East Germany, was often dismissed in the early years after unification as simply the party of ‘
Ostalgie
'—a crypto-Stalinist throw-back to the DDR, dependent on the ageing functionaries and accomplices of a police state. In fact,
more than any other post-Communist party in Eastern Europe, the PDS has evolved into a lively radical movement of the Left. Much of the credit for this transformation is due to its leader Gregor Gysi, the only Jewish politician of note—not by accident from the East—in today's Germany, whose quick wits, imaginative flair and irreverent sense of fun reverse every stereotype, to the point of making most Western parliamentarians look like heavy apparatchiks. Together with a handful of colleagues—Chairman Lothar Bisky, a former scientist, is the most important—he rejuvenated the ranks of the party and widened its support. At first confined mainly to the north of the old DDR, and very reliant on SED veterans, this year it scored over 20 per cent evenly throughout East Germany, with its strongest vote coming from younger, well-educated women, who now often provide its personable representatives in
Länder
institutions. The appeal of the PDS reaches to an even newer generation: enthusiastic teenage campaigners thronged headquarters on election night. Numerically, with over ninety thousand members, this is much the largest party in East Germany. The bureaucratic weight of the past is still visible in the internal structures of the PDS, especially as it tries to gain a foot-hold in the unfamiliar ground of the West German Left, but it is diminishing.

The SPD, by comparison, will not only be governing the whole country from the new capital, but with 35 per cent of the vote in the East is now the leading electoral force in all the new
Länder
. Yet organizationally, with no more than 27,000 members in the whole zone, it remains a shadow of the PDS. In the first years after the war, the SPD under Kurt Schumacher stood firmly against the division of Germany, with far more feeling for national unity than the CDU. But during the long decades of the Cold War it over-adapted to the Bonn Republic, to the point where in 1989–90 the party leadership—Lafontaine was then its candidate for chancellor—completely misjudged the dynamic of unification, proving incapable of either welcoming or canalizing it into a better institutional form. The perception that it was basically reluctant to accept national unity handed electoral victory to Kohl. Few voices were raised against the folly of this course, whose deeper origins have been trenchantly criticized by party freethinker Tilman Fichter.
¹⁵

The SPD now has a historic chance to start again. Breaking Cold War taboos, Lafontaine lost no time after the election in
authorizing the formation of the first SPD–PDS governing coalition, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern—a Red–Deep-Red alliance that is a potential majority across most of the East. Both parties stand to gain from cooperation: the PDS becoming a normal political partner, the SPD connecting with local realities from which it has been isolated. Social democracy will need to be in much closer touch with ways of life and feeling in the East, if popular disappointments are to be avoided, that might otherwise be explosive. The distinguished oral historian Lutz Niethammer, who now teaches in Jena, believes that beneath the surface calm of the first post-Communist student generation, there is often a suppressed rage at the way in which the whole world of their childhood, with which their most intimate memories are bound up, is now dismissed as worthless by the official version of the past. Meanwhile, widespread youth unemployment and urban dislocation are so much kindling in the streets outside.

Here, in ominously concentrated form, is the general problem on which the fate of the new government will turn. Germany now has over four million registered unemployed. This is not a society like Britain, where rule by the radical Right long inured public opinion to the permanence of large-scale unemployment. Massive joblessness is still perceived on all sides as a scandal. The SPD's promise to tackle it is likely to make or break the incoming regime. How does it plan to address the issue? Its stance is twoheaded. Schröder's answer is the nebulous ‘Alliance for Work'—a neo-corporatist entente between government, firms and unions to improve supply-side conditions for investment, combining lower payroll taxes with wage restraint and a more flexible labour market. The Federation of German Industries, under the hawkish leadership of Hans-Olaf Henkel, has already expressed its hostility to the higher energy taxes that are the price-tag on this scheme. Lafontaine, on the other hand, has gone for demand-side measures: lowering of personal taxation, and reduction of interest rates. Here the contrast with Britain could not be more pointed. Where Brown's first act was to transfer control over monetary policy to the Bank of England, Lafontaine's opening move was to attack the Bundesbank publicly for persisting with a deflationary course in defiance of government objectives. There has been a predictable outcry at this break with German convention.