Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff

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.
    â€˜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