Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff Page A

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 asif 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
    â€œIt 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