Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff Page B

nation, yet, after forty-five years in different states, barely able to recognize each other.
    â€œThey are nice people,” the new West German owner of Leipzig’s oldest restaurant had told me over dinner before the cabaret. “Nice people. Only they don’t know how to work. I swear to you. I have had to start all over again. Teaching them to show up on time, ring up customers’ bills properly, keep their hands out of the soup. I’m not in the restaurant business. I’m a social worker.” He had talked about his fellow Germans with the same affectionate condescension British colonial administrators used to adopt when discussing Tanganyikans.
    Unification has not been the disquieting reunion of two lost twins on a suburban lawn but a colonial occupation. Thesound you hear when you wake up in Leipzig in the guts of old buildings—lath, plaster, nails, window frames, boards— being tossed down those long, echoing plastic chutes into builders’ trash bins. The façades are retained—there must be something to pin the Benetton sign on—but the guts of the city are being removed.
    It is only to be expected, Böhnke thinks, that when a social system collapses, those who were mostly its victims should be blamed for its failure. It is just the way of the world that a people who actually brought the regime down should now be dismissed as whining scroungers by the same West Germans who once sat in front of their television sets and applauded their civic courage.
    As the writer Peter Schneider used to say, the Wall was a mirror. Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, the West Germans asked, who is the fairest one of all? And the Mirror unfailingly replied: You are. For forty-five years, the division of a nation into two states offered both sides the necessary negative image of each other. Why should this end just because the Wall has come down? Why should this end just because everyone now lives in the same nation?
    But something has changed in this game of mirrors. Before the revolution, the negative image in West Germany was the DDR, the state itself and its odious institutions. Now the negative image is the nation, the people themselves: their whining passivity. Now that the state has vanished, the people itself—the nation—is blamed for its ever having existed.
    The blame, curiously enough, is often apportioned from the East German side. There is no shortage of former East Germans doing well in the West by loathing their former brothers and sisters. Thus the former DDR novelist MonikaMaron: “What I like least about my fellow ex-DDR citizens is their belief that the whole world owes them something, and that it particularly owes them their dignity. They seem to have forgotten that until three years ago they had not exactly looked after that dignity.” Hans Joachim Maatz, an East German psychiatrist, has written a book that tells the German public that forty-five years of totalitarianism produced an East German personality structure characterized by “repressed emotion, insecurity, and latent aggression.” He goes on:
    The basic human rights to be oneself, to have an opinion, to be understood and accepted as an individual were secured, nowhere in that society … Only those could live safely in this system who adjusted and sacrificed their spontaneous liveliness, their honesty, their ability to criticize, to the dull but relatively danger-free life of a subordinate.
    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