Blood and Belonging (16 page)

The Heimat Ogla and her daughter dreamed of bears no relation to the one they are venturing out to explore. They are surprised by everything, by the twenty kinds of soap in the stores, for example, and by the brutal speed of the traffic. Most of all, they are surprised by all the foreigners. “I thought I was coming to Germany,” said Olga's daughter. “Instead, it's Turkey,” she says, wrinkling her nose in dismay. She says this in Russian because she speaks no German.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In guilt and reparation for its ethnic nationalist past, the German constitution enshrined a commitment to grant asylum to all victims of political persecution, only to find it could not keep its promise to its own conscience. It is not the number of asylum seekers that constitutes the problem. It is also that postwar liberal Germany saw itself so much as a post-nationalist or even anti-nationalist state that it found itself incapable of defining clear national interests in relation to international migration. Thus, for German liberals like Rosa Wolf, the asylum crisis is the first moment in the postwar period when they feel forced to renounce the utopia of a post-nationalist state and think more soberly of Germany's national interest. Even for liberals, in other words, some nationalist discourse is unavoidable. They have to talk about quotas, limits, repatriations, putting the German unemployed first. All of this would be natural enough, were such a language not disgraced by its associations with the right.

Yet the times are no less disobliging to the German right. The arrival of a multicultural society in Germany's cities makes it absurd to think of the Germans as a mono-ethnic Volk, and the persistent divide between East and West Germans must make anyone wonder just what the identity of the Volk actually consists in.

Despite these violent incursions of reality into the fantasy of German identity, the legal instruments that define German identity remain defined by the ethnic nationalist past. The criterion of citizenship remains one of ethnic descent on the basis of
jus sanguinis
. The resulting contradiction between reality and ethnic fantasy produces manifest
unreason. To most outsiders, and to many Germans, it seems absurd that a Turk, born and brought up in Germany, should be unable to become a citizen, while a German from Siberia, with no history of residence in the country and little language competence, should be entitled to citizenship and to extensive settlement assistance.

The absurdity of German citizenship law is forcing conservative Germans to confront the incoherence, in a modern multicultural world, of grounding national identity in the Volk. At the same time, liberal Germans are discovering that a post-national identity built on guilt and reparation is not enough. It is as if both sides are slowly being pushed, by the force of reality, into abandoning a utopia, in the one case, of a Germany for the Germans, in the other, of a Germany open to the whole world.

At the same time, Germany is at last, with unification, passing from the stage of being a hungry nation to being a sated one. Its borders are settled; its lost peoples are coming home. Its task now is not, as some liberals suppose, to pass beyond nationalism altogether and move into bland Europeanism but instead to move from the ethnic nationalism of its past to the civic nationalism of a possible future. This could be the moment, in other words, to bury the idea of the German Volk forever. In practical terms, this would mean moving away from identification with the nation toward identification with the state, i.e., away from a citizenship based on the fiction of ethnic identity toward one based on allegiance to the values of democracy.

The chief obstacle to this enterprise lies, not with the ethnic minorities themselves, but with conservatives who dream of a Germany that has never existed and with liberals who suppose that patriotism is for fools.

The result is an impasse, a political and cultural void where a believable image of Germany ought to be found. In this void where a nation ought to be, there is only the state, and it lacks the will to do what any state must do, which is to conserve its monopoly of the means of violence. Every day that this impasse persists, every day that the state's authority weakens, Leo, Leech and their friends grow stronger.

I
BOARD MY PLANE
for London wondering at the irony that the Germans, who invented the idea of ethnic nationalism, should actually like themselves so little. What would it be like, I wonder, for a German to be genuinely at peace with his nation? To love it for what it is, not for what it might be, to love it with all its history, all its tragedy, all its violence? What might that nationalism be like? Is such a love possible?

UKRAINE

WINE BOTTLES AND SOAP

On the flight from Vienna to Kiev, I find myself examining a small plastic bottle of Austrian table wine served with my airline meal. Archaeologists say you can infer the shape of a whole civilization from the smallest trinket. My little wine bottle is capitalism epitomized: efficient, cosmopolitan, without distinction.

Beneath me the rug of the Hungarian plain crumples up into the Carpathian mountains and we enter Ukrainian airspace. I have been across the border many times. My sudden attention to the flotsam of capitalist life is a sign that I am reluctant to leave this world behind.

What will I choose as the tiny symbol that stands for the whole magnificent, dreadful, failed attempt to imagine an alternative to capitalism?

As we begin our descent into Kiev, I decide it will be the soap: the tiny pink bars with crenellations that await me in what I know will be the dank, evil-smelling bathroom of my Kiev hotel room, lit by the smeared light of a forty-watt bulb. This soap, which appears to be made from the renderings of some animal, which has no odor and no discernible cleansing power, is produced in hundreds of millions of bars, all the same, for every dreary hotel room on every interminable echoing corridor of every hotel in a once vast, now collapsed empire. A civilization's largest yearnings are expressed in
those little bars of soap: for equality; for an end to a society where some have fragrant soaps in sculpted soap dishes and others have no soap at all; for a ban on pleasure, on the very possibility of idle soaping in a foamy bath. But, finally, there is the ridiculous inefficiency—this hard, plain little bar of soap never in fact cleans you.

Thinking about soap bars and plastic wine bottles, I decamp from the plane and join the double lines of men in suits and briefcases queuing up for Ukrainian visas. Every single person in the line is male, everyone is on business. These are the new post-imperial type you see everywhere in Eastern Europe, who all speak such a strange English Esperanto to each other that you wonder whether they have a native tongue of their own. The man ahead of me turns out to be a Russian émigré based in Vienna who works for an American chemical company. Which one? Dow Chemical. A name to conjure with. The makers of napalm. I once sat in on the steps of the university job center to prevent Dow Chemical from recruiting young men like this to join their company as sales reps. What is he selling? Fertilizers. To whom? He smiles. In the old days of the empire, he explains, all our business was through Moscow,
and we had one purchaser. You wined him, you dined him, and at the end of the bargaining you got your price. Now—he smiles again—we have to do business, republic by republic. There are a lot more people to entertain. I wonder—a lot more to bribe? Do you have any small customers here? Yes, a few farmers. A few collective farms. They have assets—and I think of the vast flat black-soil country I have seen south of Kiev—but they are all so short of foreign exchange. A British businessman, a sharp customer with seven suitcases of soccer kit he hopes to unload before his return flight tomorrow night, overhears us and agrees. Plenty of business opportunities, provided you bribe everyone you come near.

Throughout Eastern Europe, these are the men of whom everyday miracles are expected. They are the ones who will provide soap that smells decent and actually cleans you. These are the ones who will make the phones work, who will market wine in the small plastic flat-sided bottles. Everything else has been tried: the command economy's armory of terror and menaces is bare; social democracy is too Swedish, too distant, to be plausible. There is no one else to turn to but these men with briefcases.

Each well-dressed, well-coiffed male disappears through passport control and dissolves into the mass of people in the airport lobby, like sharp drops of ink dispersing in a large tank of water. In the next three weeks, I see Western businessmen in only two of the biggest Kiev hotels. Hundreds of them arrive daily, yet such is the size of the country, and of its problems, that they seem to vanish leaving scarcely a trace behind.

The customs declaration, I notice, is the same old Soviet form. I declare how much currency I am carrying, “in figures and in numbers,” whether I am carrying weapons, “objects of
art,” books, or medicines. The new nation hasn't got around to printing new forms, so, in the meantime, the dull momentum of imperial bureaucracy continues to grind on.

By peeking over someone's shoulder, I discover that even the Ukrainian passport is the old Soviet document with “Ukrainian” in a ragged ink stamp on the spot reserved for Nationality. Ukrainians have been told they will have their own passport and their own money. Till then, they make do with a transitional nonconvertible currency called the kupon, still pegged to the Russian ruble, and like the ruble depreciating at something like 20 percent a month. Like all the countries of Eastern Europe, the whole society is engaged in a frantic search for hard, convertible currencies as a hedge against the slow collapse of their own. At the visa window, Ukrainian officials are writing out visa forms as quickly as they can manage, palming businessmen's fifty-dollar bills into cashboxes. All around me, the first impressions of Ukrainian independence are of decline and decay, broken panes of glass, smeared windows, cigarette butts all over the floor, a dim half-light from low-wattage bulbs, policemen in new green uniforms, smoking, fingering Kalashnikovs. What, I ask myself, am I doing in this godforsaken place?

This is the largest successor state of the fifteen that have emerged from the ruins of the twentieth century's greatest empire. I've come here to find out what real difference it makes to have a nation of your own. Does it get ordinary people proper soap, for example? Ukraine is the largest new state to be created in Europe this century: 52 million people in a territory the size of France, a nation with an army of 600,000 men; the legatee of an imperial arsenal that makes it the third nuclear power in the world; the sixth largest naval power by virtue of its claim to part of the Black Sea fleet
moored in Sevastopol; a nation of enormous natural wealth ranging from the coal and steel of the Donetsk basin to the agricultural abundance of the black-soil lands.

I have reasons to take Ukraine seriously indeed. But, to be honest, I'm having trouble. Ukrainian independence conjures up images of embroidered peasant shirts, the nasal whine of ethnic instruments, phony Cossacks in cloaks and boots, nasty anti-Semites.

From my childhood in Canada, I remember expatriate Ukrainian nationalists demonstrating in the snow outside performances by the Bolshoi Ballet in Toronto. “Free the captive nations!” they chanted. In 1960, they seemed strange and pathetic, chanting in the snow, haranguing people who just wanted to see ballet and to hell with the politics. They seemed fanatical, too, unreasonable. Hadn't they looked at the map? How did they think Ukraine could ever be free?

Yet the tendentious fanatics who refused to look at maps, who refused to accept that Soviet power would last an eternity, got it right, and the rest of us were wrong.

Clearing customs, I feel like declaring my basic prejudices on arrival. Isn't nationalism just an exercise in kitsch, in fervent emotional insincerity? Especially so in Ukraine. It has been part of Russia for centuries. Ukrainians now have a state, but are they really a nation? Into this inauthentic void streams nationalist emotionalism, striving to convince them that there always was a Ukrainian nation; that it has been suppressed for centuries; that it has at last found its freedom, and so on. The reality is different. Some Ukrainians—especially those who joined the Communist Party—did well out of the empire. For most of the last fifty years, the Party was not wrong when it dismissed nationalist feeling here as weak, marginal, and easily suppressed. The glasnost era did see an
awakening of nationalist feeling, and in western Ukraine it blossomed into a genuinely broad-based national movement. But elsewhere, in the more justified parts of eastern Ukraine, there was no upsurge of demands for independence.

When independence did come, in the wake of the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991, it did not represent—as it did in the Baltic states—the culmination of years of nationalist agitation. It happened because the local Party boss, Leonid Kravchuk, saw that, without firing a shot, he could slip away from the empire and set himself up as the leader of a nation-state. And so he remains, presiding over an apparatus still run by ex-Party people. Ukraine might not necessarily be a story about nationalism at all, perhaps only a story about how a leopard tries to convince you he has changed his spots.