Proud of What I Did Not Build

nd. Wie wir miteinander leben. At home in Germany. How we live with one another. Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that the Basic Law knows no Volksgemeinschaft gleichen Blutes, no community of one blood, and no citizenship privileges for the so-called Biodeutsche. He said there are no citizens of the first and second class. He wished for a country that chooses cohesion over exclusion and that refuses anyone who develops Phantasien von völkischer Abschottung***, fantasies of ethnic sealing-off.

I want to be fair to him, because the speech was not the crude thing it could have been. Steinmeier did something most of his colleagues no longer bother with: he named the fear out loud and did not immediately diagnose it. People feel, he said, that immigration is overwhelming the society, that the sense of strangeness in one’s own country has grown too large. And then the sentence that has stayed with me all week. Diese Angst ist erstmal einfach eines: Sie ist da. This fear is, first of all, simply one thing: it is there.

That is a decent, humane sentence, and it is also the sentence in which the whole problem is visible. He acknowledges the feeling and concedes nothing to its content. The fear is there, the way weather is there, the way a symptom is there. It is a condition to be managed, met with reassurance and with the observation that the country needs immigration if it wants to function. What it is never allowed to be is a claim that might be partly right. I understand that you feel this, and I have no intention of letting it mean anything. I am not sure that is kinder than contempt. It may be the more humiliating of the two, because contempt at least treats you as an opponent.

The wrong president

Reading it, I thought of a line I had carried around for years and attributed to Richard von Weizsäcker: that you cannot be proud of something you did not personally achieve. I went looking for it. It is not Weizsäcker. It is Johannes Rau, on the sixteenth of March 2001, on N24. Man kann nicht stolz sein auf etwas, was man selber gar nicht zustande gebracht hat, sondern man kann froh sein oder dankbar dafür, dass man Deutscher ist. Aber stolz kann man darauf nicht sein. Stolz ist man auf das, was man selber zu Wege gebracht hat.

Being wrong about the attribution turned out to be worth more than being right, for two reasons. The first is what surrounded Rau’s remark. In October 2000 the CDU general secretary Laurenz Meyer told Focus that he was proud to be German. On the twelfth of March 2001 the environment minister Jürgen Trittin said in a radio interview that Meyer had “the mentality of a skinhead and not only the appearance”, and that his statement displayed “the shallowness, the mental nosedive that characterises every racist thug in this republic.” Four days later, the President of the Federal Republic supplied the philosophical version.

There is the conflation, with dates on it. It is not a mood I am inferring from the general atmosphere. A mainstream conservative said he was proud of his country. A cabinet minister put him in the same sentence as racist thugs. The head of state then explained, in a calm and reasonable register, why the sentiment was not merely distasteful but incoherent. Trittin later apologised to Meyer personally while repeating the criticism of what he had said, which is its own small monument to the era: “Sorry about the skinhead, but you really must not say that”.

The second reason is that Weizsäcker, whom I had cast as the prosecution, was the defence.

Ungesund und unheimlich

At his swearing-in before the Bundestag on the first of July 1984, Weizsäcker said this: Unsere Lage, die sich von der der meisten anderen Nationen unterscheidet, ist kein Anlass, uns ein Nationalgefühl zu versagen. Das wäre ungesund für uns selbst, und es wäre nur unheimlich für unsere Nachbarn. Our situation, which differs from that of most other nations, is no reason to deny ourselves a national feeling. That would be unhealthy for us, and it would only be uncanny to our neighbours.

Consider who is saying it. Weizsäcker served in the Wehrmacht from the first day of the war. His father was convicted at Nuremberg and he sat in that courtroom as part of the defence team. Ten months after this speech he stood up on the eighth of May 1985 and gave what is still the most unflinching account of German guilt ever delivered by a German head of state. He is the last man in the Republic who could be accused of going easy on the subject. And his considered position, from the same office Steinmeier now occupies, was that a nation which refuses itself an ordinary relationship to itself is not thereby made safe. It is made unheimlich.

That word is doing a great deal of work and English does not really have it. Uncanny, eerie, sinister, unhomely, spooky, unsettling. Freud built an essay on it. Its root is Heim, home. The unheimlich is what should be familiar and is not. Weizsäcker’s claim is that a country with no settled feeling for itself becomes strange, and that a strange country frightens its neighbours more, not less, than a country that is at home in itself. The feeling does not evaporate when you forbid it. It goes somewhere. It goes underground, where nobody civilised is tending it, and it comes back up in a shape that nobody chose.

Forty-two years later the same office is warning against fantasies of ethnic sealing-off, and the party that traffics in them polls at or near the top. I do not think those two facts are unrelated, and I do not think the relation runs in the direction the warnings assume.

What Rau got wrong

Rau’s argument deserves to be taken apart properly, because it is a bad argument that has done real damage precisely by sounding rigorous.

You cannot be proud of what you did not achieve. Apply it consistently. You may not be proud of your children, since they did the growing. Not of your parents. Not of your city, your language, your school, your regiment, your football club, your grandmother who hid someone in a cellar. Nobody believes this. Nobody has ever believed it. The English language, like the German, carries two senses of the word: the pride of the maker, and the pride of belonging, of being of something. The second is older and far more common. Rau’s move is to take the narrow sense and use it to abolish the broad one, and then to present the amputation as clear thinking.

Watch what he offers in its place. You may be froh or dankbar, glad or grateful. But gratitude is not the modest emotion he thinks it is. Gratitude has an object and a direction. You are grateful to someone, for something they did, which means the inheritance is back in the room and the debt with it. He lets you owe your forebears everything while denying you a word for standing in their line. The distinction does not survive five minutes of contact. What it does is establish a rule about who may say what, which was always its function.

The seawall

My own view is that the attachment underneath all of this is not a doctrine and cannot be argued out of anyone, because it is not held as a proposition. People love what is theirs. Their mother before other mothers, their street, their language, their weather, their dead. It is the same faculty that makes family love possible, and no political programme in history has succeeded in removing it, though several have made impressive attempts and left large cemeteries.

It is not, importantly, an attachment to blood. That is the substitution that does the damage, and it is made by both sides. Blood is what the völkisch mind offers as the object of the feeling, and blood is what the anti-völkisch mind assumes the feeling must secretly be about. Both are wrong in the same way. The real object is the particular: this place, these songs, that view, this way of doing things. Which is why the feeling transfers, and why it can be joined.

The failure mode is entirely real. The same faculty that loves the particular can be inflamed into something murderous, and Germany is where the world learned what that looks like at industrial scale. But you do not cure a faculty by denying that it exists. You cure it by giving it a decent object and a respectable channel. Orwell drew the line in 1945 and it has not been improved upon since: patriotism is devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people, and it is by its nature defensive, militarily and culturally. Nationalism is inseparable from the desire for power. One is a wall against the sea. The other is a fleet. To attack patriotism as though it were nationalism is to demolish the seawall because you are frightened of the water.

Isaiah Berlin took Schiller’s image of the bent twig for the same mechanism. Press a society’s sense of itself down far enough and it does not stay down; it lashes back, and it lashes back with a violence proportionate to the pressure rather than to the original grievance. Berlin was writing in 1972 about nineteenth-century Germany. It reads now like a weather forecast.

You cannot emigrate to a set of procedures

There is a further problem with the civic answer, and it is not a small one.

Ernest Renan is the patron saint of the civic nation, and the line everyone quotes is that a nation is a daily plebiscite. But read the rest of the 1882 lecture. Renan says a nation is a soul, and that this soul has two parts: the common possession of a rich legacy of memories, and the present consent, the desire to live together. Past and present, and he is explicit that you need both. The modern civic formulation keeps the consent and throws away the memories, and then cannot understand why what is left feels thin.

It feels thin because it is. A nation defined purely as a constitution and a set of procedures is fungible. If Germany is the Basic Law and nothing else, there is no reason to prefer it to Denmark, no reason to grieve when it changes, and no reason on earth to sacrifice anything for it. Sternberger’s Verfassungspatriotismus was a serious and honourable attempt to solve a specific German problem, and Habermas made it the intellectual furniture of the Federal Republic. But a constitution is a thing you can admire. It is not a thing you can be homesick for. Nobody has ever wept at a border because they were about to see the administrative law again.

I know this from the wrong side, which is the side worth hearing from. I am Romanian. I did not build Romania. I did nothing to deserve the language, the food, the particular quality of light on a bad concrete street in August, my grandmother’s vocabulary. I am proud of it anyway, in the belonging sense, and nobody in England has ever suggested this makes me a danger to them. My attachment to my origin is called heritage. It is welcomed at festivals. It goes in the diversity column.

My English neighbour’s attachment to his own is monitored for early signs of pathology.

That asymmetry is the scandal at the centre of the whole business, and it is not subtle, and people are not stupid. The same emotion is given two names depending on who is feeling it. Told for thirty years that your love of your own country is a disease while your neighbour’s love of his is a celebration, you do not become a better citizen. You become a man looking for someone who will say the other thing, and eventually somebody will, and he will not be Weizsäcker.

And here is what the civic answer never reckons with: it was the particular that made England worth coming to. Not the procedures. I did not cross a continent for a set of procedures. If a country is nothing in particular, then it is nothing to join, and the immigrant has arrived nowhere. The people most invested in England being a real place, with a character that persists, are often the ones who chose it.

The exception that was generalised

Germany is not a normal case and I will not pretend otherwise. Its inability to hold an ordinary national feeling is not elite malice or fashion. It is a rational response, arrived at honestly, to having done the worst thing that has ever been done. Renan also wrote that forgetting is essential to the making of a nation, and Germany has correctly decided that it may not forget. That is a real bind with no clean solution, and Weizsäcker on the eighth of May 1985 is the closest anyone has come to living inside it with dignity.

What I object to is not the German exception. It is that the exception has been generalised. What Germany does for German reasons has been exported across Europe as though every nation’s love of itself carried the same charge and stood at the same distance from catastrophe. Britain did not do what Germany did. Romania did not do what Germany did. Treating every national sentiment as a pre-Auschwitz condition is a category error, and it is the specific category error of the last thirty years of European politics.

So I come back to Steinmeier’s sentence, which I think is the most honest in the speech and gives the game away entirely. Diese Angst ist erstmal einfach eines: Sie ist da. Yes. It is there. It has been there the whole time, in every country, in every century, and it is not going to be therapised away or shamed away or waited out. The only question ever available was whether it would be given an honourable form or an unspeakable one. Weizsäcker knew the answer in 1984 and said so in his first hour in the job: deny a people its national feeling and you have not made it safe, you have made it uncanny.

We chose the other way. We are now living in the country that choice produced, and calling it a fantasy will not make it one.