Volkseinbildungsbesorgnisschrift

I had the good fortune to stumble across an inexpensive copy of Good Bye, Lenin! recently. This is a profoundly German film, despite the gratuitous English title, a sorta-comedy sorta-drama about a young man living in former East Berlin during the tumultuous reunification process which occurred in the early 1990s. I first watched it back in 2005, not long after its release in English-speaking lands. As I was the only person in my then-circle of friends to understand German, or to have any personal experience with the nuances of its language and culture and history, I merited the film more highly than the rest of them. Having the maternal side of my family hailing from the Fatherland helps.

I was too young to care about or understand my mother's and grandparents' opinions on the reunification at the time, but that changed once I matured mentally and politically. Even twenty years after reunification, former West Germans looked down at the former Ossies. The way the East Germans were treated by some (including my grandfather and to a lesser extent my mother) was seemingly paradoxical and profoundly patriarchal. On the one hand, East Germans didn't deserve any kind of assistance in getting a leg up on the pile. Using West German resources to bring the East up to economic speed was the worst kind of pandering. The incredibly generous currency exchange given to bearers of the East German Mark was seen as tantamount to robbery, or perhaps more accurately a financial scam, by the West Germans. On the other hand, the worthless ex-commies had nothing worth contributing to greater German society. That their manufacturing base was in the shitter was their own fault, not the fault of the centrally planned economy under which they existed for 40 years.

To anyone who follows American political discourse with any regularity, these arguments may sound a little bit familiar. Different players and different words, perhaps, but overall the same out-group ostracization that happens whenever the topic of using collective funds or political power to impact, for better or for worse, someone not of one's own social group comes up—North vs. South, urban vs. rural, Caucasian vs. non-Caucasian, male vs. female.

It's only natural for people to place the greatest emphasis on their local identity—the community to which they most immediately belong—because that is the social group with the greatest impact on one's daily life. People are the most forgiving towards, even ignore, egregious deeds which would make them scream bloody murder if anyone else asked it of them. Local taxes are a good example; people bitch about having to pay them, sure, people bitch about anything (*cough*), but how common is it for anybody to flip out over them when compared to state or, Osiris help us, federal income taxes?

Gender hypocrisy is another big one that I'll nudge with a twenty-foot pole right now. Things which are socially acceptable for men to do or for women to do are not okay when done by the opposite sex, and that's not even touching on the great twisting ball of one's social gender. That damnable, mysterious Other rears its head once more, and opacity of comprehension gives way to revulsion and indifference and no small amount of ignorance. I didn't know until about three months ago that I ought to refer to myself as “cis-sexual” in gender theory circles and discussions as opposed to “normal”; the rudeness and connotations of using that particular word never occurred to me.

One thing I perhaps ought to mention at this point is that Good Bye, Lenin! does not portray all of the former Ossies sycophantically, and that there is a great deal of nuance within the characters, particularly the protagonist's mother, who is an ardent believer in the socialist state and whose coma and recovery therefrom drives half the film's plot; the other half is, by necessity, a love story, but it's kept from being overly cloying because it is treated fairly realistically and the conflicts within the blooming relationship tie into the other half of the plot. The street of cultural acceptance (homogenization into the social majority collective?) runs both ways. As the old adage puts it, the horse can be led to water but cannot be forced to drink. Does the horse have a right to be as stubborn as it wishes, even if it will clearly result in a death by dehydration?

People much much smarter and wiser than me—Hobbes, Locke, Rawls and Nozick among many many others—have tried tackling this problem. That we as a species have not come to a consensus could portend that we never will come to a consensus. That does not, however, mean that we should not work towards such an end. One individual will never be capable of totally understanding another person's point of view and way of life, but not striving for at least some degree of understanding is tantamount to throwing our hands up in the air and resigning ourselves to not accomplishing anything seeing as perfection will never be had in pursuit of any endeavor.

What is it that prevents us from embracing a larger understanding of community, of opening our minds to the social and psychological Other? Is it merely cultural, the persistence of a clannish or tribal social upbringing that is passed on to successive generations through word and deed? Or is it something deeper, something more primal and biological, a style of social organization hardwired into our brain chemistry like pack behavior in canines or schooling among some types of fish? The constructivist in me believes it to be the former. The cynic, of course, tends to the latter. Sadly, there is no way to definitely, let alone ethically, prove which is the correct option, or if there exists some third (fourth? Fifth?) explanation.

But even that style of thought, a black and white nature vs. nurture sociological debate, falls into a zero-sum trap. The quest for absolutes, for a Platonic purity of logic and structure in understanding, drives most scientific discourse. The need for conformity, while understandably laudable given the methods and philosophy of science, seeks to compartmentalize the disparate flora and fauna, the varying geography and strata of geology, of the sprawling forest which is existence into a perfect solid, a thing which perhaps has many disparate and flavorful bits trapped within it but which, in the grand scheme of things, is as sterile as any modern medical lab.

I've been to parts of the former East Germany. Even twenty years after reunification, there's a distinct difference in the air, a unique visual and cultural flavor that two decades of Western integration has not entirely managed to stamp out. It's most prevalent in and around the small towns. The rail lines are iller-kept, the roads are more worn and prone to potholing, and the buildings are dingier compared to sibling villages in the former West. The dialects of German spoken there have a curious, generation-long lingual diaspora. The younger folk I interacted with were perfectly understandable, but I struggled a bit to understand older men and women, ones that had lived in and through the DDR, on the occasions when I spoke with them. Of course, they were eminently surprised when I revealed that I was an American student-tourist rather than a visitor from elsewhere in the country. Apparently it's rather uncommon for lone young Americans to pay a visit to Leipzig, let alone the Nietzschehaus in the cozy hamlet of Naumburg; the wonderful old lady who manned the ticket table at the museum's entrance told me that she thought I hailed from somewhere around Frankfurt once we got to talking.

For better or for worse (personally I feel it's for better), people are not all one uniform culture or creed. We'll have arguments over the “proper” way of doing things. Usually those arguments will be hashed out with harsh language; other times the situation will sadly devolve into an exchange of bullets and missiles rather than ideas. I don't hold to much of the Marxist (though technically it comes down from Hegel) thought I once embraced in my naïve university days, but one bit which I do cling to is an idiosyncratic interpretation of dialectical materialism, the notion that conflicting ideas can be resolved into a greater, more complete whole. The world and all its bits are not inevitably destined for Marxist-style communism, no, but they are destined for something different from and greater than what they are right now. It happened in the reunification of the two Germanys in the early '90s. Some places, like North and South Korea, may rejoin into a political whole, peaceably or maybe not so much, in the coming years. Other places have been and will continue to break apart along ethnic or cultural lines, like the state of Kosovo from Bosnia; or South Sudan from Sudan, also for the better.

Fighting change merely for the sake of fighting change leads to stagnation and frustration. Nothing can hold back the tides of progress; it is as inexorable and relentless as wind and rain shearing down a mountain range, and may need to act over just as long a span of time. Mindlessly going with the flow is likewise not the appropriate reaction. Being swept up in a gamut of new ideas without grounding oneself in the familiar is as short-sighted and suicidal as yelling, “Hey, watch this!” and diving into a tsunami's riptide.

As for the what proper ratio between the two ought to be...well, if I had the answer to that, I wager I'd be doing something with my life other than running a video store.