Mücher, Not Mucher

I. An Umlaut

In Much, a village in the Bergisches Land east of Bonn, there is a fine distinction that outsiders do not hear. Whoever lives in Much is a Mucher. Whoever was born there is a Mücher. I am a Mücher, born in the “Klösterchen”, the little convent, and no one has been born there for many years. The umlaut is therefore a closed circle: it cannot be acquired, applied for or granted any more.

I like this umlaut because it says something true about origin. It is an event, not a merit. It cannot be repeated, and it obliges no one to anything. It is simply there, like a birthmark.

II. A Hungarian on the Rhine

My family can be traced back through five generations of Rhenish smiths. But at the beginning there is no Rhinelander. Conrad Ley, born in 1794, came to the Rhine with his brother during the Wars of Liberation, in a Hungarian hussar regiment of the Austrian army. A hussar regiment consisted largely of horses, and horses need smiths. I suspect the two were not there to fight but to keep the fighters moving. What is certain is that they stayed.

The land they arrived in was itself changing masters. Napoleon’s Grand Duchy of Berg was dissolving; in 1815 the Rhineland became Prussian, in 1871 part of the German Empire. Then came Weimar, the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. The smiths stayed. They shod horses, forged tools and mended ploughshares while the flags above them changed.

More than a hundred years later my father Toni did the same in another war and with other tools. In the Second World War he was a motor mechanic in a workshop company, among other places with the Afrika Korps. Where his ancestors had forged horseshoes, he changed pistons and clutches, and like them he kept the fighters moving. That absolves no one: whoever keeps a war running serves it. But it says something about how these men saw themselves. Not as warriors, but as the ones who make sure that things move.

Had anyone asked them what they were, the answer would not have been a state but a trade and a place: smith, from here. And after one generation no one asked any more where grandfather had come from.

That is the order I grew up in. First comes what you do, then where you do it. The state comes last, and it is the one that changes most often. And the Rhineland I claim is not the land of my blood. It is the land that took in two young hussars from Hungary and made them its own.

III. Three Things People Confuse

The question whether one must identify with the country of one’s birth is usually asked the wrong way, because three different things are thrown into one pot.

The first is belonging. It is a legal matter: passport, right to vote, duty to pay taxes. It can be proven and, if need be, changed.

The second is attachment. It is concrete: a language, a tone of voice, a landscape, the smell of a bakery on a Sunday morning. You do not decide on it; you have it or you do not.

The third is identification, the inner assent: this is me, I stand for this. It is the one thing that cannot be demanded of anyone. A country is like a family. You are born into it, but no one is obliged to like every uncle.

IV. The Cheapest Pride

Schopenhauer put it with his customary rudeness: the cheapest kind of pride is national pride. It costs nothing, it presupposes nothing, and it belongs to those who have nothing else to show.

I would put it more gently. Pride in a birthplace is pride in an accident. Gratitude, on the other hand, fits: for a language one was given, for people who shaped one, for a countryside whose hills one would recognise in one’s sleep. Gratitude is directed at what one has received. Pride pretends one has earned it.

V. What Is Rhenish

When I say I am and remain a Rhinelander, I do not mean a smaller nationalism. The Rhineland is singularly unsuited to that. Romans, Franks, Frenchmen and Prussians all passed through, and the Rhinelanders came to terms with each of them without letting any of them take them over. And whoever stayed was taken in. The Rhineland does not ask for long where someone comes from, but whether he is sitting at the table.

The Rhinelanders never quite warmed to Berlin. Konrad Adenauer is said to have remarked on every train journey east, as soon as the train crossed the Elbe: “Now Asia begins.” Whether it is true no one knows, but people have always liked to believe it of him.

What is Rhenish is written in no constitution, rather in three sentences every child knows: “Et es wie et es. Et kütt wie et kütt. Et hätt noch immer jot jejange.” – It is what it is. What comes, comes. It has always turned out fine. That is not love of homeland but an attitude to life: take what is, do not despair of what is coming, and give life an advance of confidence without harbouring illusions. One could call it cheerful nihilism.

VI. The Attitude Travels

An identity of this kind does not depend on a place, and I only understood that far away.

In Medellín I was “el alemán”, whether I liked it or not. Attribution from outside cannot be shaken off; one can only accept it kindly. But I found something else there: a mountain region, long poor, with hard-working, stubborn, pious and at the same time business-minded people, who out of scarcity had created a festive table astonishingly similar to our Bergische Kaffeetafel. Two regions that knew nothing of each other had found similar answers to similar conditions of life.

That is when I understood that home can recognise itself, even on another continent. It is not a border but a way of answering the world.

Now I live in Germany again, in Nuremberg, and only for a while. The Franconians have their own identity and defend it against Munich with the same devotion with which the Rhineland held its own against Berlin. Here I am a guest, and I consider that a good attitude, even in the country of one’s birth. A guest looks more closely than a native, because nothing is self-evident to him. He can appreciate what works and name what is decaying without having to defend it.

VII. What I Owe the Country

That does not mean I owe the country nothing. As long as I live here, I use its roads, its hospitals and its courts. For that I owe it what everyone owes who lives here, born here or not: to respect its rules, to pay my share, to harm no one.

This duty arises from living here, not from birth. And it demands loyalty to the rules, not love of the flag.

I would even go further. Whoever criticises a country because he sees it falling short of its possibilities takes it more seriously than whoever celebrates it. The essays on this site are in that sense not a reckoning but a form of concern that need not disguise itself as approval.

VIII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The strongest objection comes from the communitarians, from thinkers such as Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel. No human being is a free-floating self. We are all formed by language, history and community, and whoever denies it deceives himself about himself.

I think that is right. But what follows is that one should acknowledge one’s formation, not that one must identify with it. Whoever knows his formation can deal with it freely precisely because of that. Whoever does not know it is steered by it.

The second objection hits me myself: is “Rhinelander” not simply a smaller nationalism, cosier, but at heart the same? It would be, as soon as it drew a border, needed an enemy or raised a claim. Rhenish self-understanding has none of that: no state, no army, no enemies – at most the people of Düsseldorf, and that is a joke. Should it ever turn serious, this essay would be refuted.

IX. The Answer

Must I identify with a country just because I was born there and live there again now?

No. I owe it decency as long as I live here. I owe it a good deal, and I am glad to say so. But who I am is not written in my passport. It is written in an umlaut, in a trade passed down through five generations, and in the story of two Hungarian hussars who came to the Rhine some two hundred years ago and stayed.

Et es wie et es. Et kütt wie et kütt. Et hätt noch immer jot jejange.