Lotharingia
Page 35
The mental and religious stresses of the period were added to and entangled with what amounted to entirely new human populations. There are so many examples: a little French Flanders town like Roubaix, with 8,000 people in 1800, balloons to 125,000 a century later; Duisburg, 4,500 to 92,000; Lille, 70,000 to 200,000. Some of these were immigrants (Poles and Silesians poured west into the Ruhr), but a combination of the availability of work and improved life expectancy meant that Belgium at independence had some four million inhabitants and on the eve of the First World War had almost four million more, new people acting in different ways. There were many horrible new jobs for these new people and it is impossible to read Germinal without recoiling in total dismay as Zola revives Bosch’s and Brueghel’s visions of damnation in modern mining. There was a direct line from the mosasaur’s discovery to the agonies of firedamp, flooding and collapsed shafts.
One very strange mine was set up around Kelmis, a small town in Limburg, near Maastricht and just across the hills south-west of Aachen, to dig up zinc ore. There had been works there since the fourteenth century at least and there had been peevish disputes between the Dukes of Brabant and the Imperial City of Aachen about who really owned them before the region had settled into the Burgundian/Spanish/Austrian Netherlands. Napoleon (‘Au palais des Tuileries, le 30 ventôse an 13’) made the mine over to one Jean-Jacques-Daniel Dony on a fifty-year lease and as almost everything was ruled by France at that point nobody really noticed. Dony thanked Napoleon by giving him an elaborate portable campaigning bath made of zinc, which is now in the marvellous Kelmis museum. With Napoleon’s defeat however there was an explosion of fusty nitpicking, with lots of experts waving old bits of paper around to show where exactly the new border should run between the new United Netherlands and the new Prussian Rhine Province. Under the unique circumstances of two potential owners, entirely new to the area, arguing a border which itself had mutated wildly over the previous twenty years, and which had before then been sunk in the jigsaw of the Empire and owned by now defunct priests, it was impossible to come up with a good compromise. Several districts (Eupen, Malmédy, St Vith and others) were given to Prussia and these would in due course become the entirely bogus ‘unredeemed cantons’ of Belgium and get dragged back and forth during the two world wars. The value of the zinc ore concession so goaded both sides that it was decided to make it into perhaps Europe’s least-known state, Neutral Moresnet. It proved much more enduring than its initial Dutch and Prussian sponsors, lasting until 1914, while its flanking states mutated into Belgium and Germany.
I would not say that Neutral Moresnet deserves an entire book to itself, but it gets close. A near triangle, with a population of about three thousand, Neutral Moresnet was so small that if there was a fire it had to call in the Prussian fire brigade. It was of course helpless to administer itself except through joint Dutch–Prussian adjudicators. Technically the Dutch still have a stake in the territory today as the mood was so filthy after the Belgian revolution that they never acknowledged the end of their role as a guarantor of Neutral Moresnet – but the chances of this becoming a live issue in the twenty-first century are quite small. The smart little Neutral Moresnet administrative building has a very prominent Belgian shield put there in 1952 after the area became finally and definitively part of Belgium, but some local artisan at irregular intervals must have chiselled off quite an array of earlier shields. The zinc ore was one of the building blocks of nineteenth-century industrialization – not just for baths, but for everything made of brass, for paint, for wire. The Kelmis museum is filled with beautiful technical drawings of ornaments, pumps, winches, shafts – indeed, so beautiful are these drawings that it seems inadequate that industrial art is not treated as a serious field in its own right.
Slightly unfortunately the relentless demands of the region’s factories meant that the mine was totally scraped out by the 1880s but there was no means by which either side could agree to end Neutral Moresnet. There had been a fun period when young Belgian men went to live there to avoid military service, but the Belgian government eventually noticed this and fixed it. There is a wonderful postcard of the spot where Neutral Moresnet and the countries of the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany met and which was an undemanding minor tourist attraction. Next to the stone markers in the picture is a little lemonade stand run by the elderly Widow Lausberg – a stand which by that point probably generated the territory’s entire GDP. The disaster that overwhelmed Neutral Moresnet was impossible to predict: the attentions of the World Congress of Esperanto. The completely terrible plan was hatched to make Neutral Moresnet the first Esperanto state – its three thousand people the helpless playthings of madness. It was renamed Amikejo (place of friendship) in 1908 and Kelmis became the world Esperanto capital. Esperantists fanned out (seemingly all in straw hats and with large moustaches), organizing picnics, holding language-teaching classes and generally terrorizing the locals. The man who let them in, GP and stamp-collector Dr Molly, seems never have had to pay for his enthusiasms. I have been simply unable to find out if they attempted to convert the Widow Lausberg or get her to rewrite her little lemonade stand’s sign in Esperanto – a research failure for which I apologize.
This peculiar idyll came to an end in the summer of 1914 when German troops swept through. It became part of Belgium in 1920. Aside from its exemplary museum, the most important trace of Neutral Moresnet lies in the church of Notre Dame. In the porch is one of the most remarkable of all war memorials. As a parting, final expression of a century of neutrality, the monument lists the seventy-nine dead and missing from Neutral Moresnet but refuses to say whether they fought for Belgium or Germany – they are simply ‘sons of Kelmis’ who are ‘in death united’.
The New Rhine
While in theory old-regime German towns must have been fun, with their unfailing patterns of tolling bells, nightwatchmen, guild parades, public punishments and city gates clanging shut at dusk, there is a tiny counter-argument that they were in practice unbelievably boring. The image of old Heidelberg in the operetta The Student Prince with everyone laughing, carousing, high-stepping, waving from windows and singing, ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’ was, of course, far worse than the reality – but nonetheless daily life must have been, save for the occasional approach of a French army, monotonous.
Basle is a good example. Two very beautiful maps were made, one in 1615 and one in 1847, and they show practically the same place the same size, minus some walls and gates and plus a new railway and factories. The idea of growth, which defines our own lives, was simply not a historical factor for many places and at most times, with the economy instead simply consisting of a steady churn: its rewards handed out in predictable patterns, and with occasional natural or military disaster from which towns might take a generation or more to recover. The beautiful area of Basle around the Lohnhof shows this make-do-and-mend atmosphere well, filled with houses some five hundred years old and which have had any number of functions over the centuries. The Lohnhof itself is a complex of religious buildings on top of a surviving stretch of city wall. The Augustinian canons who once ruled it were kicked out in the Reformation but the buildings themselves have since been through all kinds of implausible fixes. From the nineteenth century it was taken over by Basle’s police and the hotel I stay at in the Lohnhof was for many years the city’s women’s prison, giving the rooms, with their great thick walls and deeply indented doors, an extraordinary mournfulness.
One of Basle’s greatest sons, Johann Peter Hebel, author of the wonderfully entertaining heap of Rhineland tall stories The Treasure Chest, recalled how as a child in the 1760s there was still a prescribed distance from any gentleman at which he had to doff his cap. The Pietist stranglehold on the town meant that no plays could be shown on Sundays and as that was the only day off for most people, it meant there were no plays. Even as late as the 1840s the famous university with its four ancient faculties only had a grand total of sixty-two students. By the 1860s, when Nietzs
che arrived to perk things up as Professor of Greek, it had risen to a hundred.
This sense of small-town doziness drove many Germans mad, but there were respectable arguments in its favour. Jakob Burkhardt, the towering figure in nineteenth-century Basle, articulated the idea that the genius of the Germans lay in being ‘Greek’ rather than ‘Roman’: a world of self-sufficient, proud, cultured and essentially pacific city states devoted to their own needs. The new German nationalism in the Prussian sense – wallowing in power and conquest, crushing the diverse, buffet-table atmosphere of the old – was a Neronian perversion of what had made Germans typically rather nicer than, say, the French. Burkhardt’s became a highly influential argument – indeed the continuing basis of the Swiss German critique of their more northerly relatives and an argument used both by the Weimar Republic and post-1945 West Germany. But from the point of view of the broad and unhappy main stream of modern history, it was seen as backward, quaint and snobbish. Burckhardt’s writing desk has survived him and in its wonderful Spartan simplicity remains a reproach to the late nineteenth century, both in ideas and aesthetics.
Basle itself was now buffeted by change. In the eighteenth century it had been ruled by the enjoyably named ‘Ribbon Lords’. Basle had a central role in that quintessentially pre-Bastille object the ribbon, for which there was an unassuageable thirst, tied or draped around every part of the human body. As in the rest of Europe, the piecework was done in thousands of households scattered across the countryside ruled by Basle, whereas the profits accumulated behind the lovely doors of the Basle townhouses. Some of this old world was swept away by Napoleon, but despite huge pressures, Switzerland, including Basle, re-emerged in 1815 with much of its stuffiness intact. It was a curious measure of how rattled and neurotic post-Congress-of-Vienna forces were that the Prussian king viewed Basle as such a relatively liberal hothouse that he banned his subjects from going to the university there, despite none of them having applied.
What did for old Basle was steam, and the actions of the Badenese genius Johann Tulla. The harnessing of steam swept through work and transport in a generation. The Basle map of 1847 shows just a handful of factories, but Basle soon became one of the quintessential industrial European cities, its population quadrupling in the following fifty years. Oddly the ribbons provided the leap, as experiments with new forms of artificial colour created the synthetic dye industry. In 1842–3 there was a final, failed attempt by Basle conservatives to stop the building of the railway from Strasbourg, on the sensible grounds that ‘French ideas’ would trundle down those tracks – which they did. Guild restrictions crumbled in 1854 and by 1869 the old city walls had gone, apart from those holding up structures like the Lohnhof. These were amazing changes, but nothing compared to what was happening to the Rhine.
Johann Tulla was a military engineer from Karlsruhe obsessed by the Rhine’s inefficiency and uselessness. Under the Holy Roman Empire there were so many petty sovereignties along its banks (people like the three Counts of Leiningen!) that no action could be taken. Indeed, enjoyably, rival digging and ditching works in the eighteenth century went on in the Bavarian Palatinate on the west bank and Baden on the east, both reshaping their riverfronts to try to make the current swamp the rival opposite shore. It was daft stuff like this that made the most eloquent case for German unity – during the 1848 revolutions, anti-insurgent Badenese forces, who were meant to be using their artillery against a rebel army holed up in the Palatinate town of Ludwigshafen, instead mucked about flattening the smart new Palatinate port facilities next to it. In any event, the Rhine was a tangled mess, with over fifteen hundred islands in the seventy miles or so below Strasbourg and territories washed away or emerging quite randomly, depending on great convulsions of water discharged by Swiss snow-melt or distant storms. Tulla spent his life turning the Rhine into the gigantic, straight drain that it is now. Ultimately the 220 miles from Basle to Worms was reduced by fifty miles. Most of the islands disappeared, almost all the flood-plains became fields for crops.
The casualties created by these changes were tragic. It had been one of the world’s great fish rivers (Strasbourg was famous for its salmon) and the disappearance of thousands of ponds, pools and bits of murk also meant most of the fish disappeared, further discouraged by places such as Basle and Ludwigshafen pouring newly invented industrial effluent into the river. Beavers packed up. It also ended the strange world of the itinerant ‘gold-washer’. The River Aare wiggled down from Bern, discharging gold into the Rhine which had been sifted since Roman times. As the engineering works peaked there was a final bonanza for the Bavarian and Badenese governments with huge hauls, but the new, fast, even flow which, as Tulla had predicted, dug a deeper river-bed, meant that there was no way to pan any more. In German museums you can see particularly cherished old medals or presentation coins made from ‘Rhine Gold’ but by the 1870s they were no longer made. Oddly, Richard Wagner’s great hymn to the metal was premiered in 1869 with the Rhinemaidens singing ‘Rhine gold! Rhine gold!’ as a sort of promotional jingle – but, almost to the year, for a product that was no longer in the shops.1
What was in the shops were countless tourists – as much made from steam as the new factories – impelled up the Rhine by steam-trains and steamboats and guided by Baedeckers printed on steam-presses. The Rhine’s flow had meant that many categories of boat could only travel once, from south to north, where they were broken up and sold for timber. The most spectacular of these were the huge log rafts with crews of up to five hundred men and made up of several thousand logs, converting the Black Forest into the wood pilings on which cities such as Amsterdam rested. But now steam removed all obstacles and anyone could travel across Europe in any direction. Basle became the gateway for that quintessential form of Victorian tourism, the visit to the Rhine Falls, followed by the Swiss excursion, either to admire the sublime or to help failing lungs. For English tourists the route along the Rhine and into Switzerland was healthful also in a moral sense, as it allowed travellers to avoid France, which for much of the nineteenth century was viewed both as a military enemy and as a pants-down moral sump. When in Dombey and Son Mr Carker and proud Edith flee England and end up in a hotel in Dijon, Dickens hardly has to sketch in any further detail to convey that they can fall no lower. ‘Clean’ Switzerland and ‘Dirty’ France were no contest, with matching general British enthusiasm for ‘picturesque’ Germany defined by Prince Albert and by his and Victoria’s children ruling or marrying so many chunks of it.
The acme of Victorian hotels, Basle’s The Three Kings, is still there and it is still possible to have a stilted tea on its balcony looking over both the Rhine and the great bridge that marks where the river shifts from west to north. Just sitting there I felt myself channelling a nineteenth-century self, reading a pocket book of sermons, keenly aware of the need for a top-up splash of eau-de-Cologne and worrying about my enthusiasm for stays and corsets. It was on this balcony that the great (well, very mildly engaging) drama of Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? opens.2 It was also here that the famous photo of Theodor Herzl was taken during the First Zionist Congress in 1897. This was an event widely viewed at the time as cranky, but which would come to define the following century and was in many ways only made possible by the strange neutral space and extensive hotel facilities of Basle, in a Europe which was otherwise beginning, as Herzl rightly perceived, to act in an ever more frightening way.
The Translation Bureau of Barbarian Books
During the (as it proved) calamitous conference held by the Japanese navy in May 1942, after it was proposed that the carrier fleet should be sent to attack the small American base on Midway Island, Admiral Yamamoto asked whether there was anxiety about how the fleet would respond should the American carriers intercept them. Magnificently, one of his commanders exclaimed with a contemptuous gesture: ‘Gaishu Isshoku!’ – ‘One touch of the armoured gauntlet!’ I hope this was said in the sort of croaking semi-shout favoured by bull-necked samurai in Ku
rosawa movies, but his exact voice pitch is sadly beyond my research abilities. I also hope that he said the same thing before every staggeringly successful decision taken by the Japanese in the previous few months, when he would have been right – perhaps, indeed, his naval colleagues had only raised objections to the invasion of Malaya or to the attack on Pearl Harbor for the fun of hearing him struggle to his feet – a mass of braid and jingling medals – to bark, ‘One touch of the armoured gauntlet!’
At many points when writing this book the Gaishu Isshoku attitude has occurred to me as essential to world history. If nobody believed this unthinkingly, there would be few wars. Both sides must have military men with such values – but with one side’s swaggering shouters proved, in the event, thoroughly wrong. The scale of Japan’s land grab in 1941–2 was astounding and had very few precedents, but it had an interesting one that proved comparably disastrous, if slightly longer lasting: the explosion across the world of Dutch power in the seventeenth century. I mentioned this earlier, but it is worth returning to. As with the Japanese in the twentieth century, the Dutch had specific forms of technology and belief which were allied to the (as it proved) only temporary weakness of their opponents: in the Dutch case the French, English, Spanish and Portuguese. For a couple of generations blameless individuals from Zeeland and Holland found themselves masters of the world. Voices who questioned this strategy were shouted down – and were, for quite some time, wrong. Great empires were carved out in the Hudson Valley (New Netherland), northern Brazil, southern Africa (Cape Town), the Indian Ocean (Ceylon and Malacca), the West Indies and Java (Batavia/Jakarta, founded in 1619). Many of these were then lost as an assortment of vengeful rivals took turns to destroy the grossly overstretched Dutch.