by Simon Winder
Each European country had its own 1848. Baden was particularly quick off the mark. In Baden there were immediate concessions as huge, threatening crowds gathered in the main towns, filled with excitement about the revolution in France. Democratic problems emerged within weeks: Jews were given full civic rights at Karlsruhe in April, but just as noticeable were anti-Jewish riots in Heidelberg and a great crowd of peasants outside Ettelheim swearing to stand together for ‘Freedom, equality and the murder of the Jews’. Freedom of speech too often seemed to mean the freedom to be anti-Semitic. Later the reliably disgusting nationalist Prussian historian Heinrich Treitschke saw the whole of 1848 as being egged on by its ‘Oriental cheerleaders’.
The Baden revolution swiftly spun out of control, despite Grand Duke Leopold’s attempts to manage it pragmatically. An immediate gap appeared between liberals and radicals, as elsewhere – with the former often being pushy bourgeois civil servants who could generally be bought off by someone in the royal family commenting favourably on their wives’ dresses. Radicals – including Karl Marx – were appalled by the way that the revolutions were made by great crowds building barricades or refusing to work, but that the gains were going to a small slice of the middle class, who now generally turned on their lower-class former allies. In the wake of the end of censorship of newspapers, radicals pointed out that for most people what really mattered was the ‘freedom to feed’ rather than the ‘freedom to read’. Radical lawyers such as Friedrich Hecker and Gustav von Struve tried to drive Baden on to genuine insurrectionary revolution, with Struve deriding those in the new Chamber of Deputies as ‘the sixty-three rabbits’.
The rigid monarchical solidarity across Europe seemed to many Germans only beatable through German nationalism. The German Confederation was essentially an instrument to fight the French (expressed in Baden by the ever-proliferating Confederal fortress at Rastatt) and to maintain a reactionary ‘Habsburg’ order by smothering the slightest peep of liberalism. In Baden insurgents marched from Konstanz only to be dispersed by Confederal troops, with the leaders fleeing into Switzerland. In a second attempt a new, united, federal Germany was proclaimed by Struve at the little Badenese town of Lörrach, which by highly technical definitions became for a few hours Germany’s first capital, before Struve was arrested.
The slightly comic opera aspect of Baden’s revolution ended though with one final, brutal convulsion, the May Uprising in 1849, which, fuelled by thousands of mutinous troops, at last heaved Leopold out. A large Prussian army marched in on Confederal orders, led by the future Wilhelm I of Prussia, and the revolutionaries were crushed in scenes of extraordinary savagery after a three-week Siege of Rastatt. Special courts there and in Mannheim and Freiburg executed twenty-seven of the revolution’s leaders. Struve himself escaped (as did the young Friedrich Engels) into Switzerland and lived a long, curious life, like many exiled ’48ers, on a circuit of conspiracy, crankiness, poverty and an attractive, continuing idealism. A surprising number became involved in the American Civil War. All together, for a variety of motives, some eighty thousand Badenese left. Throughout the three waves of the Baden revolution there had been a fatal inability to manoeuvre through the splits between liberals and radicals and too vivid a fantasy that the often isolated and hungry small towns of Baden were, on no evidence, filled with baying, Paris-style sans-culottes. Large enough crowds were generated to make a cheering and exciting mob, but this always proved much smaller than the forces arrayed against it.
Grand Duke Leopold returned to Karlsruhe and his descendants continued to rule Baden until the final and total dynastic fail of 1918. Baden became entangled in Napoleon III’s plans for a ‘southern tier’ of German states which would resist a Prussian-controlled united Germany, but Baden was in practice riddled with pro-Germany enthusiasts and thousands of Badenese troops under Prussian leadership took part in the 1870 Siege of Strasbourg during the Franco-Prussian War. Gustav Struve lived long enough to see the beginning of the siege – he had been resident in Vienna under a general amnesty for ’48ers, now viewed as harmless and irrelevant. One of the problems Struve had faced many years before, as he tried to announce a German Republic, had been trying to define who was in and who was out of such an entity. Standing in Lörrach, symbolically at the point where Baden joined onto Alsace and Switzerland, Struve concluded that these places too were themselves by language necessarily part of his Republic. If he had lived to see the aftermath of the Siege of Strasbourg, with Alsace incorporated into what he would have seen as a grotesque parody of his vision for Germany, he would have been appalled – but he would also have seen it as in some ways correct. He died just in time. Hecker had also escaped Baden and had fought in the Union armies in the American Civil War. When he visited Imperial Germany in 1873 he shook his head sadly: ‘Republicans eke out a meagre existence in dark caves like the last of the dinosaurs’.
A Newfoundland dog in Luzern
My interest in Switzerland is an entirely summer one. Many years ago my family took the eccentric decision to have a winter sports holiday in a context where my parents had previously restricted us to sitting agreeably in various French squares slurping chocolate milk or beautifully coloured aperitifs, depending on the drinker’s age. I think the decision to take up skiing was a semi-serious gesture by my father, but sadly I never got round to asking him for a post-match assessment of what he had really had in mind for Europe’s most contentedly immobile family.
I must have been thirteen or fourteen. My only clear memory – aside from being cold, wet and baffled – is of our spry old instructor’s face. We were all being pulled up the mountainside on a button-seat surface-lift, leaning back on the seats, our skis pointing straight ahead. Somehow I had got to the top, but each of the succeeding button-seats came up empty and Jean-Claude and I, peering over the edge, could see various Winders sprawled at different points down the slope, with discarded poles and skis dotted here and there – a couple of them making pantomime beetle-on-back gestures. I will never forget, turning to Jean-Claude, seeing his eyes, brimming wells of sadness in his seamed, granitic face: a lifetime devoted to the rigours of alpinisme mocked. Once we all got to the top and found our poles and skis we were too exhausted to do much more than make jokey slaloming gestures and hum the theme tune to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I did not dare to glance across again at Jean-Claude. The following year we went on a barge holiday in Alsace, which was equally ill-judged but at least returned most of us most of the time to sitting down.
Taking on board this major seasonal reservation, Switzerland is so compelling that one of my many regrets about completing this book is the lack of further excuses to wander from town to town. Who can ever forget the remarkable sound made by the Fribourg funicular railway ballasted by human waste? Or the severe shock of being in Montreux and seeing how functional and dull the hotel was where Nabokov spent so many years of his life? Or the beautiful austerity of the cenotaph to the Counts of Neuchâtel in the Collégiale? As the sun pours down Switzerland becomes a sort of paradise. Bern’s city centre is built on its defensive cliff-top, the federal buildings glittering and looking oddly like Queen Amadala’s palace on the planet Naboo. The site is carved by a tight loop of the Aare and in midsummer cheery individuals put their clothes in plastic bags and then jump into the aquamarine river, the current taking them round the town and dropping them reasonably close to where they began.
Switzerland practically invented the idea of tourism and there is a camp pleasure in following in the footsteps of every royal, writer and ne’er-do-well of nineteenth-century Europe in gasping at the prison cellars of Château Chillon, shedding a tear at the poignant monument in Lausanne Cathedral to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe’s young wife or thinking last thoughts when admiring the statue to the gloomy, peripatetic Empress Elizabeth of Austria in Montreux, her endless wanderings brought to an end in Geneva by a sharpened-file-wielding anarchist. The trains and steamboats and grand hotels that made it all possible are so untouch
ed by passing time that these themselves attract last thoughts – the many, now ploughed-under generations of trippers and tax exiles who have admired the same views, enjoyed the same faultless waiters. The acme is Luzern or Lucerne – a grand lake-port still stuffed with hotels, cafes, vistas and excursion boats, thronged with the ghosts of earlier card-sharps, sexual adventurers and remittance men. Things which would once have appeared merely tacky – such as the Mirror Labyrinth and Edouard Castre’s colossal panorama painting of the internment of a French army during the Franco-Prussian War – are now priceless survivors of Victorian travel. The short summer season gives Luzern a hectic quality, with excursion boats zooming out into the complex of lakes loaded to bursting with visitors. A brass band plays Meat Loaf’s ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’.
If I were old, rich and unreasonable I would settle here in a trice, thumping my walking stick on the hotel’s parquet to summon a waiter to fix me up with another wilfully obscure aniseed or fermented-walnut liqueur. I would attend church at the magnificent St Leodegar’s – built in a particularly full-tilt style during the Thirty Years War after its venerable predecessor had been burned to its foundations following a poorly managed attempt to shoot a jackdaw on the roof.5 Above all, I would go for repeated walks along Lake Luzern’s western shore, a tangle of boatyards, offices and little parks leading down to one of the nineteenth century’s principal musical shrines: Wagner’s house at Tribschen.
I have never been an obsessive Wagner fan – I love The Ring of the Nibelung, particularly Siegfried, but attempts to move out beyond this have all failed. Every shot at listening with an inward smile of concentration and reverence to Lohengrin or even Tristan and Isolde has always ended up after an hour or two with trips to the biscuit cupboard, resultant crunching noises that mess up the lavish orchestration and then a sudden, overwhelming urge to check emails. Wagner’s sheer nastiness also gets in the way of veneration: the anti-Semitism, the wheedling, the lies and betrayals. His role as supplier of Nazi theme tunes is obviously not his fault, but it does not help. Many years ago I was listening to Ring highlights at my parents’ house in an ecstasy of teenage pretension when my grandfather tottered into the room in a genuine fury, shouting at me to turn off ‘Hitler’s music’.
Despite this or because of this I have found myself repeatedly visiting Tribschen. Wagner was there because, even many years after his own participation in the 1848 revolutions, he was still a wanted man. That he could live in total safety in this big bourgeois house, just outside a town which so many of his enemies would have visited in private capacities, is a perfect example of how critical Switzerland has been to Europe’s politics and culture. If Wagner had been captured he would probably have been first condemned to death and then reprieved – but only to a similar extent to his friend August Röckel, who wound up spending thirteen years in solitary confinement in some horrible Saxon fortress. Such a fate would have knocked Wagner’s career on the head just after he had completed Lohengrin. Whether or not this was a good thing for the future of Europe it is, of course, hard to say. It would have prevented the Kaiser from having a special horn made for his new car that played Donner’s motif from Das Rheingold. It would have denied key bits of theme music to the 1930s – but perhaps life in Europe would have been even worse? There is nothing to say that, say, French light opera might not have filled the void left by Wagner’s prison confinement, so that instead of Götterdämmerung being the backdrop to dictatorship, documentaries about the same period would have instead the blood-chilling, nihilistic melodies of Bizet’s La jolie fille de Perth or Offenbach’s Le roi Carotte. But I have become distracted. In many ways, Wagner’s prolonged exile (in Switzerland and in France) made him more desirable – a king-across-the-water figure. Liszt could conduct Lohengrin in Weimar, its ‘Bridal March’ could conquer Europe, but Wagner could not be present himself.
Amazing things happened at Tribschen. The lovely Siegfried Idyll was first performed here on the stairs outside Cosima Wagner’s window on Christmas Day 1870. The young Nietzsche visited Wagner here constantly and they would have had wide-ranging, borderline demented discussions looking over the lake at grand Mount Pilatus (oddly believed to be the burial place of Pontius Pilate). It was at Tribschen that Wagner played on piano the entire score of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg for Liszt – an event that strikes me as so frighteningly boring that (perhaps unfairly) it triggers involuntary memories of sitting in church as a child almost crying with dismay at the yawning acres of time during Veneration of the Cross services. Nietzsche himself became besotted with Wagner’s music entirely on the basis of a piano reduction of Tristan, a curious example (like the Meistersinger run-through) of how almost impossibly remote we are now from the technological, temporal and sonic context in which all this great work was actually created.
The house is a fan-boy shrine and filled with old programmes, scores, the actual piano on which Wagner played for Liszt. My favourite is a glass case which contains the tiny whip Wagner used to chastise his Newfoundland dog, Russ. This absurd object brings everything back to a happier level. It is impossible not to think of Tribschen’s gaslit interior, with the tiny maestro in his velour cap, capering with rage as he ineffectively whacks his pony-sized pet, with the shadowy, weird Cosima Wagner and Franz Liszt towering over him like carnival-parade giants. In a triumph of pointless internet research I have worked out that the dog and the composer must have weighed about the same.
Wagner wrote the almost unbelievably brilliant Act III of Siegfried, Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy. Liszt was rather in transition, shifting from Europe’s top long-haired seducer to his latter-years, warty Abbé persona, but he can be forgiven anything for his much earlier Years of Pilgrimage piano pieces which crystallize a particularly effervescent Swiss romanticism. I can never quite be sure when I am just making retrospective pretentious claims, but I’m fairly certain that my enthusiasm for Switzerland is based on many years of preliminary listening to Liszt’s ‘Obermann’s Valley’, ‘By a Spring’ and ‘William Tell’s Chapel’.
It was in every respect a most peculiar household, with Cosima being Liszt’s illegitimate daughter, and Cosima and Nietzsche miles younger than the others. In a way Nietzsche and Wagner were both knitting together different cultures in much the same way Philipp Franz von Siebold had linked things Dutch and Japanese. Charlemagne’s regular invasions of the Ruhr to kill Saxons had unfortunately deprived Germany of paganism and had indeed been so thorough that no trace of a record of it remained. Wagner, to create an ancient panorama of mythological Germanism, had therefore simply to steal outright completely unrelated Icelandic sagas and, using the crudest surgery, staple their gods to the Nibelungenlied. Nietzsche, as Professor of Philology at Basle, continued Burckhardt’s ideas about the German genius being inspired by city-state Greek rather than imperial Roman civilization, but also already hinted at the Indian philosophy that would so preoccupy him. Both were obsessed with Schopenhauer. Wagner was at the height of his greatness, and could magic up music which makes even something as silly as Siegfried’s rescue of Brünnhilde from the flames thrilling and deranging. Nietzsche was writing a chaotic and often quite boring book, but one which contains flickers of what he will become so adored for: ‘A storm seizes everything decrepit, rotten, broken, stunted, shrouds it in a whirling red cloud of dust and carries it into the air like a vulture.’ Only the ‘fire-magic of music’ (i.e. Wagner’s) can renew and purify the German spirit.
It is striking that the two men who would be most blamed for providing the backdrop to the Third Reich – and who were, undoubtedly, in some ways fairly nasty individuals – were sitting by Lake Luzern and only tangentially linked to the vast dramas of German unification happening around them while the Siegfried Idyll was being debuted. Nietzsche served briefly as a medical orderly in the war, but had given up his Prussian citizenship when he moved to Basle and remained stateless for the rest of his life, having no patience at all for the Second
Reich. Wagner was plunged into composing about a world of gods and heroes, but also ultimately of treachery and the death of ambition which ends with the Rhine flooding its banks and Valhalla in flames, a long way from the rational, economically-driven world of Bismarck’s new Reich.
Grand Duchies, Empires and Kingdoms
Luxembourg remains one of Europe’s strangest entities. Somehow, through innumerable evolutionary twists and turns, it has survived. After all the Prüms, Touls and Salm-Salms have long been tidied up and given to reasonably careful national owners, Luxembourg – so often menaced, truncated and kicked about – has reached the twenty-first century. Luxembourg City is one of the great, weird European landscapes. Many major towns start, of course, on a defendable, flood-resistant hill, even if it is merely a small rise now invisible under a traffic crossing. But Luxembourg battles with Edinburgh or Budapest in any Most Craggy City contest. Even today, the geological cataclysm that sits at its heart is off-putting, with only one road from the south jumping the huge gap into the Old Town. There are few more defendable spots and over the centuries this has made it extraordinarily attractive to conquerors or would-be conquerors.
Luxembourg’s contribution to European history was the run of Holy Roman Emperors who preceded the Habsburgs, most importantly the great Charles IV, who in the fourteenth century ruled the Empire from Prague (he was also King of Bohemia) and imposed the document known as the Golden Bull of 1356, which regulated the Seven Electors and the Empire’s overall structure until the French Revolution. Luxembourg was passed around by various owners but, like a bathtub duck, however often it was pushed underwater it bobbed up again. Only twice was it threatened with total disaster – under Napoleon it became merely part of the department of Forêts and under Hitler it was subsumed in the Gau Moselland. Otherwise, it has always suited someone somewhere for it to exist. It was in the 1860s, though, that it briefly became the focus of all eyes.
