by Simon Winder
It seems unlikely, but France might just have accepted Alsace’s loss if it had not been for Metz – Metz was an unquestionably French-speaking city and Germany’s acquisition was an overtly voracious one. The Germans were not particularly upping the levels of greediness: earlier French conquerors heading east or north were always claiming that city x and then city y were critical to France’s future security and would have kept going all the way to Moscow making the same claim (oh – hold on – they did!). Anyone could point to Metz and say how incredibly strategic and essential it was, and then move on to the next place and make the same point. It was always an uneasy German possession, transgressing the whole point of language nationalism. By pandering to these bull-necked and scarlet-faced German sentiments, Bismarck catastrophically failed to think about France’s matching fury, which never really moved on, bubbling up periodically under a welter of impotent loathing for Teuton greed. The Germans tried to be reasonable by allowing anyone who wished to leave the new Reichsland a two-year grace period, and many thousands did. It is interesting that so many of the most influential figures in twentieth-century French history had roots along this new frontier: Poincaré from Bar-le-Duc led France through the Great War; Lyautey from Nancy allowed France to revel in the distraction of spreading its national destiny across North Africa; Maginot, who lived in a Lorraine village destroyed during the Great War and was instrumental in creating his Line; and Dreyfus, from Mulhouse (then Mühlhausen), who emigrated, joined the French army and through no fault of his own tore apart the French state in the 1890s.
These figures all grew up in a deluge of printed, painted or sculpted kitsch about the horrors of German actions against Alsace and Lorraine, entities invariably pictured as outraged women. One famous image shows Marianne, the personification of France, with a limb sawn off. In a statue which still sits in a square (now named after Maginot) in Nancy, the provinces are two helpless little girls trying to comfort each other. Many cartoons showed either Marianne or these other girls being hauled away and raped. No politician could ever propose a friendly attitude towards Germany without provoking nationalist curses and another round of cartoons featuring semi-pornographic images of lost honour. Sometimes the issue simmered down, but the idea remained that these two geographical areas were in fact ravished and humiliated daughters of France. Germans could point out until they were purple in the face that this was land snatched by various French monarchs from the sixteenth century onwards and that somewhere like Mulhouse had been Swiss less than a century before, but nobody in France was listening.
The Germans could have tried to placate France, perhaps by at least handing Metz back, but this immediately came in turn to look both shamefully weak and beside the point. In the longer term the Germans understood that Metz would, with patience and social engineering, be duly absorbed. Many French-speakers left and German settlers arrived. Implacable generational churn put children through schools who assumed Strasbourg was Straßburg and were proud to live in the western lands of Europe’s greatest state. With control of education, government offices and the army, the Germans could reasonably expect the Frenchness of Metz to dilute to a barely tastable flavour over a century or so.
Today Metz is an almost ridiculously interesting city, its different layers enshrining the battles for its soul and the confused motives of all concerned. It is still split architecturally between the cathedral hill, which is completely French (shutters, puzzling little bits of wrought iron, perverse, tangled street patterns, Catholic, artisanal, funny smells), and the new Imperial city at the bottom of the hill (bombastic, four-square, humourless, an emphasis on drains, totally bananas architecture), which might as well be Wiesbaden on steroids. Of course these stereotypes are all wrong – except that this is what both sides themselves felt. Kaiser Wilhelm was deeply involved in the rebuilding of Metz, treating the whole city as a sort of toy box. However unpleasant a figure he was, he did brilliantly engage with the importance of symbolism’s ability to reshape attitudes. When the city walls were demolished he intervened to keep the magnificent Germans’ Gate – a mishmash of pepper-pot towers, firing platforms and machicolations sprawling across a pretty tributary of the Moselle. Named after the Teutonic Knights, whose hospital stood by it, this was always the point where travellers left the city to head to the Rhineland, so there were Imperial reasons for Wilhelm’s enthusiasm – but this does not stop his instincts being sound. His drastic vision for the cathedral also worked. At the nadir of Gothic’s fortunes in the eighteenth century, the French concealed what now seemed the irredeemably barbarian shambles of the cathedral’s architecture with a skirt of classical arcading and a pillared gateway. Sensibly Wilhelm had this all demolished and replaced by standard-issue rather leaden German Imperial Gothic, drawing on the vast ateliers of sub-sub-William-Morris figures who could carve any quantity of tendril and any weight of saint. Attractively, the French, when they took Metz back in 1918 (and again at the end of 1944), kept the elaborate Latin inscription marking Wilhelm’s role. A lot of things were got rid of (the German Garrison Church was not very accidentally burnt down, for example) but keeping the inscription was a brilliantly judged piece of historical courtesy. Inside the cathedral a little plaque marking the deaths of two officers in German Kamerun (Cameroon) and South-West Africa (Namibia) has also been kept – again, something which could so easily have been chipped off, but which adds a strange resonance that can only become greater over time.
But Metz above all else is known for its extraordinary railway station. This building, again closely supervised by Wilhelm, brings together a vast range of Imperial neuroses and was meant to be the western terminus of Germandom. Built as a Nibelung hall plus railway tracks, it is both a monstrosity and a wonder, forming part of an ensemble which also includes a post office which looks as though you need to have chainmail and a horned helmet just to buy a stamp from it, and one of the world’s very few medieval-style water-towers. With its Charlemagne Hall, mythological, faux-runic carvings and hunkered down Romanesque clock-tower, the station is almost lovable, even if originally designed just as a backdrop for Wilhelm’s visits in ever-stranger uniforms. Many of the carvings are designed to enchant bored children in waiting rooms. Its main purpose might have been to get as many troops de-trained and re-trained as quickly as possible in a future war, but it achieves this with great style.
There is a famous statue on the outside of the booking hall. It shows a Roland figure with sword and Imperial shield looking frowningly towards France. His face was modelled on that of Graf von Haeseler, the head of the XVI Army Corps stationed at Metz, an ancient Prussian officer who had served in the wars with Denmark, Austria and France many years previously. At the end of 1918 an occupying French soldier scrambled up there and put a sign on the shield saying, ‘Hey! So what is he still doing here?’ (‘Eh! Bien celui ci que fait-il encore là?’) In 1919 his shield was re-carved as the Cross of Lorraine; this was then again redone as the shield of the city of Metz in 1940 and in 1945 his German head was at last lopped off and replaced by a French one with an Asterix moustache.
Expanses of baize
Like much of the Western world, our local shopping mall a couple of years ago was seized by the bizarre fashion for putting your bare feet in a tank and having the dead skin bitten off by little Middle Eastern fish. It would be easy to rant about how this sums up everything that is most hopeless about the twenty-first century, etc., but I was mainly saddened both for the fish (who cannot actively want to be in south-west London) and for the activity being described as a ‘fish spa pedicure’. As helpless as the tiny fish themselves, the word ‘spa’ itself continues its relentless journey both laterally (around the globe) and downwards (into ever more humiliating contexts). The name of the original town of Spa springs from other, similarly odd words in the linguistic rubble formed by the Romance-Germanic frontier in the Ardennes: places like Theux, Trooz, Ovifat, Ster and St Vith. We are so inured to the word Spa that we are no longer struck by it
s oddness. The practices first worked out here for turning illnesses into a happy racket have changed the world.
The sheer grandeur of these original spas remains astonishing. I grew up in a small spa town in south-east England and while the water is no longer a draw, it is still strikingly elegant. But it is a mere village compared to such monsters as Spa itself, Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. By the nineteenth century their town centres were jammed with gargantuan palaces for water, in an arms race to inveigle and then keep the wealthiest, biggest-spending clientele. The spas’ social function was invaluable – transferring as much money as possible from the aristocracy and new bourgeois elites into the pockets of others. Strange skills with fingertips, playing cards or nasty-flavoured water brought staggering riches to an arbitrary cross-section of outsiders. The few hours taken up with bogus treatments had to be supplemented, just to pass the time, by drinking, gambling and infidelity. Small groups of money-with-menaces spivs could engage in all kinds of blackmail, flitting from spa to spa in their elegant clothes, pencil moustaches and oiled hair and having a field day. Random maid-servants, walking into a hotel room to find themselves face-to-face with the whipped bum of the Finance Minister, could set themselves up for life. Medalled statesmen and their wives could savour the gap between their public, palm-court gentility and their private perversions. Activities once confined to a very narrow group in the privacy of palaces became a major economic proposition. Wandering through the magical suburbs of Wiesbaden today, with its seemingly endless rows of Imperial German villas, it remains something to marvel at that such happy homes could be found for so many blackmailers, quacks and sharp-minded prostitutes.
The carnival played out in the great spas was always highly unstable, and a change in the international situation, or spasms of fashion (a great opera star coming to Baden-Baden, royalty deciding to try out the Bohemian spas this year) could lead to boom or bust. As each spa was in essence just a large assembly of bedrooms and administrative offices there was always a danger of being reconditioned as a military headquarters in wartime – whether the Germans in Spa in 1918 or the Americans in Spa in 1944 or Wiesbaden in 1945. They could also be converted into sprawling military hospitals. At the very worst (as in the case of luckless Vichy) they could be turned into the capital of a collaborationist government. Today the battle between the spas continues, with ever bigger water-slides, dafter treatments, more luxurious shops, all frantically trying to distract the visitor from the whispered possibility that they might be quite boring places.
My own spa research has always been a bit muted and shy. Years ago I spent days summing up courage to go to one of the great Budapest baths, anxious to see their surviving Ottoman architecture. In most of the really echt baths there is no English spoken or written, and once I had plunged nerve-racked through the doors, it was unclear what the metal tags meant, what the lockers were for, which corridor led to the men’s pool. I was also anxious about being propositioned and not being able to politely say no. I had therefore practised a Hungarian phrase which would have come out as something like ‘My sorrys but me am differently othered’. Having at last got into the pool, admired the dome for a bit and with the hot spring water roaring in, I then switched to become ever more furiously sulky that my fellow-bathers must have had a quick glance at me and felt Eros dwelt elsewhere. There was another occasion when I was basted in mud and salt crystals and put in a machine that made me feel like a hog-roast, but these events are too silly to dwell on further.
The key nineteenth-century spa breakthrough technologically was made by an Irish doctor, Richard Barter, who invented what became known as the Hiberno-Roman spa. Unlike the Turkish use of steam, this allowed people to sweat in a room with dry heat. The greatest of the Hiberno-Roman spas is in Wiesbaden, named after Kaiser Friedrich III, Wilhelm II’s short-lived war-hero father, who remains the town’s presiding genius, his hirsute form once subjected to any number of water and heat treatments. I thought for research I should really try the Hiberno-Roman baths as their Babylonian-style interiors are apparently wonderful. But they require total nudity, which I felt I could only carry off if I could walk around leaning backwards about forty-five degrees so that my stomach would be stretched flat rather than acting as a gruesome sort of pelmet above my genitals.
One aspect of Wiesbaden that I could not avoid however was the famous casino. Gambling, legal or illegal, has always been almost as important as blackmail in the success of spa economies but the idea of walking in on such a heavily coded and expert space filled me with dread. My only experience of gambling was some desultory blackjack on a cruise ship and I worried that, just as I cannot start a packet of biscuits without finishing it, I would be flushed out at once as an until now latent reckless, wild-eyed high-roller who would have to be collected the next day by my wife from a padded cell, my shirt stiff with spilt Cointreau, screaming about the queen of spades.
I dolled myself up, although only to the pathetic extent of a jacket and tie, abandoning my ideal gambling alter-ego wish-list (bottle-green smoking jacket, splash of toilet water, discreet rouge, teeth a little loosened by syphilis). I left my credit card behind and stuffed a pocket with cash but I was in the end far too timorous to get involved, perching on a bar stool sipping a martini, munching the unlimited free nuts and staring at the fantastically beautiful room, with its ideal combination of cut glass, polished cherry-wood, gleaming metal and expanses of baize. I was quickly hypnotized by the postures and actions of the croupiers – another fascinating group who have traditionally done so much to transfer money from the pockets of the wealthy to other socio-economic groups. The vast room was like a fully-functioning temple with a wholehearted congregation, regulated by the complex sets of exaggerated actions and muted sounds made by the staff. Even roulette, surely the stupidest game of all, became utterly compelling. A fevered-looking man had created at a separate table huge paper charts, colour-coded with marker-pens, from which he was plotting his roulette strategy. I kept waiting for the discreet nod which would commit him rather than me to a padded cell (itself perhaps a room with charming polished cherry-wood elements), but suddenly he won some colossal sum, with lots of gasps and chuckles from other players but not a flicker of feeling from the hieratic croupiers as they heaped his winnings. By this time I had already had way too many nuts and was not even sure I could remember the rules of blackjack, certainly not well enough to dare to take on the groups of wizened pros hunched over the tables. The evening ended absurdly as I tried to saunter out with the blank arrogance of a many-times-married shipping magnate but, not having realized that a casino’s outer doors are locked, was reduced to battling with a recalcitrant knob until rescued by an icy and meticulous functionary. I could have sworn I heard titters from the bar staff.
Wiesbaden is immortalized in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, a rats-in-a-sack phantasmagoria of bankrupts, imposters and snobs. His picture of ‘Roulettenberg’ as a sort of open sewer, a carnival of disgust, is with rather odd pride marked by the Wiesbaden fathers with a grand banqueting and business-meeting room in the spa/casino named after him. I cannot really convey how much time I have wasted trying to work out whether this decision was a brilliant joke or just flat-footed localism. Nobody seems to know. A sad side effect of my research though was to discover that the gorgeous casino rooms I wandered through with such aplomb were in fact a fake. If only Dostoevsky had arrived a little later he would not have lost all his money. The little Grand Duchy of Nassau, of which Wiesbaden was the capital, chose the wrong side in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and was crushed by Prussia with the ease of an elephant shifting slightly in its sleep. Shortly afterwards all casinos were banned throughout Prussia (one of the legal moves which made Monaco, an even more mini version of Nassau, famous as the home of Monte Carlo). I knew that the casino itself post-dated Dostoevsky and had been opened in 1907, but had wrongly assumed that people like the Kaiser were all whooping and frothing at the tables as the little ball went round: medals leaping, sp
urs gouging the thick carpet littered with dropped monocles. Sadly the cherry-wood rooms were then a ‘wine salon’ and the casino opened only by enterprising characters during the post-1945 American occupation.
One of the pleasures of The Gambler is that it preserves the important role of Russians in the nineteenth-century spa economy. Wiesbaden became a favoured haunt because of Grand Duke Adolf’s brief marriage to a niece of the ferocious Tsar Nicolas I (who sent Dostoyevsky to Siberia). Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mikhailovna died aged eighteen, while giving birth to a stillborn daughter less than a year after her marriage. This was both a tragic event and a novel one as her burial at Wiesbaden was problematic from an Orthodox point of view. The traumatized Adolf solved this by building the Russian Orthodox church of St Elizabeth on the Neroberg, a beautiful wooded area above the town, haunted by the ghosts of thousands of slowly walking posh hypochondriacs. The church is a sensational shrine both to the Grand Duchess and to 1840s official taste, the sort of panicked classicism which was about to be blown away by the 1848 revolutions. With their own Orthodox church to pray at and the tomb of a famous, melancholy Romanov heroine on site, Russians poured into Wiesbaden, with Dostoyevsky merely part of the general churn. These transients became permanent after the First World War when a mixed bag of White refugees settled, subsequently buried in the adjoining graveyard.
The Russian link was a peculiar one. After their marriage, Tsar Nicolas II and Alexandra Feodorovna – previously just plain Alix, a German princess from the nearby Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt – worshipped here. Following the Revolutionary historical twists and turns that first killed them and then, generations later, made them – after the collapse of communism – into Orthodox saints, there are now icons in the church to St Nicolas and St Alexandra the Passion Bearers, a striking leg-up for the former spa guests. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev visited Wiesbaden and at his request a Russian sculptor created a statue of Dostoyevsky, which now decorates the gardens by the casino. As with the business executives chewing over how to achieve year-on-year growth in the Dostojewski-Saal, this statue revels in the sheer rhino-hided gall of spa towns – one of the nineteenth century’s greatest writers went to all the trouble of writing a novel to warn the world that Wiesbaden is a pullulating, verminous trough and this is blandly converted into yet another tribute to the town’s star-power.
