by Simon Winder
Ostend’s great claim to fame (aside from Marvin Gaye’s living there in the early 1980s and recording ‘Sexual Healing’ in an Ostend studio) is the lifelong presence of James Ensor. He has always been one of my heroes, with postcards of his paintings of grinning carnival masks, skulls, dolls and elaborate hats dotting the area around my desk ever since I can remember. He lived much of his life above his uncle and aunt’s shop, which sold the sort of seaside gewgaws that were incorporated into his paintings. I generally do not see much point in visiting artists’ houses as they do not seem to have all that much to do with the work itself – even Rubens’ house in Antwerp, while fantastic in itself (why did we ever abandon leather wallpaper – or wallleather I suppose?), seemed interesting as a great seventeenth-century house more than as saying much about Rubens. Ensor is an exception because the shop and the seafront were his personality and somehow the shop has survived the bombings and become a museum, still done up with hanging pufferfish, disgusting fake ‘mermaids’ in glass cases and heaped seashells. The overstuffed sitting room has a good reproduction of his Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, the vast painting (now in Los Angeles) that for decades filled the wall and can be seen in photos of Ensor and his friends, lurking behind them in all its terror and brilliance obscured by pot-plants and a piano.
I have loved Ensor for so long that it did feel like a real pilgrimage. The ossified, weird flavour of the museum, even though it was only put together long after his death in 1946, seems plausibly accurate. Here at last I was in the house of the man who, back in the 1880s, had created such marvels as Death Looking at Chinese Objects and The Astonishment of the Mask Wouse. In 1936, two remarkable writers, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig, were in Ostend, both exiled by the horrors of Central Europe and twisting and turning to create futures for themselves under terrible circumstances (Roth died of alcoholism in Paris in 1939; Zweig and his wife committed suicide in Brazil in 1942). At one point Zweig decided to visit the elderly Ensor. He was allowed into the shop and walked quietly up the stairs to the main room. Here he saw Ensor in a flat cap, his back to him as he played quietly on his piano in total solitude, surrounded by the macabre trinkets of a lifetime and with Christ’s Entry into Brussels filling the entire wall behind him, the picture heaving with masked, leering figures, for the most part ignoring the tiny spiritless Christ in their midst. Overcome with unease, Zweig turned round and went quietly back down the stairs.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘Barracks, barracks, barracks’ » War plans » The Battle of the Frontiers » Kilomètre 0 » Red, yellow and blue » Shame on the Rhine
‘Barracks, barracks, barracks’
In the decades before 1914, Europe became a vast, chaotic building site. Architecture lurched about crazily, devouring then regurgitating a buffet trolley of unrelated styles: Byzantine, Aztec, Greek, Javanese, Carolingian – an incontinent thrashing about which caused such indigestion that it forced modernism to come to the rescue, kicking in the stained-glass and copper-tendril front door and arresting the lot. At the time it must have seemed both stimulating and deeply confusing. We are ourselves now so far out of modernism’s shadow that we can pick our way around these buildings in the same spirit as we enjoy a gigantic box of soft-centre chocolates: in other words – before abandoning the food/aesthetics metaphors – no longer for sustenance but for fun. The gleeful panache of such buildings as Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel in Brussels or the extraordinary Winter Garden of the Ursuline Nuns just outside Mechelen now seems a summit of cheerfulness and it is hard to recapture how from the 1920s onwards most intelligent opinion would have seen them as walnut-whirls with a turd filling.
One striking oddity was that so many places became just much more medieval. Ghent was a battered, grimy factory town which, largely in the run-up to its hosting the 1913 World’s Fair, turned its historic centre into a wonderful fantasy of Burgundian style. Standing on the entirely made-up St Michael’s Bridge, looking at a superb array of similarly made-up pinnacles, curlicues and doodads, I suddenly felt urban, proudly mercantile, prayerful; I seemed to be wearing pointed shoes, a felt hat, brightly coloured tights, with a dagger and leather florin purse on my belt, and perhaps feeling a first hint of plague. The real buildings, such as the fabulously blackened, carcass-like front of St Michael’s Church, blend seamlessly with the fake – such as the superb new medieval building stuck to that church’s north-east corner. This is true throughout Ghent, as historicist obsessives triumphed. The Gravensteen, the battered, much abused old castle of the counts and dukes, had been raided as a stone quarry for years and had the indignity of being used just as a back wall for various shops. Plans to demolish it were quashed and it was so crazily over-restored that it looks as though human-size Playmobil figures should be guarding the battlements. One of the Gravensteen’s many pleasures is seeing how the real urban environment was reshaped, inspired substantially by historicist Grand Opera sets, in ways that would then in turn have a huge influence on history-themed movies.
This is an endless subject and some slight sense of discipline has to be kept. In the Netherlands, for example, it seemed in 1869 fairly uncontentious to sell off the huge, magnificent rood loft from the Cathedral of St John in ’s-Hertogenbosch, a classical work in coloured marble from the early seventeenth century, which could not have been more unfashionable in an era of Gothic fancy. It ended up in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, where it remains today on spectacular display (and could perhaps, in a nice gesture, just be handed back to the cathedral for free at some point?). Unexpectedly, this patrimonial sell-off caused a spasm of horror across the Netherlands and launched a vigorous new Dutch conservation movement. The vagaries of taste and fate almost led to the fabulous Knights Hall in The Hague being demolished, before it was rescued, rebuilt, given its two charming, medievaline towers and restored to its central place in Dutch political life. This was in large part thanks to the energy and wisdom of the great Pierre Cuypers, architect extraordinary (Amsterdam Central Station, the Rijksmuseum), who not only renovated the hall but also, to the delight of so many generations, added the magical flourish of the Binnenhof fountain, a fantasia of flowers and monsters and heraldic shields topped by a gold statue of Count William II. The fountain started off life (as with bits of Ghent) as part of a World’s Fair and this sense of international and local rivalry made such grands projets (fuelled by steam, petrol and electrical breakthroughs, plus unparalleled sums of money sloshing around) into a near-universal aspiration. There is a fine example in the French Flanders town of Douai where someone (sadly I have been unable to find out who or why) decided in 1900 that it made sense to commission for the Town Hall an absolutely colossal painting by Auguste François-Marie Gorguet as part of the newly medievalled ‘Salon Gothique’. This delirious picture shows a cavalcade through the streets of Douai in 1355 by the French king John the Good. The picture (which is in four chunks, interrupted by vaguely olden-times carved doors) is a summa of the genre: bursting with flower-carrying maidens, little page-boys, austere prelates, stern elders and a seemingly unending parade of brilliantly caparisoned horses (one head-to-hoof in gold fleurs-de-lis), armoured men and weapons. With part of my mind whirring with scenarios for getting myself elected as a douaisien local councillor so I could legitimately report back on parking issues in this very room, I simply stood there flabbergasted. As with the wilder reaches of art-nouveau architecture, Gorguet’s painting seems designed as a frenzied goad or a Technicolor emetic that will force into existence Malevitch’s Black Square. But it is in itself extremely fun. Two startling bits of modernity, however, are also marked by Douai Town Hall. Just outside there is a plaque marking the first ever helicopter flight, a one-minute hover in 1907 by the Gyroplane Breguet-Richet No. 1. As the centre of early French aeroplane construction, Douai also hosted the world’s first fatal mid-air collision in 1912. Relatedly, on wooden Gothic panels, the town hall has a scarcely comprehensible list of the hundreds of citizens who were killed in
the First World War – the list is so long that it almost seems like a list of the town’s entire population.
Other forms of more aggressive building were going on further to the east. There is an enormous crappy Germania monument looking out across the Rhine and towards France from a hill opposite Bingen. This monster was built to celebrate the Franco-Prussian War and German unification. It features the usual banal allegories of War and Peace and a matronly Germania statue holding the victor’s laurels, all on a vast scale but – entertainingly – nonetheless made vanishingly small by the surrounding countryside. Up close it couldn’t be worse (although getting there on a little gondola lift swinging over vineyards is fun), but over in Bingen the gap between its known size and its actual tininess accidentally makes it a welcome symbol of human transience and weakness. The statue’s great claim to fame was that during its construction anarchists managed to pack a huge bomb into the new road up the hill, planning to detonate it under Bismarck and Wilhelm I at the opening ceremony. In one of history’s stranger twists, it simply did not go off. The French anarchist Émile Henry said the explosives might have been better used just to blow up the dreadful statue itself.
More mad, and a joy for ever, was Germany’s great gift to Alsace: Schloß Hochkönigsburg, later renamed, under new management, Château Haut-Koenigsbourg. Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted his eastern and western borders to be marked by major castles to show (or assert) the German Empire’s ancient continuity. This was readily done in the east with the renovation of old Teutonic Knight buildings, but in the west Louis XIV and other invaders had done an effective job in erasing Germandom. Hochkönigsburg was a battered stump high in the Vosges, an old Imperial fortress destroyed by Swedish troops in the Thirty Years War. From 1900, using the latest technology, it was rebuilt as a delirious fantasy by Bodo Ebhardt. Bodo, like Wilhelm, can by some lights be seen as not strictly sane. With blithe indifference to the original ground plan he threw into the mix absolutely everything he could think of – towers, a windmill, a portcullis, a drawbridge and a chapel of the purest camp: even down to a separate little high balcony so that Wilhelm can like the emperors of old observe the service separately from the vulgar below. Even the guttering is done in a rough-hewn way to make it seem all ancient.
On the bus up the mountainside there is a stop for the leading – and apparently not as cruel as one might idly think – Alsatian tourist attraction of Monkey Island, but in practice this cannot hope to compete with the real Monkey Island of the Schloß. Wilhelm would hang out here with his friends, surrounded by pictures of his great predecessors Charlemagne, Godefroy of Bouillon, King Arthur and King David, with stuffed capercaillies and hundreds of old weapons. Guests would come in through the carved gateway twinning Wilhelm’s coat of arms with those of Charles V, making explicit the new German Empire’s claim to be the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, with all the problematic border issues for its neighbours that this could imply. The actual Kaisersaal, where Wilhelm would entertain his guests, is, with its antler chandeliers, wall paintings of shields and funny smell, disappointingly like a provincial Ratskeller dragged from a basement to the top of a mountain, but this is a minor quibble.
Setting aside fun buildings, the technology that could recreate entire medieval castles was also being used to pile up real fortifications along the borders. The French response to the Franco-Prussian War was to build an extraordinary tangle of strongpoints behind the new French–German border known as the Séré de Rivières system, its main strength running from Verdun through Toul to Belfort. Resources were poured into three generations of tunnels, supply dumps and fortresses. Like a nightmare inside the synapses of the French military mind the network proliferated over the decades – endlessly expensive, soaking up huge numbers of troops, technologically harassed by weapons innovations that made each generation of updates a bust even before the concrete was dry. Decades of war games came to nothing and whole, extraordinarily lucky year-groups of French troops passed through the system unscathed except by boredom. Eventually the luck ended and the gigantic and now antiquated fortresses at Verdun became one of the most terrible places in human history.
Belgium’s fort-building was designed not to fight a war but to make an unspecified aggressor (which, in practice, could only be Germany) think twice about breaking its neutrality. Liège was defended by a series of enormous structures which, like the French ones, lurched from being state of the art to being painfully vulnerable in a very short time. A National Redoubt of forts was created circling Antwerp, not just one of the world’s biggest ports but the place that could most easily be reinforced by troops from some of the powers that guaranteed Belgian neutrality. Given Belgium’s many peaceful years it was difficult to maintain readiness and a sense of realism. The Liège fortresses were genuinely very powerful though, albeit catastrophically undermined by the handful of ‘Gamma guns’ and giant howitzers developed by the Germans and Austrians just in time, in 1913–14, the latter (a ‘Big Bertha’) demonstrated to Wilhelm only in the spring of 1914.
The Germans themselves built up and reinforced their own fortress complexes. Above all Metz, the key city acquired in 1871, became the hub for everything – both a colossal defensive position and the place from which men and supplies from the Empire could be channelled to the Front. Even after years of post-war demolition of many of its forts, Metz is still defined by its defences. There are strange walks in its outskirts where bafflingly oversized buildings, like moss-covered Aztec temples, loom up above you or old German barracks or cold stores suddenly turn up round a corner.
In a way all this was a harmless activity for people who liked to work outside or make things from concrete, but there was always the chance, in many years very hard to imagine, that the fortresses might actually swing into action. The endlessly peripatetic D. H. Lawrence visited Metz in 1912. He was kicked out as an implausible suspected spy. In a letter he wrote that Metz was ‘a ghastly medley … new town, old town, barracks, barracks, barracks…’
War plans
In the decades after the Franco-Prussian War both sides relived in excruciating or exalted detail every moment of their great conflict. The French looked back on a war marked by incredulous prostration – in six weeks Napoleon III’s armies had been effectively destroyed. If they boldly marched forward (as at Mars-le-Tour) they were defeated and if they stayed put (as at Metz) they were defeated. The long-drawn-out final months of the war were a shameful agony with no heroes and the horrors of the Commune. The Prussians calculated the colossal indemnity payable by France exactly in proportion to the one extorted by Napoleon I from them back in 1807. As Napoleon III went into his English exile and then died, much of the execration could be heaped on his shoulders. The new Third Republic went through periods of revanchism, particularly during the picturesque episode of ‘Générale Revanche’, the absurd Georges Boulanger, who in the late 1880s huffed and puffed about fighting the Germans, dithered and then suffered electoral fiasco before fleeing to Brussels and shooting himself. But the Republic more often just focused on growth and finding allies. In Lille Cathedral there is a side altar which features a painting of the Count of Chambord, the legitimist pretender to the throne (‘Henri V’). The very existence of this picture is a residual trace of treason and shows the poisonous gulf within France between the Republic and much of the Catholic Church, influential parts of which had seen the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War as the result of secularism: ‘Catholic Christians, Protestant Christians, Christians of all name and all party, on your knees!’ The unhelpful Bishop of the newly truncated diocese of Nancy and Toul roared vengeance, claiming there was an ‘essential difference in the afterlife’ between a soldier who died dutifully and one who retreated. Nancy itself became a revanchist boom-town, fuelled by thousands of emigrants from the new German territories. French Lorraine became one of the most militarized places in the world, but also a huge centre for metal industries – its steel built the Eiffel Tower,1 a structure that has always defin
ed the period’s many enjoyments, alongside reading Zola’s novels about how awful Napoleon III’s empire had been, with its gripping account of the war, The Debacle, showing a heroic, genuine France betrayed by the squalid speculators’ fairground of the old regime.
France remained split but ever more elaborate use was made of the sacrificial image of Joan of Arc, and the battlefield of Mars-le-Tour became a great national shrine, with ceremonies held just inside the French border that were partly bitter but also held the chance of reconciliation, with many Germans attending. 1891 saw a new era with the creation of the Russo-French alliance: the isolation that had produced the disaster of 1870 would not be repeated – Germany was now hemmed in. In the run-up to the Great War, a banquet was held in St Petersburg to celebrate eternal Russo-French friendship and which featured as part of the decoration plants grown in the soil of German-occupied Lorraine, so soon to be redeemed. How and when the soil was transported I have never been able to find out, but it has to be said that, whatever the circumstances, this was a thoroughly loopy idea for a table setting.
For the Germans, an era of self-congratulation opened, but it was a nervous one. They felt certain that France would try to reverse what had happened. They looked back at the many campaigns of earlier centuries that showed how extremely hard France was to invade, how, for example, even the grand alliance of much of Europe ground to a halt at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709, never getting more than a few miles across the border; how Napoleon I was defeated almost entirely outside France; how in 1870 the French armies had been just astonishingly obliging, clinging to the frontiers and eventually being chased into Metz and squashed against the Belgian border at Sedan. It remained one of the great what-ifs as to how differently the war might have gone if a major French force had managed to manoeuvre west or south-west, extend Prussian communications and defeat each spread-out invading army in turn. As it was, France’s generals seemed to treat the war as though they were visiting the barber, simply waiting in a row for their turn.
