by Simon Winder
Germany is dotted with such survivors, gnarled and bashed up, but pressing down in the modern era as goads and irritants, strange reminders of a prior German greatness. I think it is not unfair to say that the Middle Ages for modern England are fairly unproblematic – a set of dramatic monuments (Durham Cathedral, the Tower of London and so on) held in affection as remarkable repositories of national and local consciousness. Nobody seems to care hugely that they were built by colonial occupying forces – the genial, rolling tide of the English narrative ignores such complexities. The events of the English Middle Ages have little remaining impact except at the level of cosy stories, generally focusing around Robin Hood and Maid Marian – itself, oddly, a tale of colonial subjection in which Hood is battling for the right to have England ruled by a hearty and amiable foreigner (Richard the Lionheart) rather than a creepy, lying one (John). There is a compelling daffiness to all this, where even the most ludicrous setbacks (e.g. the Hundred Years War) become part of a brightly coloured tapestry of noble-browed achievement (the Black Prince, Agincourt, the Order of the Garter), moving the reader on to the next scene of Greatness.
This really isn’t the Germans’ story at all. The roots of their nineteenth-century fascination with the Middle Ages are very similar to England’s, not least a shared enthusiasm for Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward and other bulky works, but also a broader literacy and growing curiosity about national history as a whole. A specifically German inspiration was Goethe’s widely read essay on Strasbourg Cathedral, which he had visited in 1772, and which celebrated Gothic art as quintessentially German, oddly. For Germans the Middle Ages represented an acute degree of annoyance – a time that appeared to be one of immense achievement, of cultural confidence and national unity, in stark contrast to the chaos of small, weak states that followed and the growth in French and Habsburg military power and Italian cultural power that made the intervening centuries so shameful. In any quarter-way rational sense, the period was as completely irrelevant to modern German life as it was to English, but for specific German reasons discussions of the Middle Ages became profoundly politicized and damaging. As so much of modern historical practice – really the very idea of history as something to study and analyse – comes from Germany, the Middle Ages can be treated as a sort of laboratory for the uses of the past.
When Heinrich Heine wandered cheerfully through the beautiful little Harz town of Goslar in 1824, he was surprised to find that the great imperial cathedral there, built by the Emperor Heinrich III and his successors, had been knocked down just four years before because of lack of funds. At the same time the Imperial throne had been sold off at its scrap-iron value (through weird bits of good luck this in fact survived and is now back in Goslar). The area of the cathedral is now just a chunk of porch and a huge, dusty car park and it is very odd to be able to wander around in such a massive visual absence. If only the cathedral, which managed to hang on for over seven centuries, had kept going for perhaps another twenty years, it would have been saved, cherished and embellished with all the confused German Romantic love for the Middle Ages which smothered its surviving contemporaries.
For Germans the chaos of the Napoleonic era and the German states’ generally humiliating, vulnerable, shoved-about role in the fighting, created a strange paradox. For many writers, politicians, journalists and artists there was a strong sense that for Germans to take on France, Britain or even Russia they needed to be a single country. Modernity required the ending of the chaos of little states that split up the land in a way which, despite considerable rationalization under Napoleon, ensured national weakness. But Germany had always looked on the map like an explosion in a jigsaw factory – so the only model for this modernity was to go back to the early Middle Ages, where the dynasties of Carolingian, then Ottonian and finally Salian emperors from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, the ‘First Reich’, appeared confident, German and militarily successful. These emperors had created what seemed to be specifically German monuments – cathedrals, castles, palaces – and these dotted the landscape still, in reproach to their effete successors. So where English enthusiasts for the Middle Ages were at worst romantic Tories, yearning for greater social deference (‘The rich man in his castle/ the poor man at the gate’), and at best fancy-dress enthusiasts, some Germans thought they were looking at a serious political template.
This confusing nineteenth-century enthusiasm was to have profound effects. It was possible to love the Middle Ages from a deeply conservative, local, antiquarian, dormouse-like perspective, and also to love them from a nationalist, progressive, but still not very liberal perspective. This generated a tremendously powerful movement, the remains of which scatter Germany in happy and unhappy forms to the present – as much in the reverent and imaginative care with which so many medieval buildings were rebuilt after 1945 as in the repulsive dreams of the SS.
Early nineteenth-century Germany was scattered in ancient, unfinished great churches, stopped for reasons either technical (the architect’s plans proved too mad and ambitious), financial (the town had been broken by the sheer cost of the building or by a poorly timed invasion) or religious (the Reformation had made the unfortunate building undesirable). The dominant feature of Cologne was for centuries not the cathedral as such, but the vast, slowly rotting crane that filled the stump of one of its unfinished towers. This shambolic building, with its half-made nave filled in with little huts and offices, came to stand as a reproach and challenge to German nationalists. Eventually over a billion dollars (including a massive subvention from the Prussian state) was spent in finishing it off – indeed the railway which runs alongside the cathedral had been long built while masons still fussed around in the scaffolding trying to carve gargoyles. What should have been a perfect symbol of Babel-style over-reaching, a celebration of German uselessness, became by the time of its 1880 completion a pompous and worrying sign that German megalomania was on the rise.
Major towns such as Ulm and Regensburg also had remarkable if spireless churches. On both a grand scale and a much smaller scale, a movement swept across Germany wanting to fix all these now suddenly unacceptable anomalies. In part this came from the general nineteenth-century obsession with tidiness, a wish to make everything just right. But it also came from a powerful desire to validate and engage with the Middle Ages – so the rebuilding became a wish for unity and a wish for serious autocracy.
Climbing to the top of the spire of Ulm Minster, the tallest in the world, as I once stupidly did, toiling up seven hundred and sixty-eight steps with an increasingly resented, not very good book about Goethe under my arm, is to come face to face with this nineteenth-century enthusiasm. As you are wrapped into a tighter and tighter set of staircases, winding up almost suffocated in blackened stonework, so you are equally trussed up in the madness of a world that wanted to engage in such monstrous work. The only break in this strenuous vertical yomp is a fusty room lined with old photos of other sacred buildings from around the world. Some are simply famous and holy but most are chosen just for the heights of their spires – the only point made being the infantile one that Ulm’s tower is taller. That the plans were closely based on the medieval architect’s original demented drawings – the minster was always way too big for any plausible congregation Ulm could round up – hardly makes it better. However notionally echt the inside of the tower, it has the same atmosphere of industrial heartiness, of Victorians’ waistcoated confidence in their own engineering prowess, as that experienced in a water-pumping station or viaduct. The spire also labours under the crippling weight of cheap historical hubris – Ulm itself was annihilated in the Second World War, shortly after Rommel’s body was laid in state inside the Town Hall, the site visible from the gaggingly claustrophobic stone cage of the bird-shit-caked spire’s pinnacle. This bombing left the new spire as one of the handful of objects still standing in a devastated landscape. The sense that the new, united Germany of the nineteenth century could best mark itself by compl
eting medieval projects sensibly aborted at the Reformation shows the power of history to make people behave oddly. The temptation to treat the less than fifty years that separate Ulm Minster’s apogee as a symbol of the new, imperial, united Germany from the catastrophe of Nazism and the destruction of the town it symbolized is a very great one – but, as the later parts of this book try to suggest, it is a temptation that must somehow be fought against.
CHAPTER TWO
Ancient palaces » Charles the Great » Pious, Bald or Fat »
A very small town » Spreading the Word »
In search of a bit of sunshine » Thrust to the east
Ancient palaces
What survives from the real Middle Ages is a range of, in practice, quite arbitrary objects based on luck and the durability of their materials. Ivories of great age, generally showing scenes from the Bible, have endured because they have always been valued but also because they could not decay and could not be reused. Very little decorative gold survives because centuries of embarrassing royal emergencies or changes in taste have taken advantage of its plasticity to remodel it or put it back into ingots or coins. Clothing, even precious clothing, has rotted, tapestries have faded, paint has worn away. Much of the texture and visual meaning of the Middle Ages is therefore lost – quite aside from the irreparable problem of our mental and spiritual equipment being so drastically altered by the intervening centuries that we can hardly engage with what we are looking at.
The massive exception to this decay and disappearance is stone, the stone which gives each cathedral or Schloss such seeming solidity, despite the remodellings, explosions and decorative efflorescences of later tastes. Palaces, always the heart of political and cultural life, even for the most itinerant of rulers, are one area where there can be no pretence about our real links with the Middle Ages. Hardly any survive in Germany, for the same reason that they generally don’t exist elsewhere: because their sites have tended to take on a specific moral or even sacred aura which has led to later, improving generations keeping the site but razing the buildings and building fresh ones, leaving simply a medley of foundations, cellars and bits and pieces for historians to puzzle over. Any fortunate and wealthy dynast is going to express his generally delusive hopes for the future by rebuilding his palace over the ruins of his dead predecessors’. The exceptions are themselves so massively fiddled with and adapted as to be almost unassociated with their origins. The Wartburg, for example, was the fortress of the landgraves of Thuringia, where Tannhäuser is set and Luther was to hide, translating the Bible into German and creating a revolution. Somehow, chunks of the old twelfth-century Romanesque palace survived, but these were so smothered in affection in the nineteenth century that the genuinely ancient interiors were encrusted in medievalene-flavoured gold frescoes celebrating a saint’s life. These themselves now have a sort of kitsch that makes their violent removal unthinkable. Almost all that is left untouched is a beautiful, undecorated, cube-shaped space with a central pillar, the room used by the landgrave’s bodyguards, pure, quiet and smelling of cold stone. Of course none of this loveliness and clarity would have existed when it was routinely filled with reeking, vermin-packed mercenaries. The Wartburg became one of the quintessential medieval-modern sites when in 1817 it filled with students commemorating the death of comrades killed in the Napoleonic Wars but also using the occasion to call for a united Germany. Unfolding the black-red-gold flag – based on the colours used by the volunteer groups (‘Freikorps’) fighting Napoleon – still used today, the students showed all the confusion of their movement. The Wartburg somehow made the leap from a mere provincial stronghold to the essence of Germany, both a symbol of lost medieval greatness and of Lutheran pride. The students wanted unification, but they saw it in anti-modern, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic terms – a military sword-brotherhood leading Germany to new glory. The event culminated in a book-burning. The students were anti-conservative in as much as they blamed German royalty for being backward and obscurantist – but it was dangerously unclear whether this made the students forward-looking or merely impatient with disunity.
In Goslar, in a perfect example of medieval crudity, the Emperor Heinrich III (1017–1056) dumped his palace down right next to the mountain where he got his silver supplies, so the metal could be dug up, refined, turned into coins and handed over to him in bags with a minimum of fuss. The surviving palace building, next to the car-park cathedral site, sums up everything about German views of the Middle Ages. The building is, in all honesty, quite boring, if enlivened by massive nineteenth-century bronze statues of Friedrich I ‘Barbarossa’, the great twelfth-century emperor and delusive role model, and a grizzled Kaiser Wilhelm I. It survived for centuries after the medieval emperors abandoned it, as a city council room, a prison and a set of storerooms. Damaged by fire, neglect and general indifference, it then became (unlike the sad cathedral) a great beneficiary of medievalism. Following unification in 1871, the kaisers saw themselves as the true heirs to their Salian predecessors. This was gratifying to them and a way of getting away from their obvious Prussianness, unifying the new Germany under a neo-Salian cloak. The intervening centuries of sad disunity then simply became something over which a beautifully engineered bridge could be laid linking a glum, unimaginative military man in the present day (Kaiser Wilhelm I) with his glittering, armoured, charismatic predecessor Friedrich I over six centuries before.
This mad self-identification, closely supervised by Wilhelm I and his heir Crown Prince Friedrich, resulted in the Great Hall in the palace being completely covered in frescoes telling the story of Germany, from its mythical origins to the present day, but skipping over all the awkward disunity issues. There is no escaping the ugly stupidity of this room, the misguided twenty-year labour of an almost pulselessly untalented Dresden painter, but for those interested in the uses of history it is almost too rich a dish. It culminates in a monstrous fresco of Wilhelm I, with Crown Prince Friedrich and the infant future Wilhelm II, his withered arm carefully hidden, in a deranged apotheosis, backed by a glowing light with the ghosts of figures such as Frederick the Great hovering approvingly in the sky and flanked by delighted-looking European statesmen, Bismarck, Prussian generals and other members of the royal family. There is also the usual detritus of allegorical ladies, representing the usual implausible characteristics. The by-rote use of these women in paintings and sculpture to indicate Justice, Unity, various rivers and so on is one of the more wearying aspects of even the most superficial wander through any German town.
When unveiled this fresco must have been a bare minimum test of character for its initial, Friends-of-the-Kaiser audience. This is a picture that presupposes a viewer on his or her knees. Even one drop of irony would have been fatal and led to uncontrollable giggling. Now it seems so poignant – all that time, trouble and paint to extol a family and a set of values that would not last another twenty years. By the time the pictures were finished both Wilhelm and Friedrich had died and that gnome-like tot in a cadet’s costume would be closing in rapidly on the incompetent sequence of decisions that would destroy his dynasty. This sense of futility is of course played out by dynasty after dynasty – so many incomplete projects, unexpected deaths, reversals of fate rack Germany that the Goslar paintings are painful merely because they are recent. The picture’s effect is not entirely poignant though because of the ease with which Wilhelm I could be substituted for by Hitler – a figure also often painted in a messianic glow and who, when it suited him, was more than happy to call down the shades of Bismarck and Friedrich the Great to smile on him, and indeed name the operation in which he invaded the Soviet Union after Friedrich Barbarossa.
Charles the Great
The ground zero for the German Middle Ages lies in Aachen – a small town on the Belgian border devastated in 1944 but which remains the home of one of Europe’s most extraordinary, alluring and mythifying buildings – Charlemagne’s basilica. This great, battered octagon, with its gold frescoes, spooky
shadows and immense candelabra is one of those places which comes at the hapless visitor from so many angles that it becomes immediately clear whole lifetimes would be required to wrestle with the twelve hundred years of cross-currents held within it. The overall feeling is very un-northern and cries out for a bit more wholehearted incense and sunshine to complete the effect. When Charlemagne (742–814) had it built as the chapel to his long-vanished palace, he was ruler of a vast empire, comprising much of modern France, Germany and Italy. He seemed to have established himself once more as the Roman emperor, a delusive, strange concept that intermittently haunted Germany’s most ambitious rulers perhaps until as late as 1945. Given that the real Roman empire had caved in centuries before and was very little understood beyond its remaining ruins and a few statues and texts, the only model Charlemagne could copy was the continuing Eastern Roman empire based in Constantinople. So his palace chapel was based around and indeed probably built by craftsmen brought in from an Italy still soaked in Byzantine artistic ideas. So the building that kicks off German identity is in practice Italian and Greek.
This building’s mental golden haze was further buffed up for me by listening to a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers there, which put me on the verge of derangement. During some of the less interesting passages in that beautiful but exhaustive work it was possible to mull over – aside from the core building’s distinctive shape and the strange, solemn presence of Charlemagne’s simple throne – just how much was really far later accretion. The chapel became the place where German kings were crowned, with Charlemagne’s tomb acting as the crucial, mystical endorsement. In 1000 Otto III opened the tomb and found Charlemagne’s nose had fallen off, his fingernails had kept growing through the tips of his gloves, but that otherwise he was not doing badly. The site’s cultic power attracted serious relics such as Jesus’ loincloth, and the cathedral (of which the chapel is now part) remains a major centre of Catholic pilgrimage, with busloads of slightly tiresome and threatening people flocking in for key festivals. The old Carolingian core was soon swamped by chapels and assorted statues given by happy pilgrims who had come from as far afield as Hungary, generally with a greater sense of effort than their modern equivalents.
