Germania

by Simon Winder

  Charlemagne himself rather vanishes under this heap of later spiritual exertion. A major contributor to this is the gigantic ‘Jerusalem’ candelabrum that hangs in the octagonal chapel’s central space, a gift from Friedrich Barbarossa to the memory of his great predecessor. These monsters are an acquired taste: only three remain and having accidentally collected the set by encountering the other two in Hildesheim and in Gross Comburg I am pretty sure that they are the twelfth-century equivalent of having a swimming pool in the shape of a guitar – less to do with culture and more to do with a kind of rampant sense of display. They couldn’t be bigger, they couldn’t be more opulent. Indeed, Barbarossa’s candelabrum at Aachen was so heavy that it caused Charlemagne’s original frescoes to slough off the inside of the dome, which makes it a funny sort of present. So the object that gives the place a big part of its atmosphere (and which, carping aside, is in its general effect magnificent) actually wrecked Charlemagne’s design. The frescoes are now neither-here-nor-there nineteenth-century fakes (again, part of the manic German completist impulse) and the feeling of awe created in the interior is in fact given by a megalomaniac bit of twelfth-century metalwork, neither actually having anything much to do with an eighth-century ruler.

  This accretion of later atmospheres which allow us to understand and enshrine leaders is of course at the heart of all history. Charlemagne as the founding figure in German history, however, is cotton-woolled more heavily than most by this process. As far as we can understand he would not have seen himself in any sense as German – he and his descendants were born in what is now Belgium, and would have viewed what is now France as more of their centre of gravity than what is now Germany. Indeed, while Charlemagne owned important German lands, he could more plausibly be seen as a sort of Hammer of the Germans, leading massively destructive and violent raids in campaigning season after campaigning season into what is now central Germany. As usual with such leaders, historians – who are generally rather introverted and mild individuals – tend to wish Charlemagne to be at heart keen on jewels, saints’ relics and spreading literacy, whereas an argument might be made for his core competence being the efficient piling-up of immense numbers of dead Saxons. Perhaps his interest in saints’ relics and Latin learning was comparable in importance to some modern, blood-boltered drug lord’s collection of little crystal animals. A baffling example is his original tomb. Charlemagne chose to be buried in an ancient Roman stone box decorated with scenes from the Rape of Proserpina – an entirely bizarre, pagan and titillating choice presumably made just because the carvings were nothing if not pure class and the whole thing felt ‘top of the range’. An embarrassed descendant replanted him in something more conventional and Christian-feeling.

  One of the most pleasurably nauseating of the Goslar palace paintings is a version of the famous scene when, having defeated the Saxons’ army, Charlemagne reaches their pagan shrine and destroys their sacred carved tree. In the painting the emperor is all frowning forbearance, the shattered idol has an oddly Hawaiian look (as though there has just been a brawl in a tiki bar) and the Saxons are marked out by their elaborate if impractical winged helmets and general shagginess. This sword-point conversion to Christianity for the Saxons was, theatrics aside, a genuinely critical moment in what turned out to be German history, and marked a step forward for Christianity that was to be a leitmotif for shaping the German experience at least for a further seven centuries. Late-nineteenth-century viewers might have seen the picture as an allegory of the struggle going on in Bismarck’s Germany against Catholics and minority groups such as Sorbs and Poles to conform to the dominant Protestant Prussian ethos – these groups being viewed in much the same picturesque yet doomed light as the tiki-bar Saxons. What it wasn’t, of course, back in the late eighth century, was anything even faintly to do with a united Germany – or indeed Germany in any sense. Nobody involved, of course, would have spoken anything understandable as modern German, the handful of people writing things down using Latin or Greek.

  In the West there were some scarcely visible strands connecting Europe to the Roman empire, most obviously the Church structure, but from the Saxon lands north-eastward (in other words most of modern Germany) there was nothing but the same chaos of forests, tribes and general freakishness which the Romans themselves had despaired of. Charlemagne and the rulers who followed him gradually carved out bigger chunks of land, but theirs were ‘empires’ where the only real source of economic growth came from booty. A successful emperor in the following centuries was one who could kill off other tribes and bring their vulgar gold display pieces back to his own palace to distribute among his leading henchmen. The unsuccessful emperors, who tended not to last long, were too old or too young or too incompetent to carry out this key mission.

  Returning to the Goslar paintings, it becomes uncomfortably clear how little has changed in some ways. Was Kaiser Wilhelm I – absurdly if briefly known, at the urging of his grandson Wilhelm II, as Wilhelm the Great, in plodding imitation of Charlemagne and Frederick – really more than a war-band leader? He enriched his followers and destroyed a range of independent states to his and his entourage’s advantage (with Bismarck, for example, simply stealing the King of Hannover’s entire treasury to use as a bribe fund). He did this with more sophisticated means than Charlemagne but it is odd to see German rulers still carving out lands, still directly copying their medieval predecessors. And, it is hardly worth saying, the Third Reich (named in sequence from Otto the Great’s notional ‘First Reich’ and Bismarck’s evanescent ‘Second Reich’) was entirely devoted to plunder and land in a way that made absolute sense of its medieval obsessions. The soldiers of the ‘Charlemagne’ Division of the Waffen-SS (themselves Frenchmen), who died defending Hitler’s bunker in the last moments of the Third Reich, brought Germany’s early medieval obsessions full-circle in a very peculiar way.

  Pious, Bald or Fat

  Charlemagne’s empire was therefore in no serious sense German, but the repercussions from the splitting-up of that empire really were significant. Over the course of a series of Carolingian rulers almost unknowable beyond their occasionally having nicknames (Pious, Bald, Fat and so on), gradually entities which approximate to modern France and modern Germany took shape, with a border area between them, variously known as Lotharingia or Lorraine or Burgundy, and with wildly fluctuating boundaries, which was to cause trouble off and on for well over a millennium.

  As reign after reign goes by, we really only have a very vague idea of what was going on. The records left are tiny, contradictory, chaotic, biased. In the Hall of the Electors in Frankfurt there is a hastily slapped-together, nineteenth-century sequence of paintings of all Germany’s Emperors from Charlemagne to the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. These paintings, until they reach rulers from the fifteenth century onwards are simply fantasy. But what a pleasure that they exist. How much better to feel that one emperor had a distinctive forked yellow beard, that another had an amusingly unlikely floppy hat, and so on. I hardly feel a purist about this – I just feel happy not to be a professional historian who really has to stare hard at the reign of Heinrich the Fowler, say, and must ignore his notionally flowing locks and chartreuse cloak, must banish fantasies of mead-halls, damsels and winged helmets, must dispose of all this picturesque accretion in favour of a handful of often woefully under-informed monastic chroniclers and the odd legal document.

  The more one studies Charlemagne and his descendants the more awkwardly un-German they appear. Even the point at which Charlemagne’s grandson Ludwig, known significantly as Ludwig the German, formalizes an eastern chunk of the old empire so that it covers an area approximating somewhere somehow vaguely like today’s western Germany, does not help much. Not the least of the problems is the eruption of yet more raiders in the ninth century who do immense damage – both to the feeble towns of the period but also to any sense of Europe having some manifest destiny for itself. These raiders fit awkwardly into European history for this rea
son – they make a monkey of the onward-and-upward school and indeed carve out entire new countries and dynasties. In the British Isles the Vikings have always stood out as the worst nightmare, destroying monasteries, ravaging more or less at will, taking advantage of their ships to attack and retreat before any lumbering land army could engage them. And yet the Vikings remain a crucial part of several national histories, founding Dublin, re-founding York, making most of the north-west part of a Scandinavian sphere which comes to include Iceland, Greenland and even (very marginally) Nordic America. England or parts of England are, off and on, part of Scandinavia until 1066 – and even then William the Conqueror is himself a descendant of other Vikings who had carved out Normandy as a separate fiefdom. The Vikings are therefore an integral, important part of English and other histories – and yet they are equated in the end with ideas of helplessness and vulnerability, an affront to nationalist self-confidence.

  All along the North Sea coasts the Vikings hacked and burned away, raising the same awkward questions wherever they went: were these people just archaic pirates or were they simply more successful than the societies that they first devastated and then intermarried with? The same problem arises with the unquestionably European Spanish Muslim ‘Saracens’ who raid and settle around the north-western Mediterranean. The ‘Saracens’ appear anomalous and strange and create histories which leave us drumming our fingers, awaiting their departure so we can contemplate a more neatly Christian land mass: and yet clearly they offer in Andalusia and Sicily and elsewhere a model of sophisticated civilization, contrasting rather strongly with the beer-and-skittles environment they laid waste to.

  Some of the worst Viking pressure landed in northern France, which really became a wasteland – a miserable, wrecked place with each bright initiative thwarted by the scale, guile and ferocity of the Viking raids. It is hard not to feel sorry for rulers like Charles the Fat, Charlemagne’s great-grandson, who were obliged to keep smiling through tears as they scraped together ever less potent resources only to have to suffer yet another round of slaughterhouse ignominy. Indeed, this could be one of the great unspoken themes of history – the shifty, embarrassing reigns that have littered the world, where the day-to-day business of marriage, ceremonial deference and rewards is played out, sometimes for decades, all headed up by someone widely viewed as an idiot. If German history particularly could be entirely recast as a sequence of absurd, fruitless marriage alliances, farcically ill-timed switches in religious faith, chaotically managed, shameful battles, faithlessness and cowardice, how attractive it all would be. Of course, the work involved would be immense as all the historians who have been mesmerized by Charlemagne or Otto the Great or Friedrich Barbarossa would need to find entirely fresh skills – but what an entertaining narrative would follow of helplessness, bad luck, human folly.

  The German lands were less overwhelmed by Vikings than elsewhere, but for the unflattering reason that the most obvious North Sea and Baltic coasts were impoverished and undeveloped places, dotted with pagan fishing villages of the sort the Vikings had gone to so much time and trouble to leave behind. Wherever there was some modest settlement, such as Hamburg, it found itself on the Viking list (almost completely destroyed, 845). Far worse for Germany were the Magyars, who sent immense cavalry forces out from the Hungarian Plain, wrecking a Bavarian army in 907 and for a further generation dominating Bavaria, Swabia and Thuringia, raiding at will as far as Lower Saxony and Cologne, while also engaging in fun detours to the Seine and the Rhône, invading northern Italy and reaching Rome in 936.

  These raiders were themselves European or becoming European, but existed outside the big English, French and German historical narratives we have all been lulled by since modern history was invented. They appear to be brakes on progress – and yet Islamic Spain proves to be a beacon of classical learning; the Norsemen discover America; Normandy and its spin-offs (England, Sicily) are central to the Middle Ages, as is the stable and indeed crucial Christian Hungarian kingdom. So the horror provoked by the raiders is a confusing one – reasonable for those who were on the receiving end at the time, but more problematic in retrospect. The German Empire which emerges under the Ottos and Heinrichs in the following century is a response to these raids – all those dukes and other panicked figures clinging together for a while to generate a state which could defend itself. But, of course, the consequence was simply to put the boot on the other foot and create an aggressive, colonial Germany.

  A very small town

  The idea of a separate German area of Europe seems to have developed under the dynasties of the tenth and eleventh and twelfth centuries later known as the Ottonians, Salians and Hohenstaufens. The Saxon ruler Heinrich the Fowler, first of the Ottonians, restarted what became a fairly regular policy of raiding east and north against non-Christians and absorbing them into his territory. That this resulted in Germany was not the plan, of course, and the emperors continued to be distracted by involvement in Italy. Almost all the Emperors spent the bulk of their time in Germany, but Italy, particularly the north Italian towns, was a crucial source of cash and an association with Italy was important to their continuing (if patently absurd) sense of themselves as heirs of Rome. The medieval Emperors were peripatetic – in an era when London and Paris were taking on something of the flavour of capital cities there was no German equivalent. Aachen could be seen as Charlemagne’s present to himself in later life, a reward for years of violent action, but none of his successors could afford to spend more than a short time in one place. Attempts to stabilize the court in a single city, such as Eisenach or Goslar, never came to anything as the Emperors needed to be constantly on the move, checking on their most important and therefore often most flaky and scheming supporters, denuding fresh areas of food and drink for their retinues of bodyguards, scroungers and clerics and, of course, leading expeditions into untapped areas of pagan backwardness.

  This German failure to establish a London shows the extremely deep-rooted nature of German fissiparousness. There was something about this region – an issue not resolved in our own lifetime – that tended to splinter power and authority. It is also what makes it so enjoyable to wander around today – these fossil records of earlier political decisions, expressed in buildings and artworks, are scattered in a thousand different places, leaving all kinds of surprising traces.

  One strange example is the miniature Harz town of Quedlinburg. This lovely place has been a backwater for about a thousand years, with even the ‘New Town’ area being established in about 1200, and maintaining ever since a sort of failure-to-thrive atmosphere. The town’s claim to greatness is that it is the burial place of Heinrich the Fowler himself, who died in 936, and who endowed the town to look after his body. Ruled by a group of aristocratic nuns as an independent state, Quedlinburg was the traditional place where the Emperors would spend Easter in honour of their great predecessor. Heinrich hurtled around chopping up Bohemians, Magyars, Danes and disgruntled fellow Germans and creating the Holy Roman Empire, albeit in a less clear-cut form than later propagandists would have liked. As usual with these figures it is hard to know whether they are visionaries following a coherent plan, or gore-soaked maniacs splitting up loot with their mates. Quedlinburg came into political existence at the very beginning of the Empire and, through many ups and downs, survived until its final dissolution under Napoleon and digestion (a very minor snack) by Prussia. It is the acme of German obscurantism, but all the while, like so many such places, remaining oddly important.

  I once spent a happy few days there and remember with some embarrassment standing in a bus queue waiting to go on the long trip over the hills to the former micro-state of Stolberg-Stolberg and realizing that I was trapped in a sick downward spiral of dependency on ‘tiny Germany’: the cult of marginal political entities that set itself, not always ineffectively, against the cosmic dreams of Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs. I turned my back on that bus to Stolberg-Stolberg, walking away, resolved that I really had to f
ocus more on Prussia and Saxony and other big bits of Germany if I was ever to get anywhere.

  In any event, the abbey church of Quedlinburg is in a perfect little residential Schloss on a hill with a tiny museum filled with all the things which give micro-Germany such a siren-song: a ballista, a narwhal horn, incompetent portraits of abbesses, a portable wooden prison, miscellaneous torture instruments – the usual. The entire state was there to generate just sufficient economic activity to pay for the nuns, to allow them to pray for Heinrich’s soul. Wandering around the abbey itself, which I did first, I was struck by its austere beauty, its lack of the usual accretions. Until very recently it had been even more austere as many of the treasury items had been stolen by an American lieutenant in 1945, whose shamefaced family had only just returned them. But even so, the neatness seemed odd – with a simple, clearly modern stone marking Heinrich the Fowler’s grave. What I had not reckoned on was that even in a dopey backwater like Quedlinburg the world of modern German medievalism never slept. Weirdly omitted from my guidebook (perhaps deliberately to add to the shock) was the crucial piece of information that in the 1930s the abbey at Quedlinburg had been deconsecrated, its congregation thrown out, and it had been turned into an SS shrine.