by Simon Winder
German tribes
When we think of the Middle Ages at all, we are most of the time thinking about the earlier Middle Ages – the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. However obscure many of the events and however much is missing or misunderstood, there is a fascination in seeing our world gradually coming into focus – cities being founded, countries developing recognizable boundaries, a social organization that makes sense after a fashion. One impossibly difficult area is trying to work out at what point the groups cheerfully called tribes at the beginning of the period (Saxons and so on) evolve into something approaching nations. This is of course an exquisitely tricky issue of nomenclature today, with a foggy and chaotic argument over, say, ‘tribes’ in Africa. In the case of Germany the disappearance of these tribes seems in the end just to be an effort of pseudo-intellectual will by historians. The assumption seems to be that tribes are old-fashioned and embarrassing, that a ‘tribe’ is un-German and unchristian and that language and conversion ends that tribalism – so Sorbs, Wends, Old Prussians and so on stay tribal not least because they shun the blessings available from stopping being Slavs. This was an issue that never really went away, having a baleful impact on Nazi thinking – and there could be an argument that one of the reasons the Nazis were so obsessed with the Middle Ages was that it allowed the entire arena to come into view, with Germans representing civilization and Poles (who had in reality controlled a massive state for centuries) becoming once more ‘tribal’ and outside the pale of civilization.
We all yearn for rows of historical pigeonholes, but perhaps the answer is that the tribes however defined never really went away. Most people had a primary allegiance to their families, then to their parishes and guilds. These in turn had an allegiance to their duke – payments of cash, goods and many hours of their time. At various points individuals would have been more or less aware of these obligations. A bad harvest would make payments in kind a potentially fatal issue and one that required complex negotiation. The sudden presence of hostile armies would require serious actions from individuals that had not been required – beyond regular and perhaps quite desultory weapons practice – for generations. A crusade would create quite other obligations – and there were many bursts of recruiting aside from the big, set-piece crusades, whose numerical descriptions (the Fifth Crusade and so on), like a highly successful movie and its less worthwhile sequels, were only given by nineteenth-century historians. As usual, we don’t really know, but it is odd not to imagine that enthusiasm for crusades ran throughout entire societies, soaked in Church teachings, inured to pilgrimage as an aspect of life, fascinated by stories of exotic lands. Some of this can still be felt in crusader tombs or in surviving sculptures of the Holy Sepulchre, such as the lovely one in Gernrode, and which once dominated many more churches.
Crusades clearly required a complicated level of commitment, at once personal, tribal and universal, and there’s no reason to imagine that these different identities could not be reconciled just as they are today. An individual crusader was seeking individual salvation, but he was also representing a community to which he hoped to return years later with the odd Umayyid helmet and a bag of dried fruit. He was leaving because he was obliged to as a subject of the Duke of, say, Bavaria, and he was doing so as part of the universal Christian quest to wrest Jesus’ neck of the woods from the infidel. He would be thinking as an individual but also as a subject part of a tribe – and certainly not as part of a notional German nation.
Tribalism is so awkward in German national thinking because it always remained so extremely difficult to be German. A Bavarian or Styrian was conscious of a range of allegiances but not of a specifically German one. This was also true in England, but it was a confusion that seems to have been resolved – although, again, the evidence is worse than useless – some time in the fifteenth century at latest. In England the counties were always too small and had too little practical meaning to allow for much wholehearted commitment – it was rare after the Dark Ages, except perhaps as a result of the Victorian county-based regiment system, to give your life for Kent, say. Some counties, such as Yorkshire or Cornwall, have strong identities, and some regions, particularly those with borders with Wales and Scotland, had serious meaning because of the requirement to fight for them. But even at their most powerful, the individual English territorial lords, however crucial as military organizers and as heads of society, had an allegiance to London that cut across and undermined their regional power-bases. Increasingly being called duke of somewhere became an expression of where some of your revenue came from, rather than implying that you lived there all the time. Political significance in the end meant being at the king’s court and that increasingly meant London.
Germany remained entirely different and only in the poorly managed and indeed disastrous form attempted in the nineteenth century did it even try to create a roughly English state, and even then with all kinds of mad incongruities. For example the Senior and Junior Princes of Reuss were rulers of a few valleys in Thuringia from at least the twelfth century, a once key area of fighting between German settlers and pagans. Every male member of the family was called Henry as a homage to the Emperor Henry VI’s patronage, which was crazy enough, but, even worse, every male member was issued with a number rather than just the ruling prince, throwing up such challenges to sanity as Henry LXVII. Every century or so a decision was taken, in the manner of sweeping back an abacus, to start the numbers again. The princes managed to make themselves a constituent part of Bismarck’s notionally unified and excitingly modern Germany in 1871, still running their micro-domains under Henry XXII and Henry XIV respectively till these were finally stamped out in the revolutions of 1918 after a zany run of some eight hundred years. At what point the inhabitants of the Reuss lands ever actually shook off their local selves and substituted a non-tribal and grown-up national Germanness must remain forever unclear.
At a more serious level, Saxon, say, or Bavarian identity must have always remained in effect tribal – more than just local, but a long way short of national. Oaths were to their individual dukes or margraves or knights. Justice and obligations were almost all local, and the Emperor was a generally distant figure. It is crucial to emphasize again how variable this atmosphere would have been, how external events would have sometimes made an allegiance uppermost in people’s minds or how much it would simply be a given. Historians on the right have tended to see the medieval structures as a lovely, graded sequence of harmonies; those on the left – a view popularized by the East German state – as a repressive system punctuated by popular revolt. Both models seem suspect because they give the historians a sort of ownership – clearly these were societies fairly different from our own, but there seems little reason in practice not to think of them as just as sophisticated (or unsophisticated depending how jaundiced one feels), with a mass of chaotic impulses, good and bad leadership, good and bad luck, all held in check by sets of agreed norms which generally hold and which sometimes break down.
It is striking in the history of most towns how much time over the long term is spent in peaceful attempts to organize life sympathetically for their inhabitants, punctuated by really very occasional disasters (a terrible fire, a call-up for an army that is subsequently massacred). For me it would seem rather appealing to live in one of these well-ordered places, with their specialized trades, their rivers with little bridges, their astonishingly small ecological footprint, their elaborate clothing codes and their beautiful walls, mansions and churches. Or at least it would for perhaps two or three days before the general levels of illiteracy and provincialism became too wearying and for perhaps four or five before you were expelled or burnt as a witch.
Famine and plague
The optimism of the central Middle Ages (the ‘high’ Middle Ages as they are sometimes called, with the implication of a top point on a graph or on a rollercoaster) comes sadly undone in the fourteenth century. The crusades had more or less given up and the Emperor was no
longer the powerful figure he had been, but life for the hundreds of self-supporting, fairly small-scale regions of Germany had continued to be tolerable, with a rising population, reasonable security and established systems of justice. All this changed for the unhappy generations arriving after 1280 or so. One striking fact that cannot be ignored when spending too much time wandering around local churches in Germany is, through the sheer density of memorials, the unfairness of your fate based on when you were born. Sculptures and, later, paintings stare back at you asserting or even boasting their subjects’ secure, civic, prominent and enjoyable existence. But other birth dates intersect with the most ghastly events. Indeed, more often than not memorials tend to come from prosperous times and a lack of memorials means something has gone seriously wrong – that the community has temporarily lost its enthusiasm for marking its own providential happiness. We are ourselves of course acutely aware of this in the twentieth century, where specific age groups suffered millions of deaths while in some parts of Europe others could come through almost unscathed – and in others of course, such as Poland or the western Soviet Union in the early 1940s, there was no generation left undevastated.
The first half of the fourteenth century was a comparable nightmare, with similar or worse percentages of dead (albeit in a much smaller overall population) to those experienced in Central and Eastern Europe in the Second World War. In some places the Thirty Years War was to offer something similar. Within the period for which we have worthwhile records these three points (the 1340s, the 1630s and the 1940s) are the worst times to have been alive in Central Europe’s history.
The crisis of the fourteenth century began with an immense famine. It seems to have rained and rained and rained. Crops completely failed over huge areas. It was so wet that salt could not be dried to preserve meat. Transport was always too poor to allow for much food to arrive from non-afflicted areas, but in any event there were hardly any of these. People were driven to eat the seed corn needed for the following year’s crop. It has been suggested that the story of Hansel and Gretel stemmed from this awful time. Germany was at the heart of a general Northern European torture. There had always been famines, but this was the one that became known as the Great Famine, killing off an unknown but massive number of people. Having absorbed such a nightmarish blow, Germans then had to face the Black Death in 1349 – a still mysterious epidemic that swept across Eurasia, killing many millions. The statistics are conjectural but prosperous places such as Bremen and Hamburg seem to have lost up to two-thirds of their inhabitants, whole villages ceased to exist and were never re-founded, entire regions became depopulated. The combination of the Great Famine and the Black Death seems to have reduced the number of Germans by about forty per cent. It is perhaps the event in Europe’s history least possible to visualize. Some historians have suggested that Europe’s civilization, that of a vigorous intellectual life, of the great cathedrals, of an expansive and outward-looking world, should be viewed as coming to an end by 1350. Buildings such as Bamberg Cathedral should perhaps be seen much as we look at Machu Picchu, as fascinating remnants of a dead culture, even if in Europe’s case they were reused by subsequent inhabitants. Though probably too extreme, it is a useful way of thinking about just how much we really have in common, as ‘Europeans’, with this earlier period – we yearn for continuity as it makes us feel happy, but perhaps that continuity is there in a more tentative way than we would like to think.
Records are very poor, the ashen comments of some of the surviving monastic chroniclers aside, and people were too busy dying to express what they felt in much art, so we are very ill-equipped to envision what happened. The most convincing and enjoyable imaginative account is Hermann Hesse’s 1930 novel Narcissus and Goldmund, which is set in part around his old school, Maulbronn, in Swabia, the only surviving complete monastic complex from the period in Germany and still a famous centre of learning. So beguiling and textured is Hesse’s novel that the era of the Black Death has a substance and plausibility which is, of course, a total hoax. Equally, Bergman’s Black Death film The Seventh Seal seems so likely that much of the emotional upset of the movie’s end is as much to do with being suddenly shut out from its world as with the fate of the characters. And yet its real concerns are with gloom in Sweden in the 1950s, just as Hesse’s real interest is in the integrity of the individual in a Germany which integrity was under acute threat. But it is easy to be too purist – I have yet to read any proper account by a real historian which doesn’t make the Black Death completely dull, unavoidably shackled as historians are by the lack of sources. Hesse makes it all likely, palpable and horrifying.
Where a million diamonds shine
Mining has a strange and central place in German life. British mining, with the exception of Cornish tin mines, is deeply bound up in the miracle of the nineteenth century: the monster, industrial miracle of many thousands of men bringing the basis for Britain’s wealth up to the surface. This great tale, the founding story and a reality for entire counties until only thirty years ago, has absorbed and made invisible earlier mining. Germany too has its great seams of coal and iron and a heroic industrial story, but it also has a vigorous and peculiar sense of an older life lived underground, not least of course because there were more fun things to find there (silver, jewels, kobolds, feldspar, archaeopteryxes), and these built up a set of potent folk myths which have imaginatively invented mining not as a horrific, dangerous, back-breaking operation, but as a fantasy of untold wealth, of secret spells and curses, of Germany underground as a part of the national story.
The world of historical or even contemporary mining is unvisitable: the rhythms, the clothing, the skills, the companionship cannot be approximated by a quick zip down a lift wearing an orange overall and hard hat. Heine tried it in 1824 in the Harz mines at Clausthal and was clearly terrified by the sense of a dripping, alien, slippery world of specialized beings who understood the layers, the lack of light, the poisons lying around, the brittle props. In one of the great surreal moments in early nineteenth-century German literature Heine is taken into the chamber where the Duke of Cumberland – Queen Victoria’s unappealing uncle and the future King of Hannover – had attended a special banquet. His feasting chair was made from heaped ore and he had sat there surrounded by lights and flowers and serenaded by zither-playing miners. Now the chair lay abandoned in the dripping darkness. It would be wonderful to know if it is still there, calcified in the abandoned works.
Where a major seam was hit, and under the right conditions, a town could sit on its find and maintain its privileges and wealth, such as the blatantly named Freiberg (free mountain) in Saxony which keeps hauling out various ores today; unlike Goslar, whose Rammelsberg mine had generated the silver that had made the Salian Empire possible but which at last, after over a thousand years, packed up its mining operations in 1988, replacing them in the British manner with a visitors’ centre and museum manned by a handful of the original workforce.
The most vivid sense of medieval mining comes from the old German monastic settlement of Kuttenberg, now Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. Much enhanced by industrial haze, one of Central Europe’s strangest pieces of architecture wobbles into view, as you walk towards the old town, like a very grey version of the Emerald City. The spires of St Barbara’s Church are a set of vast witches’ hats, seemingly floating free of any town or indeed any base. The church was built in the fourteenth century by the German silver miners as a symbol of their good fortune. The town itself is fairly standard post-Thirty Years War Habsburg, complete with superficial baroque features and a sinister old Jesuit educational complex. The medieval mines are best indicated by a church tower which has lurched to the side at an alarming angle having many years ago partly fallen through into the honeycombed diggings under the town.
The Kuttenberg Hymn Book, decorated by Matthew the Illuminator in the very late fifteenth century, has a sensational page showing the entire mining process – the bottom third filled with
a suffocating rendering of cowled figures clambering about underground, the centre filled with horse-turned winches and miners washing themselves or hauling sacks of ore. The top of the picture – a riot of accidental proto-communist sarcasm – features beautifully dressed figures rubbing their hands together and listening to music as they watch the ore being sorted.
St Barbara’s itself has a set of frescoes, badly damaged (and thereby, of course, much enhanced) of miners at work, not in any immediate way sacred or even self-aggrandizing. The pictures simply show miners as they were, underground, in their special clothing, the heroic point of their own story, but protected by their church and their saint. To come face to face with these frescoes naturally gets you nowhere near the experience of mining, but it does make apparent something quite difficult about the Middle Ages: that there was a level of day-to-day, sophisticated expertise entirely comparable to our own, that technology always operates in perfect synchronization with its users, and that these silver miners were just as capable, just as aware of their world and its dangers and limitations as we are. Medieval miners were a closed-off little planet, as specialized as their close cousins (also protected by St Barbara) who worked siege engines or made explosives, but in a world of little movement they could define entire communities, set a pace and a range of values and self-sufficiency which deeply marked their towns. These mines, many of whose origins remain quite mysterious (who first dug in the right place?), continue under German feet to maintain a sort of odd potency.
