by Simon Winder
As a literary idea the stifling world of underground pops up everywhere, from Hoffmann’s ‘The Mines of Falun’ to Hebel’s ‘The Unexpected Reunion’ (one of Kafka’s favourite stories) and Kafka’s own ‘The Burrow’. The Grimms have figures popping out from underground – little black manikins, but most famously of all the Seven Dwarves, whose mine (where a million diamonds shine) is – admittedly rather notionally – meant to be some miles east of Bonn. Most overpowering of all must be Wagner’s Nibelheim – accompanied by some of the most implacable, frightening music ever created. Wotan and Loge descend through a ‘sulphurous cleft’ into Black Alberich’s dictatorship where the Nibelung dwarves are cursed to work without end digging up gold. The screams of the tortured miners and clanging of tuned anvils create a sort of fever of dread.
By the late nineteenth century, German mines were raging away, spitting out millions of tons of coal and iron in the same manner as the British ones. And in the same manner the essential accident of sitting on vast seams of industrial stuff became confused in the minds of nationalist boosters with a sense of virtue. Symbolically and actually this German romance with the underground world came to a sick close with Mittelbau-Dora, the underground factories built into the Harz Mountains, a real Nibelheim, created by Albert Speer and Wernher von Braun, where armies of workers assembled the V2 rockets, a story harrowingly re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow. Walking around the site of Dora is one of the very worst experiences available in Germany and perhaps the world. The freezing tunnels are still heaped with thousands of tons of scrap rocket parts and collapsed gantries, half flooded with eerie, crystalline water and mostly bricked up – an entire underground town with every pick- or drill-mark in the endless corridors made by the labour of slaves, of whom some twenty thousand died. Unlike many of the Nazi sites, Dora, because of the nature of its physical space, feels hideously close – only sixty or so years separate us from its full function. The V2s may have gone on and mutated into Apollo rockets and space shuttles, but lurking here in the southern Harz is the original evil lying behind it all. Its creators, Speer and Braun, respectively ended up writing bestselling exculpatory memoirs and being loaded with honours as the father of the moon landings.
CHAPTER FOUR
The tideless sea » The curse of Burgundy »
Happy families » Rampant folk costume »
Imperial circles » Habsburgs
The tideless sea
Günter Grass’s novel Cat and Mouse is set during the Second World War, substantially among a group of teenagers who meet to chat and swim one summer on the half-submerged wreck of a Polish ship sunk at the beginning of the war off the Baltic coast. There is one particularly nauseating scene where boys take turns to masturbate on the deck and, in a bravura passage, Grass creates a sort of phantasmagoria blending images of fresh semen, iron rust and hungry sea-gulls. I first read Cat and Mouse many years ago, but its effect has been rather fundamental. The German Baltic may be the magic land of amber, of Casper David Friedrich, of Vladimir and Vera Nabokov walking along the beach, of the Hanseatic League, of Thomas Mann’s schoolboys with sealskin satchels racing along town dikes. And yet, whenever I thought of going to the Baltic I wound up thinking of Cat and Mouse and going somewhere else.
This is an odd aversion, not just for the associations above, but because as a child I had for many years – for reasons which are complex but really uninteresting – a copy of a terrific sixteenth-century Venetian map of the Baltic on my bedroom wall. This map represents the acme of its genre – accurate enough to appear pleasing and decorative, but not something you would want to navigate by, despite the fraudulent reassurance of compass points and what pretends to be a precise scale. The designers have not yet noticed the most startling thing about the Baltic Sea – that it looks like a crusader praying on his knees. The map pullulates with the stuff you would hope to see – sleds, monsters, pagan shrines, knights fighting bison, wolves fighting reindeer, pretty shields to mark kingdoms and bishoprics. There is even a little inset claiming to show part of Greenland – a country inhabited by two men with spears seemingly in Chinese clothing and, discouragingly, with the shattered remnants of a ship bobbing in the surrounding waters. To the map’s left a generous chunk of the Norwegian Sea is included, mainly as a virtuoso class in drawing implausible sea monsters of a kind I’ve always loved and which was the real source of its longevity on my wall rather than any enthusiasm for things Baltic. A mass of armour, snouts, flippers, snaggly teeth, they fight each other, munch thoughtfully on ships, attack – oddly – giant lobsters; they have bull-, lion-, horse-faces and generally set such a high bar of excitement that the open ocean has always been, for me, in practice a bit of a letdown.
In the later Middle Ages the dominant city of the Baltic was Lübeck, the head of the great trade and mutual-protection society, the Hanseatic League. Ships from this city and its associates spread through the Baltic, Norwegian and North Seas. My love of trading cities battling in my breast with distaste for the Baltic, I at last wound up spending a few days in Lübeck. The sea itself fulfilled my worst ideas about it – a listless, grey mass without tides or proper waves, it implied a children’s dystopia in which there was no point in building sandcastles, as there was no tide to threaten them. Indeed the entire rhythm of seaside activity seemed completely violated. The beau ideal of a beach for me was one of those Cornish coves which can only be used at low tide, each turn of the tide chasing refugees with deckchairs and towels back up the cliff paths as outcrops convert back into islands, reeking sea caves fill again with sea, and the most elaborate child-made systems of channels and fortifications are swept away. The Baltic, despite occasional dirty storms, seemed to offer an outrageously dull contrast, as though under a spell of peculiar illegitimacy and malice: Baltic children doomed never to walk on expanses of wet sand, never battle the invading sea, only engage with the most highly constrained flotsam and jetsam. Metaphorically of course it had a superficial appeal, but like all open-target metaphors (stagnancy, unchangingness, lack of ambition) it failed through its own obviousness. I briefly perked up thinking how Sibelius drew inspiration from water, but this, sensibly, proved to be Finnish lakes, a very different proposition.
Just through my own ignorance I was amazed by the monstrous size of the ships going into Lübeck’s port – a shuttle-service of Swedish and Finnish boats transporting an infinity of containers filled with everything needed for Scandinavian consumer capitalism. This Hanseatic continuity made me very happy – through centuries of vicissitudes, fires, bombs, trade rivals, changing patterns of world commerce, Lübeck still controlled a big chunk of the Baltic trade.
The Hanseatic League is a relief, reading about the Middle Ages, as it is a recognizably modern organization. Here, at last, are people who are not kings and queens or peasants or soldiers. They are interested in weights and measures, rational bargaining, new products, workmanship, profit – all the things widely disregarded by spittle-flecked fighting monks, for instance. Cities like Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen and Danzig, and Hansa colonies such as Reval (Tallinn) and Riga, set up one of the key tensions in German life – between the aesthetics of the merchant state and that of the royal/ military state. Each city was a small republic run by a group of rich (sometimes very rich) families. Their republicanism was a bit provisional: as elements in the Holy Roman Empire they were after all guaranteed by the Emperor, without whom the city states would have been snapped up by surrounding predatory princes. But the jigsaw nature of the Empire meant that specific bits of territory tended to take on the colouring of their principal function, rather than being mixed up as they were in England or France, so royal or merchant or religious towns tended to have widely different flavours. Somewhere like Lübeck was therefore in its entire manner a sort of reproach to late-medieval royal towns such as Meissen or religious towns such as Mainz, although of course all engaged in trade and had major markets.
This sense of Hanseatic self-sufficiency w
as perhaps exaggerated further by the Reformation as the towns tended to all become Protestant, but in many ways Protestantism’s outer trappings merely reflected an early Hanseatic manner. Pre-Lutheran portraits also tend to show people wearing sober, dark clothing. The heaping up of plain, flat brick fronts shows the clear Baltic origins of Lego: the quintessential post-Hansa toy. A world lacking stone for building but instead devoted to turning out millions of bricks simply had to come up with Lego at some point, and much of Lübeck is like being trapped in Legoland itself.
These merchants were callous and predatory, working cooperatively but enforcing the sort of extra-territorial rights in places like London which the British themselves would later enforce in places like Hong Kong. Hanseatic business lay in timber, pitch, amber, bulk goods of different kinds. While kings and princes were lying around in piles of hunting dogs and underage mistresses, the devout, pensive, intensely hypocritical Hanseatic merchants were creating the outline of a modern economy, the links that would prove so crucial in, for example, the later establishment of the British Royal Navy, made possible by Baltic supplies. In a world in which most people moved about very little, the Hanseatic merchants were peripatetic on a startling scale, with tentacles spreading from Novgorod to Hull and from the Arctic to the river systems of Northern Europe. All these Baltic cities are best seen through their habitual mist of rain – Riga’s and Lübeck’s and Bremen’s roofscapes come beautifully to life in a steady drizzle, all that green copper and mercantile rectitude. With the sun out they seem a lot less interesting and a bit exposed – the coach parties and road signs coming through more strongly than the green spires and the stacks of brickwork.
The League eventually fell apart in the sixteenth century, having for years been outpaced by the ocean-going economies of the Atlantic countries and by the new banking skills of Italy, but it survives in odd ways. Bremen and Hamburg remain separate provinces within Germany, the last survivors of the old Free Imperial Cities. Lübeck had kept its independence too as late as 1937, although the rest were mostly gobbled up in wave after wave of acquisitive princely and religious wars. Danzig, disastrously, maintained itself as a separate, mainly German-speaking city state after 1918, another goad to rival nationalisms, and finally wound up with its Germans expelled from the shattered ruins and reborn as the Polish city of Gdańsk. Other Hanseatic – but with an admixture of Teutonic Knight – cities such as Tallinn and Riga lost some of their Germans after 1918 (some forming a particularly virulent, bitter element within the Nazi Party) and the rest in 1945. The German cities still refer to themselves as ‘Hanseatic’ with their city badges festooning every conceivable surface, suggesting that a specific set of virtues is understood by the term.
These continuities of geography and trade were oddly shown up in 1945 in Lübeck where the Swedish legation in the devastated town (there to protect the interests of Swedish sailors and merchants) became the venue for a panicked, sweating Heinrich Himmler’s deluded attempts to broker a deal with the Western Allies to form a sort of UN–SS united front against the Russians. Needless to say this did not work out.
The curse of Burgundy
Perhaps more than any part of the world, Germany has attracted makers of elaborate maps. Germany’s fame as a creator of atlases for the rest of the world is in fact just a self-evident side-effect of its own painful, historic thirst for means to patrol its own thousands of internal boundaries, sub-divisions and reallocations. The portrait of a figure holding a map has always been a cliché of command for kings, generals and surveyors, but in a German context, with every frontier a provisional one, it has held a specific resonance, culminating in the defining wartime photos of Wilhelm II poring over a map with Hindenburg and Ludendorff and then of Hitler and his entourage – indeed Hitler clung to his maps through thick and thin as a means of understanding the world, almost as a form of early computer game, a finger pointing or a gesture across a paper surface meaning the elimination of thousands of lives.
Maps can easily become a sort of sickness – a simplifying process defining nationalism, ambition, failure. This is not just true of Germany, but it has had a particularly sharp effect there both internally and in relation to its neighbours. Germany has always had disastrously unstable western and eastern boundaries, whereas seas and obstreperous Danes blocked up the north and mountains prevented it spreading south: not to mention the smaller eastern ranges that failed to keep German rulers out, but nonetheless protected a separate Czech culture and language.
The western border issues are so complicated that too detailed a contemplation of them would probably bring about a nervous breakdown, but they are so important – indeed one of the principal machines for generating Europe’s history – that they need a certain amount of thought. I think it is easier to deal with the whole course of Lotharingia/Burgundy’s history in one section rather than keep returning to it.
By the time of Charlemagne’s death in 814 it is impossible to talk about anything that might be called either France or Germany, whatever generations of nationalist historians in either camp may have said. Charlemagne inherited what became northern France (Neustria) and south-eastern France (Burgundy and Provence) and north-western and central Germany (Austrasia). He added southern France (Aquitaine, Gascony and Septimania), southern Germany (Alemannia and Bavaria), northern Germany (Frisia and Saxony) plus the Kingdom of Lombardy (north and central Italy) and border territories further east. As Charlemagne and his descendants all came roughly from what is now Belgium both the French and Germans have proudly declared them ancestral to their own countries, whereas in practice the Carolingian kings would have been puzzled by both. At the Treaty of Verdun in 843 Charlemagne’s grandsons carved the Empire into three, creating what would become broadly a French-speaking realm and a German-speaking one. Sandwiched in between however was the inheritance of Lothair I (hence Lotharingia or Lorraine – land belonging to Lothair).
Lotharingia if put through a computer projection through the following twelve hundred or so years would wobble, lurch, intermittently vanish, re-emerge and bulge in all kinds of fantastic ways. It could be seen as thriving or withering depending on the relative healths of the regimes to the west or east. If the King of France was feeling expansive it dissolved but if the King of France was in decline (and for great stretches of the Middle Ages he was) then it grew. Just as the French had a tendency to want to colonize eastward into Lotharingia, so the Germans wanted to colonize eastward into Polish and Czech lands and the Poles wanted to colonize eastward into Ruthenian and Lithuanian land – a motor that explained much of Europe’s history. The Holy Roman Emperor would sometimes be deeply engaged in Lotharingia, but would often be tangled up in fighting further east, would sometimes be a minor, would sometimes live in Italy and through inattention would let Lotharingia crumble.
This zone tended to fill up with all kinds of unstable semi-independent organisms with doubtful allegiances. Even extremely vigorous rulers such as Otto I (who perhaps more than anyone made a clear border between France and Germany plausible) had to battle shifty Dukes of Lorraine (and indeed a murderous Archbishop of Mainz, up to his neck in at least two plots to have Otto assassinated). As France and Germany both went through extended periods of central royal helplessness with their principal subjects carving out often very convincing states (such as Normandy or Flanders or Bavaria), the central Lorraine (or Burgundy) zone became simply one of many headaches or givens, depending on what else was going on. If it was to become ultimately a crucial European fault line then it is fair to say that until the fourteenth century it was one among many. That the region would turn out to contain independent states in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland would have been a surprise – there were plenty of other entities that could have made it through just as plausibly. At any point in modern history the accident of Luxembourg’s survival would have caused astonishment. But, of course, the real problem is that nobody was looking forward to a time when Germany (which did not exist as a s
ingle piece) and France (which was also fractured) would grind against each other to such horrible effect.
Perhaps the key turning point was the slightly odd decision by the French King Jean II in 1363 to leave Burgundy, which he owned as duke, to his younger son. This created within a generation a powerful state between France and the Holy Roman Empire and with many geographical points in common with the original Lotharingia. It straddled the formal boundary of the Empire – essentially northern France, the Low Countries, a sprawling version of modern Luxembourg and roughly the modern area of Burgundy split between the Duchy of Burgundy to the west and the County of Burgundy to the east, with the stuff in between Luxembourg and Burgundy filled by the lands of the Duke of Lorraine. These lands remained sometimes somnolent but at other times crucial to the rhythm of Europe’s history until Alsace-Lorraine and some little chunks of eastern Belgium were definitively settled into French and Belgian hands respectively in 1945.
The ins and outs are beyond my scope – they would swamp this whole book. Burgundy as an independent state is rather an appealing idea, and in portraits from the fifteenth century and in some of the atmosphere of cities such as Beaune and Dijon, Bruges and Brussels there are clear traces of its existence. A key English ally in the latter part of the Hundred Years War (and helper in burning Joan of Arc), Burgundy reached its height of power and prestige under Philip the Good, creating a specifically Burgundian fur/ velvet/armour aesthetic visible in images made by Burgundian painters such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. Of course Burgundy was a grasping and violent place on a par with everywhere else, but if it had remained stable and independent then subsequent history would have been different in ways we cannot really imagine. This stability collapsed with Philip’s death and the ten-year fiasco of his son Charles the Bold’s reign. Incidentally, with all these rulers, suffixes such as ‘the Good’ or ‘the Bold’ are merely tags which have congealed in the historical records, the initiatives of often anonymous sycophants or detractors, usually many years later, and clung on to by nineteenth-century historians to make life more interesting. In his own, extraordinarily intemperate and violent life Charles probably got called many more things than ‘the Bold’ but in any event, burning and massacring and lashing out at everyone in his neighbourhood, he was finally cornered in Nanzig (Nancy) by vengeful Lorrainer and Swiss troops. With Charles’s death in the battle his heir suddenly became his teenage daughter – whoever married her would scoop the lot. The French king wasted time taking over the bits of Burgundy which historically belonged to France (the duchy) while Frederick III, the Habsburg Emperor, wheeled out his son Maximilian for a quick marriage and the Habsburgs overnight became Europe’s greatest family, with Maximilian owning land (with some friendly gaps) from the North Sea to the fringes of the Hungarian Plain.
