Germania

by Simon Winder

  What is so attractive about these towns is that we can mentally populate them. There are realistic and engaging pictures from the fifteenth century, carved, drawn or painted, of their inhabitants – Northern Europe comes suddenly to life through the work of artists who, through changes in taste and technology, have – almost incidentally to their true purposes – memorialized forever the sort of people who walked through these markets and worshipped at these churches. This was achieved initially through carving – the great proliferation (a striking feature of Germany) of large images of the Passion. We can be grateful that medieval woodcarvers and sculptors had no serious interest in what Jesus and his friends might actually have been wearing in the hot and dusty conditions of the Holy Land in the early first century. This frenzy of German carving then shifted into an absolute explosion of religious painting of the same themes after about 1500, and it is impossible not to notice, wandering from regional museum to regional museum, that almost every little parish church seems to have bought a fresh altarpiece around 1505, implying a monstrous sweat-shop of skin-tone specialists, good/bad thief aficionados, Golgotha experts. As these images of the Passion were created for the societies their audiences and creators lived in – much like the contemporary tableaux, festivals, plays on religious themes – they are accidentally full of things for us now to love. Thank goodness that at crucial moments in the Passion soldiers were required to guard Jesus, taunt him, divvy up his clothes, snooze in front of his tomb. Thanks to this grace note in the Passion story we have whole armies of late-medieval soldiers preserved in their chaotic medley of equipment, with their science-fiction-inflected sallet helmets, their chain mail, padded jerkins and studded chest-pieces, still holding swords and crossbows and arquebuses. This unstandardized hodge-podge of metal, leather bits and pieces and pinched, harsh faces once populated a thousand town walls, with their reinforced gates, curfews, alarm bells, crenellations. Similarly, thank goodness, Jesus deals with a wide range of haut-bourgeois scoffers: merchants, judges, lookers-on, all similarly preserved like insects in amber by the artwork that includes them, with their showy hats, lovely capes, decorative belts and clasps and rather odd coloured tights.

  These townscapes can be seen so clearly in the background to painters from the Van Eycks to Dürer – a world of charismatic turrets and spires, stone and wood bridges, substantial merchant homes. In Laughter in the Dark, one of Nabokov’s Berlin novels, there is a millionaire who wishes to create a monstrous movie cartoon which would animate Pieter Breughel the Younger’s Proverbs, allowing the entire townscape and its myriad inhabitants to drop their frozen poses – to let go of the eel’s tail or continue firing a crossbow at pancakes on a roof (a Flemish proverb I really am not going to research). Of course, this idea is both mad and pointless, but it becomes almost oppressive wandering around Schwäbisch Hall or Marburg’s crooked, spooky Upper Town: this is a world that has left such a full, vivid, textured record of itself that it seems almost touchable.

  As an imaginative game this era is fun, but as real life it is naturally a disaster. Many modern Germans are happy at the drop of a wimple to put on period clothing – Schwäbisch Hall is particularly guilty of this. The whole country indeed is a mass of festivals in which people in strange outfits struggle at various olden-times pursuits, play extinct musical instruments, engage in tasks such as making salt in needlessly laborious ways, or try to persuade people of the virtues of foods mercifully no longer current. This behaviour would almost be enjoyable if it were self-contained, if Schwäbisch Hall were to insist all its inhabitants act as though they lived in 1500 and for the duration was sealed from the outside world, with roadblocks and police helicopters, treating it as an introvert sort of game. But, naturally, the point of doing this is to attract tourists – so, perversely, Hall disappears under a welter of people dressed in Tommy Hilfiger leisurewear and waving digital video cameras, with the occasional smocked figure selling horrible pies or wearing gauntlets and a falcon completely lost in a chaotic ruck of idiocy very precisely dateable to 2010.

  At worst though, this low self-esteem pageantry is harmless and perhaps even poignant. Long shorn of its Nazi-tinged folkishness, the dressing-up is so compulsive because it represents a time without the horrors of the modern age. In the Schwäbisch Hall town museum there is a very strange painting of the immaculate sixteenth-century square at night in 1871, filled with the town’s entire population cheering the creation of the German empire and their absorption into it. The painting is almost black, but has an electric light behind it which illuminates the flags and lamps and fireworks. The message of the picture is very clear – in this intensely locally patriotic little town, here is the town square, site of so many earlier great happenings, now witnessing a fresh page in its history. Of course the museum also has photos of the same square in the 1930s filled with immense, billowing swastikas, hanging from the same windows and poles, festooning the inns and the church. People in Schwäbisch Hall did terrible things across Europe in the 1940s and these people and their descendants still live there – clinging to a more brightly coloured and hopeful past seems a very good idea.

  Imperial circles

  These quite small, very vigorous but also vulnerable towns were a crucial part of a sort of cultural human chain that reached from northern Italy up to the Dutch coast, shifting ideas and objects back and forth on a mixture of carts, panniers, barges and backs. This was a thriving world, well policed, heavily armed and watchful but, aside from occasional disastrous outbursts, one in which it was plausible to travel with reasonable safety. Most people only moved very short distances with goods being passed along by many hands, their value increasing with each exchange. But of course the most serious money could be made by holding onto your goods and pushing them along greater distances at your own risk, without dozens of impeding middlemen. This mix of the local and the longdistance traffic created different kinds of fortunes, from the great merchants of Antwerp or Nuremberg to countless more petty figures in the interstices. This is the world that can almost be stepped into in some of Dürer’s drawings – of water meadows, craggy walls, church towers doubling as watch towers, irregular streets and tiled roofs. It can still be glimpsed in all kinds of places – parts of Bamberg or Quedlinburg or in some of the rebuilt set-piece areas of Münster or Frankfurt.

  In the fifteenth century the Empire was reduced to near chaos by the failure of its Emperors (crucially Sigismund and then the long-reigning Frederick III) to pay it sufficient attention, as they retreated into their core, directly owned lands. This led to the crucial invention of ‘imperial circles’ late in the century – groups of duchies and smaller units who would cooperate both in protecting each other and in representing their members’ interests with the Emperor. Started by Maximilian I with a great meeting at Worms, the details took years to settle but ended with a semi-plausible structure of imperial courts (based in Wetzlar and in Vienna and with unfortunately clashing jurisdictions), a system of somewhat consultative meetings and a serious tax base for what was from now on recognizably the Holy Roman Empire.

  Some of the resultant atmosphere can still be felt in Regensburg, in the Imperial Assembly building there. For many years the assemblies were peripatetic, meeting in Worms or Nuremberg or wherever was convenient. The shift to Regensburg did not take place until the late seventeenth century, but effectively the institutions remained until Napoleon disposed of them so it is a pleasure to wander around a place so completely soaked in a semi-archaic but not unworkable spirit of compromise and deference. This small but beautiful wooden-ceilinged room with its Imperial symbols is much enlivened by a torture chamber in the basement with rack, stocks and spooky lighting – gleefully set up by some unknown anti-Catholic benefactor with a small crucifix on a stand in the corner to give it an air of monkish hypocrisy. Even allowing for this splendid bonus (and a surprising one – Regensburg is itself a very Catholic place), the surviving Imperial Assembly Hall keeps its dignity and interest. It is impossible
, sitting there and thinking about it, not to feel that there has been a conspiracy of odium heaped on the Holy Roman Empire. It did after all last in its mature form some three hundred years, and before that, in all sorts of mutations, many centuries more. It suited German nationalists to hate it naturally enough, as it was nothing if not multi-ethnic and decentred, but we should not take their ideas on this at face value any more than on anything else. It certainly fused into place a sort of fusty bureaucratic obsessiveness (perhaps best explored in Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, both of which have far deeper than mere twentieth-century roots). It is true that some legal cases literally took centuries to be resolved in Wetzlar with waiting lists for new hearings that could outlast lifetimes. But equally it held together under the most extreme stress: not just the Reformation and the Thirty Years War, but an astonishing array of fighting, shifting alliances and so on, none of which ever really – until Napoleon’s arrival – questioned its overall existence.

  The ‘imperial circles’ limited the sovereignty of individual members with even substantial states such as Saxony or ecclesiastical Cologne hamstrung, but it also protected hundreds of chips and fragments, the semi-independent abbeys and castles that proved in many ways to be some of the great facts in Germany’s existence – the reasons for the admittedly unwilling tolerance for different religious opinion after the Reformation that allowed, after immense amounts of fighting, for a diversity enshrined in national jigsawism. One crucial imperial circle, for example, was the Netherlands (both north and south) and that circle held the roots of the nationalism which ultimately created the Netherlands and Belgium. It may be that this structure delayed nationalism in Germany, an unhappy contrast with dynamic England or France – but until the late eighteenth century nobody seems to have even thought of such an idea. One of the pleasures of being German must have been watching the failed attempts of wave upon wave of Habsburg Emperors to try to impose a sort of hegemony over their Empire, attempts which always backfired hopelessly, leaving the happy inhabitants of the Mergentheim lands of the Teutonic Knights or the county of Öttingen-Öttingen to get on with their relatively blameless lives. This may have been an arrangement to outrage London or Paris centralists, but in the light of later developments it certainly has now regained its charm.

  Habsburgs

  I have a clear memory of my sixteenth birthday, which fell on the same weekend as that of a German school friend. Swapping notes about our birthdays I had rashly gone first and said that I had celebrated it at home with my parents and sisters, we had a Chinese takeaway and I’d been given Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, all of which of course had thrilled me (‘Feelin’ groovy!’). The German friend then countered by saying that he had been given a motorbike and had slept with a friend of his mum’s. I certainly remember feeling out of my depth on hearing this, but it seems unlikely that it caused such psychological damage that it set me onto a path of dependence on German history as such.

  I also remember the previously mentioned trip to Alsace and the effect it had on me, but again this seems inadequate. In the end perhaps Germany was a displacement activity. I moved to New York in my twenties and, much as I enjoyed being there, reacted to this environment not by a wholehearted embrace of American culture but by heading off in a different direction – by learning German, or trying to learn German, and by getting soaked in German writing and writing on Germany. My bible was always Claudio Magris’ extraordinary Danube, his set of essays following the river from a squashy field in the Alps to the Bulgarian delta. This set me off on years of loosely Austro-Hungarian reading: particularly the great spasm of regret that followed the disasters after and during the world wars and which ruined the multi-ethnic worlds: Stefan Zweig, Gregor von Rezzori, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka in a way. I was particularly struck by Rezzori’s The Snows of Yesteryear, which despite having an appalling title (itself fleeing in dismay from the German title of Flowers in the Snow) is a great book. He writes in a series of vignettes about life in the northern Bukovina and its capital Czernowitz (now the far western part of Ukraine). This area was almost a parody of Habsburg diversity, with an astonishing blend of Germans, Jews, Galician Poles, Roma, Ukrainians and Romanians, beautifully described by von Rezzori in an era (the 1920s) when already, as a newly acquired part of Romania (with the city renamed Cernuti), this diversity was coming under strain. The Second World War killed or expelled almost everybody, leaving, after a totally fearful series of events, only Ukrainians. The book ends with von Rezzori wandering around the modern town (now Chernivtsi), scarcely able to recognize it.

  This is a perhaps roundabout way of saying that in the end I can best trace my interest in German things much less to Germany than to Austria, or more precisely the Habsburg lands. The Habsburgs were always far more than German because they ruled such an absurd array of territories, but it was through my interest in them and a sense of loathing for what happened after their disappearance – with the rival nationalisms they had once managed with fair success tearing each other to pieces well into the 1990s – that Germany came into view for me. As so often throughout most of its history, the real action was in Vienna with the bulk of Germany following behind – a fact that remained true in, alas, ever worse ways into the twentieth century.

  So for me the Habsburgs are everything – despite their on the whole rather disappointing personalities, particularly in the final centuries of their astonishingly long period of rule, where even fighting Emperors such as Leopold I have left an oddly colourless legacy, swamped by their role and practising a sort of glum yet fervent religiosity of an unenjoyable kind.

  Some of the earlier Habsburgs took full advantage of the opportunities open to them though and their great shrine is the Tyrolean city of Innsbruck. Innsbruck is in many ways a large, dull, functional place, with the battered air all mountain cities have, where the annual corrosion of ice, wind and salt causes subtle but depressing damage everywhere. It is really not enjoyable as a whole, but it has two sensational things in it worth any amount of gloom.

  The Emperor Maximilian I died in 1519 having spent a long and enjoyable life, fighting, having children, feasting and fixing up marriages for his own children. His reign has the air of a vastly prolonged international card game where through debonair luck and skill Maximilian winds up with virtually everything. He even had the pleasure of living long enough to sort out his grandchildren’s futures and see a fresh round of Europe-wide dramas result, a soap opera of staggering complexity. Sadly Maximilian died before the episodes where it fully unfolded, that the marriage of his son Philip the Handsome to the Castilian Joanna the Mad was going to have the sensational result of their six children turning into two emperors and four queens. The Habsburgs through Maximilian were to pick up Spain, the New World, the Low Countries, Franche-Comté, Hungary, Bohemia, most of what is now Austria, parts of Italy and chunks scattered around Germany. His only loss was Switzerland, which went its own wacky way after the Battle of Dornach in 1499 and need concern this narrative no further.

  There is a pleasure in life about Maximilian which is extremely winning, although perhaps misleading. He knew so much, did so much, travelled everywhere, enjoyed the Renaissance as it filtered across the Alps, he spent time being fawned on by toadying humanists while he mulled over whether decorative schemes should show him as a descendant of Aeneas or of Noah, he had Dürer paint his portrait. The last years of his life were spent in part indulging in the unbeatable hobby of designing his own tomb in Innsbruck. Well aware of his great achievements, he wished to make a memorial of such size and grandeur that it would last forever. Consulting various humanists and artists he came up with an immense structure placed at the centre of the Court Church (the church itself built by his successor) with a kneeling figure of himself on top. This is impressive enough, but the real pleasure comes from the array of twenty-eight huge bronze standing figures around the tomb, a blend of real predecessors, contemporaries and mythical ancestor
s. Some of the sitters were alive still – and indeed Maximilian himself lived to supervise and approve some of their statues. They are about seven foot high and cannot really be reproduced in photographs as it is their texture (bronze doubling as cloth or flesh or indeed as armour) and sheer volume that make them so startling. Much of the emperor’s scheme was unrealized – not least the major setback that he himself ended up buried elsewhere. Some of the statues can claim to be the greatest German art ever created: King Arthur and King Theodoric were made in Nuremberg by Peter Vischer the Elder to designs probably by Dürer and sum up a sort of hyper-stylish brilliance that can hardly be improved on. It is perhaps these figures most of all that make such a sad mockery of their thousands of nineteenth-century sculpted successors as Germans tried and completely failed to regain this Gothic-Renaissance spirit. Some of the other statues are simply beautiful records of clothing and hairstyles. There is an old King of Portugal who, happily, left no record of his appearance and had to be shown in full armour to conceal his face – a terrifying sort of Renaissance robot. There are some cheerful absurdities too – the dark patina giving way to shining bronze at Rudolph I’s glowing groin, as numerous fingers over the centuries have found it impossible not to touch his prominent codpiece. And there is the amazingly dressed Polish princess Zimburgis of Masovia (Maximilian’s grandmother) who was so strong she could straighten a horseshoe with her hands and pull nails from a wall.