Germania
Page 14
The other all-action spectacular in Innsbruck is Schloss Ambras, the home of Maximilian’s great-grandson Archduke Ferdinand II, ruler of the Tyrol and Further Austria (which from a British point of view is actually Nearer Austria, a medley of territories based around the Black Forest). Ferdinand had a most enjoyable life: fighting the Turks, ruling Bohemia, illegally and secretly marrying a banker’s daughter of acteonizing beauty, and collecting great piles of armour, weapons, pictures and curiosities, many of which are still in the rooms he built to display them. His great collecting rival was his nephew, the Emperor Rudolph II, and after Ferdinand’s death in 1595 some of the collections were moved to Rudolph’s gloomy Schloss at Prague (where they in turn were looted by Swedish soldiers during the Thirty Years War). Enough remain though to get a strong sense of Ferdinand as a sort of civilized, restless Action Man. The weapons and armour are heaped up everywhere, with sensational helmets and famous pieces, such as armour owned by Louis II, King of Hungary, who was killed by the Ottomans together with three-quarters of the Hungarian nobility at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Most armour is, of course, not that interesting – but the idea that the armour of the famous Louis, Ferdinand’s revered uncle, was part of his collection suggests the reality of family, violence, luck and inheritance in sixteenth-century Austrian life.
Ferdinand’s own great moment with the Turks was the successful defence some thirty years after Mohács of the last Christian parts of western Hungary and his whole life was spent in the shadow of further possible advances by the Turks (there are trophies on the walls of Ottoman quivers, bows and shields). Each campaigning season could see devastating setbacks, heroic last stands and hideous accidents and these would have been chewed over ad nauseam by Ferdinand and his guests. Just as he was building the enormous ‘Spanish Hall’ at Ambras news came through of the Battle of Lepanto, where finally Christian forces managed to deliver a serious blow to the Ottoman navy. This is commemorated at Ambras with huge, rather tabloid paintings of the key commanders and enough of the atmosphere remains to feel how these were topics of personal and immediate interest rather than historical events.
Aside from portraits of members of the Habsburg family (some marvellous, some less so), Ambras is also famous for Ferdinand’s obsession with oddity: paintings of the Canary Island family entirely covered in thick hair (a little girl painted à la Velasquez but with a face like a monkey’s), a court giant’s suit of armour, a picture of a Hungarian nobleman who survived a lance through his head (it enters through the back of the skull and comes out his eye – this dreadful picture is impossible to look at, like a three-hundred-and-fifty-year anticipation of Otto Dix). There is also a painting of a dwarf thought to have jumped out of a pie at the wedding celebrations of William V of Bavaria to Renata of Lorraine, a fine example of the period’s rather plodding sense of humour – imitated presumably in many dozens of other ever more minor Renaissance courts, where dwarves must often have been ruefully brushing bits of pastry off their shoulders. It goes on and on: a crucifixion made from coral and seashells, another made from an old tree root, concave mirrors, Indian daggers, a North African kaftan from about 1580 which looks as though it was made in about 1970, a lime-wood skeleton in a mincing, gleeful pose. There is very little in the whole collection that could be described as beautiful, but its strangeness more than makes up for it. Ferdinand and Rudolph between them, with their great wealth and unlimited curiosity, created one of the crucial bases for the scientific revolution. Their interests may have had a fairground-sideshow element to them, but entangled in astronomy, alchemy, weird forms of medicine, the Ambras collections still give off a strong sense of a dangerous, alert, restless era and of individuals fizzing with the possibilities open to them. Later Habsburgs may in many cases lull everyone to sleep, but in Innsbruck at least there is a reminder of the sort of brilliance that made them so formidable and so hated.
CHAPTER FIVE
Spires, turrets and towers » A birthplace and a death-house »
The devil’s bagpipes » The ruler of the world »
The New Jerusalem » An unhappy wine merchant
Spires, turrets and towers
Free Imperial Cities are the real heroes of Germany. At different points in the Middle Ages they managed to pull themselves clear of local princes or were created directly by the Emperor and from that point on maintained themselves, often through considerable luck and ingenuity, as semi-independent states. Responsible only to the generally distant and distracted Emperor, they dotted the chaotic landscape of the Holy Roman Empire, a gleeful, mercantile contrast to their palace-bound ecclesiastical or secular neighbours.
These cities’ distinctive landscapes in part appeal so much because they have a sort of toy-town geniality – the city square, the town hall, the posh shops, a tinkling fountain – but also because they seem relatively sane and reasonable. They must have in practice often been bigoted, stifling places, obsessively hierarchical and tiresome, but so much of what is valuable and worthwhile about Germany stems from them that clearly something went right within their walls.
It is hard to generalize about these cities. Some were hardly cities at all and simply sat there rather residually, just about fending off their neighbours. Others were very compact – a small dot on the map like Regensburg seemed hardly worthwhile, but around 1140 when the Regensburgers built the only bridge for many miles across the Danube they had a happy goldmine which made them rich, with strange multi-storey merchants’ houses accumulating like a chemical side-effect of the bridge. Ulm and Straßburg were also quite compact places with riverside locations, able to dominate their bits of the Danube and the Rhine respectively – Ulm’s Danube fortifications and protected fishing village, however rebuilt, still showing its autonomous, rather threatening position.
Others had sprawling patchworks of territory – Nuremberg and Hamburg, for example, having a core of land with other fragments (some themselves quite important) scattered around. There were severe limits in many cases on their independence. However much they might bristle with weapons and towers they only thrived as entrepôts for their regions and as such needed to get on with those around them. Even within the towns there were all kinds of exclusions and oddities – monasteries or cathedral chapters could own large chunks of land within the walls, the Emperor himself and imperial officials would have a variety of rights (most famously the imperial elections in Frankfurt and the imperial parliament in Regensburg). Sometimes the towns had what could be seen as horrible fungal spores. Nuremberg was cursed in the late Middle Ages by the Hohenzollern family having got hold of an old fortress in the centre of town. The townspeople and the Hohenzollerns competitively built fortifications against each other, adding ever more elaborate platforms, walls and crenellations in case one side or the other tried to make some decisive move. Ultimately the Hohenzollerns were defeated and much of their Schloss demolished in the fifteenth century, but it has left Nuremberg with a peculiar (if, of course, marvellous) mass of stonework hanging over the town.
Cologne had been the main city in the territories of the Archbishop of Cologne, one of the most important princes in the Holy Roman Empire, an Elector and owner of one of the most ancient of Northern European Christian titles. But in 1288 the Archbishop backed the wrong side in a mind-blowingly complex territorial dispute (squaring off against, among others, someone called the Count of Loon) and wound up captured in battle and kicked out of the city forever. From that point on Cologne was a Free Imperial City with the archbishop himself, over several centuries, obliged to sulk, gnash and flounce out in Bonn.
The Free Imperial Cities were so remarkable because while not truly independent they nonetheless had a sort of civic arrogance that expressed itself in lavish display, spectacular town halls, considerable patronage and a wish to compete with each other in ways that made the Empire into one of the great cultural flywheels. Of course the contribution to this atmosphere made by princes, kings and archbishops and the imperial court itself
was not slight either, but the sheer density of buildings, gold work, beautiful fountains and generally alluring forests of steeples, turrets and towers made these places startling at a time when Berlin was scarcely a twinkle.
Nuremberg is in many ways the most tragic example. Of course it will always be the city of rallies, laws and trials and will never shake these off. Arriving there for the first time I remember being amazed that I had no sense in advance of what this great townscape looked like – a city as vivid and important to European culture as Siena, say, but which is now a perfect example of how cauterized from the mainstream Germany became in the twentieth century. For Germans themselves it is a townscape which stands for the quintessence of tradition, the perfect echt German town (one of the reasons it so appealed to the Nazis). Featured on a million German tea-towels, cheap prints, beer mugs and table mats, Nuremberg could probably not be identified in a photo by almost anybody in Britain or the United States. And yet here is the home of Dürer, one of the great mapmaking, sculpting, goldsmithing, armour-creating cities – in the Renaissance probably one of the most interesting and absorbing places in the world and still preserving, however much restored, a mass of city walls, bastions, spires, sinister little streets, giant public fountains and so on. Visiting Dürer’s house is a predictably dismaying experience (this may have been where his kitchen was, but perhaps not), but there are still scattered around the town (which was severely bombed) some interiors of merchant homes, filled with lovely carvings, decorations, great oak tables and objects of value and interest. My favourite Nuremberg object is the world’s first true extant globe, the ‘Earth Apple’, made by the cosmopolitan Nuremberg freebooter Martin Behaim in 1492. Haggard with age and incompetent restoration, the ‘Earth Apple’ still magically preserves a just pre-Columbus age, the Atlantic still littered with fake medieval fantasy islands like Saint Brandan and Antilia, which irritated mariners would continue to clean off their charts for years to come; a world in which Zanzibar and Madagascar are the same size and (most importantly) Cipangu (Japan) is an easy sail westward from the Azores. Behaim was involved in schemes with the Emperor Maximilian to sponsor a trip to reach Japan and China and there is even a letter from the summer of 1493 on Maximilian’s behalf recommending Behaim and others to the King of Portugal for such an expedition. But four months beforehand Columbus, acting on the same false hunch about Asia’s accessibility, had already returned to Spain, changing the entire course of human history and beaching the ‘Earth Apple’ and its world view forever. It is curious that one object should preserve Nuremberg’s expertise (metalwork, cartography, painting, information), ambition (the city’s symbols thickly decorate the South Pole and the globe was clearly an element in the city’s relations with Maximilian) and eventual failure (made at the exact endpoint of the Middle Ages and the opening of the new Atlantic trade world which would convert Nuremberg into a backwater).
Almost as magical is the extraordinarily complex bronze reliquary for St Sebaldus (in a church which in itself is one of the most complicated, beautiful and moving in Central Europe), a phantasmagoria the size of a small car, crawling with statues of saints and flowers, dragons and boys and all held up on the backs of huge bronze snails (symbols of man’s slow progress to meet God). Its creator, Peter Vischer, includes a genial image of himself in his working clothes. The extremely cautious Reformation in Nuremberg protected the shrine from being smashed to pieces or melted down, as so many were.
And none of this faintly impinges on Nuremberg’s German Museum, a monstrous set of halls originally built in the nineteenth century cataloguing all aspects of German cultural life (rank upon rank of oboes, saints, goblets, Tyrolean masks). This museum has a wearying completeness which rather swamps the beautiful things in it – what I chiefly remember now is the sheer pleasure of finding a mock medieval stained-glass window donated by Bismarck and featuring himself in full plate armour in one corner, both an honour to one of Nuremberg’s old specialities and a fine example of the patently demented nineteenth-century German sickness of identifying over-heavily with the Middle Ages.
The Free Imperial Cities each tended to specialize and become famous for some attribute – the mighty bankers of Frankfurt and Augsburg (the amusingly named Fuggers), the saltworks and mint at Hall, shipping and fish at Hamburg and so on. There were roughly seventy-five Cities altogether; some thrived, some blew in completely. Some were so pointless it is unclear how they survived beyond perhaps a sense that they were not worth the trouble (Bopfingen is a town whose name is on relatively few lips). Nuremberg had been sitting pretty as a crossroads of the Holy Roman Empire but as the patterns of trade became more sea-based and more enamoured of the Americas and Asia many of these inland entrepôts lost their vitality even before the horrors of the Thirty Years War. Indeed one of the reasons Nuremberg is so attractive is that it became frozen into inanition and a byword for antique charm and also for economic failure, a dilapidated shadow taken over as a minor gain by Bavaria during the Napoleonic Wars.
The struggle to survive meant that one by one the Free Imperial Cities became absorbed by their neighbours. One group, Basel, Bern and Zürich, became the core of Switzerland and went off on a different tangent. More were grabbed by the French in the 1550s, most notably Wirten (renamed Verdun), Metz and Tull (suddenly Toul). A particular massacre occurred in the Rhineland in the 1670s and 1680s when Louis XIV came up with totally absurd rationales for absorbing, often in the wake of immense violence, places like Cambrai, Kolmar (Colmar) and Straßburg (Strasbourg).
One odd latecomer was Bremen, established as a Free Imperial City from the rubble of Swedish-ruled north-west Germany in 1646 and somehow managing through all kinds of setbacks to maintain its semi-independence to the present, still keeping in a cathedral outbuilding as one of its odder attractions the mummified bodies of a couple of Swedish troopers: a collection added to later by other lucky cadavers, including that of an English adventuress with orange fingernails and a bewitching chocolate complexion generally referred to as ‘Lady Stanhope’. The major massacre came in the dying throes of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803 when Napoleon sat and dealt out the cities to his favoured, slavering German allies, who could now at last rule proper contiguous territories. At its lowest point Bremen was absorbed by France and, alarmingly, found itself turned into Brème, capital of the French department of Bouches-du-Weser. This was reversed with France’s defeat, but many of Napoleon’s new German countries stayed, albeit in highly adapted form, and with them went the Free Imperial Cities that had been snaffled, with Augsburg going to Bavaria, Ulm to Württemberg, Dortmund to Prussia and so on. Coming out the other side of Napoleon’s period only Bremen, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Lübeck managed to get back their independence within the German Federation. Frankfurt fell in 1866 through supporting the Federation in favour of the Austrians and against the Prussians. After Prussian troops occupied the city the last bürger-meister, Karl Fellner, killed himself. This endlessly inventive and complex place (its appeal now heavily disguised by annihilatory bombing and post-war redevelopment) just became swept up as an extra piece of Prussian booty – its specific urban traditions irrelevant to the behemoth that now absorbed it. Lübeck clung on until its council took the admirable decision to ban Hitler from speaking there. When the Nazis came to power this proved a bad mistake and in 1937 Lübeck was tossed to the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein to make up for Prussian land lost to Hamburg when the latter’s territory was reorganized. Lübeck’s subsequent rather enthusiastic Nazism and its position on the front line between east and west in 1945 meant that it was doomed to stay as an aberrant part of Schleswig-Holstein. This left, at the end of the war, American-occupied Bremen and British-occupied Hamburg and these have kept their tangled and often semi-broken autonomy going, with Bremen even still owning a territorially separate port (Bremerhaven) as a last, genial reminder of the geographic craziness which once made Germany such a confusing but nourishing place.
A birthplace and a dea
th-house
Martin Luther was born in the Thuringian mining town of Eisleben in 1483. His birthplace is one of those richly enjoyable fake heritage disasters that strew the German landscape. Luther’s family only lived in the house of his birth for a few months before leaving town, and the house burned down in the seventeenth century. There was a sufficient shock locally that a new house was built carefully inscribed as his birthplace, but which looked completely different. As nobody had cared about these things when the rather transient Luther family had been in the original house nobody knew which room the prodigy had been born in. To paper over the house’s tenuous – indeed non-existent – links with Luther its owners appealed for keepsakes from the great man’s life, ultimately scraping together some short letters, a lovely fifteenth-century Bible and some uninvolving medallions. They then put in a pretty hall decorated with the usual paintings of various Electors and princes. This shambles somehow lurched on into the nineteenth century, when the Prussian king took an interest, and in the late nineteenth century a Prussian official, appalled by the house being jumbled together with others and being insufficiently ‘picturesque’, ordered its surrounding buildings demolished.
The Pope himself would volunteer a thin smile of sympathy at the sheer difficulty in keeping going such a woefully marginal and inauthentic sacred site. Driven to distraction, the current birth-house regime decided last year to go for broke. Now visitors wander into a room featuring a crib and some rather new-looking furniture. Hidden speakers provide quintessentially late-fifteenth-century noises – clopping hooves, groaning cart wheels, barking dogs. And then: a baby cries (little Martin!) and his mother sings a lullaby.