Germania

by Simon Winder

  The final wine outpost lies around Meissen in Saxony, so far north-east that you feel every grape needs to be individually coaxed and pleaded with to plump up at all. I was staying at a guest house with two straggly and stunted vines immediately outside the window and there was clearly a sort of chic within the town about the absurdity of growing wine in such an un-Mediterranean environment. The blissful pub which showcases this wine, the Vincenz Richter, has something of the air of a moonbase or Saharan fort – the last place before things get worse, a final glass of wine before moving into the leaden, grain-alcohol skies of Prussia and Poland. I think I’d be entirely happy eating my dumplings and gravy, surrounded by President Hindenburg ashtrays, rusty swords and agricultural tools, slurping a thin and steely bottle of Vincenz Richter. I even tried to buy some to take back home but so small is the crop that all they could – in polite bafflement – offer me was a monstrous display bottle of rosé which had clearly decorated the bar for some time and lost much of its colour even in the weak sunlight. I still have it as a sort of talisman as I write now – I’m sure undrinkable.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Golden City of the Faithful »

  The land where the lemon blossom grows »

  Black armour » The King of Sweden’s horse »

  A surprise visit from an asteroid

  The Golden City of the Faithful

  In the later sixteenth century something really does seem to go wrong with Germany. After the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 there was the most extended quiet patch recorded in Central Europe’s history, lasting until 1618. That this should be so shows just how much the region’s default setting has always been either war or preparation for war, both at the instigation of its own rulers and through the unlucky role of being a natural arena for others. Some countries could last centuries hidden behind mountains or the sea without fighting on their soil, but it seems that everybody took turns to ravage Germany. This long peace oddly does not call up any sort of golden age – it was a poisonous and unproductive peace, filled with bitter religious disputes (many between different Protestant groupings), an ebbing of cultural and intellectual initiative, an economic silting-up and a growing assumption that a major war might clear the air.

  Much of this atmosphere is caught and preserved in the town of Lüneburg, in Lower Saxony. This had been a crucial part of the Hanseatic League despite being so far inland. One of the largest medieval industrial sites in Europe, Lüneburg churned out immense amounts of salt, the mining of which riddled the ground beneath it and only fully stopped in 2000. Salt was the crucial element in northern commerce, needed in infinite amounts to preserve food for the winter but controlled by a handful of major producers. Lüneburg’s close links with Lübeck can still be seen in its Lübeckstyle architecture – the strange, stepped brick house-fronts – and the intensely mercantile atmosphere, with its storehouses, canals, ancient crane and austere churches. In the later sixteenth century Lüneburg began to seize up as salt became easier to ship from elsewhere, merchants focused on more interesting things (such as trading with America and Asia) and the centre of the world shifted. This ghastly feeling was available to the burghers of towns across inland Germany – places with easy coastal access were getting richer and richer while much of the interior began to decay. It didn’t seem to matter how violently the Spanish attacked the renegade Netherlands, both sides (maritime, outward-looking) just seemed to become ever wealthier. The Netherlands even took over most of the Baltic trade, as the Hanseatic League fell to pieces. As so often, an old and pretty town centre in Germany is a strong indication of an ever more decrepit economy. Lüneburg dwindled into an ever less important place: by the time of the Second World War it was happily not even significant enough, despite its convenient location, to be worth bombing. It re-entered history briefly as the place where Heinrich Himmler – recognized by his British captors in his pathetic disguise – killed himself.

  A startling effect of this neglect can be seen in Lüneburg’s one great building – the town hall. Through a combination of economic gloom and inertia, much of the inside of the town hall has been kept in its late-sixteenth-century condition, when a final great decorative effort showed off the town’s grandeur just as it ended. I’d be hard pressed to find quite so much allegory stuffed into any other comparable space, whether painted or carved, and the famous rooms offer a glimpse into a lugubrious world in which everything is an emblem, every virtue is clunkingly spelt out, every monarch a fountain of justice. One hall has its ceiling covered in hundreds of standardized pictures of great kings from the past, dark walls are covered in a seeming infinity of family shields, an obsessive genealogy of local rule. The most stifling and glum of all must be the fusty tangle of the old archive room, with its ancient desks and walls stuffed with year after year of dated record boxes (1601, 1602, 1603). That they should exist is, naturally, astonishing, but I felt a part of me suddenly quite keen on the sort of commercial, royal, social confidence that might simply set fire to the whole lot and start again. Surely at some point all this must have looked rather embarrassing? Why did Lüneburg so completely lose that desire for change of the kind that, for example, drove Catholic architects in the following two centuries merrily to tear out centuries of Bavarian church fittings and fill up the lot with zooming white marble angels, barley-sugar pillars and ceiling vaults filled with implausibly sunshine-style blue skies?

  The Great Council Room, a mass of carved wood panelling and lovely old benches, is a scarcely credible survival, clinging on through four hundred and fifty years of changing fashions, warfare and drunken nightwatchmen dropping their oil lanterns. The room gives off a rich sense of only just being vacated by serious, dark-clothed, heavily bearded and ruffed patricians, fresh from mulling over profound splits within the Protestant camp and the annoying growth in enthusiasm for, say, Moluccan spices or Peruvian silver over their own honest and practical local product.

  Much of the character of all these rooms comes from the tireless work of Daniel Freese, a jobbing painter who trundled around north Germany turning out maps, devotional works, coats of arms and allegories as the need arose. Freese in many ways exemplifies the crisis in German culture in that he picked up so many commissions while not being terribly good. One can only hope that at least some Lüneburgers laughed at his earnest allegory of justice, with Prudence helping the ruler judge when faced by Anger (with a flaming sword), Lies (with a devil behind her head), Suspicion (blind and handless), Calumny (arrow instead of tongue) and Invidiousness (snakes for hair) plus the usual duller figures of Wisdom and Victory.

  But it is Freese’s tabloid or infant-school sensibility that makes his paintings for the Great Council Room so striking. Here, accidentally preserved in all their clumsiness, are core-samples of the brain of the late-sixteenth-century Protestant. Created in the 1570s and ranged around the walls they show a world of Last Things, of a religious struggle in which winning could not be more important, and where enemies would literally be doomed to eternal torment. In one mad vision the Second Coming sweeps away, like an enthusiastic housemaid, a tangle of losers: figures representing Death, Turks, the Pope, Eastern Orthodoxy and the Devil. These evil characters give way in another painting in the face of the glory of a vast, orange and turreted Golden City of the Faithful, presided over by God, picked out by Freese in an infantile orgy of glaring colour which, for most sane observers, can only make lying in a pile with skeletons and fat popes seem a better housing option.

  At the centre of the room is Freese’s most poignant work: a painting of the Emperor Maximilian II flanked by the solemn, ermine-robed Electors (in reality, a pretty variable bunch). Maximilian died in 1576 after a fairly short reign and this painting must have been made shortly beforehand. The tragedy lying at its heart is that Maximilian probably represented the best opportunity for some form of religious peace. Sympathetic to Lutherans, sceptical of papal authority, he seems miles away from the incense-laden Jesuit fodder who made many other Habsburgs such
bywords for dull-minded bigotry. Like many important rulers across the Empire, he toyed with changing faith and, given how riddled with Protestantism the areas he directly owned and ruled – Austria, Hungary and Bohemia – had become this would have been as sensible as remaining Catholic. Incredibly – at least in the light of later recalcitrance on this issue – he urged the Pope to agree to married priests. But he was much distracted by fighting the Ottoman empire, pressured by a host of more devout Austrian and Spanish relatives and in the end did little more than continue a tolerance which could always be suspended. His reign held the chance that Central Europe as a whole might have become Protestant, but in the end he disappointed his fans. His children were educated in Spain in the worse strains of Castilian black-clothed gloom and he himself died suddenly in Regensburg en route to a pointless invasion of Poland. For both Protestants and Catholics the fervent hope had been the end of the schism, with one side backing down and being converted. Maximilian’s reign made it clear that this would never happen. Protestantism reached its greatest extent, but huge blocks of Germany remained Catholic, allowing both sides to imagine that with missionary persuasion stumped, warfare might do the trick. The doom-laden atmosphere preserved in Freese’s pictures, visions of plague and starvation and the end of the world, lashed on by economic failure and paranoid religious certainties, made an unappealing world in which to live.

  The land where lemon blossom grows

  Standing contentedly in front of the cooker making a risotto, drugged by clouds of scent from newly torn-up basil and listening to Vivaldi’s Gloria, it is hard not to think that my interest in Germany may have been a wrong turn. Inputting ROME on the airline booking site instead of BERLIN and clicking YES would have created an entirely different book. I’d be in better health, pleasantly tanned and filled with Mediterranean laughter, instead of what I’ve got. A friend who could speak both German and Italian fluently claimed to feel his personality change quite drastically when using these languages – the former making him punctilious, waspish, acrid, remote, extremely polite, the latter making him expressive, promiscuous and a pleasure to be with. Regardless of the truth of this, it is certainly hard not to feel wistful about the South when wandering around Germany – olives and lemons trump root vegetables, and sunshine makes a monkey of all those low, lugubrious clouds. This is a common problem for many Germans, who have always had a fraught but important link with the country from which the Alps almost mockingly bar them.

  Both German and Italian historians had immense difficulties dealing with this relationship. For example, two of the most powerful German rulers of the Middle Ages, Otto the Great and Friedrich II, spent much of their time not in Germany but in Italy, the latter indeed living most of his life in Sicily and giving off little indication that he had much interest at all in Germany. Many of the Emperors spent large parts of their reign in Italy – partly because from Charlemagne onwards the Pope was crucial to their mystique and partly because they really did see themselves as reviving the Roman empire, which had, of course, been more famous for its substantial Italian component than for its German. This Italian inheritance has latterly pleased nobody – no nationalists could have much time for it. If Friedrich Barbarossa, for example, was so intensely German and such an Arthur-like hero, then why did he spend so much time pursuing his Italian inheritance (and indeed get beaten by the Italians in the process)? There is an absorbing computer game where you can pretend to be Friedrich taking on the Lombard League, complete with castles, navies, trebuchets and the fruity German accent of Henry the Lion who pops up on the soundtrack – already replete with sword-clangs and dying cries – to say, ‘Zo zorry, Barbarossa, but I mussst now betray you.’ The game is gleefully set up so that your German armies are snuffed out every time by the Veronese. I gave up in disgust in the end, lacking the martial stamina and men-leading skills that would make me an inspirational figure of a kind likely to wake from my mountain tomb in Germany’s greatest hour of need.

  This link between Germany and Italy was expressed in all kinds of dynastic tangles over the centuries, but the Reformation really fixes in place a cultural and political loop of great importance. In the later sixteenth century the split between a northern, Protestant Germany and a southern, Catholic Germany meant that two artistic spheres tended to give the north close links to the Netherlands and Scandinavia, the south a gravitational pull towards Italy. These separate worlds were reinforced quickly by the near monopoly on serious cultural activity enjoyed by the Church and princes, with forms of worship, palaces, marriages and so on having to conform to confessional needs. The tragedy for Protestant Germany was that this created too thin a texture for much of anything, with Calvinist areas such as Switzerland and the Palatinate banning and destroying all religious images. The high point of image-making in the northern and central towns based around the Cranachs churning out stuff collapsed with their deaths: the money and the inspiration just no longer seemed to be there. So embarrassing is this artistic failure to later nationalists that attempts were made in writing about the barren seventeenth century to rope in Rembrandt as a German painter – a desperate idea but also indicative of the Low Countries’ continuing, peculiar role within the Empire as being somehow nearly German despite all evidence to the contrary. Catholic Germans did the same, with Ludwig I of Bavaria’s hall of German heroes, the Walhalla, including a bust of a rather uneasy Rubens.

  Southern German and Austrian culture seems to have similarly weakened during the long peace but with the major difference of having open religious access to all of Italy. Of course, German culture had never really been something quite separate, with even the hard core of Germanness – Dürer, the Holbeins, Altdorfer, the Cranachs – being in all kinds of ways thoroughly Italian-influenced. But there was a clear process in the later sixteenth century whereby the sort of turreted, spooky gloom I like so much gives way to something smoother and more brightly coloured and, indeed, give way to actual Italians, who clustered thickly as musicians and decorators throughout the Catholic German lands, perhaps most famously Giuseppe Arcimboldo whose strange faces made from fruit and vegetables have become a sort of shorthand for Rudolf II’s dysfunctional reign in Prague.

  This fascination is most enjoyably seen in the Antiquarium, built for Duke Albert V of Bavaria in his Munich palace. This Renaissance hall, the shape of a giant, lightly compressed Swiss roll, has been much tampered with (and substantially rebuilt after a disastrous air raid), but it sums up the delights available for Catholics through their direct links with Rome, the greatest source of patronage and artistic ideas in Europe. It is impossible not to feel, walking purposefully about on the marble floors, admiring the exhausting ranks of Roman portrait busts, a sense of certainty buoyed by faith, plus the usual confusion provided by the display in a vigorous, Christian context of objects from a pagan culture. Albert drifted along in a fog of intense religious feeling while amassing great piles of ancient coins, Egyptian items and treasures, and leaving almost farcical debts on his death in 1579.

  There was really no serious artistic alternative to Italy at this time, with much of Protestant Europe either directly antagonistic towards art in most forms, or on a permanent war footing or (in England’s case) continuing with its strange inability to impose its eccentric art forms on its more sophisticated neighbours (with even Shakespeare disregarded in Germany until Schlegel began his translations of the early nineteenth century). The last great specifically German painter, Adam Elsheimer, grew up in the Lutheran city of Frankfurt in the 1580s but moved (almost inevitably) to Venice and then Rome in his early twenties, dying a Catholic ten years later. Much of his genius emerged from working with Italian painters and his magical pictures are somewhat German in tone (he certainly saw Altdorfers in Munich and perhaps in Regensburg), but such is the gravitational pull of Italy that it is hard to square actual human experience with the demands of nationalism. The very notionally somewhat possibly German Rubens was also in Rome and a friend of Elsheimer’s,
but then the whole issue of national allegiance becomes chaotic in the seventeenth century, with the two greatest ‘French’ painters, Claude and Poussin, managing somehow to live respectively some fifty and forty years in Rome (Claude is a particularly unlikely Frenchman, born in the then independent Duchy of Lorraine, raised in the Habsburg Black Forest town of Freiburg and then living in Italy from his late teens).

  Elsheimer left very few paintings and they are scattered around, in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Braunschweig and elsewhere, but I am always alert to the hope of seeing one (one indeed has just been added to the Braunschweig collection paid for by a football lottery!). My favourite is Jupiter and Mercury in the House of Philemon and Baucis in Dresden, a never previously painted subject from Ovid, where the gods come to earth in disguise to try to find good people to save from the flood which will destroy all sinners, and find only one old couple, Philemon and Baucis, with the decency to welcome them. In this tiny, but incomparably vivid and warm picture, Jupiter and Mercury manage somehow to be both plausible humans yet ineffably god-like as their elderly hosts make them their meal. At various times I’ve looked at this picture (including, as a happy surprise, at a London exhibition of paintings chased out of Dresden following the disastrous floods of 2002). I always wind up feeling pathetically upset that such a painter should have died in penury in Rome aged only thirty-two. As the sixteenth century curdled and ended, with different religious ideas digging in and preparing to fight, it was clear that a south-eastern, Italy-linked Catholic Germany was in the ascendant, together with the important Rhine Catholic electorates of Trier, Mainz and Cologne – the last ruled invariably by members of the Bavarian ducal family from 1583 onwards. This resurgence was an unattractive surprise for a Protestantism that continued to see itself as the self-evident future.