by Simon Winder
The appeal of Italy has, of course, been a virtual constant in German life and at different times caused more or less confusion. Was German culture to be found in its own resources (the cult of Dürer, of Nuremberg, of northern gloom) or in being, in effect, subjugated by a greater southern culture? Waves of fashion (confused immensely by the irruption in all kinds of ways into German life of the France of Louis XIV) played mayhem with later nationalists. These deplored the Italians who played music for the Habsburgs, built palaces and churches, designed clothes and painted portraits and ceilings, giving a particular style to cities such as Munich, Salzburg and Vienna. This in practice happy cross-fertilization throws up hundreds of examples, but two from the eighteenth century sum it up.
In 1706 the twenty-one-year-old Georg Friedrich Händel, raised in Halle and Hamburg, headed off to Italy and reacted to what he found there with some of the most beautiful music of the entire century: cantatas set in myth-riddled, brightly lit Italian landscapes, sung in Italian, perhaps most perfectly Apollo e Daphne, and a sort of summation in music of the world created in Elsheimer’s landscapes a century before. Händel could not be more German, but he was able to make a sort of brilliant concentrate of Italian sensibility, with a cantata such as Aminta e Fillide being composed to be played in a private garden outside Rome for the members of the appealing-sounding Arcadian Academy. Arguments about how German or Italian he really is are just too confusing to have any value. Particularly as he was in fact British.
Heading in the other direction half a century later, Giambattista Tiepolo, the greatest living Venetian painter and in many ways the last of his line, was invited to Würzburg by the prince-bishop to design ceiling paintings celebrating Würzburg’s standing both in the Holy Roman Empire (a previous bishop had married Friedrich Barbarossa to Beatrix of Burgundy) and in the wider world. Even without Tiepolo’s ceiling paintings the Würzburg Residence would be an astounding building – a genial response to Versailles and frivolously self-indulgent, as the prince-bishop was by almost any international yardstick a very unimportant person. Tiepolo painted Barbarossa’s marriage with everyone looking Venetian in amazing silks and with no concession of any kind to the chillier and more northern medieval context, and with his usual dwarf and dog in attendance. The mind-disordering follow-up to this though was the ceiling over the grand staircase, painted to glorify the prince-bishop and showing images from the entire planet, a continent along each side in a mad but beautiful hymn of praise to a man who, in practice, had no links of any kind to American alligator-hunters, Nubian princesses or Asian wizards. It remains the biggest fresco in the world as well as the funnest. Würzburg was badly bombed in the war and the town now only has isolated reminders of its time as a tiny capital city but, through the enterprise of an American soldier getting sheets of canvas hauled over the palace’s devastated roof, the fresco itself was rescued, enshrining a mixed-up German and Italian world that seems impossibly remote from the strident and exclusive nationalisms that were to follow – and indeed that would swallow whole such screwy little spots as Würzburg.
Black armour
Tucked away in disregarded corners of provincial German museums are works by an early seventeenth-century Flemish painter called Sebastian Vrancx. In my ever more heedless and chaotic travels I would find myself remembering them quite clearly when far better or more beautiful pictures had already been mentally filed and lost. Vrancx’s pictures are highly disturbing images of powerlessness. They show groups of armed men who have achieved absolute superiority over other groups of armed men – through ambush or sometimes through wearing a particularly satanic sort of black bullet-proof armour. The pictures show the immediate aftermath of the point where one side bests the other: some of the defeated side are already dead, sometimes already being stripped of their clothes and weapons; but many others are on the point of losing their lives and express their terror through hopeless flight or turn and face singly an implacable group of attackers. This scene is watched by an assortment of winners who, confident that the survivors will be mopped up and killed by their confederates, are chatting or taking off their armour. It is the matter-of-fact nature of these pictures that is so disturbing – this is just a day’s work to those involved. The viewer is doomed to hunt through each painting looking for some survivor of the defeated side who might reasonably hope to escape: except that Vrancx has thought of this and filled every corner with despairing encounters which will result, if the spell hovering over the unmoving figures were to be removed for only five minutes, in the execution of all the losers. It further adds to the sense of unease that Vrancx is not a very good painter: he is a sort of stolid, gloomy version of his contemporary Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Also surprising is that there is no sense that the winners have any moral advantage – the viewer is not invited to celebrate any specific triumph such as Spain’s victory in Velázquez’ The Surrender of Breda where, having neither enthusiasm for imperial Castile nor hatred for Dutch freedom, you still get a happy lift from the general air of congratulation. Instead, with Vrancx, there is a grim fantasy of an almost meaningless but lethal encounter, painted by a diseased individual. The very worst is his little picture of a group of cavaliers (all floppy hats and lovely buff jackets) encountering a group of men in black armour, also on horseback, who, impervious to the cavaliers’ pistols, are clearly just about to kill them all.
It is odd thinking of specific dukes or princes being shown some pictures by Vrancx by one of their procuring agents and giving them the thumbs-up. But they must have matched a sort of reality. I was once wandering through the freezing rooms of the Schloss at Ingolstadt and suddenly there were those identical black suits of armour, in terrible silent rows, like so many lightly decorative, deactivated robots. Dating from the Thirty Years War, these suits were serious body-armour’s last outing before the twenty-first century: unwieldy, expensive, unbeatably macabre. Wandering around these rooms, filled with the horrible armour, with pikes, halberds, wheel-lock and matchlock guns, Vrancx’s pitiless early seventeenth-century world seemed quite plausible and real – as indeed it was for much of Central Europe.
The Thirty Years War has almost no place in the British imagination because of the wise decision of James I to stay out of it. By doing so he betrayed his only living daughter, wife of one of the crucial if idiotic early protagonists of the war. This seems quite acceptable given the fate of everyone else who delusively felt at different times and – such was the war’s duration – even in different generations that their engagement in the fighting would tip the scales. The horror of the war lay, among other things, in the way it perverted and destroyed the efforts of all who entered it, regardless of their motives – whether deeply religious, completely cynical or helplessly vacillating, everyone was ruined by the conflict. It left between a quarter and a third of all Germans dead and even in relation to the twentieth century must, as a percentage of population, be the worst man-made disaster ever experienced in Europe.
All the labyrinthine details of the fighting hold their distressing interest because of this futility: nobody gets what they want and everybody dies. The Dutch (in as much as their eighty-year conflict was entangled in the mere thirty-year one) gained their independence from Spain, but only after generations of the most hideous fighting and at the cost of giving up the southern Netherlands (Belgium). The French ended up turning themselves into a threat to the rest of Europe of a new kind, making other rulers nervously finger their ruffs at the monster that had been unleashed. After half a century of being a disunited and helpless shambles, France emerged from the Thirty Years War on its own ‘special path’ of militant, chauvinistic arrogance. But even in France’s case, the architect of the new military policy, Cardinal Richelieu, was dead before any treaties had been signed.
There is no limit to the fascinations of the Thirty Years War, but to plunge into its details would unbalance this book entirely. The central point is that this was a war with origins which were genuinely about rel
igion. There have been attempts to make it an economic war or come up with other class or Realpolitik reasons, but it is clear that most of those involved in its initial stages felt that what they were doing was steeped in prayer and missionary zeal. It was to mutate into something else, but by then there was no going back. In a peculiar way the conflict cried out for some top-level hegemon to weigh in. The unacceptable idea that had afflicted Europe in the mid-sixteenth century was of the Habsburgs ruling everywhere in the manner of the contemporaneous Ming Dynasty. But this threat was now replaced by a strange Europe in which nobody in whatever coalition was able to end the fighting, or indeed even faintly impose order. Each year the war chewed further through this world, wrecking city after city and making whole regions of countryside empty of inhabitants for many decades.
I was raised as a Catholic but wound up (as there are not that many English Catholics) going to quite aggressive Protestant schools. In the end, being bombarded with Protestantism won through and I have always seen the Thirty Years War as an exciting tale of how Protestantism comes so close to disaster but is saved by the wonderful Gustavus Adolphus. I imagined the Catholic enemy as a sea of credulous Austrian peasants egged on by serpentine, leering Jesuits. This unsophisticated picture was somewhat challenged by actual visits to Catholic Germany, where an Imperial commander such as the Count of Tilly, a blood-caked Protestant-slaughtering freak, I had reliably understood, appeared to enjoy open public recognition, with attractive statues, buildings named after him, and so on. In Munich’s Odeonsplatz, for example, seeing if I could find the spot where Hitler stood in the famous photograph of the crowd cheering the outbreak of the First World War, I became far more interested in the presence there of a massive, sombre statue of Tilly, the saviour of Catholic Bavaria from blood-caked, etc. Protestants.
It is this mutual sureness in 1618 that is the origin of the disaster of the war. During the long interval of peace, both Protestants and Catholics had come to share a mirror image of disappointment: that their true faith had failed to topple the other and that compromise meant the compounding of that failure – a failure answerable in Heaven. Maps conveniently colour in Protestant and Catholic states, but of course these are a polite fiction. Both faiths’ lands were peppered, often heavily peppered, with heretics – even the heartlands of Habsburg real-estate in Austria and Bohemia were stuffed with Protestants, sometimes rural and obscure and sometimes rich and powerful. Even very Lutheran cities such as Frankfurt never lost the knowledge that they owed their independence to their direct relationship with the Emperor (even if he was the odd Rudolf II) and that a reasonable degree of latitude towards Catholic worship was needed. Even worse, the Protestant camp was split over the severe, iconoclastic form of Calvinism, which had scooped out and destroyed almost every religious image ever made in countries such as the Palatinate, Scotland, the northern Netherlands and much of Switzerland. For many Lutherans, the Calvinists were so threatening and unacceptable that they would rather support the Catholic Imperialists in any conflict.
One of my happiest possessions is a very fetching photo of my wife grinning in front of the window in Prague castle where the Thirty Years War began, with Imperial emissaries being thrown through that window by enraged Protestant Bohemians in 1618. The Bohemians used the concessions made to them by the weak Emperors Rudolph II and Matthias to elect their own king, Friedrich, the Calvinist ruler of the Palatinate (married to James I’s daughter Elizabeth). This unfortunately for them broke against a profound wave of Catholic revanchism. This had already begun in areas such as Tyrol where the Archduke Ferdinand had split his time in the late sixteenth century between collecting ambitious, sensational paintings and expelling Protestants, looking on in some dismay while first his fairly reasonable brother Maximilian II enjoyed being Emperor and then second his nephew Rudolf II, who retreated into his own private and gloomy world. Ferdinand’s brother, Archduke Karl, tried something similar in Styria (south-east Austria), splitting his time between founding the Lipizzaner stud, whose oddly dancing white horses continue to provide doubtful entertainment for tourists in Vienna to this very day, and expelling Protestants, first blowing up their churches, then making great bonfires of their books and scattering corpses from their graveyards all over the roads. But even Charles had in the end done a deal with the Protestants. A more squarely Catholic, Jesuit-inflected world came to full fruition when Karl’s son Ferdinand II became Emperor in 1619.
The terrible sense of single purpose in Ferdinand II contributed hugely to the events that now unfolded, but the sort of va banque provocation of the Bohemians was also something new – a deliberate attempt to break up the Empire and lock into place a diminished inheritance for the Catholic Habsburgs after their long period of inanition. As soon as he could raise an army, Ferdinand invaded Bohemia, with an old campaigner, the Count of Tilly, who had fought the Dutch or the Turks for much of his life, as commander of the Catholic League army. The result was a disaster for the Bohemians and their small scattering of Protestant allies (many Protestants stood on the sidelines, either through being fearful and broke like James I, or through dislike of the Calvinist Prince of the Palatinate, or through a genuine, prudent anxiety about war).
Wandering around Prague today, which is in so many ways a supersaturated solution of the great achievements of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Czech nationalism, it is strange that so much of what is built there – so many of the churches and institutions and what make Prague so pretty – are in reality symbols of Czech abasement and failure. The ruinous Battle of the White Mountain destroyed Bohemian identity – the execution of many leading Bohemian nobles, the confiscation of their property, the digging-up of anything smelling even faintly Protestant or anti-Habsburg. A country well on the way to becoming an at least semi-independent, Protestant Central European state disappeared for three centuries, instead becoming a mere Austrian colony, with Prague a German city. This central catastrophe raised the stakes in the fighting incredibly high – a rich, serious, dynamic part of Central Europe had been reduced to an experimental laboratory for the most extreme forms of the Counter-Reformation, its landscape dotted with Jesuit colleges and Marian shrines. The Czechs even had to cope with a church dedicated to Our Lady of Loreto, named for the absurd hut, notionally Mary’s, which in the face of infidel invasion of the Holy Land flew up into the air in 1291, landing first in Croatia before heaving itself up once more and crash-landing in Italy. There is a surely intentionally hilarious painting by Tiepolo – for obvious reasons Loreto features little in sacred art – which looks like storyboarding for Dorothy’s house caught in the twister in The Wizard of Oz. In any event, in the wake of the Battle of the White Mountain, the sort of people who had plans for building a Loreto shrine moved in and we look elsewhere for inspiration until the arrival of Smetana and Dvoák. The threat of a religion imposed on them by people who worshipped flying huts must have provoked a desperate resistance in the surviving Protestant states.
The King of Sweden’s horse
As there is hardly a town in Germany without an intense feeling of local pride there is hardly a town without its own museum. These can sometimes be just incredibly boring, with a handful of glazed visitors dragging themselves through exhibits on local geological issues, the invariable reconstructed apothecary’s shop, something about spinning and cloth, some old hats and an engraving of things going wrong in 1848. Wandering from room to room, trying not to catch the eye of other equally somnambulant figures (and, in all honesty, there are sometimes few enough) and trying not to panic as a room filled with weights and scales approaches, it is hard not to see the whole thing as a cruel trick – a religiously inspired attempt to mock the futile nature of human existence. These museums tend, because of the political nature of so much German history, to emphasize the non-political – so there is a huge enthusiasm, for example, for all aspects of Early Man, with reconstructions of huts, lots of business with things made from reeds or flint and dummies of hirsute families squatt
ing around a fire preparing their simple fare. Sometimes there are engaging reconstructions of mammoths or other fun creatures, but on the whole you are left simply with a puzzled sense of the surety all curators have of hair-lengths for early humans for whom all evidence derives from skeletons: and why do they all look like West German university lecturers of the early 1970s?
While these museums can be stupefying they have to be persevered with as in all the tedium there is always some treasure. Treatment of the twentieth century can only be interesting and varies greatly, often thoughtful and intelligent and only very occasionally cursory in a disturbing way. Once I was wandering around a nadir of the city museum experience when, suddenly, it became all worthwhile: in the midst of the usual, space-filling slap-in-the-face exhibit of ‘toys of yesteryear’ (dolls, wooden bricks – there is no need even to mount the display, let alone keep its temperature steady and its shunned glass cases clean), there was a board game from the early 1940s called Bomb England. The lid was only partly off but showed a nicely rendered British Isles, with Ireland properly neutral and little squares with all the towns marked – it looked like a dice game with better points for getting to more far-away targets, such as Glasgow or Belfast. It was eerie and unsettling, but also exciting – I have always loved board games and I even rummaged around briefly inside my own little moral box, examining the issues involved in stealing Bomb England: it would give much more pleasure in use than trapped in a desiccated museum, objects are designed for use not exhibition, conceivably I had some rights as a representative of a victor power, and so on. I was held back by cowardice and a nagging anxiety that the game might be missing some crucial pieces.
