Germania

by Simon Winder

  In any event, this is a preamble to a serious return to the Thirty Years War. Ingolstadt is a town in northern Bavaria and in many ways the sort of acme of medium-sized, self-conscious German urban pride. Stuffed with money from the upper management of the Audi works (and with large teams of highly trained shopkeepers adept at getting that money circulating in the town through the sale of fur coats, elaborate underwear and long-haul package tours), Ingolstadt has great churches, serious city walls, characterful pubs and a magical Schloss which houses, among other things, the Bavarian Army Museum. For me this last was meat and drink – what could possibly be more fun than following the military twists and turns of one of Europe’s most persistently turncoat and confused fighting organizations? It had been snowing heavily and as, a little before lunchtime, I waded through the drifts filling the grand main courtyard, it was impossible not to notice that, some three hours into the museum’s opening time, mine were in fact the only footsteps in the snow, meaning that on this February day I was the only person in Europe who found the travails of the Bavarian army funny.

  By contrast, at the other end of town is the much more characteristically sleep-inducing city museum – a mass of things so dull that I can now recall none of them. But the place may have been put together by a curator of genius, who understood that if you have one really great thing to show, then you don’t want to confuse visitors with anything else. Fill up the space with engravings of market day, cannonballs and apothecary equipment, because all this is just a frame for something unique.

  The 1620s were a nightmare for Protestants. After the initial catastrophe at the White Mountain, Catholic forces had moved forward, devastating all attempts to stop them. The Protestants were painfully disunited – Saxony, fatally, a powerful Lutheran state, first joined the Imperialists and then stayed neutral, through the venal idiocy of its drunken ruler Johann Georg I (I cannot afford yet another digression, but I will develop later the uplifting theme of Saxon political and military incompetence – a theme so consistent that it provides a perfect refutation of any sense at all that Germans have some inherent thirst for or brilliance at warfare). England continued to be neutral and there was chaos and dissention in the Protestant command that ushered in disaster after disaster. It was in the 1620s that the remorseless, savage nature of the war became apparent as it disposed of the reputations and lives of all involved. Most of the initial Protestant champions or those willing to support their cause were neutralized, destroyed or chased away, from the Savoyards to the Transylvanians. The Elector Palatine’s territory was eradicated, taken over by the Spanish and Bavarians. Admittedly a highly unstable psychopath, the dashing, implausibly titled Bishop of Halberstadt, a key Protestant champion and a prince of Brunswick-Lüneburg, after careering around Northern Europe and having alarming paintings made of himself, died ‘his vitals gnawed by a gigantic worm’, according to Catholic sources. The Count of Mansfeld, leader of the main Protestant army, after endless humiliating defeats, packed up and left for Dalmatia, where he died. The Danish king tried to rescue the Protestants (egged on by England and France) and was quickly beaten by the Emperor’s startling new champion, Wallenstein, a military contractor of genius and a Protestant who had brushed himself down and become a Bohemian Catholic so as to grab many of the immense chunks of formerly Protestant Czech land being handed out by Ferdinand II.

  The sheer misery of this period set the pace for what was to follow, with rival armies living entirely through plunder, ruining both friendly and unfriendly territory through their insatiable depredations. Armies marched and countermarched across Germany in a warp and woof of ever-greater density, in the end debauching most towns and villages aside from occasional, bristlingly defended neutrals such as Hamburg. Wallenstein was particularly wedded to the wrecking of territory, both to pay for and feed his troops and to spread terror, but it was a model pursued by all sides. Ultimately armies became the almost zombie-like murder collectives of Grimmelshausen’s great novel Simplicissimus, published in 1668, long after the war had ended but written by someone who had himself been entangled in the fighting since the age of ten. While sometimes the story gets lost in feeble fantasy, much of it has a ghastly, documentary air as gangs of marauding troops slaughter villagers, torture them to extract hiding places for money (and then kill them anyway), ambush one another, but all with no sense of purpose, of a beginning or an end – warfare as an unvarying and unstoppable way of life.

  Once the Danes were finally ejected from the fighting in 1629 it appeared as though Protestantism had no further resources. The Imperialists as a first move announced that all territories which had become Protestant over the previous seventy years (mostly former religious lands) would be returned to Catholicism, and it appeared that any surviving Protestant territories (most importantly Brandenburg and Saxony) would only co-exist under sufferance. This was a period of huge satisfaction in Vienna and provoked a lot of extra-long masses – much of the Empire was in ruins, but at least they were now Catholic ruins. The nadir was the destruction of Magdeburg – a powerful Protestant fortress town that Tilly totally erased, with some twenty thousand of its inhabitants and defenders killed, leaving it a shattered ruin with a remaining population of about four hundred. This outrage was used to galvanize Protestants in thousands of cheap, less cheap and highly elaborate engravings (all battling with the same problem of how, with rather crude means and in black and white, to represent graphically buildings and people blown into the air).

  It was at this point that, for Protestants at any rate, one of the most exciting events in all European history happened. The previous year the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, had arrived on the north coast of Germany with a small but highly trained army, driven to intervene by a desire for self-aggrandisement but also by a wish to help his fellow Protestants. The effect was astounding and I can never look at my Gustavus Adolphus beer mat without emotion. Initially he was ignored by the Imperialists as just another doomed Scandinavian interloper. But unfortunately for the Imperialists, even without Gustavus the tide was turning – not least because the Dutch had overcome the worst of the Spanish attacks on them, and were becoming a dynamic, wealthy and vengeful Protestant element, and the French had resolved their own internal problems and had a limitless well of anti-Habsburg feeling to draw on.

  But it was the Swedes who caused astonishment. Using new mobile tactics Gustavus destroyed the Imperialists’ main army under Tilly in the autumn of 1631 at the Battle of Breitenfeld, and in the following year, at the Battles of the River Lech (where Tilly was wounded) and Lützen (where Wallenstein was defeated), the Swedes ruined the Catholic cause so completely that even over a further sixteen years of fighting it never recovered. Gustavus himself died at Lützen so his active impact on Europe was only some fourteen months, but it was enough. The Protestants would never be strong enough to defeat the Emperor absolutely but the idea that Central Europe could be in its entirety re-Catholicized became ever more unlikely and indeed religion as a basis for fighting between Christians was discredited and dropped.

  This is where the Ingolstadt museum comes in. In the chaotic aftermath of the Battle of the River Lech, Imperial forces fled inside the walls of Ingolstadt, where Tilly died. The Swedes then besieged the town but without success, Gustavus eventually lifting the siege and marching on to his eventual death at Lützen in Saxony. But before he did so he was nearly killed when his horse was shot from under him. This sort of lucky escape is such a common cliché of history books that it is tempting to think of a parallel version which would privilege the horse: so that later, at the Battle of Lützen, ‘the horse’s rider was shot from over him’ would be a happy and much-whinnied at outcome. In any event, after their heroic defence against Gustavus and after the Swedes had gone, the Ingolstadters opened their gates, grabbed the king’s dead horse and mounted its skin – and here, nearly four centuries later, the horse remains, standing on its battered legs. Of course, it is not in great shape – it had after all been sh
ot from under the king so the Ingolstadters were not working from perfect material; there is also a wealth of patches, stitch marks and dark spots, as though over the intervening years several drinks have been spilt on him. He has been through a lot, but here is the horse, preserved as an object of mockery and local Catholic pride, the focus of banquets, a classic seventeenth-century memento mori, as curious a preserved historical animal as Stonewall Jackson’s horse Little Sorrel in the Virginia Military Institute or the elephant skeleton sketched by Goethe in Kassel, but far older than either and in its sheer haggardness speaking volumes.

  A surprise visit from an asteroid

  The latter parts of the Thirty Years War are remorselessly grim. The fighting became so complex, the alliances so fraught with mutually excluding special deals about ownership of this or that town, that it is nearly as unenjoyable to read about as it must have been to endure. From being the heroes of the middle part of the war, the Swedes now became horrible parasites, drifting around Central Europe destroying everything they encountered, spreading plague and famine. If it is any consolation to fair-minded and neutral modern Swedes, it has to be said that most ‘Swedes’ were in fact Scottish mercenaries or prisoners captured from other armies. Nobody had any real way to pay for these troops so they tended simply to gravitate towards whoever was on the march, just in the hope of getting some food in a countryside that could no longer support large groups and where many towns were now almost empty.

  A key point in the war was reached in the small Swabian town of Nördlingen, one of a handful of places that have until today kept their entire city walls. Aside from being a battlefield site, Nördlingen has a second, very peculiar claim to fame. Some fifteen million years ago, when Germany was a balmy, sub-tropical place filled with the grunts and whistles of proto-elephants and giant turtles, a nearly mile-wide asteroid smashed into Nördlingen (or at least its future site), making a crater some fifteen miles wide and having an impact comparable to an inconceivable 1.8 million Hiroshimas. Not so much as a proto-elephant’s trunk tip survived. Really oddly, the shape of the crater is still entirely clear, with pretty fields stretching in every direction, rimmed by a scrumpled partial circle covered in trees. The impact created millions of tiny diamonds that suffuse the region’s geology and make a kind of shocked quartz stone called suevite, which Nördlingen’s sensational church is made from. Babyishly I thought for a few moments that the church was made from rocks from outer space, but even the reality is peculiar enough. The town itself is a perfect circle, with the huge church tower in its exact centre, lying in the far, far bigger circle of the crater impact. As I walked clockwise in the steady arc of the town walls and the tower bells struck the hour I had the sick strange sensation of having become an element in some unmanageably large, inconceivably ancient and utterly unknowable mechanism.

  The people of Nördlingen all have something of this air as it is a place so trapped by its past, by its stifling walls and towers and olden-times buildings, that it exists (like nearby Rothenburg) only to be pumped full of tourists, fed in a steady circulation through a mass of pubs and minor sights. The townsfolk are therefore obliged to operate in a coded framework of geniality which must be almost insufferable – like being the little people who pop in and out of the doors of one of those Bavarian barometric cottages to show whether it is rain or shine. But the battle was real enough. In 1634 Nördlingen was threatening to become the new Magdeburg – an isolated Protestant stronghold under siege from an Imperial– Spanish army. Since the destruction of Magdeburg the war had turned so violent that when the Catholic soldiers in, for example, the lovely fortress of Würzburg had surrendered honourably the Protestants slaughtered them all anyway. Nördlingen was holding out in desperation and an army of Swedes and their German allies were more or less obliged to try to rescue them. The battle could not have been more badly handled and the Protestant armies were ruined and the town taken and ravaged.

  While this was a painful moment for the Protestant cause, the nightmare now is in seeing that despite Nördlingen the war went on for a further fourteen years. Imperial forces thought that they had their enemies on the run, but in fact this was just a fresh but final high point in their fortunes. If only Ferdinand II had managed a comprehensive peace now (which would have been very hard, but not impossible) then the war might have ended – but he and his son Ferdinand III (who fought at Nördlingen) carried on and forces (not least France) turned against them. As in so many wars, the psychological high point had come and gone with none of the protagonists noticing.

  As the war progressed, armies on the whole got smaller. Neither side was able to create a knock-out blow, with the Protestants (now fully supported by an increasingly out-of-control France) holding off Imperial forces but never seriously threatening the Habsburg core. Negotiations for ending the conflict dragged on for years, and the war ended with the painful coda of the mainly Swedish Protestant army at last breaking into Bohemia and attempting to liberate Prague, where the trouble had all begun. The Swedes tried and failed to fight their way across the very same Karl Bridge whose approaches are now so plagued with amusing ‘human statues’ covered in metal paint and with less than competent jugglers. Unable to break through the defences of the Old Town, the Swedes turned back (looting the castle on the way, which explains why such quantities of Rudolf II’s collections, including some prime Arcimboldos, are mysteriously to be found in Stockholm). The Swedes could not get through because the Bohemians now saw them as the enemy: the inhabitants of Prague were no longer Protestant – staked out by the Jesuits and taken on innumerable school trips to visit the Church of Our Lady of Loreto, they had in the twenty-eight years since the Battle of the White Mountain, like something from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, been turned into fervent Catholics.

  The Thirty Years War had long lost its primarily religious character by the time it ended and indeed it marked the point where Protestant and Catholic remained fundamental units of political and religious life across Europe, but not in a way that would again provoke open warfare. Wars would now be fought for dynastic and economic reasons and the fervour that had made the great issues of 1618 seem so profoundly important had burned itself out. The successors to the initial princes and commanders, all of whom had now died, were far more cautious or cynical.

  The room in Münster where parts of the Treaty of Westphalia was signed is still there – a grand, solemn space lined with portraits of dignitaries, appropriate in every way to the weight of what was witnessed here, aside from a confusing, dried-out human hand lying on a desk, presumed to have been severed from a malefactor at some point in Münster’s history. The envoys came from all over Europe, and the result was a triumph for the northern Netherlands and for Switzerland, who were now both fully recognized as independent states. Sweden received large blocks of fairly useless Baltic and North Sea German coast – the only valuable bit being Bremen, which managed in the end to fend the Swedes off. But Swedish ownership further boxed in and excluded most of Germany from a direct role in the new global economy. The existing multiplicity of German states acknowledged the Emperor’s role as head of the Holy Roman Empire while reserving the right to carry out their own foreign policies, an arrangement that was to last under all sorts of stress and strain until the arrival of Napoleon some hundred and fifty years later. The Emperor abandoned any attempt – perhaps never serious anyway – to convert Germany into a unitary state comparable to Spain or France or England.

  For most German states the war had been nothing but a disaster and many areas never really recovered until the nineteenth-century population boom and industrialization set them off again. Many great cities sank into a deep sleep. There is a painting in the Nuremberg city museum, made to commemorate the banquet marking the final departure of the Swedish occupation troops in 1649 (after the payment of an immense fine), a sea of men in the black-and-white clothing of the period, trying to put a brave face on a hopeless situation. As elsewhere in Germany, most of the inha
bitants of Nuremberg had no experience of anything except war by this point and the Swedes left behind an utterly ruined place – one of Germany’s great Renaissance cities reduced to a rotting museum piece, something for which we can be grateful now, but which doomed the Nurembergers themselves to irrelevance until their miraculously pickled Germanness caught the eye of nineteenth-century nationalists.

  The trauma of the Thirty Years War has been overlaid by later traumas. It remains a key part of the German historical memory but its terrible theatre of helplessness was to be re-enacted again in the Napoleonic Wars – and this was to be a further model and warning that did such ruinous damage to Germany’s idea of itself in the modern age. For generations of German historians, arguments about the nature of the Thirty Years War were central to the making of Bismarck’s Second Reich, with Gustavus Adolphus a sort of honorary German trying – apparently – to create a unified Germany, but thwarted by Catholic Habsburg bloodsuckers. This shrill and Protestant reading of the war was a parallel, intellectual version of the struggle between Prussia and Austria for ownership of Germany and fed the poisonous idea that only Protestants could be real Germans. For pre-Bismarck German rulers who valued and clung to the Peace of Westphalia there were profound lessons about how to run their states and how to avoid the sort of uncontrolled rampages that had done such damage. There is a famous propaganda print of the 1630s of alarming modernity, showing an armed man in fashionable clothing gesturing in despair at an allegory of War: a hideous monster – a sort of dragon covered in metal armour, breathing fire and squatting on a pile of corpses. By 1648 this creature had eaten most of Germany and there was simply not enough left to keep him fed – the war had ended in a bitter exhaustion and stasis within Germany from which it would take generations to rebuild. In the war’s later stages, too, it had become clear that whereas its religious aspects had been so discredited that its initial causes had been after a fashion resolved, there was something else far worse unleashed by the fighting. For the mass of tiny territories around the Rhine, the nightmare for the next two centuries was to be a predacious, immensely powerful France.