Germania

by Simon Winder

  These vagaries are perfectly expressed in Wolfenbüttel, where the unlamented Heinrich Julius was succeeded by his son, the even worse Friedrich Ulrich, who was so drunk and so profligate that he was even deposed for a while by his strong-minded mother. He then handled the delicate issue of the Thirty Years War in such an abject way that while he dithered friendlessly the entire duchy was ravaged by any passing forces, both Catholic and Protestant, scratching around for diminishing loot and food. But help was at hand: with Friedrich Ulrich’s death in an accident in 1634 and no successor, complex negotiations led the Emperor to choose a distant cousin as the new duke, August the Younger. This adorable man was named ‘the Younger’ to mark him off from a deceased elder brother – an increasingly odd and confusing designation as his eyes became more rheumy and his beard more Father Christmas-like, remaining the Younger until his death in his late eighties. He entirely changed the atmosphere of dissolute chaos and spent some thirty years adding to his collection of rare manuscripts and mulling over a lifelong obsession with chess and secret codes. His books have been re-housed in a rather pedantic Victorian building and are almost too beautifully looked after: there is none of that wormy, bibliomaniac atmosphere that makes Duke Humfrey’s Library in Oxford or the old library of the Frankesche Stiftung in Halle (with its early eighteenth-century German–Persian grammar books!) such sources of perverse enjoyment. Augustus’ collection, however, with his handwriting on the books’ spines and his astrological globes is not without its chiaroscuro glamour. And the idea of the scholar duke, taking full advantage of his money (and of the total prostration of the era in which he reigned – possibly a time when more money could have been spent on basic assistance to his subjects rather than on books, but never mind), is one repeated across Germany, and is no more and no less characteristic than the red-faced hunting-crazed ducal boor.

  Almost exactly the same age as August the Younger was the prince of the Reuss dynasty Heinrich II Postumus (a related burden to being called ‘the Younger’: his father died before he was born), who ruled the tiny territory of Gera in eastern Thuringia. This enjoyable man looks almost exactly like Augustus, with the same air of gloom and darkness and the white beard. He ruled prudently, built a large Schloss for himself looking over the town, above the raging White Elster River, and spent much of the last period of his life choosing suitably gloomy little epigraphs for himself which he had inscribed all over his copper coffin (‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, naked shall I return thither’). To have had the privilege – as the Thirty Years War raged – to come to such a theatrical sense of self-belief is something which should be admired for all time. After his death the greatest German composer before Bach, Heinrich Schütz, who had long been associated with Heinrich, and had indeed been born in another Reuss-ruled town was commissioned to set the epigraphs to music, producing in the process the Musikalische Exequien (which could be translated for its sense as ‘Music to Escort the Dead from this Life’), one of the most beautiful and moving of all German choral works. Sadly, the story that Heinrich listened to the music before his death is almost certainly not true – it would all be perfect if it were, as he stage-manages his own departure (piles of black velvet, a memento mori or two to hand) with a morose severity teetering on the edge of camp. Indeed it is hard not to feel angry with the musicologists who established that Schütz wrote the music after his patron’s death.

  Heinrich’s Schloss is now a sad place: it was blown to pieces in Nazi–Soviet fighting in 1945 and not reconstructed. The German communists built a rather grim restaurant on the site – one of those places which proves the rule that the more panoramic the view the worse the food. One pre-Postumus little tower remains – plus as a happy extra a children’s climbing frame in the form of a castle, a witty, titchy echo of the elaborate monster that features in engravings. It was frequently pointed out that the rulers of the small German states enjoyed a great advantage over places such as Prussia or Saxony because they were too insignificant to do anyone much harm. This was absolutely true with Reuss-Gera, tucked away in its sleepy hills.

  In the time of powdered wigs

  After August the Younger’s death in 1666, Wolfenbüttel returned to its old chaos with two brothers ruling jointly (the elder was duke but could not be bothered to do the work) and some amazingly bad political plotting that, after many twists and turns, resulted in foreign invasion and complete humiliation. The figure at the heart of this was Anton Ulrich who, on his elder brother’s death, eventually became duke in his own right in old age. Despite being on the verge of disaster for chunks of his career, Anton Ulrich in a more vigorous way seems a highly appropriate son for August. He extended the library and appointed Gottfried Leibniz to run it, employed the Ghanaian polymath Anton Wilhelm Amo and built up a superb gallery of paintings.

  The absolute archetype of the silk-clad, massive-wigged late-seventeenth-century grandee, Anton Ulrich sneers haughtily from portraits and busts and waves goodbye, with an imperious gesture, to all that darkened room/contemplating a skull mentality. Indeed, there seems an unbridgeable gap between the two generations – a chasm opened up not least by the disastrous stylistic impact of Louis XIV’s new palace at Versailles. At a stroke the palace made all existing structures obsolete, hick and pitiful, unleashing an immense, ludicrous campaign by various rulers of really quite small territories, such as the Prince-Elector of Cologne or the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, to conjure up something similar. This littered the landscape with useless and often unfinished structures and caused local building contractors to scratch their heads in wonder as they had to mix up yet another immense vat of stucco and order a further gross of stone nymphs. A state such as Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel could not even imagine competing directly, so the duke confined his court to copying the sartorial aspects of Versailles, with astonishing wigs, lovely shoe buckles and acres of patterned silk.

  Quite a bit of Anton Ulrich’s powder must have sprung from his face in a spasm of shock when he learnt of one of the period’s great bolts from the blue. With the sudden death of the childless William III and accession of his sister-in-law Anne (also childless after horrific numbers of miscarriages and young deaths), the English throne was going to fall vacant. Through a quirk of genealogy of a type common in Germany, this top job would fall, on Anne’s death, to the nearest suitable Protestant. This was deemed to be Sophia of Hanover, the clever and wonderful daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, herself the daughter of James I, who had, after the humiliation of the Thirty Years War, spent a long exile having tons of children. So some fifty years after Elizabeth Stuart’s death everything at last went right for her.

  But not for Anton Ulrich, as the lucky winner was, following Sophia’s own death shortly before Anne’s, Sophia’s son George, the head of the other branch of the Welf family, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg and, through the payment of terrific bribes, Prince-Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. So in one those dynastic swirls which I have generally tried to shelter the reader from, two rather daft and marginal bits of Lower Saxony suddenly went their different ways, with one branch, from its new bases in Hanover and London, ruling a large part of the world, and the other remaining daft and marginal. Anton Ulrich at least had the good fortune to die a few months before the whole ghastly sequence came to its final fruition with George’s coronation.

  I mention August the Younger and Anton Ulrich, both because they are rather sympathetic, but also because they, far more than the wonder-cabinet collectors, move Germany towards the whole brilliant, intimidating world of paintings and sculpture which still fill so many small towns, almost unobserved by non-German or nonspecialist eyes. The sheer quantity (but also quality) of intellectual and cultural power lurking even in a backwater such as Wolfenbüttel remains astonishing. Anton Ulrich’s pictures were moved to Braunschweig, where they can still be seen, and form the basis for one of the oldest museums in Europe. What is so fascinating about the collection is that it remains hung so that the core of pictures ar
e Anon Ulrich’s own, with his fervent, late-convert Catholicism very much to the fore, but uneasily allied to his enthusiasm for nude orgasmic female death, Dido, Cleopatra and Procris all juddering away. A surprisingly topless Circe, several Venuses, Diana, Potiphar’s wife and Eve herself festoon the walls, and Jesus’ no doubt admirable qualities are completely upstaged by the repentant yet oddly clothing-free prostitute he is converting. This is all presided over by a particularly louche and beaky-nosed sculpted bust of the duke.

  Like so many collections of this period it seems to have no protection whatsoever against floods of boring minor Dutch works (which could presumably be transported over to Wolfenbüttel quite cheaply on carts), which raise questions about the static nature of these collections. They could so readily be thinned out with the vigorous use of lighter-fluid in a way that would make them immediately more appealing. Although, to be fair, the duke’s collection is a minor job compared to what needs to be done with the collections of the Dukes of Hesse-Kassel. There, teams of grim, asbestos-suited men with flamethrowers could be employed for weeks with tough-but-fair instructions to look out for skating and tavern genre scenes and witless bits of flat landscape.

  Damascened yataghans

  Up on a hillside high above the town of Passau is the little pilgrimage church of Mary of Mercy. It is reached by walking up some three hundred and twenty steps, itself an important part of the pilgrimage. I’ve probably spent too much time staggering up penitential stairways in southern Germany, but this really is the worst. People are parked all the way up; some are clearly praying but others could as well be having some form of seizure or been marooned there for days. I have never been able to work out the etiquette issues around gasping and puffing past someone in a prayerful state – there could not be a better example of where an English culture of panicked privacy gets completely unstuck in a more gestural zone of Europe. The view from the top makes everything worthwhile, banishing all anxieties about shortly needing help from Medivac helicopters manoeuvring through steep hills. To see the swollen, bulky, green River Inn, all the way from the Swiss Alps, slotting into the side of the rather smaller, blue – or, to be honest, blue-grey – River Danube, itself all the way from a squashy field in Swabia, is one of the greatest map-obsessive’s sights in Europe, beaten only by being able to stand in Passau itself on the concrete of the thin V of land where the two rivers actually first touch.

  The Mary of Mercy chapel was interesting enough in itself for its little ex voto paintings thanking Mary for rescue from drowning, lightning, fire, robbers and runaway coaches. But what seemed truly startling was a small plaque left by the Emperor Leopold I, giving thanks for the deliverance of Europe from the menace of the Turk. During the 1683 siege of Vienna, Passau became a temporary main base for the Holy Roman Empire and, following the Allied victory over the Ottoman army, Leopold wanted to leave a sign of his gratitude there (‘Mary of Mercy’ – or ‘Mary Help’ had been the Habsburg battle cry). Leopold spent his long reign fighting virtually everybody – every frontier of the Empire was under threat – but in the end his life was about defending the rest of Europe against the Ottomans.

  This core Imperial competence hardly featured in English ideas about Germany but Habsburg Catholic militancy was in practice far more important an ideology for taking on the Ottomans than for taking on Protestants. With the Habsburg court in Vienna working its way through its unvarying annual calendar of masses, processions, movements between palaces, an entire elaborate astrological wheel of almost Qing complexity, in the short breaks most of the discussions were about the state of the alarmingly near frontier with the Ottoman state.

  For centuries the serious defence of Christian Europe was undertaken by the Poles and by the Austrians. Of course, the Ottoman role in Europe was always a complicated one. If such a huge chunk of Europe was under stable, long-term rule from Constantinople (including Greece, Europe’s notional cradle) then how could the bits of Europe that happened to include French or Italian people be more authentically European than the Ottoman bit? The constant affront and military threat presented by the Ottomans stemmed from their having since at least the fourteenth century simply been more powerful than other Europeans. At a time when England was engaged in endless, futile fighting just to try to absorb some parts of western France, the Ottomans ruled the Mediterranean from the Adriatic all the way, clockwise, to Morocco. At the critical Battle of Mohács in 1526, the Ottoman army was, including smelly but effective irregulars, almost twice the size of its Christian opponent and with three times as many cannon. In the near-contemporary Battle of Pavia, which pitted the main French army against the main Imperial force (perhaps unfortunately, given the imminent arrival of the Ottomans), both armies were less than half the size of the Ottomans’ Mohács force. Despite some occasional, exciting Christian successes such as the naval Battle of Lepanto in 1571, there was never any hope until the end of the seventeenth century that the Ottomans could be seriously dealt with. The Emperor’s job was to hold the line and not lose even more territory. Every year Ottoman raiders would sweep through the tiny Habsburg remnant of Hungary and the zone east of Vienna, snatching many thousands of slaves. The old frontier is still dotted with church towers with their ‘Turkish bells’ to warn of imminent attack. And there was always the knowledge that if Vienna fell, the Ottomans could sweep up the Danube to Salzburg, then Passau and then debouch in a welter of kettledrums and scimitars into Bavaria. This remained a serious threat and is reflected in an Austrian landscape that still bristles with castles and armouries. It was also reflected in the massive Military Frontier – a zone running eastwards from Slovenia, attracting settlers through freedom of faith and no serfdom. This was filled with Serb, Croat and German troops, ruled from Graz and designed to hold the line against the Ottoman armies in Bosnia and Hungary. The Frontier was financed by Habsburg crown lands, hence mainly Austria – but for many German soldiers across the whole Holy Roman Empire service on the Turkish frontier was an important source of excitement and reward, and the Emperor stood at the head of a highly complex, often tense framework, an unstable set of alliances and blandishments that, it was hoped, would be sufficient to keep the Ottomans at bay.

  There are few stranger survivals of the Turkish wars than the great armoury at Graz, capital of the frontier dukedom of Styria. There has been a certain amount of fixing up and rebuilding but this gloomy, suffocating building gives an alarming sense of the planning needed to counter the Ottoman threat. Over several floors there is nothing but row upon row of standardized weapons – hundreds of breastplates, powder horns, muskets, boar-spears, helmets, pistols, all absolutely utilitarian. There can be few other places in the world where there are so many old-fashioned ways of being killed. This was a real frontier and a place where the Austrians only just hung on – in one disastrous year crop-eating locusts, plague and Turkish raiders disposed of thousands of Styrians. Huge markets were set up by the Turks to sell the glut of Christian slaves. As Graz itself gradually relaxed and became a military headquarters rather than a front-line fortress, the arsenal’s importance drifted downwards but somehow the weapons have stayed intact as a peculiar and awful reminder of Austria’s origins and its specific form of militancy.

  The great change came as the Emperor Leopold I’s reign stabilized in the 1650s. There was a new confidence that the Turks, despite still being able to field armies that were massive by European standards, were at last beginning to wobble. They found themselves under pressure from several fronts, most importantly from Russia, which spent the next two centuries steadily doing the serious work of wrecking the Ottoman empire. The great siege of Vienna in 1683 was a slightly despairing final attempt by the Ottomans to move the frontier further west or at least cripple the Habsburgs. After two months the Ottoman force, together with its Crimean, Wallachian, Moldavian and Hungarian subject allies, was decisively beaten by a mixed Polish–Lithuanian, Austrian, Swabian, Saxon, Franconian and Bavarian force. The siege is one of those frust
rating historical events that have left no trace – Vienna was then encased in huge and now demolished fortifications and the battlefield is now hidden under streets and houses. Much of the fighting was carried out underground, in ghastly sets of tunnels, dug and counter-dug as Ottoman sappers attempted to get under Vienna’s walls and blow them up and Imperial sappers armed with bombs, pistols and knives tried in turn to countermine their opponents.

  It was during this astonishing emergency that Louis XIV took advantage of the Emperor’s distraction to attack western Germany – on the one hand a peculiarly contemptible act, but on the other a curious indication of the degree to which, of course, the Ottoman empire was in practice a European great power much like any other. Clearly there were important chunks of a notionally solid Christian bloc not totally fussed at the idea of Vienna’s fall.

  The siege and battle at Vienna were the sensation of the period and there is hardly a Schloss or museum throughout Germany which does not have engravings of the battle or plans showing the layout of the Imperial ‘Holy League’ forces. The hill above Vienna, the Kahlenberg, which marks the meeting of the Polish and Imperial forces before they swept down into the Danube valley to destroy the Turks, remains a spectacular place, with a special restaurant, a Polish pilgrimage church and a very moving nineteenth-century inscription listing the king, Emperor and major princes who doffed their helmets to each other on that day.