Germania

by Simon Winder

  To a striking degree that victory had depended on Poland – a country which gained very little from having helped the Austrians and which was to be carved into oblivion, not least by the Austrians, in the coming century. Again, this offered a curious limit on any sense of a concrete European or Christian ‘culture’, with Poland, a powerful and impressive Catholic entity for centuries, treated as being as much of a predatory target by Austrians, Hungarians and Russians as their new, formerly Ottoman lands in the south-east.

  The best location to get a sense of these wars with Turkey (that in this period ended with the Habsburg takeover of the bulk of Hungary and Transylvania) is, oddly, in the far-off Rhine city of Karlsruhe. This is in many ways an unappealing place. Its layout is in the shape of a lady’s fan, with the streets forming spokes out from the focal point of a tower in the palace of the Margraves of Baden-Durlach – an absolutist idea which only makes sense from the palace and makes walking around the town a mind-bending challenge, like being trapped in a drunken, lurched version of a grid system. Karlsruhe has the odd fame of being the town where Fritz Haber at the end of the nineteenth century worked out how to fix nitrogen, thereby inventing artificial fertilizers, thereby summoning into existence roughly a third of all humans alive today – a discovery that makes all others seem merely provisional and paltry.

  But, trying to restabilize a bit with more normal history, the pride of Karlsruhe is the ‘Turkish Booty’. This amazing display of Ottoman weaponry is part of the haul taken by Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm of Baden-Baden, also known as ‘Turkish Louis’ (as featured tirelessly on local wine, chocolate and schnapps packaging), after the crucial post-Vienna Battle of Slankamen, fought in 1691 in what is now the Serbian Vojvodina. Louis’s mixed German and Serbian force destroyed a far larger Ottoman army, inflicting some twenty thousand casualties and permanently ending Ottoman offensive power (although their defensive ability was to keep them going, albeit mutated and contracted, right down to the present as the Republic of Turkey).

  The ‘booty’ is perfectly displayed and leaves in the shade the sort of objects in the rest of the museum I would generally spend happy hours with (a sawfish saw, a crocodile skull, an amber jewel box, a wax and glass rendering of the Fall of Troy, the usual). It is also wittily juxtaposed with a modern sculpture of a Turkish-German taxi-driver carrying his taxi under his arm like a farmer carrying a small goat. There are double-edged axes, war banners, composite bows, kettledrums, whole chests of weapons, chainmail, leather quivers, campaign tents, sipahi armour, Persian flintlocks and – two words that do not come up much but must therefore be all the more savoured – damascened yataghans, the fathomlessly elegant Ottoman long knife, sometimes carried as a set of two crossed across the chest. If there is a hopelessly Orientalist child lurking inside so many of us, then these cabinets of eastern cruelty bring him thrashing to the surface.

  There is also a painting from 1879 – pedantic and lurid in the academic German empire manner – of ‘Turkish Louis’ on a ramping charger looking down in disdain on the corpse of his chief opponent, Mustafa Köprülü, the picture contrasting Western strength (all armour, warrior comradeship and frowning rectitude) with Ottoman softness: parrots, turbans, a panicked Negro, a cowering houri, and some terrific damascened yataghans. While, naturally, shaking my head at the picture’s witless nastiness I did spend rather too long contemplating its follies. It seems fair to admit that the picture had the appeal of the ‘Turkish Booty’ perfectly nailed.

  I once went to a lecture on empires which made a point that is obvious but that has since bugged me: that at the frontiers of empires the soldiers, farmers and traders are all very familiar with each other but are generally very remote from the rulers and capital cities and that the line on a map hides a porous, vigorous reality. The Habsburgs and Ottomans were eye to eye for centuries – the Serb and Croat troops of the Military Frontier were familiar with Ottoman Bosnia, Royal Hungarians in Bratislava/Pressburg were well aware of the plight of other Ottoman-ruled Hungarians. There was a sufficient, if small, interchange of envoys, and traffic through Greek middlemen, for both sides to know each other’s societies. One of the rather tense pressures in being a Habsburg envoy at the Ottoman court was that while in normal times you were heaped with jewels, if war was declared you would be made into a galley slave or something similarly dead-end for the rest of your life.

  We still today live in the shadow of Habsburg propaganda – a feeling that Ottoman south-east Europe was not real Europe, that it is more murderous, more mysterious and somehow worse, when of course it was a highly sophisticated and brilliant society, with its great fortresses such as Belgrade and Buda, its trading cities such as Salonika or Smyrna and, of course, Istanbul, a city which today still exudes a residual greatness entirely comparable to Vienna’s. In terms of civilization it is quite hard in some moods to know who to have sided with during the Siege of Vienna: a fairly tolerant world of silks, sherbets, harems, zithers, tinkling fountains and tulip festivals lit by wandering tortoises with candles on their backs, or a world of gloom-ridden ‘brocade Catholicism’ in which, for example, Viennese Jews were not allowed out of their homes on Sunday mornings because they were Christ’s murderers. There is a part of me that would be much happier in curly slippers, sipping coffee and watching camel-drawn artillery trundle past. It is curious if unsurprising that it is Austria that leads the block of European Union countries violently opposed to Turkey’s entry – a sort of pip-squeak epilogue to ‘Turkish Louis’ and his exploits.

  ‘Burn the Palatinate!’

  These political flows are in the end impossibly deep, complex and inexplicable but, for whatever reason, just as Europe was in the final phase of the Thirty Years War it had the horrific bad luck to give birth to Louis XIV. As the war’s dazed survivors tried to rebuild their towns and kick trade routes back into gear with some non-homicidal commerce, this ghastly man was growing up and rubbing his hands together at the financial and military machinery built for him by Richelieu and Mazarin. With this he was to make life entirely miserable for western Germany, along with many other places.

  It is one of the chief pleasures of culture that it remains so specific to nation, class, region or time and that it cannot be faked. Louis XIV has never had many English admirers, so it is easy to fall into a long tradition of not admiring him. England had a fun role in ruining the later part of his reign but the real issue is a cultural one: what made Louis the arbiter of taste, architecture, music and design no longer seems interesting or even plausible. As with so many things, too much time has gone by even to see him vividly as a monster, to fully appreciate the enormity of what he did. When I think how much time I have wasted wandering around Versailles over the years – a sort of cold and inhuman nightmare of a place – it is hard not to feel that, despite it all, he does keep us all in his freakish orbit even three hundred years after his death. But the sheer absurdity of his court, with everyone watching the king shitting or admiring his ballet moves (dressed as Sunshine), or sitting around watching pageants at which representations of the rivers of Europe (the Rhine, the Danube and so on) bow down before the Seine – did really nobody laugh?

  Louis ruled from the age of five to just before his seventy-seventh birthday, and once he got into his stride, it was misery all the way. This was expressed in military ways and in cultural ways. From the German point of view the military misery came from Louis being someone who, like many unattractive people, spends too much time staring at maps. On almost invariably quite spurious grounds he wished to expand France’s frontiers to its ‘natural’ boundaries – the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine. The human cost of this completely arbitrary, and indeed mad, vision was incalculable – there is probably no good way to work out how many thousands died just in order to grind the borders of France forward into what are now on the whole marginal, sleepy, resort-oriented places, with the exception of a bit of the north that later turned out to have some significant (but still inadequate) coal supplies on t
he Belgian border. Whether providing Zola with a suitable setting for Germinal is an adequate return on Louis’s investment we cannot judge. Indeed what is odd about Louis’s endless efforts is the smallness of the results (aside from the barely settled and abortive Louisiana) at a time when England was creating the basis for the future United States and Austria taking over the whole of Hungary and Transylvania. The futility stemmed from these geographical borders not being natural in any sense and Louis being so widely loathed that vigorous coalitions could always be thrown up against him.

  The German nadir came in the 1680s when Louis chewed through the edges of the Holy Roman Empire, armed with absurd legal documents drawn up by shameless lawyers giving him the right to take over various towns, including the previously independent and genial Straßburg. Straßburg had managed to stay neutral throughout the Thirty Years War but it now fell to Louis’s deranged greed – thereby inaugurating a key aspect of Franco-German hatred only resolved in 1945. Louis himself was quite happy to ascribe his motive as purely ‘glory’, a glory expressed in babyish pageants, ceiling paintings with wearying allegorical elements and so on. In the later 1680s, in order both to force the Empire to accept his thefts along the frontier and to impose his own candidate as the new Elector-Archbishop of Cologne, Louis moved his forces moved across the Rhine and devastated all the helpless major towns. Mainz, Koblenz, Worms and Speyer were wrecked (under the banner ‘Brûlez le Palatinat!’) with a deliberate emphasis on destroying them as centres of civilization, so that even if they did not end up owned by France they would form part of a ravaged zone protecting the frontier. Their inhabitants were herded out and every building of value or importance burned down. The damage to Speyer Cathedral, for example, was so bad that it was not until 1850 that it was entirely restored (having in the meantime been further smashed up by the French during the Revolutionary Wars). Of course, later layers of devastation hit all these towns in the 1940s so it is hard to get a sense of how bad it was. The most famous ruin left by the French remains the picturesque shell of the Heidelberg Palace, so loved by generations of tourists and painters, but itself a side effect of extreme, sour violence.

  It would be unreasonable simply to place all blame on the French for these catastrophes – Louis had plenty of clients among the local rulers who were happy to egg him on in a faithless way – but these wars were fought for such baffling abstractions that they raise curious questions about our attitude to warfare as a whole. For many people there is a point to much European fighting from Napoleon onwards – there are clear, if contestable, motives and meaningful, if often tragic, sequences of events. I have always found it impossible to discern such ideas in the wars fought between the opening, religious phase of the Thirty Years War and the outbreak of the French Revolution – everything seems to be just the result of the ghastliness of scoundrels dusted in wig-powder. Louis’s actions really start off this harsh period, with its obsession with a ‘balance of power’, a balance which varied according to which country you were talking to and which still treated territory as a question of personal ownership. Indeed, one of the ways of salvaging the era’s politics is to look out for the strange, often small signs that as the eighteenth century progressed, this assumption of royal ownership became undermined by genuine nationalism – a feeling of belonging to a state rather than belonging to its owner. Historians tend to heave a sigh of relief when spotting something along these lines – for example in the late eighteenth century the more than dynastic unease that greeted the Emperor Joseph II’s failed attempts simply to swap Austrian-owned but tiresome and far-away Belgium for Bavaria, shunting off the Elector of Bavaria to Brussels and tacking Bavaria onto his own land. This idea was greeted with outrage by both Belgians and Bavarians and we are clearly now, even before the French Revolution, on track for nationalism to break out all over the place. Instead, all that the Emperor got as compensation was a small chunk of near-empty agricultural land along the River Inn, thereby later on giving Austria the opprobrium of being Hitler’s birthplace, with consequences too complex and sickening to muse on.

  Back to Louis: the other disaster, as already mentioned, was cultural. Looking at the chilly shell of Versailles today, it is hard to imagine what an impact the court there had had and the general cultural focus provided by wigs, elaborate coats, huge amounts of meaningless ritual and hunting on a grotesque scale. Wigs have done a lot of damage to the image of the period. The rulers during the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War are all portrayed with their real hair, whether shorn or lank; then it disappears under wigs for a hundred and fifty years, giving a strange, permanent sense of modernity to those earlier rulers denied to their bizarre-looking successors. Of course fake hair is not a valid indicator of character, particularly through the heavy filter of fawning court portraiture, often of indifferent quality. Louis XIV has a central role in disseminating this absurd headgear, so that even sensible and cunning operators such as William III have heads almost swamped in brown bubbles. As it becomes so hard to get a sense of the personalities of these rulers, it becomes easy to assume that they are all merely lizardy cynics. They present themselves in a style which is no longer comprehensible. The audience who can pick its way unself-consciously through the ideologies in these pictures has died long ago and we now look on at such displays with hostility and boredom, oblivious to the white-silk-clad shins and unsubtle comparisons to Mars or Apollo.

  What remain are the huge monuments built to ape Versailles. Whether such monsters were the result of rulers having more money or whether more money was gouged out of the peasants in order to pay for them can never be resolved. In any event, as areas of Germany recovered economically as the seventeenth century ended and the eighteenth century began (even if bits were always being blown up by somebody or other), a lot of this money went into pointless copies of Versailles. As the Versailles model ruled Western Europe until the French Revolution, this was clearly an important change. All over Germany genial, turreted, rambly castles were cast aside in favour of immense rectangles with carvings of weapons on top. Palaces at Kassel, Ludwigsburg and Brühl stay today as symbols of French cultural dominance, a shorthand (or rather longhand) for a particular kind of remote autocracy, intimidating and depressing.

  Catholicism goes for broke

  As I mentioned earlier, I was raised a Catholic, went to Protestant schools and came out the far end as a sort of Protestant. It may well just flatter my self-image to be sitting in the cool rationality of a whitewashed Lutheran hall church humming something by Bach but – like a former alcoholic diving face-first into a tray of liqueur chocolates – there is something that makes me get on planes to south Germany, hastily book into a hotel and jog down the street to the nearest baroque pilgrimage gross-out. I would like to say that my favourite painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is Rembrandt’s austere self-portrait, but really I know I have come home when I see Rubens’ delirious whopper St Francis Xavier Preaching, with the saint as a sort of wizard, fixing up the ill, curing blind folk and blowing up a Chinese temple – its josses shattering to fragments to the dismay of the cringing, top-knotted idolaters – all backed up by a troupe of sensational angels. In a spirit of self-scrutiny I would have to say that I have always liked childish special effects and refreshed Catholicism on the march has them all.

  This Counter-Reformation faith was astonishingly self-confident. Many ancient and important churches – the Comburg monastic church; Freising cathedral – were in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made completely unrecognizable by shocking makeovers in white stucco, glowing marbles and gold-leaf. The geniuses at doing this were the Asam brothers, among the greatest theatrical decorators in Europe, who turned the inside of churches into a wilderness of special effects: beams of light, flying babies, immense heroic bishops, clouds, martyrs, candy-cane pillars. When it works well – as in the tiny church they made for themselves in Munich, the Asamkirche – it is wonderful, but it does require a steady nerve and
constant restoration. I once made the mistake of wandering into the church of St Emmeram in Regensburg and suddenly felt as though I was at the scene of an accident and was required to do something urgent to help. (‘It’s too late to save the early martyr, but this putto’s still breathing; in God’s name, does anyone have any gold paint?’) For me it may have been the kebab talking but, far from zooming heavenward, everything the Asams had done at St Emmeram implied an explosion in a chemical-weapons factory.

  The general tone of this church is added to by the survival of rows of skeletons of minor saints, lolling in provocative, Rita Hayworth-like poses in glass cases along the walls, held together by rotting brown body stockings and with rhinestones for eyes. Most of these Scooby-Doo-like horrors were chucked in the skip years ago, sometimes through revolutionary violence but also through Catholic renewal movements which have often taken a cold view of this sort of performance, but here and there a few survive. Worse still, if you are looking to be frightened stiff by outdated aspects of Counter-Reformation faith (not high on some people’s to-do list), is the cathedral museum at Freising. Oddly, I was the only visitor – and indeed even the elderly ticket-seller soon vanished – so that didn’t help the generally eldritch atmosphere. Going down some harmless-seeming stairs, I was entirely surrounded by very old and complex crib scenes and a seeming infinity of wax Baby Jesus dolls. In the low, murky lighting it was hard not to imagine that the missing ticket-seller had run off to flip the mains switch. I would be found dead in the morning, as in one of those wonderful scenes in science-fiction films where the pathologist turns to the policeman and says, ‘This man didn’t die of a heart attack, Inspector. He died of fright.’ Only then would they notice the thousands of tiny hand marks all over my skin.