Germania

by Simon Winder

  The nature of the Habsburg ruler was peculiarly important because of the personal nature of the entire Imperial arrangement. Britain or France could, within measure, afford some pathetic monarchs because they were both nations with identities that could transcend the king, however powerful. Indeed, there is an interesting question in the course of the eighteenth century about the general low quality of monarchs, who across so much of Europe form a sort of parade of malfunction. The revolutions of the end of the century tend to be given economic and social roots, but they might at least in part stem from the strangely helpless notional keystones (from France to Tuscany to Saxony-Poland) who created such a general atmosphere of decay.

  Within the Empire there was a particularly unforgiving environment as there were so many potentially fissiparous elements all held in orbit by the Emperor, both within Germany and within the non-German Empire, with the Emperor separately being King of Bohemia and King of Hungary, the latter with a medley of territories spreading from the Carpathians to Slavonia. The one later Habsburg who really commands respect, oddly, is Maria Theresa, plus her fun husband Franz I. Maria Theresa tends to come across badly in relation to the other two great women rulers in eighteenth-century Europe (the Tsarinas Elizabeth and Catherine) because she looks such a pious frump. Her taste for particularly inert court portraitists (a taste shared by many later Habsburgs, whose features are almost lost in clothing and routinized symbolism) has not helped. But although she lacked the swagger of the Russian rulers, there is something both heroic and likeable about her. The appalling circumstances of her coming to power make an exciting start, a teenager battling for her inheritance, surrounded by the faithless wolves who had promised her father they would protect her. The sheer novelty of a woman in such a position, refusing to give in, rallying her generals and the aristocracy, dealing with defeat after defeat and somehow still fighting her enemies to a standstill is one of the great, completely unexpected epics. The humiliation of the creepy Bavarians is a particular pleasure, with Duke Karl Albrecht, aided by his French friends, spending his entire treasury and the lives of thousands of his subjects to force his way into the Empire and get himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor as Karl VII, only to find it all turning to ashes with Maria Theresa’s troops occupying Munich and his unmourned death following after only three years in the job.

  These sorts of reversals of fortune, startling dashes and amazing battles make the eighteenth century semi-fun to read about, but in the end the lack of ideology and the sheer childishness of the motivation make it all a bit hard to take seriously. Having constantly to remind yourself that ownership lay at the heart of what made Europe tick and that the glory of the ruler was the point of history becomes through endless repetition a rather unconvincing mantra. With Maria Theresa, though, it really is still possible to glimpse what was at stake: her legitimacy as a ruler in a world of predators in wigs and elaborate cloaks. That she holds on to her inheritance and indeed (despite in the end having to concede the loss of Silesia to Frederick the Great) makes Vienna into a great city and the Empire into the heart of Western civilization is a happy and surprising result.

  After that rococo bankrupt, the so-called Karl VII, died in the shame and obloquy of his ambition, it was clear that the new Emperor was going to have to be a man despite Maria Theresa’s claims. And this is where Maria Theresa’s adorable husband came in. Franz Stephan had been Duke of Lorraine, but in a complex international swap of a kind that raises severe doubts about how interesting history really is he found himself as Grand Duke of Tuscany instead, after the death of the almost unbelievably disgusting and incompetent Last of the Medicis. This swap, incidentally, ended the important history of Lorraine as an independent state, as its new, Polish ruler only got the job on the basis of Lorraine then becoming part of France on his death.

  With so many figures from this period it is almost impossible to judge their personalities – their martial or ecclesiastical attributes in their portraits and their immense cloaks and hats simply swamp them. But wandering around Vienna, Franz Stephan’s picture is always turning up on palace walls and, however festooned in wigs and medals, it still shines through that he was an amusing chump. There is something about his eyes and the general, self-indulgent set of his mouth that makes him look enjoyable to meet.

  After the Austrians had given the Bavarians a final crushing at the Battle of Pfaffenhofen (with Hungarian irregulars looting Munich), it was agreed that Franz Stephan should become the new Holy Roman Emperor (because he was a man) whereas Maria Theresa would be queen regnant in Bohemia and Hungary and Empress through her being married to Franz Stephan. This arrangement fooled nobody as she was patently in charge, exercising immense (if sometimes chaotic and rather narrow-minded) sway.

  What makes Maria Theresa and Franz Stefan so appealing is their genuine love for each other. To be interested in dynastic history at all is to be forced to deal with a great welter of human misery, of frosty, vicious or even murderous marriage arrangements, of hundreds of women having to pay a very high price for having access to enchanting lapdogs and pretty tea-sets. There is hardly a palace which doesn’t in the end reek of cruelty and inadequacy. By contrast, Maria Theresa and Franz enthusiastically turned out piles of children (mostly called Maria) and – when she was not inspecting her troops on parade before they were beaten by the Prussians and when he was not engaged in standard-issue philandering and collecting minerals – spent as much time together as possible.

  This most charmingly survives in the unexpected environment of the zoo in Vienna. Just next to the Habsburg summer palace at Schönbrunn, the zoo has its origins in Franz’s enthusiasm for all branches of science and still features the rococo pavilion built for him and Maria Theresa to enjoy breakfast together, drinking cups of chocolate surrounded by parrots, zebras and (those quintessential rococo animals) ostriches. Even the layout of animal houses, radiating from the pavilion, has been kept and there can be few luckier creatures than the hippos and giraffes still entangled in this ancient decorative arrangement.

  Franz’s death has had as much impact on Vienna as his life, as Maria Theresa commissioned portraits to remind her of him and worked to preserve his huge if miscellaneous collections of minerals, curiosities and animals. He remains in all his glory at the heart of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, with his great portrait surrounded by savants, fossils and collection cabinets, looking just as teddy-bear-like and self-indulgent as though he were alive today.

  But, in the long tradition of Habsburgs enjoying the chance to design their own tombs, Maria Theresa (who wore black for the remaining fifteen years of her reign) had a brilliant time working on one of the most excessive of them all. There can be few greater pleasures in life than wandering around the Capuchins’ Crypt, where so many of the Habsburgs are buried. Maria Theresa’s tomb was up against some considerable competition from her own father and mother. The former – the ineffective Karl VI (for whom we must be grateful anyway for building the Karl Church and the State Rooms, two of Vienna’s most fun pieces of architecture) – and the latter, Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, had gone nuts with their tombs, miracles of proto-Goth with skulls wearing crowns and metal women’s faces suffocated in metal-gauze mourning veils. To solve this problem she simply had designed a tomb of infinitely larger size than those of her parents, in the form of a bed with figures of herself and Franz waking up at the End of Time and greeting each other, as though just about to hop up and head to the pavilion for a nice breakfast. It is silly, but still very moving – and a likeable end to an attractive reign.

  More competitive tomb-building

  I am always happy in Mainz. For many long years, visits to the Frankfurt Book Fair could be cheered up by a quick train trip up the River Main. Mainz has been repeatedly ravaged by invaders since its origin as a bunch of Roman military tents and it is possible to imagine a gene in many of the inhabitants that would allow them simply to roll their eyes fatalistically as the next Vandal
, Hun, Swede, Frenchman, Hessian or Imperialist marched in. On the banks of the Rhine at the river junction with the Main, awkwardly close to France (which was always threatening to turn it into Mayence), the city used to bristle with fruitless crenellations, ditches and towers. Its readily pinpointable river location meant it was ravaged by bombers in the Second World War and rebuilt in an often glum, utilitarian way. As with similar medium-sized towns such as Hannover it is, under the circumstances, impossible to complain about this rebuilding. It at least creates an arena for the enthusiasm of the post-war German state in supporting traditional shopkeepers, protecting them with restrictive opening hours and discriminating against out-of-town megastores, which means that places like Mainz and Hannover still pullulate with the core German competence of mindlessly buying tons of stuff. Far more than old buildings this buzz of shopping, to me at any rate, gives a direct feeling of continuity with the older Mainz – although of course its citizens were then buying things like wooden shoes or pig’s trotters for dinner rather than fur underwear or dodgy all-in holidays to Thailand.

  Mainz is famous as the birthplace of printing – commemorated with an excellent statue of Gutenberg and a notably boring museum, although not as boring as the gauntlet thrown down by the endless, totally without interest Roman objects that cram another of the museums. But Mainz’s other claim is as the capital of the old ecclesiastic Electorate of Mainz. Like many territories, it was made up of a chaotic mass of geographical oddities, owning chunks of surrounding land and valuable rents in others, and even the far-off Thuringian town of Erfurt (which still features a rather forlorn little monument to one of the last Electors, in a stiffly bewigged cameo, now a hangout for understandably disaffected Erfurter skateboarders).

  The Electorate of Mainz was not very big but it was always very significant as its ruler, the Archbishop of Mainz, was the most important cleric in Catholic Germany – indeed, apart from Rome, Mainz was the only town that could be referred to as ‘the Holy See’. He was Archchancellor of the Holy Roman Empire, which put him in charge of several key institutions, not least the ceremonies in Frankfurt around choosing each Emperor. He was also the director of the Electoral-Rhenish Imperial Circle and generally too of the Upper Rhenish Circle. These defensive groups were crucial to the vain attempts to keep out invaders and roped together the military potential of everything from chunky (or at least meaningful) territories such as Hesse-Kassel, Cologne, Koblenz and Frankfurt down to scraps like the Abbey of Prüm, whose sole asset in the event of foreign invasion was a pair of sandals apparently once worn by Jesus.

  Like the other significant ecclesiastical territories before they were swept away after the French Revolution – Cologne and Trier being the most politically important, also being Electorates – Mainz was a very odd place. Strikingly, it was not motivated by sex. Each ruler was by definition celibate (and indeed was in practice too, with the odd spectacular lapse) and on each ruler’s death there needed to be a fresh election. These were not dynastic states, in other words (although other dynasties often meddled in them), and therefore, in a peculiar way, a bit progressive, albeit with eye-wateringly large bribes changing hands before each appointment. This lack of sex around the court tended to create a unique atmosphere blending intense piety, greedy, rather blatantly compensatory building projects and heavy drinking. Long before they were disposed of after French invasion, the ecclesiastical territories were viewed as a medieval disgrace by many, not least the secular rulers who dreamed of carving them up (Hesse-Darmstadt eventually lucked out and swallowed Mainz). Predators were kept at bay because the ecclesiastical territories both biggish and tiny were crucial to the Habsburg family and at the heart of the running of the Empire. One oddity of the Reformation was that many of the key princes had become Protestant – the big exceptions being the Habsburgs themselves and the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria, plus at the end of the seventeenth century the outrageous reconversion of the Albertine Wettin family in Dresden, just so they could become Kings of Poland. This meant that the many ecclesiastical territories were out of the orbit of Protestants and part of a separate Catholic hierarchy linked to the Habsburgs.

  This gave free rein to the immense numbers of Imperial Knights – rulers of tiny territories with totally mysterious origins in the dying days of the Carolingian Empire and whose comically minor but legitimate nobility allowed them to dominate appointments in the Catholic Church. These knights (who have no British – let alone American – equivalent) often lived in towns, only visiting their native castles in the summer months, and many lived in Mainz, which was once famous for its many borderline tumbledown knightly mansions. These knights had many children who filled innumerable jobs in the Church, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes indolently or corruptly, in such proliferation that you could probably create a chart using them to express the entire range of possible human behaviours.

  The importance of these people in the Empire meant that, despite much of the chunkier territory being in fact Protestant, the Empire as a whole had a strongly Catholic air, dominating the institutions which ran it, just as the Emperor himself was always Catholic. Bismarck’s and Hitler’s antipathy towards Catholics as un-German, disloyal and unacceptable was – for two men so crippled by historical concerns – oddly unhistorical, therefore. The rule of the prince-archbishops meant that Rhineland Catholicism was deeply entrenched in a way that Protestants could never expunge.

  The inside of the cathedral at Mainz has much of the atmosphere yearned for by makers of science-fiction films where the hero enters the hold of some long-abandoned spaceship – a cold, grand and bracing mournfulness. And preserved along its walls are statues to some forty of the prince-archbishops, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, again with an air of alien beings in stone or marble pods, and presenting an extraordinary catalogue of the sculptural style of each era. The tombs start with suitably monolithic, harsh warrior bishops, then they get more genial with Renaissance emblems, followed by the ruffed austerity of the seventeenth century, and then everything goes mad, with life-size white marble skeletons, figures of Father Time, winged skulls, blubbing putti, extravagant folds of clothing, all positioned to be hit to advantage by shafts of real sunlight. One friend I once went round with bailed out, queasy with horror, at about 1680, but I remained bouncy and immune throughout – by the early eighteenth century the Electors’ tombs are entirely out of control and indeed strongly anticipatory of the fine moment in Fellini’s Roma where the Vatican holds an excitingly modern ecclesiastical fashion show featuring neon-clad, roller-skating priests and entire reliquary skeletons of saints hanging like the Andrews Sisters from the sides of a jeep.

  Just as the tombs they wound up being tipped into were the most enjoyable, so the eighteenth century as a whole was the apogee of fun for these rulers, who had a tremendous range of costumes to wear and intricate ceremonial occasions, both religious and political, for which to kit themselves out. It was an era of substantial armies and serious fighting, and ever more decisions were being taken in distant Berlin or Vienna, so their power was far less than it appeared, but that probably made the ecclesiastical electors’ jobs even more pleasant. A classic minor noble family who made good were the von Schönborns who, from their original base in a scarcely visible piece of territory in Franconia, managed to scatter their seed all over the place, winding up with an extraordinary range of bishoprics and archbishoprics. Blending a vigorous, conspicuous piety and extreme acquisitiveness, the Schönborns were the men in the control room of the immense gift-that-goes-on-giving of the traditional Catholic Church. As late as 1918 the government of the new state of Czechoslovakia was confiscating half a million acres of Schönborn land and even today a Schönborn, who fled with his family from Czechoslovakia as a baby, is the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, offering a rather odd continuity.

  The world owes a lot to at least three Schönborns – Lothar Franz and his nephews Philipp Franz and Friedrich Karl (one strange trait of these families is their necess
arily indirect connections). All the time that more normal eighteenth-century rulers spent marrying off their children, selling their subjects as soldiers or trying to blow each other up, the ecclesiastical ones could spend in agreeable building projects, collecting art and paying for music (perhaps most famously the wonderfully named Hieronymus von Colloredo, Archbishop of Salzburg, one of Mozart’s early sponsors). Lothar Franz managed to be both Elector of Mainz and Bishop of Bamberg. Lothar Franz loved building palaces and gardens, for example the ‘Favorite’, a crazy mass of fountains, pyramids and pavilions looking over the Main and Rhine which was humourlessly burned to the ground by the French during the siege of 1793 (admittedly, in the same year Prussian artillery managed to smash to pieces one of the cathedral towers and in 1857, as a key German Confederation fortress, Mainz was the unlucky location of a powder magazine which exploded taking another chunk of the town with it – this is a place used to rebuilding). Lothar Franz’s most magical survival is the New Residence in Bamberg, a perfect Baroque wonderland next to the great cathedral. His nephews aimed – successfully – at topping it with the New Residence in Würzburg, where they took turns to be bishop, but there is something slightly dopey about Bamberg’s palace which makes it more fun room-by-room than Würzburg, even though the latter is obviously one of the wonders of the world.

  Chief joy of Bamberg’s New Residence is the Imperial Hall. These odd rooms litter the German landscape and were built to express the unique role of the Emperor in the rulers’ lives – the grandest possible space reserved specifically for visits by the greatest ruler of them all. Of course, Bamberg, however much I myself would like to live there, is objectively not an important place and in fact in the remaining century of the Empire’s existence after the Imperial Hall was completed no Emperor ever got round to visiting it. And it is probably just as well. This huge, fabulous room was subjected to many years of labour by the Tyrolean painter Melchior Steidl to create the ultimate illusionist ceiling painting of the empires of the world, flanked by giant portraits of the usual scattering of German Emperors. There is one point in the floor where you are meant to stand and experience the full illusion of hundreds of figures, clouds, clumsy allegorical elements and so on whirling up into the air. The beauty lies in the way that the illusion doesn’t work at all – the colouring and figures are all rather babyish, and very far from creating the sort of vertiginous lift that was Cortona’s or Tiepolo’s specialité de la maison. The result is a sort of queasy disaster with the opposite illusion – that by standing on this specific spot you are in danger of being crushed by a heaving mass of glowing tat. It is – in an environment where you are being barraged by generally brilliant and exciting works of art – a thrilling relief to encounter a grade-A disaster and speculate over the years of awkward silences and insincere praise which must have followed its unveiling.