Germania

by Simon Winder

  There is a very striking photograph of the Imperial Hall in the First World War when it was used as a military hospital (one of the odder contributions to the war effort by the Bavarian royal family, who had taken over Bamberg in the general early-nineteenth-century territorial free-for-all). Aside from the normal suffering of a frontline soldier at this time, it seems an astonishing extra psychological grinding of the mill-wheel, to have to lie on your back, staring up at such a lurid oddity, the duff brainchild of a long-dead cleric.

  Chromatic fantasia and fugue

  Every town is doomed to be imagined under the conditions in which it is visited. For me the eerie expanses of the Hindenburg Park in Ingolstadt will always be dark and snowbound, while in the suburbs of Magdeburg, where I once spent a happy few summer days in the spare room of a couple of elderly flower-obsessives, everything was brightly coloured. Even the notoriously drab, Stalinist town centre seemed to me cheerfully tinged with my hosts’ pansies and sweet peas. This rather arbitrary tagging of individual towns (this one blustery and louring, that one light and sparkling) was a problem with my method of criss-crossing Germany and only regularly returning to the really big cities, but it did give a specific extra dimension of vividness to each place which would have been erased by careful, seasonally paced encounters.

  Köthen, a small town in Saxony-Anhalt, formerly the leading town of the micro-principality of Anhalt-Köthen, suffered from this through an alarming combination of dreary weather and a winter Sunday morning visit. Like so many such places it had known moments of greatness and notoriety – in Köthen’s case as the home of the nineteenth-century ornithologist Johann Friedrich Naumann and the Naumann Museum, one of the principal temples for European bird-lovers, filled with beautiful watercolours and sinisterly old stuffed birds in crowded glass cases. Even for someone with no interest in birds at all, it has one sensational case heaped with hundreds of taxidermists’ glass bird eyes on wires, for every size from a warbler to an eagle owl, which seemed to me one of the great (if accidental) artworks of the twentieth century. Köthen was also the home for some years of Samuel Hahnemann, who seems to have quite randomly made up many of the precepts of homeopathy while practising his surprising branch of medicine there. Now a deeply depressed place, Köthen has lost more than a quarter of its population within a generation and this, coupled with the continuing low levels of religious observance in former East Germany, meant that Sunday mornings offered nobody any reason to leave bed. Wandering Köthen’s streets, I felt that it had been emptied in some disturbing and total accident which would, with the almost tedious inevitability of the genre, result in my being attacked by red-eyed flesh-eating zombie children around the next corner.

  The only sign of life was a distant sort of hurdy-gurdy, fairground noise of an enjoyably creepy kind. After wandering through empty, battered and confusing streets, I at last came out in the main square. Here there was a truly brilliant church – a spindly, blackened oddity with thin towers capped with little hatlike roofs and every appearance of being an alchemically minded giant’s stove. The fairground music was coming from a very battered stage erected by the church on which, really oddly, a troupe of teenage girls wearing spangled electric-blue majorette costumes were kicking up their legs to a selection of Prussian and Austrian marching tunes while a colossal, ill-shaven MC leered and giggled at the microphone, very much like the puppet-master in Pinocchio. Watching this spectacle were a scattering of semi-derelict morning-after men and some clearly rather uneasy yet supportive mothers come to cheer the girls on. It was like being trapped in a particularly irritating art-house movie from the sixties or seventies with a snearingly anti-capitalist message.

  Moving on from this strange scene I reached the real reason for being there – the bleak, battered, unkempt ducal Schloss, its moat stuffed with dead leaves and even its handful of ducks managing to give their quacks a depressive timbre. Here Prince Leopold, the territory’s ruler and a Calvinist, had in 1717 the brilliant idea of asking Johann Sebastian Bach to live in Köthen as Master of the Chapel, having already pinched a set of top musicians from the disbanded Prussian court orchestra. Bach had spent an unhappy time turning out religious works (and being put in gaol) in Weimar and was happy to work instead for a man whose very religion made him abhor church music of any kind. So for six years, for whom Prince Leopold should be thanked as long as music is played, Bach sat around turning out some of the greatest and most enjoyable material ever invented: everything from Air on a G String to the Brandenburg Concertos to the solo works for violin and cello to the Well-Tempered Clavier to the crazily cheerful and tiny Badinerie, kicking off what became the German secular music world in which whole lifetimes can be spent. Here Bach wrote my favourite piece of keyboard music, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. On the piano it can sound merely emollient and virtuoso, but on the harpsichord it is like having some witch’s basket dropped in your lap – a demented series of sounds from some other world. Usually it seems a good idea to be interested just in pure music and to ignore a composer’s often pointless biography, but it was genuinely exciting to feel that the Fantasia must have been heard in these rooms, the man himself crossing and re-crossing this courtyard, climbing these spiral staircases, entering this dank and austere chapel.

  Wandering or rather shuffling around the fabulous little Bach museum – wearing the outsize grey felt slippers still issued to visitors walking on historic parquet floors in the former Eastern Bloc, one of the Soviet Union’s smaller legacies – I was as happy as a clam. Even if Bach actually wrote the Fantasia in a pub down the road I didn’t care. Here, in one place, was the triumphant vindication of Germany’s odd political structure – a little Calvinist statelet (Anhalt-Köthen) near enough to other small and medium states to filch for a bit a renowned composer and a top-quality orchestra for him to work with, and to change his life and the lives of everyone since who has even faintly liked classical music. When the prince died, still only in his thirties, Bach returned to Köthen to play the music for his funeral, unveiling several parts of what would become the St Matthew Passion. It is clearly not practical and probably undesirable, but there is definitely part of me that would feel it alegitimate use of the rest of my life to shuffle, in the style of some religions, in my shaggy slippers round and round the rooms of Köthen Schloss as an act of seriousness and focus and gratitude. But my attention began to wander. It was nearly lunchtime, and a peculiar version of the Radetsky March rescored for synthesizer was drifting across from the main square.

  The Strong and the Fat

  It is conventional in histories of Germany at this point to start talking about Prussia so that everyone can start gibbering and rolling their eyes with fear. Instead I thought I would write about Saxony. This part of Germany has always been one of my favourite places. It was one of the first I stayed in, shortly after the Wall came down, taking a room in a student flat in the south-east of Dresden, an area which, with its soot-caked late-nineteenth-century shop fronts and apartment blocks, its newspaper kiosks and battered trams, all arranged along a particularly beautiful stretch of the Elbe, seemed to me, even under the harsh conditions of the time, to maintain a vigorous argument for the wonders of urban life. A pub, placed slightly madly close to the river’s edge, was defiantly marked on its outside wall with the heights over the centuries where Elbe flooding had wiped it out. I remember drifting in a happy daze around Dresden, Leipzig and Meissen.

  This happiness came in part from the sense that this was Germany profonde, an area crucial to the great cultural and political moments that define Central Europe, but also tucked away to such a degree that I felt genuinely almost alone. I’m not sure why that feeling should be desirable, but in the context of the recent collapse of East Germany (with the trains all still marked as being run by the Reichsbahn, unchanged since the Third Reich) the ground seemed historically still warm and it was exciting to be engaged – to my own satisfaction at least, if to nobody else’s – with a historical sense of
what had really happened here.

  The fundamental pleasure of Saxony lies in its hopelessness. It is as characteristically German as Prussia and yet as a political entity it failed in all it did. Saxony’s history appears somewhat marginal, and yet this is the place that gave us Schumann, Wagner and Nietzsche. Despite woeful frivolity, insanity and mismanagement it clung on to its independence, never quite going under, until the last wholly unmourned king abdicated at the end of the First World War. At least while within the confines of Saxony it is possible to think of an alternative Germany – wayward, self-indulgent and inept in a way that gives hope to us all.

  As with all the more serious German states, the more one finds out about Saxony’s history the more absorbing it becomes, acting as a parallel and just as completely realized world, with many bizarre actors and events entirely comparable to the histories of England, say, or Spain, and impossible to go into too much detail over without accidentally writing an entire book. For all German schoolchildren, the Saxony story hinges around the Stealing of the Princes, an upbeat version of the Princes in the Tower, when in 1455 the fiendish (and brilliantly named) Kunz von Kaufungen and his confederates infiltrated the great Schloss at Altenburg, snatched Ernst and Albrecht, the two little heirs of the mighty Wettin family, Electors of Saxony, and rushed away with them. The plan had been to barter with their father the Elector from the safety of the highly unstable Saxon–Bohemian borderlands to right the ancient wrongs felt by Kunz, but it all went wrong: the princes were recovered and Kunz was beheaded. Nine years later the Elector, Frederick the Gentle, died and Ernst and Albrecht ruled Saxony jointly until 1485, reabsorbing during this time western territories lost through earlier disputes.

  In 1485 a crucial decision was taken. The two brothers agreed to split their country, with Ernst becoming the Elector of Saxony, based at the soon-to-be-famous Wittenberg, and Albrecht becoming Margrave of Meissen and ruling over the cities of Leipzig and Dresden. Ernst died at Colditz only a year later after an accident, making the whole split superfluous – but in the way of such dynastic decisions it now had its own momentum, rapidly generating a multi-branch tree of descent as the Ernestine Wettin and Albertine Wettin lines went their separate ways. As a consequence of Ernestine support for Luther (including, famously, the Elector’s hiding Luther in his great Eisenach castle, the Wartburg) and military defeat by the Emperor’s forces at the Battle of Mühlberg (with loaned Spanish troops filling Wittenberg), the Electoral vote was moved by the Emperor to the Albertine line. Indeed historically at this point the Ernestines’ great work was done – without the Electors’ support for Luther it is quite possible that the Catholics could have hunted down and extirpated him and his followers as they had done with the Cathars and Hussites.

  Ownership of the Electorate tended to keep territories together, as a substantial country was necessary for the dignity of the role. By contrast the Ernestine line, now restricted to the jumbled hills and valleys of Thuringia, tended to split lands between sons, resulting in a chaotic jumble of tiny states, all prefaced (in English and French) with Saxe-. These little places were economically insignificant but sometimes culturally and dynastically amazingly important – most obviously Saxe-Weimar but also (for many royal families) Saxe-Coburg and even somewhere hardly traceable on a map like Saxe-Hildburghausen could make its mark (it was the marriage of a princess of Saxe-Hildburghausen to the Crown Prince of Bavaria in 1810 that instituted the Oktoberfest, now attended by some six million people a year).

  As can be imagined there was gloom and ill feeling between the Ernestine and Albertine Wettins, despite a long, distinguished shared medieval heritage. A strong sense of this can still be felt in the magnificent, if daft, Victorian decorations to the Albrechtsburg in Meissen, in any event one of the world’s best castles but capped off by zany statues of all the often rather made-up-sounding ancient Wettin ancestors: ‘the Oppressed’, ‘the Strict’, ‘the Warlike’, ‘the Degenerate’ and so on, all frowning from their pedestals and accompanied by a genealogical table mapping the subsequent fates of all the Wettins, a document so complex that its designer must have gone mad.

  The Albertines, once they had the Elector’s title, remained for many years aware that their hold on it remained precarious and it became a sort of enjoyable pastime for the Ernestines to scheme and undermine the Elector using any means to hand. It has to be said that the Electors were not a very admirable or interesting bunch – cruel, heavy-drinking, indecisive. The indecision was what made Saxony so hated by Protestants. In the end ownership of the title of Elector was based on the Emperor’s favour and so, while Saxony remained the quintessential Protestant state, this meant it was useless as an ally to other Protestants. This problem – and the fundamental headache of not being big enough to be able to defend itself properly and yet big enough to be worth invading – tortured the Electors (when they weren’t drinking or having immense numbers of children). After the Thirty Years War the territory gradually recovered and, as it was rebuilt after a great fire in 1685, Dresden started to take on its current appearance, with its oddly encrusted towers and domes.

  Saxony immediately generates an atmosphere of ease – a step away from the great issues generated by being in Berlin and Vienna. I even spent some happy days in Meissen under the pathetic delusion that I could learn to draw everything I saw in coloured pencil, sitting by the Elbe sketching the Albrechtsburg, hoping that my lack of talent could be balanced out by buying really expensive pencils and paper. Having spent so much time seeing the sometimes startling out-of-doors work of other amateur artists I was more than happy sitting there, putting in little touches on the intricate town-scape conjured from my fingers, before I realized that passers-by, in the very body language of their walk, thought I was on day-release from some mental asylum, and I sadly set aside my wonky and lurid little pictures.

  Saxony’s great invention was porcelain. Created in around 1704 by a mathematician and an alchemist in the pay of Augustus the Strong, Meissen porcelain allowed Europeans to make their own rather than import it from China. The porcelain factory in Meissen is still there: simpering shepherdesses, a fox playing a piano, a drunken goat in glasses with a drunken Saxon official on his back – just terrible. I knew it was a mistake walking in, but I had not realized that for some three hundred years consistently awful objects had streamed out of Meissen. Other rulers copied Augustus and soon there were several loss-making imitations scattered around Germany. For many years, as an ingeniously nasty way of reducing royal losses slightly, Jews wishing to get married in Brandenburg were obliged, in return for royal permission, to buy an ornate and hideous set of Berlin porcelain.

  Saxony as a whole has an oddly porcelain air, with Dresden itself seemingly made out of buildings which have the same sort of fragile crispness. Its great wealth came from agriculture and mining and it always offered an odd contrast to its bleak northern neighbour in Brandenburg. But while the main cities of Saxony remain extremely civilized places, they also show the limits of incompetence. The rulers of Saxony had a strange inability to rule intelligently. After the reasonably successful military career of Johann Georg III, who died of plague in 1691 and initiated the rebuilding of Dresden, a pathetic sequence followed. His son Johann Georg IV had a brief and deranged reign during which, obsessed with his teenage mistress (who was also quite possibly his half-sister), he tried to murder his wife only to be prevented by his younger brother Friedrich August, whose hand was permanently damaged in the struggle. Johann Georg and his mistress shortly thereafter both died of smallpox and Friedrich August quite unexpectedly came to the throne. Here there was a potential glimpse of greatness: a young, rich and motivated ruler. The Hohenzollerns in Brandenburg managed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to convert themselves into a major power by picking up territories across Northern Europe; the Habsburgs did the same, taking Hungary and Transylvania from the Turks.

  The Wettin opportunity came with Friedrich August being elected King of Poland (
after huge bribes and a breathtaking switch to Catholicism) as August II the Strong. He spent and spent on making Dresden into a great centre of patronage and courtly life (including the babyish gesture, which still dominates the complex today, of featuring a giant stone version of the Polish crown as a decorative feature in the new Zwinger palace). The result was ruinous. He embroiled Poland in disastrous wars, frittered his money away on bits of amber and ivory, fathered over three hundred children, did a party-piece involving tearing apart a horseshoe with his bare hands, and left Saxony helpless and indebted to an eye-watering degree. In 1700 or so Prussia and Saxony had equalsized armies – by the 1740s, when Prussia set out to destroy Saxony’s pretensions, the former’s army was three times the size. August the Strong’s son, August III the Fat, was a helpless and catastrophic figure who in his long reign oversaw the dismantling of Saxony–Poland as a major power. The Wettins were never able to make the Polish crown hereditary and were ultimately swamped by the greater intelligence and voracity of Prussia, Austria and Russia – indeed it was the sheer uselessness of the Wettins that contributed so much to the destruction of Poland, a country which August III could hardly be bothered to visit and which was finally partitioned and disappeared in the last part of the century. Understandably the memory of the Saxon kings of Poland is much execrated by the Poles. August III’s grandson followed in a rich tradition by managing during the wars with Napoleon to play his hand so poorly that he wound up losing over half his country to Prussia in 1815, including Wittenberg, the home of Lutheranism, the faith the Wettins had so creepily betrayed in their grab at becoming kings of Poland.