by Simon Winder
August III the Fat was a pitiful king and Elector but he did enjoy paintings and it was his commissions to the great Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto that have left the most striking images of Saxony, both its buildings and its people. Many of these paintings are of palaces and residential castles, all rendered in an oddly photographic black and brown. Bellotto’s greatest work, though, is his quite unintentionally resonant 1765 painting The Demolition of the Church of the Crucifixion. Here in the Old Market is a sea of rubble, workmen and planks with only a single, devastated wall from the old church still standing, a permanent monument to a moment in time before the building of the current church began. Its eerie link with 1945 hardly needs to be pointed out and the picture appears as an appalling premonition of Dresden itself as a sea of ruins (indeed the successor church was itself burned out). The political infantilism of the eighteenth-century Saxon electors ended up destroying Poland and reducing their own country to a nullity. It has always been easy to feel unease at the sheer predatory cynicism of Frederick the Great and see in this the seeds of later German disasters, but after a while Saxony’s behaviour also starts to become more curious and interesting. After all, Germany’s twentieth-century fate was not as Wilhelm II and Hitler believed it to be: to follow in the footsteps of Frederick the Great. Instead Germany followed in the footsteps of August III the Fat and his successors and was beaten, devastated, occupied and partitioned, having twice entirely misunderstood the forces and resources arrayed against it. Perhaps Saxony is a more striking model for the anxious appraisal of German behaviour in the modern era and a much less harmless one than first seemed the case.
CHAPTER NINE
Little Sophie Zerbst » Parks and follies »
In the footsteps of Goethe »
A glass pyramid filled with robin eggs »
A surprise appearance by a sea cow »
German victimhood » Good-value chicken
Little Sophie Zerbst
Until the wars with Napoleon – and to a degree still even after them – the fundamental clock that ruled German life was always dynastic. Any national, patriotic feelings that might be felt by an individual living in, say, Saxony would be less important than the plans and wishes of his rulers. It was entirely possible for these rulers to swap territories, amalgamate them through marriage or conquest, split them between obstreperous brothers. Like some absurdly long-term game of cards, with each generation inheriting the previous generation’s hand at irregular intervals, each duke, elector or king would play either a stronger or a weaker hand depending on geography, wealth, luck or personal brilliance/idiocy. Sometimes the game would move at a glacial pace – entire decades went by waiting for Carlos II of Spain to die without children and thereby provoke the War of the Spanish Succession; most of the Emperor Karl VI’s long reign was spent pleading, with little dignity, for everyone to accept, against the entire course of imperial custom, that his daughter Maria Theresa should succeed him. Germany is littered with foolhardy building projects based around short-lived possibilities of immense inheritance, whereas equally there were states such as Prussia and Austria who, although they were fundamentally fighting states, gained far more through luck and marriage.
One real oddity was the continuing attractiveness of the little German states as sources of marriage partners. For much of the time really big partners were more trouble than they were worth (most famously perhaps Louis XVI’s marriage to Maria Theresa’s daughter Maria Antonia). In a pre-industrial era when quite tiny states could potentially be more than rich enough to bring in jewels and some nice hunting territory, there was much to be gained for one of the major rulers in tracking down some broad-minded, micro-state-bred creature who could proceed to fill a Schloss fairly reliably with children without causing serious diplomatic damage.
The Hanoverians, once they had become rulers of Britain, were brilliant at this and indeed have, with only two exceptions, followed an unvarying rule of provoking squeaks of baffled delight from princesses and their imperious mothers in tiny states up to the present day. In order, from George I onwards they have married a duchess of the Braunschweig-Celle family, a margravine of Brandenburg-Ansbach, a princess of Saxe-Gotha, a duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a duchess of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (the unfortunate Caroline, beating fruitlessly on the doors of Westminster Abbey to be allowed in to attend her estranged husband’s coronation), a princess of Saxe-Meiningen, a prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a princess of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg and a princess of Teck. This unvaryingly German choice partly came from the important role that the British royal family had in German life, a link that only frayed with the First World War, but also from the peculiarly narrow requirement that the bride had to be Protestant as well as upper class, thereby cutting out great swathes of potentially less frosty and more enjoyable Mediterranean partners. The kaleidoscope of small German states however always meant that there was plenty of choice, that is until the kaleidoscope was put away in 1918 with the German revolution and all the princesses vanished into dodgy coastal hotels around Europe. This was part of the backdrop to Edward VIII’s disastrous decision to marry a Maryland divorcée and his younger brother’s cleverer choice of the steely youngest daughter of a Scottish aristocrat. The current queen took us back to the good old days by marrying another member of the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg family, much to everyone’s relief.
I go on about this, partly because it is funny and curious (both the facts and the names), but also because these little territories had potentially very considerable power and prestige and the most bashful beginnings could end in glory. In a sort of asteroid belt of low-grade German princesses and narrow, petty, moustachioed princes, there was enough room for something really surprising to happen. Most absolutely alarming in this respect was pretty little Sophie Augusta Frederica of the laughable territory of Anhalt-Zerbst, a place so small it could hardly breathe. Her father was a Prussian field marshal and as a helpless pawn in plans to boost Prussian–Russian relations in the 1740s Sophie was shunted off to Russia where, after several ups and downs, she married the Grand Duke Peter, learned Russian, became Russian Orthodox, had Peter killed and wound up as Catherine the Great, devastating the Ottomans, the Swedes and the Poles and carving out immense new territories from Latvia to the Crimea. Indeed, a case could be made for her being the single most successful German ruler of all time, albeit not one ruling Germany. Oddly, but appropriately, she sits in Ludwig I’s hall of German heroes, one of the handful of female marble busts. She probably did more than anyone to make Russia into the totally unmanageable super-nation that was to prove such a mixed blessing to Germany over the coming two centuries.
Shoving contemptuously to one side the countless rather stiff and uninvolving paintings of Catherine made in her lifetime, the delirious, dream-come-true 1934 movie The Scarlet Empress remains the definitive account of how she came to power – albeit one with a loose hold on historical detail. Perhaps the greatest collaboration between the Berliner Marlene Dietrich and the Austro-Hungarian-American Josef von Sternberg, The Scarlet Empress manages to compress into an hour and a half a riot of German anti-Russian loathing, with Hollywood footing the bill for the demented production, which includes a superb, one-minute summary of Russian history as a carnival of iron maidens, mass beheadings, conveniently nude girls burned at the stake, humans used as bell-clappers, etc. A battle-hardened performer, Dietrich has some difficulty playing Little Sophie as a girlish thing in ringlets but once she gets into the saddle as ‘the ill-famed Messalina of the North’ it’s all wigs, furs and crazy Russian cruelty, stalking about among von Sternberg’s astonishing expressionist sets (huge, pain-wracked statues, doors of inhuman size). The final tableau of a grinning Dietrich in a devastating snow-white Cossack outfit, surrounded by flying flags and cheering troops, is one of the strangest 1930s fantasies about German greatness and Russian barbarity. The movie is so vivid and brutal that it almost blocks out completely the real Ca
therine, but it would be a gloomy pedant who did not revel in The Scarlet Empress and admit that watching Dietrich dressed in a sort of satellite dish covered in pompoms eying up her strapping troopers brings history to life.
Little Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst’s fate is so ridiculous that it shows there was no limit to the dreams available to marginal German princesses. But how many turrets must have remained filled with the unrequited sighs of the remaining marginals, to balance out all the jewelled dresses, Turkish conquests and Baltic palace horse sex? (I know, I know – but who else attracts such anecdotes, even if untrue?) Long-term marriage planning really did set the tone for the eighteenth century – it would decide who would rule over you, whose army you would fight in, who would nick your crops. Entire states could ruin themselves in pursuit of mad dynastic ambition – Bavaria tore itself to bits at frequent intervals in its futile attempts to break out of middle-rank status; Hannover hit pay dirt; Saxony crashed and burned. The loss-making computer game Liege Lord could be run showing the total numbers of German princesses coming onto the market and the changing opportunities available to rulers in specific years (the throne of Poland, alliance with the Habsburgs, immediate invasion).
Parks and follies
I have spent so many days clumping around German parks that they now form a substantial, happy region of my memory – a sort of collective burst of pleasure which can be drawn on at any time. To be able to drift into a reverie and think about these magical spaces is as good a way of meditating on the nature of civilization as any. I have dealt with these parks under all conditions, at all times of day and all times of year and this process of cheerful drift – both actual and recollected – could perhaps be seen as taking the place of drugs or music in some lives. I could almost imagine having total recall of the bridges and paths of the park at Weimar if I could only concentrate hard enough: the path out to Liszt’s house, the Soviet cemetery, the rock with an inscription of friendship from the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau, Goethe’s summer house (in itself a little dull, but transformed by a postcard showing an elderly, uneasy yet compelling Thomas Mann posing outside it in a long coat and bow tie), the ridge with its line of grand villas, including one of the very first Bauhaus buildings – the original Bauhaus being on the other side of the park. Admittedly, the park at Weimar is almost madly fecund – a concentrated essence of German pleasures – but there are none that are boring and many hide small but startling things.
As with so many aspects of German life, the great parks are a side-effect of the broken-up, fragmentary nature of German politics. Each ruler of however small a state expressed his rule through parks. These parks had practical purposes – for hunting, growing things for the palace, recreation, drill, exercising horses, major festivals. The Schloss was always the main focus of the town with the park as an important and exclusively royal element of that, whereas things like squares and boulevards always had tense overlaps with merchants and other potentially awkward townspeople. Some rulers had parks with wide access, others kept most of their subjects out. In many ways they are an expression of the joys of cheap labour, with the tinkly fountains and green contours being simply an eighteenth-century version of pyramids, temples or ziggurats – expressions of power over the lives of the veritable armies who worked to create them, albeit less violent and more daisy-strewn.
Being English it is impossible for me not to notice how aggressively English these parks are. The English style of park, always contrasted with the geometric, gravelly French park, early on became a symbol in Germany not for liberalism as such, but at least for thinking vaguely about liberalism (and for being anti-French). It became an easy indication of their reasonableness for German rulers to order large percentages of their local populations to labour entire seasons on carving out little dells, irregular lakes, bosky knolls and intimate tea-houses. The Princes of Reuss-Gera never showed specific symptoms of liberalism, aside from an undying hatred of Bismarck, but down by Gera’s little river there is a perfect English park tucked into the foothills of eastern Thuringia, closing in on the Czech border, with weeping willows, artfully laid-out flowerbeds and gangs of coots pigging out on nematodes. In the nineteenth century such places were, as in Britain, generally thrown open to the public before passing into public ownership entirely when their royal owners were chased away in 1918. They remain both as workaday lungs for each town and as strange reminders of a quite recent feudal past.
This Englishness was not by any means the only outcome. Perhaps Europe’s most disturbing park is in Kassel, where the repulsively absolutist idea came to one of the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel that a single straight line should be drawn from the top of a hillside outside Kassel down to the far end of the town. At the top of the hill is a peculiarly massive yet uninteresting Italian statue of Hercules, then, following the line, a series of waterfalls drop down the hillside, eventually mutating into a road that cuts through the whole town. This image of total ducal control was matched by elaborate gardens flanking the cascades. This hideous work, patently comparable to the pyramids in its cruel pointlessness (and paid for by the duke’s selling his subjects as mercenary soldiers to other countries), was subverted by a later duke who messed up the geometric gardens by making them more English and liberal, but the damage had been done. Kassel has a headachy quality, like being trapped in a De Chirico painting: a quality not helped by so much of the town being rebuilt after devastating bombing, but more fundamentally arising from the gloomy, controlling legacy of the dukes.
There are also of course the great Prussian parks in Berlin and Potsdam, again both very English in flavour. I worked out how to write my first book wandering about through the high grass of Potsdam’s vast park with its somewhat theme-park ambience, offering sites of exceptional beauty and leisure (the Sanssouci Palace, the Chinese tea-house) and whip-crack authoritarianism (the New Palace), Prussia’s schizophrenia all laid out in these rolling acres.
Changing tastes could provoke wholesale changes to each park – the current layouts being simply the point at which the parks passed into static, custodial public ownership, as in the end of a round of musical chairs. All over Germany, the two models of Versailles and Blenheim battled it out: a brawl between Le Nôtre and Capability Brown, both requiring immense numbers of workers, formidable hydraulics, paid-by-length-or-weight sculptures and decorators and a willingness to rearrange nature on a scale now perhaps only practised with new airports or shopping centres. In the end English ideas won, not only because aristocratic design in England offered an interesting and seemingly valid model for innumerable princelings, but because once the initial work had been done it was easier to keep up – absolutism having as its Achilles heel the need endlessly to rake around gravel, board up unloved statues of Venus in winter and have elaborate fountain systems of a kind to defy cheap repair.
This tension between open artifice and a hard-won but specious naturalness is celebrated at Wörlitz, the set of burstingly fecund gardens along the Elbe built by the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau, the Duke of Weimar’s friend, described at the time as a great gardener but an indifferent ruler. My time there was a bit scarred by my very odd hotel, which featured in its dining room one table occupied by eight human-size toy rabbits eating plastic food and a selection of gentle orchestral pop hits such as ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ emanating from an old record player, a waiter having the job of moving the needle back to the start of the LP the moment the side finished, all under the owner’s beady eye. I felt ever more anxious that the corpses of previous guests in the thinly populated hotel were inside the rabbit suits, a trickle of blood from one paw slowly engulfing the plastic ice-cream in a ghastly sort of sauce. This rather blots out my memory of the gardens themselves, beyond a lingering sense that they were very beautiful.
In the footsteps of Goethe
In the parts of Germany not historically under some faintly rational large-scale management, the landscape becomes so thickly dotted with palaces and castles that it is possible to feel ever m
ore jaded and irritable as yet another oversized pile with its banqueting hall, podgy statues representing virtue and clemency, shady walks, gift shop and heavily signposted toilets heaves into view. I once arrived in the Bavarian town of Ansbach late in the afternoon and still feel a guilty sense of relief that I had just missed the final guided tour and would never have to enjoy the splendours of the usual ho-hum mirrored state room, dowager’s bedchamber and so on. As these buildings with each passing second move further and further away from the era of their true functions there must surely come a time when they are at least heavily culled. Ansbach was made memorable not by its stiff-looking and now shut palace but by a caretaker who gleefully undid for me a gloomy, padlocked door under the church to show me the last resting place of the Margraves of Brandenburg-Ansbach, a crypt of utter desolation, partly filled with water and with a miscellany of stark lead tombs scattered around, the whole place having the air of an abandoned car-repair shop. It was very cold and wet and the general neglect gave a strong sense of the futile oldness of palatial rule in Germany. Ansbach itself when independent was a bizarre scattering of bits of territory, some pieces literally consisting of single fields, to the west and south-west of Nuremberg. Its inhabitants had the peculiar ignominy of simply being sold to Prussia by the last margrave, who in 1791 pocketed the money, married his mistress and capered off to Newbury (to add to the local total lack of Ansbacher self-respect, Prussia after Napoleon’s defeat did a quick swap with the Bavarians, giving them Ansbach in return for the lovely Duchy of Berg). It is perhaps unsurprising that the margraves’ tombs appear so forlorn, with the entire, mildly distinguished history of independent Ansbach so humiliatingly ended: a key player in the Reformation but also home of the fiendish Wolf of Ansbach which gorged on the locals in the late seventeenth century before being caught, killed and – its corpse dressed in a wig and coat – paraded through the streets before being hanged as a werewolf. These are, in all honesty, slim pickings and perhaps the margrave was right to sell up when he did. In any event Napoleon would put a bullet into hundreds of places like Ansbach.
