by Simon Winder
Another footling German state would have to be the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, tucked away in Thuringia, and in the late eighteenth century a classic example of the limits of what could be done in this highly constrained world. Duke Karl August clearly enjoyed his reign hugely, with his specially uniformed hunting staff, his mistresses and charming park (this last already described). In love with military life, he insisted on having his own light cavalrymen (with a specially designed uniform) but could only afford a very few of them. He briefly created a fair-sized miniature army until the state debts forced him down to a mere thirty-eight cavalry and a hundred and thirty-six infantry. This amiable and enthusiastic man was assisted for many years by Goethe and clearly there was something about the atmosphere at this tiny court that attracted the most extraordinary literary talents.
Goethe in Weimar is a richly comic but also poignant subject. There is something about his earnest and thoughtful attempts to bring some order to the priorities and money of this little state that makes it hard not to cry. There is simply such a large gap between Goethe’s solid application and his master’s zany attempts, for example, to reintroduce wild boar to his land because it would be funny to hunt them, or his insistence on keeping his dogs with him at all times, meaning that they could howl and snarl with impunity during concerts. That his enthusiasm for hunting dogs resulted in the creation of the pretty Weimaraner is some compensation.
There is a sensational walk through the Thuringian Woods west of Weimar, outside the town of Ilmenau where Goethe used to go on totally doomed trips to try to get the local copper mines going again in the hope this might at least pay for a little Weimaraner food. In a spirit both of frustration and pleasure, Goethe would walk up into the almost ridiculously beautiful hills and you can still see the immense battered rock which he studied, the views he could see and the site (with a commemorative repro hut) on Kickelhahn Mountain where he wrote his tiny lyric ‘Wanderer’s Night Song II’. I had probably been primed on too many Grimms’ stories at this point. Each turn of the Goethe trail implied the sudden appearance of a mysterious charcoal-burner’s hut or of a tiny grey man who you really, really must be polite to. The atmosphere generated by Goethe’s presence for generations of hikers and the exciting extra provided by the outside chance of a gnome or two make it a walk with a unique atmosphere.
Of course, what this most appealing, reasonable and great individual actually thought about as he wandered through these hills is unrecoverable (he conceivably worried mostly about the derisive laughter of the peculiarly inept copper-miners of Ilmenau), but one feels that the entire spirit of the walk (and indeed of so much of Thuringia) and this ‘small state’ Germany was essential to Goethe and the other figures who made Weimar so exceptional – from Schiller to Herder to Liszt to Wagner to Nietzsche to the Bauhaus. When the Napoleonic Wars broke out the duke marched off with his tiny army (he and Goethe were both at the siege of Mainz) as a tiny contingent in the Prussian army, which was dissolved almost without being noticed, fighting for both sides as fate helplessly dictated. Managing to steer himself sufficiently towards the Allies, Karl August ensured Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach’s independence or semi-independence right through to the end of the Second Reich, the much-loathed, sadistic last duke being kicked out with everyone else in 1918. The national assembly that met in Weimar inaugurated its constitution there as a symbolic alternative to the militarism of Berlin – sadly and unfairly making ‘Weimar’ in the twentieth century a synonym for failure and disaster.
A glass pyramid filled with robin eggs
The Franconian city of Bamberg is somewhere I find myself in my imagination coming back to over and over again. Almost undamaged in the war, it sprawls over seven small hills and is jammed with amazing buildings and atmosphere, as well as being the home of a ‘smoked beer’ that deserves patience and respect.
I cannot stand not mentioning just in passing the lovely Michaelsberg, one of Bamberg’s seven hills, with a group of monastic buildings on its summit in a sort of unified fantasy of medieval excellence, now turned appropriately into an old people’s home and therefore carrying on the site’s ancient hospital function. Not only would I like to live in Bamberg, but I’d cash in my next couple of decades out of sheer impatience to launch myself into the planet’s most fortunate old people’s home. The sheer variety and pleasure of constant access to the Bamberg roofscape of spires and red tiles would be enough, but beyond that is the monastic garden, filled with every plant mentioned in the Bible: aloe, box, mint, hyssop, wormwood, gourds – there are a lot. It is an even better biblical garden than the superb one in Bremen, only with similar issues about flowers and trees finding themselves marooned in some cases perhaps unhappily in a non-Palestinian environment of steady drizzle. The inside of the monastic chapel roof is made up of dozens and dozens of panels, each depicting a beautiful painting of a medicinal plant, so that in the long round of daily masses the monks could spend spare moments remembering what cured what. But then, setting aside some astounding tombs, in a side chapel: the piece of resistance. This is a monstrous sculpture of the sacred heart, designed to be admired candle-lit and with singing monks and which has much of the air of an old movie special effect which is no longer convincing. Even better is the side chapel’s ceiling, made in blue and white stucco as a rococo Dance of Death, with little paintings of a proud artist finishing the picture on his easel and Death as a mocking, cloaked, skeleton connoisseur laughing behind his back – or Death as a skeleton wrapped in a toga painting a final stucco air-bubble onto the ceiling. Germany is filled with derisive skeletons, but these are the best – both satanic and camp – and they would be enough to keep me cheerful even as my decrepit frame gives out.
This must all be understood to be in brackets (indeed, there could be an argument that this entire book should be understood to be in brackets). The real reason for mentioning Bamberg is that it contains perhaps the most wonderful room in the world. There are many grander, more original or more powerful rooms, but in the admittedly implausible context of being forced for no conceivable reason to choose only one, it would have to be the prince-bishop’s Natural History Museum in Bamberg. In an act of very late restitution, as though realizing that the whole idea of a prince-bishop was at an end with the French Revolution, Franz Ludwig von Erthal (also Prince-Bishop of Würzburg) decided that he needed to educate his flock. Therefore, among other initiatives, he decided to build a museum specifically to teach the beauties and use of Franconian flora and fauna. After his death in 1795 (he had only one successor before independent Bamberg was swept away) work carried on until the little museum took its current form in 1810. I do not really know how it has survived without being ruined – inertia (an unsung friend to many German things) must have been involved, beyond the sheer beauty of the place, a beauty which could always have fallen to changes in fashion.
This room may be an eccentric love of mine. I have a limitless tolerance for even the most static, moth-ravaged natural-history displays and can squat up near the roof of the epic Natural History Museum in London for hours just for the view down on the diplodocus-filled hall; I have spent entire days in the library there leafing through old volumes of engravings of animals, plants and native peoples. Alexander von Humboldt is my God, so in many ways I was already pre-programmed to a fatalistic degree to like the bishop’s museum. It is also – another happy piece of continuity in many of the best places in Germany – virtually deserted, giving a strange, time-travel quality to the experience which would be denied if it was carrying on more effectively its original educational function.
The room is painted, including all the display cabinets, entirely in white and gold aside from a prominent portrait of the prince-bishop. The cases themselves are a monument to a specific, pretty neo-classical moment in design that enjoyed pyramids, bobbles and high little galleries. Everywhere there are stuffed animals, skeletons, piles of hedgerow birds’ eggs. As usual in such places there is an attempt to impose some sort of
order – principally this is meant to be a practical museum giving descriptions and examples of Franconian wildlife. But of course, this stolid purpose is undermined by fun extras – an orangutan, a glass obelisk of hummingbirds, an entirely arbitrary whale jaw. The room requires no soundtrack: so many historical spaces need sprucing up with some mental Bach or Mozart, but the stuffed creatures and the delicate architecture chase off that kind of extra, as though you have come through to the exact, silent heart of Enlightenment idealism. One small cabinet contains wax models of all the edible fruits of Franconia (accidentally preserving just how small fruit used to be). These strange masterpieces were designed to cut through the wilderness of folk names for different kinds of plum and pear and establish a definitive name and definitive appearance. Some of the fruit are somewhat damaged, with holes in the thin wax both destroying and enhancing the illusion of exact ripeness and desirability.
The sometime Bamberg residents who may have enjoyed the museum were a mixed bag – on the one hand the leader of the July Plot, Colonel von Stauffenberg, on the other Willy Messerschmitt. But one very strange inhabitant of Bamberg was there while the museum was being built and the Napoleonic Wars were tearing Germany to pieces: the Prussian master-magician E. T. A. Hoffmann. I can’t really remember when I first read Hoffmann but since adolescence I’ve always felt wrapped in his cloak. Standing in the rain outside his old house in Bamberg and realizing it was shut (much to my relief, of course, as writer’s house museums are invariably a let-down) seemed, in a very tiny way, to allow me to share the pain of my hero, who seemed to spend much of his time socially and intellectually locked out and wet. A caricaturist, theatre manager, essayist, composer, civil servant, short-story writer and playwright, Hoffmann flailed from post to post, chased by amazing bad luck (including a spell as a civil servant in Prussia’s recently stolen chunk of Poland). Wherever he went, from Berlin to Warsaw, he was, like many other Germans, pursued by Napoleon’s troops, in the humiliating mayhem which warped and traumatized German nationalism for generations. But in Bamberg, futilely trying to run the theatre there in the face of an orgy of backbiting, not helped by his falling in helpless love with one of his young music pupils, Hoffmann at last found his true metier, starting to write, both under psychological pressure but also through sheer imaginative verve, stories which changed European literature.
Hoffmann’s vision of the world, with its Sandman scooping out children’s eyes, its clockwork dolls, grinning door-knockers, glass face masks and magic snakes, seems to me to mark so much of Germany. He makes crooked alleys and wonky houses alive and frightening – populating with his imagination entire small blameless towns. What is so startling is how oddly his stories hang together, indeed often hardly make sense – and he definitely took some disastrous wrong turns such as the achingly boring Venetian fantasia ‘Princess Brambilla’. Perhaps what is so appealing about Hoffmann is that he cannot be categorized and is completely unuseful – he leads nowhere and is entirely self-sufficient. His work can be illustrated, it has been made into ballets and films, but none of these come close to the odd atmosphere that makes each of his paragraphs so unstable and hair-raising. It is impossible to imagine Kafka, say, or Grass without Hoffmann, and yet in the end he is just himself, mysteriously polluting everything around him, with eyes looking out through windows, figures glimpsed in the street, absolute malice creeping up the stairs.
So while Napoleon was remoulding Europe, as many thousands of elegantly uniformed men were being mown down on battlefields, as Prussia teetered on the verge of extinction and hundreds of German knights, counts, bishops and dukes packed their bags, in one small town a small white-and-gold shrine to Enlightenment benevolence was being completed and, down the road, the way was being prepared for the residence of the man who would dream up ‘The Mines of Falun’.
A surprise appearance by sea cow
If Hoffmann shows some of the most freakish side of Prussia, then the most rational but also romantic side is shown in his contemporary Alexander von Humboldt. Both Hoffmann and Humboldt are strikingly unmilitary figures, and although their lives were shaped by Napoleon’s wars, they did what they were famous for despite the events around them. Humboldt spent five years in the New World, before coming back to Europe in 1804 shortly after Napoleon had declared the French empire, to find that most of the German states with which he had been familiar had completely disappeared.
There does not seem to have been a downside to Humboldt and he remains one of those entirely admirable figures who both greatly extended our knowledge of the world and through their work helped create a new model both for scientific application and international adventure tourism. He drew on Germany’s interesting but thin thread of global science, unsurprisingly thin given Germany’s unoceanic place in the world. His most direct predecessor was Georg Wilhelm Steller, a Nuremberger who in the 1730s and 1740s had worked for the Danish-Russian explorer Vitus Bering in charting and investigating the northern Pacific. He described for Europeans countless new creatures, such as sea otters and northern sea lions. I spend a lot of time with my wife’s family in America’s Pacific North-west and, having flown around from England I always feel I am meeting up with Steller from the other direction as I sit in a garden frequented by the big, violent, noisy but very startlingly blue Steller’s jay. He also discovered Steller’s sea cows (as they were now named), huge but helpless manatees that had survived human hunting as a residual population in some Siberian coves but which were then, thanks to the discovery, all killed off in about thirty years. He also left the mystery of the ‘sea ape’, a weird animal that sported around his ship in the north Pacific but which has never been satisfactorily linked up to any real creature.
There were also Johann and Georg Forster, father and son, the descendants of Scottish emigrants who had settled in the Polish-ruled section of Prussia in the seventeenth century. The Forsters, through a series of bizarre chances, found themselves as the scientists on James Cook’s second great voyage (1772–75), and so became the first Europeans ever to see the Antarctic (a miserable disappointment, as the hope had been it would prove to be a new Australia). The younger Forster’s A Voyage around the World is still a venerated classic in Germany and it is hard not to feel intense envy for this man in his early twenties living a life of contrasting icebergs and palm islands, lost in a sort of wonderland of small tropical civilizations, many thousands of miles from the blustering and cabbagy North German Plain.
Georg Forster taught in Kassel and Vilnius before settling as head librarian at the University of Mainz. Here he was swept up in the excitements of the early 1790s, declaring for the revolutionary Republic of Mainz. When this was crushed by Prussian troops he fled to Paris where he died of illness, still aged only thirty-nine. Forster was the young Humboldt’s great hero and example and, setting out to make his own mark in the world, Humboldt left for South America – an expedition that he would spend a large chunk of his adult life then writing about, an epic that would result in twenty-one volumes of scientific and personal material and transform the study of tropical America. Reading Humboldt’s Personal Narrative it is impossible not to cheer at every turn. He is simply so interested in everything, from the details of the Venezuelan voting franchise to the nature of riverbeds to the diversity of mountain plants. He is great on piranhas, jaguars and caimans, childhood enthusiasms I have never managed (or wanted) to shake off. He also gives a sensational account of his attempts to capture some electric eels, with harpoon-armed Indian cowboys herding horses and mules into a bend in the river where the eels counterattacked, electrocuting their persecutors so that the river became a mass of stunned and dead animals before some exhausted and by now low-powered eels are hauled ashore. Characteristically Humboldt both studies the eels and then tries cooking them: ‘their flesh is not bad, although most of the body consists of the electric apparatus, which is slimy and disagreeable to eat’. Who can ask for more?
In a rich and marvellous life Humboldt spread his i
deas on biology, meteorology, physical geography and anthropology (he popularized the term ‘Aztec’) all over Europe. He split his time between Paris and Berlin and, aged sixty, travelled across Russia as far as the Yenisei River, in the footsteps of Georg Wilhelm Steller. Reading about Humboldt’s achievements he must be seen both as one of the most appealing figures of the nineteenth century, and also one who, only a month younger than Napoleon, perhaps shaped the world in more profound ways than the Great Man himself.
