by Simon Winder
German victimhood
The ducal palace in Gotha is the proud owner of one of Napoleon’s hats. It is undoubtedly the hat we all know from pictures, sitting there in its glass case, now nearly two hundred years old. Looking at these sorts of musty objects reminds me of the scene in W. G. Sebald’s novel Vertigo, set in the high Alpine valleys of Bavaria, where an aunt of the narrator has a Habsburg Tyrolean soldier’s uniform of the Napoleonic era in her attic, draped on a tailor’s dummy. It has been undisturbed for many decades, and when the narrator goes up to inspect it, his attempt to feel the cloth ends in disaster as it falls into flakes of dust between his fingers. Surely Napoleon’s hat must be under a similar threat – a constant battle between curators armed with temperature-control gadgets and insecticide and the ceaseless grind of passing minutes, hours and years.
Presumably the hat must always have been on display and for many years most of its observers would have felt it to be thrilling or alarming to see the hat of the great man, who had passed through Gotha only two or twenty or fifty years previously. Given his contemptuous reordering of Germany and overall Frenchness he was a hard figure to admire for most Germans, but as a general and as a man of action his only rival was Frederick the Great. And for Germans the Napoleonic Wars were a providential story, much as the Second World War has been for the British: defeat, humiliation, helplessness, and then a gradual recovery of spirit, new allies and the final, absolute destruction of a generation-long nightmare at Leipzig and Waterloo. The difference was that the compromises and humiliations for Germans were so much greater (enemy occupation, the loss of many thousands of lives fighting alongside Napoleon in Russia) and the end result was a world utterly unrecognizable from that of 1792, when a Prussian army under the command of the Duke of Braunschweig had so confidently and, as it proved, foolishly lumbered across the French frontier to end the Revolution. The Germans in 1815 had absolutely no choice but to come up with something quite new.
The great reorganization of Germany in 1803, the last act of the Holy Roman Empire before its abolition, is often seen as the traumatic result of Napoleon’s overwhelming defeat of various German armies and his gobbling-up of the Rhine. But the damage had in many ways been done much earlier with the partitions of Poland. Looked at now, these seem pieces of insanity. It had been clear, if surprising, since the early eighteenth century and the victories of Peter the Great that Russia was to be as big a factor in European politics as Britain (both countries flanking Europe and, in their different ways, impervious to normal attack). It should have been in everyone’s interest to keep Poland as a cheerful, thriving buffer, but instead, for careless, short-term reasons the Prussians, Austrians and Russians carved Poland into non-existence. Aside from the rights of the Poles to an ancient and, for centuries, highly successful state, this international piracy meant that Germans and Russians now shared a border – an issue that was to define international politics until Soviet tanks arrived in Berlin in 1945. The 1772 partition gave Prussia Danzig/ Gdask, Austria Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv and Russia a chunk of Belarus and Ukraine; the second, in 1793 gave Prussia Posen/Pozna and Russia Minsk and most of Ukraine; the third, in 1795, quickly finishing the job in the face of a despairing Polish rebellion, gave Austria Lublin and Krakau/Kraków, Russia Lithuania and Prussia a fleetingly existent province of South Prussia based around Warsaw.
This carve-up implied that aggressive violence and the cold fixing of boundaries would be the future. The whole of Germany was racked with fear as to who would eat and who be eaten. The guarantor of the entire system was meant to be the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, but he was always bored by his pan-German duties, and having taken his lump of Poland looked around for other improvements. Oddly the great defender of these hundreds of timorous states turned out to be Frederick the Great who, having digested both Silesia and western Poland, enjoyed winding up the Austrians by posing as the little man’s true champion. Each time Joseph tried some further plan of rationalization, swapping territories or absorbing monasteries, Frederick expressed shock and dismay, wrapping himself in Imperial virtue and even going to war with Joseph over his plans to take over Bavaria. But if a state as ancient and central to the Empire as Bavaria could potentially be messed around with by the Emperor, then it was all up for the Abbess of Quedlinburg or the Count of Quadt-Isny. Before dying of exhaustion in 1790, Joseph II spent much of his feverishly busy reign attacking and shutting down religious institutions of exactly the kind on which, on a larger scale, Napoleon was to ring the dinner bell in the following decade. If the Holy Roman Emperor was not the friend of funny little indefensible territories, some quite rich, then nobody else would be.
Napoleon marched therefore into an older, rotten environment filled with greedy and often incompetent petty monarchs, many of whom flocked to his colours in the hope of an abbey or two. The basis for resisting Napoleon was always a bit unclear. There had been only limited interest in helping Louis XVI, and for some years after the Revolution there was a gleeful if wrong belief that the France which had been such a misery for much of Europe was now permanently in the bin. Prominent among those who would have stared at Napoleon’s hat in Gotha over the years were many senior members of the Prussian military, who may have hated Napoleon as a foreigner but were entranced by the ease with which he beat army after army, surrounded initially by a group of ardent young officers of genius and surrounded ultimately by a group of jaded, overweight fuss-pots with failed marriages and piles. It did not seem to matter what the conditions were or the odds, Napoleon always devastated yet another painfully assembled Austrian army. Just as British naval commanders spent the rest of the nineteenth century oppressed by dreams of a second Trafalgar that never happened, so Prussian generals such as Moltke dreamt of emulating one of Napoleon’s battles which, in a century otherwise notable for ill-managed, grotesque mutual slaughterhouses, they actually managed to do, defeating Austria in 1866 and France in 1870. These victories in turn set a fresh level of Napoleonic brilliance for the unhappy successors of Moltke (including his nephew) in 1914, which they were – at least in the west – unable to match at all.
This frantic change of sides during the Napoleonic era can be seen in all its confusion in the small but wealthy state of Hesse-Darmstadt. Landgrave Ludwig X is portrayed before the Revolution in conventional short wig, sash and lovely fabrics – but with Napoleon’s headlong charge into Germany he played his cards perfectly, becoming Grand Duke Ludwig I, losing the wig, sash and lovely fabrics and suddenly appearing in portraits looking remarkably like Napoleon, with sensible hair and dark, vaguely military clothing. In Napoleon’s carving-up of Germany, Ludwig was handed out startling amounts of land along the Rhine and in Westphalia. After Napoleon’s defeat some clever footwork was required to avoid being ploughed under like the King of Saxony, but in return for losing his lightly acquired north-west German lands Ludwig nonetheless kept a sizeable chunk, including Mainz, and the odd new title of Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine.
The price paid by his subjects can be seen in the monument to the Napoleonic Wars which stands in one of Darmstadt’s terrific parks – a giant, nude sort of Viking with a horned helmet, his shield covering his penis, standing in a vaguely church-like tower festooned with the names of the countless battles fought by the Hessians on the side of whoever was in the saddle at that time. Most accounts of these battles do not even mention the Hessians’ presence: as a minor element in vast campaigns, they were killed in Spain, Russia, Germany and France to very little purpose. The monument was built in the 1840s and therefore shares the charm of other early nationalist structures, in happy contrast to the mature absurdity of the neo-Olmec piles that were to litter the German landscape later in the century. It is impossible not to think that the veterans standing around at the opening ceremony must have been a confused lot – fighting first for reaction, then for Napoleonic empire, then back to reaction again. For the smaller states the threats and opportunities offered by Napoleon were in every way deeply per
plexing. The Frenchmen scattered all over Germany had a similar effect to the Americans in the later 1940s – spreading new ideas, upsetting existing hierarchies, remaking the German world in ways that quickly made the old Holy Roman Empire look staggeringly antique. Hundreds of states vanished for good and those that survived, such as Hesse-Darmstadt, Baden or Württemberg, may have offered constitutional continuity in their monarchs, but nobody can have been unaware of the often grotesque compromises that had allowed them to cling on and ingest their neighbours.
Without Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in 1812 and his failure (killing in the process many thousands of Germans, in a sneak preview of 1941) it is impossible to begin to speculate on how Germany would have developed. Effectively the whole of Central and Western Europe briefly existed only to supply the needs of this immense invasion force – and when this force collapsed, the region was in turn invaded by Russia. Austrian perseverance in fighting Napoleon is one of the key aspects of the war, often underplayed. Drawing on an even bigger hinterland than France, Austria was fiendishly hard to attack and tended to be defeated only when it entered the main part of Germany, at least allowing it to retreat and regroup. In the end it was an Austrian as well as a Russian army that spearheaded and commanded the first successful foreign attack on Paris since some ridiculous point in the Dark Ages. Prussia survived through the patronage of the Russian tsar, whose loyalty to the undeserving Frederick William III prevented Napoleon from dispersing Prussia altogether. A substantial element in Berlin’s bullying neurosis in the nineteenth century can be seen to stem not from the final victories over Napoleon in which Prussia was so prominent, but from a strong sense of having been within an ace of being expunged – Prussia as an ex-state with the same curiosity value as the defunct Electorate of Cologne.
Napoleon’s inventions, such as the Kingdom of Westphalia (with its capital in Kassel) or the new French départements that gave a makeover to the Rhineland and north Germany, lasted only a few years, but bewildered the minds of later generations hypnotized by fear of a repeat humiliation. That one Frenchman could wipe out so much history, reorganize states more or less at will, make up fun new names for them, give them to relatives to run, fill them when he fancied with French troops: this was a nightmare of helplessness with strong echoes of the Thirty Years War, generating a longing for self-sufficiency and a justified hatred of France that was to shape Europe’s future.
As the whole enterprise came to such a feeble end, Napoleon’s project inevitably feels melancholy and futile, but at the time there must have been a high-rolling excitement. One melancholy and futile indicator of this is the monument to Marshal Berthier in Bamberg. Berthier had spent some thirty-five years washed along in the excitement of French military life – fighting the British in America, protecting the French royal family, capturing the Pope, fighting in Egypt, deeply engaged in the elaborate, world-changing (as it turned out) Louisiana Purchase. He fought at Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, in Spain and in Russia. But in the giddy months when Napoleon returned from exile to re-found his Empire before going down under wave after wave of Allied armies (with Prussian troops going on to occupy Normandy, in an anticipation of 1870–71), Berthier, who had experienced so much and lived so vigorously, found himself marooned in Bamberg at the bishop’s fortified palace. Not knowing what to do and unable to reach Napoleon he fell to his death from a dizzyingly high window a fortnight before Waterloo. It will never be established if this was an accident or deliberate, but the place where his body was found is still marked and generally adds a not unpleasant sense of gloom. If this can still be felt now, then it is easy to imagine just how widespread that gloom was at the time – whether as loser or winner (and all of Germany had been faced with political extinction at one point or another), a complex and strange adventure which had engulfed an entire generation had finally come to an end, leaving a peculiar and friable new world in its place.
Good-value chicken
Wandering through a street market in Hannover one evening, I revisited my happy sense that this was simply an updated version of a picture by Breughel. The same world of credulity bumping into low cunning, a world of higglers and mountebanks, with everyone vying to sell their plastic dolls, coconut water, strange wall ornaments – and with only the trader’s skill making any of these things faintly plausible as purchases. I spent ages watching one man stalking back and forth on a platform, a microphone strapped to his head, his patter entrancing a huge crowd as he presented metal trays crammed with chicken pieces which had an air of having been circulating within the restaurant trade for quite some while. His waggling eyebrows, lewd gestures and virtuoso range of comic accents made even me – who could hardly understand a word – want to press forward waving my money and walk off with whole bin bags of old thighs.
This sort of core German skill is beautifully preserved in one of the happiest memorials to the Napoleonic Wars, Johann Peter Hebel’s little book The Treasure Chest, first published in 1811. In dozens of tiny stories, moral tales or helpful bits of information, Hebel (a teacher and poet who lived much of his life in Karlsruhe) describes a world of larrikins and ne’er-do-wells, clever servants, cunning hussars, put-upon inn-keepers and stalwart hangmen. Many of the stories have a market-day atmosphere to them, where twisters of all kinds flummox town guards and fleece idiotic townsfolk. Quack medicines, hidden stashes of coins, dubious strangers wandering into marketplace pubs, these are all Breughel’s standbys; they are just as at home in Hebel’s world and seem remarkably close to the world of the modern Hannover market and countless others like it.
These German markets have a quite different atmosphere from the sunnier and more cheerful ones in more southern countries. There is a perhaps more frantic edge to German markets, dictated by the way the weather can whip in and chase off a day’s entire customer base. The range of local produce can also be extremely restricted – one blustery, autumn Saturday market in Darmstadt seemed to be limited almost entirely to pumpkins and honey, local demand for which could presumably be sated quite quickly. But this seasonality continues to make itself felt in ways more or less alien to Britain, say, or the United States. The stalls that spring up along the Rhine in October selling generally really awful cider, for example, or the white asparagus that dominates menus in May sometimes give me the feeling, over some years, of being trapped inside a complicated astrological clock filled with symbols dictating that now you can eat goose (pride of the Altenburg Ratskeller) and now the shopkeepers can take the little ghost and witch models out of their boxes and decorate their windows with them. This rhythm is cute, but also a bit maddening, as though the same year has to be lived over and over again.
Enormous annual fairs add to the sense of seasonal clockwork. Far more than many other countries, Germany continues to thrive with giant fairs – from the terrifyingly pseudo-jolly Christmas markets in places such as Nuremberg, Esslingen and Vienna to the trade fairs in Cologne, Frankfurt and Leipzig. These fairs give concrete form to Germany as the place that needs to be crossed to get to other places – the Leipzig fairs were where for centuries German, Italian, Dutch and French goods were exchanged for Polish and Russian. A network of dizzying complexity linked barges, mules and wagons to town markets, individual shops and chapmen, spreading furs and horses, barometers and swords, nails and music-boxes wherever they were required. The huge Leipzig fairgrounds have been through a lot in the twentieth century, but they remained under the communists the key trade fair grounds within the Eastern Bloc and now carry on with their crazily diverse portfolios, the staff presumably rolling their eyes with bafflement as they clean up after a prize chicken show, the ophthalmology convention, an expo about new sewage techniques, garden furniture, frozen food, the Baptist World Conference and so on and so on.
My own most direct and consistent experience of this process has been the Frankfurt Book Fair each October where people from around the world gather to buy and sell the rights to publish books, many of us quite closely related
in spirit to the Hannover chicken-higgler. The scale of the Fair is inspiring or depressing depending on whether you find the commerce in books funny or not. Over a quarter of a million people from every conceivable nation wander in a daze through a seeming infinity of stands trying to work out what the next international bestseller will be. For myself I can think of nothing more fun than going from booth to booth, not least because the spirit of The Treasure Chest is so alive and well. The larrikins and mountebanks might now be wearing poorly fitted international business clothing, but they are still the same men and women on the lookout for the unwary or poorly informed. Myriad almost unrelated worlds are tangled up, united only by their products being expressed in paper – photo-books of toddlers dressed as flowers, calendars of baby-oiled, semi-nude firemen, entire booths devoted only to cute animals or Che Guevara or manga or a complete new critical edition of the works of Thomas Mann or vintage motorbikes or models with their pubic hair shaved off or really cheap-looking and depressing nursery-rhyme collections. Booth after booth is filled with stuff which can only make sense financially if someone else in another country can be tricked into taking it on. By the end of the fair many thousands of deals will be done, with pointless books on knitting with dog hair or cooking with insects now just as pointlessly being translated into Spanish or Korean. And lurking in the background: those discreet men who can arrange for the whole print-run to be tipped into the sea off the docks at Lagos with the insurance money split 50:50. In a fever of credulity and suspicion the publishers carry out their dreadful work, spreading printed things around the planet and using the seemingly antique form of the medieval trade fair to do so.
