Germania

by Simon Winder

  CHAPTER TEN

  Marches militaires » Karl and Albrecht » Girls in turrets »

  Heroic acorns » Victory columns

  Marches militaires

  The period between the defeat of Napoleon and the revolutions of 1848 has always been despised by writers of both left and right – from the left because of its creeping atmosphere of cosy apoliticism and from the right because Germany appears to settle into a determined effort at being non-heroic and local. Once the German empire was underway the ‘Biedermeier’ generation appeared as a sort of farce of genteel idiocy. The heroic young students with their swords and special hats swearing to make a united Germany were seen as the lost prophets of the era – swamped by the general atmosphere of fine tea-sets, frilly napkins and tinkling pianos. Of course twentieth-century events have long undermined that contempt, but there is still something smashable and tiresome about so much of the sort of physical material that tends to survive from the period (spindly tables, ladies’ fans, wanly pretty plates) that it does require an effort not to fall in with nationalist ideas that this was all a wrong turn, a shameful drift away from manifest destiny. What was being created – in London, Paris, Leipzig and Munich – was the first timid attempt at bourgeois civil society, a sort of limbering up for us all now just sitting in a happy pile watching television, but of course there were many horrible twists and turns before that point was reached.

  It was a period when throughout Central Europe huge amounts of effort went into creating plausible new states from the rubble left by Napoleon. The Revolutionary interlude had caused such political and geographical havoc – and killed such immense numbers of people – that a time of quiet consolidation seemed inevitable and appealing. Just as most Europeans after the Second World War were, if given the chance, quite happy sitting around in family groups and buying consumer goods, so the new rulers were able to preside over a generally rather dozy population. Indeed, a parallel history of Europe could be written which viewed family life and regular work as the essential Continental motor of civilization. Then war and revolution would need to be seen by historians as startling, sick departures from that norm of a kind that require serious explanation, rather than viewing periods of gentle introversy as mere tiresome interludes before the next thrill-packed bloodbath.

  The unquestionable heart of this world was Vienna. The Habsburgs, with only a few humiliating wobbles, had been implacable opponents of Napoleon and they found their reward in 1815 with a complete endorsement of their immense territories, their special position in German-speaking Europe confirmed (despite the disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire) and a cultural power with no equals. An era which starts with Beethoven’s Ninth and Schubert’s songs and sonatas and ends with Johann Strauss I’s ‘Radetzky March’ cannot be all bad. The last of these was – an accidental discovery – the only piece of music that would calm down our eldest child when he was a baby, a fact perhaps more odd than interesting. In many ways the era can be summed up by Schubert’s Marches militaires for piano four-hands, with their drawing-room, decorative, comically unmilitary flavour: they could not be softer or less threatening and come from a time when it was possible to wear really lovely uniforms without having to fight too much.

  Austrian confidence in the future was expressed most forcibly by the country’s new role in Italy. Having been shaken apart by Napoleon, the Habsburg grip on Italy and the Adriatic was greatly expanded, most splashily by picking up the old territories of Venice – the city itself, the mainland north-eastern block of Italy and the Dalmatian coast (plus the old Republic of Ragusa, which tried and failed to re-establish its independence). This all proved in the longer run to be a disaster. Rather like the British acquisition of Middle Eastern colonies after the First World War, what had appeared to be a dream come true soon turned into an insoluble problem and sap on resources. Austrian soldiers and administrators loved Venice and the top army posts tended to become Italian ones – fulfilling beautifully long-held German fantasies of sunshine, grappa, special girls and soft living. The Habsburgs had always had a small area of the northern Adriatic (ultimately known as the Austrian Littoral) under their control, focused on Trieste, but this had long been a backwater. Their wider hold over the Adriatic now forced them to become a more serious Mediterranean presence. These delightful schemes – a mass of fortifications, special uniforms, navies – had almost as much effect in draining Austria’s otherwise preeminent role within Germany as any mean actions taken by Prussia. It became one of the pleasures of Austrian life to defeat the Italians in battle (indeed the ‘Radetzky March’ celebrated Field Marshal Radetzky’s victory at Custoza), but this misdirected effort led nowhere as Austria was still prised out of Italy by Italy’s more powerful sponsors, particularly France.

  Austria’s role in the Adriatic was to have all kinds of implications. Italian nationalists viewed the territories of Venice as part of Italy and so once the Austrians, following their defeat by the Prussians in 1866, were kicked out of the rest of Venetia, the coast of what had been Venetian Dalmatia remained a highly unstable zone of nationalist desire, despite its having only a very few Italian speakers. This was to have disastrous and destabilizing consequences in both world wars. And Austrian ownership of the coast gave logic to imperialistic interest in the interior: Bosnia and Herzegovina. The eventual annexation of this land in 1908 was meant to imply a greedy robustness in the Empire, but in practice it disposed of a useful barrier between the Habsburgs and the Serbians and became one of the causes of the First World War.

  But, as with so many aspects of Central European history, there is such an amazing spread of unintended consequences that only a form of political paralysis can substitute for the actual kaleidoscope of decisions which generate the oddness of European history – a small, bitter and crowded landscape somehow incapable of (indeed allergic to) the broad-ranging uniformity of the Chinese Empire or the United States. It is unfortunate that what seems in many lights so fascinating about Europe should also, as a spin-off, be the basis for so much rage and death. There seems to be no would-be European superpower whose existence does not almost at once generate a reaction of a sort that ultimately humiliates and crushes the aspirant. In this period Napoleon’s fate had been the most obvious example, but within a somewhat smaller compass, the Habsburgs (who, of course, could point to many ancestors similarly brought low) would also see their amazing prizes of 1815 rapidly turn into depressing liabilities.

  An unresolvable problem for the new political philosophy following Napoleon’s defeat remained the issue of legitimacy. If the point of Napoleon’s reordering of Europe had been to create some sense, however cynical, that talent should rule, then the various emperors, kings and grand dukes of 1815 were meant to chase away for good any such idea. Legitimacy – rule by monarchs following in strict family succession – was the new (old) order. Historically, there had been a great diversity of types of rule across Europe, from republics to elective monarchs to absolute monarchs, and 1815 saw this diversity collapse. Most of the Free Imperial Cities with their local merchant oligarchies had vanished and were not brought back, nor were the welter of funny Church lands, some of which had been very aristocratic and others more egalitarian, but almost all of which had been employed in a genuine, serious and almost exclusive focus on devotional life rather than power politics. Such oddities as the Imperial Abbey of Quedlinburg, however much its real independence had been circumscribed and threatened, had been killed off by Napoleon and now they just became minor bits of Prussia or lurched forward into a doubtful new greatness: the old Imperial Abbey of Essen, for example, now under Prussian rule, turning out to be the home of the inventive Krupp family.

  So what was odd in the ‘Biedermeier’ period was the uneasy combination of a claim by rulers of legitimacy based on ancient right being imposed on a landscape filled with people fully aware of what a joke such claims really were. The Dukes of Württemberg, for example, had long been derided for their powerlessness, entangled
in a mass of legalism both by their own subjects and by the inhabitants of the dozens of often prosperous enclaves buried in their territory. The Napoleonic Wars had been one long round of humiliation for the duke. At last he had got hold of all the irritating enclaves like Heilbronn, Esslingen, Gmünd, Ravensburg and Hall, but in return had to support Napoleon – the nadir being the army of some sixteen thousand Württembergers sent to Moscow, of whom only a few hundred returned. The duke might now become King of Württemberg but he ruled over a depopulated, wrecked landscape and had betrayed his people. Luckily the scoundrel now known as King Frederick I (who incidentally weighed over thirty stone) died shortly after the Congress of Vienna, allowing for a fresh start. But essentially it was hard to see what legitimacy really meant under such unpromising circumstances.

  Even if the new German Confederation consisted only of thirty-nine states rather than the hundreds before Napoleon, this still allowed for an impressive variety of legitimacy-backed rulers to come forward and make a case for their continuing existence. Unfortunately many were peculiarly dreadful or useless people, throwing up in their every action questions for even the most passive intellectual or the most hidebound local politician. The King of Hannover, Ernst August I, for example, was a genuinely horrible man. The younger brother of George IV of Great Britain, he inherited Hannover once Victoria’s succession to the British throne meant that the link through the male line connecting Britain and Hannover was broken. A reactionary of an almost demented kind, Ernst had been ironically cheered by the British press as he left London (where he had been known as the Duke of Cumberland and was tainted with possible murder and incest). A founder of the Orange Order in Ireland, a violent opponent of Catholicism and reform of any kind, Ernst fought against any timid attempt by the inhabitants of Hannover to hang on to their political rights, even, in a moment of irreparable swinishness, expelling a Brother Grimm. Ernst’s every gesture implied the problems and limits of legitimacy.

  So too did the awful Duke of Brunswick, Karl II, who despite the welter of good will created by both his father (the Black Duke) and grandfather dying fighting Napoleon, managed to get thrown out by an enraged mob by 1830, his palace burnt to the ground. The Prussian run of luck was clearly over with two vacillating mediocrities in a row (five in a row, depending on one’s mood, which takes you up to the end of the entire dynasty in 1918). And in Vienna itself the colourless, mean and dreary Franz I eked out his suspicious and uninspiring existence (conveyed so beautifully in even the most obsequious court portraiture), handing over on his death to Ferdinand I, an epileptic simpleton hardly seen in public, a further parody of legitimacy’s shortcomings. By all accounts an amiable man, Ferdinand was quietly set aside during the 1848 revolutions and lived out the rest of his long life surrounded by doctors in Prague Castle.

  This pattern of hopelessness could be partly balanced out by more worthwhile figures such as Leopold I, the Grand Duke of Baden, or Ludwig I of Bavaria, who was brought low by his extensive and clearly fun sex life. But there was always a problem of inbreeding or bad luck lurking in every corner and the Badenese and Bavarian royal families were haunted by madness even if they avoided the violence and crudity of Hannover.

  Karl and Albrecht

  Born less than eighteen months apart, in prosperous circumstances, two of the quintessential nineteenth-century Germans could not have had more different fates, although they shared many interests, not least in science and progress, and both wound up spending the bulk of their lives in London. Both were educated at the University of Bonn and both were Lutherans. They never met but could probably have found some neutral ground in leadenly amusing stories about the limits and irritating tics of the English.

  Karl Marx’s pretty if heavily rebuilt home in Trier has been through some ups and downs. The most tiresomely symbolic humiliation must have been its use as a local Nazi headquarters under the Third Reich, gleefully festooned in swastikas. The West German state was created almost as much as an anti-communist citadel as an anti-Fascist one, but Karl Marx’s House was always a place of heavy pilgrimage for Western Leftists even if many from the Eastern Bloc were frustratingly unable to get there. Of course this high tide has long gone out and the days when Chilean Trotskyists and Italian Stalinists would hiss at each other on the rather narrow staircase are long over. And unrestricted travel for those in the former Eastern Bloc unfortunately (at least from the narrow perspective of those running the Karl Marx House) coincided with the collapse of the ideology that would make a coach outing to Trier seem a high priority. A continuing wild card remains the People’s Republic of China, whose fervent tour groups swamp the hotel facilities of Trier at random intervals. I would be curious to know what happens to these groups once they have trampled around the perhaps rather thin pleasures of the Karl Marx House: it is a long way to come just to see the old haut bourgeois home of a Prussian lawyer with a cafe attached. Even with the relative relaxation of Chinese life, it seems hard to see what positive enforcement for the Party could be given by touring nearby vineyards or wandering around the Black Gate of the Roman empire, except perhaps to think about shipping it back for inclusion in some future ‘Failed Empires of the Past’ exhibition in a Flash Gordon-like New Beijing of the later twenty-first century.

  My own woeful inability to absorb abstract ideas would make me a flailing, threadbare guide to philosophy, a crucially important strand in German life, so I intend to avoid humiliation just by dodging the entire area. I am happy to read knock-about material like the more epigrammatic bits of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but can progress no further. Marx’s theories of the function of the state and economy therefore drop from my crudely materialist fingers, but simply as a journalist, polemicist and commentator he remains the most caustic, sneering and enjoyable of writers for all the European events he observed from his North London exile. It could be – although I confess that this is unlikely – that Napoleon III was a creative, thoughtful and progressive figure dedicated to improving France (which he really did in various ways), but Marx’s derision has to win the day. Marx’s entire reputation hangs on the importance granted to ideas and we can never know what shape the major and minor revolutions of the twentieth century might have taken without his writing. Presumably the upheavals themselves would have happened anyway (Russia would always have collapsed in 1917), but Marx provided the ideology that opened the door for a strong central state of a kind the nineteenth century could not have even dreamed of.

  The Germans did many parochial and stupid things in the First World War, but the breathtakingly decayed decision to put Lenin onto a sealed train and transfer him from Switzerland to Sweden (and thence on to St Petersburg) probably takes the biscuit. Their wish to whip up unrest in Russia by injecting such a famous revolutionary into the mix had consequences which shaped the whole twentieth century, and comes as close historically as we are likely to get to laboratory conditions for releasing the power of ideas into the world. Without straying too far from the subject, Lenin certainly believed he was enacting (with a few little embellishments of his own) the ideas of the chain-smoking sage of Highgate. The nature, ambition and horizons of these ideas changed the possibilities of government and made the most foam-flecked golden-uniformed, execution-obsessed absolutist seem overnight like a genially ineffective pub quiz-master. Marx’s father was a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, and religion – as one would hope for consistency’s sake – played little part in Karl’s own life. But the perception that Marx’s ideas were in a sense Jewish ideas sunk into German life and had consequences. These chilling certainties make the Karl Marx House still fairly funny, with its gift shop and its place in a row of stores selling vacuum-cleaner parts and children’s shoes, but not that funny.

  Marx’s Thuringian contemporary, Albrecht (or Albert as he was to be hastily retooled later on), was the second son of Ernst I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Traditionally girls of the minor courts tended to be picked off by members of the British royal family, but because Pr
incess Victoria was limbering up for the big job, Albrecht had to play the girl and found himself whisked off to Britain to marry his first cousin and become her consort. The peculiarly uninteresting court portraiture of this period and the need to stay still for photographs have tended to make Albert look like a pompous waxwork. Every now and then though, in unguarded moments, photos have by accident preserved images of the tough, clever and arrogant German operator behind this facade. He was much disliked by many during his lifetime, though the cult that developed around his memory after his death of typhoid in 1861 obscures this. Britain’s German wives of the past had stayed out of the way or become tabloid disgraces like George IV’s Caroline of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (whose sad little red-velvet-covered coffin lies in the gloomy confines of the Braunschweig Cathedral crypt). Albert’s activism and German accent, on the other hand, seemed politically unclear – on what authority was he reforming the army or writing to his foreign relations or setting up the Great Exhibition? Albert’s enthusiasm for natural science and museums makes him dear to my heart. His crucial role in both creating the Great Exhibition (what a paradise it must have been to visit it!) and the museums of South Kensington tapped into deep and existing British enthusiasms, but they were also an expression of the kinds of German trade fairs and cabinets of curiosities which I at any rate am unable to get enough of. The whole area for the museums was bought with the profits from the Great Exhibition and although substantially developed after Albert’s death, it is still fair to say that the museums would not exist without him. It is some measure of Albert’s intelligence that after On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 he proposed a knighthood for Darwin (an idea that was rejected).