by Simon Winder
Albert’s interests seem thoroughly genial, a relief in the stony desert that is the intellectual life of the British royal family, but in other senses he was a dynast of an old-fashioned kind. He married off his teenage daughter Victoria to the Prussian Crown Prince, Friedrich Wilhelm, and thereby initiated one of the great tragedies of German royal life. Victoria and Friedrich waited for decades for the latter’s fantastically old father, Wilhelm I, to die so that they could sack Bismarck and liberalize the German empire, but Wilhelm held on long enough for Friedrich himself to be dying, of throat cancer, by the time he became Kaiser Friedrich III. He ruled for three months – speechless, in despair and communicating through little bits of paper – before clearing the way prematurely for his and Victoria’s unappetizing child, who ruled as Kaiser Wilhelm II. Ultimately Friedrich III and Victoria’s only real legacies were a cranky and hysterical heir and a completely superb marble monument in their mausoleum in Potsdam. Albert’s dynastic scheme therefore misfired sadly and indeed Kaiser Wilhelm II’s being Queen Victoria’s grandson only gave him a further, unfortunate sense of debility, stoked by the patronizing grandeur of his uncle, the bulky womanizer Edward VII.
Albert is also famous in the English-speaking world as the man who transmitted the idea of the Christmas tree beyond Germany. The British royal family had put up Christmas trees in the eighteenth century through the desires of George III’s wife from Mecklenburg-Strelitz, but it was the publicity for Britain’s own ‘Biedermeier’ idyll Victoria and Albert and the young royal family having Christmas at home which really made a tree an increasingly crucial aspect of life for prosperous people. This has always struck me as a mixed blessing. One of my own festive tasks tends to be to go to get our Christmas tree and the car-park traders I frequent have an uncanny ability to offload on me a pine with some hidden and deathly sickness. By Christmas morning the front windows of all the houses on our street will be shining with piny good cheer while our own tree looks as though it has been hit with Agent Orange. The effect is not helped by the miscellaneous and home-made nature of our ornaments. These crude lumps of papier-mâché and wrinkled oblongs of card covered in cotton wool and poster paint, made in the children’s nursery schools of yesteryear, are allied to odd mementoes from trips to the Pacific North-west, such as a little Seattle ferryboat or a toy elk, now with no legs or antlers but which still swings ghoulishly from the tree’s spectral branches. The overall effect – with a few inexpertly added bits of old tinsel and some malfunctioning lights – is of a blackened, loosely pyramidal object on which the Christmas Monster has thrown up. And so, even our humble home can offer an allegorical parallel for Prince Albert’s attempts to mould the future of the Prussian royal family.
The historic year 1848 saw very different priorities for Karl Marx and for Prince Albert, with the former embroiled in the destruction of autocracy and writing The Communist Manifesto and the latter looking to buy land in Balmoral for a new Scottish royal palace suitable for a growing family.
The vast scope of the Revolutions of 1848 encompassed in one form or another everywhere from Ireland to Sweden, albeit with often different roots and with an increasing element of copycatism as the year progressed. The failure of the revolutions almost everywhere has meant that they have tended to be patronized and dismissed both from left and right. It is certainly easy to deride such insurrectionaries as the young opera-composer Wagner (entirely a by-product of court culture) on the barricades in Dresden. There is a very funny ‘Wanted’ poster for Wagner issued by the Saxon government and with a sketched likeness unlikely to single him out from the crowd with any confidence. But the stakes were in practice very high with a tremendous fizz of excitement and possibility, although few were able to articulate a consistent definition of these stakes. Beyond a revulsion at the cold grind of repression instituted by regimes such as Metternich’s in the Austrian Empire after 1815, there was no real agreement as to what should come next. This was allied to a middle-class timorousness that wanted political representation but was acutely anxious, on the whole, to exclude the working class.
All sides in 1848 felt an often crippling self-consciousness. Few events have occurred with more of a sense of acting out a historical script, of making gestures all waiting to be immortalized in the period’s innumerable cheap prints. In Germany, everything followed behind France – both an obsession with interpreting correctly what had gone right or wrong there in 1789 and the fact that in February 1848 the French had got the ball rolling again by easily throwing out their own monarch, Louis-Philippe, thereby serving notice on other monarchies across Europe. Just as the kings themselves all had the ghoulish image of a beheaded Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette dangling before their eyes, so many middle-class insurgents felt sick with anxiety that they would be torn apart by brutalized proles, who they nonetheless needed to bulk out barricades and offer a sense of real threat. The working class in turn was constantly braced against the inevitable middle-class betrayal. This mix of excitement and hesitancy gave a dream-like quality to 1848 – with the forces of reaction not appreciating how strong a hand they had to play and the middle class not clear just how few concessions from their rulers might cause it to switch sides and lick the hand that fed it. This nervousness in the end provided the basis for royalist and militarist forces to fight back, headed by such hate figures as the Prince of Windisch-Grätz, who gunned down rebels in Prague and Vienna and generally reimposed order.
The decision to try to create a united German parliament in Frankfurt dramatized the problem that was to tear Germany and therefore Europe into pieces until the imposition of order after 1945: if there was to be a united Germany rather than lots of smaller countries some of which happened to have German speakers in them, then how was that Germany to be defined? German insurrectionaries in Prague thought Bohemia should be part of a united Germany because they were politically dominant there, even though most of Bohemia’s inhabitants were Slav. German nationalists in Vienna wanted Austria to be included, but were viewed with almost as much loathing by the Habsburgs as were the revolutionary Hungarians: the Habsburgs might themselves have been originally Germans but the whole point of their Empire was that Germans, Croats and Romanians were equally subservient elements within it and German nationalism could only (as it ultimately did) destroy that Empire. St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt where the parliament met was flattened during the Second World War and inevitably its rebuilt incarnation has none of the atmosphere which must have stuck to the old building, but that atmosphere, for all its idealism and democratic potential, was also not entirely admirable. Anti-Semitism, tirades in favour of war with Danes and Poles, urgent calls for ‘Germanization’ of any number of minority groups, all filled it. The attempt to ask the King of Prussia to become King of a united Germany was doomed by the King’s contempt but also by the shaky legitimacy of the whole institution. When Friedrich Wilhelm IV turned down the ‘shit crown’ offered to him by ‘bakers and butchers’ this was hardly a surprising result. As soon as the rulers realized the timid and confused nature of the revolutions’ representatives they operated with ferocity, first using the loyal armies to strike them down and then using the fervent excitement of nationalism to distract and suborn them. The last, sad attempt at insurrection took place in June 1849 in the Baden hills where a tiny revolutionary army was effortlessly taken apart by Prussian and Badenese troops – every tenth surrendered soldier was shot and the rest spent much of their lives in jail.
1848 has always been an intensely serious and painful subject for German democrats – the flag proposed by the Frankfurt Parliament became the flag of the Weimar Republic and of the West German state. St Paul’s Church was one of the first buildings in Frankfurt to be resurrected after 1945. The implication that Germany could have taken a democratic, inclusive and peaceful turn in 1848, and that this opportunity was lost by the selfishness and bigotry of a ruling elite who were themselves swept to perdition in 1918 leaving Germany prey to far worse forces, is surely a delusion. There is
nothing in the French example, where there was plenty of experience with regime change, to imply some golden uplands that Germany was denied – and in any event it could be argued that Germany was a remarkably peaceful place after the suppression of the revolutions, unengaged in any serious fighting outside Bismarck’s brief wars for several generations. But the questions raised – both good and bad – were to bristle for many Germans on left and on right.
Marx was to prove in the rest of his long life a crucial figure in articulating these questions, particularly as the unexpected primacy of the Ruhr turned first Prussia and then the German empire into a considerably more powerful place than it had previously been. Prince Albert died too early to see the astounding changes to Germany later in the decade of his death. He would have been pleased to see his elder brother, Ernst II, finesse it so that Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became a proper if tiny part of Bismarck’s new German empire and not absorbed into Prussia. The childless Ernst was then succeeded by Prince Albert’s second son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh who – having spent much of his life travelling to places like Australia, India and Africa, playing the violin and collecting glassware, picking up a Russian wife and turning down the Greek throne – found himself in the gloomy confines of Coburg for the last nine years of his life. Albert would have been less pleased with the grandson, Charles Edward, who succeeded Alfred following the suicide of Alfred’s son and the busy renunciation of the title by everybody with a better claim than Charles Edward who, still a schoolboy at Eton, was suddenly packed off to his little throne. In an extremely unfair series of events, following his perfectly reasonable decision to side with his adopted country during the First World War, Karl Eduard (as he now was) had his British titles stripped from him. He was then thrown out in the 1918 revolutions, ultimately becoming a convinced supporter of Hitler and attending George V’s funeral in London in Nazi uniform. His record during the Second World War was contemptible and he was probably well aware at the very least of the Nazi euthanasia programme.
But all this family shame lay in the future and only resulted from the twists and turns of unimaginable cataclysms really not rooted in the failure of the 1848 revolutions. In 1848 Victoria and Albert moved as a precaution to the Isle of Wight in case insurrection broke out in London, but it never did. Albert’s English family lived on in prosperous peace, in a dynamic, wealthy and inventive Britain, as did Karl Marx.
Girls in turrets
I was once placidly standing outside a kebab shop in Regensburg when a sharp flash of pain crossed the inside of my head, accompanied by a horrible, almost electric fizzing noise. In the moments before I realized that the fizzing came from a malfunctioning neon sign rather than my brain I suddenly felt very alone and panicked. Nobody I knew was even aware of the name of the town I was in and my mobile was, as ever, stone dead. My happy isolation seemed suddenly threatened and stupid – but I soon got over it.
Solitary tourism is something that everybody should indulge in. Of course it is a fraudulent solitude because its enjoyment comes from its limited duration and having a cheerful, only very temporarily abandoned main base area. I am paid at work to be a sort of grotesque Mr Chatterbox, in a chaotic welter of talking about books and their virtues. There are similar volumes of sound at home, with everyone shouting and mucking about, and every decision reached on the basis of almost UN-like levels of frayed consultation. And then, suddenly, I am in Vienna, standing in the shadow of a monstrous, derelict flak tower, and completely alone. The virtue of solitary tourism is its infinite ability to absorb boredom. I often find myself almost crippled with anxiety that the companion or companions on a journey might be finding everything wholly without interest, would rather be eating somewhere else, are secretly angry that we have wound up walking down this street rather than that, are contemptuous of my own interests. Solitary tourism cauterizes all this: if a museum is boring beyond all measure there is no pressure to feign interest, you just leave. I am perfectly happy, in a zoned-out way, to crisscross a town, walking for hours, just for the off-chance something curious might be round the next corner – indeed in the confidence that there will always be something curious (there always is). But for each street, each bar, each folklore museum to be converted into an inter-human negotiation creates an entirely different dynamic.
One pleasure of solitude is a heightened awareness of animals. A decision simply to stand still and not make a noise, if in the borderline tedious company of oneself, is easy. I remember in Lübeck sheltering from rain under a blossoming crab-apple tree crowded with blue tits tumbling about above my head; or spending ages watching a shrew working its way up a slope of the Dragon’s Rock, a modest Rhineland hill, but a sort of larvae-packed Annapurna from the shrew’s point of view. I once walked the length of a sunny street in Hildesheim accompanied by a light-scared bat, which flittered about, scooted under a car, panicked again and shot back over my head, as though I was a wizard with an admittedly rather incompetent familiar.
That is quite enough Nature Notes, but these moments and many others seemed to validate in the happiest form a simple wish to be left alone. The constant need to entertain myself meant spinning out endless rough topics for this book, so many of which wound up knocked on the head: astrology and decoration, the fear of bears, ice in German culture, unbuilt statues, magic and alchemy, the cult of the Landsknecht, rogue taxidermy and the hideous Bavarian Wolpertinger, Viennese novels between the wars, Altenburg and its playing-card factory, the paintings of Albrecht Altdorfer and so on and so on, generating an infinite, crushing shambles of topics, but also a small handful of real ideas.
Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century – a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. Everyone must have at least a part of them that wants to live in a stairless, doorless tower as a sort of intellectual Rapunzel, setting aside, at least in part, the complicated sexual frisson laid out by such an idea. Germany really is thick with ivy-covered turrets and the promise of solitude (Kepler staring at the planets above Prague, Faust conjuring demons) – the great majority presumably built in the nineteenth century in response to the whole literature devoted to the subject. There is one turret in Lübeck, built onto a city guard tower of just outrageous fakeness, which would do me for life.
The figures such ideas draw on do not really feature in English literature – the independent scholar in his tower, the journeyman going from town to town, the maiden in the castle, the wandering freebooter trying to win his spurs. These all sprang from the strange political structure of hundreds of different little countries and cities. Germany was made up of the circulation of people through the infinite arteries of broad roads, dirt tracks, mountain passes (such as the ones so frighteningly described in Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal) and scarcely marked paths: labourers, merchants, mendicants, quacks, troops, drifting across a landscape that could range from the most populous and benign to the most dangerous and isolated. Grimms’ fairy tales, mostly drawn from the relatively settled and safe world of Hesse, can in some moods just seem too horrifying, with their isolated protagonists the victims of magical powers, lost in trackless forests. But on balance I could not be happier than falling in with the German love of the lonely woods. A walk in an English forest is associated with brevity and teatime treats – if you throw a stone you are almost certain to hit somewhere selling coffee and walnut cake. A walk in the German forest, however manicured and signposted, is to plunge into a tradition of infinite richness. ‘A king once went hunting in a great forest, and he went in such eager pursuit of one deer that none of his huntsmen could follow him. As evening drew near he stopped and looked about him, and saw
that he was lost’ (the Grimms’ ‘The Six Swans’). What else can compete with such opening sentences? Or from Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s definitive Undine (1811): ‘The Black Valley lies deep in the mountains. What they call it nowadays is impossible to tell. In those days, the country folk named it after the impenetrable darkness cast by the shadows of the high pine trees. Even the stream that trickled between the rocks looked quite black . . .’ The reader just has to sit back and wait for a single, questing knight to gallop into such a landscape.
The poetry on this subject stretches out to the most hazy, distant horizon and fed a century of German songs, culminating perhaps in one of the greatest of all them all: Mahler’s setting of a Rückert poem, ‘I have lost track of the world with which I used to waste much time’, a work of such richness that it can only be listened to under highly controlled circumstances. The idea, whether in Goethe, Mörike, Rückert or Heine, is to be alone, in a wood, on a mountain, in some overpoweringly verdant garden, or just inside one’s head, almost always as a moment’s pause before plunging back into a world of love and normal human decisions. This tic is of course a bit unpolitical and some writers have seen it as passive in a way that implies a German malleability and failure to engage with disastrous implications for the future. But equally it is an anti-political, fiercely private stance, with a built-in resistance to fanaticism or mass manipulation. It seems hard on Schubert’s songs for them to be viewed as early danger signs of a failure to stand up to Nazism.
I need to move on – I want to write page after page about stories in impossibly remote castles, or old women or little men found by the roadside who may or may not be benign. Or the musical representation of the lonely forests – particularly Schumann’s astounding summary of all woodland music, ‘A Place of Evil Reputation’ from Forest Scenes (1848), which manages to be pretty, menacing, uneasy and mournful in about three minutes. But I really have to stop before this book stalls completely.
