by Simon Winder
An exception though must be made for a brief mention of Joseph von Eichendorff’s Life of a Good-for-nothing, published in 1826. Eichendorff is yet another friendly Prussian who can be called into service to trump all the clinking-spurred, en brosse military men, although unlike Humboldt or Hoffmann he did in fact fight in the Napoleonic Wars. He wrote an immense amount, not least poems which further fuelled the needs of song composers from Mendelssohn to Richard Strauss – indeed perhaps marking the absolute end of the tradition, as Eichendorff’s ‘At Sunset’ (set to music in 1948) is played as the last of the Four Last Songs.
Life of a Good-for-nothing is a tall tale and a narrative wonder, where the reader is hurtled along through the miscellaneous adventures of the chaotic, underachieving narrator. The story is thick with coaches, palaces, beautiful yet mysterious women, rascals, gardens, forests – a sort of omnium gatherum of Romanticism. ‘So I went into the house and took off the wall the fiddle I played so well, and my father gave me a few coppers to help me on my way, and off I strolled down the long street and out of the village . . .’ The palace scenes immortalize the whole pre-Napoleonic world of the little court (as does Mörike’s equally sunny and nostalgic Mozart’s Journey to Prague written a generation later), with its tiny concerns, its beauties and love affairs. And then, in an astonishing turn, Eichendorff sends his hero to Italy, thereby making almost a parody of German attitudes of longing for the land where ‘raisins just drop into one’s mouth’. The tone is often of an unbearably brightly coloured dream, crammed with songbirds with gaudy feathers, obscurely threatening strangers, unexplained chases through deserted city streets. Every paragraph seems to contain a further reason to be happy, with the narrator rolling about like a puppy in the pleasure of his own wanderlust.
Strolling along the banks of the Danube or up in the Harz Mountains, I’ve never been whisked up into a coach, encountered a mysterious charcoal-burner’s hut or had to decide whether or not to be polite to a roadside gnome, but it hardly matters. It is impossible to take a step without feeling very slightly like a journeyman larrikin embarking on his wandering years or a knight on some unfeasible errand. A simple walk in the woods is invariably accompanied by an ineptly hummed Siegfried ‘Prelude’, no matter how undragon-filled the walk might be. But then, just getting a bus outside Cologne to get to the magical wooded valley of Cloister Altenberg you can’t, while punching your ticket, not whistle a bar or two from ‘Siegfried’s Rhine Journey’ (indeed, commuters taking the tram into Bonn must routinely at the very least hum it, rocking from side to side, making the whole journey quite noisy). Such choking clouds of musical, visual (Caspar David Friedrich!) and written material swathe themselves around anyone – however unyouthful or unheroic – to such an extent that it is impossible to talk of this being a genuinely solitary experience at all.
Heroic acorns
A contrasting strand to the doomed wish for solitude is the exaggerated German enthusiasm for group activity. Towns can become almost unnegotiable as their historic cores silt up with tour groups; cathedrals choke on the numbers of little singing clubs and parish coach outings; a simple walk in some mountains will find the solitary hiker almost swept from the path by gnu-like herds of specially equipped, hiking Germans. It is always possible to join a group at a Ratskeller, to find space at a table, with everyone moving up and smiling, in an open and welcoming manner prone to make English people pass out with horror. There is a sort of semi-genial tyranny in these groups with their matching tops and their little medals stamped onto their walking sticks and they always make me a bit skittish – as though one moment they could all be chatting and swapping anecdotes about long-haul vacation packages and the next going berserk in a Clockwork Orange sort of way.
One odd manifestation of this communal behaviour is the seemingly limitless enthusiasm for sitting in boats going up and down rivers. On bits of the Rhine or the Danube flotillas of glass-roofed vessels will drift pointlessly back and forth past very slightly interesting crags or mildly appealing ruined castles (the sheer numbers of the last rapidly devalue their currency). Of course the point of these jaunts is not really to do more than glimpse at these low-grade sites, which really are just the thinnest of pretexts. The real goal is to sit in groups around tables, eating astonishing amounts of sausage and cake, drinking massive glasses of lager and smoking furiously. I’ve often been struck by the delicate chemical balance within these boats – the flame from the cigarettes glowing bright in the methane-rich atmosphere, mercifully burning off the dangerous edge to the inevitable human by-product generated by the sausage, lager and cake combo. I almost come to expect to see in the twilight, dotted along the river, sudden, brilliant vermilion flares as boats detonate from an unlucky, fatal combination of build-up and a solitary smoker’s delay in lighting up.
It was on one of these unstable experiments in human living that I went to see the Walhalla. As part of that great wave of early nineteenth-century love of everything Greek, Prince Ludwig of Bavaria decided that when he became king he would build a copy of the Parthenon on a hill above the Danube and make it into a hall for heroes, a Walhalla, filled with busts sculpted by the greatest sculptors of the greatest Germans in German history, as judged by himself and some of his friends.
The building looked completely odd from inside the fuggy boat – its lush deciduous surroundings an odd substitute for parched and blistered Athens. It is appealing enough, though – with the enormous advantage over the original of not looking all sad, bust-up and broken. The boat moored and some of us got off, leaving others to clear the display cases of strudel and generally enjoy themselves. The walk to the Walhalla was arduous, a struggle alongside a great mass of burping, heaving leisure clothing across paths choked with millions of acorns from the heroic oak trees planted everywhere. But once inside, having registered the mildly interesting view and noted with approval the underfloor heating system (another clear improvement on the Greek original), all jokes are off.
The interior is about two-thirds Enlightenment magic and about a third everything that’s freaky about Germany. Light pours in on a neo-Greek cuboid, stern caryatids, sumptuous marbles, a ridiculous statue of King Ludwig. Only after a few moments of mental stabilization is it possible then to focus on the point of the place, the row upon row of white-marble busts, like some classicizing science-fiction vision of cryogenically frozen geniuses awaiting the signal for their brains to reactivate. When Ludwig came up with his original list he must have had great fun, chucking in blood-soaked Dark Age nonsense like Totila and Hengist, some generals he admired, lots of kings (Heinrich the Fowler, Otto the Great, Charlemagne, Frederick the Great). Ludwig understood ‘German’ to mean ‘Germanic’ or even ‘kind of Germanic’, so Swiss, Dutch and even Belgian heroes can get in (Rubens looks particularly implausible). Ever since its inception new busts have been added at intervals, each one having a Nobel Prize-like quality of enshrinement, however bogus, and since it first opened every visitor has complained about obvious, sinister or incompetent omissions – no Schumann, no Daimler, no Heine (finally allowed in in 2009), neither Mann brother and so on and so on. The pleasure lies in the arbitrary arrangement, with scientists and composers blissfully entangled in the Bismarcks and medieval fruitcakes. There are hardly any women, but one that is included more or less counterbalances the totality of all the other Germans there, as surely the most successful and powerful German of all: Catherine the Great. The modern era has to intrude and the whole project’s fresh-faced, early nineteenth-century pottiness is at the very least under question. But as usual it is crucial to concentrate a bit and not witlessly track everything back. It is eerie, but it is also bracing and happy – a version of Top Trumps, albeit an unwieldy one.
Uneasy attempts have been made in recent decades to balance out the sea of kings and generals, including an almost unrecognizable Einstein. But the great, genuinely moving coup of 2003 was to install a bust of Sophie Scholl, the remarkable Munich student beheaded by the Nazis in
1943. As a member of the White Rose movement, recklessly distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, she is one of the handful of figures within Germany at the time who can be pointed to with pride. The bust itself as sculpture is hopeless (she looks like a Tiny Tears doll) but it doesn’t matter. Her presence, undifferentiated from the Kants and the Gneisenaus, the van Dycks and the Strausses, seems to revalidate the whole idea of German forms of cultural and moral greatness. In Scholl’s final statement (‘Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?’) there is a sense that she and her colleagues knew exactly what they were doing, knew that they were literally saving their country through the moral courage of their actions. Her bust in this bizarre time-capsule of two centuries of German nationalism makes it again into a real hall of heroes, subjugating and denying the power of the ‘Hitler time’.
As I reeled and staggered back down the hill, on a sort of avalanche of heroic, ball-bearing-like old acorns, I felt moved by the strange outcome of Ludwig’s eccentric vision. There are, however, other nineteenth-century German monuments which have not broken free in the same way.
Some hundred and twenty miles north of Ludwig’s strange 1830s temple lies something far worse and which, however hedged around with qualifications, has to stand for what went wrong with Germany in the following sixty years or so. If much of the point of this book is to lament the widespread lack of engagement with German places, people and things, then by contrast we should all be grateful to be shielded from the Battle of the Nations monument outside Leipzig. Anyone who through sheer, foolish bad luck types into Google Image the word Völkerschlachtdenkmal will find their screen filled with photos of Europe’s largest, heaviest and nastiest memorial. This historicist monster was built to mark the centenary of the 1813 Battle of Leipzig – the largest battle in Europe’s history to that point, with over half a million troops involved and a key event in the destruction of Napoleon’s empire. The monument’s inauguration in 1913 was attended by the usual ostrich-plumed crowd of soldiers and royals. That it was built entirely through private initiative makes everything even worse. Leipzig is a musical and mercantile city and it is strange that only a tram-ride from Schumann’s rather funny-smelling favourite restaurant an object of such immense, humourless, Aztec gloom should be languishing.
The monument has been through a lot and is one of the most historically charged sights in Germany – for the battle it commemorated, for the values it suggests, for its status as a last hurrah for the peacetime Kaiser, for Hitler’s enjoying giving speeches in front of it and for its role in the passing-out parades of the East German army. It is the work of Bruno Schmitz, the world’s worst architect, who unleashed his wretched talents on ruining several previously charming sites (the Kyffhäuser mountain, the point where the Rhine and Mosel join) and smothering them in industrialized pseudo-mythology.
The contrast between the pretty landscaping of the park and the monstrous memorial of rough, blackened granite that lurks in it is really disturbing. Something that should be found in the heart of a jungle, lying half strewn about and choked with jungle creepers, bats, snakes and poisonous flowers, has been set down in what looks like a quiet bit of Central Park. The sheer mass is strangely needless – it is a bulk rather than a definite architectural shape and even walking towards it there is an uneasy sense of resignation that you are about to be in the presence of a whole lot of ludicrous allegoric carving. Once inside you are threatened by immense stone figures – the worst being the medieval madness of the eighteen-foot-high ‘Guards of the Dead’ in full armour, awaiting activation in some pathetic horror film. The only pleasure it gives (a not small one) is the atmosphere of decay and neglect – the bits of old scaffolding and sheeting, the steady drip of water. After 1945 the communists decided that although the memorial was an imperialist one it should be kept going as during the Battle of Leipzig the Russians and at least some Germans had fought on the same side. The united German authorities have, with their usual bludgeoning seriousness, decided that they have a duty to later generations (who might just possibly have so degraded an aesthetic sense as to not find the memorial hideous) to restore it at a cost of millions of euros. One local priest made the happy suggestion that a fraction of the money should be spent on a cafe overlooking the site where, over the course of the coming century, lucky drinkers might witness a really big piece of the monument crashing to the ground as the whole thing fell to bits – the edifice itself becoming a powerful symbol for the futility of war rather than merely a pricey kitsch misfire. But this idea was ignored and dozens of stonemasons must now be employed in toning up the beard or pecs on the huge statue of Strength Through Belief and fixing up the sword of a Guard of the Dead.
Across the German world the period before the First World War threw up all kinds of ghastly monuments and buildings in a similar vein to this one – from the appalling Berlin Cathedral to the Neu Burg in Vienna. The only thing that saves these buildings is that they stand as monuments to failure – the civilization that built them was destroyed. The Neu Burg is doomed to forever face onto a Heroes’ Square which will never be completed, a place famous only as the setting for Hitler’s announcement of the destruction of independent Austria. As for Berlin Cathedral – perhaps figures such as Wilhelm II are underestimated and in fact one of their secret, never-to-be-spoken-of pleasures was the carrying out of dull, ugly but very expensive building projects knowing that they would rapidly become synonymous with dynastic futility. The Hohenzollern crypt, bringing together the sarcophagi of some eighty Prussian royals, has the cramped and uninvolving atmosphere of an underground car park, with dozens and dozens of near identical coffins laid out in rows like vehicles, all assembled just in time, after half a millennium of power, for the whole enterprise to pack up: only one family member (a child) was ever interned there and Wilhelm himself was buried in exile in the Netherlands. This monstrousness is absolutely palpable – these were dynasts of a highly traditional frame of mind wanting to express their ideas using modern financing, materials and size. There is something very similar in such awful mistakes as the Hamburg or Hannover town halls – buildings so huge and nasty that they appear only to have been put there (let alone remade after war damage) to confound later generations. But there is no direct line between such bad taste and Armageddon – everywhere in Europe large, dull, backward-looking structures were going up shortly before 1914: they deface Rome or Brussels, they could include such lumpish objects as Buckingham Palace (one of Europe’s most banal rather than most frightening structures). What is attractive when surrounded by such horrors is the knowledge that, like small mammals that scampered around while triceratops lurched across the plains, the architects who were to end all this madness were hidden away throughout the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, in Weimar and Vienna.
Victory columns
With such a welter of rulers, the different bits of Germany were always bound to be richly peppered with monuments to the greatness of individuals and families. Made from stone or bronze, these monuments are meant to last forever and some have had serious longevity. The eerie lion statue in Braunschweig has been there since 1166, albeit now in its third identical casting, the first freestanding statue in Northern Europe since the Roman empire. The Bamberg Rider and the Magdeburg Rider from the following century also survive. The meaning of the lion statue remains opaque: it clearly refers to Henry the Lion and to the power of the Welf family but we no longer have any idea of what occasion it was created for. The two horseback statues are also reinventions: in turn, these are the first northern figures on horseback to be sculpted since the Roman empire. This is either impressive, or shows how entirely derivative of Italian models medieval Germany really was, depending on your prejudices. Although some guesses can be made there is no evidence at all as to the identity of either Rider or why they were made: somehow, at some point, through disaster or accident or indifference, the names of these no
doubt very significant figures were lost.
I have spent far too much time staring at monuments such as these, peering into crypts, battling to understand inscriptions. My favourite piece of prose is Sir Thomas Browne’s magnificently resigned and gloomy Urne-Burial, one of the wonders of the seventeenth century, in which Browne meditates on the futility of all human monuments in a language of suffocating and dusty richness. Looking at so many battered, neglected columns, carved tablets and war memorials, Browne’s reflections beckon at every turn. ‘Pyramids, Arches, Obelisks, were but the irregularities of vainglory, and wilde enormities of ancient magnanimity’, or ‘But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids?’ Of course the damage done to so many memorials adds immeasurably to their own message of human frailty, the beau ideal perhaps being those tablets in churches where the lettering has completely worn away, leaving only a skull or an hourglass decoration, the inscription’s disappearance making a more aggressive Vanitas than the dead person’s family had intended.
These monuments have two purposes. Their overwhelmingly more important one was during the lifetime of those who built them. The materials used are meant to be for all futurity, but in effect this is always a knowing bluff. What really matters is to mark the present, whether it is the survivors of a war or the immediate descendants of a recently dead ruler. In this sense we are all poorly informed interlopers, relishing the irony but missing the point. No better example of this is the rash of monuments put up to bolster the new kingdoms after Napoleon’s defeat. As these kingdoms were only genuinely independent for a couple of reigns each and during that time were weak and on the whole unloved, these victory or memorial columns seem rather vulnerable, but their real value lay in the grief of those who lived through the events marked. The huge Waterloo column in Hannover or the black-and-gold column in Braunschweig marking the deaths in battle of two successive dukes fighting Napoleon had a double weight of marking, in the traditional nationalist manner, the blood-price foundation stone of new states, but also providing a focus for the thousands of individuals who had lost relatives or friends. We can see the same process now with British memorials to the world wars: events around these monuments which in my childhood brought together rank upon rank of elderly veterans of the First World War are now filled with comparably elderly veterans of the Second, who in turn will soon peter out, leaving behind a relatively hollow and static meaning for those who, thanks to the durable materials used to make the objects, will encounter them in the future.
