by Simon Winder
Perhaps the strangest of these surviving monuments – surviving with fragments gouged out from the base by Soviet shrapnel – is the Victory Column in Berlin. This ugly and unengaging thing was for many years the focus of all sorts of hopes and fears. It was started to commemorate the Second Schleswig War of 1864 and the Prussian defeat of Denmark. The war marked the first really serious engagement by the Prussian army since 1815 and an appropriately grandiose monument was required. While this was still being designed the Prussians and Austrians fell out (not least over Schleswig-Holstein, but more generally over who would be the dominant force in Germany) and, following Austria’s crushing defeat in 1866, the column was given further meaning. But again, this was too soon, the column was not finished and war with France in 1870–71 and the unification of Germany meant that the column had to bear the weight, not of a minor police action in Denmark, but of events of boggling world-historical importance. These led to the already very clumsy and dour column having a bulky bronze statue put on top. The Nazis moved it, added a bit more and put in subways under the roads to reach the column. It was further messed around by the French taking advantage of being among the occupying authorities in Berlin in 1945 and gleefully removing some of the more gloating reliefs on the base marking their earlier humiliating defeat. The Victory Column has been kicked about so much that it floats entirely free of its chauvinist origins, or indeed of the original commemorations once held around its base where the great figures of the era, Bismarck, Moltke, Wilhelm I, Roon, the Crown Prince, would gather, thinking about events that they had themselves carved out. A plaintive exhibition inside points out that the Column is comparable to similarly grandiose projects of the era such as the Statue of Liberty or Tower Bridge in London, but of course it is infinitely more scary and on its own circuit entirely – not because of the events it commemorated, but because of its mutation through so many years of German-initiated disaster. It still stands as a grim, battered reminder of human folly, waste and delusion – the exact opposite of its architect’s and sponsors’ intent. It is also, in a quintessential act of Berlin subversion, now the focus of an annual gay pride march, which in a way that so often is the case in modern Germany, cauterizes the damage reflected in the memorial in a beautifully appropriate way.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The grandeur and misery of nationalism »
Snow-shake particularism » A surprise trip to Mexico
The grandeur and misery of nationalism
Of course, I am as ravaged by nationalism as anyone else. All I have to do is listen to the quiet, intensely noble part of Sibelius’ Finlandia and I start to fall apart – appreciating the short season for picking cloudberries, grateful for the cooling summer wind that comes off uncountable Finnish lakes, the taste of cured reindeer meat on my tongue, shoulder to shoulder in epic defence of a country which, actually, I’ve never visited.
Nationalism is one of the most confusing subjects of the nineteenth century, with the added bonus of becoming worse and worse the more anyone thinks about it. The central problem lies in the conviction that it was something specifically dynamic and new in Europe which crystallized there and then sped around the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Even under the briefest scrutiny this does not work very well. Reading Simplicissimus, the seventeenth-century German novel about the Thirty Years War, there can be no doubt that the characters are aware of nationalism – that they are proud to be sociable, comradely, fair-minded Badenese or Swedish or French, that they are equally contemptuous of the small-minded, miserly, vicious Badenese or Swedish or French. While it is true that ruling dynasties had ownership over their territories in a way which did not imply for a moment that their subjects could have national views, this does not seem to have in practice prevented them from doing so. To imagine that a Brunswick army facing off against a Bavarian army was not filled with a welter of religious, social, linguistic and moral views on its opponent, but was instead only doing its duty as a mass of grovelling subjects, is to condescend towards the past much too heavily.
The nationalist argument was extremely useful to the Prussians and their allies scattered across Germany (both liberal and reactionary) because it implied a sort of inevitability in the creation of a single Germany (which nonetheless somehow missed out German-speaking parts of the Habsburg Empire). The chaos, ill feeling and, ultimately, murder carried out in the name of nationalism makes it an intensely serious subject in Germany, but it is difficult not to feel derisive about its claims. The most successful of nineteenth-century European states was undoubtedly Britain, which was to the core of its self-definition multi-national, both in itself and in its colonial empire, with the English, however overweaning and ghastly, always using and even admiring collaborators among other groups. Portugal and Spain started off the nineteenth century as ancient nationalist states, but with enormous empires of many races which shaped and defined their sense of national sentiment. France might, after centuries of fighting, be moving slowly towards being a linguistically coherent place, but it seemed to have an insatiable need to attack bits of the Rhineland without the faintest claim to Frenchness. The Habsburg Empire was far more wholeheartedly multi-national even than Britain, Russia was a shambles of irredeemable national chaos and Italy had been in fragments since the end of the Roman empire. Germany was split into tiny bits for centuries and had sometimes thrived and sometimes been miserable, but it was hard to say that the amazing achievements of a disunited Germany were all irrelevant. The country best poised to take advantage of German nationalism, Prussia, ruled over millions of Poles and was split into a jigsaw of purely dynastic chunks.
With the high tide of frightening, activist nationalism now ebbed from Europe and the Cold War that froze it up equally vanished, it seems clearer that a united Germany came from forces way beyond the imaginative projects of specific intellectuals or politicians. The black-red-gold flag used by some of the Freikorps fighting Napoleon and embraced by the student fraternities and others who met at the Wartburg Schloss in Eisenach in 1817 on the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig traditionally marks the beginning of serious German nationalism. But these students were really only cranky and rather sad. Their views were at the time either ignored or disapproved of by an immense cross-section of opinion. They can get no credit – and indeed hardly any blame – for turning out after dozens of twists to be ‘right’, much to everyone’s loss.
What is curious about German nationalism is its slowness and indeed incompleteness. As a linguistically defined entity it only began to function with the very brief incorporation of Austria from 1938 to 1945 and always included chaotic mutations and exceptions, with the Kaiser’s Reich still filled with many autonomous kings and dukes. In an extreme form it is possible to say that German nationalism only had coherence between the incorporation of Austria in March 1938 and the takeover of the remains of western Czechoslovakia a year and two days later, when linguistic nationalism became once more a chaotic and disgusting imperialism. By the time such German-speaking areas as Danzig and Posen had been ‘brought home’ following the invasion of Poland, Germany was onto a track which made a mockery of the language-defined state. Clearly it is possible to say that the normal run of life for the roughly German-speaking areas of Europe has been, in the many centuries from the end of the Ottonian Empire to the present day, to live in a tangle of political arrangements – with the exception of these 367 days. Oh, and I’ve forgotten about Switzerland again – a standing affront to nineteenth-century nationalist dreamers: federal, multilingual and completely uninterested in invading people.
The reasons for the unification of some Germans into a single entity were peculiar and specific. Some of the new states carved out after Napoleon’s defeat, such as Baden, could easily have stabilized and become countries not dissimilar to Switzerland. Others, such as an enhanced Bavaria, were entirely plausible – Bavaria’s wealth has always been a given, however misused by its rulers, and in the early twenty-first-century
world of European states such as Latvia and Slovenia, Bavaria could easily exist on its own. The smaller surviving early-nineteenth-century bits and pieces, such as the lands of the Reuss princes or (my favourite) Schaumburg-Lippe, were always going to be vulnerable to the slightest breeze, but equally these could have become harmless anomalies like Liechtenstein or Andorra or Monaco – daft but not inherently impossible.
Prussia had benefited more than anybody from Napoleon’s demise. From being a state teetering on the verge of extinction and a gloomy, French-occupied satellite, it had jumped clear of its dependence during Napoleon’s defeat in Russia and got lucky, since Berlin was far enough away from Paris to avoid immediate retribution. The decision by specific Prussian army officers to throw away the alliance with France and force the dithering monarch’s hand was both heroic and dangerous, but it was also only successful because of forces very far beyond Prussia’s control. In the final phases of the fighting Prussia was significant but in various configurations always less so than Russia or Austria or Britain.
Where Prussia cashed in enormously, in ways which would dominate the nineteenth century despite severe setbacks, was in the division of the spoils. Everyone assumed after Napoleon’s eventual, final and exhausting defeat that France had only been thrown back into a temporary prison and that the nineteenth century would be dominated, as the previous nearly two centuries had been, by aggressive French expansionism. (Interestingly, a similar assumption was made about Germany in 1919. Only in that case the assumption was not properly enforced, and turned out to be true.) The British therefore disposed of the old Austrian Netherlands, Belgium, adding it onto the Netherlands to make a single, substantial country to the north of France, guaranteed by Britain against future French incursion. To match this to the east of France, Prussia, which had previously only owned bits and pieces in western Germany, was given huge, valuable chunks to allow it a permanent policeman’s role.
The difficulties this produced were invisible to the Congress of Vienna but boiled down to the very slow realization that, although Paris became, if anything, even more enjoyable to visit as the century wore on, France had had her fun geopolitically and was no longer an overwhelming threat. Further, the strong northern state of the United Netherlands was ruined by the insurrection that created a separate Belgium, thus creating a small, tempting, vulnerable state that was to cause such headaches in two world wars. Further than this, it turned out that, more or less by accident, Prussia had been given the Ruhr Valley (previously split up between harmless little states such as the Vest Recklinghausen lands of Cologne and the Lordship of Limburg-Styrum-Styrum). Some of this had been handed to Prussia by Napoleon in happier days, the rest agreed at the Congress of Vienna, but unfortunately with nobody realizing that the inhabitants of a somewhat under-resourced but militarily excitable bit of land up near Poland had accidentally been given the heart of the coal and steel Industrial Revolution!
It is an odd accident that Mary Shelley should have been writing Frankenstein just as Prussia was settling into its new territories – a similar tale of unrelated chunks being stitched together. Her book was in large part inspired by a visit to the medical faculty at Ingolstadt with its state-of-the-art preserved cadavers, the corpses threaded with coloured wiring to show veins and nerves – plus the usual bottled horrors suspended in pickle. These are still there and unbeatably sinister and fun (together with a simply amazing display of models of the diseased human eye, discoloured, distended, leaking, clouded, according to type of illness). But this is to stray off the subject. There was nothing on the face of it inherently bad about Prussia now being constructed of bits and pieces from such disparate cultures – other states had managed this, not least Austria, which had ruled places from Ostend to Dubrovnik. The old Prussia had owned some very small but valuable western lands, such as the County of Mark, for many years. It was not programmed to be a Frankenstein’s monster – it could have simply become a genial, schizophrenic mess. There was also always an influential, and rather moving, element within Prussian life that was scornful of or anxious about Prussia’s preponderant weight inside Germany. Frederick William III and his son Frederick William IV may have been poor kings, but their weakness left its mark on Prussia until the latter’s stroke in 1857. Both in their different ways were highly suspicious of a united Germany, rightly feeling that such an organization might swamp the country they valued. They were also admiring of and deferential towards the Habsburg Empire and would have been appalled by the events supervised by their successor.
Unfortunately nationalism was not trundling along at the whim of monarchs, but through industrialization that crushed everything before it. Canals and railways and rivers, but particularly railways, made a mockery of the often very local customs and dues which paid for each small state. These innovations hated localism and demanded instead as big a customs-free zone as possible. This zone, joined by most German states by 1852, became a political weapon. Initially it reinforced individual countries as it increased customs revenue overall and let sovereigns fritter the money on the new palaces and funny, self-serving statues and columns that litter the era. But once it had settled in it tended to make financiers and merchants think nationally.
But just as potent was the continuing fear of the French who, despite suffering what in retrospect is clearly a sort of wasting illness, looked to still have designs on the Rhineland. The new German Confederation which allowed military cooperation between the different states should have been guarantee enough. But with much crucial Rhineland territory ruled by small places like Baden and the Grand Duchy of Hesse it was inevitable that in any emergency Prussian troops would be the only serious guarantor. The territorial tidying away of old Austrian lands such as Belgium and the Black Forest enclaves had the entirely accidental effect, allied to new Austrian responsibilities in the Balkans and Italy, of making the Rhine ‘front line’ of limited further interest to the Habsburgs, who had always been one of France’s most unthinking enemies. Tons of resources were poured into such Confederal fortresses as Luxembourg, Mainz and Rastatt, but in the event of a serious French attack everyone knew they would run screaming to the Prussians for help.
Much of the period was spent preparing for wars that never happened. The British and the Americans were convinced that they would fight each other again after the Treaty of Ghent in 1814 and used most of the century planning for it. The British and the French spent immense sums, both sick with anxiety that some naval innovation would give the other a crushing superiority that would annihilate the other in some second Trafalgar – an anxiety that in the event never came to anything. Equally, much of German history was based on terror of a fresh French incursion, perhaps most strikingly in 1840 when the French government incautiously and incorrigibly stated that it viewed the Rhine as France’s natural eastern border. This provoked a frenzy of German-wide indignation, including the song sung by so many million German soldiers over the coming century, ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ (‘As rich in water is your flood/ Is Germany in heroes’ blood’, &c). It was sometimes as though the French were goading the Germans into unification, as announcements such as this had places like Württemberg and HesseDarmstadt bleating with fright. This meant that when war did at last break out in 1870, the British were neutral, assuming despondently that the French would win, but hoping that the Prussians might at least damage them severely in the process. This British attitude of seeing the Germans as a sort of thermostat that could be regulated to keep France at the right temperature now spectacularly malfunctioned as Prussian troops marauded across Normandy (leaving a trail of excellent Guy de Maupassant short stories behind them). But this was a surprising outcome – and surprising to many Germans too, until then hostile and sceptical towards what was happening.
Snow-shake particularism
Tucked away in a corner of north-west Germany lies the former Principality of Schaumburg-Lippe, an absurd Plutoid with fewer than fifty thousand inhabitants that through cunning and luck
managed to survive until the German Revolution of 1918, and where the ruling family has clung on to their palace in the lovely if undeniably tiny town of Bückeburg right up to the present. As with other German princely families, such as the amazingly wealthy Thurn und Taxis family in Regensburg (I am not visiting any more museums with displays of mouldering old coaches and sleighs ever again), the Princes of Schaumburg-Lippe make it clear just how boring it would be if any of these families had actually retained real power into the present day. We are lucky that they were all kicked out in 1918, thereby preserving forever their image as pop-eyed, moustachioed uniform-obsessives. The modern Schaumburg-Lippes in their beautiful Schloss – complete with duck-packed moat, ugly late-nineteenth-century ballroom and intimate salon filled with mythological statues – have photos of themselves enjoying a joke with King Hussein of Jordan or sitting regally with their adorable Labrador, but all with that same air of plain-suited dullness that curses too other, more significant European ruling families. The shop sells Schaumburg-Lippe chocolate, CDs of music played in the ugly ballroom, and a Christmas-at-Schloss-Bückeburg snow-shake dome which never leaves my computer table (made, dare we dream, by the Prince himself?).
