Germania
Page 33
Outside the station at Bückeburg (and the town is so small that if you lose concentration for a moment you have already walked past the palace) is a lumpy and untalented statue commemorating the Franco-Prussian War, in which some five of the Prince’s subjects were killed. I have to admit here that I am absolutely obsessed with the way Germany has commemorated its wars and it is a constant struggle not to write an entire book about these monuments, so any reference to them must be read against an implied background of a writer fighting to hold back a sort of brain-explosion of carefully scribbled but, alas, unused material. This monument in Bückeburg (a town which, to be honest, also deserves an entire book) is interesting because on the smallest possible scale it shows the oddity of German unification. This was not a simple town war memorial, but the expression of the sacrifice of a constituent principality in the German empire. The ruler, Adolf I, had in the 1860s played his cards so well that rather than being devoured without a thought by a Prussia thousands of times his size he managed at just the right moment to become their military ally, while his mighty neighbour, the Kingdom of Hannover, under its blind, autocratic ruler George V, got everything wrong and disappeared forever.
The 1860s were a time of exhilarating, precarious change in Germany. The Prussians had gained a total ascendancy over the much smaller remaining north German states, and had designs too on the substantial southern German kingdoms and their protectors Austria and France. The decision by the overbearing, brutal Prussian Minister-President Otto von Bismarck to achieve German unification through war seems a fearful precursor in retrospect to all that went wrong in the twentieth century, but at the time was far less controversial. Countries routinely switched alliances, went to war and generally were quite happy to do the most outrageous things to each other. Grotesque land grabs were going on everywhere. An amazing example from the 1840s was the Mexican War (as it is known in the USA) or the United States Invasion (as it is known in Mexico). The US carved out for itself immense new territories at gunpoint – for example, uh, California and, uh, Texas – simply stolen from Mexico in a spirit of stuffy and ludicrous Protestant rectitude. The British hardly allowed a year to go by without shooting up a pile of individuals somewhere in the interests of free trade and British decency. And the multinational force of British, French and Sardinian troops who had invaded southern Russia and Kamchatka in the 1850s exhibited no greater or lesser frivolity of purpose than Bismarck did in his wars of the 1860s.
Warfare was therefore, it is reasonable to say, an acceptable if risky aspect of nineteenth-century European life. The elites were military elites – a fact shielded from the British only by the odd chance of their being ruled then by a woman who spent much of her reign in mourning dress: her now less historically visible male children were utterly drenched in medals, spurs, sashes and sabres. War was not embarked on lightly (except in Africa and Asia) but it was always a card to play and most of the point of the revenue-raising power of the state was to come up with money for ever more elaborate armaments. The sheer, delirious inventiveness of the nineteenth century meant that this became very expensive, with obsolescence always threatened for any weapons system within a decade. Some states could simply not keep up. The Habsburg Empire remained a dynamic, brilliant and (in the light of later events) admirable part of Europe, but its dominance crumbled rapidly as it did not have the depth of industry or tax base (thanks not least to a lot of unhelpful and obscurantist Hungarian noblemen) to compete with France or Prussia.
These hidden strengths and weaknesses – how quickly could an army mobilize, did it have secret weapons, would morale hold up? – meant that each of the mid-century wars was a complete surprise. The military manoeuvres which, alongside hunting, occupied so much of Europe’s rulers’ time and money could never answer these questions, and in all the major conflicts both sides would face war with similar levels of self-confidence: with the result showing one side’s self-confidence to have been misguided. There were some baffling military culs-de-sac. One great oddity was the Battle of Lissa, a naval struggle in 1866 off the Dalmatian coast between units of the Habsburg and Italian navies (with neither opponent drawing on a glowing naval tradition). This chaotic melee resulted in a Habsburg victory because the Austrians used their ships to ram the Italians (a technique previously resorted to back in the days of Mediterranean oared galleys). This meant that for some years ships were fitted (at considerable expense and with much futile training) with rams – which as it turned out were never used. The wider war of 1866, in which the Habsburg Empire defeated the Italians but was crushed by the Prussians, ended in humiliation for the Habs-burgs. But the Battle of Lissa was also interesting because it ensured that the Dalmatian coast would remain – unlike the rest of the old Venetian territories but now handed over, at Prussian insistence, to the Italians – under Habsburg rule. The side-effect of a captain’s fluky decision to use a ram therefore entirely changed what would become the histories of Yugoslavia and Croatia.
The three wars fought by Prussia – with Denmark; with Austria and her ineffective German allies; and with France and one last batch of ineffective German allies – made her synonymous with military brilliance. But this was, it must be remembered, a new reputation. Everybody understood that the Danes could not win their war, but most observers assumed that Austria and then France would crush the Prussians and, indeed, with a little more luck, intelligence and planning that could well have happened. The Prussian military machine – the work of Roon and Moltke – was drawing from weak roots. Frederick the Great’s defensive battles of the mid-eighteenth century were a long time ago and for stakes that now look paltry. It had never faintly been plausible that he could bring the Habsburgs to their knees – his only aim was simply to prevent them from getting back Silesia. He was incapable of, say, attacking Vienna itself, let alone Paris or St Petersburg. And the Prussian performance in the wars with Napoleon had been initially unremarkable – defeated and humiliated both in fighting the French and then in fighting the Russians alongside the French, the Prussians ended the war, having extensively reformed their state, as a striking and brave but patently less important element in the coalition. Indeed a wider point could be made that the oddity of the modern German military experience – including the two world wars – has been the catastrophic inability of its strategists ever to win a war outside this delusive little seven-year period in the 1860s. If the point of a war was to create a more favourable political and economic environment for its winner then there was a sickness at the heart of German military-political planning that made it uniquely unable to achieve a result, ultimately with the most terrible consequences imaginable.
The 1860s wars were retrospectively called ‘cabinet wars’ because they were so brief: operations against Denmark took nine months, against Austria less than two months and against France ten months. The first of these was fought by Prussia alongside Austria to prevent the Danes absorbing fully the region of Schleswig-Holstein, a territory which had always had a mongrel, semi-Danish, semi-German political status now unacceptable to rising Danish and German nationalism. The other two wars were more significant, indeed central to the story of Germany, because between them they wrapped up all the remaining independent German states. The wars asked every constituent country whether they were for or against Prussia, with rulers from the King of Bavaria to the Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe having to take extremely fast decisions. Militarily none of the minor states had the resources (particularly given the speed of the wars) to make much difference, although substantial Prussian resources went into defeating them. The Catholic south, particularly Bavaria and Baden, had every reason to loathe the idea of being absorbed into Prussia. Not just the elites, but absolutely everyone had been raised on a traditional hatred for Prussia (a small example: Frederick the Great’s comment that ‘Bavaria was a paradise inhabited by animals’). But there was also nowhere which did not have tucked away a pro-Prussian party or, more significantly, a pro-united-Germany party.
As it turned out the forces of particularism crumbled to bits in the face of the Prussian military (aided by minor allies such as Brunswick and Oldenburg, who thereby preserved their futures cheerily). The independent city of Frankfurt refused to back Prussia; it was occupied by Prussian troops and turned into part of Prussia. The Kingdom of Hannover backed the Austrians and was destroyed (George V’s immense treasury was privately snaffled by Bismarck, who spent many years using it as his secret ‘Reptile Fund’ for buying off journalists). Liechtenstein suddenly declared its neutral independence and somehow got away with it. All over Germany panicked decisions were taken in the shadow of the world-changing defeats of the smaller states’ great power sponsors. At the immense Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, Austria and her ally Saxony were crushed and at the Battle of Sedan in 1870 the French army was attacked so brilliantly that it was in part destroyed but also so completely outmanoeuvred that its remaining large units remained intact but paralysed.
In the wars with Austria and France, the Prussians were as surprised as anybody that the fighting was so brief – and this became another poisonous legacy. The idea of the lightning strike which, in a single strategic gesture, could end a conflict became something that entranced Europe’s militaries. In contrast to the miseries of the Crimean War or the American Civil War, perhaps a more Napoleonic model could be retrieved, where the sheer brilliance of the Prussian–German military could prevail. Generations of German generals would lie crushed beneath the reputation of Moltke and his staff – but for over forty years after the defeat of France their services saw no further fighting. Paul von Hindenburg had fought as a teenager at Königgrätz and was hauled out of retirement in his late sixties to fight the Russians in 1914. Graf von Schlieffen spent most of his life planning for and dreaming of a further war yet died aged almost eighty before the First World War broke out, on which he had such a profound and – as it proved – useless and damaging influence.
These were ‘cabinet wars’ therefore only in as much as they happened to end quite quickly and with the disastrous suggestion that this might be true of future wars. Far from being a militaristic barracks state, Germany was in practice simply in love with the idea of cheap victory. An all-encompassing cult of volunteer units, veterans’ associations, shooting clubs and special privileges for anyone in uniform grew up from a relatively trivial real military experience of a few weeks of lopsided fighting. More pleasantly, most of these associations were just fronts for colossal drinking bouts and the paunchy reservist became a standard satirical figure. Bismarck himself, who had never really fought anybody, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had not even been a cadet, set the pace in a laughable scrapyard of breastplates, ornamental sword pommels and ever sillier helmets. Perhaps a micro-history of the German empire could be written from the point of view of the networks of perhaps quite amusing individuals who actually designed this stuff, or just of the merchants who dealt in ostrich feathers.
These were also wars in which a surprising number of people had been killed, but over such a brief period and in such a swirl of patriotic euphoria that, however much devastated private grief the deaths might have generated, it was viewed as an acceptable ‘blood-price’ for unification. In my pan-German fossicking for curious memorials to the Second Reich, I found in a dark corner of a church in Mühlhausen, propped mouldering against the wall, a large wooden board covered in white Gothic script listing the names of local men who had died in the Austro-Prussian War. For such a small town it had an alarming number of names. This was, as far as I could find, a unique survival, but every town had its memorial to the Franco-Prussian War and – again a brief conflict – the names really stacked up: fifty for this town, a hundred for that. In several battles of the war the Prussians had been massacred even if they had ultimately won. There was a clear implication that modern weapons (which were being revoltingly refined every year) in a war which proved less one-sided could have a quite new effect. This was to be found out by the grandchildren of the victors of Königgrätz and Sedan and the children of the harmlessly posturing, beer-enhanced military clubbers of the 1880s. What would happen in a long war and what the point of such a ghastly investment of lives might be was not something which military or civilian leaders had to think through after the astonishing victories of their newly mighty armies in the 1860s.
Already however in the Franco-Prussian War itself there were disturbing signs of how hard it was for the military rulers of Prussia and then Germany (as it became at the end of the war) to separate political and military questions. The Battle of Sedan was so brilliantly handled that this should have marked the point at which a treaty was signed. Instead, the army pointlessly besieged Paris and began to suffer from guerrilla warfare from an increasingly enraged French population. The war ultimately ended with France an insurrectionary, bitter disaster area and with the fateful decision to annexe Alsace-Lorraine, partly for the usual specious strategic-security reasons (Hitler wound up annexing most of Europe without improving his strategic position) but also because of the curse of history: too many nationalist medievalist obsessives wanted to welcome home this ancient part of the Holy Roman Empire, despoiled by Louis XIII, XIV and XV. The Austrians had in 1866 been almost happy to be defeated and soon became Germany’s key ally. This was impossible for the French and set both sides on a specific, disastrous course for the following eighty years. Whatever damage was done by jingoistic soldier-worship in creating united Germany, it was nothing compared to the original sin of grabbing Alsace-Lorraine.
The aftermath of the wars was the declaration of the German empire in the Palace of Versailles in 1871. The oddness of this ceremony has often been commented on. It partly came from the continuing war and the degree to which most German princes were hanging around in France anyway, but it also came from a genuine problem that there would have been no location within Germany in which such a ceremony would have been acceptable. Everyone going red in the face and waving their swords around in fealty would for the Badenese or Saxons or Bavarians have been totally impossible in Berlin, the inner sanctum of Prussianism.
Huge efforts were made to ensure that although the emperor just happened to be also the King of Prussia, it was understood that at a royal level at least the new empire was still a bit federal and evasive – if you were a royal who had come through the chaos of the 1860s with your territory intact then you could just keep going. Ambassadors continued to be exchanged within Germany as though Bavaria or indeed Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt was still independent. Leipzig railway station, now stuffed with some two hundred shops, is the world’s largest simply because of the farcical need to make it both a Reich and a Saxon terminus, with separate grand entrance ways for the Kaiser and for the King. No German emperor (well, there were only three anyway) was ever crowned because such a ceremony would have been so ersatz, but also so confusing. So even at a point when Germany had ‘united’ it still kept the stubborn obscurantism and federalism which makes it such an attractive place today. Only the brief twelve-year interlude of Nazism ever forced Germany into a pseudo-coherent frame, albeit by bringing back the medieval term ‘Gau’ – comparable to ‘shire’ – as the seemingly rational new administrative unit, but these as it proved temporary arrangements did nothing to erase older localist habits.
This brings everything back to thinking about SchaumburgLippe. Dozy and absurd, the principality is now just a small area of a neither-here-nor-there corner of Lower Saxony. Through the guile of Adolf I it came through the traumas of unification intact, and Adolf could stand shoulder to shoulder with Kaiser Wilhelm or enjoy a joke with Ludwig II of Bavaria. But the tiny memorial to the dead of the Franco-Prussian War, with its little statue of Victory so shoddy that it might just be a cheaply recycled decoration from some dilapidated orangery, has wound up carrying far more weight than it intended. Becoming entangled in the German empire was, for even its most rural and minor elements, going to prove to be an unlimited liability.
A surprise trip to Mexico
I had flattered myself that I had been pretty hardened by the street performers of Covent Garden, but an amazing new level of stupidity was introduced outside St Stephen’s Cathedral by a man break-dancing on his head while pretending to fart at his audience while also singing snatches of Puccini. I later saw him in a drunken row with someone painted entirely silver, presumably an off-duty Mozart statue. As part of this farrago, but far more worth watching, there was a troupe of bulky Mexican Indians dressed only in extravagant feathers, leather and shells, there to protest over Austria’s continuing ownership of ‘Montezuma’s Head Dress’. This object may or may not have belonged to Montezuma but is undoubtedly a very ancient and beautiful Mexican artefact in Habsburg hands at least since the days of Archduke Ferdinand II at Schloss Ambras, who had thought it was a ‘Moorish’ head-dress. (Oh, why are old rulers so ethnographically disappointing? James I of England owned a suit of Japanese armour which he thought belonged to ‘the Great Mogul’.) An interesting history of the world could be written entirely consisting of accounts of total mutual incomprehension and ignorance. In any event, these Mexicans dance a bit and then berate the dazed crowd with a fervour that puts the juggling fire-eater and the Emperor Joseph II singing statue to shame.