Germania

by Simon Winder

  Unfortunately in Germany this is not really an option as, while much of the country manages to avoid them (and I am excluding here of course the delightful foothills of the non-Brocken Harz and the Thuringian Forest), they are central to the existence of southern Bavaria and the Tyrol. I put off going anywhere near these places for some years. This decision was reinforced by people brightly suggesting that I should go to Berchtesgaden to see the remains of Hitler’s Alpine palace, an idea which both confirmed my feeling that mountains are aesthetically pathetic (Hitler liked them) and that places built for Nazi recreation should be very low on any list.

  One summer while we were growing up, my sister, slightly younger than I, was given by some vicious relative an enormous Ravensburger jigsaw of the usual Alpine kind: an onion-domed church surrounded by dense, sunlit, uniformly green trees with, set further back, a jagged white mountain and acres of blue sky. These things were then reflected in an absolutely still pool of water which filled the lower half the picture. This exercise in sadism almost ate my sister’s brain. An entire summer seemed to go by with this cursed object filling the table as day by day she crazily mulled over each of the thousands of pieces. It was like watching a mental version of the queen who danced herself to death in red-hot shoes. This pointless jigsaw-related tragedy did not help my view of the Alps. Indeed, pieces of music such as Strauss’s Alpine Symphony or the more excitably fresh-air, pantheistic bits of Mahler’s Third Symphony always seem to me to be music versions of a Ravensburger jigsaw and are completely spoilt as a result. Should one of the more minor bits of business transacted at the Potsdam conference in 1945 have been to send some troops down to Ravensburg (a little town in the Swabian Alps) and make sure the jigsaw factory never functioned again?

  Ultimately I had no choice but to confront these inner demons and head off into the mountains as it seemed implausible to try to write a book about Germany without at the very least visiting Neuschwanstein and Innsbruck. Most of the train journey was spent wreathed in thick mist, which meant that the Alps more or less disappeared and it was not unlike taking a train through the Chilterns. The Allgäu region is stuffed with immense numbers of very pretty cows with clonking bells and lovely eyes – but after a while it becomes clear that this is a monoculture as sinister in its way as the vines of the Mosel Valley, only with hooves substituting for trellises and with a great, burping Nestlé factory lurking at the heart of it. But as I like milk chocolate as much as I like wine I am happy to turn a blind eye to this ferocious industrialization masquerading as loveable upland.

  Neuschwanstein is famous both as Ludwig II’s most spectacular homage to Wagner and as the castle the expense of which broke the patience of the Bavarian treasury. Ludwig was forced to abdicate and then died mysteriously, perhaps by throwing himself in humiliation and despair into a lake and drowning both himself and his doctor in the process. Nobody ever lived in Neuschwanstein, it was never finished and it was opened to the public only weeks after Ludwig’s possible suicide. It was an inspiration for Disney’s castle and through an enjoyable reverse-loop feed its owners now copy Disney techniques of timed entry tickets and super-saturation tchotchkes. Ludwig’s relationship with Wagner was clearly a very important one and the Bayreuth Festival Hall only exists at all thanks to Ludwig’s or rather Bavaria’s money. But one thing I absolutely refused to research for this book is Wagner’s own feelings about Ludwig. Wandering around Neuschwanstein it is clear that what he took from Wagner was something really very tacky – a world of simpering maidens and bovine heroes painted in immense almost talent-free frescoes all over the castle walls. Each room has a different opera as its theme and the momentary pleasure of the place comes only from trying to work out which is what. Is this immense, completely stifling and unengaging woodland scene from Siegfried? Or from Parzifal? Who is that dim-looking girl in a wimple (too many options!)? I have never been an obsessive fan of Wagner, but I certainly like him well enough not to want to have answered the question: did Wagner like these wall paintings? If the composer himself felt that his music – which seems sometimes to achieve an almost unique level of stifling imaginative pressure – was accurately portrayed in Ludwig’s journeyman vision then it is all over. My sneaking anxiety is that he did like them – sketches of the original sets for Lohengrin look suspiciously dopey. Perhaps it is inevitable that stagecraft dates as cruelly as special effects in the movies, but I would like to think of Wagner’s musical mental picture streaming light years ahead of what could actually be achieved on stage. I just don’t want to know unless the news is good.

  In any event Ludwig’s homage to Wagner at Neuschwanstein has proved to be a desperate failure. Even though you wade through Ludwig-related rubbish almost up to your mouth (mouse mats, tea-towels, lushly written biographies, fridge magnets, ashtrays, all coated in his creepy features), the castle shop has almost nothing on Wagner at all. The cult of this puerile loony continues to flourish, fed by coach after coach of generally rather odd people. (What are they doing in the Allgäu at all? How can they be interested in this sad figure? I guess the romantic cult of Ludwig never really reached Britain.) Wagner himself remains completely sidelined, leaving the notional shrine as merely a residue posh excess – the thousands of pieces of mosaic in the forever unfinished throne-room of an extinct dynasty, the yet further turrets that will never be built, the completely ugly wood-carved room in which Ludwig was reading when he received the news that he was at last being fired.

  The only thing to be said in Ludwig’s favour was that once he had signed the paper ending Bavaria’s independent existence he refused to go to Versailles for the gross hailing of the Kaiser. He was also interesting simply because he showed in perhaps its most horrible form the degree to which some Germans had become absolutely worm-eaten with medievalism. The idea that he built at Linderhof (which I absolutely refuse to visit) a fantasy of Hunding’s Hut from The Valkyrie in which he would hold Germanic oath feasts seems just beyond idiocy.

  The Wittelsbach dynasty lurched along, past Ludwig’s sad, institutionalized brother Otto, through Regent Luitpold, a sort of Kris Kringle lookalike, who kept a commendably cold distance from Prussia, particularly during the absurdities of Bismarck’s anti-Catholic agitation, and then, very briefly, Ludwig III, who was similarly elderly and also looked like Kris Kringle, before the whole lot fizzled out in 1918, ending a rule over Bavaria that could be traced back to the twelfth century – or in madder moods to the ninth. They had ups and downs and at various points were a faithless or incompetent lot, but it seems sad that ultimately they should be remembered for these infantile Alpine fantasies.

  Hunting masters

  Growing up in south-east England, we used occasionally to go on family walks through the countryside, sometimes just rambling aimlessly and sometimes with a specific goal, such as finding various wildflowers. One of my father’s many cheerful habits was to give these on the face of it slightly dull outings excitement by suddenly freezing still and gesturing to us all to be silent whenever a bush rustled. We would then hold our breaths, waiting to see what came out. Of course, it being England, it could never be anything even faintly galvanizing – indeed almost always it was a questing thrush. But just for a moment (I was fairly young) my father’s gesture would suggest a real chance that a feared Gila monster might lurch from the little hawthorn.

  I can only blame these outings for a continuing sense, as an adult, of the terrifying possibilities implied by going on a walk. In Germany, all my woodland and mountain meanderings have been tinged by a bogus sense of slight danger. The big signs in the Harz Mountains promising lynx and wild boar always set my heart racing, puffing along quite alone and without even a walking stick to fend off these killing-machines. Indeed, given how much time I have spent fruitlessly looking for boar, wading up to my ankles in beech mast (the boar’s favourite food!) strewn like giant breakfast cereal over the forest floor, staring between the trunks looking for boar, it would be a bit love–death if one did actually kill
me. Even as I was being disembowelled I would simply have to laugh at the irony that I had finally, finally encountered that tusky lord of the deciduous woods.

  The huge scale of even the central German forests where you can, albeit with a certain amount of artistry, get views of tens of thousands of trees reaching into the haze, does imply a closer relationship to ancient European megafauna than in Britain, where by the Middle Ages everything bigger than a badger or a deer had been wiped out. Wolves and bears remained a potent element in many lives until the seventeenth century. There is a sad little stone memorial kept in the Darmstadt provincial museum commemorating the last wolf to be killed in Hesse and in Sigmaringen there is the actual, stuffed last ever Upper Danube wolf, albeit much repaired with what looks like low-grade industrial teddy-bear fur. Further east and south-east, wolves remained a serious problem into the nineteenth century, particularly after major wars. After the Austro-Ottoman war which ended in 1718, in the brutally depopulated regions beyond the Military Zone (in what would now be Serbia) there are descriptions of packs a thousand strong forcing the very few travellers to take substantial military escorts. Any long-term war would see wolf populations rapidly soar, with a matching campaign in the war’s aftermath to exterminate them. The availability of more or less uninhabited woods in central Germany, Austria and Bohemia allowed wolf packs to melt away for some generations and resurge quickly when the chance showed itself. For most Germans, though, wolves became by the seventeenth century at latest merely a folk memory – but an important one that was to spill into nineteenth-century legends and stories in heaps of ways, impinging just enough even now to allow for some slight thrill in the midst of the Thuringian Woods, with their sombre glades, stifling silences and carefully marked hiking paths.

  The serious access enjoyed by Germans to megafauna used to be in East Prussia, particularly in the Rominten Wilderness (a region now split between Poland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, based around the formerly German city of Königsberg). This was the very area over which for centuries the Teutonic Knights and the Lithuanians had fought – a remorseless tangle of misty forest and swamp of no value in itself but providing a neutral zone in which raiding parties could get lost, go mad and starve. It was forests like this and similar, seemingly endless tracts further south which sheltered amazing creatures – occasionally interrupted by baffled people in chainmail – such as tarpan, aurochs and bison, with stuff like wolves, lynx and boar almost on the defensive.

  By the time East Prussia was coalescing into a reasonably peaceful and straightforward piece of German land in the seventeenth century it was already too late for the tarpan: the ancestral wild horse was last recorded there in 1627 (the very last one in existence, probably itself cross-bred hopelessly with domestic stock, died in a Ukrainian zoo in 1918). The aurochs, the ancestral wild cattle, a creature of dazing size preserved in a handful of skeletal remains, disappeared from Prussia even earlier, with a handful of final reports from Poland coming in during the early seventeenth century. The last Prussian bison was spotted in 1755.

  The memory of these huge animals continued to stalk Rominten and nineteenth-century illustrators loved to do drawings of aurochs fighting off wolf packs. Kaiser Wilhelm II was obsessed with Rominten, built himself an extravagant lodge there and spent as much time as he could gunning down elk and other big-antlered objects in a pathetically one-sided and pointless contest. As usual with Wilhelm everything seemed frenetic and a bit depressing – the atmosphere of gun-oil, hipflasks, special feathered hats and hour upon hour of male badinage cannot have made Rominten a fun spot. But what Wilhelm saw there was an image of a murky, feudal, mythical Germany, of Teutonic Knights and the forest scenes from Siegfried, with a dragon hidden in some impossibly distant cave.

  As usual with German medievalism, the fact that access came thanks to telephones, electricity, internal combustion engines and a massive tax base was not allowed to intrude. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons Wilhelm is so odd a figure is that his reign so precisely marks the point when the iconography of horses, special costumes and deference is swept away by inventions which – while they find their apotheosis in the First World War – are already changing everything in the previous decade. Whereas in the 1880s the bulk of Europe’s population would be dealing routinely with horses (the breeding of which was an East Prussian speciality), by 1918 everything pointed to the Stuttgart-invented future of cars and motorcycles. Hitler barely touched a horse and lived a petrol-based fantasy, with the Third Reich’s iconography entirely horseless, even when, in practice, the Eastern Front required astronomical numbers of pack animals. Certainly nobody would have dreamt of commemorating any of Hitler’s actions in a statue of him on horseback – a problem that has indeed more generally plagued military sculpture throughout the twentieth century as a bronze staff car and driver obviously would not work.

  But the Kaiser, with his gun and his toadies, creeping through the Rominten bogs would not have imagined that as he royally shot stag after stag he was ending a regal tradition as old as the idea of kingship itself. Indeed, for many German princes it has been argued that they spent more time hunting than ruling, raising unmanageable questions about what royalty was really for. Many mid-range eighteenth-century German princes, in heavy obeisance to the example of Louis XIV, would do little else but hunt, leaving large parts of the country still dotted with pretty lodges but rather denuded of animals. In case we should imagine that the Kaiser, with his mega-rifle, was uniquely unbalancing the man–animal relationship, these baroque hunts were no less ridiculous. Often the royal involved, with favoured guests, would stand on the edge of a pen and as deer were released into the pen, would kill them with a bow and arrow. There were also bizarre, vanished variants such as the baffling Saxon royal sport of fox-tossing where, in front of hundreds of happy onlookers, dozens of foxes would be chucked up and down in blankets in the courtyard of the Dresden palace until they died.

  Of course Rominten came to a bad end. The First World War had seen the area briefly threatened by an invading Russian army and, in a horrible parody of traditional Prussia, bored and hungry German troops in the Polish forests gunned down many of the surviving bison there with their howitzers – the idea of modern artillery and lumbering, snuffly herbivores intersecting in this way is peculiarly distressing.

  Herman Göring among the Nazis most directly inherited the Prussian lust for hunting and declared himself Reich Hunting Master. From his bitter exile in Holland (where he spent much of his time shooting every living thing on his estate there), the Kaiser refused to sell his hunting lodge to Göring, who was obliged to build his own. The rather sinister, if compelling, East Prussia provincial museum in Lüneburg, a town some six hundred miles away from East Prussia where many East Prussian refugees settled after their flight from their homeland in 1945, has colossal sets of antlers from deer killed by Göring’s favoured guests quite late in the war (including the antlers of ‘The Mammoth’, a fabled whopper shot in 1942). Göring was obsessed with the missing megafauna (and had hunting costumes quite as daft as the Kaiser’s) and became involved with the quixotic project of the Heck brothers in Munich, begun in the 1920s, to try to ‘reverse engineer’ tarpans and aurochs through selective breeding. This resulted in some slightly odd-looking horses and large bulls but was genetically, of course, a joke.

  Attached to the Kaiser’s hunting lodge was a royal chapel dedicated to St Hubertus, patron of hunters – a typically inane Wilhelmine gesture. This featured a bronze statue of a stag which, after many unguessable wartime adventures, wound up decorating a children’s playground in Smolensk, a happy ending for at least one aspect of a strange German inheritance. The exiled Kaiser died in the summer of 1941, three years before the historical German presence in Rominten (where a hunting lodge had first been built for his great-great-great-great-granduncle, Frederick William I of Brandenburg-Prussia) was erased by defeat and disaster in the Second World War – a war fought by the Nazis imbued with many of th
e more disgusting and weird ideas that had been floating around these forests for many years.

  Ruritania, Syldavia and their friends

  There are many dozens of towns scattered across Germany which immediately make the word ‘Ruritanian’ spring into your brain. Ruritania was the invention of Anthony Hope, a cheerful and clever English barrister, who enjoyed writing stories set in made-up places. Invented countries were not new of course (Utopia, Lilliput; even California began as a fictional country), but The Prisoner of Zenda, published in 1894, was the sensation that gave the fantasy of a time-warped little country a fresh impetus. It made Hope extremely rich and crystallized a particular idea of German political organization shortly after the nineteenth century had effectively rubbed out such places. Of course, Ruritania’s location is in practice rather unclear and its political rough-and-tumble unlikely in the painfully overregulated and somnolent world of the real German micro-state. In many ways Hope is making fun not so much of Germany (although the cultural milieu is undoubtedly German) as of the new states of south-east Europe – the details sometimes seem as much Serbian or Greek as purely German.

  The overwhelming success of The Prisoner of Zenda led to numerous stage plays and movies and a rash of imitators, who enjoyed a nutty framework which allows an infinity of ridiculous castles, archaic, lovingly described customs and scheming queen-mothers, all floating happily free of actual historical events. Everyone will have their own lists – Hergé’s Tintin stories The Calculus Affair and King Ottakar’s Sceptre (‘Even at this moment those scoundrels may be trying to steal your sceptre!’) are glowing riffs on Ruritania, with Syldavia a zany mass of clicking heels, aides-de-camp, lemon-yellow uniforms, monocles and big-shirted revolutionaries fighting it out against a backdrop of (as revealed in Destination Moon) disturbingly enormous deposits of uranium. The evil republic of Borduria (khaki, cropped hair, big statues, secret police, a generalized gloom) makes repeated but fruitless attempts to destabilize Syldavia, a country entirely reliant on a quiffed Belgian journalist of an uncertain age for its defence.