by Simon Winder
Thomas Mann’s Royal Highness is an uncharacteristically relaxed novel for him and a classic Ruritanian work, with the book’s pleasure lying in the breathless elaboration of his Grand Duchy’s Schloss, the Grimmburg, not to be confused with the ‘formal, gracious beauty’ of the summer palace at Hollerbrunn, and the panoply of advisers, customs, special rooms and so on, all being derided yet also rather revered, simply as an enjoyable stream of invention. In the same breath one could mention Captain W. E. Johns’ Biggles Goes to War, where the redoubtable British pilot supports the plucky inhabitants of Maltovia against the double-dyed fiends of Lovitzna, possibly the only context in which the crusty captain and the Master of Lübeck slightly intersect. Examples of Ruritanian fiction indeed close in from all sides, with even Winston Churchill having a go with Laurania, subject of his only published novel, Savrola. I should probably stop just by mentioning the funniest, George Macdonald Fraser’s magnificent Victorian pastiche Royal Flash (1970), set in the too plausible Duchy of Strackenz (‘“Don’t dare to order me about, you cabbage-eating bastard,” says I. “I am a British officer”‘) and the most amiable, Antal Szerb’s Oliver VII (1942), with its sardine- and wine-exporting little state of Alturia, packed with the usual panoply of enjoyments (‘. . . his hair, which was unusually straight for an Alturian’) and a cheerless neighbour in Norlandia, with its gloomy skies and obsession with money.
The wobbling location of Ruritania and its variants reflects the numerous opportunities for Ruritanian behaviour among German princes, of which there were so many that they could be packed off to deal with the royal needs of many of Europe’s nineteenth-century monarchies. A quintessential petty German state, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen is scattered along the banks of a little bit of the Upper Danube. Its rulers were maddened with humiliation at being just the junior branch of the same family that was otherwise in charge of the whole of Prussia and they successfully grabbed at the chance to become the royal family for Romania. A junior prince of Hesse tried to start an abortive royal family for Bulgaria, while the tiny Wettin territory of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha generated royal families for Portugal, Bulgaria and Belgium as well as a husband for Queen Victoria. Indeed by descent Wettins have utterly outclassed their long-time, now crash-and-burn Prussian Hohenzollern rivals by being rulers to the present day of places as diverse as Barbados and Australia – not to mention their Bulgarian branch office managing to pull off the astonishing coup of getting their last king (Simeon II), at one time humiliated and forced into exile by the communists, elected as the country’s prime minister, under the name Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Otto, second son of the madly pro-Greek king of Bavaria Ludwig I, was packed off to newly independent Greece in 1832, in a quintessentially Ruritanian move. His long reign was a disaster in all kinds of ways and a curious example of pre-German unification semi-imperialism, with Bavaria attempting in a highly constrained way to run Greece, albeit very unsuccessfully. Eventually Otto and his wife (a feisty daughter of the Grand Duke of Oldenburg) were kicked out and replaced by a teenage member of the Danish royal family (sometimes the past looks just odder and odder). One of the great Ruritanian shrines is the suite of rooms where the couple spent their gloomy exile back in the old and neglected palace of the Bishops of Bamberg. There they practised speaking Greek to each other every day and insisted on wearing forms of Greek dress of an archaic kind, waiting futilely to be called back. It must have been an extraordinary adventure for them to be packed off from Catholic, landlocked Bavaria to Orthodox, island-and-seawater-oriented Greece, spend thirty years in the sunshine alienating everybody, and then wind up back again in a draughty Bavarian palace.
There is a magnificent white marble bust of Otto in Greek costume which is perhaps poignant, and yet as so often with royals Otto clearly emits a general sense of not taking full advantage of what was on offer. For every dashing, clever, brave and artistic royal there are dozens of total blanks: imperious, not very bright, symbolic fodder staring drearily from official portraits and photos, floundering in a sea of acrimonious politics. Rudolph V of Ruritania and his British doppelganger in The Prisoner of Zenda, whether played by Stewart Grainger or Ronald Coleman or Christopher Plummer, have the lovely advantage over their real-life equivalents of being frozen in time, of always being dashing, always looking super in close-fitting uniforms, of always being about to get the girl. It is impossible not to think that the reign itself could only be a disappointment, a slough of weight-gain, infertility, querulous younger brothers, degrading sexual temptation, anarchist daggers and bourgeois agitation. Perhaps an unwatchably harsh sequel could be made with Rudolph sharing the fate of the real Otto, pacing up and down in Bamberg, declaiming to his now phantom subjects. The Prisoner of Zenda is so wonderful because it is such a chronologically constrained historical slice, shutting out the hidden trajectory of heroism which ends so many once glamorous careers: in a seedy, burned-out Robin Hood, in a prolix, cadging and elderly Hannibal.
An absence
In the Lower Saxon city of Brunswick (Braunschweig) there is a small museum built into the monastery behind the battered church of St Giles. The museum has a selection of objects illustrating Jewish life in Germany down the centuries, its origins lying in the nineteenth-century Braunschweig Patriotic Museum, whose probably very curious contents have been otherwise destroyed, stored or passed on. The centrepiece of the museum, which survived the Third Reich, is a series of painted wood panels and pieces of furniture from the nearby town of Hornburg. These were the most important fittings (ark, lamp, reader’s platform) from a disused synagogue which was dismantled in 1925 and brought to Braunschweig.
This is a book about things that can now be seen in Germany, and what cannot be seen is anything much to do with Germany’s Jews. The accidental rescue of the old Hornburg synagogue preserves it as a gloomy and isolated oddity. The unmanageably distressing Worms burial ground remains, and the much grander one in the Pankow district cemetery in Berlin, but (except in Prague, where Nazi plans to create a Museum of an Extinct Race preserved far more) otherwise many centuries of Jewish life have left horribly little trace. A range of post-war monuments, markers and symbolic pieces of rebuilding help, but in effect they all merely emphasize absence. At the other end of the German lands, in the Austrian-Hungarian border town of Eisenstadt, a small synagogue survives. This is only because the authorities moved so aggressively to expel the ancient Jewish population on the Nazi takeover of Austria (unfurling the traditional ‘Jews Not Welcome’ banner across the main road) that by the time of the mass destruction of synagogues in the pogrom of 9 November 1938 it was already government property and therefore protected. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that it was heavily used by Soviet Jewish troops until they evacuated Austria in 1955, but not much. In the museum next to the synagogue there are displays about different festivals. Purim features a large photo of Holocaust survivors in a refugee camp in 1946 celebrating by wearing their old camp clothing and with one of their number dressed in Nazi costume and made up to look like Hitler. The idea of the masquerade, the way the photo is taken, the expressions of those involved, make it a masterpiece of uneasiness, defiance and pain, living in the absolute outer reaches of black humour.
These fragments and the fate of the Jews under Nazism make it very difficult to focus on earlier German history without seeing it as a sort of prelude or fools’ paradise. If this book has a serious point then it is as a record of the constant but necessary effort required to resist such backdating. To say that we deal with the Nazis too earnestly might sound frivolous, but I think it is true. The killing of Europe’s Jews stemmed from the pitiful ideas of a handful of inadequate cranks. Through a series of devastating military and economic events, so many echelons of Germany’s normal leadership (albeit itself often anti-Semitic in a ‘traditional’ way) were killed or discredited that these pitiful figures came to power. Virulent anti-Semitism was a vital glue in making Nazism, but its mass support came from Hitler’s promise t
o make Germany great again, with anti-Semitism only a minor element. It was a measure of the despair and confusion of the time that so many Germans were willing to concede the idea that defeat in 1918 and the rise of communism was somehow to do with ‘the Jews’, but this was thousands of miles from any endorsement of what became Auschwitz. The process by which so many Germans came to participate in or turn a blind eye to the Holocaust is a terrifying example of how any group of humans can be led and misled, but it is hard (albeit flattering to other nationalities who therefore get off the hook) to see this as a specific, pre-programmed, exclusive and inevitable German frame of mind.
I mention this now, in a section of this book dedicated to the nineteenth century, because I will end in 1933 and it remains for very obvious reasons not possible to write about Germany in any form without addressing this issue. But the Jews of nineteenth-century Germany and Austria have their own story and, despite continuing discrimination, for the most part it is a very happy one. It is extremely tempting to see this as delusive, carrying the seeds of destruction within it, and so on – but it is simply not the case. Germany had to be warped, torn and beaten, a generation killed and its economy so ruined that its moral, political and social fabric disintegrated and something terrible stepped in. Without the wholly unlooked-for curse of a stalemated war in 1914 these events would not have happened. The nineteenth-century world has to be allowed its autonomy, with its events and views uncontaminated by the hideous ironies that seem to lie to hand from our own post-Holocaust vantage point.
An immediate example of this is the ‘Hep, hep’ anti-Jewish rioting that convulsed many German cities in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. These horrible events have never really been understood – contemporaries were baffled by them and they were not repeated as the century progressed. No Prussian cities were affected and this spasm of mob hatred died out for no better reason than it suddenly emerged. Starting in Würzburg in the summer of 1819 the riots spread south to Frankfurt and Darmstadt and then up and down the Rhine, engulfing notionally liberal cities such as Karlsruhe and Cologne and spreading as far north as Hamburg, where many Jews fled for safety to Denmark. Shops and houses were burnt down, Jews were killed, many more were severely beaten up and generally terrorized into leaving. Order was rapidly restored by the army and in most places the authorities seem to have been shocked and revolted by what had happened. The riots showed how odd the role of Jews in German society remained. The terrible chant of ‘Hep! Hep! Slaughter all Jews!’ which accompanied the street mobs everywhere seems to have been an acronym for ‘Hierosolyma est perdita’, ‘Jerusalem is lost’, apparently the cry of the crusaders in the Rhineland pogroms seven hundred years earlier. If ever there was a good example of how creepy an interest in history can be then this must be it – and it has a strong whiff of the sort of violent, right-wing pseudo-medieval pedantry of the contemporaneous students swearing undying brotherhood in the Wartburg.
The riots seem to have in part been a reaction to the chaotic status of Jews in Germany. Napoleon emancipated them but his defeat meant that many of the German states rolled out a fresh array of disabilities, in some cases (such as Frankfurt) attempting to recreate medieval levels of discrimination. This association between Napoleon and emancipation meant that many rulers tended to ignore the way that so much discrimination had in fact been removed by enlightened monarchs well before the Revolution. German states which still defined themselves by their Christianity (traditionally, but also in contrast to the godless French revolutionaries) battled to work out how to deal with this awkward non-Christian minority in their midst. The unimpressive but devout Prussian king Frederick William III refused to promote a Jewish soldier, not because he doubted his bravery or patriotism, but because he felt in his heart that the soldier should first convert to Christianity. Indeed this idea so obsessed him that he quashed all attempts by Berlin Jews to reform observances, abusing his role as their rather notional protector out of fear that lessening what he saw as the obscurantism and backwardness of Judaism would make the Jews less likely to convert. Frederick William’s on the face of it deranged if internally consistent thinking would have a long history.
This highly complex swirl of motives, slights and confusion propelled the German–Jewish relationship until 1933. Until final emancipation in 1871, Jews continued to be torn between the wish to maintain their separate identity and their wish to overcome the mass of major and petty disabilities that governed their lives. Despite centuries of anti-Semitic fantasy, most German Jews were extremely poor in the early nineteenth century. The astonishing exception of the Rothschilds, who had escaped the rigours of the Frankfurt ghetto, could not hide the fact that most Jews worked in rough and marginal jobs, legally shut out from much of German society. The gradual and then quite rapid shaking-off of these disabilities is one of the nineteenth century’s great stories, but it is one too often seen in isolation. The century was for many Germans regardless of religion a time of extraordinary excitement, with a sort of tidal wave of opportunities creating prosperity and mobility unimaginable in the crumbled, introvert, local planet in which almost everyone had lived. Towns which had hardly grown in size in centuries became unrecognizable, education was transformed. Professions such as banking, medicine, science, soldiering and the law became immense concerns – anyone in these roles in the 1870s would have had only the tiniest connection to what, in retrospect, seemed their obscurantist, dust-covered and ignorant equivalents from the 1770s. The Jews who entered these professions and became famous were only ever participating in a German-wide phenomenon and were, by definition, heavily outnumbered in everything they did. What came to be seen as their ‘prominence’ was always niche or local.
As the nineteenth century progresses it becomes ever more difficult even to see Jews as a coherent group. Traditionalists would have little to do with those eager to assimilate to the mainstream – both strands would join in dismay at the Eastern European Jews who at the end of the century were taken in sealed trains across Germany to Hamburg and Bremen to emigrate to the United States. For many Jews it was simply not problematic to be both Jewish and German, particularly as, in common with other European countries, confession became ever more adrift from government. Jews were, after all, used to being Jews and the agonies of how to deal with them were created not by Jews themselves but by the chaotic anxieties of rulers who felt they ruled at the behest of and under the critical eye of Baby Jesus. If you had little time for such stuff (whether you were Napoleon or Bismarck) then the pressure was off. It was only if nationalism itself became a religion (and only then once it had been injected with some truly pathetic ideas about race on top of the pathetic ones about language) that there could be any serious question about Jews not being as German as Lutherans.
One of the culminations of this German Jewishness was the famous engraving of Jewish officers and men commemorating Yom Kippur on a battlefield outside Metz during the Franco-Prussian War. Once a common sight in German Jewish homes, this allegory (based on a real, but much smaller-scale event) shows a huge ark of the law surrounded by many Jewish troops with, in the distance, German Christian soldiers guarding the service. With many thousands of Jewish combatants (three hundred and seventy-three receiving the Iron Cross), the war and the entire process of German unification seemed to show that there was nothing about being Jewish which prevented anyone from being German.
There was, though, widespread anti-Semitism within German society. The term itself was invented by the deeply confused and pathetic figure of Wilhelm Marr in his 1879 pamphlet The Way to Victory for Germanness over Judaism. Originally from Magdeburg, Marr had variously bummed around Austria, Switzerland, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Costa Rica (oddly), claiming at different times to be an anarchist or a communist or a nationalist. He had been a delegate at the 1848 parliament and in a very uncomfortable way he does show himself to be an heir to the Wartburg students. His ideas and his Anti-Semitic League had little impact and late in life he renounced
anti-Semitism as, on further reflection, patently untrue, but he had established a poisonous if very small stream to which others would contribute.
Despite both casual and official anti-Semitism, German Jews found that they could create a sufficiently robust reality that it simply did not matter. Indeed, much as late-nineteenth-century Prussia was diverse and vigorous enough to turn out both the best militant German nationalists and the most articulate and derisive critics of that tradition, so German Jews adopted every imaginable position from pop-eyed king-and-country to doctrinaire communism, with the great unnoticed majority simply leading quiet German lives. So confusing and capacious is this world that it even throws out the invention of Zionism – the Austrian Theodor Herzl’s astonishing, strange insight that the Jews should have their own home. This idea, which seems in so many ways to be steeped in traditional German particularism, began with the hope, again in some ways traditional (the emperor as the Jews’ doubtful protector), that the Kaiser could carve out a protectorate for the Jews in Palestine.
