by Simon Winder
One painful story is told at the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio, a miraculous museum that manages with a minimum of folksiness to convey the full diversity of Texan settlement. This was where I learned about the Texan Wends. The Wends are a Sorb-speaking Slav group living on the upper Spree, now mainly in Saxony, in the lignite-mining region of Lusatia. In the nineteenth century they were partly under Prussian and partly under Saxon rule and subject to ever greater interference with their language and religion in a gust of German nationalism that predated unification by two decades, in moves of similar intolerance to those experienced by Welsh- or Breton-speakers. Under a charismatic pastor, Jan Kilian, they decided to save their culture by moving en masse to Texas in the 1850s. A group of six hundred had already been devastated by cholera by the time they reached Liverpool. More contracted yellow fever when they finally reached Galveston, but the survivors set up a small town inland, near New Braunfels, called Serbin and settled down to protect their culture. Of course, this was completely ineffective as the community leaked away into the surrounding immensity of English- and Spanish-speakers. The last Sorb newspaper packed up in 1921 (its Gothic script having in 1917 ironically attracted the same opprobrium as if it were being used to convey German words).
Wends ended up as a tiny strand in the new inter-war Gulf of Mexico boomtowns down in the Golden Triangle on the border with Louisiana – an alarming region I once visited, with hurricane-ravaged beaches thick with smashed up Portuguese-men-o’-war and dollops of tar, water that reeked of sulphur and cockroaches of a huge, meaty, glistening and imperturbable kind. The Wends who had remained back in the sparse and temperate woods of Lusatia had a grim time under all forms of German nationalism, from Second Reich to Third Reich to German Democratic Republic, with their villages ripped up to make way for open-cast mines. Wends within the new post-1945 Polish borders were all expelled into the fledgling GDR. But, unlike Jan Kilian’s congregation, they have somehow survived and now have to make their way in the first genuinely unantagonistic regime in generations – in the end as much a threat to Wendish solidarity as the strange temptations of Texas.
The Texan Wends may have not thrived as a specific cultural community but like millions of other Germans – making the crossing first via British ports and then later direct from Bremen via North German Lloyd or from Hamburg via the colossal Hapag – they found potentially enjoyable and straightforward lives in America. Indeed, so many left that by the time Hitler came up with his pitiful ideas for somehow reigniting – after quite a break – Germans’ medieval eastward colonization, there were almost no ‘spare’ Germans with which to do it, as they were almost all safe in America, having taken a decision that spared them and their descendants from the moral disaster about to be inflicted by those who had stayed at home.
Pidgin German
A new and unfortunate global German era was hustled in during the chaotic struggle for minor colonial territories in the 1880s. If the French could be described as having an empire made up of the bits the British didn’t want, then the newly united Germans got hold of places shunned even by the French. This strange, wholly uncharacteristic bid for empire was in its way as disturbing a sign as the building of Wilhelmshaven that there was something magniloquent and parodic about the new German state – a state bent on acquiring remote, harsh pieces of land for the sheer wish to point at them on a map.
In the inimitable Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt there is, among many other treasures, a ridiculous tin clock with crude, tiny paintings of palm trees and beaches on it. Painted on the clock is the little heading to the effect: the German empire on which the sun never sets. It would be easy to come up with a conspiracy theory that it was the manufacturers of this clock who secretly bribed Bismarck to purchase and swap into existence a German empire, as they may have been the only people to have really benefited. To make the sun never set (and it really must have set anyway quite a bit of the time) can have been the only reason to have snatched so crazily a remote territory as Western Samoa which now, to Samoan bafflement, found itself reporting to Kaiser Wilhelm.
The power projection required to rule Samoa and cut a reasonable figure in the South Pacific in itself provided a rationale for the German navy, a rationale which could have been avoided simply by not being involved in the first place. From Yap to New Pomerania all that Bismarck could promise from the German Pacific Empire was a certain amount of coffee and an infinity of coconut matting. The people actually living in these islands probably did no worse under the Germans than under anybody else, and had in most cases already been devastated by fatal illnesses from other Europeans. One should give a few seconds’ thought to the more or less blameless colonial administrators; men who had presumably planned to shine in local administration in Münster or Wuppertal, perhaps settling down and marrying a local girl, who now suddenly found themselves wading ashore, already seriously ill, on Truk or Blup Blup with mule-loads of ineffective medicines, crates of tinned sausages and a hastily designed, hard-to-clean white uniform.
The one exception, and the real if evanescent lynch-pin of Prussia-in-the-Pacific, was the concession port of Tsingtao on the coast of eastern China. This is still a baffling place. For many years I had a crudely coloured postcard by my desk showing the monstrous governor’s mansion, the Lutheran church and the brewery that introduced Bavarian beer to China and which still exports Tsingtao lager, despite some thin periods since the Germans left. This could have become the German Hong Kong, but it would only ever remain a liability and piece of window-dressing unless Germany could make itself into a genuinely global power. This seemed plausible in 1900 with the launch of the nastiest (in a crowded field) of all colonial outings – the International Expedition to destroy the Boxer Rebellion in China and impose foreign order on the rulers in Peking. This expedition was an extraordinary mix of British, Japanese, American, Russian, French, Italian, German and Austrian marines, a prominent member of the last group being the future Captain von Trapp of The Sound of Music fame. This provoked the Kaiser’s speech about how German troops should behave in China mercilessly, ‘like Huns’ (which they duly did, like everyone else) – one of the most clear-cut examples of a German worldview which was patently becoming toxic. This brutal walkover and looting raid was commemorated feverishly in Germany, with parades and memorials and exotic postcards: I saw one showing German cavalry on the Great Wall of China – a curious high-water mark in European self-aggrandisement.
However, this spirited agreement by Europeans to all join together in mowing down helpless Chinese peasant troops with machine guns did not last and, through chaotic and incompetent diplomacy, Germany had no Pacific allies at all by 1914, allowing Britain and its very many allies easily to mop up these expensive outposts and never give them back. Indeed the fundamental derangement at the heart of German strategic thinking can be seen in the loopiness of its empire, an empire which could only be serviced by ships tiptoeing past innumerable British bases. Even a hint of British hostility made German pretensions in the Far East (hedged in by, for instance, the whole of India and Australia) completely bizarre. The tragedy for the western Pacific was that through the frivolous disregard of every political actor in the region, many of the old German islands wound up in Japanese hands – thereby helping to put the Japanese Empire on its own disastrous, delusive trajectory: one of Bismarck’s regime’s many parting gifts to the twentieth century.
The German presence in Africa was more substantial and part of a wider and more inexorable European pressure to exploit economic and technological discoveries, dress these up as racial supremacy, and impose a brittle, short-lived hegemony over Africa. The German parts were far from prime real estate and it is hard not to feel that the Kaiser’s fury over Britain’s sickeningly self-serving and ferocious absorption of the Boer republics (and with it the cornering of most of the world’s gold and diamonds) was fair enough. His own imperial trailblazers died of malaria or gradually sank into the swamps of scattered, pr
ostrate African territories, turning out nothing that could justify the investment required by actual ownership, when a far cheaper option would have been simply to trade with their inhabitants. Throughout the nineteenth century Germans had traded in a minor way along the coast, fitting in with the sort of creepy transactions still dominated by the British. One striking humiliation was the Germans’ lack of sugar islands in the Caribbean, obliging them to trade in ‘rum’ which was in fact tinted Prussian potato schnapps. Specific companies dominated each coast, with Bremen linked to Togo, Hamburg to Cameroon and Rhineland missionaries to Namibia, but with none penetrating beyond a tiny coastal strip. Bismarck’s decision to annex these regions was hardly influenced by the existence of these peripheral concerns: he was simply aware that these were areas not yet snapped up by colonial rivals, making it a cheery way to wave the flag – but a cheery way that was to have a disastrous impact on many thousands of Africans.
If shooting Chinese was a clear indication that something had gone wrong with Germany, and indeed with Europe, then events in the barren German territory of South-West Africa in 1904 took things a step further. Lothar von Trotha was born in Prussian-ruled Magdeburg, joined the Prussian army and in a quintessential German career fought in both the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars before encountering the conventional problem: that Bismarck then lost all interest in warfare. This gave the army a long period with few opportunities and generated some of the peculiar frustrations which would emerge so horribly in the twentieth century. Indeed, although it would be impossible in practice to analyse this, could the long period of almost total unemployment for the German army between 1871 and 1914 be the heart of the disaster? This combination of very high prestige, an ever more burdensome and mythic legacy of heady, startling achievement in three quickly won wars and then an absolute doldrums for forty-three years must certainly have played its part.
In any event von Trotha scraped together the opportunities still left – first killing those protesting against German rule in East Africa (Tanganyika), then joining in the fun in China. In South-West Africa he was taken off the leash entirely and crushed Herero and Nama resistance to German rule with a savagery that even the British in the Transvaal would have baulked at, driving thousands of Africans into the desert to die in what has a reasonable claim to be seen as genocide. The only things that can be said in the Germans’ defence is that once it was clear what had happened there was outrage in Berlin, but this had no effect on the frame of mind that thought in such terms. It can also be pointed out that the Herero and Nama massacres in retrospect became a convenient shorthand, woven into what seemed a uniquely German pattern of viciousness, when in so many ways it mirrored European behaviour elsewhere in Africa. Everywhere, a truly poisonous technological and moral atmosphere seems to have driven Europeans mad; whether in the Transvaal or the Congo or Morocco or Sudan there was a sort of frenzy of violence, bolstered by a contemptible religious and patriotic high-mindedness. This ferocity, this strange formula that allowed the takeover of other people’s land to be followed by speechless outrage when those people had the gall to resist, is a phenomenon not sufficiently thought through. This telegraph, gunboat and machine-gun hysteria that racked so many places in the run-up to the First World War formed a generalized European nadir, a sickness within much of the continent which would end up being turned on Europe itself.
There are such a lot of odd things about the German empire. Two will have to be enough here. One of the many enraging facts for sweating administrators on the African west coast was that centuries of British slaving and trading meant that the German territories of Togo and Kamerun used an English pidgin. In a classic piece of German absurdity, painful and sustained labour went into creating a synthetic German pidgin which was going to be enforced along the German coastal sections. The brainchild of a Munich lawyer, ‘colonial German’ was reduced to a thousand or so words and was meant to counter the slap in the face of the status quo. Of course the only value of pidgin is its usefulness and the idea that all German colonial administrators were going to be taught a simplified version of German and then have to teach it to traders and illiterate fishermen is so hilarious that it is a big shame the First World War intervened. Just before ‘colonial German’ was due to be rolled out the Allies took over the whole of German South-West Africa and German West Africa and the Germans never came back. The enterprising British explorer Mary Kingsley, when setting out in 1895 to become the first European to climb Mount Cameroon, noted (in her immortal Travels in West Africa) several fair-haired Germans toiling away on roads in the jungle, which seemed to lead nowhere. This very temporary German presence ends up as a parody of the equally quixotic and sometimes lethal attempt by all Europeans to ‘rule’ such places, with the British, French and Belgian inheritors of the German empire themselves shrugged off just a generation later.
Another oddity was the island swap organized between Germany and Britain in 1890. The Germans had vague claims to Zanzibar, off the coast of what had just become German East Africa. The British also thought they as good as owned Zanzibar because of their hold over its far-off notional real owner in Muscat. Indeed they so valued Zanzibar that to secure it (and its useful nutmeg crop) they gave the Germans the island of Heligoland in the North Sea, a piece of loot the British had stolen from Denmark during the Napoleonic Wars. Heligoland was in fact a rather vexed spot of land of limited use as a naval base, but its possession in the First World War would have drastically threatened the Germans. Of course nobody in 1890 could have imagined how events would unfold in the twentieth century (not least none of the peculiarly luckless inhabitants of Heligoland, a place which ended up by 1945 as a sort of giant ashtray, a probable result whether under either British or German ownership). Every year odd decisions are taken with incalculable results. Too much time thinking about them can result in madness.
Thomas and Ernie
In a constant hunt for cheap but interesting lodgings I have spent a lot of time crisscrossing German suburbs, or rather the late-nineteenth-century ring of housing which, for many towns, showed that after sometimes centuries of inanition they were once more economically on the move. These houses were built for the locally wealthy and have a mass and stolidity matched perhaps only in the Midwest of the same period: homes for lawyers, bankers, managers of substantial factories. The variety in these homes is enormous, but it is variety only of ornament – folkloric rhymes, industrial Jugendstil decoration, monstrous pillars and lots of coloured glass. Even walking past these houses I feel as though I am becoming a German banker of the 1900s, in a burstingly tight swallow-tail coat, mopping the bulges of fat at the back of my shaved head with a fine linen handkerchief, studs about to explode from my collar as I inwardly boil about Social Democrat traitors, whether my wife would benefit from a little electro-convulsion therapy and why my daughter has cut her hair so short and started smoking cigarettes.
There is a uniform atmosphere of sadness about these homes, the product of such a brief period of aggressively confident prosperity, but since then filled with terrible political ideas, telegrams with unmanageable news, endless demands for public action of a kind that destroyed private life. This is not helped too by the German fondness for small cactuses which, in their tumescent gloom, press themselves against the windows of a hundred thousand suburban windows, like a toytown, sadistically confined version of Saguaro National Park. The old suburbs of eastern Germany have a further layer of distress to deal with and it is perhaps in the smaller towns, such as Eisenach or Eisleben or Meissen, that the full measure of the German disaster becomes clear, a feeling that what has been achieved since the 1900s has simply been a sequence of private nightmares building on each other until, at last, the Wall was brought down. At regular intervals these eastern suburbs still have abandoned homes – and industrial Jugendstil looks very grotty with amazing speed – put into limbo by legal uncertainties and mocking all the busy restoration work on the rest of the street.
Th
e era of these houses can also be seen in the shops, where a large proportion of the surviving buildings come from the same mad wave of prosperity, even the most quaint and hand-painted old apothecaries turning out to be the remaining flotsam of some 1890s bout of historicism. The years of blockade in the First World War, Depression, Total War and communism offered few opportunities to replace or even maintain anything at all – beyond the often understandably utilitarian response to bomb damage.
This pre-war Germany now seems an almost intolerably poignant place, expressed in the building stock that still keeps indifferently going despite the terrors of its owners. There is a sort of confident innocence too about the major chancellors of the period, Caprivi and Bülow, who between them spent some thirteen years under Kaiser Wilhelm certainly making an aggressive and overweening Germany, but not a place of unique or awful dysfunction.
This atmosphere is perfectly preserved in Thomas Mann’s early novels. I’ve always had a rather mixed relation with Mann. I remember reading The Magic Mountain, ill-advisedly, on the south-eastern edge of the Gobi Desert where the rival attractions of Bactrian camels, mutton stew, yurts and a genial Han guide who spoke excellent French but no English rather swamped Mann’s beautifully modulated philosophical discussions. The most serious Mann setback was undoubtedly during a period when I commuted daily on a train across a dull bit of south-central England and decided to use the opportunity to read the whole of Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, his immense tetralogy dramatizing the world of Genesis. I remember with mixed shame and triumph, as my train pulled into Woking station, jumping out, impelled by some inner necessity, dumping Joseph and His Brothers in a platform waste bin (a satisfying clang) and leaping back onto the train.
