Germania

by Simon Winder

  These setbacks aside, I have always come back to Mann (but not to Joseph) and particularly to Buddenbrooks and Royal Highness and the pre-war short stories which in their different ways exemplify the pleasures and tensions of an era which had so much going for it and which, in the light of what happened in the next thirty years, seemed so painfully hopeful and appealing. These books are a world away from the spiked-helmet, scarlet-faced Germany of the parade ground, as indeed were so very many aspects of German life.

  There can be no doubt though that the scarlet-faced Germany does have a strong presence in the run-up to the First World War. Spurred on by the example of Bismarck’s own heroic physique, a style of total excess married to ever more outlandish decoration makes German leaders of this period thoroughly distinctive. A sort of sexual dimorphism comparable to that seen among sea-elephants kicks in – with women tending to be little, gaunt, corseted, sickly and prone to hanging around in spas, while the men, stuffed with course upon course of beer and venison at ever-grosser regimental reunions took on a monstrous bulk, festooned in vast moustaches and beards, ostrich-plumed hats, and medievally inflected uniforms. There must have been myriad grimly boisterous occasions when these characters bloviated interminably about Germany’s greatness, its unique mission, the disgustingness of Jews, Poles, etc. So large do these monsters loom (Tirpitz’s whiskers, Moltke the Younger’s stomach) that it is tempting to see them as the quintessence of the era. Certainly Hitler very self-consciously made himself into their exact opposite – a tiny moustache, a raincoat, vegetarianism. For people used to having the Kaiser’s moustache in their faces, Hitler’s radicalism must have been immediately visible before he even spoke.

  But while these figures were both important and as it turned out disastrous for Germany, they only represented one strand in a country which in other ways could not have been more admirable or exciting. Everywhere Germany bristles with reminders of this world, however haggard from later devastation. There are so many examples, but Darmstadt really sticks in my mind. I first went there after the Frankfurt Book Fair many years ago because it was nearby and because I thought it would be funny to go to the Wella Hair Care Museum. As it turned out I never went to the museum as the rest of the city was fascinating enough. Darmstadt is the old capital of Hesse-Darmstadt, the southern enemy of Hesse-Kassel (Hesse had been split between the children of Phillip I of Hesse in 1567). Outrageous attempts to do each other down were mixed with other periods of cooperation or indifference, but in the end it was Darmstadt that won: Hesse-Kassel battled through amazing setbacks to survive the Napoleonic Wars (in the process playing a crucial part in bringing the Rothschild family from nearby Frankfurt to prominence), but blew it by supporting the Austrians in 1866 and being swallowed up as a Prussian state. Hesse-Darmstadt was nimbler and survived as a political unit into the Weimar Republic.

  Kassel and Darmstadt were reunited, however, in the devastation of Allied bombing – in one hideous raid sixteen thousand people were killed in Darmstadt in a few minutes and the old city destroyed. Darmstadt had as many reasons to be destroyed as any German town, but at least in its pre-1914 incarnation it had stood for some of the sort of slightly daffy introversy which Mann had celebrated in Royal Highness. The vexed, death-obsessed, gay Grand Duke Ernst Louis (‘Ernie’) is one of those fabulous if rare figures who make being interested in modern royalty actually worthwhile. I can’t overload this book with much detail on his cursed upbringing, but it is fair to mention just as a start that he believed himself responsible for the death of his mother and had survived the deaths of a brother (a horrible accident) and a sister (diphtheria). He married a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, known as ‘Ducky’, who had a nightmarish time battling for Ernie’s attention under the impact of his numerous affairs and bitter melancholy. They had two children, one stillborn and one who – shortly after Ducky finally divorced Ernie – died of typhoid (she is still commemorated in a Darmstadt park with a moving if strange little relief showing her as Snow White in the midst of grieving dwarves).

  This sequence of depressing domestic events filled in the 1890s, but as usual the personal gets buried and all that is left is the buildings – or in this case a handful of mainly reconstructed buildings. Ernst Louis’s great claim to everyone’s time was his enthusiasm for Jugendstil and his founding of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony, an entirely adorable initiative which makes Darmstadt the wonderland of pre-1914 modern design, just as the strongly linked later Bauhaus fulfils the same role for the post-1918 era. Of course, this role makes both initiatives at many levels unbearable. The sheer pleasure that the artists took in working across madly different media and their commissions dotted across the German landscape (often for patrons who were made to suffer financially for their enthusiasm) is so at odds with what Germany is more generally known for in the first half of the twentieth century that in some moods their jaunty clocks, typefaces, statues, cupboards and tapestries seem almost too much. And these designs and their creators cannot be completely corralled off from the rise of the Nazis, whose aesthetic was deeply indebted to their work. Someone like Joseph Maria Olrich seems now so lucky to have died young and unimplicated, having created first the Vienna Secession Building and then some of the happiest and strangest Darmstadt buildings, including the Wedding Tower with its wondrous sun-dial by the great typeface designer and graphic artist Friedrich Wilhelm Kleukens. Peter Behrens built a house in Darmstadt designed down to the last towel (what a marvellous thing to be able to do!) and then went on to design the AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin and invent the idea of corporate design and logos, teach Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, and live just long enough to become tangled in Nazism before mercifully dying in 1940. It is impossible even to conceive of the modern world without these figures and so much was kick-started by ‘Ernie’. Most late-Victorian royals seem to be merely freakish soldiers awaiting their own extinction while either eating and drinking themselves sick or shooting the sorts of animals that children like. But ‘Ernie’ is an appealing throwback to Archduke Ferdinand II in Innsbruck three centuries earlier, however much emotional wreckage he left around him.

  Indeed the more I mull over this subject, the more difficult it becomes to leave it: there is almost no upper limit to the achievements of this slightly marginal Germany, as it is this Germany which has survived, while the political and historical Germany destroyed itself. I have to stop, but must mention at least in passing figures as various as Alfred Ballin, the millionaire Jewish owner of Hamburg America, the world’s largest shipping line, who ferried to America a large proportion of the five and a half million Germans who left in the century before 1914 and thereby absolutely revolutionized the fates of their children and grandchildren – perhaps not something that can be dwelt on too much: what seemingly sensible decisions are any of us taking today which might have as drastically a happy or unhappy result? Or Paula Modersohn-Becker, a painter who lived as part of the Worpswede community outside Bremen, and created a wonderful sequence of self-portraits, landscapes, pictures of little girls and images of rural life before dying aged thirty-one of complications after giving birth to her first child. Her painting of herself naked, heavily pregnant, proud and anxious, is one of the great modern self-portraits, but of course for us informed by her fate shortly afterwards. Or Albert Einstein from Ulm. Or Gustav Mahler, a Jewish, German-speaking Moravian employed by the Habsburg court who died in 1911, fortunate to avoid any knowledge of the destruction of the Jews, the end of the Habsburg court and the expulsion of the German Moravians. Indeed so many aspects of Mahler’s existence were swept away after his death that we could really just be flattering ourselves to think of ourselves as living in a culture which is connected to him, much as the inhabitants of the Renaissance were severed from the Middle Ages by the Black Death. But if the point of this section is to show the vigour and pleasure of the pre-1914 world this can be summed up by the image of Mahler and Strauss in 1905 happily playing through the score of the latter’s
forthcoming opera Salome in a piano shop in Straßburg, a reminder that magical events could occur even in the occupied Reich Territory of Alsace. Or there is my favourite German painter, August Macke, who I would have liked to devote an entire chapter to. Under the pressures of such a pointless question, if I had to choose a single, favourite painting it would have to be Macke’s Little Walter’s Playthings in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt: a series of simple colour shapes to create a table corner, a mat and its surroundings and a group of objects – a matryoshka, two balls, flowers in a pot, a toy rabbit and a little rodent pet. There are thousands of grander, more powerful and more brilliant pictures in the world, but I’d settle for Little Walter’s Playthings, not least for its revolutionary role in making guinea pigs an acceptable subject for portraiture. Macke spent his entire, short life creating paintings of happiness – shops, souks, parks, parrots, beautiful hats, all in the most surprising and lovely colours. He was killed in Champagne a few weeks into the war, which of course is where the problem begins.

  Podsnap in Berlin

  Originally built in a village some way outside Berlin, the Charlottenburg Palace continues somehow to feel rural despite streets, houses and factories having long since chewed up to and around it. As so often in Germany its ‘English Park’ manages to be more successfully of its type than most of those in England itself, with little buildings and statues tucked away, proliferating, richly smelling undergrowth, plus such exotics (to English eyes) as macabre hooded crows and almost tame red squirrels, with straggling tufts of unkempt hair and hectic eyes that give them something of the air of traditional Berlin squatters.

  The Palace holds all kinds of pleasures and since it was built in the late seventeenth century it has represented the cheerful, normal side of Prussia. The tombs of several Prussian monarchs, none too mad or flashy, are in the mausoleum. Karl Friedrich Schinkel worked on the buildings in the early nineteenth century and his whole career (he died in 1841) is a reminder of the civilized, eclectic and charming aspects of Prussia, just as much as figures such as Kleist, Humboldt or Hoffmann. His legacy has taken a beating from high explosives, but every one of his surviving works is likeable and still surprising. Perhaps even more enjoyable (as with the work of his older English contemporary Sir John Soane) is stepping into the fantasy world of unbuilt projects, such as his delirious plans for a massive royal palace for Otto, the Wittelsbach king of newly independent Greece, which would have incorporated the Parthenon as almost a minor decorative feature. Schinkel also happened to be a marvellous if part-time painter, and his Gothic Church on a Cliff by the Sea (in the Old National Gallery in Berlin) is a sort of encyclopaedia of mad German enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, with brave knights, mighty banners, a Schloss, a rainbow, ancient German woods and the most amazing lighting effects. Painted in 1815 it all seems a world away from the infantile and obscene medieval world imagined by Himmler but, as with Caspar David Friedrich, one can see worrying, if blameless, flashes of what became so curdled in later German nationalism.

  Schinkel’s work at Charlottenburg sets the tone for the whole place – particularly a pavilion built for Friedrich Wilhelm III in an Italian style, which, almost uniquely among German-Italian buildings, does not look suicidally glum and displaced. Wandering around the palace itself there is the happy surprise of one of David’s heroic paintings of Napoleon crossing the Alps, which Marshal Blücher picked up as war loot and which ended up here on a wall far too small for its demented size. But all the fun comes to an end with a stifling room devoted to a monstrous set of silver, given as a wedding present to Crown Prince Wilhelm and his wife on their marriage in 1905. Seeing this infinite expanse of heavy, dreary, unusable and pointless cutlery is to land heavily in the noxious world of Mr Podsnap from Our Mutual Friend, with his inhumanly heavy silver dinner-table centrepieces, his spoons too wide for normal mouths, his insufferably self-righteous opinions about his nation’s superiority to all others and about the evils of the poor.

  It is perhaps putting too much weight on some knives and forks, but the atmosphere of almost weary grossness in that room is truly startling and can be linked to a wider unease with how official Germany saw itself in this period. The most enormous example of the same tendency remains Berlin Cathedral, built at the orders of Wilhelm II as a showcase for Hohenzollern religiosity, and as a last resting place for numerous Hohenzollern lead coffins which had formerly been scattered about. This truly awful historicist stoneyard can of course be enjoyed very briefly for the irony of the royal family it extols being kicked out in the decade following its completion, but this only gets you as far as the front steps. Some trouble was taken in dropping bombs on the cathedral during the war and the communist authorities should have honoured this by dynamiting the rest, but somehow it survived and was lavishly restored after reunification.

  All this is really just to say that Wilhelm II’s Berlin is miles away from the wonders of Schinkel’s imagination, or the baroque cheeriness of the main Charlottenburg complex. There is something absolutely arid and cheerless about this official Prussian world which also infects so much of the photography of the period. The Kaiser himself might have been enthusiastic about inventions – Zeppelins, dreadnoughts, cinema – but he and his entourage seem caught, much like the Romanovs and the Habsburgs, in a clotted aesthetic almost unrelated to the modern world springing up all around them, adrift from Germany’s vigorous consumerism, its social democracy, its arts and science. The Prussian rulers and their military had no monopoly on unstable and disturbing nationalism, but there is something definitely hectic and extremely unattractive about official Germany, with its relentless obsession with uniforms, grandiloquent, talentless building projects, unfeasible cutlery, ceaseless ceremonial, speeches, stuffiness and chauvinism.

  Varieties of militarism

  The causes of the First World War is a despairing essay topic. For the British generation who fought that war, and for those who had to deal with its even worse successor, the Great War was the result of German militarism. It was essential to any worthwhile narrative that there should be a villain in 1914 because it would be self-evidently too horrible to imagine killing on such a scale as a result of mere accident. The famous American poster showing Germany as a huge gorilla in a spiked helmet, standing in a devastated landscape with the corpse of a girl in one hand and a blood-caked club with ‘Kultur’ written on it, has haunted me ever since I saw it in a history book as a child. The Kaiser himself, in fact a rather depressive and marginal figure during the war, is shown in hundreds of cartoons exulting in death, attempting to eat the world, and so on.

  With the cooling of the hatreds of the time this view seems odder and odder. There can be no doubt about the disastrous result of the war – the destruction of the world economy and the incubation of dozens of sick and creepy forms of nationalism that resulted in a further world war orchestrated by the pitiful and malign figure of Hitler. When writing this book I had to decide when I would bale out – and that would clearly be when most of the Germans I most admire also baled out if they could, about 1933. Germany enters a genuine and horrifying dark age at that point, but this was still a long way off in 1914.

  What now seems strange is the fake nature of German militarism. It was not expressed in fighting anybody – since its inception in 1871 the German empire had fought nobody at all outside small but disgusting colonial wars, on which it shared a level playing field with Britain and France. By contrast the Russians had fought two very serious wars – one in 1876–7 against the Ottoman empire in conjunction with the Serbs, Romanians and Bulgarians and one against the Japanese in 1904–5. Both these conflicts were on a huge scale and strained all the countries involved to their limit: the strain even of success on the societies that fought them was hard to sustain, the casualties huge and the damage horrifying. The total destruction of a Russian fleet by the Japanese in a few minutes made admirals around the world sick with fear. As a gesture of solidarity with Russia, Montenegro had also declared w
ar on Japan. While this in practical terms achieved little, it could have been a little warning – which went unregarded – about the mystical and irrational links between Russia and the small Balkan states. In the same period Russia carved out a Central Asian empire for itself of over half a million square miles and industrialized on an increasingly startling scale, not least through French investment. The army lay at the heart of the Russian ruling class and was the principal focus of state expenditure.

  The point of discussing Russia is not to launch into yet another grand summary of the causes of the war but to provide some context for Germany’s own undoubted militarism. Compared to Russia, Germany was a state that venerated its army, poured money into it, and dressed it up, but did not use it. Britain is another interesting contrast. Her key needs were for a navy and she had the largest in the world. In order to secure much of the world’s gold and diamond production she had provoked a conflict with the Boer-ruled, independent republics of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal). Some seventy-five thousand people were killed in the fighting, including a huge number of Boer civilians put into concentration camps to end the guerrilla warfare that followed the defeat of the main Boer armies. The Germans had invested heavily in the Boer states, but had been told by a British emissary before the war broke out that if they interfered the British would declare war on Germany, destroy all German shipping and blockade Hamburg and Bremen so that Germany would choke. This was an interesting and tactful preview of British behaviour in 1914. In that single threat was all the argument that figures such as Admiral von Tirpitz needed to build Germany’s own navy to prevent this happening (which, after colossal expenditure, it didn’t).