by Simon Winder
Accidental decisions could have a major effect on the durability of a memorial. A huge list of dead inside Wolfenbüttel’s principal church keeps all its power, whereas one outside the church in Augsburg is so weatherworn it is missing many names. It has its own power, however, because inside is a photo of King Ludwig III of Bavaria arriving in the summer of 1914 to dedicate the new regiment, many of whose troops, present in the church on that day, would have shortly thereafter contributed their names to the list on the fading marble outside. As with all such monuments there is a sense that even taking a slight interest makes one an interloper. It is unlikely that the memorials ever took on a constant meaning. Most were put up in the early 1920s once order had been reimposed, often after local civil wars. Fresh events were piling up so rapidly that the atmosphere of the dedication ceremonies is unimaginable. It was the constant wish of politicians in the Weimar Republic that people would move on – but they didn’t. The millions of dead, the influenza epidemic, the loss of national territory, the hyperinflation crushed any sense of a future. Each year the inhabitants of whole towns would gather around their memorial and reflect on Germany’s, their town’s, their family’s disaster. In due course the memorials were richly Nazified and then set aside by later events.
The greatest German memorial remains the first one I encountered, on my first visit to Germany in 1991. For reasons that I simply cannot recall I spent some time in Hamburg but then went to spend several days in the haggard East German town of Magdeburg. This was at a point of very superficial reunification – empty, Stalinist squares lined with shops selling only cans of meat. Magdeburg was one of the most unrelievedly grim of these towns, but I enjoyed it endlessly – the layers of history seemed so thick and reunification held such promise (mainly fulfilled as it turned out) that Germany’s dark years were finally coming to an end. The new authorities had made some tiny efforts to perk things up, but as yet these appeared merely ghoulish. The soot-caked, suicidally gloomy old Wilhelmine post office, with its rotting statues of Otto the Great and friends, had been decorated with stickers featuring a cheerful yellow cartoon glove with eyes, exhorting Germans to enjoy their postal services.
Through almost unbelievable setbacks the much battered and repatched cathedral has survived and so, despite years of controversy and hiding, does Ernst Barlach’s Magdeburg Cenotaph. Barlach is one of the many highly attractive Weimar figures who, much like the Darmstadt artists before 1914, give Germany a completely different direction – but one which comes to nothing, flattened by a mass militarism which has had such uniquely terrible consequences. Barlach had been happily swept up in the fervour of 1914 but ended his service as a convinced pacifist. The cenotaph does not for a moment glorify war, but instead, in a set of monumental wooden figures, shows mournful, frightened or dead troops clinging to a cross. At night, in the darkened cathedral, with an area filled with candles in front of it, the cenotaph seems to sum up the shocked, fearful response to the Great War in a German equivalent to Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (published in 1929 – the year that Barlach’s memorial was unveiled). In the ever more threatening, polarized atmosphere of Germany the monument caused outrage and was, of course, dismantled after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Hidden, the monument re-emerged in East Germany and was reinstated, becoming in due course a focus for pro-unification sentiments in 1989. Like so many of Germany’s great monuments, it implies a road not travelled – and takes on an almost unbearable additional layer of meaning.
Some royal aftershocks
Stepping off the train at yet another tiny railway station, swinging my ballsy pigskin grip filled with heaps of books and underwear, it became after a while almost second nature to orient myself deftly to the geography of small princely towns. The main street from the railway would be surprisingly far away from the town square – a reflection on the local lord wanting to keep the threat, noise and indignity of trains at a distance. A spire or tower would quickly mark the main town church, which would be near the principal (or indeed only) square, with the Schloss set back several streets. As I whistled a tune and swung my grip (or, latterly, as I pulled along a little wheelie-bag, having damaged my lower back with that initial, ill-judged piece of luggage), I could not help feeling the sheer pleasure of harmlessness. These daft little towns, even if individual princes might have been in practice Prussian commanders, offered such a welcome affront to the more brutal currents in German history. If Saxony was a lesson in the limits of political incompetence, then the small towns seemed to celebrate a pure and genuine irrelevance, a crucial trait underestimated by historians. These places are like potato crisps in that there seems to be no upper limit to how many it is enjoyable to consume. Indeed, this entire book could have been filled with evasive and marginal material on an infinity of loopy backwaters, none without value or some unique oddness.
I cannot prevent myself, for example, from returning to that old favourite Bückeburg, former capital of the doll’s handkerchief state of Schaumburg-Lippe. Almost nothing ever happened here, for the understandable reason that there were too few people for anything other than a minor argument. But, as usual, it contains something strange – a Mannerist chapel inside the Schloss coated in painted flowers, fruit and cupids, the best, maddest heraldic decorations conceivable and an altar held up by enormous gold angels, sheltering the buried hearts of the counts and princes of Schaumburg-Lippe. The tours of such places are always tense as, however boring any given room, there is always the chance for something grotesque around the next corner and it is hard not to skip ahead in the hope of finding a treat – a stuffed wolf, a miniature cannon, an arbitrary tusk or some unsuccessful piece of locally produced classical allegory. Bückeburg’s glory is its run of portraits of the counts (who became princes with the end of the Holy Roman Empire) which allows an incredibly quick fast-forward of the entire experience of minor absolutist fashion from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, as a full dark wig gives way to a short white wig; sensible hair and a high collar to a manly beard and military uniform; and in turn to monocle, moustache and evening wear – and over and out! Bückeburg’s entirely disturbing feature is a series of chairs, each with its seat pattern stitched by the new bride of the count/prince – an assembly with a Duke Bluebeard-like atmosphere, implying a whole world of panicked and incompetent young stitching fingers now long reduced to dust.
I mention these places now because it is striking how recently they were at the heart of each small town, indeed much of the economic point. The people who lived in places like Bückeburg or Sigmaringen or Altenburg were there to service the family, economically and deferentially. Sometimes the late nineteenth century brought local or even quite substantial industries and at the latest real power drained away from these minor figures with the German empire’s creation in 1871. But if they could survive dynastic twists and deaths many of the rulers lasted to 1918. Wandering around these immense piles it is impossible not to notice how many of them took on new wealth and improvements right up to the First World War. The deal done with the surviving rulers in 1871 suggested that they would be frozen in place in an uneasy subserviency to the new emperor indefinitely and they behaved as such, continuing to lay down fresh layers of dynastic tat for their sons and their sons’ sons. In old photos the principal hall at the astonishingly large and magniloquent Schloss Altenburg is sensible, dull and neo-classical. Following a fire in 1900 or so it was rebuilt in an industrial neo-Renaissance style with riots of carved woodwork, elaborate fireplaces and leering wildmen. If the Dukes of Saxe-Altenburg had enjoyed a bit more use of the hall before being kicked out it might have looked by now, with a century of scuffs and kippering, fairly realistic. Or at Schloss Sigmaringen, also rebuilt after a fire, there is a gentlemen’s games room with a revolutionary black-graphite ceiling to absorb tobacco smoke, the whole place redolent of a sort of broad-arsed and side-whiskered Edwardian bonhomie of a very unappealing kind. The highlight of any of these, almost but not quite inte
rchangeable tours is always the royal/princely/comital bathroom, permanently frozen with the style of toilet installed in the 1890s or 1900s.
I need to stop here before I am reduced to sketching in details of the Empress Zita’s shower facilities, put into the Schonbrünn Palace during the First World War. The point is that in the chaotic, terrifying weeks of the Emperor Wilhelm II and the Emperor Karl I’s resignations, the whole lot fell to bits. Without the legitimacy of the main monarch, dynasties which had lasted centuries suddenly stopped. Many of these rulers, particularly the larger ones, had flattered themselves that they maintained a sort of autonomy, but in practice none did. They were as much part of the failed, loathed system which had brought the Central Powers to ruin as the more ostensibly powerful emperors. Some fled abroad acknowledging no change, some resigned in brief pedantic ceremonies, some managed to negotiate reasonable deals to retire. This Central Europe-wide spasm, straddling the announcement of the actual Armistice, was both positively revolutionary and oddly null. There seems to have been almost no interest in preserving these figures, flicking idly through their bathroom-fixture magazines, and the entire skein of symbolism and inter-marriage in many ways quite unexpectedly disintegrated. This generated some temporary oddities, such as the People’s Republic of Reuss, a Thumbelina-sized nest of Bolshevism created on the abdication of the last Reuss princes which was crushed and incorporated into the Weimar Republic by 1920.
Some families managed after 1918 to twist and find fresh public roles for themselves – Prince Charles Frederick of Hesse managed to become King of Finland for a couple of months, his son Prince Philipp of Hesse had a horrible role in the Third Reich. Many retired into wealthy private life. Others had a strange, continuing dynastic half-life. The Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen family, in their guiltily appealing Schloss on the Upper Danube, had suffered the indignity of seeing the other, Protestant branch of their family become Kings of Prussia. They lost control over their own territory in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, being absorbed by Prussia almost without anyone commenting. They retained their Schloss and honours as Hohenzollern princes and played their cards shrewdly (latterly, under that revolutionary black-graphite ceiling). Prince Karl Anton managed to have one child married to the King of Portugal and another to a son of the King of Belgium; another died fighting in the Austro-Prussian War and another was offered the Spanish throne, the action that sparked the Franco-Prussian War. There can hardly have been a dull week for the postman in Sigmaringen from the 1840s to the 1870s. And in a superb dynastic coup which made the others relatively paltry, a further son, Karl, became first Prince and then King of Romania, as Carol I. Quirkily, the Romanian Hohenzollerns found themselves fighting the Prussian Hohenzollerns when Romania joined the Allies in the First World War. Despite a disastrous war, the Romanians were rewarded for this, as Kaiser Wilhelm sloped off into exile, by being given piles of old Habsburg and Russian territory in a final, mad efflorescence of Hohenzollern–Sigmaringen power on the Black Sea. King Carol’s birth at Sigmaringen is proudly marked on a slate tablet in one of the upper courtyards of the Schloss (just after a quite matchless arquebus display), placed there to mark its centenary in 1939, immediately before the outbreak of the war that would finally destroy the dynasty.
Sigmaringen is also famous for the unwanted reason that the Nazis used it as the final home of the Vichy government, after D-Day had made it unsafe for them to remain in the country they were supposed to govern. The remaining members of the Hohenzollern family were themselves kicked out and lodged in a nearby Schloss of the Stauffenberg family, which had been confiscated following Claus von Stauffenberg’s involvement in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. There can be few better examples of the futility and terror of political power than the slow months spent by the Vichy government, pacing back and forth in the gentlemen’s games room or under heavy chandeliers of industrial Bohemian glass pretending to rule France and snarling at each other over whose fault it all was, with Pétain having as his medical attendant (by a happy stroke of luck) the collaborationist novelist of genius Céline, who wrote a brilliant, albeit impenetrable, novel, Castle to Castle, around his experiences.
Rather as the Taiwanese government would solemnly debate dam-building projects in Sichuan as though it still ruled mainland China, so the Vichy government was obliged to behave as though it still had a role in the life of France. Instead its members had now to suffer the exquisite torture of an endless, nightmarish, permanent Schloss tour: here is the yellow drawing room, so named after the canary-coloured furnishings, here is the dowager’s room, where she used to take chocolate with her friends, here yet again is the gentlemen’s games room, please note the revolutionary black-graphite ceiling, back and forth, back and forth for month after month waiting for the Allies to arrive and to be exiled or shot.
Indeed as ever more time goes by and with their real functions lying in an ever remoter and less plausible past, these places might all merge together into a single tour, an awful continuum before the final disaster: a slurry of fly-blown glass, hand-stitched cushions, paintings of men in sashes, unflushable toilets, rotten bed-frames, ridiculous old weapons, worm-eaten mounted elk heads, with the whole lot – following a final cry of ‘And through the next door is the yellow drawing room’ – slowly lurching to one side and crashing into the moat/river/formal gardens below.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
An unattractive lake » Putsches and suspenders »
‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . .’ » The death of science »
Terminal throes » Ending
An unattractive lake
Having felt sorry for Europeans obliged to holiday on the shores of the brackish and unengaging Baltic, I felt my sympathies being recalibrated further at the sight of families clustered on the shores of the reed-choked, biting-insect haven of the Neusiedler See. This surreal lake on the border between Austria and Hungary is very shallow (indeed so shallow that it occasionally just vanishes) and its water, as you chug across it in a lugubrious boat, takes on the appearance of lightly slopping and shiny chicken stock. In an intensely inland world, this haven of liquid, however duff, is so sought after that the little towns around it have hacked their way through the reeds and mud to build concrete vacation platforms which allow holidaymakers to encounter the lake’s quite narrowly definable pleasures. Suddenly the Baltic seems on a par with Waikiki.
The southern end of the lake is controlled by Hungary, and while it may be a somewhat depressing place to swim, the whole area is from almost every other point of view completely fascinating. An old piece of Royal Hungary (the small chunk held by the Habsburgs after the Ottoman annihilation of the Hungarian monarch and aristocracy in 1526), the lake and its shores were one of countless casualties in the shattering of the Empire in 1918. It is now the most eastern spot where German is spoken and forms one of the great linguistic frontiers. It is hard to convey to anyone not besotted with Central European culture just how tough it has been for me over the past few years to maintain mental military discipline and not spin off into thinly justified trips outside the core German zone. I so want to see Roth’s Galicia, von Rezzori’s Bukovina, Kiš’s Voivodina, Handke’s Karst, the countryside that inspired Bartók’s ‘night music’. Once down in the German-speaking far south-east it seemed unfair and mad that I had decided to saddle myself with a linguistic circumference which now – I hectically felt, with the cunning of an addict – simply made no sense. Sitting in the little Austrian village of Rust, eating pumpkin soup, watching countless tiny insects mating on my shirt, listening to the freakish rattle of storks clacking their beaks from their chimney-top nests, I could almost feel the gravitational pull of Hungary – only a short walk down the road to Fertörákos! I had deliberately left my passport in Vienna to prevent myself from taking that walk and this confusion and self-loathing probably contributed a lot to my antagonism towards the blamelessly slopping Neusiedler See.
The inhabitants of Royal Hungary had generally been ruled by Hungarian
aristocrats, but in many cases themselves spoke German. This was true from Pressburg in the north, through to Ödenburg and innumerable small towns, enough of which ended in the suffix burg to justify the newly invented, 1918 Austrian term Burgenland. At the end of the First World War the inhabitants of such places across Central Europe had only miserable options. Often dopey and agrarian regions which had been either internal to Austria-Hungary or, like the Sudetenland, been on a benign and unthreatening border, suddenly became key linguistic and ethnic fighting grounds. The point where German stops being spoken around the Neusiedler See could not be more dramatic – on the left bank was the small town of Eisenstadt with its old Hungarian aristocracy and German, Jewish and Croat inhabitants (including most famously, in much happier times, Haydn and Liszt), but once down off the hills and across the lake there are a handful of microscopic places before the prairie begins, crammed with grapes and sunflowers, and there can be no doubt you are heading into Hungary. In rough outline this was the point where medieval German settlers and Hungarian settlers crashed into each other, squeezing aside Slavs up to the north (who became Czechs and Slovaks) and Slavs down to the south (who became Croats and Slovenes).
