by Simon Winder
As the Habsburg Empire imploded after the Armistice, the question of who ruled this area provoked serious fighting, upheaval and poverty as Allied forces tried to adjudicate between the puny new Austrian state and the equally demoralized and shorn Hungarian one. The Czechs pulled off the strange trick of appearing to have always been on the side of the Allies and secured the northern city of Pressburg, changing its name to Bratislava. A tense, brutal referendum in Ödenburg made it part of Hungary and turned it into Sopron. Posters and pamphlets from the time (1921) are a horrible reminder of just how quickly politics can sour. The Austrian and Hungarian relationship had always been a tense and awkward one, but between them they had defeated the Ottomans, played an incalculably important role in European culture for four centuries and just fought a world war alongside each other at huge, mutual sacrifice. The Empire’s end tore this up in weeks. Pro-Austrian propaganda offered the voters of Ödenburg/Sopron a choice between Austrian ‘Freedom, Nationhood, Prosperity’ or Hungarian ‘Brutality, War, Starvation’. Another pamphlet shows Hungary as a skeleton in gypsy clothing beguiling the innocent Ödenburgers with his violin music into voting for Hungarian loathsomeness. It is all a long way from the slightly dopey beauty of Schubert’s Hungarian Melody. Thousands left their homes in scenes which were to be become gruellingly familiar over the coming decades, but which then had a shock of novelty for Germans. With the Cold War the inhabitants of Bratislava and Sopron had the unhappy experience of realizing that decisions taken by their parents and grandparents put them on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain while the rest of the Burgenland, once the Russians had gone in 1955, was left to muck around in expensive cars and enjoy, quite accidentally, the pleasures of post-war white-goods capitalism.
This was one of many disasters – a pre-1914 world in which language had been important but not fundamental was replaced by a set of nation states committed to a linguistically driven uniformity. Linguistic nationalism, once it had created some good operas, erected a few statues and changed some road names, tended to turn ferociously on anyone viewed as outside the ethnic pale. The only justification for the existence of, say, Czechoslovakia was a linguistic one – but in practice the new country remained linguistically a shambles. Even the relatively moderate Czechs were compelled by the logic of their own language nationalism to come down hard on ‘their’ Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles and Ruthenes. This toxicity was resolved with the most extreme violence: the nature of the disaster was dictated by Nazism, but none of the nationalists in their new nations could ever stabilize and legitimize their unhappy countries.
Austro-Hungarian officers had been obliged to speak a number of languages, at least in pidgin form, but this was not the future. Romanians forced Hungarians and Germans to speak Romanian, Czechs turned on their German-speakers, and so on. Regions or provinces reliant on other regions suddenly became countries surrounded by enemy countries and their economies, never strong and already wrecked by war, simply collapsed. The traditional responses to such failure (to move to the cities or emigrate to America) came to nothing as the cities themselves began to fail (Vienna lost some three hundred thousand inhabitants after 1918) and America shut down immigration.
Each small country had its own absolutist ideology of a kind which was both loathsome and highly dangerous. German-speakers went into a kind of shock – their own chauvinistic language of rule had become a badge of shame and a broad swath of Central Europe from Danzig down into what became Yugoslavia enclosed all sorts of marooned German communities under the orders of other linguistic groups who their own nationalist culture had raised them to despise. And tangled up in a poisonous situation were groups viewed as beyond simple nationalist categories – Jews and gypsies. German organizations held elaborate regular ceremonies at the new borders to express their contempt for them. The fate of cities felt to be German, such as Bratislava, Posen, Riga and Sopron, was viewed with a similar fetishistic tearfulness to that felt by the French when Alsace-Lorraine had been made German in 1871.
It is impossible, even at this distance in time, not to feel absolute despair at the result of the First World War. It is traditional to see Germany as tied to the rotting hulk of the Habsburg Empire, but in terms of the impact of the war it is more plausible to see the Habsburg Empire tied to the cretinous and wholly unrealistic goals of the Germans. All the Habsburgs wanted to do was punish Serbia for killing their heir and attempting to destabilize Bosnia. Their attempts to do this might in 1914 have provoked a Russian intervention which would have resulted in the Habsburgs losing and a treaty being drawn up with various changes of a traditional kind, but Germany’s irrational attempts to defeat much of the world (including large and important bits its army could not even reach) doomed the Habsburgs to disaster. The Habsburgs’ own epics of terrible defeat, ranging from the Siege of Przemyl (a hundred and fifty thousand dead or captured) to the Brusilov Offensive (a million and a half dead, wounded and captured) could, despite regularly beating the Italians, have no effect on a war whose decision was being reached elsewhere.
The Empire would have broken up anyway at some point, but there was little indication in 1914 that this was going to happen in the ruinous way it did. Vienna had pointed to a fabulous future and was in no sense an anachronistic city. It had even created its own ‘luxury modernism’, expressed variously through Klimt, Freud, Berg, Hoffmann, Loos and so many others and which could easily have defined European style and ideas for decades. It seems more rational to be angry than mournful that a war of such a peculiar kind would end all this. The final movement of Berg’s extraordinary Three Orchestral Pieces, with its lurching, macabre military march, written in the spring and summer of 1914, is generally seen as a brilliant premonition of the conflict to come – but nobody could foresee such a thing. It would be as plausible to criticize Klimt because his paintings incorrectly presaged a future mostly filled with half-nude society hostesses. Most of the great works of Central Europe after the war would have happened in some form regardless of the political arrangements. Just in terms of music, figures such as Bartók, Szymanowski, Janáček and Schoenberg were clearly set on their marvellous paths before or during the war and the subsequent political arrangements of their countries were an accident, however celebrated by nationalists. Without the fracturing of the Empire (and the Russian Civil War and its results) they could have been perhaps just more happy and productive – and certainly not ended up with Bartók struggling with American breakfast cereal in New York or Schoenberg watering his garden plants in Los Angeles.
Putsches and suspenders
Berlin in the 1920s is one of the modern era’s great clichés. What had been the starchy heart of the Prussian barracks became almost overnight a lubricious wonderland. The sheer violent energy of Grosz’s, Dix’s and Beckmann’s paintings, with their robot-like profiteers, porcine streetwalkers and mutilated beggars, define the period so vividly that any suggestion that this may not have been the common experience has almost no meaning. For myself, I am anxious that, dressed in suspenders, an old Freikorps helmet and clumsily applied blusher, lying in the corner of some chaotic squat, I would probably not have been able to keep up. But I doubt that I would have been alone. A more characteristic picture of the 1920s might have been one of an impoverished family whose high hopes in 1913 had been turned to garbage and whose wan lives were dominated by the deaths of several members through the trenches, civil war, epidemic or starvation and by having no work. Berlin was in the 1920s a city of ghosts, both at a private level and at a public one, with the military and imperial heart of the city ripped out and thrown away. The orgiastic feeling of the city, so enjoyed by foreigners, was based on a void.
1920s Berlin keeps an astonishing glamour now in large part because what followed was so horrible that this one decade can be seen as a delusive but pleasurable bubble, rather than as an incubator for subsequent events. There is no doubt that some of the era’s cultural achievements were extremely alluring, but they stemmed from the st
range vacuum in Berlin’s moral code and were not characteristic of most of the rest of the country, which instead saw Berlin’s vigour as a disgusting laxness and depravity that added to the sense the Weimar Republic was illegitimate. Fritz Lang’s spectacular and highly successful movies (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, M and particularly perhaps the delirious Spies) all peddle Berlin and the Republic as display cases for the worship of criminals, drug use and promiscuity – a mix that perhaps drummed up as much support for Nazi discipline (albeit somewhat regretfully) among rural and small-town populations as the economic situation or fallen national pride. Equally the major artists of the period, with their emphasis on viciousness, prostitution and the distorted or murdered human form, appalled many Germans and made the Nazi ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition and removal of Expressionist pictures and sculptures widely applauded. This tension, intolerance and rush to violence were as characteristic of the German avant-garde as of communist or Nazi street gangs. The room for manoeuvre among the thoughtful and genuinely democratic politicians remained painfully slight, even in the tiny period between Germany entering the League of Nations in 1926 and the Wall Street Crash three years later that ended any chance of the republic becoming ‘normal’.
One of the most really uncomfortable ‘Weimar’ things to do remains walking the route taken by Hitler and his followers through central Munich in November 1923 at the end of their attempted putsch. The putsch was a joke, in as much as most of the country paid no attention and Hitler’s announcement that the government in Bavaria and Berlin had ceased to exist had no currency outside the walls of the beer-cellar where he and his associates held several Bavarian officials hostage. Hitler, inspired by Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ the previous year, in the face of which the Italian government had collapsed, felt he could achieve something similar. Extraordinarily, given that Hitler was still a marginal and ridiculous obsessive in a provincial town, Ludendorff (who had put down his detective novels and returned from Sweden when he thought it safe) was also a critical figure in the putsch. In the status-mad German world, a vegetarian ex-corporal plotting with a man who had only five years earlier been effective dictator of Germany shows how chaotic life had become, driven mad by military failure and economic implosion.
Aware that the putsch was being met in the wider world with indifference, Ludendorff attempted to dramatize events with a march through Munich. Some two thousand assorted Nazis tramped through the town centre – as you come to the narrowed road, lined with the palace to the right and pretty chocolate shops to the left, it becomes almost intolerable to share the same space. Here, before the street opened into Odeonsplatz and the Field Marshals’ Hall, a cordon of police took advantage of the narrow street to bar the way. Both sides opened fire and the man linking arms with Hitler was killed. Given Hitler’s unique and specific role in the death of millions, this gloomy, high-walled patch of road is one of the world’s worst places. By a few inches an anonymous Bavarian policeman just managed to miss doing what it took an inconceivable level of worldwide violence to achieve.
The aftermath of the putsch was curious. Ludendorff, with a sort of loopy bravery, carried on marching until arrested, while Hitler ran away. Ludendorff despised Hitler from then on, was acquitted at the trial, and played no further part in the Nazi story. Even then, Hitler’s range of offences was voluminous and he should have been in gaol until well into the 1950s, but the poison that had seeped into so many aspects of German life came to his rescue. An outrageously partial judge gave him a short sentence, patently out of admiration for a man of the right who was anti-communist, anti-Jewish and pro-military. The publicity around the trial gave Hitler a platform which he never relinquished and a near-comic failure became the basis for Europe’s ruin.
The madly distant worlds of Berlin vaudeville and Munich militarist plotting were equally characteristic responses to the collapse of 1918. In Britain and America the great mass of millions of survivors of the war went home, and lived out their lives as veterans only at occasional beery reunions. A minority never recovered from their experience, remaining in vast purpose-built hospitals for the rest of their lives or distressingly at odds with the post-war world. But most were relieved that the fighting was over and had no further interest in the values of a terrible time, beyond a clipped and tidy manner much laughed at by later generations. These were countries which had suffered, but had also triumphed. Every country had its own reaction. Perhaps most disastrously many Italians felt their war dead (in proportion even worse than Britain’s) an absolute and shameful exercise in futility. This resulted in the collapse of its government and the arrival of Mussolini – a figure who played a far more baleful wrecking role in Europe than Hitler did until 1938, a ruler as damaging to peace as Napoleon III had been in the 1850s and 1860s.
The German reaction to defeat was furious disbelief. The new government’s decision to allow troops from the front to march through Berlin after the Armistice – like victors rather than the tail-end of a now permanently expunged military tradition – signified a disastrous confusion not resolved until 1945. There were, of course, plenty of beerily ineffective veterans’ associations, but there were also repeats across Germany of the small group that formed around Hitler in Munich, constantly, acridly reliving the events of November 1918. Some consistently good economic news might have swept these groups away or a bit of luck might have killed or imprisoned Hitler (and it is striking that none of those around him could, in Hitler’s absence, have ever been more than a brutal South American caudillo – the chaotic, very specific evangelical cocktail in Hitler’s mind was crucial to what followed).
Far away from these bitter responses, there remained a quieter and more reflective Germany, albeit one that in the end proved completely useless. Most famously there was the ‘Migrating Birds’ (Wandervogel) movement, whereby hundreds of thousands of people hiked, sang songs and built camp-fires. Although its roots lay before the First World War its great expansion happened in the 1920s when every conceivable hiking trail must have been choked with uncontrollable defiles of whistling characters with special hiking sticks. (The aftershocks of this movement continue to make hiking a precarious activity today. In one of my ludicrous attempts to follow in Goethe’s footsteps, this time in the hills above the Harz town of Thale, things started out perfectly enjoyably, but by mid-morning so many walkers in special fluorescent gear were pouring down the hillside, like a jolly version of an orc army, that I had to press myself against the cliff face to get out of the way.)
The ‘Migrating Birds’ movement was both a direct response to the war and a further expression of popular romanticism, egged on by better communication. The trains that had whisked millions of soldiers to the Eastern and Western fronts now provided similar super-saturated concentrations of cheerful hikers. Together with the scouts, the ‘Migrating Birds’ were banned by the Nazis. Some of their members enthusiastically switched to the outdoorsy values of the Third Reich: others turned away and into themselves. As so often in German history there was a strong pull towards the soft or incompetent which tragically proved an insufficient response to the aggression of others.
Forms of avant-garde life continued too, albeit with much reduced resources. The vigour of German music had never relied on the gormless Berlin court and so did not feel its loss. In 1921 Prince Max Egon von Fürstenberg founded the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany’s far south-west, which premiered in its first season the perhaps quintessential piece of Weimar music, Paul Hindemith’s Chamber Music Number One, with its deliriously clattering xylophones, siren and tin can filled with sand – a vision of somewhat frenetic happiness. The festival burst with remarkable sounds until it collapsed in the Depression. It is a curious indication of how briefly the Nazis ruled that Prince Max was still presiding over the revived festival in the 1950s, receiving on his death memorial pieces by Stravinsky, Boulez and others. The effort required to keep in mind these cultural currents without seeing them as a naive interlude between wars i
s perhaps just too great, but it remains crucial in the interests of sanity, proportion and self-worth.
‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . . ‘
There is so much to be written about the popcorn-popper explosion of ideas out of Germany in this period, even if it was all within a drastically narrower ambit than before 1914. The Bauhaus managed to invent most aspects of modern design in a mad flurry of excellence and to walk along the leafy street of the professors’ houses in Dessau remains a thrilling experience. This continuing, light, stainless-steel version of Wagner’s ‘complete-work-of-art’ approach to life had its schools in other countries too, but there was a wholeheartedness in Weimar Germany, inherited not least from the pre-war Darmstadt colony. It imprints an entire era, from writing paper to factories, and involved artists shuttling frantically between disciplines and ideas. Oskar Schlemmer is a perfect example – a painter and sculptor who used a sort of Bauhaus style in any number of media and who collaborated with Hindemith in making a ‘Triadic Ballet’ where dancers lurched about in semi-robotic costumes of great, colourful stylishness (and which can still be seen at the New State Gallery in Stuttgart). Schlemmer sums up a world of intensely experimental and curious ideas, linking the Bauhaus (where he taught) and many other practices and values, all feeding off each other.
The robot-like ‘Triadic’ dancers were part of a wider fascination with automata that also seems very characteristic of the period. Karel apek had introduced the word ‘robot’ in its modern sense in his 1921 Czech play R.U.R. and mechanical or jerkily moving people flit about in German culture in a way that makes the atmosphere new, alarming and very enjoyable. Nabokov’s brilliant Berlin novel King, Queen, Knave enjoys itself with the invention of robot shop-window mannequins, artists such as Schlemmer or Klee portrayed humans as forms of dolls or automata, two of the most haunting German films, The Golem and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, lumber and lurch and, of course, in one of the greatest pulp coups in all cinema, the atrocious Rotwang conjures up the Maria robot in Metropolis.
