Germania

by Simon Winder

  Nabokov clung on in Berlin until 1937 before continuing the enforced journey that would turn him into a great writer in another language. But very soon after Hitler came to power, the first wave of unwilling, frightened exiles had begun. Brecht headed for Scandinavia, Beckmann for Amsterdam, Gropius for London, Mann for Switzerland, Moholy-Nagy and Roth for Paris, Walter for Vienna, Heartfield for Prague. Some would end up with relatively easy new careers in the USA or Britain, others would be forced to move from country to country ahead of the Nazis, others were overtaken and destroyed. It is impossible not to focus on the absolute and terrible disasters – Stefan Zweig and his wife, his magical achievement in so many novels and stories now counting for nothing, killing themselves in southern Brazil in 1941; Walter Benjamin committing suicide on the Spanish border; Kurt Schwitters, creator of enchanting collages and Dadaist objects, forced apart from his wife, cut off from the whole world which had made him one of the most genial figures of the inter-war period, dying totally neglected in the English Lake District in 1948.

  These figures are wholly unrepresentative, in as much as their fame and the nature of their work at least gave them mobility – but this is a personal book and I love what these people created so much, indeed cannot really imagine my own life without them, that I can only mark my own distress by stopping this book here. So many of the threads that run through modern German history – a creative irony, edginess, glee and oddness – are gone in a few weeks, wound up and replaced with messianic infantilism. The extreme violence of the regime is immediate and new and yet it is now hard to grasp because what followed once the regime had really settled in was so much worse, sorting all Germans (and then most Europeans) into perpetrators, bystanders and victims, categories which we will never cease agonizing over. Nazism’s linking of a sort of historicist sickness to industrialism had no precedent. The terrible cruelties that had happened on German soil over the centuries, the pogroms, plagues and massacres had now given way to something far, far worse. Anecdotal facetiousness has to get out of the way and simply stop.

  Conclusion

  In the hills

  There are so many places where this book could end. The ancient Harz city of Halberstadt might be one. In the closing days of the war this then beautiful place lay in the path of the American army. The fighting had almost ended and the Allies dropped leaflets instructing the town to put up a white flag on the city hall to indicate that it had surrendered. Halberstadt’s Nazi ruler – in one of those thousands of German decisions in this period that now seem absolutely baffling – refused. The Allies sent over a plane to check and, when there was no flag, destroyed almost the entire town in a few minutes. The shattered remains were then handed over to the Soviets and became part of East Germany. It now feels like another of those eastern towns, like Halle, Köthen or Brandenburg, which will simply never recover. The inhabitants have gone through too much and too many just want to leave. Immense work has gone into rebuilding parts of the old city, but there is not enough money or energy left. One curious local initiative has been to hold an organ concert in one of the churches to play John Cage’s piece As Slow As Possible, a performance which will end on 5 September 2640 and for which you have to book tickets years ahead to be present when the next key change is due. It should be pointed out that the notes are sustained mechanically rather than by employing several centuries’ worth of under-achieving organists linked up to tubes and buckets. While Cage’s piece is obviously a marvellous idea in itself, it does seem to act as a rather cruel theme-tune for modern Halberstadt.

  To the south of the town there are some hills called the Spiegelsberge. The landscape is the usual lovely German woodland with the usual little animals scampering about, but it is also a sort of palimpsest of sad German themes. The woods are dotted with follies built by the eighteenth-century Prussian poet Ludwig Gleim, who wrote The Grenadier’s Prussian War Songs, a once-famous collection sparked by the campaigns of Frederick the Great and initiating the great stream of German songs and lyrics that for two centuries punctuated and inspired nationalist events: some beautiful, some pompous and some loathsome, but almost all now completely sullied by later events. The follies have collapsed and are covered in soil, dead leaves and moss to a point where it has not been possible even to work out what some of them were meant to be. Gleim had been inspired by the endless, dream-like gardens at Wörlitz to make his own little version for the delight of his friends and, wandering around the remaining lumps and bumps, it is easy to sink into a general despondency about the cruelty of passing time and events.

  Gleim’s element in the Spiegelsberge is as nothing compared to Bismarck’s. Abandoned, boarded-up and thoroughly unloved is one of the hundreds of Bismarck Towers which were put up all over Germany after the great man’s death. They tend to look like a mixture of medieval keep and lighthouse and inevitably Bruno Schmitz, the World’s Worst Architect, built many of them, when he was not busy creating ziggurats of rubbish like the Kaiser Wilhelm I Monument in Koblenz. Some of the towers were blown up and some fell over, but most are still around. The one over in Dessau has been attractively rebranded so that Bismarck’s face and name were taken off and Schiller’s put on instead. The Halberstadt tower is a standard-issue piece of bombast and on special occasions an immense flame used to be lit which would stream from its summit, visible for miles across the countryside and rich in runes/dwarfs/ Wagner/fun-with-pagans meaning. The special-flame feature of course stopped working ages ago and the tower’s only contemporary fans are occasional graffiti taggers. As a completely discredited symbol of local pride, something which on special occasions in the first half of the twentieth century all Halberstadters must have taken their excited children to see, the Bismarck Tower takes some beating.

  By this point wading slowly through the sheer accumulation of gloomy symbolism in this wood, the rambler is then brought to a complete halt by a tucked-away Soviet cemetery. These cemeteries dot East Germany and it was an important part of the discussions when the Soviet empire collapsed that the German state would promise to protect and maintain them. They all fit the same pattern (aside from the massive set-piece monuments in places such as Vienna and Berlin), with row upon row of small headstones topped by a red star. Some of the cemeteries are in prominent places. Eisleben, for example, is notable for its strikingly unavoidable fields of Soviet war dead. Others are located with careful symbolism, such as the beautiful one in the ducal park in Weimar, a place which takes on rich additional layers of meaning with every passing year.

  The Halberstadt cemetery is particularly melancholy because it is so hidden. Having had the town passed over to them by the Americans, these Soviet soldiers were killed in the final acrid days of mopping-up, of military accidents and countless almost private acts of Nazi fanaticism. The Soviets killed, raped and looted their way through the region in a riot of violence not seen since the Thirty Years War, in a vast act of retribution which it is impossible not to see as nearly legitimate and yet which also marks a point of final and absolute disaster from which Europe has been rebuilding slowly ever since. Now it has come to an end, East Germany itself seems part of that punishment – the taking of a large block of Germans, imprisoned for decades in a system of work and surveillance, a much less onerous version of the kind of punishment the Germans themselves had once wanted to impose on much of Europe.

  Mendel’s statue

  Another town rich with conclusive possibilities is Schwäbisch Gmünd, a pretty, dozy place in the Stauferland, home for many years to an American missile regiment and the birthplace of Emanuel Leutze, painter of Washington Crossing the Delaware.

  There is a particularly odd building in the hills behind the town where a hermit once lived. After his death a chapel was built in the seventeenth century around his cave, clinging to the cliff-side, part Counter-Reformation standard issue and part living rock. It is a dreary spot, damp with superstition and only enlivened by cats, beetles and some aggressive redstarts, but the chapel has an ac
cidentally Gaudí-like quality. There are some truly alarming life-size stations-of-the-cross tableaux on the way up to the chapel which offer a form of living folk religion that is a disturbing challenge to the modern world. Gmünd’s somnolence is absolute and the hillside suggests there must be other caves, perhaps filled with enchanted sleepers. Unlike Halberstadt, Gmünd’s fabric was untouched by the war and it slipped, after some years of hard work, into the same pleasant prosperity as the rest of West Germany.

  Down in the town, I was wandering around one of the little parks looking for surprising monuments when – as usual – I was rewarded: this time with a bronze statue of Gregor Mendel. I knew little about Mendel beyond the bare facts of his having been a Moravian monk and the creator of modern genetics. I could not understand why his statue would be in Gmünd, a world away from the Habsburg north-east. It turned out the statue had been placed there by Moravian Germans, some of the three million Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia at the end of the war, partly out of revenge and partly to ensure that no ‘Sudetenland’ issue would ever arise again. Like other undamaged towns, Gmünd filled up with expellees, in this case mainly from Brno (or Brünn). Mendel died in 1884 (Janáek played the organ at his funeral) and his science ultimately formed the basis of a system which made a mockery of the Nazis’ pathetic race concepts.

  The world in which he had lived seemed impossibly distant from the events which would have resulted in his statue coming to rest in Swabia. The refugees from Brno are now very old and the whole idea of Moravian Germans seems very remote, but Freud was born in Moravia and Mahler spent his childhood there. This was not a minor part of the world. The Iron Curtain blocked off the expelled (who came from all over a huge belt, from Estonia to Yugoslavia) and made maintaining a link with Central Europe impractical. In any event the circumstances of expulsion had been themselves traumatic and shameful, with an unknown number of dead – at least half a million and probably many more. The Hitler issue of ‘unjust’ borders, of German minorities trapped and needing to be redeemed by the Fatherland, was decisively ended by the expulsions, but at a staggering cost.

  Again, as with the ferocious actions of the Red Army, it is impossible to argue against the expulsions under the circumstances – there was a racial logic which the Nazis themselves would have approved of. But it was another act of European diminution, of a nationalist set of ideas which began in the nineteenth century and ended in the dementia of the Holocaust. When the German attempt to become the colonial rulers of Europe failed, the failure created its own momentum, no different from the expulsion of the French from Algeria or the Belgians from the Congo. The result was the shaking of Europeans into a dreary sequence of monoglot little states, none very creative, none very interesting, but at least no longer at each other’s throats, aside from the unfinished Habsburg legacy of Yugoslavia.

  I don’t know quite why I found the Mendel statue so upsetting – there are plenty of other expellee monuments dotted around. His blamelessness perhaps, or the sense that his scientific importance sprang from a very complicated Habsburg universe which has been buried by layer after layer of later events. Is there in fact too great a break between modern Central Europe and the Jewish–Catholic– Protestant/German–Slav world which was the glory of the pre-1914 world? Just as historians now see Europe’s civilization before the Great Famine and Black Death as in many ways distinct from its haggard successor, will we all retrospectively be seen as merely the provincial remnants of a great civilization that destroyed itself?

  Death by oompah

  That Zeppelin-shed of conviviality, the Hofbräuhaus in Munich, is one of those essential tests of Germanness which rapidly winnows out anyone who really cannot stand this particular model of civilization. For foreigners who dream of sun-dappled trattoria or sitting quietly with a pint of mild in the saloon bar of the Magpie and Stump, the sheer communal grossness of the Hofbräuhaus is a sort of hell on earth. The hundreds of mostly male drinkers are manipulated by the management through a clever use of folk costume, breasts and an oompah band into a form of scarlet-faced hysteria. By late evening there is a clear and constant roar of aggressive conversation, the crash of dropped mugs and trays, screams of laughter as patrons fall backwards off their seats.

  On balance I really cannot cope with Munich. Some places will always be ruined by Nazism and Munich is above all of them. If the Third Reich had survived, Munich would now be a sort of modern Bethlehem, linked to the other two great Bavarian Nazi sacred sites, Nuremberg and Berchtesgaden. Huge coach parties would be visiting the places that Hitler had created with such symbolic care: the ‘Brown House’, the national headquarters of the Party and last resting place of the ‘Blood Banner’ carried by the 1923 beer-hall putschists, the Bürgerbräukeller where that putsch began, the ‘Honour Temples’ built to house the bodies of the dead, the different places around Munich where Hitler had stayed or given speeches. The Hofbräuhaus had an honoured place in this pantheon – in 1920 Hitler laid down the basic tenets of Nazi doctrine there and it remained a favourite destination for Hitler and his entourage (none of this is mentioned in the Hofbräuhaus’s strikingly aphasic website).

  Much of specifically Nazi Munich has been destroyed – the ‘Brown House’ by Allied bombing, the Bürgerbräukeller by a heroic and despairingly unlucky 1939 would-be Hitler assassin, the ‘Honour Temples’ by contemptuous American military administrators (weeds now attractively grow over the remains). The Hofbräuhaus was also wrecked but, unlike its fellows, was rebuilt and remains a vexed reminder of the culture that created Hitler. From the usual chaos of motives, I spent a long evening there and was, as it turned out, completely rewarded. As the hysteria mounted, conga-lines of foreign businessmen lurched past the frantic oompah band, deranged with laughter, and amid a general sense that the factory-scale toilets were now irreparably backed up and it was time for me to leave, something wonderful happened. A Japanese businessman or tourist tipped the band to allow him to pretend drunkenly to conduct a piece of music. This happened quite frequently – a few minutes previously an Australian with wild eyes and a cinnabar complexion managed to pretend to conduct the band through ‘Waltzing Matilda’. But the Japanese man was a genius, as he asked them to play Shostakovich’s Waltz 2. This piece was made famous as part of Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut, an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story. Hearing this marvellous, odd dance provoked initially very confused feelings. I had always loved Schnitzler and in my publishing job I had used the excuse of the Kubrick film to republish some of his work. This had not been a great success, falling victim to the – as it turned out – general contempt felt for the film. But then, at last, I realized what was truly startling. Here, in one of the birthplaces of Nazism, a traditional Bavarian band was playing an American jazz inflected piece by a Soviet composer, made famous by a Jewish-American adaptation of a Jewish-Austrian novella, the film’s stars being a tiny Scientologist and a lovely Australian. It would be trivial to say that this music buried the past even for a second, but it was enjoyable to tot up the number of ways in which the famous pre-war frequenters of the Hofbräuhaus would have been struck dumb with rage by such a piece. Suddenly I felt aware of how much Germans had themselves put layer upon layer of work, culture and thought on top of their terrible past and that it was possible to sit in the chaos of the early twenty-first century and feel that actions are being taken every day – even by an oompah band and its drunken Japanese maestro – to build a replenished world in which Munich can be more than just the cradle of Nazism. But the band was now playing ‘The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond’ and it was time to take the ill-judged decision to have another drink.

  Bibliography

  These are all books which have affected the way I have understood the subjects in this book. All the main sources are here plus a selection of novels and stories, some of which are mentioned in the text, while others lurk behind what I have written about. I have not included the piles of leaflets, CD notes,
mini-guides and other scraps of paper that choke our house. Some of these have been very important (for example John Eliot Gardiner’s superb essay on Schütz that accompanies his recording of the Musikalische Exequien).

  There are many remarkable websites – every town and Schloss in Germany seems to have one, some just bits of Toytown vanity but others packed with interest. Photos of almost anything mentioned in this book can be found online. Perhaps the most remarkable website is Mark Hatlie’s www.sites-of-memory.de, but there are also sites of fevered if enjoyable specificity such as www.bismarcktuerme.de or www.almanachdegotha.org. The ability to riffle quickly through generation after generation of royal and ducal family trees on www.wikipedia.org, often decorated with funny portraits, is an amazing technological improvement on horrible old printed family trees. Another great breakthrough is Thomas Höckmann’s hypnotic Germany 1789, a series of electronic maps of the Holy Roman Empire which adds a sense of ease and pleasure to previously eye-watering microterritorial issues (www.hoeckmann.de). To be able to zoom in on the details of what the Dukes of Württemberg owned (and why these geographical constraints drove them mad) or investigate places like the Principality-Provosty of Ellwangen an der Jagst is both confidence-building and a way to waste oceans of time.