Germania

by Simon Winder

  Easily the most important sources have been the various editions of Gordon McLachlan’s Rough Guide to Germany (latest 6th edition, London, 2004), a perfect example of how a guide book can sometimes also be an exceptional piece of literature. I have never met McLachlan but worship him from afar, with an unhealthy closeness to the variants that emerge from each new edition’s publication (the entry on Bernburg has been dropped from the sixth!). His enthusiasm can sometimes be borderline demented – no matter that a town’s only focus of interest is a mildly odd fountain, the place is always worth a two-to-three-day stay – but the book is clever, enjoyable and encyclopaedic and my own book could not have been written without his guidance.

  Place of publication and date given are for the editions I happen to have. In a spirit of personal truthfulness and consistency all books in German are here purely because they have nice pictures.

  Uli Arnold et al., Grünes Gewölbe Dresden (Leipzig, 1986)

  Ronald G. Asch, The Thirty Years War: The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618–48 (Basingstoke, 1997)

  David Attenborough et al., Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery (London, 2007)

  Erich Bachmann et al., The Würzburg Residence and Court Gardens (Munich, 1992)

  Richard Barber, The Penguin Guide to Medieval Europe (Harmondsworth, 1984)

  Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, 1993)

  C. A. Bayley, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004)

  Hans Belting, The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship (New Haven and London, 1998)

  John Berger, Dürer (Cologne, 1994)

  Thomas Bernhard, Concrete, trans. David McLintock (London, 1989)

  Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy, trans. Ewald Osers (London, 1989)

  Thomas Bernhard, Yes, trans. Ewald Osers (Chicago, 1992)

  David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (New York, 2006)

  David Blackbourn, History of Germany 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century, 2nd edition (Oxford, 2003)

  T. M. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002)

  T. M. W. Blanning, Joseph II (Harlow, 1994)

  Tim [T. M. W.] Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (London, 2007)

  T. M. W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743–1803 (Cambridge, 1974)

  Richard Bonney, The European Dynastic States 1494–1660 (Oxford, 1991)

  Douglas Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich (London, 1985)

  Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, 1990)

  Sir Thomas Browne, Selected Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago, 1968)

  W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival (Cambridge, 1959)

  Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (London, 1962)

  Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier, 1100–1525 (Basingstoke, 1980)

  Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2006)

  Christopher Clark, Wilhelm II (Harlow, 2000)

  Kenneth John Conant, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture, 800–1200 (Harmondsworth, 1959)

  Kevin Cramer, The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln and London, 2007)

  Edward Crankshaw, Bismarck (London, 1981)

  Matthew Craske, Art in Europe 1700–1830 (Oxford, 1997)

  Charles D. Cuttler, Northern Painting: From Pucelle to Bruegel (New York, 1968)

  Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt (Fondation Paribas, 1996)

  Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism (London, 2007)

  Erich Egg, Hofkirche in Innsbruck. Das Grabmal Kaiser Maximilians I (Innsbruck, 1993)

  Joseph von Eichendorff, Life of a Good-for-Nothing, trans. J. G. Nichols (London, 2002)

  Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1969)

  Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (New York, 2002)

  R. J. W. Evans, Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683–1867 (Oxford, 2006)

  Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London, 2003)

  Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, 1914–1918 (London, 1998)

  Theodor Fontane, Before the Storm: A Novel of the Winter of 1812–13, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Oxford, 1985)

  Theodor Fontane, Two Novellas: The Woman Taken in Adultery and The Poggenpuhl Family, trans. Gabriele Annan (Chicago, 1989)

  George Macdonald Fraser, Royal Flash. From The Flashman Papers, 1842–43 and 1847–48 (London, 1970)

  David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago, 2002)

  Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars 1558–1721 (Harlow, 2000)

  Horst Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, c. 1050–1200 (Cambridge, 1986)

  Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968)

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight to Italy, trans. T. J. Reed (Oxford, 1999)

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Man of Fifty, trans. Andrew Piper (London, 2004)

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe et al., Romantic Fairy Tales, trans. Carol Tully (Harmondsworth, 2000)

  Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse, trans. Ralph Manheim (London, 1963)

  Günter Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winston (New York, 2002)

  Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, trans. Ralph Manheim (London, 1962)

  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Selected Tales, trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford, 2005)

  Johann Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, trans. Mike Mitchell (Sawtry, 1999)

  Johann Peter Hebel, The Treasure Chest, trans. John Hibberd (London, 1994)

  Heinrich Heine, The Harz Journey and Selected Prose, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Harmondsworth, 1993)

  Heinrich Heine, Selected Verse, trans. Peter Branscombe (Harmondsworth, 1968)

  Hermann Hesse, Narziss and Goldmund, trans. Geoffrey Dunlop (London, 1959)

  E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot and Other Tales, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Oxford, 1992)

  E. T. A. Hoffmann, Tales of Hoffmann, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1982)

  Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2000)

  Jan Jelínek, Kutná Hora (Prague, 1990)

  Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, trans. Michael Hofmann (London, 2003)

  Anton Kaes, M (London, 2000)

  Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1933: Hubris (Harmondsworth, 1998)

  Rüdiger Klessmann et al., Adam Elsheimer 1578–1610 (Edinburgh, 2006)

  Michael Levey, Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art (New Haven and London, 1986)

  Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to1814 (London, 2009)

  Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000)

  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003)

  David McKay, The Great Elector (Harlow, 2001)

  Claudio Magris, Danube: A Journey Through the Landscape, History and Culture of Central Europe (New York, 1989)

  John Man, Zwinger Palace, Dresden (London, 1990)

  Heinrich Mann, Man of Straw, no translator given (Harmondsworth, 1984)

  Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth, 1957)

  Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. David Luke (New York, 1988)

  Thomas Mann, Royal Highness, trans. A. Cecil Curtis, rev. Constance McNab (Harmondsworth, 1975)

  Peter Marshall, The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology i
n Renaissance Prague (New York, 2006)

  Eduard Mörike, Mozart’s Journey to Prague, trans. David Luke (London, 1997)

  Thomas J. Müller-Bahlke, Die Wunderkammer: Die Kunst- und Naturalienkammer der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle (Saale) (Halle, 1998)

  Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, 3 vols., trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London, 1954)

  Robert Musil, The Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans. Peter Wortsman (Hygiene, 1987)

  Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author (New York, 1963)

  Vladimir Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave, trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author (New York, 1968)

  Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark (New York, 1938)

  Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York, 1973)

  Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. Brian Murdoch (London, 1994)

  Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800–1056 (Harlow, 1991)

  Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesterday: Portraits for an Autobiography, trans. H. F. Broch de Rothermann (New York, 1989)

  Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago, 2008)

  Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York, 2007)

  Joseph Roth, The Emperor’s Tomb, trans. John Hoare (London, 1984)

  Joseph Roth, Flight without End, trans. David Le Vay (London, 1977)

  Joseph Roth, The Silent Prophet, trans. David Le Vay (London, 1979)

  Joseph Roth, Three Novellas: Fallmerayer the Stationmaster, The Bust of the Emperor and The Legend of the Holy Drinker, trans. John Hoare and Michael Hofmann (Woodstock, 2003)

  Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995)

  W. G. Sebald, Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse (London, 1999)

  James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989)

  Brendan Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779–1850 (Basingstoke, 1998)

  Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (London, 2007)

  Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The Northern Renaissance (London, 2004)

  David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (London, 2004)

  Adalbert Stifter, Brigitta and Other Tales, trans. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (London, 1994)

  Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal: A Christmas Tale, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore (London, 1999)

  Helmut Stoecker, ed., German Imperialism in Africa, trans. Bernd Zöllner (London, 1986)

  Richard Stokes (ed. and trans.), The Book of Lieder (London, 2005)

  Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London, 1975)

  Norman Stone, World War One: A Short History (London, 2007)

  Hew Strachan, The First World War, vol. 1: To Arms (Oxford, 2001)

  Michael Sußmann, Der Dom zu Magdeburg (Passau, 2002)

  Antal Szerb, Oliver VII, trans. Len Rix (London, 2007)

  Tacitus, The Agricola and The Germania, trans. H. Mattingly, revised S. A. Handford (Harmondsworth, 1970)

  John Tincey, Blenheim 1704 (Botley, 2004)

  Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006)

  Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (London, 2006)

  David Rains Wallace, Neptune’s Ark: From Icthyosaurus to Orcas (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007)

  Geoffrey Wawro, The Austro-Prussian War: Austria’s War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 (Cambridge, 1996)

  Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge, 2003)

  C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (New York, 2005)

  Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009)

  Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806 (Basingstoke, 1999)

  Peter H. Wilson, War, State and Society in Württemberg, 1677–1793 (Cambridge, 1995)

  Stefan Zweig, The Invisible Collection and Buchmendel, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London, 1998)

  Illustrations

  The title page shows a detail from an Oktoberfest woodcut from the Illustrierte Zeitung, 18 October 1845 (akg-images). Chapter one: King Wilhelm I visiting the studio of Ernst van Bandel in 1869 to see the head of ‘Hermann the German’, part of the immense Hermannsdenkmal to be built in the Teutoburg Forest to mark the chieftain’s defeat of the Romans. The monument took several decades to fund and build and was finally completed after German unification. Chapter two: a photo from 1879 of Cologne cathedral still unfinished with a railway now running past it (Kölnisches Stadtmuseum/Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln). Chapter three: a fourteenth-century miniature of the Wartburg under siege (University of Heidelberg Library/akg-images/Erich Lessing). Chapter four: to my frustration I ran out of space to talk about the Lübeck artist Bernt Notke, whose great sculpture of St George and the Dragon (the original in the Stockholm Great Church and a copy in St Catharine’s church, Lübeck) is one of the last truly alarming flourishes of late medieval art. This is part of his once famous dance macabre for Lübeck’s St Mary’s church, showing a complacent Hansa merchant, his proud ships in the background (akg-images). The painting along with much of the town was destroyed in an RAF bombing raid. Chapter five: unfriendly Catholic image of Martin Luther from the early 1520s showing Luther as a Turk, a fanatic, a wildman, etc., referring to the seven-headed monster of the Apocalypse (akg-images). Chapter six: moving and heroic portrait of Gustavus Adolphus on a horse, coming to save Europe (The Granger Collection/Topfoto). Chapter seven: Mathaeus Greuter’s engraving of bees from the Melissographia (Rome, 1625), after drawings made by Francesco Stelluti and members of the Academy of the Lynx (The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland). Chapter eight: dementia at the Saxon court: Johann Melchior Dinglinger’s elephant, made from wood, silver, gilding, enamel, precious stones, beads and lacquer, just a tiny element in his budget-busting ‘The Birthday of the Grand Mogul Aurangzeb’, 1701–08 (Grünes Gewölbe, Staatliche Kunstsammlung-en, Dresden/Jürgen Karpinski). Chapter nine: a still from von Sternberg’s immortal The Scarlet Empress (1934) (akg-images), with Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great and with John Lodge as the smouldering Slav love-animal Prince Alexei (Lodge went on in real life to become governor of Connecticut). Chapter ten: a typically mad and depressing photograph of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal under construction (Deutsche Fotothek). Chapter eleven: allegorical painting by Cesare dell’Acqua from the Miramare castle, Trieste, showing the Emperor Maximilian’s apotheosis, surrounded by a helpfully clothing-free group of allegorical Mexican girls, c. 1865 (Alinari Archive, Florence). Chapter twelve: Neuschwanstein Castle under construction (view from the Heideck cliffs, based on a drawing by Robert Assmus, 1886) (akg-images). Chapter thirteen: Part of a German marine band with a Chinese man squatting mysteriously at their feet. Tsingtao, before 1914 (Bundes-archiv Koblenz). Chapter fourteen: an anonymous coloured print from a 1909 edition of Der Wahre Jacob showing the naval arms race between Germany and Britain, Dreadnouht-Fieber (sic), with a dance macabre pay-off (akg-images). Chapter fifteen: a panicked crowd racing through the streets of medieval Prague in Paul Wegener’s German silent horror film The Golem (1920) – this unbelievably potent, beautiful and complex film brings together almost every theme from this book, but in a way that appeared to me in the end just too clunky to be spelled out. If you have got far enough in this book to be reading this paragraph then I can only urge you to go and watch it immediately (Ullstein Bild/United Archives).

  Acknowledgements

  I spend most of my time editing history books and have therefore had for some years the dreamy privilege of being able to talk at length with historians who, from a decision to stay civil to their publisher, have been both obliged to answer my sometimes confused German questions and at least mull over briefly some of my more obviously not true ide
as. None of these beleaguered individuals have any responsibility for the content of this book, but I am indebted to them for conversations which, to me at any rate, were fascinating: Tim Blanning, Richard J. Evans, Niall Ferguson, Richard Overy, Mark Roseman, David Stevenson, Adam Tooze, Alex Watson and Peter Wilson. Adam Tooze will particularly appreciate the way I have misunderstood the ideas at the heart of his revolutionary book The Wages of Destruction and then misapplied them to other contexts. Alois Maderspacher generously shared his unpublished research on Kolonialdeutsch and John and Beth Romer were essential to solving my problem with Prussians in Egypt. I am very grateful to various friends who have read the text, much improved it with their suggestions and helped in important ways: Paul Baggaley, Nicholas Blake, Malcolm Bull, Sarah Chalfant, Christopher Clark, Jonathan Galassi, Ian Kershaw, Andrew Kidd, Barry Langford, Cecilia Mackay, Adam Phillips, Sigrid Ruschmeier, Norman Stone, Carole Tonkinson and Andrew Wylie. At work I would particularly like to thank for their help and kindness Alice Dawson, Helen Fraser, Stefan McGrath and Stuart Proffitt. Penny and David Edgar, Jim and Sandy Jones, Steph and Nico Poirier and Christopher and Lizzie Winder are supportive and lovely relatives – I apologize to everyone for misused family anecdotes. In Germany I feel I really ought to acknowledge a tremendous number of patient small-town hoteliers and bratwurst salesmen. Barnaby, Felix and Martha have become strikingly older while I have been spending my spare time wandering along the Rhine or typing this stuff up. Their cheerful welcomes and outlooks on life have made writing the book possible. Christine Jones managed to be both supportive and ironic: everybody else has the option of tossing this book to one side, but she had to spend years listening to me droning on about the colonization of the Uckermark or the changing values of the court at Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. In the face of this sort of waking nightmare she never broke down, never indulged in unhelpful tirades and never changed the locks. There must be a useful, pertinent and pithy German term to describe just how much I owe to her – but as usual I don’t know what it is.

  Sequim, Wandsworth Town