Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  On the whole, Germans have an inclination towards, and a propensity for, this sort of small-to-medium specialist enterprise. They have an ability to plough the same furrow, again and again, until they can do it to perfection – or ad nauseam, as the rest of Europe might say. They know what they can do, they do it well, and they go on doing it, on and on, comfortable within their own realm, largely without feeling a pressing need to get richer, or to swallow up other companies. The rest of us benefit from their mental rigour, because no one can match them when it comes to perfecting dental instruments and egg noodles, and ultimately their factory owners become wealthy because we appreciate the quality of what they’ve made.

  This mentality has its beginning in an educational system that is more focused than ours, and is followed by apprenticeships, vocational qualifications and probationary periods. Combine this with a national characteristic of treating the wish of higher authority as law, and you have a formidable workforce, both obedient and productive. Thus the person behind the ticket window in the railway station will have spent a probationary period in all aspects of ticketing, including postings to other ticket windows in the region. He’s done the training, so now he does the time, waiting for more senior management to retire or die before moving up the ticketing tree. By early middle age he knows absolutely everything there is to know about his station, the people in it, and the wider railway industry. In return, he has a job for life.

  The downside of this predilection to be organized is that there’s a good chance that the thoroughly informed ticket clerk is also thoroughly bored. There’s nothing he hasn’t seen, heard or said before, so he’s not interested in his work any more. He has no inclination to do anything above and beyond what the job description requires of him, and must always go home at 5 p.m. (half day on Fridays). So while you’ll certainly get the information and the ticket you want from him, a smile is not in the contract.

  Such creeping dissatisfaction is made bearable by holidays, leisure activities, cable television and beer, plus the sense that everyone else is in pretty much the same boat. The harder task is for those unfortunates who suddenly realize they’re in completely the wrong job, and who’d actually far prefer to be doing something else. In other cultures such career volte-faces are relatively easy: you can buy an answering machine, print yourself a business card and call yourself a plumber or a translator, and if someone actually pays you good money to do what you say you can do, then you can truly claim to be whatever it says on the card. But not in Germany; if you want to strike out as an individual, away from your chosen path, you must go back to the beginning to collect all the right certifications and apprenticeships again, and you don’t pass Go or collect £200 until you’ve done so. Consequently not many people do.

  This structured channelling of society produces people in boxes, and social stereotypes which we all recognize. These include the inflexible German who finds it hard to adapt when something in his or her environment doesn’t turn out as it says in the brochure; the forward-planning German who gets up early to put his towel on the sun-lounger and can’t understand why others don’t do the same; the thorough German who is so emphatically confident about his area of knowledge that he is quite prepared to tell others when they’ve got something wrong.

  In Germany these stereotypes operate within their own comfort zones, where the unexpected rarely happens and where their views and their expertise are repeatedly endorsed. The disinclination to disturb the status quo is a legacy of the post-war years, when everyone had something they’d rather not talk about, so they closed ranks and stuck to their own environment. It wasn’t until the last decade or so, for example, that schoolteachers actually started to dwell at any length on the Nazi years. Before then, nobody dared mention the war at home or in the media, and it was not something that children studied, even though it was the invisible hand on everyone’s shoulder.

  For the older generations, those comfort zones helped to exclude all the awfulness of the twentieth century; they kept their heads down, worked hard and for God’s sake didn’t complain, because they’d lost the right to do that when they lost the war. All was fine as long as they remained behind their ticketing windows; stepping outside their comfort zones could be a real shock to the system, so on the whole they preferred not to.

  Just occasionally you can come across a German in this advanced insular state, at large in the wider world. Some years ago I bumped into one in a hotel kiosk in Tunisia, where he was in a state of outrage at being asked to pay three times the normal cover price for a copy of Bild, the most popular German newspaper. He simply couldn’t understand the take-it-or-leave-it attitude of the shop’s proprietor, who was charging on the basis of what holidaymakers were prepared to pay. As far as the tourist was concerned this was blatant profiteering at the expense of the unwary, and furthermore when he realized, having bought it, that it wasn’t even that day’s edition, he condemned Tunisia and all who lived in it with some fairly choice language. Plainly he hadn’t left his home town for a while.

  Back in Germany there are many major advantages to such an organized, channelled society, and the best amongst them is quality and reliability in workmanship, which are both still highly prized. When you call out a plumber or visit an optician you know your job will be done properly, within the time stipulated and for a justifiable price. The plumber or optician has a tradition and a reputation to maintain if he wants to stay in business, so he takes care. Even retailers take pride, refusing to obsess over increasing this month’s turnover compared to last month’s, because they’re in business for the long term in high streets whose shops don’t change from one year to the next.

  Go to a German optician, for example, for an eye test and new glasses, and the latter will be produced as prescribed for a price that amounts to only a third of what you’d have been quoted in the UK. Tell the German sales assistant what you would have paid at home, and he’ll be horrified. He’ll sit down and work out the approximate cost of materials, the cost of labour and the rental cost of the shop, add his profit on top and demonstrate how the final price is a combination of all those elements.

  ‘That may be how your retailing works,’ you’ll be forced to admit. ‘But it is not ours.’ Ours is increasingly based not on what things cost, but on what people are prepared to pay. Just as the right price for a house is not based on the number of bricks in its walls, but on perceived demand. Just as the right price for a German newspaper in Tunisia is not based on its cover price plus freight cost, but on how badly a holidaymaker wants to read it. It’s a market-based approach that many Germans have yet to accept.

  But that’s where, sadly, German industry is beginning to go. Hundreds of small family-owned manufacturing operations like the dental equipment and egg noodle factories on the outskirts of Tuttlingen haven’t been able to persuade the next generation to take over when dad, or grandad, retires. With nowhere to go, the latter are being hoovered up by American-style mergers and acquisitions specialists who are dressing them up and selling them on, pushing them into much larger conglomerations and corporations where the concern is shareholder value first, quality of product second, needs of workforce third. The emphasis of this new-look manufacturing is on increasing revenue, reducing costs and making more money. And the message to the ageing benevolent owners is that they’d better look lively or else they’ll simply get edged out of their market by these hungrier, acquisitive animals who are crowding their space.

  Meanwhile, aware that there are other, possibly easier and certainly more glamorous ways of making money, the younger generation, no longer restrained by the heavy hand of history, are reluctant to follow their parents into the family firms. These young Germans are emerging from the post-war tunnel, beginning to adjust to a bigger marketplace and a life of more change. They don’t see the need to hide any more, because it wasn’t their generation that caused the problem. They’ve travelled widely and they can see that there is a bigger stage waiting for them than t
heir uncle’s small manufacturing company in the neighbouring valley. They don’t want to be tied to a niche enterprise that does its job well but isn’t going anywhere in particular. They’re resisting the rigour and insularity of their parents, and many will describe themselves as Europeans first, Germans second. In this, European marriage statistics bear them out, because in terms of mixed-nation relationships Germany tops the league: a German is more likely than any other European to marry someone from another country.

  I have direct experience of this phenomenon, having married one myself, and I have to say it doesn’t feel like a cross-cultural relationship at all. Like it or not, out of the whole range of Europeans we are closest in character to the Germans, and they closest to us. We are, after all, fundamentally Saxons at heart. And our Queen is a German too.

  1Hintertupfingen is a German byword for rural backwater. It refers to any mythical rural village ‘behind Tupfingen’, which itself is already the back end of beyond.

  3

  Sigmaringen: Encounter with a Prince

  When Patrick Leigh Fermor set out for his long walk back in 1933 he made a point of staying with as many aristocrats as possible. He had the right social contacts before he left home and he made even better connections as he went along, so in the event he was virtually passed like a sociable parcel from schloss to schloss, from one four-poster to the next. Along the Upper Danube in particular he wrote that castles were seldom out of sight, and many of his days ended with the spying of a ‘small and nearly amphibian schloss mouldering in the failing light’, which would turn out to be lived in by the ‘widowed descendant of the lady-in-waiting of Charlemagne’, who would be pleased to see him.

  In those days the life of an archduke, a baron or a count was essentially leisurely, the various households busy with guests as they all visited each other and made sure their children married within the right social milieu. In such gently paced existences Leigh Fermor must have been an exotic and engaging house guest, with plenty of anecdotes to tell of his unusual voyage thus far. The likes of Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff were happy to receive him in their studies, where they’d be wearing slippers and reading Proust, or at least that was the position they’d adopted to receive their English visitor. And for a day or two at each place – sometimes even several days when he felt particularly welcome – he’d enter a world of riding, shooting, dinners and servants, accompanying families on excursions in charabancs to riverside picnics and playing polo on bicycles around their ornamental gardens. Some of these families spoke French at home, had English nannies and international family networks, and they all knew everyone else along the river, irrespective of national borders. So when he announced it was time he was moving on they’d write a note to their noble cousins further east to arrange his next accommodation.

  In an ideal world I would have loved to have done the same, but many of the aristocratic families of the 1930s were no longer in residence, particularly in former communist countries. Many of them had been ‘all handle and no jug’ – i.e. titled, but with no cash – and once the war and its aftermath had taken away their land and their privileges, they’d chosen to flee and to start again overseas. Those who were brave or foolish enough to stay were reclassified as political dissidents and incarcerated in labour camps, 100,000 of them from Hungary alone, where every fifth person had aristocratic blood. There they were literally worked to death, particularly the tens of thousands of dissidents who died while digging the Black Sea Canal in Romania, a project to join the Danube to the Black Sea avoiding the meandering Delta, which was still ongoing as recently as the 1970s. Of course the death toll of European aristocracy is dwarfed by the numbers of Jews who died in the Holocaust, but the cull of the gentry remains one of the untold stories of the aftermath of the Second World War.

  With Leigh Fermor’s experience in mind, I was keen to meet aristocrats on my journey too, but it didn’t prove easy to arrange. I don’t move in the right kind of social circles and so (with one or two exceptions) bumping into the blue bloods of the Danube was going to be a matter of banging on doors and begging an audience. Those exceptions were down to the Transylvanian count I mentioned earlier, Count Tibor Kalnoky, who gave me the benefit of his knowledge, his wisdom and the email addresses of his lordly cousins on the riverbank.

  Back in 1933, Leigh Fermor had moved eastwards at a steady walking pace and yet he occasionally arrived at the next schloss ahead of the relevant letter of introduction. Despite this, his hosts would still admit him, and entertain him, without really having any idea who he was or why he’d pitched up on their doorstep. These days, sadly, people are more private, less trusting and less flexible. In theory, in an era of instant communication, it should be even more possible to make arrangements at the last minute, but in practice people now require exact timings, plus heaps of advance notice. At least they did with me.

  It was thus, for example, with the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas of Grein, a dynasty whose UK arm is more familiar to us under its adoptive name the House of Windsor (changed in 1917 to avoid anti-German sentiment), and who are also the rootstock for the Bulgarian and Portuguese royal households. For them, I was told that unless I could give a time and date a month in advance there was no chance of an appointment. I responded with regret that I could not be so specific: the vagaries of the weather, of bicycle travel in general, of my stamina in particular, of the quality of the route over the 800 kilometres between Donaueschingen and Grein, and of all the other appointments I was making along the way meant that it was impossible to say, before I set out, when exactly I’d get there, but I would be only too happy to provide more accurate updates from the saddle as I got closer. But the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha answer was uncompromising: without a month’s notice it would not be possible to meet any member of the family. It was a response that made me grind my teeth and envy Leigh Fermor his email- and mobile-free existence.

  I had more luck with the Hohenzollerns, however, another name with plenty of history attached and one with more relevant connections on the Danube. As their castle was at Sigmaringen, only around 90 kilometres downriver from Donaueschingen, providing an ETA at the portcullis wasn’t so difficult. I was particularly keen to make a date because the Hohenzollerns represented my first nobility along the river. There was a good chance they’d be my last, too, at the other end, because they’d also been the royal family of Romania who had been deposed by the communists. I’d been in touch with a Hohenzollern pretender to the throne in Bucharest, and he’d agreed in principle to meet when I got there, even though it was some months down the line. So with the promise of Hohenzollerns topping and tailing my journey, I pedalled hard towards Sigmaringen, while trying not to get too sweaty, for my appointment with Prince Karl-Friedrich Emich Meinrad Benedikt Fidelis Maria Michael Gerold von Hohenzollern. Or Charly to his mates.

  The route to Sigmaringen lay through an extremely pretty riverscape where an increasingly self-assured Danube burrowed its way through the southern end of the Swabian Alps, a grand name for a range of limestone hills that struggled to reach 1,000 metres. For a while the river valley turned into a pint-sized gorge, punctuated by thumbs of limestone sticking out of the woods of beech and juniper like broken piano keys, some of them topped with castle ruins. The cyclepath started to wrestle with the scenery and my lungs had to wrestle too to keep up. All around me were explosions of blossom, stationary puffs of smoke that represented spring’s heavy artillery, as fruit trees announced that they were back in business again and this year they were determined to do well.

  I stopped briefly for refreshment at a pathside farm where a youngish and enterprising farmer’s wife had installed a coffee machine and an ice-cream freezer. She’d put tables and chairs out in the sun to detain passersby, and a sign that read ‘Fahrradeis’ (ice-cream for cyclists) with a strong hint at paradise. However, her husband seemed to be doing his best to ruin her little Eden. He shouted as he stomped from the barn to the toolshed. He shouted as he stomped from the toolshed
to the tractor, and he shouted again as he stomped from the tractor to the byre. His accent made what he was saying fairly impenetrable to my ear, but I could tell that he was using a vocabulary that wasn’t impressing his wife.

  A few kilometres further on and the atmosphere was much more refined. The monastery town of Beuron turned out to be practically all monastery and practically no town. Although it had been founded back in the eleventh century, most of the buildings dated from the nineteenth century and their big roofs loomed over the river valley, in a setting that was immaculately groomed. It all looked very prosperous, and walkers who circled the monastery could buy Kloster Wurst, Kloster chocolates and even tins of Kloster spaghetti bolognaise in Kloster shops. Most of the surrounding houses were part of the Kloster estate, with saints’ names on their gateposts. Some were gaunt and rather grotesque guesthouses, the eaves covered in frescos and the entranceways choked with weeds, suggesting that, while prosperity wasn’t a problem, numbers of visitors had been much reduced in recent decades. Money flowed, but people stayed away.

  The whole place marched to a beat that I couldn’t hear. Seeking enlightenment, I ordered a Kloster beer in the local café and fell into conversation with the only other drinker, a lively Swiss man in his thirties. His brother was one of the monks, and he was waiting to take him out for the day.