A Writer's World
Page 51
Some of it would have been physically familiar to her, because many relics remain from the bombed and bombarded Altstadt, and have been lovingly restored. The Renaissance Old Town Hall looks as good as new beside the market square; there are lavish burghers’ houses here and there; church steeples stand as they always stood above high-pitched roofs and little squares; the Haus zorn Kaffeebaum serves coffee just as it has served it since the sixteenth century. More to my point, within the circuit of the vanished city walls there flourishes still the Saxon gemütlichkeit that so seduced my mother long ago.
I took to eating my suppers along there, alfresco at a self-service restaurant in the Naschtmarkt. The baroque Old Bourse looks genially down upon this little piazza, and my evening meal generally consisted of mushrooms, potatoes, strawberries and white wine. The place was full of people to talk to, the wine went down very nicely, I habitually indulged myself with second helpings of strawberries, and what with the music of a busking accordionist around the corner, and the evening sunshine warming the back of my neck, I soon began to feel myself agreeably among friends. (The only unpleasant Leipziger I encountered during my entire stay was a man who brazenly crashed a queue for concert tickets: and him I successfully tripped up, pro bono publico, as he swaggered away.)
*
So despite all that has happened to Leipzig since my mother’s time, her rosy half-dreams of the city were confirmed for me. The German Empire had come and gone, the nightmare of the Nazis had passed, the Americans had stormed through with fire and chewing gum, the chilly communists had clamped their dogmas on the place, and only five years ago did liberal standards return to the grand old city. Yet I was unexpectedly at my ease there, even in the bleak Stalinist quarters where skateboarders clattered over concrete paving stones, and graffiti proclaimed ‘The Universal Zulu Nation’. Leipzig is a fine place to be, even now. In the 1990s, as in the 1900s, it is a great thing to walk into the Thomaskirche (having knocked off an ice, perhaps, in the café immediately opposite its main door) and to feel oneself instantly in the company of its mighty organist and choirmaster, Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach stands in effigy outside its façade, sternly surveying the ice-creams. Bach sounds tremendously in the music of its organ. Bach lies for ever (we hope – he has been moved once already) beneath his monumental slab in its chancel. And in the Leipzig of today, who could not be moved by the nearby magic of the Nikolaikirche, the very church where the massed will of the Leipzigers, expressed in prayer and candle-lit vigil, led directly to the fall of the communists, the collapse of the whole dread system and the re-unification of Germany?
As to the little cottage where Schiller wrote the ‘Ode to Joy’ (in Beethoven’s setting, the anthem of the European Community), it stands in a particularly joyless quarter of the city, one of the streets that still speaks gloomily of Honecker and the Stasi, surrounded by drear red-brick blocks with bomb sites, broken windows and sagging lintels; but upon it there is a commemorative plaque done in such a gloriously festive baroque, all gilded high spirits, that the house stands there like a defiant declaration of happiness, come what may.
*
My mother’s Leipzig was most particularly the academic Leipzig to the south of the Old City, where every kind of intellectual institution sprang into existence in those heady days of Wilhelmine confidence. I had no idea how much of it had survived the war, but I knew that the Conservatorium still existed somewhere as the Hochschule für Musik Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, so I set off one morning to find it, guided by the splendid maps in my 1913 Baedeker North Germany – splendid, but alas now largely useless. In that part of the city, whole areas have been transformed. Where was the Anglo-American Episcopal Church (‘Plan 4, B4: Chaplain – Rev JHM Nodder’)? What had happened to the König-Albert Park? One of the few things I could find was the Schreber-Strasse Swimming and Bath Establishment (‘Plan 1, B4’), and there I asked at random, among the sunbathers by the pool, where everything else was. A young man volunteered to guide me to the Conservatorium, where he happened to have been a student himself. I put my Baedeker away, and we set off across my mother’s landscapes.
Here was the Johanna Park, very dear to her memories, where she had once seen small frogs (or was it fish?) falling out of the heavens during a sweet Saxon shower. Somewhere over there, across a weedy wasteland, must have been her lodgings, whence she escaped to see Salome, and where my grandfather no doubt buttered up her chaperone during his visit of inspection. Over the road was the school house of the Thomaskirche boys’ choir, Bach’s own choir – frequently in my mother’s mind, I do not doubt, when she went home to play her own organ in Monmouth church.
My guide turned out to be one of the Thomaskirche choirmasters, in line of descent to Johann Sebastian himself, and as we walked through the city together I began to feel I had achieved some sort of apotheosis, and really was back in the Leipzig of Nikisch and Teichmüller. My companion, give or take a T-shirt and a pair of trainers, was just how I imagined the students of my mother’s nostalgia. No frogs fell from the skies, but the Johanna Park was still green and full of young life. Horn music greeted us faintly from somewhere out of sight, and when we came to a big green space, and my companion announced it to be the site of the old Gewandhaus concert hall, bombed in the 1940s, we stood for a moment in properly reverent silence, thinking of Mendelssohn and my mum.
And here at last was the Königliche Conservatorium itself. It looked to me just as it does in the engraving on my mother’s diploma: the very image, acme and epitome of a music conservatoire. In we went, and there were the statutory bearded busts of eminent musicians, and students hurried past with cellos and music cases, and notices of recitals or rehearsals fluttered from noticeboards as they had doubtless been fluttering constantly since my mother’s day. ‘We shall enter’, my guide courteously announced, ‘the Piano Department’: and there, up a winding staircase, we were back in the Conservatorium of the 1900s. Nothing had changed, so far as I could see or feel; nothing was missing. Beside each door was a list of the Herr Professors, and I would not have been in the least surprised to see the name of Robert Teichmüller among them. And when we went into one of the practice rooms, where a student was hard at it with a Chopin prelude, just for a moment I thought it really was my mother, young and smiling in a lacy dress, looking up at us expectantly from her keyboard.
On the windowsill, I am almost certain, lay a brace of pheasant, wrapped in a copy of the Monmouthshire Beacon.
Another centre of old German culture was Weimar in Thuringia. It was full of gracious memories, but like so many German cities, even in the 1990s this sweet town had skeletons in its cupboard.
I am ashamed to admit I had never heard of the composer Benedetto Marcello, although I now know him to have been a seventeenth-century Venetian governor of Pola in Istria, and when I saw his name on the cover of the score on the music-stand for a moment I wondered if he were no more than a student fancy. The whole episode seemed rather hallucinatory. There I was on my first morning in Weimar, walking all alone through the leafy park on the Ilm, when I came across a charmingly unorthodox pair of student buskers. The boy played the trombone, the girl played the cello, and together they were working their way hard, oblivious to me or to any other passer-by, through the Marcello sonata that was propped on their old-fashioned brass stand. What a delightful conceit, I thought to myself! How romantically German! How proper to Weimar, City of Art and Music! The path was dappled. Insects hummed beneath the trees. The river splashed away beside us. The Marcello was melodious. I popped some money in the buskers’ collection box, but they didn’t seem to notice, so engrossed were they in their performance.
But then Weimar is not an avaricious sort of town. On the contrary, its distinction has traditionally been elegantly cultural. In the late eighteenth century the young Duke Carl August turned his city into a kind of aesthetocracy, an alliance between the aristocratic and the creative. Beauty ruled! Bach and Cranach the Elder had already given the place artist
ic cachet, and they were to be followed over the years by a regular flood of artistic geniuses – Schiller, Liszt, Richard Strauss, Gropius, Mann, and above all Goethe, who became a kind of wazir to the star-struck duke and did everything from designing public buildings to inspecting the dukely mines. For generations Weimar was a dream of Germany. Madam de Staël reported that it was not so much a small city as one large, liberal and wonderfully enlightened palace.
To this day it is bathed in the light of those great times, when artists and monarchs were equals. Carl August lies in his mausoleum flanked not by his generals, but by his two great poets, Goethe and Schiller, and the names of artists still provide terms of reference for the city. There’s a pleasant restaurant, you will be told, behind the Liszthaus. The tourist information centre is next door to the Cranachhaus. Turn right at the Goethehaus to get to the bus station. You want the Schillerhaus? That’s easy: just go straight down the Schillerstrasse from the Goethe and Schiller statue – itself, so one local guidebook tells me, ‘the world-renowned symbol of Weimar, like the Eiffel Tower for Paris’.
And agreeable indeed it is to amble down the Schillerstrasse and take an ice-cream beneath its avenue. It is a lovely gentle street, as free of motor traffic today as it was when Schiller lived in his unassuming house at No. 12. There is a good antiquarian bookshop. There are pleasant cafés. The tourists are mostly German and greet you with wreathed smiles. A street musician plays agreeable guitar music in the shade. The ice-cream is excellent, and it is easy to imagine the young Carl August promenading past with lyricists on each arm, bowing right and left to his dutiful subjects.
After the Schillerstrasse, a stroll perhaps up the road to the Architectural High School – the original Bauhaus, a little shabby and run-down now, but still a place of fateful importance for the Western world. And after that back to the green park beside the river, where Goethe had his garden house, and the oldest statue of Shakespeare in continental Europe basks upon its terrace, and small boys are wading across the river with fishing-rods, and the music of the cello-trombone combo still echoes diligently among the trees.
Goethe wanted Weimar’s visitors to see the little city and its parks as ‘a series of aesthetic pictures’. Certainly I know of no city so instinct with the idea of beauty as a political conception, as part of the established order – and not the beauty of pomp and majesty, either, but an amiable, entertaining, chamber-music kind of beauty. It was in the theatre at Weimar, in 1920, that the constitution of the brief Weimar Republic was drawn up, creating for the first time a united Germany that was free and potentially fun.
So I felt on my first morning in Weimar, but after a while things began to curdle. The first rebuff to my euphoria happened in the church of St Peter and St Paul, just off the market square. This fine old church possesses Lucas Cranach’s celebrated altarpiece of the Crucifixion, Weimar’s greatest work of visual art, and I eagerly joined the cluster of tourists around it. It is certainly a marvellous thing – vibrant, full of fancy, with Luther and Cranach himself boldly introduced to stand at the foot of the cross. But for my squeamish tastes something distasteful coarsens the scene: a thin stream of blood, emerging from the wound in Christ’s right side, arches across the picture to splosh upon the artist’s head. Yuk, I could not help thinking: and although I knew it was allegorical blood, the merciful blood of Christ, still I wondered if it perhaps said something unexpected about the sensibilities of sweet Weimar.
*
It was partly hindsight, I confess. I had already discovered, during my ice-cream reading in the Schillerstrasse, that when Carl August had gone to his mausoleum the enlightenment of Weimar was never quite so absolute again. The dukedom of artists lost some of its delight when Goethe was no longer there to supervise the aesthetics, and it was symbolic that by 1860 a large and showy Russian Orthodox church, built with golden onion domes by a Russian grand duchess, grossly overshadowed the delicate mausoleum of the young duke and his poets.
Besides, the dukely court might be liberal, at least in artistic matters, but the populace was often boorishly Philistine. ‘Unbelievably small and narrow,’ the dramatist Friedrich Hebbel thought Weimar society when he came here in the 1860s. Poor old Liszt, who became the city’s director of music, found himself altogether too avant-garde and patrician for the local petit bourgeoisie, and the cool amateurism of the ducal house became institutionalized, as the nineteenth century passed and the court became more Prussian, in foundations and societies and museums and art schools and all the other heavy expressions of the Wilhelmine Reich. When some nude drawings by Rodin were exhibited in the Museum of Arts and Crafts, the court itself forced its director to resign. As for the Bauhaus, the people of Weimar so despised it and all its works that mothers used to threaten their recalcitrant children with banishment there.
Worse still, as the literary capital of Germany, the repository of its immortal poetic spirit, a retreat of nature-worship and mythic dreams, Weimar became beloved of the Nazis, and it loved the Nazis in return, voting them into local power long before Hitler became chancellor. ‘The mixture of Hitlerism and Goethe,’ wrote Thomas Mann fastidiously in 1932, ‘is particularly disturbing.’ In the market square stands the Elephant Hotel, and all the waters of the Ilm cannot wash the taint from this unfortunate hostelry. It is a handsome thirties building, but unfortunately redecorated inside in a glittery, chromy style that irresistibly suggests the imminent arrival of swaggering Gauleiters with blonde floozies out of big black Mercedes. This impression is all too true. Hitler and his crew were particularly fond of the hotel, and more than once the Führer spoke from its balcony to enthusiastic crowds in the square outside.
So enamoured were the Nazis of Weimar, in fact, that they erected there one of their most celebrated and characteristic monuments. The site they chose was on the lovely hill of Ettersberg, just outside the city, which Goethe himself had long before made famous – he loved to sit and meditate beneath an oak tree there. On my last evening in Weimar I paid a hasty and reluctant visit to this place, now a popular tourist site well publicized in the town. My taxi-driver, a gregarious soul, chatted cheerfully to me all the way. Had I enjoyed my stay in Weimar? Did I visit the Goethehaus? What did I think of the food? Did I know that Weimar was to be the European City of Culture in 1999, at the end of the millennium?
Congratulations, I said. Recognition once more for the City of Art and Music. ‘Exactly,’ said the taxi-driver, and just then we turned off the highway up to Buchenwald.
Italy
Fifty miles only separate the two great cities of Italy that, in my view, most vividly express the great dichotomy of the Italian national character – in Johnny Mercer’s analysis, between the immovable and the irresistible. For immobility, of course, where but Rome?
Thinking properly sententious thoughts about the turn of another year, I leant on a balustrade of the Pincio to watch the sunset behind St Peter’s. Unfortunately the sun never reached the horizon that evening, instead finding itself glaucously absorbed into the thick pall of smog which lay like a curse over Rome. I could almost hear the noise it made, I thought – not a fizzle, more a kind of glurp – and imagine the sulphurous smell of microwaved exhaust fumes as it disappeared into the murk.
Rome has always been the place for contemplating the passage of time, the rise and decline of certainties, and the departure of a year was no big deal in a city that has triumphed so often and suffered so much. Nevertheless, the symbolism of that sunset struck me as powerful. We had endured a messy year of it, and the corrosive pollution of Rome seemed to me like an allegory of some more general decay. No doubt about it, Rome is in an awful mess. So fearful is the atmosphere, and so appalling the congestion, that they have been allowing cars to circulate in the city only on alternate days. Squalid litter lies everywhere, blown across glorious piazzas, festering in fountains, lining the Appian Way. Loveless and abandoned the poisoned Tiber flows between its concrete quays. Buildings that used to seem picturesque now seem dingy
almost beyond redemption, pavements are cracked and potholed, all over the city restorations and excavations are in abeyance for lack of money.
For a time the conclusion I drew, as I wandered the city, was that our civilization, having here once reached so exquisite an epitome, was now running irrevocably down, so that the glittering shops of the Via Condotti, the gorgeous rituals of St Peter’s, were no more than cruel anachronisms. Gradually, though, this conviction was replaced by one more invigorating: that if the environment of Rome was invalid, by God, the inhabitants of Rome were robust as ever. Smog or no smog, they remain precisely as they have always been, displaying just the same mixture of swagger and simplicity, cunning and compassion, that visitors have discerned in them down the ages. Recession, pollution, crime and triple parking seem to pass them by; if the whole city were suddenly to be Scandinavianized, I came to think, all its buildings spick and span, all its traffic ordered, all its corruptions cleansed, the Romans would hardly notice.
Several times in the course of my stay I came across a couple of bucolic musicians, dressed in quaint hats and peculiar shoes, tootling on flute and bagpipe in public places. They were like substantial fauns, haunting the city out of its remote rural past. These medieval figures seemed to me wonderfully exotic, until late one night I encountered the pair of them anxiously consulting a bus timetable beneath a streetlight in the Corso. Then I realized that in fact they piquantly illustrated the matter-of-factness of the city. Nobody took the slightest notice of them, as they huddled there; they looked up and asked me for advice about the best way to get home, but when I told them I was a foreigner, ‘Ai, ai, ai,’ they said theatrically, like Italians in movies.