by Jan Morris
A century ago people like my grandfather would wander awestruck about this place, marvelling at the glories of German culture – ‘noble, patient, deep, pious and solid’, as the Scots historian Thomas Carlyle called it. Of course one would find the field marshals – Gneisenau, von Moltke, Blücher – and a sufficiency of grim Teutonic statesmen. But Mozart was there too, and Beethoven, and Schiller, and Goethe, and a host of philosophers and scientists and theologians: Germans every one, in the sense that the German culture produced them, and they enriched the German culture in return – and in enriching Germany, my grandfather doubtless thought, they enriched all Europe too.
76 Un-influence
But look what history was to do to the German reputation! Before he died my grandfather had lost his only son to German arms, and for years he declined to listen even to his beloved Bach; by the time I got to Valhalla my chief response was surprise to find that the latest recruit to the pantheon was Albert Einstein, a Jew. The Germany that had once seemed a model of liberal and generous progress, the patron of poets and musicians, the reconstructor of Ålesund, had long squandered its assets. Even in the 1990s, when it was once more the richest and most powerful State in Europe, nobody wanted to be like the Germans. The Germans might be the best footballers, make the best cars, produce the best tennis-players, have the strongest currency, but nobody wanted to be like them. Nobody suggested that German, spoken by 80 million people in the heart of the continent, would ever be Europe’s lingua franca. Nobody could even identify a German style, except in war, economics and automobiles, and few foreigners chose to spend their holidays in Germany. Fifty years after the death of Hitler and the extinction of his mad regime, when a new generation of Germans had come to maturity and the German Republic had established itself as one of the stablest and most democratic States in Europe, still nobody wanted to be much like the Germans.
In Leipzig once I was standing near the front of a box-office queue, in a long line of courteous and well-disciplined citizens, when a tall young German walked bumptiously in, pushed his way to the front, and demanded tickets. He got them, too. My blood atavistically boiled, and as he swaggered past me on his way out I poked out my foot and successfully tripped him. The Leipzigers in the queue smiled collusively at me as he dusted himself down and aggrievedly withdrew: perhaps they did not much want to be like themselves.
77 I clapped too
More than most European peoples, when Germans travel abroad they prefer to stick together. Like the English, they have established cultural colonies in Europe – places that they peacefully dominate with the willing collaboration of the indigenes. Ischia, for instance, has been so enthusiastically adopted by Germans that German is its second language, and its very public attitudes have been half-Germanized. No doubt the island’s native calm forms part of the therapy for the multitudinous Hausfrauen and their ample husbands who come here year after year for the volcanic cures: after a stimulating sauna in the morning, a day’s undemanding hike in the hills, or a potter around the piazzas, returning to a soothing sulphurous bath or mud treatment at the hotel spa before dinner (with perhaps a quick call to Dortmund thrown in, to reassure the blood pressure that everything’s all right at the office).
I had a very German experience when I was lunching one day at a little café on the central mountain of the island, Mount Epomeo. A dog was tethered above the café, on an uncomfortably short rope which kept its legs tangled and constantly kicking. The Germans at the next table were upset by this, and asked the café proprietor to give the animal a longer leash. When he did so they clapped their approval, and presently all around the place people were applauding. Half of them had not set eyes on the dog, and had no idea what the applause was for, but they were all fellow Germans, and as they clapped they nodded to each other and smiled in a comradely way across the tables. I clapped too.
78 Certainties
For if we fellow Europeans do not always wish to emulate the Germans, we still recognize those patient, solid elements in the German character, and it can still be a pleasure to come across pockets of Germanness left behind by history elsewhere in the continent. Most of them were eliminated after the Second World War, when the German minorities which had been among the causes of the tragedy were repatriated, or shipped off to labour camps in Russia. A few were so deeply entrenched in their settings, had been there so long, were so much a part of the local society’s fabric, that they survived. One such forms a dwindling minority to this day in the Romanian city of Braşov, ex-Stalin, né Kronstadt, which was founded by the Teutonic Knights during their eastern adventurings in the thirteenth century. Braşov does not look very German now, except for the remains of its city walls and a few ancient buildings that have survived the wars, but it has one gloriously Germanic monument, fine to come across in the 1990s in shambled and unpredictable Transylvania. The Black Church, built in the fifteenth century, is the largest church in Romania, and stands with stern Gothic confidence in the main square of the city. Inside the church one memorial, in particular, represents the nature of the Saxons who lived, worked and fought in this city for so many generations. It is the tomb of a seventeenth-century German soldier, in full armour like the architect von Eschwege in Portugal, magnificently moustached and bearing the uncompromising inscription ‘I KNOW AND I BELIEVE’.
79 There for the crack
Among the European nations in my half of the twentieth century, then, these have been the great influences, affecting the way the rest of the continent thought, looked, dressed, ate, played, earned its living and entertained itself: the Germans, the French, the Italians and the English. Others exerted influences of other kinds. The Scandinavians, for a few decades, not only introduced Europe to new ways of furnishing its rooms, but also seemed to set the guiding example of social progress. The Dutch, by their astonishing industrial and commercial acumen, dictated far more of what Europe did than most of Europe ever realized. Customs and styles of the Spaniards were taken across Europe by millions of returning holiday-makers, and so were the Greek habits of drinking resinated wine and breaking plates in celebration. The Irish became legendary among the guitar-strumming Aquarian youth of Europe – I once saw a young German couple standing on the threshold of a Dublin pub and gazing at the fiddle-drum-and-whistle band inside, with its Guinnesses at its elbows, as though they were seeing emissaries from paradise.
By the last decades of the century, in fact, the Irish were all over Europe. ‘Look at all the new boutiques,’ said my cicerone proudly to me as she showed me round the streets of Tallinn in Estonia, recently emancipated from Soviet rule, ‘look at all the bright new shops. That’s a new bookshop. That’s a television store. And that’ – she pointed to a building under reconstruction – ‘that will be the Irish pub.’ By the mid-1990s there was hardly a big city without one, generally in some less expensive part of town, with its statutory Guinness sign in its windows, its warm and fusty atmosphere within, its generally youthful and boisterous clientele, and genuine Irishmen often behind the bar. What could induce such people, I once asked a Donegal barman in Paris, to leave the fun and comradeship of the merriest country in Europe and try their luck in often dismal side-streets in remote foreign cities? He said sure you know the Irish – we’re all a bit mad. And what made his own pub so attractive to its evidently well-satisfied customers, crowding every corner of the bar and talking loudly in exuberant French? You know how it is, he said, they come for the crack.
80 Beside the swan-house
Three great influences, though, fell upon Europe from outside the continent, and have left their symptoms still. For a start there was Russia – the Russia both of the tsars and of the Marxists. The best place to contemplate the cultural effects of Old Russia is Riga, the capital of Latvia, if only because for much of its history it was actually part of Old Russia – Russia’s third city, in fact. In a park in the centre of the city there is a wonderfully Russian memento – a wooden swan-house beside a small lake, with wide eaves, p
ainted in the bright crude colours that Russians used to love, and rather crooked with age. Just the sight of it makes me think of Russian lovers under the trees, Russian officers strolling the paths in fur-collared greatcoats, Turgenev, Pushkin, troikas, exiled intellectuals, impoverished landowners, serfs, students with bombs, and everything else that the memory of Old Russia conjures in the minds of romantic readers of Russian literature. Much of Riga looks like a tsarist city still, with its handsome terraced streets, the skyline of its towers and steeples, and the castle by the river that now houses the President of Latvia but once housed the Russian Governor-General. Strung along the coast a few miles away is Jurmala, in the days of the tsars a favourite seaside retreat for the St Petersburg gentry. Clapboard villas shelter there among the woods, with outbuildings for horses and servants, and there is a long pedestrian street of shops for strolling along and gossiping, and there are coffee-shops where the samovars used to bubble, and suburban railway stations where Anna Kareninas could stand tragically in the steam. ‘Next door to the Kurhaus at Majorenhof,’ comfortingly says my Baedeker Russia, 1914, ‘is the Sanatorium of Dr Maximovitch.’
Helsinki is good, too, if you like this kind of thing. It was once the capital of a Russian Autonomous Grand Duchy, and for all its differences with modern Russia it has by no means abandoned its heritage. An elderly steam-yacht that cruises its harbour is called Nicolai II, and has the white eagle of the Romanovs on its funnel. Old-school Russian restaurants abound, not to mention old-school Russian rogues. You can buy Russian icons in antique shops, and old postcards of St Petersburg, and paintings of peasants and snow-scenes. Many of Helsinki’s institutions are housed in Russian buildings to this day. The Presidential Palace, authoritative on the waterfront, used to be the palace of the Governor-General. The City Hall used to be the hotel for visitors from Russia. The chamber-music auditorium was the House of Nobility. The city’s ceremonial centre-piece, the great square of Senaatintori, was the creation of Tsar Alexander II, and looks decidedly like St Petersburg, with Alexander himself riding a bronze horse for ever in the middle of it. Not far away the double-headed tsarist eagle roosts upon Tsarina’s Stone, an obelisk commemorating an imperial visit in 1833 – in the later years of the Soviet Union it was the only such bird left: at large in the world. Ah yes, if you happen to be a Grand Duchess yourself, you will still feel at home in Helsinki.
81 The after-taste
But then Finland, as we know, is the Lucky Country: tsarist Russia generally treated it kindly enough, and Soviet Russia never ruled it. There is one other European country – Bulgaria – that still feels a historical debt of gratitude towards Old Russia, but there is no European country at all that feels grateful for the influence of the USSR. At the end of the twentieth century Russia retains only one foothold in my Europe – the enclave of Kaliningrad, which used to be German East Prussia, and which is cut off from the rest of the country by Lithuania: but a blight still hangs over all those other parts of Europe once dominated by the Soviet Communists. Sometimes it is a measurable economic or administrative blight, but more often it is an indeterminate legacy of shabbiness, squalor and corruption, a lack of colour still, an unhelpfulness, a grumpiness. One day, I suppose, they will remove the vast and vainglorious Soviet war memorials which stand with banners, bayonets and stars in every capital of eastern Europe, Stalin’s sphere of influence. They may even demolish the pinnacled Mongol-Gothic skyscrapers, the Palaces of Culture, the Houses of the Party, which figure in so so many skylines. The sculpted Stalins and the Lenins have already gone, and only a few monumental factory workers and statuesque agricultural labourers are left to ornament office blocks and bridges. It will be generations, though, before that miasma finally disappears, with its wastelands of dingy concrete, its last rude shopkeepers, its dubious politicians and its mafia. In the meantime the citizenries cherish their bitter and satiric memories. In Budapest in 1996 the pizzeria called Marxim’s, fitted out with Soviet posters, bare benches and chicken wire, awarded busts of Lenin to high achievers in the field of anti-art. In Vilnius the surviving Soviet-style restaurants were nicknamed Golden Oldies, and they were about to open a nightclub named Iron Felix, after a notorious local-born Soviet police chief: all the pleasures of Communism were to be ironically re-created in it, down to a choice between newspaper or real toilet paper in the lavatories.
82 Interlude with Russians
In a small coffee-shop in Riga, near the Freedom Memorial, the only other customers are three hefty well-wrapped people sitting over the remains of their lunch at a corner table. A man in a woollen hat drinks beer. A woman heavily befurred has a bottle of white wine to herself. A youth in jeans and a leather jacket slouches over a bottle of vodka. All three are very drunk. They talk to each other in erratic spurts of invective. Often they knock glasses over, or drop things on the floor. The woman is totally unsmiling. The man occasionally looks ingratiatingly across the room to me. Every now and then the youth slumps forward on to the table, as though unconscious. When the man finishes his beer he hoists his companions to their feet and they leave the restaurant. The woman walks out as though sleepwalking, in a positive parody of inebriation. The youth staggers disjointedly towards the door. The man, pushing him out with both hands, turns to me with the hazed and flowery suggestion of a bow. ‘My apologies,’ he says in a slurred approximation, and tries to bow again as he disappears into the street outside. When the waiter comes to clear the debris of their table he looks across at me, too, with a sour smile. ‘Russians,’ he says.
83 Out of the East
No less significant has been the effect of Islam, whose old threat did so much to make Europe what it is. Before the wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia a truly Islamic experience was to drink a coffee in the little café in a tower of the bridge at Mostar. I was particularly vulnerable to the spell of Islam when I first went there, having recently returned from residence in Egypt, and everything about the place enchanted me. The coffee was the thick black Turkish kind, with cardamom in it. The room was hung with carpets. The skyline around was pierced with minarets, and when the sun went down one heard the magical call of the meuzzin echoing over the town. Figs and lemons grew in the gardens along the river-banks. There were fields of tobacco, and orchards as in Persia. It was lovely! The sixteenth-century bridge was a miraculously fragile-looking single span, said to have been designed by a pupil of the incomparable Sinan, architect of the Suleiman Mosque in Istanbul‚ and was attended by all the proper Islamic legends about collapses, penalties and generous sultans. If this was Europe, I thought, it was a Europe delightfully mutated!
But it was only a grace-note, only a happy incidental to a fearful theme. For generations the hostile power of Islam was one of the great unifying forces of Europe, making the continent more than ever synonymous with Christendom. Islam had come to Bosnia in the fifteenth century, by the agency of the Turks, but its first footholds in Europe were far older. The Arabs of North Africa invaded southern Spain and Portugal in the eighth century, remained there for 600 years, and for a time advanced far into France too. Other Muslims occupied Sicily for 150 years, and later the Ottoman Empire, storming Europe from the east, reached the walls of Vienna itself before the tide was turned. All this profoundly scarred the psyche of Christian Europe, and even now you can hardly escape memories of the long and bitter struggles against the Antichrist.
Some of Europe’s great champions were champions against Islam, from the Catholic Monarchs of Castile, Ferdinand and Isabel, who drove the Moors from Andalusia, to Don John of Austria, who beat the Turkish fleet at Lepanto, or Charles Martel (‘The Hammer’), the victor of Poitiers. The Muslim threat is not forgotten. Each pleat in the starched skirts of Greece’s evzone soldiers is said to remember a year of Turkish occupation. In the Museum of History at Vienna they still display the head of the Grand Vizier Kara Mustapha, who besieged Vienna in 1683 attended by 1,500 concubines, 700 black eunuchs, several cats and an ostrich. In Spain they have never forgiven the sav
agery of Franco’s Moroccan troops in the civil war of the 1930s. In Serbian Yugoslavia a supreme day of mourning is still the day of Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds, when in 1389 the Turks slaughtered the flower of Serbian nobility. It is a victory over Islam that the Bulgarians celebrate in their most grandiose national memory. As late as 1986 a memorial was erected in Crete to the heroes of the 1866 Sfakiot rising against the Turks. As late as 1995 Christian soldiers in Bosnia were murdering Muslims simply for being Muslim.
84 From A Hunter’s Sketches by Ivan Turgenev, 1847–1851, translated at the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow
LUKERYA: And I’ll tell you what I was once told by a student of the Bible: there was once a country, and the Muslims made war on it, and they tortured and killed all the inhabitants; and do what they would, the people could not get rid of them. And there appeared among these people a holy virgin; she took a great sword, put on armour weighing eighty pounds, went out against the Muslims and drove them all beyond the sea. Only when she had driven them out, she said to them, ‘Now burn me, for that was my vow, that I would die a death by fire for my people.’ And the Muslims took her and burnt her, and the people have been free ever since then! That was a noble deed, now!
