Europe
Page 42
Two other books, in particular, have also opened my eyes to the power and resilience – and often the charm – of the aristocratic network which for so long constituted a kind of supranational autonomy across much of Europe. There were powerful aristocracies, of course, in every European country, but the patricians seem to have been at their most collusive or club-like in central and eastern Europe, in Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary and the Baltic countries – little kings and queens on their own estates, although it was said of them that as they were often hard up their crowns were fur hats, their sceptres were sticks and their orbs potatoes. Since in those countries they have mostly been swept out of existence, or at least out of recognition, I have met them only through literature. Who can ever forget Patrick Leigh Fermor’s odyssey across patrician Europe, in his memoirs of a journey in the 1930s from England to the Black Sea? He mingled with every rank of citizen, as a footloose and adventurous youth, but he regularly stayed in the castles and country houses of aristocrats, and has given us an imperishable picture of life among the toffs of Mitteleuropa before catastrophe fell upon them. Here he learns the game of bike-polo on a stately lawn. Here he listens to nightingales while his host plays fugues on the next-door piano. This count has eccentric notions about the fattening of ducks, this one smokes a hubble-bubble after dinner. Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff points out on the map country houses Leigh Fermor might visit on his onward journey – ‘My old friend Botho Coreth at Hochschatten. The Trautmannsdorffs at Pottenbrunn!’ Grófnö Lászlo of Lobos gives him a pistol plated with mother-of-pearl to see him safely on his way. Baron ‘Pips’ Schey introduces him to the works of Proust. From family to family Fermor wandered across Europe, kindly welcomed everywhere (for he was a prepossessing young English gentleman), passed from one castle to another in a generic ambience of comfort, cultivation, selective hospitality and originality. ‘We are like potatoes,’ one Hungarian nobleman said to him of his family connections: ‘the best part is underground.’
A decade later we meet just the same people, in very different circumstances, in the diaries that the adorable Marie Vassiltchikov (‘Missie’) kept during the years of the Second World War in Berlin. She herself was the daughter of a Russian prince, and throughout the war she maintained her friendships with the aristocratic clans of Germany, some of them pure German, some Russian, some Polish, some Hungarian, Lithuanian, Czech, Austrian or even Swedish. The patrician network was, it seems, scarcely affected by the advent of the Nazis: in 1939 the Hohenzollern family were still the greatest landowners in Germany, with palaces, villas, hunting-lodges and vineyards from Kiel to East Prussia. When Missie went into the country out of the war-blasted, half-starved capital, familiar country houses were always ready to welcome her, and fatten her up with good country food off the estate. Convivial princes, baronesses and counts were always to hand – Prince August-Wilhelm (‘Auwi’) Hohenzollern of Prussia, Count Axel (‘Wolly’) von Saldern-Ahlimb-Ringenwalde, Baron Anton (‘Tony’) Saurma von de Jeltsch, Count Johannes (‘Hansi’) von Oppersdorff, Princess Helene (‘Lella’) zu Mecklenburg. Dashing young aristocrats lived dashingly as ever through the squalors of Nazidom and the miseries of war – the night-fighter pilot Prince Heinrich zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, for instance, who sometimes flew into action with a raincoat over his dinner-jacket, or the brave, doomed company of young noblemen who were concerned in the bomb plot against Hitler in 1944.
They were mostly gone by my time, their stylish half-private world shattered by war, ideology, revenge, prejudice or justified grievance. Sometimes I have seen their houses, like that old Baltic manor, but their lives I have only glimpsed through the eye of imagination, or of literature. ‘All of us are descended,’ said Kross’s Baron von Trock to his fellow-nobles of Estonia, ‘from a long line of soldiers.’ So they were, the old aristocrats of Mitteleuropa. They had won their precedence by the sword, and by the sword they mostly lost it.
20 Arts of government
The dynasties of Europe were often extremely shrewd, shifting their positions, their styles and even their convictions to suit the times. Often they allied themselves with the forces of religion. For several centuries the Habsburgs sustained the myth of divine right, with great success. The Medici princes of Florence were sometimes Popes too. The kings and queens of England were officially Defenders of the Protestant faith, and their coronations were profoundly religious ceremonies, invoking the alliance of God himself to help them in their duties, rather as the doges of Venice used to be married ceremonially to the Adriatic Sea.
Sometimes monarchies even associated themselves with that universal Power, the power of art. The Russian artists of St Petersburg, before the Soviet Revolution, seriously thought of taking over the Government and creating ‘an artistic dictatorship’. European artists never aspired so high, but they did often join the ruling hierarchy. We read of mighty kings humbling themselves in the presence of artists. The Grand Duke of Tuscany offers his own chair to Michelangelo. Francis I of France attends Leonardo da Vinci’s deathbed. King Christian IX of Denmark summons his carriage to pay a call on Hans Christian Andersen. Queen Victoria of England bases her white-palled funeral upon Tennyson’s. ‘I was born too soon,’ declares Frederick the Great of Prussia, himself an accomplished flautist, ‘but I have seen Voltaire.’ And at the city of Weimar one may still enjoy the fruits of a practical political association between Art and Government, because there the enlightened young Duke Carl August took into his administrative employ no less an artist than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This was a great success. Goethe became a sort of wazir to the star-struck duke, and did everything from designing public buildings to inspecting the dukely mines, besides attracting to the city other poets, artists and musicians of every kind (when he went away to Italy His Grace paid his stipend anyway). For generations Weimar was a dream of Germany, neither Frenchified nor Prussian, neither nationalistic nor imperialist. Madame de Staël reported that it was not so much a small city as one large, liberal and wonderfully enlightened palace.
I feel Goethe’s organizing presence still when I wander the streets of Weimar, as we wandered them together on pages 228–9. He 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. The ideology did not last. The young duke might be enlightened, but his people were mostly terribly Philistine, and the dukedom of artists lost some of its delight when Carl August was no longer there to set the tone, or Goethe to supervise the aesthetics. Still, where else in Europe can one find a ruler buried not among his princely peers but between a pair of poets? For if you visit Carl August’s simple mausoleum, on its little hillock above his city, you will find that Goethe lies on one side of him, Schiller on the other. Most European sovereigns would rather be buried among racehorses.
21 Two castles
Among all Europe’s petty princelings (none of them, of course, in the least petty to themselves), some of the grandest have been the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, whose names have echoed through European history since the Middle Ages, and who were sovereigns of their own independent State until 1918. Nowadays the most famous of them is Ludwig II, the so-called Mad King, who died mysteriously in 1886 after having built the original Disneyland, his immensely towered and turreted castle of Neuschwanstein on the edge of the mountains south-west of his capital, Munich. This structure, conceived by stage designers rather than architects, was greatly liked by Ludwig’s friend Richard Wagner, and is now one of the supreme tourist destinations of all Europe. It generally raises a sneer among more sophisticated travellers, and really does look rather ridiculous in photographs; but looking at it from the meadows in the flat land below gives a very different impression. From there you can see it as upon an opera stage. Half a mile away, seldom pictured in the postcards,
there is another of Ludwig’s castles – Hohenschwangau – which is a far more sombre and warlike building, based upon a twelfth-century fortress, with a squat ochre-coloured keep like a genuine citadel. These two great buildings, the one so camp, the other so macho, eye each other in a bemused way across an intervening valley. Behind them the mountains rise marvellously into the Bavarian blue. Sweet green fields lie in front, speckled with white houses; hang-gliders soar; an occasional helicopter whirrs around the towers of Neuschwanstein; the combination of majesty and frivolity, pretension and domesticity, seems to me irresistibly engaging. Lying flat on my back in the flowered stubble there, in the middle of a meadow on a summer morning, I once called Wales on my mobile telephone, and sent a breath of High German romance into the grey stones of home.
22 A smell of wild garlic
The Bavarian dynasty still has its political supporters, for many Bavarians still feel themselves Bavarians first, Germans second, and show it even in the clothes they wear – lederhosen and feathered hats for the proletariat, beautiful green caps for the smart set. In 1996 the respected Prince Albrecht, who had distinguished himself in his youth by refusing to join the Nazi Party, died at the age of ninety-one and was buried in the family plot at the monastery of Andechs, where I met the disagreeable monk on page 45. I visited his grave a few days after the funeral, when morose Bavarian gardeners were clearing away the wreaths. No memorial plaque had yet been raised, but all around the green cemetery garden, with its crucifix in the middle, were the names of recent members of the dynasty, princes and princesses, all given (although Germany has been a republic since 1918) the old honorific of ‘Royal Highness’. While the gardeners brushed up the leaves and took the wreaths away, I rooted idly through the funeral ribbons and sashes which lay in a pile on the grass – a pile of silken reds, yellows and blues. What a mess of royalty was there! Crowns and coronets and embossed princessly initials lay in a crumpled, discarded heap – the detritus, I thought, of a long discredited idea, in a monastic garden where only Royal Highnesses could be buried, and surly gardeners would soon be throwing the whole lot into the dirty back of a truck. There was a smell of wild garlic about, I see from my notebook.
23 Still trying
In 1900 there were only two republics, France and Switzerland, in the whole of Europe, and it has been only within my own fifty years that the last royal dynasties of Europe have begun to lose their lustre and their significance. For long after the Second World War the Austrian Republic still banned all Habsburgs from setting foot on Austrian soil; only in the 1960s was the gentle pan-European Archduke Otto allowed to visit Vienna. ‘Ah well, what the hell,’ one seems to hear history saying then. King Farouk of Egypt once prophesied that by the end of the twentieth century only five royal courts would be extant – the courts of Clubs, Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and England: by the 1990s even the English were having their doubts.
Several other royal houses of Europe kept trying – in 1996 nine hereditary monarchies were still in office. As we have seen, the King and Queen of the Belgians, though they had lately given up court balls, were still living regally enough, and so were the reigning princes of Monaco and Liechtenstein. Others compromised with history. King Juan Carlos of Spain was thought to be a prime champion of democracy in that old despotism. The old palace of the Swedish king and queen, in Stockholm, now flew far fewer flags, and looked much less regnant, than the Grand Hotel across the harbour. When I first went to Sweden I saw His Majesty’s destroyer Gävle (1,040 tons), of the Royal Swedish Navy, parked bang outside the palace front steps: but by the 1990s King Carl Gustav XVI and his Queen were seldom there, the Gävle had finished up as a floating generator at a nuclear power station, and no public authority might call itself ‘royal’, not even the Navy. The Dutch royal family seemed to have established the same equilibrium with democracy, a harmless arrangement which pleased the tourists and appeared to satisfy the indigenes. The toy soldiers I sneered at in Denmark, in their peaked bearskins and cross-straps, still foolishly marched up and down at the royal headquarters in Copenhagen: but when the Royal Danish Ballet ended its command performances the company bowed first to the general public and only secondly to the royal box. The Norwegian monarchy was celebrated with an affectionate dignity that edged endearingly towards humour. The royal palace stood, properly pillared, surrounded by parkland on a hill almost in the middle of Oslo. Sentries in feathered hats and striped trousers stood guard outside the house, now and then marching up and down a bit, or ceremoniously stamping their feet, and at lunch-time every day they shifted duty with a ritual of bands and sword salutes. This was hardly the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace – when the parade was over a tuba-player was quite likely to be left smoking a cigarette on a bench outside the guardroom, his legs stretched comfortably out and his cap on the back of his head. In London he would soon be bawled out by a sergeant-major: in Oslo he helped to give the little ceremony an easy assurance that I found at once moving and entertaining – just what a modern monarchy needs.
24 A perfectly good job
As for ex-King Michael of Romania, or Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia, or ex-King Simeon II of Bulgaria, or ex-King Constantine of Greece, all of whom are sometimes tipped for a return to their abolished thrones, for myself I would not put my money on them: but then I am a Welsh republican, and sympathize with Prince Charles Castroit de Renzi, who says he is unlikely to claim the throne of Albania to which he might apparently be entitled, having a perfectly good job already as an electricity clerk in Stoke-on-Trent.
25 The third spasm
I have a particular aversion, not entirely inherited, to the greatest advocate of European unity by family network, the author of my third European spasm – the little bugger Napoleon, as he was defined by his contemporary Marshal Pierre François Charles Augereau. It always astonishes me that in Paris Napoleon Bonaparte is still honoured as a national hero, his tomb in the Invalides still a place of pilgrimage, his memory presented as all but holy. A century and a half after his death, I have been unable to get away from him. Wherever I go he has been, with his arrogant poses, his bullying armies, his preposterous pretensions and his false claims to liberalism. I detest him. I despise him for sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, from almost every country in Europe, for the sake of his personal ambition. I loathe him for his impudence in removing from Venice the golden horses of St Mark and erecting them in self-glorification on a triumphal arch in Paris. It infuriates me to find yet another sycophantic plaque commemorating his visit to a city, or just the house he spent a night in somewhere. Where did Napoleon not spend a night? He is as ubiquitous a lodger as George Washington in the United States, and generally much less welcome.
For a few years Napoleon did more or less achieve a unity of Europe. It is true that he in effect himself put an end to the old Holy Roman Empire, but he created a holy empire of his own. He saw himself as the direct descendant of Charlemagne, whatever the Habsburgs said, and adopted many of the mystical suggestions of the old Empire. Was there ever a more sickening scene than the one depicted in Jacques Louis David’s painting of Napoleon’s coronation in Notre-Dame, still attracting its worshipping hundreds at the Louvre? Grouped around the high altar of the cathedral are his cronies and toadies, most of them atheists or at least violent anticlericists, ridiculously dressed up in the ruffs, feathered hats and pantaloons decreed for them. The simpering Josephine kneels to be crowned herself by her husband, and the members of Napoleon’s Corsican family look on in complacency from their box behind. Napoleon himself stands centre-stage, of course, the very image of upstart arrogance in his ribbons, sashes and robes, with a wreath of golden laurel leaves on his head: meekly behind him sits Pope Pius VII, insolently summoned all the way from Rome despite his age and ill-health, holding his hand up in a febrile gesture of blessing. Almost everything about the picture is false, in one way or another. A priest had married the demure Josephine to Napoleon only the night before, in order to legit
imize her own coronation. Napoleon had already crowned himself, having snatched the crown from the high altar before the Pope could reach it. Napoleon’s family was not in fact present at the ceremony, and David was obliged by imperial order to paint in the Pope’s benedictory hand, long after the event. Napoleon himself, far from being chosen or anointed by divine unction, was hardly more than a sort of sexy Hitler, and almost every clause of his coronation oath he was presently to perjure.
26 The empire of vulgarity
It was all the essence of vulgarity, and Napoleon’s restoration of the monarchy, his absurd scattering of trumpery kingdoms, princedoms and dukedoms across Europe, is the best argument for republicanism I know. His vision of a Europe united by his own dynastic arrangements came to nothing, the revolutionary and nationalist nineteenth century being the wrong time for it. Nevertheless his empire lasted a decade, and has left its stamp upon Europe eversince. Napoleon and his brothers and sisters ruled in France, Italy, Holland, Spain and Germany, and, having rid himself of Josephine, he married a Habsburg princess who gave him the King of Rome as an heir. His fighting marshals, mostly the sons of the petite bourgeoisie, became sovereigns too: Soult the Duke of Dalmatia, Murat King of Naples, Bernadotte King of Sweden (from whom those pleasant contemporary monarchs in Sweden are descended). He must sometimes have been confused himself as to the number and even the location of his puppet kingdoms. When he summoned a conclave of his ancillary sovereigns, in 1809, there sat in his salon the rulers of Saxony, Württemberg, Naples, Holland, Spain and Westphalia, with Napoleon and Josephine presiding over them all as undisputed Emperor and Empress of the new Holy Roman Empire. The Imperial Guard included units from Italy, Germany, Lithuania, Poland and The Netherlands.