by Jan Morris
27 Napoleon’s island
In the end, of course, Napoleon overreached himself His empire collapsed into its constituent parts, and he was banished almost as far from the continent as it was possible to be banished. For ten months, though, before his final abasement at Waterloo, he was exiled to the comfortable Mediterranean island of Elba, which became his sole sovereign principality. There even a bigot like me finds his memory more endearing than repulsive. His Empire of Europe reduced in scale to an island eighteen miles long, he behaved himself rather well, and proved an able and sensible ruler of his little fief. For me he is more alive in Elba than anywhere else – far more vividly than in Corsica, his birthplace, or in Paris, the stage of his grandiloquent climax. He set out, as always, to engrave his own personality upon the place, and the island remains palpably Napoleonic to this day.
His modest summer palace there is his best memorial of all, to my mind. It is not a very grand house, but even so it is said that he could not afford to buy it until his sister Pauline came to his rescue by selling some of her jewels. In it he spent the hot island days with a couple of generals, a small domestic staff, Pauline and his mother, and the Napoleonic reminders which are scattered all over the property have lost their pomp and hauteur – the eagles, the crests, and above all the bees, sculpted, plastered, drawn and modelled, which also appear on the flag Napoleon himself designed for his principality. The flag still flies in Elba, and there are many other reminders of his presence, too. There is a spring called Napoleon’s Fountain, whose excellent water is collected by islanders with flasks, and commercially bottled with bees on its label. There is a sweet and lonely hermitage, lost among woods, where Napoleon spent two happy days with his mistress Marie Walewska. There is a death-mask of Napoleon in the Church of the Misericordia. There is a thronelike rock, traditionally called Napoleon’s Chair, where the ex-Emperor is said to have spent lonely meditative hours looking out to sea, longing for France, dreaming of greater days …
But there, I see that like everyone else I am succumbing to the romance of Bonaparte. Napoleon was a monster, but he was undeniably fascinating. Despite myself I still pause to read those plaques, wherever in Europe I glimpse his name upon them, and here I stand beside Napoleon’s Chair, looking across the blue Tyrrhenian, with a perceptible frisson of sympathy. How pathetically romantic a fate, to be reduced from the command of Europe to the squiredom of this small island! How touching the bees! How noble the death-mask! How loyal his brave generals were! How poignant that brief meeting with his love at the hermitage! Just for a moment I am seduced, as millions have been seduced before me. I have to pull myself together, to remember that when Napoleon was gazing so wistfully towards the horizon he was probably plotting his escape from Elba and a return to violence: which he presently achieved, sacrificing a few score thousand more lives in a resumption of his heartless aspirations, before getting his well-deserved come-uppance at Waterloo, and his final banishment out of Europe altogether. If he had lived in our time they would have put him on trial for war crimes.
28 As to those horses
As to those horses of St Mark, which the little bugger stole, like many another work of art they are emblematically citizens of Europe themselves, so often have they been the objects of international envy and theft. They were made by some ancient genius of Greece or Rome, were stolen by the Venetians when they plundered Constantinople in 1204, were trundled away to France in immense horse-drawn wagons when Napoleon seized Venice in 1797, became Austrian subjects when Venice fell under Habsburg rule in 1814, and Italian subjects when Venice became part of Italy in 1866. In the two world wars they were taken down from their balcony on the Basilica San Marco and carted away for safety’s sake. Now they have been replaced up there by lifeless replicas, and are stabled immune from pollution in dark rooms behind the belvedere from which, for a thousand years, they proudly surveyed the Piazza to the wonder of all who saw them. I was in Venice when they were removed, apparently for ever, and it seemed another of the seminal moments of my life, like that train journey under the English Channel: the moment when Venice, the city that had so long bewitched me, reconciled itself to its future as a civic museum.
I wept a little to recognize this moment of acceptance, because it reminded me of the last Doge’s remark when, as Napoleon’s forces approached, he handed his ceremonial hat to his valet – ‘Take it away,’ he said, ‘I shan’t be needing it any more.’ Besides, the golden horses of St Mark had always brought out the emotional in me. They had stood there for so long, so nobly, so gently, with the dull-gold ripple of their magnificent bodies, their hoofs raised so majestically, their lovely heads turned one towards the other with such magnanimous tenderness. I had known them all my adult life, and the thought of them immured in those cavernous chambers out of the sunshine, off the stage at last, struck me as infinitely poignant – more poignant, actually, than their removal by Napoleon to be exhibited as the ultimate trophies of war on his triumphal arch on the other side of the Alps. In a book I wrote about Venice in 1960 I claimed to have heard these glorious creatures stamp their hoofs at midnight, and call to each other in a kind of whinny. One of my less friendly critics called the work ‘impossibly fey and self-indulgent’, but I was not the first to have such fancies.
29 From An Itinerary, 1617, by Fynes Moryson
And above this gallery, and over the great doore of the Church, be foure horses of brass, guilded over, very notable for antiquity and beauty; and they are so set, as if at the very first step they would leape into the market place.
30 The Second Reich
I was in Berlin one day when I saw a strange spectacle at the east end of Unter den Linden. During the Communist period the East German Government had built itself a vast House of the People on the site of the Königliche Schloss of the German emperors, the headquarters of the Second Reich, which the Russians had destroyed at the end of the Second World War more for ideological than for strategic or aesthetic reasons. Now it was time for the House of the People to be eliminated in its turn, and as a sort of socio-aesthetic-historical experiment the whole building had been covered with painted canvas sheets showing what things would look like if it were decided to rebuild on its site, just as it had been, the old royal palace. Most of the bystanders that day seemed to think it a bad idea – ‘It makes my flesh creep,’ one man told me – and in the end it was abandoned. I was rather sorry. I knew the look of the old palace very well, from old photographs – a lumpish vainglorious thing, four-square beside the Spree, attended by the usual statues, stables, ceremonial entrances and watergates, and I would like to have seen it hugely standing there again.
I felt myself that the memory of that old empire was so faded and ancient as to be innocuous. The Second Reich was my fourth spasm, the next attempt after Napoleon’s to make a whole of Europe – if only, to begin with at least, German Europe. The German States, kingdoms, duchies, princedoms, theoretically retained their separate identities until the twentieth century – German soldiers were sworn in by a dozen different oaths – but in the 1860s they were welded into a national cohesion by the power of Prussia, led by its Iron Chancellor Bismarck. The King of Prussia became the Emperor of Germany, the Kaiser: and it was under the two Hohenzollern kaisers, Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II, descended from a Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, that Germany became the strongest Power in Europe, humiliating the French, overawing the Austrians, extending its power into Poland and the Baltic countries, challenging the British even on their own element, the sea. ‘Germanization,’ declared Bismarck in 1869, looking around him at the Europe of his day, ‘is making satisfactory progress … by which we do not mean the dissemination of the German language, but that of German morality and culture.’
I need hardly say that the Hohenzollerns were allied by marriage and descent to most of the royal families of Europe – Queen Victoria was Wilhelm II’s grandmother – but in retrospect their style of sovereignty seems to have been particular to themselves, more
flowery and plumed, more resolutely imperial perhaps, a little more defensive or self-conscious than any other. It seemed long beyond resurrection to me. I thought a rebuilt schloss would be about as wicked as the Albert Hall, and I wouldn’t have cared if they had also rebuilt the equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I which used to stand above the Spree opposite the palace gates. I knew this figure well, too, from photographs of its unveiling in 1897, an almost orgiastic parade of plumedness, greatcoatism and thighbootery. It was an absurd piece of nineteenth-century braggadocio, all horses and flags and snarling lions, and, far from raising horrid spectres of aggression in the mind of passers-by, would surely remind us for ever how preposterous self-glory can be.
31 Kaiserstadt
For me there was no need to rebuild the schloss, anyway, to revive the Wilhelmine feeling in Berlin. One day in the early 1990s I took my Baedeker’s North Germany, edition of 1913, and went for a contemplative walk through the history of the capital. The Iron Curtain had only lately collapsed, the Berlin Wall was being demolished. The capital was recovering its proper shape again, and the longer I wandered the more it seemed to me that both the Communist and the Nazi experiences were hardly more than terrible aberrations, and that the city’s presiding era remained the time of the Prussian monarchy. At least in historical suggestion, with that old Baedeker in my hand, this was Kaiserstadt still. ‘The glory of the Parisians robs Berlin of its sleep,’ Wilhelm II had observed, as he consciously set out to make his capital ‘a world city’. Dear God, it was pompous! Of course a century ago pomposity was the general European style, but no capital flaunted itself like Wilhelmine Berlin, and on skyline and façade there still preened the emblematic champions of its self-regard – armoured and muscular, with swords, trumpets and cannons, attended by chimeras sometimes, astride lions, taming wild horses, brandishing flags or exhibiting trophies. Here was Frederick the Great flanked by cavalry generals, here Marshal Gneisenau stood next to Blücher in the shade of the Operncafé trees. The museums of Royal Berlin stood learned as ever on their island in the Spree. Even the Communists’ bulbous television tower looked, to somebody in my mood, acceptably Hohenzollern, and imperial ghosts were everywhere. The vestige of a colonnade, a cracked plinth, or simply a name on my Baedeker map – Wilhelmstrasse, Lustgarten, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Brücke – conveyed me magically to the Berlin of my fourth spasm. In my mind’s eye I wondered still at the fashionable brilliance of Pariser-platz beside the Brandenburg Gate, with the Adlon Hotel at the corner where everyone stayed, and the gleaming lines of carriages around the ornamental gardens. I had coffee at the same spot, on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, where once Johann Krantzler held sway over his world-celebrated café. I all but heard the mounting of the Prussian Guard (clanking of weaponry, screeching of commands) outside the New Guardhouse. I looked up towards the vanished window of the Königliche Schloss where, long before, old Wilhelm I used each day to take the salute, bolt upright at his window, while the band played and the watching crowd cheered. They seemed to me picturesque shades, long disarmed, and the monarchs themselves almost mythologically comical. I had to remind myself that it was the kaisers, their chancellors and their generals whose bombastic ambitions for their Fatherland had helped to embroil Europe in one of the most dreadful of all its wars. ‘The Fatherland,’ said Mussolini, ‘is a spook … like God, and like God it is vindictive, cruel and tyrannical.’
32 The fifth spasm
And presently along came Hitler, creator of the Third Reich and the fifth spasm, which he called his New Order. He was infinitely worse than the kaisers and the Habsburgs, a good deal worse than Napoleon or any of the Holy Roman Emperors. Yet he succeeded in making a unity of all Europe more nearly than any of them. At the height of his power the entire continent was under German control, with the exception of Britain, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Liechtenstein – and if it had been expedient he could probably have acquired most of them too. Never had Europe so coalesced. For anyone of my generation it is impossible to travel around Europe without thinking of that evil Reich, which was designed to last a thousand years, like Charlemagne’s Reich before it, but which fortunately for us all lasted only twelve. It was not altogether a unity imposed, either. In almost every country the New Order had its enthusiastic supporters. There were opportunist politicians, like Quisling in Norway. There were frightened and befuddled patriots trying to do their best for their countries, like Pétain in France. There were passionate anti-Communists. There were racist fanatics. Many thousands of men of many nationalities willingly fought in the German armies, not least in that huge praetorian guard the SS. It was an Austrian general who, as the Germans withdrew from northern Norway, saw to it that every last little fishing-hamlet was burnt to the ground. They were French SS men who, in the last desperate days of the war, defended the Reichstag in Berlin against the Red Army. Spanish volunteers fought alongside the Wehrmacht in Russia. Russians and Ukrainians defected to it. Hungarians, Italians, Romanians, Croats, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes all fought for Hitler’s cause. The forces that finally demolished the Third Reich, and suppressed my fifth spasm, were forces from all over the world – every continent, every colour, every faith and language: but the army that fought on Hitler’s side was a truly European army. The SS division of French volunteers was called the Charlemagne Division.
33 Memorials
Yet it came and went like a bad dream – twelve short and terrible years, from Hitler’s accession to power until the end of him: no longer than it takes for a baby to grow into a boy. If the Third Reich had lasted longer it would certainly have built for itself some monstrous monuments. Berlin, as Germania, the capital of the New Europe, was to be transformed with ceremonial highways, vast buildings of Government, a gigantic triumphal arch through which the city traffic would pass as though in obeisance, and a Hall of the People capped with a dome higher than the Eiffel Tower and designed to hold standing audiences of 150,000 people. In Vienna the Ringstrasse was to be extended by two avenues running in parallel to the Danube; between them a neoclassic plaza, a Nazi forum, was to replace most of the city’s Second District (conveniently occupied chiefly by Jews): in the event nothing was built, and the only architectural legacy of the Nazis in Vienna was a ring of concrete anti-aircraft towers which proved indestructible. Granite blocks were imported from Sweden to build a mighty victory monument in Warsaw; some of them ended up as a memorial to the heroes of the Ghetto Rising against the Nazis in 1943. Linz, near Hitler’s birthplace at Braunau in Austria, was to have been metamorphosed into a mighty exhibition of Germanic culture, and we may assume that in all the subject capitals there would have been erected overbearing physical monuments to the might of the Reich. As it happily is, there is remarkably little to see of Hitler’s empire. Within Germany the Germans got rid of most Nazi relics in shame: in the rest of Europe there was not much time to build anything except military works. Talk about Ozymandias! Kaiser Bill left far more behind him than Adolf Hitler.
In occupied Europe, however, one tremendous and proper memorial to Nazi values may still be seen: the Atlantic Wall on the coast of France, built by hundreds of thousands of slave labourers to defend United Europe from invasion. To this day the gigantic bunkers and gun-towers of the Atlantic Wall look authentically monstrous and handsome. They are the most impressive architectural mementoes of the Nazi era – some designed, as it happens, by Albert Speer, who designed Hitler’s new Berlin too (the plans for Linz were Hitler’s own). They are a true cenotaph to the Thousand Year Reich, and all its illusions attend them. One or two strongholds have been made into museums, some are shattered wrecks, but many still stand just as they were built, among the windswept sandy turf of the Atlantic coast.
Sometimes I wander through one, when I have time to kill before catching a Channel ferry, and as I pass through its massive concrete portals, rather like the gateway of the other world in an Egyptian tomb, all sorts of uncomfortable images pass through my mind: jackboot
ed generals on tours of inspection – prisoners bowed deep below the weight of concrete blocks – collaborationist mistresses perhaps, brought here after dinner for the pornographic thrill of it in ribbed Volkswagen staff cars. The Atlantic Wall is like Nazidom in concrete, horrible and compelling, and like Nazidom itself it abjectly failed.
34 The burden
I used to suppose that the world would soon be forgetting and forgiving such images of Nazi Germany, but I have come to doubt it. In our time the cinema has made history more vivid than ever, and many future generations will find their attitudes towards the Germans affected by the images of film. The slaves of the Atlantic Wall will still be alive to my great-grandchildren; the Gestapo will be sinister as ever; death trains will still be rumbling through the late-night movies: it is another of the burdens that the Germans, a people of equivocal destiny, are condemned willy-nilly to bear.
And it could be said, too, that the most unforgettable of all the Nazi monuments is the central monument of our time. Everyone knows, from film and literature, the look of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the high arched tower through which the trains passed to their last terminal: but I did not grasp the awful power of the place until I climbed that tower myself, and looked down as the Nazis looked over the immense desolation of their camp. It is enormous. As far as the eye can see stand the remains of the barrack huts, and all around is the terror of barbed wire and watch-tower. There was no need for me to visit the museum, so full of famous horrors. All alone up there above Birkenau I realized that I was looking at the worst place in the world – the worst place there had ever been, where every hint of kindness was banished. This was where mankind had reached the bottom: perhaps things could only get better.
