Germania Read online

  GERMANIA

  Also by Simon Winder

  The Man Who Saved Britain

  AS EDITOR

  Night Thoughts

  Sea Longing

  The Feast

  “My Name’s Bond . . .”

  Simon Winder

  GERMANIA

  In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  NEW YORK

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2010 by Simon Winder

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Originally published in 2010 by Picador,

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd., Great Britain

  Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First American edition, 2010

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Winder, Simon.

  Germania : in wayward pursuit of the Germans and their history / Simon Winder.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-374-25400-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Germany—Civilization. 2. National characteristics, German. I. Title.

  DD61.W545 2010

  943—dc22

  2009045651

  www.fsgbooks.com

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Felix

  ‘What things there are to see, if we can only get away from our own fireside!’

  Joseph von Eichendorff, Life of a Good-for-Nothing

  ‘Watch out! Historical steps!’

  Sign on a slightly uneven staircase at Luther’s birthplace in Eisleben

  Contents

  Maps

  Introduction

  ‘Bound with chains of flowers’ » A note on Germany and German

  Chapter One

  From the land of gloomy forests » Roman Germans » An alligator far from home » I’ll have some green sauce with that » The medieval car park

  Chapter Two

  Ancient palaces » Charles the Great » Pious, Bald or Fat » A very small town » Spreading the Word » In search of a bit of sunshine » Thrust to the east

  Chapter Three

  Walled towns » Other superiority complexes » A brief note on political structures » German tribes » Famine and plague » Where a million diamonds shine

  Chapter Four

  The tideless sea » The curse of Burgundy » Happy families » Rampant folk costume » Imperial circles » Habsburgs

  Chapter Five

  Spires, turrets and towers » A birthplace and a death-house » The devil’s bagpipes » The ruler of the world » The New Jerusalem » An unhappy wine merchant

  Chapter Six

  The Golden City of the Faithful » The land where lemon blossom grows » Black armour » The King of Sweden’s horse » A surprise visit from an asteroid

  Chapter Seven

  Hourglasses and bird-eating spiders » ‘Music to Escort the Dead from this Life’ » In the time of powdered wigs » Damascened yataghans » ‘Burn the Palatinate!’ » Catholicism goes for broke

  Chapter Eight

  The descendants of Cyrus the Great » Drinking chocolate with ostriches » More competitive tomb-building » Chromatic fantasia and fugue » The Strong and the Fat

  Chapter Nine

  Little Sophie Zerbst » Parks and follies » In the footsteps of Goethe » A glass pyramid filled with robin eggs » A surprise appearance by a sea cow » German victimhood » Good-value chicken

  Chapter Ten

  Marches militaires » Karl and Albrecht » Girls in turrets » Heroic acorns » Victory columns

  Chapter Eleven

  The grandeur and misery of nationalism » Snow-shake particularism » A surprise trip to Mexico

  Chapter Twelve

  Lambs and ladybirds » Jigsaw country » Hunting masters » Ruritania, Syldavia and their friends » An absence

  Chapter Thirteen

  Beside the seaside » Texan Wends » Pidgin German » Thomas and Ernie » Podsnap in Berlin » Varieties of militarism

  Chapter Fourteen

  Failure » The British–German divorce » Disaster » Defeat and revolution » Remembering the dead » Some royal aftershocks

  Chapter Fifteen

  An unattractive lake » Putsches and suspenders » ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . .’ » The death of science » Terminal throes » Ending

  Conclusion

  In the hills » Mendel’s statue » Death by oompah

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Introduction

  ‘Bound with chains of flowers’

  I have spent many years chewing over German history and this book is an entirely personal response to it. Dozens of visits to Germany and Austria form the core of Germania. It is an attempt to tell the story of the Germans starting from their notional origins in the sort of forests enjoyed by gnomes and heroes and ending at the time of Hitler’s seizure of power, by way of my own thoughts about what I have seen, read and found interesting. Of course people travel for different reasons and what I find bewitching someone else may well find stupefying. If, for some, travel is a chance to admire Counter-Reformation altarpieces and for others a chance for a one-on-one roughhouse with a Dortmund transsexual, then these are possibly irreconcilable priorities – although they could intersect in some of the less bustling regional museums. It is therefore built into this book that I will bore or alienate some readers – but I hope not too many. Germania is designed to be an entertainment – although I hope the implications of some of what I am saying are reasonably thought-provoking.

  Germany is a sort of Dead Zone today. Its English-speaking visitors tend to be those with professional reasons for being there – soldiers, historians, builders. One of the amusements at Frankfurt airport is seeing baffled little clumps of British recent ex-students in special dark suits waiting for planes – given jobs by German banks purely because they are part of, in evolutionary terms, an alarmingly un-diverse band who had happened to study German at university, their career choice based on a facility with languages rather than being able to, say, count, flatter clients or take smart decisions.

  Germany is shunned for a very good reason – the enormity of its actions in part of the last century. But is there perhaps a point when this quarantine becomes too mutilating to Europe’s culture, when in effect it allows Hitler’s estimation of his own country to prevail? This book is, of course, soaked in the disaster of the Third Reich, but by beginning in those ancient forests and ending when he seizes power in 1933, I want to get round the Führer and try to reclaim a bit of Europe which is in many ways Britain’s weird twin, and which for almost all of its history has been no less attractive and no more or less admirable than many other countries. Germany is a place without which European culture makes no sense, and for over sixty years Germans have been working strenuously to rebuild that culture in a way that, while admitting the legacy of the Third Reich, allows that earlier past to shine again.

  The book is in chronological order, although the Roman and medieval bits veer around alarmingly and are as much about why later Germans were so obsessed with these periods as they are about the periods themselves. Every attempt has been made to avoid a mere sequence of dreary dynastic events. The chronology is less oppressive than it might be because I take regular time-outs to talk about music, fairy tales, alcohol and so on. But where did this interest come from?

  Some families relish action and adventure, others are perhaps more passive. Growing up, I – like all children – assumed that my own family was just like any other – that we in fact provided a bench
mark by which other families were more rambunctious than ourselves or more snobbish or more gloomy. Looking back from the slightly more comparative heights of adulthood, my family (myself included) now strike me as almost crazily inert. Months would go by with effectively no form of activity whatsoever. We would engage in a restricted range of household chores, but otherwise my parents and my younger sisters and I lived, in our west Kent idyll, in a sort of enchanted castle of torpor. My mother disapproved of any form of exercise so we had no bicycles and, despite having a large garden, I had a clear sense that it was probably a mistake to go outside at all, with its lack of comfortable chairs and reading lamps. Occasionally my father would battle to mow the moss-clogged lawn, but I certainly never volunteered to help and the garden always won. Once a summer we would stir ourselves sufficiently to have lunch outside, but my sisters and I would take turns to be alarmed by wasps, something would always get spilled and the conversation would tend to veer acrimoniously in wrong directions. My hatred for all forms of sport – stemming of course from incompetence – put the final lid on. While we were busy in the usual ways during the school term, the weekends and holidays seemed to drift by in a genial slough of inaction. This background is necessary to understand the sheer drama and excitement of my first encounter with Germanness, the unintended pivot that changed the direction of my life.

  Looking back I think my father was a little frustrated by the general housebound stasis. He liked to do DIY and had run and fenced at school. His one great surprise was that he was in the Royal Naval Reserve. This was a commitment he began shortly before meeting my mother and she always hated it as it meant that for two weeks of the year he would disappear with an irritating combination of nonchalance and patriotism, while she had to deal with a pile of needy if unvigorous children. How I loved his annual trip. He would go on nuclear submarines, minesweepers, aircraft carriers (the Ark Royal!), fly as a passenger in Phantom fighter-bombers. Clearly the whole thing was a laugh, and because the Cold War never went anywhere, it simply became a government-paid-for way to eat huge fatty breakfasts, wear a devastatingly lovely uniform, drink a lot and fire guns. He wound up with the James Bond rank of commander, with a gorgeous peaked cap and a jacket festooned at the cuff with the sort of gold-stitching that makes fighting wars almost worthwhile. He would send me occasional, curtly mysterious postcards with suitable pictures of jets and missiles and stuff, which gave me a cumulative, phony credibility at my boarding school.

  So, as may be imagined, there was what could potentially be viewed as a creative tension in the household between the day-to-day cheerful somnolence and the secret two-week burst of apparent action and adventure enjoyed by my father. Our annual family holidays were always very happy events, almost always in France, every now and then (and much less happily) in Scotland or Wales, depending on how much money was around. In France we usually and sensibly went to the seaside, staying in little rented houses, and while the ferry journey was an epic of vomiting and distress, these trips to Brittany or Normandy were genuine idylls – sunshine, child-friendly food, just enough sightseeing and small museums to be tolerable, regular intakes of ice-cream.

  But one year, when I was aged fourteen, this all changed. I have never quite dared confront my father with why he thought this was a good idea – at some level I can see why, of course, but it implied such an absolute failure to understand the weakness of the human materials at hand that it leaves me at a loss. In any event, he decided that we should go on a barge holiday to Alsace and Lorraine, taking a week to chunter along a canal to Strasbourg. Once there he would get a taxi back to our car and we would all go on to a holiday house in the Alsatian countryside.

  The objections to this were considerable. The sheer lack of coast was a bit perplexing – holidays, by definition, were on the fringe of the land and Alsace and Lorraine were almost aggressively not. As a parent now myself I can see this as a wholly legitimate cry for help. Slumped on beach after beach, part of a colossal herd of bored adults, I will routinely fantasize about taking everyone off to Chad or Missouri for a holiday – a dream of inland, of an environment not shaped by the tyranny of the salty margin. But at the time we were all incredulously unable to deal with what might have been going through my father’s head.

  Of course the whole thing was not improved by my being in the middle of a grim, sulky, epicene sort of phase – an adolescent extension of my childhood inertia. Everything was too much trouble, too much fuss, but also everything was insufficiently glamorous or intellectually aspiring. Indeed it is, on reflection, quite possible that my parents gleefully conspired to come up with a holiday that would do most humiliating damage to my little fort of self-regard. Burping along in a tiny boat down a reeking canal through an almost featureless bit of scarred eastern French landscape may have been a joke on a scale I have never managed to grasp.

  The whole trip was a predictable disaster. My father stalked the bridge like a trainee version of the grizzled Captain McWhirr in Conrad’s Typhoon, or a general sort of Conradian amalgam, grimly breasting aside Fate, thinking how nice it would be if only he could harbour some dark secret or had some hidden flaw which a crisis would fatally show up. He had the part down pat, but alas his crew, far from being the swarming, nimble lascars of his imagination, consisted of me and my younger sisters. I proved of limited value as the morning mist on the water turned out to give me a migraine, so I would lie below decks with multi-coloured thread-worms flowing through my eyes, listlessly reading an early Anita Brookner novel between bouts. My sisters were slightly more helpful but obsessed with keeping their gorgeously patterned holiday trousers from getting dirty. Each time we reached a lock we all leapt around, heaving on a variety of stanchions, nauseated by the filthy water, squealing as wet ropes slapped about. Memorably a dead rat bobbing in the lock water, inflated with gas like a bolster, burst as we incompetently crashed the barge into the concrete side wall. We were always letting go of the wrong ropes or heaving on the wrong side, my father once having to take emergency action (a Conrad-style life test that could not be failed!) as the ropes remained tied on one side of the lock and, as the water level rapidly went down, the boat threatened to be left hanging on its side from the top of the lock – presumably only for a few moments before the ropes snapped under the immense weight and we crashed to the lock’s bottom, leaving nothing to remember us by but a sodden copy of Anita Brookner’s A Start in Life.

  The real sufferer in all this was, as ever, my mother. It is an odd feature of so many holidays that they are structured around having far worse facilities for cooking and cleaning than at home. So the expression of festive family special time becomes having a single little hot plate, or no washing machine. Every summer, the world fills with individuals huddled in houses, boats and caravans, cursing a tiny gas flame and battered pot, unable to express any of the creativity which was so often a key to our shared existence. Perversely, holidays therefore dull down the heart of family life and leave only tins of soup, spaghetti and pieces of ham. This was certainly the case in our ill-starred barge. My mother was an exuberant, complex chef, but here she was catastrophically reined in. Like some woefully uninvolving card game, each meal was played out within the same set of desperate, narrow variants. Aware of this, my mother was in a permanent rage – she had not asked to chug through grey countryside on a filthy, evil-smelling, dwarf, shunned, freshwater cousin of the Good Ship Lollipop.

  Of course, the canal cutting through a haggardly agricultural landscape and in itself harbouring frequent stagnant patches, the stage set for our barge generated a constantly changing, but massive, chorus of insects. These came in every size – seemingly fitting neatly, like keys, through different sizes of crack in the boat. The evenings were intolerable, as we grimly munched through the usual spaghetti with bits of ham and an incredible, almost Pandoran pile of flying creatures filled the room, the air thick with the reek of useless anti-mosquito smoke and the desperate, if artful, screams of my sisters. It must have been
an enjoyable sight for any passing Alsatian labourer at the end of a day of toil, to see the barge rocking at its moorings, glowing with insect-attracting light, smelling strangely of Italian cooking and giving off a rich blend of buzzes, shrieks and moans.

  In any event as we steadily headed eastward I little realized that I was, very slowly, being injected into the Germanic lands which have now occupied me for more than a quarter of a century; through what at the time seemed a sodden, dull part of the world, but which had been fought over by the French and Germans for centuries and in which hardly a field had not been the arena for some awful war, with everyone from Louis XIV to Patton passing through. My ignorance shielded me as, in the trip’s low point, we turned a bend in the canal, looking forward to reaching Strasbourg the next morning, only to find a tunnel, blocked up with mangy old planks clearly of great age and a massive sign proclaiming that the canal was closed – and must have been for some years. I never worked out the source of this spectacular failure of communication, but we returned to the nearest lock and abandoned the stupid barge. My father sheepishly tracked down a taxi via the lock-keeper; this took him the startlingly short distance back to the car and we then all drove on in comfort, style and speed. What happened to the barge I will never know – perhaps we were the last people poorly informed enough to use it. We stayed in a hotel for a night, resolved never to go on an action holiday again, and then moved on to our tiny house in the Alsatian countryside. I had arrived.

  It would be good to imply that being in Alsace was a sort of instant revelation to me, but to be honest it was more just a puzzle. We had not asked for a holiday on some world-historical fault line, but just for the usual sort of jolly vacation cottage in France generally demanded by English families. On the first morning we capered down, as traditional, to get croissants only to find that there was only a sort of crusty roll available. The houses looked funny too. If English towns were my unthinking baseline and French towns the exotic variant, then these houses fitted with neither – their whole vocabulary was just subtly wrong. The village’s name was also a little confusing: Wolfskirchen. Settling down the first morning while my father negotiated with the heavily whiskered old lady in a bulky house-coat who owned the house, there were further oddities. Her French was almost unintelligible and she clearly spoke something else to other people in her little shop. Her offer of a glass of schnapps to my father (this was about eight in the morning) also seemed to cross some sort of line – particularly when he, driven on as ever by the needs of politeness, drank three in quick succession, thereby putting the rest of the day on a rather odd footing.