by Simon Winder
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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For CMJ
‘On the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what
we have read, but what we have done…’
THOMAS À KEMPIS
Introduction
I was in the Ardennes, on a bus travelling from Stavelot to Spa. The bus was filled to bursting with primary- and secondary-school children and I was the only adult, aside from the magnificently stone-faced and imperturbable driver. It was midwinter and the fog was so solid that it looked as though, once outside the bus, you would have to be resigned to washing it out of your hair and brushing strands of it off your coat. The bus was, frankly, a monkey-house on wheels. One child was using a lighter to burn through a plastic handle, another had a phone app which converted a pupil’s photo into a demon face. At irregular intervals an inflated condom was fired over our heads to happy cries. The whole atmosphere was hilarious and you almost expected the bus to rock from side to side as it drove along, like in an exuberant cartoon. It made me feel wistful about the long-gone years spent waiting for my own children in various school playgrounds. I had forgotten the magical way in which large groups of children flicker in their moods, managing to be morose, thrilled, exhausted and hyper in perhaps less than a second.
Each stop made by the fog-bound bus was a surprise. As the doors hissed open, a clump of children would gamely launch themselves into what appeared to be a solid form of Milk of Magnesia, with just a roof-angle visible to indicate houses of some kind, and the odd skeletal branch. In all kinds of ways this bus was really in the middle of nowhere – a series of rugged, thinly populated valleys which most Europeans have no need to engage with. From the air you would be able to see each valley filled to the brim with fog. But, like so many places I will write about in this book, it has had its turn as the centre of the world. Most obviously this was where the Battle of the Bulge was fought – the last major attempt by the Germans to defeat the Western Allies. The little town of Stavelot – of which I had previously been entirely ignorant – was where the battle reached its high-water mark, in December 1944. American troops had kept destroying bridges and blocking the narrow roads by felling thousands of trees, the Germans kept rigging up pontoons and blowing up the obstacles – but at Stavelot they briefly entered the town, massacred dozens of its inhabitants, could not fight their way through, tried to drive round, failed and began the retreat which only stopped with their surrender in May. A small marker in the town states: HERE THE INVADER WAS STOPPED.
I was surrounded by the same fog that had made the initial German attack through the Ardennes so successful, but this was just one part of the region’s central role in the twentieth century. It was, famously, the source of the British and French armies’ crushing and almost instantaneous defeat in 1940, as thousands of German tanks and troop-lorries secretly wound their way through the same narrow roads. During the First World War, the town of Spa was the German military headquarters in the fighting’s later period. A series of photos taken in 1918 show the last weeks of imperial and aristocratic rule in Germany, as Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Crown Prince and various generals stand around hobnobbing in their immaculate uniforms in one of Spa’s commandeered assembly rooms. It was in these rooms that the Kaiser, hearing about the revolution breaking out in Berlin, appealed to his generals for support, only to find that they no longer trusted their men and could not even guarantee that they would not attack him. Wilhelm panicked and fled to Holland, abandoning the imperial train in case troops took potshots at it, and ending over eight centuries of Hohenzollern rule. In 1944 the same complex in Spa was in turn the headquarters of the US Army, evacuated during the temporary panic that followed the surprise, fog-bound German offensive.
I had come to Stavelot partly out of contrition and annoyance that I had not heard of the place before. It turns out to have a sensational museum in its sprawling former abbey which showed that in the first half of the twelfth century it was the only place to be. But Stavelot once I was there also showed that I really just had to stop my travelling around for this book. There was effectively no limit to the richness and density of a region that is both the dozy back of beyond, and central to the fate of humanity. Here I was in a bus filled with the great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of those who had experienced ‘historical’ events of various, terrible kinds and who were – with their jolly backpacks and untiring ability to laugh helplessly when one of their number farted – happily oblivious. My own children were now adults and I looked back with dismay at the immense amounts of time I had spent away from them, drifting around dozens of Stavelot-like places, face to face with the same question about why European events and ideas have swept through so many places that just wished to be left alone.
* * *
I have always wanted to write these words, but they are now true: this book is the completion of a trilogy! Germania was a history of German-speakers roughly within the modern Federal Republic of Germany. I tried to make it an evenly spread book, but the locations kept being tugged eastwards as I wallowed shamelessly in the tiny towns of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt. I then wrote Danubia because I was aware that Germania failed to deal with the Germans of Austria or of other points east. Before the twentieth century, German culture had spread into the lands across Central Europe and this opened up several other interests I had, in the nature of competing nationalisms, in the Habsburg family and its many oddnesses, and the Christian–Muslim frontiers that shaped the whole vast region for centuries. As someone who grew up in the Cold War and was, like everyone, gripped by the discovery of what was for a generation a new and previously near inaccessible swathe of ex-communist land, it was easy to take for granted the more familiar, western parts of Europe. Even when writing Germania I had a dim sense that I had short-changed and not really engaged fully with perhaps the most important motor of all in Europe’s development: the lands to the west. I had not noticed them as they were all just part of the European Union, like the United Kingdom, and simply represented modernity, the present and a sort of ho-hum banality. And yet, even a moment’s self-interrogation would have made me realize that the area from the Rhine westwards and the German-speakers’ relationship with French-speakers is the least ho-hum subject it is possible to find.
The theme of this book is defined by one of the most important if accidental moments in European history. Charles I ‘the Great’ (Charlemagne) spent a long and enjoyable career carving out a huge empire across much of north-west mainland Europe. It was very much a personal achievement, however, and after his death in AD 814 the personalities of his successors, new enemies and the sheer, unmanageable size of the Carolingian Empire made it collapse into civil war. Charlemagne’s grandsons met at the small town of Wirten (Verdun in French) in 843 and agreed to split the Empire into three chunks, one for each of them. The Franks had often broken up their lands between siblings and there had always been a distinction between the older territory of Austrasia (‘eastern land
’), on the Rhine, as against the more recent block of Neustria (‘new western land’) on the Seine, but this new split stuck. Charles II ‘the Bald’ received the west, which became France. Louis I ‘the German’ received the east, which became Germany. The big block in the middle, including the great imperial city of Aachen, went to nickname-free Lothair I. Lothair’s inheritance stretched from the edges of the North Sea down to central Italy, but was itself impossibly sprawling. On his death it was itself split, with his three sons each taking a bit: one received north Italy, one received Provence and Lothair II received everything north of Provence – a region which was called after him Lotharingia, ‘the lands of Lothar’.
Today the area of Lotharingia has reduced, like a small leftover lump of snow – frenchified into the word ‘Lorraine’ (Lothringen still in German). But the issue of what constitutes Lotharingia has, with innumerable mutations, survived from 843 to the present. Lotharingia has provoked wars in every century and it has been the site of many of the events which have defined European civilization. Sometimes the gap has been sealed up almost completely – indeed it came close to vanishing permanently as early as after Lothair II’s death – but its in-between status has never gone away and in 2017 it consists of the kingdoms of Belgium and the Netherlands, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the northern part of the Swiss Confederation, with the rest of the region shared between the Republic of France and the Federal Republic of Germany. These states are simply the inheritors of a crazy quilt of predecessors and the aim of this book is to give some sense of these and how Lotharingia has proved such a key element in so much of European history.
I have chosen to define Lotharingia for practical purposes as the area from where the Rhine leaves Lake Constance, taking in the banks of the Rhine including the northern Swiss cantons. Once clear of Switzerland, Lotharingia is formed to the east by the banks of the Rhine and to the west by the areas of France which were for many centuries parts of the Holy Roman Empire.
I have had to take one or two sad decisions. The arc of Lake Geneva is the clear southern point, but I have had to leave out Geneva itself as for so much of its history it is part of Savoy and faces south, tangling itself in the affairs of Turin and the rest of Italy. If I had to incorporate Italy too this book would be doomed. On the banks of the Rhine I am fairly strict – so lots of discussion of lands west of it, but on the east not budging much further eastwards to avoid being dragged (by cities such as Frankfurt) into Germany profonde. An exception is Heidelberg as so much of the territory under its control, the Palatinate,1 is on the Rhine. Once the maze of Rhine branches spreads through the Low Countries I am fairly expansive about what gets included, stopping just short of North Holland. To the south I include the areas of northern France which were also historically contested – down to the old territories of the Counts of Flanders north of the Somme River, the ownership of which has provided soldiers with intermittent pay-packets and constant grief for as long as we have historical records.
This is an enormous region, but it is strikingly empty of major capital cities. Lotharingia has had a consistent ability to mess up outsiders, but those outsiders have come from states with far greater resources and wider horizons than Lotharingia itself. At different times Paris, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Rome and Madrid have seen both headaches and opportunities here – indeed whole eras have been defined by the headaches, bringing entire dynasties to their knees in rage and frustration. To be consistent with leaving out these interfering external cities I have also left out Bern (or mostly left out – there were one or two things I had to mention about Bern) and Dijon (definitely a core part of France, but a principal base for the Dukes of Burgundy during their hundred and twenty magical years of exploiting the Lotharingian seam). I renounced this latter in tears, having to forgo tables loaded up for research purposes with bottles of Nuits-Saint-Georges and plates of parsleyed ham. Amsterdam is the most controversial omission, but just as Geneva heads the reader south into another realm, so Amsterdam moves the story up into the Baltic, Frisia and a variety of other external lures which make it problematic. It is also true I think that, like London or Madrid, say, Amsterdam’s interests historically were often far removed from the lands to its south. It always had other fish to fry – or pickle – and is sufficiently north to have almost always been outside the front line, a fact often commented on bitterly by those embroiled in devastating events further south which Amsterdam bankrolled and egged on.
This book requires, like my two previous books, a sort of mind experiment, albeit not one requiring huge forces. Many of the political units in this book existed for centuries and had a robustness and long-term plausibility which gave them an unthinking acceptance. We may now laugh at the Duchy of Bar, which geographically looks like a bowl of spilt breakfast cereal, but we have no evidence that its many generations of inhabitants felt sheepish about its patent unviability – or at least not until the eighteenth century. The Imperial Abbey of Prüm, whose only asset was ownership of a pair of sandals once owned – and rather scuffed up – by Jesus and given to the monks by Charlemagne’s father Pippin, kept its semi-independence and attracted an endless stream of pilgrims with surprising success for many centuries, only totally losing its status once Napoleon swept through.
Every period assumes that it represents a rational order and looks back in sorrow at the political idiocy that so defaced earlier, less civilized eras. But, of course, because we grow up with specific arrangements we assume they are natural, whereas even in the twenty-first century ‘Lotharingia’ remains a mass of seeming illogicality. Just heading from the bottom of the modern region to the top some highlights would include the German exclave of Konstanz, the Swiss exclave of Schaffhausen, the pointless separate bits and pieces of the Canton of Solothurn, the teeny French department of Belfort (maintained in honour of its successful defence – a lone bright spot – in the Franco-Prussian War), the irrationally small German province of Saarland (a side effect of Paris’s efforts after both world wars to absorb it into France), the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (which only exists because France and Prussia could not be bothered to fight over it in the 1860s), the German-speaking districts of Belgium (taken as war booty in 1919 and making no sense as an acquisition then or now), the eccentric Dutch appendix of Maastricht, the eight tiny blocks of Baarle-Hertog (fragments of Belgian territory left inside the Netherlands because of bad-tempered bickering in the 1840s) and ending up with a flourish at the attractively named Dutch territory of Zeelandic Flanders, a chunk of diked farmland only directly reachable from the rest of the Netherlands by ship and a new car tunnel, left over from the long era of blocking up the River Scheldt to shut the rival port of Antwerp. I am sure there are more (the two pieces of Canadian territory in northern France donated as war memorials for example) but these small or large bits of ‘rubble’ are wholly characteristic of Lotharingia and represent an almost geological continuity, evidence for the region’s strange past, making it quite different from much of the rest of Europe. Even with the ferocious efforts to crush Europe into a single, rational entity after the French Revolution and during the Second World War, somehow these fragmented political units survive, mocking such efforts.
A note on myself and France
The first flight I ever took was when, aged fourteen, I was packed off by my parents to spend three weeks at a farm north-east of Meaux on my own to learn French. My mental state can only be compared to the sort of disregarded small mammals in a zoo that huddle at the back of their cage in soiled straw, ears flat to their heads and eyes blank with permanent terror.
With our own children for years we ran threat variations on the French exchange theme: ‘If you don’t do your homework, it’s six weeks in Clermont-Ferrand for you, eating lamb’s brains.’ But my parents were serious. My mother had in her late teens worked as an au pair for a French family who we had then visited when my sisters and I were fairly young. Coming from a cheerful ‘Home Counties’ middle-class background we a
ll found this French family staggeringly exotic – with guns and dogs and open-face flans, spiral staircases and Monsieur wearing a long cloak. Their house was a former priory and the wrecked chapel next to it had a baptismal font filled with human skulls – whether this was done as a gesture of laïque contempt or just to tidy up we never knew. There was a German student staying with them who had just done his military service and showed us rifle drill using my four-year-old sister, under instructions to stay very rigid, as the firearm. It was an odd few days.
My chief moment of shame happened at a formal lunch featuring a seemingly infinite number of strange French adults plus the family and a first course of some very rare slices of beef. My first mouthful simply made my jaws bounce apart and while everyone else was chattering away I felt an excruciating helplessness, almost choking in a failed attempt to swallow just this first leather-like morsel. Help was at hand from a large, strong-smelling schnauzer dog called Clovis. In a reckless attempt to break the meat impasse I started feeding him chunks under the table. This worked very well and soon I had cleared my plate. My thought processes are unclear, but I think as a treat for Clovis being so helpful, I then handed under the table a piece of toasted baguette. This was a disastrous error as the loud crunching sound brought conversation to a halt. My parents later explained that the resulting chaos came from Clovis being the pride of the house and a very old friend to all, but who was now, toothless and rickety, reduced to a special liquid diet. I went into a sort of dissociative trance of embarrassment and have no further active memory beyond that provided by my parents, who themselves always enjoyed that blend of real and feigned dismay the French so revel in.