Germania

by Simon Winder

  As with almost all important events, the significance only becomes clear in retrospect – but I do remember throwing Anita aside and becoming immediately much more alert. Walking around the mournful tunnels of the Maginot Line with its empty gun emplacements and a long-deserted underground canteen painted with elaborate Mickey Mouse murals by bored French troops in the 1930s was perhaps goad enough for anyone with a potential curiosity about historical events: the expression in millions of tons of concrete that Alsace was eternally, if intermittently, French. An afternoon in Baden-Baden, the nearest German town, was another. My parents had never been to Germany before and were patently uneasy with the whole idea – not helped by my sisters and I wandering through the streets yelling ‘Dummkopf!’ and ‘Achtung!’ at each other and whistling the Great Escape music in a way that probably didn’t promote post-war healing.

  The real surprise was Strasbourg, which we at last visited, sensibly using the car. It really did seem something new to me. I was probably at a vulnerable age, but Strasbourg’s grandeur and the sense it had of belonging to a culture I did not understand gave it a strange clarity in my mind. Like some acne-laden Kentish Goethe, I had arrived. Wandering around the extraordinary cathedral museum was the first occasion when I realized I had an aesthetic sense. There is a famous double sculpture there, brought down from the cathedral’s facade, of a simpering maiden being offered an apple by a finely dressed and winning man. As you walk around the back of the male statue you can see that his cloak is decorated with toads and other loathsome creatures. I remember spending ages staring at this statue and being thrilled to be back in Strasbourg a couple of days later, allowing me to look at it again. This was also my first encounter with those late medieval paintings of Adam and Eve before and after the Fall – ‘after’ showing them as repulsive, tortured semi-corpses.

  The cathedral itself again had a different atmosphere – Gothic but odd. For me its unbeatable centrepiece was the astronomical clock – a monstrous nineteenth-century confection clinging to one wall, featuring at midday a skeleton beating out the time on drums, a cock crowing in remembrance of Peter’s denying Jesus and an unworkable jumble of mechanical pagan and Christian elements (Juno in a little chariot, various Apostles) cavorting around to Death’s drum. And so my art sense was born: evil creatures lurking in a cloak, plague-derived Grand Guignol, dusty mechanical toys. This all now seems so long ago and yet thirty years on I cannot say I have progressed much, still clinging to a sort of ghost-train aesthetic, despite any number of failed attempts to haul myself onto the higher ground of Beauty.

  Looking back, and knowing a little bit more, Strasbourg Cathedral is what you would expect to find – a hybrid German– French building, showing in itself Alsace’s tragic inability to be clearly definable as belonging to one nationalism or another. I became more and more interested in the area and found myself reading more and more. So what started with rat-filled canal locks and an odd lack of croissants ended in an adult life reading voraciously around the subject, editing (my real job) many history books about Germany and having countless conversations with historians, an unmethodical but zealous immersion that has resulted in this book.

  I come, though, with a tragic flaw. In the dystopic waiting room that is one’s forties it is possible to be quite serene on the language issue. I am reconciled to being useless at languages in the same way that I am now reconciled to dying still unable to identify tree species or remember phone numbers. But for many years I charged at language after language in the manner of someone running up against some massively barred and studded fortress door: Italian, Latin, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic (in a moment of lunatic lack of self-knowledge), German, Ancient Greek – a catalogue of complete pointlessness. On a conservative estimate I must have spent over a thousand hours of my childhood in Latin lessons – a magnificent grounding in that tongue and the sort of steady application that takes full advantage of the sponge-like absorbency of the young mind. In an adult spasm of masochism I recently bought Teach Yourself Latin which, to my total dismay, showed that eight years of Latin lessons had actually only got me about twenty-five pages into a three-hundred-page book. This hopelessness extended everywhere – Italian, Spanish and French were always doomed simply because they were taught at school. I have some vague memory of being castigated in a French lesson aged eleven or so for having spent much of the lesson trying to fill my pen cap with saliva. Spanish and Italian were exam subjects of which I now have no memory at all.

  Russian, Arabic and German were different because they were actively self-motivated. Trying to learn Russian was stupid – a humiliation but a short-lived one. Arabic was more serious. I had spent some time in the Middle East selling books and became completely enamoured of cultural Islam, souks and sand – but above all the shape of the letters and their artistic use. Given that I had a clear block on all language learning I’m not sure really what I was thinking. I was living in New York at the time and it is possible I had erroneously felt a sense of opportunity in the air. I trooped into my evening class at New York University and happy hours curling, looping and dotting followed. Many in the group were Lebanese-American men who, in their twenties, were suffering a legitimate pang of anxiety about their loss of family roots. It was curious to see the difficulties they immediately crashed into – the sense that they had some genetic relationship with Arabic which would allow it naturally to flow with a little work, a relationship which in practice did not exist at all. They had no more of a leg-up on this fiendish language than I did, with my head fizzing with images of hookahs, divans and minarets. In any event, after a perfect term learning the wonderful script there was an awful awakening – Arabic beyond the alphabet turned out to be even worse than French. My attention wandered – I may even have toyed with seeing how quickly I could fill my pen cap with saliva. So another language bit the dust and I was left with the (very briefly) amusing trick of showing friends what their names looked like in rough Arabic transcription.

  There was an unhappy sequel to this. I still vividly remember wandering around the abbey of St-Denis, north of Paris, where all the French kings were buried, and vowing to improve my knowledge of medieval monarchs. I had the sequence down from 1550 or so (everyone’s called Louis, in order, with a handful of easily remembered, vivid exceptions) – but the huge accumulation of earlier people called Louis or Charles was a tangle. This was when I realized the limits of the human brain. I had always assumed I could indefinitely add stuff – battles, capital cities, dynasties. As I loaded up those Merovingian and Capetian kings I felt my brain, like some desperately rubbish, home-assembled bathroom shelf, lurch suddenly to one side, and all the Arabic alphabet fall off the other end. Shortly after that the whole thing came off the wall, taking the pointless Merovingians with it too.

  So I reeled into my adult life with a virtual language blank, beyond an ability to order beer or ask for train platform numbers. I can see in my mind all my teachers: stern, bland, desirable, desiccated, impatient, prim, fiery, resigned, bitter, bilious, despairing. It is an enjoyable exercise, in fact: faces, mannerisms, bodies all so clearly recalled by my brain’s purring visual functions – a stark contrast to the crashed spaceship that is the bit dealing with languages.

  It was then that I encountered German. By this point in my adult life even at my most delusive I could see that I had a problem with languages. I was resigned to always flunk Tlingit, say, or Miao – but perhaps through sheer effort I could land one mainstream European language and not remain trapped in the roomy but over-familiar cage of English. Ever since that teenage visit to Strasbourg my enthusiasm for German history and literature had grown and grown. Thomas Bernhard, Joseph Roth and Günter Grass were my heroes, and it was time to be serious at last about engaging with their work and the real version of the words they had written.

  And so I embarked on the last great language adventure. Thinking about it now, intellectually it seemed to be the equivalent of one of those grizzled, independent-mi
nded medieval German warlords who, pondering too long in his isolated castle, decides to go on one final raid, having already lost most of his best hounds, horses and sons on earlier outings, galloping down to the plains in a hopeless yet honourable bid to die, yet live on in story.

  Galloping into New York University again I remember being oddly buoyant and cheerful about the whole business: a new exercise book, a new language, nicely sharpened pencils. Quite quickly I ran into the usual problems – like not really understanding anything. The individual words were as sonorous and magnificent as I’d hoped and many hours were spent rolling them over my tongue and getting what I imagined to be a rather wonderful accent. However: they knocked on the door and they rang on the bell, but Mr Language was not at home. After a term the only real breakthrough was when there was a flurry at the door and Roland Gift, formerly of the Fine Young Cannibals, was ushered into the classroom through one door and then out the other – to avoid his fans: or, more plausibly by that point, to avoid imaginary fans. In any event, happy minutes were spent thinking, ‘That really was Roland Gift,’ while issues of sentence structure drifted along in the background.

  There followed a fruitless few months with four other students and a Latvian dancer who was gamely attempting to use language lessons to construct a financial rope bridge between her free-form-dance-explosion income and her Village rental outgoing. These lessons were as futile as the rest, but on the subway each morning and evening I would practise by reading Heine’s poems, with a crib, and became absolutely obsessed with the German language and its beauties even as my brain continued to be wrongly structured for any absorptive work. I do not know now why I chose Heine – probably just as a random find in a bookstore, in an edition that did not appear threateningly long. My head filled with Moorish princes, ivy-clad castles, sea-ghosts and roses. I would plunge along each day on the N train, unable even to manage the simplest German idioms but, with a faltering confidence, articulate enough to say that my lance and shield were stolen and my love had bound me up with chains of flowers. Once I started my wanderings around Germany I kept crossing Heine’s path and he has since always stood for everything attractive and thoughtful – but I really think that my making him my mentor was an accident, and my view of Germany could equally have been shaped by other more malign, grandiloquent or stuffy figures. In any event, Heine may walk by my side, but we are unable to talk to each other.

  Regensburg is a small German city on the upper Danube, tucked into a corner of eastern Bavaria and well on the way to Austria. It remains medieval in an almost cartoonish form, with its Gothic cathedral, its swaggering merchants’ houses, narrow alleys with cute and obscure names and, above all, the great bridge. By building a fortified stone bridge over the Danube, by having a town at the only point where, thanks to an island, this was feasible, by defending it over the centuries against all comers and charging everyone for going over it or round it, the Regensburgers became rich, controlling the trade between Northern Europe and Venice. The simplicity of their cunning and good fortune gives their town a happy, daft quality.

  The huge piers of the bridge cause chaos for the Danube’s flow, which is sedately implacable on one side and a dangerous cauldron on the other. The pleasure of this sight is much enhanced by the surviving medieval watchtower and salt depot, and a tiny, ancient bratwurst restaurant, saturated inside by smoking grills and steaming sinks. I had been chatting by this restaurant to a cheerful couple from Rottweil who, after a few minutes, nudged each other and in some embarrassment asked: ‘So: why are you here?’ They were happy to visit Regensburg themselves but could not understand what someone English could be doing there – and it was true that over several days I had bumped into nobody English and only a couple of Americans, and these were retired veterans who had once been stationed in Germany. It was as though Regensburg’s amazing cathedral, a shop selling potatoes made from marzipan, a Roman wall, the site of Napoleon’s headquarters, the former assembly chamber of the Holy Roman Empire and an amusing medieval torture chamber could simply not be legitimate sources of interest for non-Germans. Later, standing on the quay by the bridge, rocking on my heels, contentedly staring at the great whirlpools, thinking of where the Danube had come from, and where it went on to, bratwurst in a crusty roll in hand, it suddenly seemed impossible not to set out to write a book that might convey something of this lost country.

  A note on Germany and German

  The modern states of Germany and Austria only cover part of the historic German land. The entire course of Germanic history has been an argument about poorly defined borders, sometimes with the most terrible consequences. I have, with a handful of self-indulgent exceptions, restricted this book to modern borders as it is within them that there are the towns and landscapes which remain a live issue for Germans themselves. Historically the areas now called Germany and Austria have been so entangled that I generally do not differentiate between them. A different book could have been written that encompassed everything from Zürich to the land of the remaining Volga Germans, and I would love to have written it, but it would have been at least twice as long and even more chaotic than what you are holding.

  It is impossible to be consistent with German names, as at different times specific names have sunk into the English-speaking conscious one way or another. In the case of cities, to refer to München, Wien or Köln would be unhelpful and pretentious. In the case of individuals, where there is not a universal English usage I have always used German. Frederick the Great, Maria Theresa, Charlemagne and Charles V all stay familiar, but otherwise everyone gets to keep their German name. The Emperor means the Holy Roman Emperor and, after 1804, the Emperor of Austria; the Kaiser means the German emperor after 1871. These are all arbitrary decisions, but mostly they work and they have the overwhelming advantage of coming out just right in the end: Kaiser Wilhelm, a name with a century-long flavour of dastardly creepiness, is far preferable to the Emperor William, who sounds like someone from an unchallenging children’s story.

  Aside from names I have used almost no German words at all, in order to reflect my own language ability. The reader will therefore be spared the usual analysis of complex German concepts which cannot be translated into English, such as ‘the sense of self-loathing and emotional collapse men feel as they walk down the steps into a beerhall toilet’, and so on. There are only two exceptions: Ratskeller and the unavoidable Schloss. A Ratskeller does not sound terrific to non-Germans, but it is a restaurant in the cellar (Keller) of the town hall (Rathaus) and tends to be decorated with elk-antler chandeliers and serve artery-gumming food. A Schloss can be a lightning-devastated tower on a crag or a pretty town-palace festooned in allegorical figures; it can be a massive, ruinous attempt to copy Versailles or just a simple country house. Words like ‘palace’ or ‘castle’ just cannot stretch to encompass Schloss.

  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

  From the land of gloomy forests

  There can be few better times to think about the myths of the ancient origins of Germany than when listening to the second act Prelude to Siegfried. This scarcely manageable piece of music creates in some five minutes a trackless, choked, gloomy forest, menace (specifically a sleeping dragon) and a sense of waiting – the many years during which dwarves and gods have been drumming their fingers waiting for the great (if borderline silly) events at last to unfold.

  It is hard to avoid a sense of irritation mixed with relief that non-Germans have such a second-hand relationship with this music. There have been many great non-German enthusiasts for and interpreters of Wagner, but none have to take quite the same responsibility that Germans do for the drama’s roots and meaning. There is something about all the elements in the forest Prelude very specific to German culture. English forests can be driven across so quickly that it’s possible to miss t
hem – and walking in them hardly counts as a form of exercise, with a playground, baked-potato salesman or nature table every ten feet or so. But in Germany it’s still possible to stand on high hills and see nothing but trees, albeit very well-cared-for trees, rolling towards the horizon – a tiny fragment of the ancient forest. The dragon, dwarves and gods also seem convincing, part of a toy box of creatures lurking in the mountains and forests and repainted by generations of linguists, folklorists and composers, at the heart of any number of festivals and children’s books.

  The Germans have invested far more in their ancient past than the English, who have always had a more restricted curiosity about their origins. The two nations share much of the same primeval ice-sheet, giving its melting as a clear start date (southern Germany was clear of ice, making it annoyingly different even in the Pleistocene era), but then we go our separate ways. Undeniably much of the national story of England’s origins is embarrassing. As a Roman colony Britannia was a hardship post and a bit of a joke. There has always been a last-ditch suggestion that the Romans may have left us at least the odd noble-browed, classically educated gene, but sheer lack of surviving information about the province shows the disregard in which its owners held it. As an obsessive fascination with the ancient past swept over Europe in the nineteenth century, British superiority complexes were simply not nourished much by such sorry stuff. And once the Romans left, Britain became a free-for-all, with wave upon wave of pleasure-seeking North Germans, Danes and Norwegians using it as a sort of chopping-board until the final ignominy of the Norman Conquest. In all this melee the figures of Arthur and Alfred bob up and down – the former invented by French poets, the latter a figure seen through so many layers of subsequent marauders that it is unclear whether modern England has any real link with him at all.