Germania

by Simon Winder

  Heinrich the Fowler, German expansionist, Slav-killer, was to become one of Nazi Germany’s non-Christianized patron saints. The abbey was so neat because it had been rebuilt – a medieval Gothic choir had been ripped out as too French (Romanesque being somehow authentically German), an eagle with a swastika in its claws had filled the main window and cult runic flags had hung from the interior walls. In an elaborate, characteristically absurd SS ceremony, with Nazi flags draped from every window on the route, leading grandees with Himmler at their head had processed through town to dedicate the temple, reburying Heinrich, his skeleton wrapped in a swastika with a metal laurel wreath on the skull. The abbey served as a temple, with a permanent SS military honour guard on the tomb, until events in the wider world mercifully wound it all up. After initial American liberation, Quedlinburg fell into East Germany, where it returned to a level of peace and quiet to which its inhabitants must have been almost genetically inured. In the museum, aside from broken fragments of the stone Nazi eagle, there is a superb photo of local dignitaries, seemingly a priest, a doctor and a lawyer (the stand-bys of dozens of horror movies), at the reopening of the tomb to establish whether the Nazis had actually reburied Heinrich the Fowler. Of course the skeleton turned out to be a fake.

  The idea that an early medieval ruler could really be an object of veneration is infinitely far from England’s experience, where obsessions of this sort are more or less restricted to a vague sense of gratitude towards Alfred and his cakes. But then the entire circumstances of the two histories are so different. Very few English towns have any real record of their foundation – by the time anybody literate and interested came along (generally Norman) they had been populated and repopulated by waves of Britons, Saxons and Vikings over so long a period that they appeared immemorial. German towns can, however, often be given founding dates – and these can be mapped from Swabia north, north-east and south-east as each Emperor defeated his pagan opponents and turned over their settlements to their followers and created bishoprics. There were areas of genuinely new settlement too. There was a real population growth and ambitious schemes to clear parts of the Black Forest and convert marshes and heath into farmland.

  Heinrich the Fowler was a talismanic figure for the Nazis both because he appeared to be on the right track and because of his role in Wagner’s Lohengrin, Hitler’s favourite opera: a pageant that could trigger off in his entourage unappealing spasms of excitement, as Heinrich beats his sword against a tree to mark the opening of a trial by combat or sings about how all Germans should gather together to defeat their enemies (‘Never again shall anyone abuse the German Empire!’). This amazing opera is of course entirely rescued by its music, but it is doomed always to be a hair-raising experience in a way Wagner himself never imagined, as we remain unable (except through some unimaginable level of determined antihistorical effort quite at odds with being interested in the opera in the first place) to shake off the knowledge that Hitler was never happier than hearing the first bars of the Prelude.

  Spreading the Word

  Heinrich the Fowler carved out substantial new lands for his Empire and restarted a process that became the basis for the German state for the rest of the Middle Ages. Incompetence or inattention (not least distraction in Italy) would sometimes retard this process, but the essential task of the Emperors was to chew through Germanic and Slavic tribes in the name of Christianity – a process with a boundless frontier, making eleventh- and twelfth-century Germany not unlike the United States in its development. This was the beginning of the great age of that long-lasting German phenomenon the ‘fighting bishop’, a scarlet-faced predator who, dabbing the meat juices from his chin, was as happy grabbing his chain-mace and stoving in some pagan chief as putting on a mitre and attending vespers. These prince-bishops carved out huge lands for themselves and formed an important part of the patchwork of ownership across Germany. Their stern, hieratic images glower from hundreds of expensive tombs scattered throughout the elaborate churches they built. They always had a strange status because by definition they were, once the medieval hierarchy became serious, unable to have legitimate heirs, making their territories permanently prone to interference by the Pope, the Emperor and powerful neighbouring dukes. They therefore tended to come from very wealthy aristocratic families, with the occasional ascetic chucked in to please Rome. In their lifetimes they could carry immense prestige, have fascinating roles in artistic patronage and then not infrequently die in battle. By the time Napoleon at last kicked them all out they had become a powdered and rather unwelcome joke, but for centuries, wherever there was yet another bout of anti-Slav bloodletting or a fresh pagan temple to demolish, these lip-smacking, armoured figures would be on the scene with their expensive horses and luxurious, intermittently pious retinues.

  The early patronage of these bishops can still be seen, dotting the landscape, despite war, greed, time and bad luck disposing of so much. In the north Saxon town of Hildesheim the cathedral is decorated with the remarkable initiative of Bishop Bernward – two doors decorated with scenes from the lives of Adam and Eve on one side and Jesus on the other, created in about 1010. The figures themselves have something of the air of a talented primary school project, for some bizarre reason permanently memorialized in about two tons of bronze, but I don’t mean this badly – there is something so tentative yet direct about the little figures, married to a sense that for over a thousand years people have been staring at Adam and Eve’s unchanging bliss and degradation, that makes these doors genuinely holy objects. Exuding a similar, eerie atmosphere, in the cathedral of Erfurt is a strange bronze man, made in the same period, holding a candle in each outstretched arm – he is not a brilliantly finished object, but to stand in front of him and think how long he has been carrying these symbolic sources of light gives an uncanny sense of being directly linked, through his sheer persistence, to an incredibly older age.

  These Emperors were still presiding over, in world terms, a pretty small place. Western Christendom could have fitted into a side-pocket of the Chinese Empire of the period. It was a provincial joke compared to the Muslim sphere, with a city like Baghdad on a different scale to anywhere like Aachen or Cologne. By 1050 or so the settled German world consisted of just the western part of modern Germany, with a sea of heathen opponents from Holland to most points east. Bremen was one of the great centres for missionary work, sending out recklessly brave figures to try to save the souls of pagans who remained at this point both numerous and feisty. Major expeditions to Schleswig and Mecklenburg in the tenth century and Iceland, the Orkneys and Jutland in the eleventh all produced results, although there was occasional spectacular backsliding. Areas that had become Christian would fall out of the habit, needing fresh missionaries and fresh punitive raids. For a long time there must have been a fascinating admixture of pagan practice lurking in the interstices of Christian Germany. This era was very far from laying down an immaculate tarmac of Christian faith, as the Empire spread along the top of the Alps and into what is now Austria or moved up towards the Viking countries. Monasteries tended to be in the vanguard of settlement, with the landscape pinned down by castles and churches in an ever denser network. As the fighting frontier moved on, what was left behind was a rich religious blend of festivals, decorations, evangelism and threats that must have seduced and frightened surviving, leaderless pagans into the Christian fold. Surviving land grants, legal documents and other papers give some sense of this rolling process, whereby a burned-over and traumatized ‘front’ would become first a new defensive zone and then a fully settled duchy. The problem the Emperors faced with these dukes was never really resolved until the end of the First World War and their final abolition. Because the Emperor himself was always so closely associated with the frontier, either its expansion or its defence, he never had a chance to settle down or gain a power base of his own sufficiently impressive to quell either the prince-bishops or the major dukes, who could become very powerful and mutinous indeed. By the
seventeenth century, when the role of Emperor stabilized in Vienna, it was way too late, even setting aside the impossible religious issues which had come up by then. It was also never very clear how desirable such boundless sway would have been in any case.

  These dukes, margraves and so on administered the territories being carved out in the great annual summer campaigns. Under the Ottos and Heinrichs the irreducible building blocks of Germany – the ducal territories and the Church lands that supported the great bishoprics – gradually took shape. These lands were named on the whole after one of the tribes who had surrendered – hence through a series of linguistic mangles that take us a long way from what might have been something faintly akin to their original pronunciations, the Bavarians, Saxons, Frisians, Swabians and so on are memorialized forever in states, regions and islands which otherwise offer no trace of the real nature of their previous inhabitants.

  This is also the era when, although it remained true that Western Europe remained a bit of a joke by international standards, the Emperors began huge building projects on such a pharaonic scale that clearly Europeans were beginning to feel on the verge of some kind of greatness. Many of these buildings, such as the palaces already mentioned, or Otto the Great’s huge cathedral at Magdeburg, have disappeared or been built over. The most powerful remainders are the three magical cathedrals on the Rhine – Mainz, Worms and Speyer. It is impossible to wander around Mainz Cathedral without wanting to know more: the sheer drama of the place – the colossal ambition that lay behind the Rhine cathedrals, the arrogance of the electors’ tombs and their sense of theatre, in Mainz’s case most memorably in its geometrically complex, gloomy, Piranesi-like east end, guarded by a lion statue of imperishable charisma. These buildings were consciously created to display the unbridled power and prestige of the Holy Roman Emperor – through the manipulation of thousands of tons of stone, through the forcing of entire communities into their construction. Speyer was designated as the Salian Emperors’ personal church, where the dynasty would always be buried. Needless to say, this did not work out, but it is still unbeatable to go down into the crypt (itself an architectural marvel, a forest of pillars in its own strange world, untouched by sunlight for nine hundred years) and see the plain slabs of Conrad II, Heinrich II and Heinrich III. The actual sites of the tombs had in fact been lost but in 1900 they were found and reburied in their current, theatrically minimalist site. This project was one of those antiquarian bits of spookiness at which Germany has always excelled. In Dr Frankenstein-style scenes, photographs show wide-eyed workmen under the direction of black-clad figures, animated by a queasy blend of scientific concern and just wanting to have a peep, pull up the lids from the ancient tombs. Heinrich II and the others were duly shown to be mere oblong piles of trash, dotted with odd bits of gold or ivory. Pocketing these goodies for museum display, the antiquarians then reburied the Emperors, adding a further chapter to Germany’s airless enthusiasm for the Middle Ages.

  I have always found it impossible, if by even the broadest definition I am close to the cathedrals, not to jump on a train and have a further look. On one babyish occasion I even zoomed between all three in one day just to see definitively and finally which one I liked best (I couldn’t make up my mind in the end). Despite much later rebuilding, not least thanks to Louis XIV’s army blowing the front off Speyer, all three churches continue to give a sense of a remarkable and new civilization. Like all such buildings, one could argue that they are disturbing objects, with every stone made from the lives of those destroyed by the expanding Empire that wished to enshrine itself through their creation. Much of the cost would have been directly paid for by the profits from raiding and forced tributes from crushed tribes. Their cold presence, after so many vicissitudes, still glowering in the twenty-first century, gives a unique sense of what the most ferocious, dynamic element in eleventh-century Europe really must have been like. There is also the curdling sense that it was this sort of arrogant, violent, missionary impulse that was intrinsic to Europe and has never really gone away. These are important subjects and, the interior of Speyer Cathedral on a dark winter evening, the nave dimly ticking over with weird echoes, susurrations and occasional candle flames, is the perfect place to contemplate them.

  It would be a mistake to think of the Church as just an expression of imperial power. In parallel were the whole worlds of monasteries and parish churches, of a society operating to religious as much as seasonal rhythms. Freising, in central Bavaria, remains today as an attractive reminder of this complex, inward, sophisticated world. The headquarters for the Bavarian church, it will always be associated with Otto of Freising (1114–58), a Cistercian monk who led an absurdly interesting and varied life, studying philosophy in Paris, extending and stabilizing German Christian rule (and wine-making) around what is now Vienna, going on the catastrophic Second Crusade with the Emperor Conrad III, and writing an invaluable history of the German Empire from the time of Heinrich IV to the coronation of Otto’s patron Friedrich I Barbarossa. Standing towards the end of this long (if patchy) period of imperial greatness (the era which would so hypnotize the nineteenth century), Otto brings a certain seriousness to the imperial enterprise, however much it might have in practice been just an annihilatory land-grab.

  The crypt of Freising Abbey shares with Speyer a sense of an ancient and very brilliant Salian culture, with its mysterious pillar wreathed in carvings of armed men being eaten by monsters. The main part of the abbey’s interior unfortunately looks as though something has gone horribly wrong involving a collision with several trucks filled with icing sugar, having had an extreme rococo makeover to mark its seven-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. However deplorable this vandalism might appear, at least it is a happy indication of just how little the eighteenth century cared about the Middle Ages, viewing them simply as old, weird and grubby.

  I wandered around Freising after a heavy blizzard one January and found myself in the hills above the town en route to the oldest brewery in the world (founded in 1040) – a patently feeble-minded task as the age of the brewery has no impact of any kind on the taste of the beer (I once stayed in a hotel in Erfurt that boasted the smallest brewery in the world, a similarly nugatory claim). Walking through the silent hills, with spires just visible, skeletal trees dotting the snowy landscape and the occasional wisp of smoke, I found myself irritably wondering why genial but essentially pointless little birds like bullfinches could bomb around in the fir trees surviving the winter whereas I would be dead of exposure within twenty-four hours. Suddenly, I realized where I was: I seemed to be walking through Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow, but with the dark, purposive figures of the hunters replaced by an out-of-condition publisher. Then I arrived at the brewery’s lorry delivery ramps, and my little late-medieval moment evaporated.

  In search of a bit of sunshine

  German engagement in the crusades was both intensive and peculiarly ill starred. At the end of the eleventh century there seems to have been a sort of brimming-over of confidence and religious zeal, a sense of spare capacity in Western European culture that allowed for a series of ambitious strikes against the Near East, an attempt to bring the Holy Places under Western Christian control. There was no doubt that this was a religious rather than colonial enterprise – there were much closer lands available for settlement which were entirely ignored and for most crusaders the region of Jesus’ late activities would have appeared hot, dusty and tiresome. The crusades were always at heart a French/Norman undertaking with important English, Fleming and German help. The positions of the Germans in Europe made it difficult to get to the Holy Land, the relatively easy ship journeys of the other combatants being replaced by arduous marches of months upon months through Hungary and the Balkans, men and supplies being shed left and right through ambush, accident and exhaustion.

  The First Crusade is most notorious in Germany for the massacres of the Jews in the Rhineland towns through which many soldiers passed, given a new sharpness of focus by
the nightmarish events of the twentieth century. Jews formed a special category in medieval Germany – they were not extirpated like heathens because they had such a specific and important historical role within the biblical narrative – and yet their presence behind the lines of a militant and missionary Christianity moving steadily east across Europe was always an unstable one, with the Jews offering a critique and question mark over its violent, absolutist claims. The complex, important and ultimately disastrous relationship between Christian Germans and Jewish Germans passed through a horrible phase in the Rhineland cities, as in Cologne, Mainz, Worms and Speyer enraged mobs slaughtered Jewish residents, whipped up by the same logic that was pushing crusaders overseas on their strange mission to attack the Muslim states. In a German context, where religious difference remained a defining aspect of the Empire, there is throughout the Middle Ages something nasty and bristling about attitudes towards Jews – a nastiness best characterized by the ‘Jewish sow’ sculpture on the wall of the City Church in Wittenberg, with Jews suckling from a pig and a rabbi gazing into its arsehole. This foul object just happens to survive at Wittenberg but was common elsewhere – there is still one in Regensburg for example, and there was a strikingly prominent ‘Jewish sow’ maintained for many years by Frankfurt’s city government on the main bridge (Goethe remembered it with disgust).

  What is perhaps strange in so violent a missionary-militant society was that there was not more violence against Jews. Perhaps the ancient nature of the Jewish communities, which could often be dated to the Roman empire and followed the line of old Roman forts along the Rhine, was a factor. Or the decentralized structure of Germany made concerted attacks more difficult. Or the special protection (in return for money) they received from some of the authorities. In any event Jewish German communities were always very small, tangled up in a welter of demeaning restrictions, but somehow endured in the face of sometimes serious viciousness.