by Simon Winder
Charles V simply had to fight too many people and deal with too many complex political issues – not least stemming from being King of Spain, a country whose language he could never speak properly, but whose multifarious interests in America and the Mediterranean had as much call on his time as events in the Holy Roman Empire. The booty pouring in from America is one of the most astonishing features of the age. On the last of his major journeys from Nuremberg, Dürer travelled in 1520 to the Netherlands to attend Charles V’s imperial coronation at Aachen. While there Dürer saw in Brussels the just arrived gold treasures taken from the defeat of the Aztecs (Dürer also saw a walrus, hauled in by fishermen back from the Arctic, whose head he magnificently drew). It is useless, but interesting, to ponder whether during the Diet of Worms the following year, Charles V was thinking more about Luther’s heresies or more about the sacks of precious metal he now owned, so valuable that they changed the shape of the entire European economy.
In any event, Charles’s absences proved fatal. Reform spread, as Luther, aided by a band of equally compelling preachers, by his own widely spread writings and by the startling propaganda images of Lucas Cranach the Elder, inspired a great swathe of Europe to throw off papal authority. Entire states switched allegiances, formed defensive leagues and awaited the Catholic onslaught. These were years of horrible persecutions, with the Low Countries under a reign of terror and all mention of Luther’s name, let alone writings, under absolute ban. But Charles did not rule directly over all his territories. The Heath Robinson workings of the Holy Roman Empire and the patchwork, chaotic nature of his inheritance made his every action almost absurdly complex and uncertain. Shortly after Luther’s death in 1546 the principal Protestant defensive organization, the memorably named Schmalkaldic League, overplayed its hand. The Protestants had taken advantage of Charles’s numerous distractions to intimidate and mop up some remaining Catholic territories, but goaded beyond endurance, Charles temporarily threw off his other tormentors and at the Battle of Mühlberg crushed the Schmalkaldic Army, led by John Frederick I of Electoral Saxony, the nephew of Frederick the Wise.
With Wittenberg under siege (the ultimate Lutheran shrine and still home to an embattled Cranach), the war ended disastrously for the Protestants, who were broken as a political force. Terms were dictated at the ‘armed’ Diet of Augsburg, ringed by Charles’s Spanish troops. Still, however, Charles could not shake off the indirect nature of his rule over the Holy Roman Empire. He could be as horrible as he liked to places like the Netherlands and Spain, which he personally owned. But he had to acknowledge that the Electors and their associates whether hostile or friendly (like the Catholic archbishops) just would not wave goodbye to their own semi-independent status. Short of invading each state and slaughtering each one’s ducal families Charles could not impose his will, even in the triumphant era enshrined by Titian in his somewhat unrealistic ‘Battle of Mühlberg’ portrait of Charles as the armoured, horse-borne champion of true Catholicism (feeling poorly, he had in fact been carried to the battle on a litter). The Lutheran rulers maintained their separate status – subsequently enshrined in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 with Charles’s brother Ferdinand.
Charles came close after Mühlberg to making a coherent Holy Roman state in Germany, but even so it was a hopeless project and the mass of separate major and minor states clung on. Then, in one of the most startling and dramatic scenes in sixteenth-century history, Charles V stood before his key lieutenants in Brussels in October 1555 and announced his retirement from all his remaining titles and disappearance to a Spanish monastery – worn out and despairing, mocked by continuing French and Protestant feistiness, he threw in the towel and through his actions made himself a rather more attractive figure than his most significant pan-European successors. But this late capitulation did not alter the overall disaster of his reign – the violent tangle of his shambolic inheritance would be worked out over the following two and half centuries.
Within the Holy Roman Empire, the Peace of Augsburg admitted a sort of fretful exhaustion after a generation of violence. It conceded the idea that the ruler of each state, small or large, could chose between Lutheranism and Catholicism – but all this at the expense of anything else more radical, which remained absolutely forbidden. Of course, this simply meant that Calvinists and others went underground or clung to friendly territories such as Switzerland or the Netherlands (which from now on really became a separate place – a broad strip of aggressive Protestantism hemmed in by forcibly re-Catholicized and burnt-out Münster to the east).
Charles V’s decision to split the Habsburg empire into two branches, one based in Madrid and one in Vienna, meant that the Madrid branch became obsessed with the Mediterranean and America, crushing dissent in the Netherlands and handling the miserably antagonistic French. Vienna focused on fighting the Turks but also, under the long, listless but artistically fecund reign of Rudolf II, more or less drifted to sleep, with its alchemists, astrology and gloom – perhaps best summed up by the sensational pages of painted calligraphy by Joris Hoefnagel and Georg Bocskay, designed for the Emperor to leaf through, with its mirror-writing, minutely observed caterpillars, toadstools and – most weirdly of all – a black page with words in white and a sloth chewing a twig.
The serious excitements in the world were therefore elsewhere and Rudolf II’s slumbers (his rooms filled with unanswered letters) allowed a multitude of German states not to maturely settle down as Protestant and Catholic, but instead to fester.
The New Jerusalem
If the Peasants’ War had made the more extreme aspects of the Reformation unappealing to many possible converts and shaken Luther into a more moderate pose, then the astonishing events of 1534 had a similar effect on north-eastern Germany.
The Westphalian town of Münster is a hard place to criticize. Its air of provincial gloom can at least in part be blamed on its devastation in the war, but it has probably never been a very fun spot. It has a permanently honourable role as the base of Bishop Galen, one of the few leading churchmen to speak out categorically against the Nazis. In stark contrast to the modern town – a steady drift of German consumerism under headachy skies – Münster in 1534 became the focus of apocalyptic hopes and fears. Anabaptists, extreme Protestants who believed in the total separation of their Church from any state authority at all, began to gather in Münster from all over Europe and, having taken over the town, made it into an independent kingdom of virtue, awaiting the brief period before the world ended and the present Godly dispensation came to an end. Their leader, John of Leyden, was in fact King of the World and the people of Münster the Chosen of Israel. Opponents were executed, all goods held in common and men could have as many wives as they wished – partly so as to allow lots of children to arrive and boost the number of Israelites as fast as possible to 144,000 (a mystical number) but partly, it is impossible not to think, because the Israelite rulers could not believe what they could get away with. This blood-soaked, highly unstable entity persevered into the following year in an environment that must have been unpleasantly like West German experimental-theatre productions of the 1970s. The Anabaptists were always fighting for their lives in the town against ever-larger besieging forces, but even if left alone it is hard to imagine that Münster could have ever stabilized into more than anything completely horrible. Having declared themselves a final, elect group with no further members, the Münsterites awaited Heaven’s sword. What they got instead was Franz von Waldeck, a classic fighting prince-bishop (in his portrait a startling amalgam of out-of-control warrior and Church grandee), with his own Protestant sympathies but with no time at all for polygamous communists. With a substantial princes’ army he stormed the town’s defences and destroyed the New Jerusalem.
For generations the story of Münster became the nightmare of what could happen when social order broke down. It destroyed the Anabaptists as a serious movement, generating freakish gangs of Bible-neurotic killers like the Batenburgers (not to be co
nfused with the pink and yellow sponge cake, which is spelt Battenberg), who roamed the Low Country borderlands murdering non-believers, using secret signs and enjoying polygamy in between times. These and their ever-crazier and more disgusting splinter groups, such as the sinister-sounding Children of Emlichheim, had all been rounded up and executed by the 1580s, but their continuing existence was very helpful in imposing an almost sheep-like docility among Lutherans, obediently clustered around their rulers for fear of something worse.
But another response to Münster came from the Mennonites, who combined some Anabaptist ideas with an extreme sort of quietism – a total rejection of the state in all its forms and a private community existence in communion with God. This set of beliefs – in its way just as startling and novel as anything put forward by the colourful Münsterites – had a profoundly valuable future. In the face of aggressive persecution by understandably unsympathetic princes, Mennonites spread around the world – to the Ukraine, to Manitoba, to Pennsylvania (in part as the splinter group known as the Amish), to Paraguay and to Iowa, creating an extraordinary and enduring critique of all national government. Their survival, sometimes under horrific threats and sometimes under far luckier conditions, is one of the great stories from this German religious explosion, albeit in its sheer quietness not one much appreciated or thought about.
There was also the Family of Love – a network of outwardly conforming individuals who followed an intensely private religion and scattered across north-western Europe – keenly aware that, as persecution grew ever more violent, they could best achieve religious reform in secret and thereby avoid being carved up or burnt. Members ranged from Breughel the Younger to the keeper of the lions in the Tower of London.
The fate of the captured leaders of the Münster commune was an unpleasant one, as can be imagined. Repeatedly abused and tortured, John of Leyden (separated from his surviving fifteen wives – he had earlier beheaded one) was with two key associates stood on a platform in the centre of town and, in the compulsory presence of the entire population, had pieces of himself pulled off with giant, specially made red-hot iron pincers. He was then beheaded and cut into quarters. The remains were then shut inside huge iron cages and hauled up the side of St Lambert’s Church from which, over the years, bits would sometimes tumble – a constant reminder to the people of the town not to even think about rebellion or heresy.
The modern reason for coming to Münster is that these cages, extraordinarily, are still there. As you wander around the town, thoughtfully munching a pretzel, suddenly: there are the cages. The idea that these things through so many years have endured (presumably restored at intervals) as a sort of permanent memorial to ghoulish cruelty, both official and rebel, had appalled me for years and it was odd, having thought about the objects so much, actually to see them. The only disappointment was going into the church and finding that there were no postcards. In one of those many moments where my lack of German has proved so valuable I spent ages working out from my dictionary how to ask the forbidding lady at the little cash desk: ‘Do you in fact have a postcard of the flesh-cages, perhaps hidden in a drawer? I will pay you well.’ By the time I had worked out a plausible form for ‘flesh-cages’ I realized that this request probably would not be viewed as a funny one. I was reminded of the time wasted in Dessau once, staring at the uninformative website for the Junkers Aviation Museum. This place was a long tram ride out of Dessau and appeared only to feature the Junkers civil airliner from the 1930s (the famous, slightly dull one, with corrugated metalwork and three engines). Rather than fritter a valuable afternoon at what felt like it could be a corporate bromide almost as numbing as the Audi museum in Ingolstadt, I pored over my dictionary working out how to say over the phone, ‘Excuse me, but do you in fact have a Ju87 “Stuka” dive bomber tucked away somewhere?’ before I realized that I probably wouldn’t be able to understand the coldly formal reply.
An unhappy wine merchant
One very odd aspect to many European countries, not often noticed, is that if you start in their top north-wests they are generally unattractive, gloomy, harsh places – but if you travel south-east life gets better. This is drastically true in Scandinavia, but more curiously it works for Spain, Italy, France and Greece – all start out blustery, a bit cheerless and marginal or indeed too mountainous to have more than a scattering of wiry farmers (Galicia, the Savoy Alps, the Pas de Calais, Epirus). But then they get sunnier and more pleasurable, packed with wine, melons, olives and a plausible, regular outdoor existence. This curious longitudinal range is critical for these civilizations – it gives them a spread of experience but also (if it is possible to see a country as an organism, which of course it isn’t except in wilder nationalist tracts) a sort of hopefulness: a feeling of ownership over types of food and life. It is not as though the entire population of Calais, say, actually moves in a catastrophic rush (as though on some destabilized raft) to the Mediterranean edge, any more than huddled Savoyard shepherds hanker to move from the Alps to Italy’s heel. Indeed the focuses of these countries (Madrid, Paris, Rome, Athens) all suggest some deep geographical compromise – access to a warm or even warmer south and its goodies allied to a studied decision to ensure that south’s political marginalization.
As this is a book about Germany it will not take much time to realize that this is a country with a different framework. As its inhabitants flee southward, away from the grimness and pickled fish of the north-west they do not find themselves in some golden land of sunshine but, instead, crash into the implacable, sterile and unhelpful Alps. It is, of course, impossible really to say what role this plays in German life. I will talk later about the generalized sick longing for Italy that has so animated German culture, but it has certainly meant that for most of Germany’s history its principal competitors have been blessed with a much more attractive world (setting aside Britain as simply a basket-case on these issues), most strikingly in relation to wine.
For much of Europe, civilization has been intimately and happily tangled up with wine – the essential element in wave upon wave of cities, cultures, ways of life. With different histories Spain, France, Italy and Greece have been united in being great conveyor belts for wine, drinking immense amounts and exporting it to less happy environments. Germany has always been proud of its wine production but it is on a tiny scale (perhaps a tenth of Spain’s, for example) and it battles constantly against a cold, rough climate and a short summer. Germany does have some fabulous wine areas. The train trip from Koblenz to Trier down the Mosel Valley is a hymn to grapes with every tiny jut or near-vertical slope stuffed with vines. For non-drinkers it might seem a rather depressing monoculture – the Mosel must have looked very pretty before wine wrecked it – not unlike driving through an oil-palm or rubber plantation. But for those, like me, in favour, it is a grapey Angkor Wat.
I once had a friend who in a moment of genial self-hatred decided to become a wine merchant in London specializing in German wines. I never dared ask what the deep roots of this decision were – perhaps just a profound idleness, or a pathological wish to fail. I once visited him in his shop in north-east London. This was some time after the grotesque Austrian anti-freeze-in-the-wine scandal and when the British market was starting to be flooded with cheap Australian and Chilean wine. Ranks of pretty bottles lined the walls, their Gothic lettering, riot of umlauts and baffling labels alienating all but the toughest wine completist. Attractive maps of the different, rather small German wine regions were pinned on the walls. Some plastic bunches of white grapes and little wooden barrels decorated the windows. There was an eerie lack of clientele.
One of the many perks of having no customers was of course that he could easily lock up the shop (or indeed just leave it open) and have a long lunch somewhere. Once he took me to a nearby cafe used by taxi drivers which did spectacular all-day breakfasts. We worked through throbbing piles of black pudding, bacon and beans with a couple of dinky half-bottles of very expensive sweet German wine. He
gloomily explained how until the First World War for most people in England drinking wine meant drinking ‘hock’ (German Rhine/Mosel white) or ‘claret’ (French Bordeaux red). Twentieth-century events made it patently weird to keep on drinking hock and it vanished almost overnight, never to re-emerge. As a historian once put it, German white wine just ‘tasted too much of steel helmet’. All that remained was the utterly and totally cheap end of the market, exemplified by Blue Nun and her friends who, despite a bad press, have spread a lot of happiness over the years.
My friend’s vision had been that German wine had hit such a low that, with ever more British people drinking wine, racked as ever by our childish national craving for constant novelty, they would turn to his expertise: only a small increase in enthusiasm for Rheingau Riesling would float his entire business. This turned out to be not true. In fact the situation just got worse and worse. I lost touch with the friend in the 1990s but can’t help thinking he has retrained by now.
The need to find those rare slopes of at least intermittently sun-friendly land means that vines pop up all over the place. Towns like Würzburg have vines coming down to the railway station and curled around its fortress. The little former Free Imperial City of Esslingen, just outside Stuttgart, has vines stretching from its hilltop crenellations to the road and there cannot be anything much more pleasant than walking past them. The marginality of much of German wine-making makes it a bit more heroic and perverse than that of the substantial, sun-kissed producers – as though the whole thing is just an effort of cultural will to fit in with the expectations of classically trained post-Roman states. But it has its own magic. I like drinking wine but I’m hardly an obsessive. A glass of wine in Würzburg one evening had me in tears – admittedly against a backdrop of exhausted hysteria from clambering all over this sensational town – but also driven by its delicious, benign clarity. This was as nothing though compared to a tiny underground restaurant in some old monastic vaults in Speyer which served a white wine that had been decanted into glass flasks and kept buried in ice for hours and which tasted like some magic, if possibly untrustworthy, potion from Grimms’ fairy tales.