by Simon Winder
The struggle though with deriding this stuff is that it is illegitimate to say that the world of singing babies on plaster clouds and saints’ corpses put in poses similar to those of the women painted on the sides of Flying Fortresses is uniquely ridiculous and apart. This was a highly self-critical, confident and dynamic faith, centred as much on the Habsburg and Wittelsbach families as on the Pope, with huge resources and at its ideological heart the mission to fight the Turks and root out heresy. It was as much an expression of this to camp up church interiors as to commission, sing and play some of the greatest music ever composed. There is nowhere more baroque than the Archbishopric of Salzburg, a state dedicated in its very being to breathing in and out Catholic triumphalism. There in the 1670s the Bohemian violinist and composer Heinrich Ignaz von Biber produced his great cycle of ‘Rosary sonatas’, one for each of the mysteries and designed to be played at services of contemplation for the archbishop and his circle. The impact of this eerie, serene, strange music must have been extraordinary (although it seems even more extraordinary now, as the final Passacaglia rather oddly shares the same ground bass as John Barry’s theme tune for the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). Biber was clearly a sort of ecstatic genius in this music, but he was equally able to write completely terrible ‘funny music’ made to sound like drunken musketeers or battles being fought, presumably aimed at some of the rougher military types in his audiences. With equal fervour Haydn’s great masses, such as the Missa Sancti Nicolai, written a century after Biber, inescapably have, however much we might pretend otherwise, tiny wax fingerprints all over them.
In the end it was Catholics themselves who tried to tidy up so much of this world for themselves. The Emperor Joseph II, the zealous, cheerless reformer who caved in through overwork in 1790, was at the core of his job description meant to protect the Catholicism of convents, hermitages and superstition. Despite being very devout himself, he was driven mad by the endless particularisms that would make even a small town a mass of tax exemptions and special privileges, with Imperial officials struggling along next to vast, well-provisioned monasteries filled with aristocratic idlers. Something of this world can still be felt in Oxbridge colleges, where individual privileges mean that on the same street one college can be on the verge of bankruptcy while at another college it is stuffed giraffe neck, Château d’Yquem and a lap-dancer for every table. Joseph swept away much of this closeted exceptionalism from his territories, closing over five hundred monasteries, pinching the Bishop of Passau’s lands when the man’s corpse was barely cold and banning the sale of Christmas cribs. He died hated and reviled and left behind merely another threadbare set of patched semi-reforms. The southern (and Rhineland) German landscape remains awash with the debris of layer upon layer of Catholic religious reform. Hulking monastic buildings may often now be government offices or wine bars, but they crop up everywhere, and remarkable numbers are still filled with monks, who bounced back after Joseph’s and Napoleon’s utmost attempts to dispose of them. These often bizarre churches too have sometimes been neglected, overhauled, bombed or burnt down or refashioned. Each change left its scars, but each in effect celebrated another failed attempt to rationalize and firm things up: still a wilderness of private superstitions, virtual polytheism and cheap lighting effects and with a sort of resilience that has managed to survive the most terrible circumstances.
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
The descendants of Cyrus the Great
Sitting in southern Bavaria, quietly reading an excellent short biography of the Emperor Joseph II, I was struck by an incidental sentence mentioning what it was about pre-Napoleonic Germany that most infuriated the ghastly anti-Semitic Bismarck nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke. What he really hated were the tiny states that puffed themselves up into a towering froth of glory on the basis of nothing at all – singling out specifically the grotesquely overblown monuments of the Princes of Hohenlohe at Weikersheim. Of course, within moments of reading this, I was on a series of aggressively local and slow trains, panting with excitement, impatiently staring through the window for a first sight of something which had received such a worthwhile endorsement.
The territory of the Princes of Hohenlohe was so small that it appeared on the map to be monstrously hemmed in by its hardly king-size neighbours, such as a little outcrop of Mainz and the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights. Hohenlohe-Weikersheim is essentially just a single pretty Franconian valley with the idyllic River Tauber running through it. The tragedy of Carl Ludwig, the prince in the first half of the eighteenth century, was that his only son died in a riding accident. The helpful result for modern purposes was that his line became extinct (absorbed by another Hohenlohe territory in a geographical convulsion unnoticed by a wider world). Carl Ludwig’s activities at Weikersheim were therefore accidentally preserved as the town became itself a marginal element in an already marginal territory, with its own micro-capital elsewhere. His family really were very unimportant. One inspired ancestor had created a wonderful ‘hunter’s hall’ at Schloss Weikersheim in around 1600, a miracle of animal-killing celebration, with dozens of ceiling paintings showing the slaughter of everything from boar to lynx to ostrich and with the walls decorated in life-size plaster bears, moose, deer and – incredibly – an elephant of unique, baggy oddness and with real tusks. This man’s son had played an undistinguished role as a Protestant leader in the Thirty Years War and the Schloss had been badly smashed up – but then in 1709 Carl Ludwig arrived.
The result was a deeply strange, almost neurotic response to Versailles which, for a change, is just completely charming. It is immediately possible to see what made Treitschke so cross, but equally for that very reason important to embrace it as everything most fun about Germany. The life-sized gold statue on horseback of Carl Ludwig is alas no longer there, but otherwise everything is as it should be – the gold statue stood at the end of a vista of formal gardens, flanked and applauded by statues of his notional precursors: there is a turbaned Cyrus the Great, Nimrod with a sceptre, Julius Caesar in armour and Alexander the Great with nice hair. If this is not mad enough, then the major classical gods all sit around on the beautiful orangery looking down in approval on Karl Ludwig – Zeus with his thunderbolts, Mars with a drawn sword and so on. There is also a wan, plump and patently insincere figure of Peace – and a lady I couldn’t place (Dido?) sitting on an elephant nearly as charismatic as his friend, the genial Trunky, back in the hunter’s hall. Beyond this heroic ensemble lie fields of barley, orchards, vineyards. There is also a set of grotesque statues modelled on the commedia dell’arte work of Jacques Callot, of comic dwarfs in various household roles, the precursors to an unhappy nineteenth-century Thuringian invention that was to swamp the world: the garden gnome. Weikersheim shines with a sort of happy daftness which should be everyone’s ideal. Sitting in the town’s little main square (the only square in fact) with a fountain tinkling and a peacock scratching about on the steps of the tiny town bank, it is hard not to feel in some sort of fairy-tale fantasy.
Naturally the reason that Treitschke picked on poor Weikersheim was to offer a pathetic contrast to his manly, visionary and adored Prussia. Prussia has ended up with its values being blamed for the disasters of the twentieth century, its heartlands absorbed into Poland and Russia, its people dispersed or killed and its very name banished after 1947. But in Treitschke’s vision (and that of so many late-nineteenth-century nationalists), while Karl Ludwig was busy fussing over which heroic military ancestors to put where, the real business was being done by that mustelid predator Frederick the Great in his epochal 1740 invasion of Silesia, the event that threw down the gauntlet to the effete, Catholic Austrians over who should rule the Germans. This challenge was finally answered in Pru
ssia’s favour in the decisive Battle of Königgrätz in 1866 that expelled the Austrians from any further role in German affairs and laid the path for German unity under Prussian rule. This providential path had a sickening plausibility, and indeed mesmerized Hitler, who saw himself for unclear reasons as following in Frederick the Great’s footsteps, his bunker decorated with a portrait of a man who would have found almost every one of Hitler’s actions disgusting, evil or absurd. This vision was quite at odds with the reality of Prussia as an often progressive, quite vulnerable and sometimes marginal place.
Of course it is possible to go too far. I was in Potsdam some years ago, visiting the new Prussian Museum which had just shyly opened there. This was a parody of quietude – Prussia as a land of rustic carts, folk-craft and embroidered dresses. There was even a special exhibition on Prussian pressed-flower collections and monastic herbal medicine, with little knobs to jiggle which then squirted the scent of rosemary, say, or sweet lavender into the air. The effect was outlandish – even those most friendly towards Prussia’s complex reality had to concede that militarism featured somewhere in the state’s make-up.
But the issues around Prussia have always been closer to Weikersheim than any German nationalists are ever likely to admit. There was a substantial aspect of Prussia which was genuinely introvert and admirable, not least the Pietists in Halle with their religious, educational mission, still beautifully preserved in the Franckesche Stiftung teaching collections, which include – by way of digression – an attic room filled with wigs, pictures of basilisks, a giant model of the solar system, pickled geckoes, a little dog made out of seashells, wax heads, a dried cow-fish, a speculative engraving of the Ark of the Covenant, an opium pipe, shoes from around the world and, hanging from the rafters, the best and biggest stuffed crocodile ever, an ancient, gnarled Behemoth which, if it fell to the ground, would detonate in a great cloud of evil-smelling dust.
But even Prussian militarism was as much the result of weakness as anything more aggressive. Repeatedly in its history, Prussia was threatened with extinction – its Elector was the weakest of the seven, Berlin a very small place, and clearly the real axis of Germany ran Cologne–Frankfurt–Munich–Vienna with spurs to Hamburg and Dresden. Much of Germany’s life for most of its history was not reliant on a grim, dark, flat area of the north-east. Brandenburg (the heart of Prussia) was always being overrun and the Thirty Years War had been a disaster of helplessness as Swedes and Imperialists ignored its boundaries, contemptuously burning and killing more or less at will.
For one generation, however, Prussia was different, because of Frederick II ‘the Great’ (1712–86). Building on the work of his cunning predecessors (their portraits featured in sequence on a special series of small matchboxes before me now, a valuable aid as the monarchs are almost all called Frederick or William or both), Frederick took advantage of an accident – that the Emperor Karl VI had no male children. Karl had defined much of his reign by weary negotiations to get everyone in the Empire to sign the Pragmatic Sanction which would allow the Empire to fall to his daughter (impossible under unchallenged early medieval laws). Of course, in the usual parental tragedy, the parent’s wish only has force while the parent is alive and the young, devout Maria Theresa’s attempt to inherit on her father’s death was always going to be difficult. Frederick, just on the throne himself, stuffed with cash and brilliantly drilled troops inherited from his borderline-insane father, Friedrich Wilhelm I, decided to alter Prussia’s status for good – by invading Silesia. This is now a moderately significant industrial region of Poland, but in 1740 it was a key Habsburg territory, with a large, well-off and taxable population. Taking Silesia both enhanced Prussia greatly and did permanent damage to the Habsburgs by wrenching away a block which had before always been closely linked to neighbouring Habsburg-owned Bohemia and Moravia.
The subsequent wars, latterly in conjunction with Britain and Braunschweig, were a series of dazzling encounters whereby Frederick held off sometimes unbelievable coalitions trying to destroy him (most memorably in the Third Silesian War, where he had ranged against him the Russian empire, France, the Habsburg empire, Sweden and Saxony). Through brilliant generalship and luck, Frederick held on to Silesia and Prussia notionally became a great power. But after Frederick’s death what is striking is just how rapidly Prussia became a minor and helpless country again (with a long run of pathetic kings, also featured on my little matchbox collection – indeed the rest of the set until the matchboxes run out in 1918 consists only of painfully weak or narrow figures). Napoleon swatted Prussia aside, destroyed its army, occupied much of it and considered abolishing it entirely (a fate only avoided through the personal intervention of the Tsar). The Prussians recovered their élan after Napoleon’s disasters in Russia and played a significant role in his final defeat (most famously at Leipzig and Waterloo), but it would be impossible to claim that they were more than the beneficiaries of events way beyond their control – Napoleon was defeated by Russia, Britain and Austria with Prussia only given room even to breathe by the actions of these other countries.
Not to run ahead too far into the nineteenth century but Prussia after Waterloo had no further serious combat victory until the storming of Fort Dybbøl in the 1864 war with Denmark (itself an engagement engineered by Prussia’s Austrian allies to make the Prussians feel better about their under-performing army). So if you bracket the heady little two-decade eruption of Frederick II’s fevered violence, Prussia stays a generally vulnerable and, if not minor then certainly rather marginal state, a curious wild card in the manner of Sweden, and not faintly comparable to France or Britain or its opponents within the rest of the Holy Roman Empire.
At a time when the Qianlong emperor was taking over the whole of Xinjiang, the British marching all over Bengal and Canada, the Russians exploring eastern Siberia and Alaska and whole Silesia-size bits of land were being settled almost daily in the future United States, the activities of this rather odd flautist, galloping about on the north German plain with smoking bits of Prussian trooper whizzing about his ears, seems perhaps less than impressive. Frederick was, after all, only saved in the Third Silesian War by the lucky death of the violently anti-Frederick Tsarina Elizabeth and her replacement with a short-lived Prussophile loony. If she had survived then Prussia would have been crushed and perhaps dismantled completely. As it was, this amazing fluke was forgotten about and only the dazzling defensive victories remembered, providing an entirely misleading picture of Prussian strength for later generations.
The Tsarina Elizabeth’s death only came back into its own in 1945, when the Nazis drew inspiration from it. Hitler, rather weirdly comparing Roosevelt and Elizabeth, imagined on hearing of the former’s death that this would in the same manner undo the coalition ranged against him. It is curious that so many of the creepier type of German nationalist drew such succour from Frederick – the apparent lessons of his greatness creating a ruinous will-o’-the-wisp that led on generations of rulers and their sycophants. Frederick’s true lesson was perhaps that in the end Germany was defenceless against its serious neighbours, and that he could heap brilliant tactical victories up to the ceiling and still be just much less important than the more heavily resourced and readily defended countries around him.
Frederick’s Sanssouci Palace and gardens at Potsdam are now his main legacy – with most other aspects of his reign politically or physically erased by the twentieth century. The palace’s general prettiness and sense of happy enjoyment bring Frederick very close in spirit to the orangery of the Prince of Hohenlohe, with lots of curves, glass and mythological trinkets, but with the rococo extras of a later generation. I could happily spend weeks wandering around the park at Potsdam (with its Chinese tea-house – the direct descendant of the lovely Chinese ‘mirror room’ still extant at Weikersheim). I was last there shortly after Frederick’s body, after many indignities, had finally been buried according to his wishes – next to Sanssouci and by the graves of his favourite hu
nting dogs. A large group of Germans on a tour were being shown the new funerary stone, and several of the older tourists were in tears. It can hardly be possible to imagine the range of confused and difficult emotions that could have provoked such a response.
Frederick’s actions did not lead to Bismarck’s empire. Far too many events intervene and almost every aspect of what happened in the 1860s would have been entirely alien and baffling to Frederick. He may have been hailed as the descendant of Mars, Alexander the Great and so on with a bit more plausibility than Carl Ludwig of Weikersheim, but in the end Frederick II shares more of Carl Ludwig’s engaging marginality than later and unattractively excitable figures have tried to suggest.
Drinking chocolate with ostriches
The later Habsburg rulers are a strikingly feeble bunch. It is as though the great effort of their dynasty – the defence against the Turks – was finally wound up with the siege of Vienna, and Leopold I’s successors could afford to be a lot less vigorous. In the dismal sequence of dull or incapable figures who get us through to the end of the First World War, there were two potentially brilliant rulers – Leopold’s son, the Emperor Joseph I, and his great-grandson, the Emperor Leopold II: both in their different ways dynamic, far-sighted and interesting. Oddly both died young after such very short reigns that it almost suggests a Vatican plot (perhaps with poison powders hidden inside finger rings) to keep smart decision-makers out of the way.