by Simon Winder
Wilhelm II became keen on this idea but from very mixed motives, not least the dreamy perception that he could then wave goodbye to loads of the Jewish communists, satirists and intellectuals who thought he was so wicked/hilarious. The Kaiser’s involvement came to nothing and the idea of Zionism was widely mocked within Germany, although it found an immediate echo among hideously persecuted Eastern European Jews. Herzl held the First Zionist Congress in the Basel Municipal Casino in 1897 and in effect created there a virtual Israel complete with national anthem. The speed with which the idea spread and developed can be seen in the career of Herzl’s radical successor, the East Prussian Jew Kurt Blumenfeld, who became Secretary-General of the World Zionist Organization in 1911. Future events should have doomed to him to death or expulsion as an East Prussian by the Soviets or death by the Nazis, but instead he died in Israel in 1963: a country which owes its existence both to the most creative and imaginative aspects of the Germans and to the very worst.
Some families converted to Christianity or simply dropped serious observance and there is a point at which it becomes too odd to insist on figures such as Karl Marx, Gustav Mahler, Fritz Haber and Ludwig Wittgenstein – who in quite different ways and to quite different extents were Jewish – only being explicable through a lens they themselves were bored by or spurned. It becomes an almost impossible struggle to work out whether or not it is even faintly relevant to someone’s success that they were Jewish – and whether being too curious on this subject runs the risk of falling into an odd form of anti-Semitism. What is incontrovertible is that by the early twentieth century, individuals who to a greater or lesser extent had a Jewish background formed a remarkable part in a brilliant culture, whether literary, philosophical, medical, musical or scientific, one of the most dynamic and creative in European history, as much in the new German empire as in the Habsburg Empire. It could be seen as a joint German and Jewish project, but it sometimes seems to me more important just to pay no attention – that people from an immense variety of backgrounds were using the German language to revolutionary effect to change the world. The almost overwhelming blow that world received in 1914–18 left German culture devastated but still turning out extraordinary ideas – but then came the Great Depression and the arrival of an autodidact fantasist who loathed that culture, wished to destroy modernism in all its non-military forms, and who had specific ideas about how Germany had gone wrong.
Sitting in the cold, dusty Braunschweig museum and looking at the abandoned remains of the old Hornburg synagogue the sadness comes in so many waves. I have myself no serious links to Judaism – I am staring at something I do not understand except in an arid, unengaged way and the people who might explain it to me are long gone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Beside the seaside » Texan Wends » Pidgin German »
Thomas and Ernie » Podsnap in Berlin »
Varieties of militarism
Beside the seaside
For many foreigners Germany is associated with a sort of special bleakness and indeed there are parts of Pomerania or Brandenburg that could usefully be twinned with Saskatchewan or Caithness for sheer undesirability. For me the real punishment unit though has to be Wilhelmshaven. This eye-achingly desolate, helpless place is where, in effect, Germany began to go badly wrong, setting itself on a ruinous course with its own disastrous logic.
Wilhelmshaven stemmed from a sense that a proper navy was needed if Prussia was to be taken seriously by the other great powers. In the 1850s Prussia’s rulers were thinking about how to nurture what they increasingly felt to be their mission to unite Germany. At that point there seemed numerous obstacles, all of which were in fact to be disposed of in less than twenty years. One was Prussian vulnerability to naval blockade: however excellent its army, much of its growing overseas trade could be stopped by France threatening a handful of river mouths. Prussia’s ports were all the wrong side of Denmark and Danish hostility (which was to be fixed in the two Schleswig Wars) could easily bottle up Prussian ships in the Baltic. And so the building of a specifically Prussian North Sea base started to make sense. A classic map-obsessive’s project, it had a certain plausibility. Jade Bay, the future site of Wilhelmshaven, is a huge semi-circle of land on the North Sea which, just to look at for a few moments from a blustery esplanade, would make most people lose the will to live, particularly once they have had to get there by walking through a haggard shopping centre featuring a man in Bavarian dress playing ‘The Sheik of Araby’ on his saxophone. Jade Bay was owned by the torpid micro-state of Oldenburg. The only real German North Sea ports were in the hands of the semi-independent states of Bremen and Hamburg, who could not be relied on at all for military purposes. In a fine example of the sort of nonsense which made liberals tend to favour German unification, Prussian plans to create a port required baffling, tortured negotiations, leasing the land from Oldenburg and then building a special road to supply it through the territory of the substantial Kingdom of Hannover.
Oldenburg took the money but then Hannover just to be tiresome refused permission for the road, meaning the entire port had to be built stone by stone and worker by worker by sea – a project that took many years to complete. In the meantime Denmark had been defeated in the Second Schleswig War of 1864, allowing the Prussians, after a brief interlude of joint Austrian occupation, to purloin the excellent Baltic port of Kiel. Hannover belatedly backed Austria in her 1866 war with Prussia and went down to defeat and extinction, allowing Prussia to take Hannover over and at last have a proper road from which to build its naval port. But in 1871 the specifically Prussian port became futile, as Germany unified and Bremen and Hamburg came on board.
This was all too late, as the new port had finally been built and unimaginatively named after King Wilhelm. Walking around the town now, with its neat rows of administrators’ houses, garrison church and old statues, it is possible to get a sense of the pride and value felt for this new Prussian city. It all however proved to be one enormous mistake. Once the framework for a navy existed then a navy needed to be built, and to justify the immense novel German expenditure on modern ships a plausible enemy was needed. International relations shifted about with such violent speed around the time of the port’s inauguration that it is hard to know what a rational policy would have been for Wilhelmshaven’s use. In the interval between its inauguration and its second birthday all three of Prussia’s major enemies – Denmark, Austria, then France – had been easily defeated. Changes in naval technology from the 1870s onwards were almost as giddying as the chaos of international relations: ships were rapidly obsolete and yet soaked up huge funds. One of the reasons Germany acquired its oddly marginal and pointless overseas empire was then to provide its navy with something a quarter-way rational to do, and the Wilhelmshaven garrison church is filled with monuments to nasty wars in Namibia and China.
Wilhelmshaven became the focus of ever-madder dreams. As ships got bigger the otherwise miraculous new Kiel Canal became harder to use and Wilhelmshaven built up ever further. By 1900 naval fantasists began to feel that Britain must be the enemy – not for any very specific reason as British and German interests were on the whole complementary, but because an ocean-going navy only made sense in relation to Britain being the enemy, all the more usual enemies being easily dealt with by a traditional army.
And so a port built from scratch on a gloomy stretch of a shunned coast became the focus of a naval arms race, which did more than anything else to alienate Britain – a country that had stood by benignly through all Germany’s wars of unification. The enormous casualty lists tell the rest of the story. Essentially the German navy was always an expensive and stupid failure. There was simply never enough money or steel or men to take on Britain, a country which entirely defined itself by its global naval presence, whatever theories oddly bearded visionary nutcases like Grand Admiral von Tirpitz conjured up.
There was also the almost comic problem with Wilhelmshaven’s total unsuitability as a naval
port by the early twentieth century. Its sand bar made the entrance to the port impassable for big ships except at high tide, meaning that for the entire fleet to leave Wilhelmshaven it took two tides, theoretically allowing the British to blow to pieces the first half while waiting for the second half. This nightmare scenario never came to pass, but essentially the German fleet was too fragile to be used. One serious attempt was made at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, but to the rage of the German commanders it was immediately clear that while they had a clear technical superiority over the British, the latter were simply too numerous. The closeness to which the German fleet came to massacre on that occasion, massacre averted only through timidity and confusion among the British, meant that it was unthinkable to try again. As one historian recently and gleefully pointed out, the investment of so many millions of marks in an ocean-going fleet simply meant that the Kaiser had vaingloriously and expensively created the organization that would destroy him. As Germany faced defeat in 1918 a typically deranged plan to send out the entire navy on an honourable suicide mission resulted in the bored-to-tears sailors rebelling. There are splendid photos of the whole of official Wilhelmshaven packed with angry sailors, the statues and the administrators’ houses seemingly afloat on a sea of mutineers. The sailors’ actions implied a possible general breakdown and the grandson of Wilhelmshaven’s founder had to resign and head off to exile in the Netherlands.
So the port that had seemed to signal a new beginning at its opening had killed off the Prussian crown less than fifty years into its existence. Of course, there were huge aftershocks – most notably the Wilhelmshaven shipyards building the Nazi super-ship Tirpitz (appropriately enough), but again the Second World War showed that the Germans simply didn’t have the economy or the geography to have a navy. The U-boats were a terrible weapon, but a weapon based on weakness, with anything German above water sunk or marginalized by swarms of British ships in the first two years of the conflict. Wilhelmshaven’s clear coastal position meant that for the duration of the war it became the stop-off of choice for Bomber Command, who dropped things on it whenever they had a spare moment. The shattered remnant of the town (with three-quarters of its buildings destroyed) surrendered to an Allied Polish army at the end of the war. In a further ignominy, what was left of the docks was dismantled by German prisoners-of-war and packed off to the USSR as reparations (a job supervised by the very young John Harvey-Jones, the future head of Imperial Chemical Industries, curiously).
Wilhelmshaven is now a large port again, helped by the oddities of German geography in the Cold War, but really it just should not be there at all. It is very peculiar to walk around an entire town whose origins lie in such a ruinous mistake and which should really just be salt-raddled marginal farmland. The Wilhelmshaven story is a very unhappy one – but then, as the twentieth century progressed, this was to become true for many other towns too.
Texan Wends
The impulse to build a glum place like Wilhelmshaven came in part from a need for an empire, and first Prussia and then Germany’s sense that German-speaking lands were ill-equipped with this key nineteenth-century accessory. One of the very major facts in Germany’s history which speak in its favour is its lack of an empire: the degree to which it was a country that, for geographical rather than ethical reasons, did relatively little harm. A group of Augsburg bankers had attempted in the sixteenth century to settle Venezuela (Klein Venedig) but with total lack of success. There had also been a short-lived Prussian slave-shipping fort (proudly called Gross-Friedrichsburg) on the West African coast in the late seventeenth century but it was always a money-losing fiasco, reliant on a handful of leased warehouses in the Danish Virgin Islands and attacked by the Dutch whenever they fancied. The vast bulk of the slave trade’s moral nightmare ends in Spain’s and then England’s laps. Germany’s orientation was in the end just too squarely directed towards the concerns of Central Europe, with more exotic goods arriving second-hand via London or Amsterdam.
Like so many European countries, however, Germany and its predecessors had various forms of internal empire, with the Poles, Czechs and Slovenes having much the same role as the Irish had within the British empire: patronized, discriminated against, confusing to the dominant grouping, but also a critical cultural, intellectual and military source of strength. These minorities had mainly been a Prussian and Austrian (and Swiss) issue though, and did not impact on most German states. It is not as though Germans were unaware of the wider world – they were just poorly positioned to take political or economic advantage of it. Georg Forster may have written his Journey Around the World, a classic of German scientific travel literature, but he wrote it as a guest of Captain Cook, whose journeys scooped Australia, New Zealand and much of the Pacific for Britain rather than for Hesse-Kassel, where Forster settled on his return – a dreary contrast to all the breadfruit, bare breasts and roasted flying-fish that must have continued to fill his mind.
Everyone’s favourite Prussian, Alexander von Humboldt, travelled throughout South and Central America in the 1800s, had a marvellous time with piranha fish and electric eels, wallowed about in the icy horrors of the northern Pacific, but had no political impact of any kind, however grateful we might be for his marvellous account of his adventures. The Royal Bavarian expedition to Brazil (1817) meant the sensational Spix’s macaw was named after Johann Baptist von Spix, the appealing-sounding expedition leader, and the Royal Prussian expedition to Egypt (1842) resulted in the Great Pyramid getting its only hieroglyphs, put there by Professor Karl Richard Lepsius to extol the Prussian king (‘All hail to the Eagle, The Protector of the Cross, to the King, The Sun and Rock of Prussia, to the Sun of the Sun, who freed his native country, Friedrich Wilhelm the Fourth, & c.’) but, while fun, these trips did not notably extend Bavarian or Prussian global reach. The Austrians, in a rich parody of colonial futility, explored part of the Arctic Ocean in the 1870s (an expedition reimagined in Christoph Ransmayr’s remarkable novel The Terrors of Ice and Darkness), and fully mapped and named what is still called Franz Joseph Land, a deathly, uninhabited nightmare. But still, Germans tended to avoid anything more than the most tentative of non-political trading outposts – such as the Hamburg-initiated port of Douala in Cameroon in the 1870s.
This colonial blamelessness was caused by political weakness rather than German virtue. It would never be plausible for somewhere like Hesse-Kassel to have an empire, and Hamburg and Bremen’s independence from the rest of Germany until 1871 meant that the two states with a genuinely global outlook were committed to free trade and a close relationship with Britain quite at odds with nutty nationalist imaginings. This was the era of ever greater Hamburg trade with the world and of beautifully cartographed German maps featuring San Franzisko, Kalkutta, Kapstadt, Neu-Orleans, Sansibar, Singapur and Schanghai (well, that was gratuitous!). The huge and fascinating exception to this imperial sidelining was the degree to which Germans themselves as individuals were of course great emigrants. They might not own the countries they were leaving for, but they were crucial nonetheless to these countries’ success.
This settler drift was expressed in tiny communities – of Prussians in South Australia, or Westphalians in central Jamaica (a community which still does a traditional German pork roast on special occasions, even though two hundred and fifty years of intermarriage have made it black). But it was also expressed in great mass movements. George Washington and his friends had fun offering the most outrageous blandishments of money and land to confused Hessian mercenaries fighting for the British, several thousand of whom took the hint and headed off to help build Pittsburgh and Detroit. As in England, special religious communities shifted en masse to America, hoping to find space in which they would be left alone to pursue the full gamut of cranky revelation. They were often successful, with their descendants still tucked away in bits of Pennsylvania or Manitoba, testaments to a specific form of single-mindedness. But more broadly millions of ordinary Germans poured into North America – a mino
rity always conceding political power to English-speakers but often wealthy and powerful in its own sphere, filling Yorktown in Manhattan, Germantown in Cincinnati and so on. Sometimes there were quite conscious attempts to plant an abiding Germanness. Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, ‘Texas-Carl’, in 1845, in the year Texas traded in its independence to become part of the United States, went over to found New Braunfels (or Neu-Braunfels) in eastern Texas, a town which to this day carries an industrial load of Teutonic folksiness.
It was common for millions of Americans to speak German at home or among friends and English to a wider world. Given the difficulty of maintaining a fierce attachment to the memory of, say, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt it is unsurprising that German-Americans were so unconditionally loyal to the USA. But these communities were devastated by the First World War, which provoked a general sense that German was no longer publicly acceptable and a collapse in German-language newspapers. This was rapidly followed by a second disaster in Prohibition. A social group that organized itself around beer and wine festivals and the ownership of giant breweries was devastated. The names live on: Miller (or rather Müller), Pabst, Schlitz, Anheuser and Busch, but the forms of sociability that made them become rich first disappeared and then re-emerged with the end of Prohibition as more generally American, losing any real German flavour. The Germans therefore share with the English the odd non-achievement of being one of the very few ethnic groups not to get annual parades in New York. I blanch when I think about the amount of time wasted when I lived there in discussions with friends, coming up with themes for the ridiculous floats that would decorate an English Pride parade, but possibly it is as well too that during the course of the twentieth century it never struck anyone as a smart idea to have celebrations of German ethnicity trundling downtown, coldly lacking in the merry spontaneity worked on so hard by so many other national groups.