by Jan Morris
44 God’s system
Anyway, if religion can give us a groping sort of definition of Europe, what makes a metaphysical unity of this continent is art, which to a pantheist like me is the ultimate revelation of the divine. In my view European religion has been the acolyte of art, rather than the other way round. Edward Gibbon said Europe was no more than ‘a system of arts and laws and manners’: the laws and manners came from Christianity, but the arts came from God, and the true human glory of Europe, as I have learnt to see it, lies in the fact that in every corner of this continent, for thousands of years, people have been inspired to make beautiful things, in the service of one god or another, or of no consciously recognized god at all. The rankest amateur, painting the slushiest water-colour of Swiss waterfall or Grand Canal, has contributed to the oneness of Europe (‘The lake here,’ wrote Cézanne of the lake of Annecy in France, ‘lends itself admirably to the line-drawing exercises of young English misses’). The particular combination of mode, time and harmony which has made European music different from Asian and African music has been a defining factor of the continent; so, for centuries, was the use of perspective. Even the nature of Europe must bow before its art: as Gustav Mahler observed to the conductor Bruno Walter when they travelled through the Alps together, ‘No need to look – I’ve already composed them.’
Art is unity is God, and the absurd rules that some European nations have devised for keeping works of visual art within national boundaries seem to me downright irreligious. Fortunately they cannot prevent the grand distribution of genius across all the frontiers of Europe. One cathedral leads you to another across this magnificent corner of the earth. In the glory of an Italian palazzo you may recognize, as in family likeness, the charm of an English country house. Shakespeare, who is undoubtedly one of God’s own personae, belongs to everyone in Europe. Mozart worked in London as in Salzburg. Napoleon invited Goethe to go and live in France. Samuel Beckett was French as well as Irish. Voltaire, Rousseau, Byron, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shelley, Liszt, Hans Christian Andersen and Tchaikovsky all, at one time or another, lived and worked beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Above all else (except perhaps marijuana), rock music has linked the young of modern Europe – it was a civic celebration to match the fantastic festivities of old when in the 1980s the rock-and-roll group Pink Floyd played on a raft in the Bacino di San Marco in Venice. I strolled into Notre-Dame in Paris one evening to find a glorious German choir singing Bach’s St Matthew Passion before the high altar, while all around the dim-lit cathedral young French people sat on the floor, or leant against pillars, reverent and entranced; and I once listened to just the same music, performed to just the same effect, in a bare and clinical church hall in a suburb of Reykjavik.
45 ‘Sweet Rosemarie’
Loiter with me now for a moment or two, on a winter day in 1996, in an alley off Ban Jelačić Square in Zagreb, down the hill from the Stone Gate. A man bundled in a greatcoat is playing an instrument of his own invention, consisting of rows of wine and mineral-water bottles strung on a contraption rather like a washing-line, and tuned by their varying contents of liquid. He is playing with great delicacy a piece you and I both know well, but can’t for the life of us place, and around him a smiling crowd has gathered, amused by the instrument, touched by the tune. In the front row of the audience a small child of two or three in a woolly blue and white jumper suit, with hat to match, is performing a shuffly sort of dance to the beat of the music.
It is a curiously affecting performance, partly because of the sweetly familiar music – what is that tune, damn it? – played upon so homely a device, but partly because the musician is one of a grand company of street performers who greet us nowadays all across Europe, a league of artists of varying talent but generally cheering message. They are a true concert of Europe. I remember, off the top of my head, a trombonist and a cellist playing a Marcello sonata in a park at Weimar, and a juggler of genius outside the Beaubourg in Paris, and brilliant Gypsy fiddlers, and a virtuoso flautist in the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, and pavement portrait-painters in Prague, and rustic bagpipers in Rome, and mimes and clowns all over the place, and my son Twm with his harp and his Welsh songs in the cathedral square at Freiburg, and a young woman with an oboe in an underground train in London (where they call it ‘busking’ – a word which originally meant, it seems, ‘cruising as a pirate’).
They are no pirates to me. They are part of Europe’s holy fabric, and except for the mimes and clowns I am always glad to see them. And hang on, I think I’ve remembered what that tune is. Isn’t it one of those charming Fritz Kreisler fripperies they used to play in Palm Court cafés, with a lady violinist in a satin blouse, and the grammar-school music-master moonlighting at the piano? ‘Schön Rosmarin’ – isn’t that it?
46 Old friends
Art makes Europe European – Joyce’s Dublin, Cervantes’s Spain, Camoëns’ Portugal, Dickens’s London, Kafka’s Prague, Proust’s France, Rembrandt’s Holland, Bach’s Germany, Sibelius’s Finland, Ibsen’s Norway, Mozart’s Austria, Leonardo’s Italy – all made common property by art’s genius. You may find works by the divine Giorgione not only in his native Venice but in Amsterdam, Bassano, Bergamo, Berlin, Budapest, Dublin, Florence, Glasgow, London, Madrid, Milan, Monaco, Naples, Oxford, Padua, Paris, Rome, Rotterdam and Vienna. After a lifetime of familiarity with reproductions of his Sleeping Venus, all unexpectedly I came across its original among the war-ruins of Dresden. I was not in the least surprised. I was not even ecstatic – merely pleased to see it there. It was like coming across an old friend in the street one day, not far from home.
2
THE MISHMASH
*
Time and again history has disrupted the shaky identity that religion has given Europe, and shattered art’s unity. The result is a maze of frontiers, enclaves, minorities, irredentisms, ethnic anomalies and political fragmentation, and Trieste is just the place for contemplating it. This city is hemmed in by artificial frontiers, inhabited by people of several races, complicated by the detritus of abandoned empires and by the effects of unnecessary wars. Even in my time its circumstances have repeatedly shifted. It has been a foreign-occupied port, a free territory, an Italian prefectorial capital, a last capitalist outpost on the edge of the Communist world, a watchpost for the conflict in Yugoslavia. It has been an evocative relic of the lost Austro-Hungarian Empire. Before the final collapse of European Communism bus-loads of shoppers used to come here from many countries of eastern Europe. A Balkan market near the bus station catered especially for them, beneath the flowering chestnuts of the Piazza della Libertà, and there they wandered in their thousands – Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Hercegovinans – stocky, calculating people, festooned with ill-wrapped packages and occasionally pausing, so the evidence showed, to write graffiti in the Cyrillic script. They were reenacting the time when Trieste was the great entrepôt for them all, and when I once asked a man from Budapest if he had enjoyed his trip, he said it had been ‘an experience of nostalgia’ – nostalgia, I suppose, like my own on the jetty that day, for a state of things he had never known. During my time the Director of the Trieste Opera has been the Barone Rafaelle Douglas de Banfield-Tripcovich, composer, businessman, politician and Honorary French Consul; he is a worldly, elegant, hand-kissing sort of man, the son of a Slav countess and the most highly decorated officer in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces, and his inherited title – Baron of Trieste – was awarded to his father by the Emperor Franz Josef himself.
Trieste hardly has a nationality. It is like no other Italian city, and to be a Triestino is to be a special kind of Italian citizen – many Triestini would rather not be Italian anyway. In this city the lines between fact and fiction, past and present, the explicit and the enigmatic, let alone between one ethnicity and another, always seem to me uncertain. If Trieste ever felt impelled to advertise itself on road signs, like towns in France (‘Sa Cathédrale, Ses Grottes, Ses Langoustines’),
it would have no problems. This is a city unique and altogether original, and it could simply announce, on one very large placard, ‘Sua Triestinità’: its Triesteness. It is the perfect place to disappear into, and sometimes over the years, as my Britishness has refined itself into Welshness, and I have found myself distracted by the impotence of the small nations and minorities caught in the apparently unravellable tangle of the continent, I have been tempted to disappear here myself. I would take an attic flat somewhere behind the Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia, among the bookstalls and the junk shops, thence to emerge in ageing anonymity, wearing slippers and a wide straw hat, to write philosophical essays all day long in the sunshine.
Thus I would escape from the mishmash of Europe, for what would race, frontier or nation mean in such a condition of liberty? I would be escaping from Europe’s complexities, the arbitrary sham of the lines that criss-cross the continent, the bits and pieces clinging to the edge of it, blurring its outlines, messing things up.
1 Dôle
For me the epitome of the European frontier will always be one of those high railway stations in the lee of the Alps where the transcontinental steam expresses used to stop, in the days when most of us travelled across Europe by train. It always seemed to be the middle of the night when we reached these places. There was always snow on the ground. The train would stop with a hiss of brakes, a clanking and a sudden utter silence, broken only by spasmodic coughs from the locomotive. Blurrily through our steamed-up sleeper windows we would peer into the night, which appeared to be almost absolute. A few dim bulbs. A deserted station. No sign of a town – only a name on a lamppost, which might have been Brig or Domodossola, but in my memory seems always to have been Dôle.
Was there really such a place, I used to wonder? Where were we? We might have been altogether abandoned, remote from anywhere, until far away along the train we heard the stamping of feet and the sliding of corridor doors. ‘Passeports s’il vous plaît – passeports mesdames, messieurs – tous les passeports!’ – louder and louder through the hush until our own door abruptly opened, jarring our nerves however long we had been expecting it, and there was the customs man holding his hand out, with a policeman looking over his shoulder. Sometimes they would want to inspect your luggage, snarled around by blankets in the awkward jumble of your berth, but only as a matter of form, scarcely examining it when you managed to open it at last. Then you heard them moving away up the train again – ‘Passeports! Tous les passeports!’ – fainter and fainter towards the engine. The silence was resumed – the smothered silence of a snowy landscape, broken only by distant banging of doors and a few sleepy murmurs up and down your carriage, before the train slowly eased itself off again with a judder of couplings and a creaking of woodwork, and made for its tunnel under the Alps.
For years I thought of Dôle only as that funereal halt in the night, just a station, a silence and two official faces at the sleeper door. It was only recently that, travelling to Switzerland by car, I found myself in the town itself. It had been there all the time! It turned out to be forty miles from the frontier proper, and was a comfortable place of steeples and bridges and happy squares, where Pasteur was born, and where I enjoyed a delightful meal of little trout and local Sauvignon in the garden of La Petite Auberge, on the other side of town from the railway station. It shows how hallucinatory frontiers can be.
2 God’s frontiers
The proper limits of France, declared Cardinal Richelieu in the seventeenth century, were the Alps, the Rhine and the Pyrenees. A web of artificial frontiers has been imposed upon Europe – even weather maps often end abruptly at national borders – but others were God-given. ‘See how the wand’ring Danube flows,’ wrote Jonathan Swift, who never set eyes on that river, ‘Realms and religions parting!’ Rivers and mountains, straits and lakes have separated peoples always, and some remain as political frontiers to this day – the Alps (parting France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy), the Pyrenees (parting Spain and France), the Danube (Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria), the Morava (Slovakia and the Czech Republic), the Great Belt (Sweden and Denmark), the English Channel (Britain and everywhere else), the Rhine (Germany, France and Switzerland).
Especially the Rhine, because you cannot travel along it without remembering the mighty confrontation here between the great rival forces of the Latins and the Teutons. The Rhine has been a frontier as potent in men’s minds as on the map. ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, Max Schneckenburger’s nineteenth-century paean to Germanness, was more than just a poem, a ballad or a slogan, but an expression of immemorial instinct – after the Prussian victory over France in 1870 Bismarck said the song had been worth three extra divisions to the German armies. The ‘Marseillaise’ was written as the battle-hymn of a French army specifically charged with the defence of this frontier. Even the British sang about it, in the First World War hit ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’ – ‘Two German officers crossed the Rhine, Parlez-vous …’ At Rüdesheim on the German side the immense Franco-Prussian War memorial, its triumphant Germania presiding over an eruption of eagles, crests, sculpted generals and angels of victory, towers above both banks of the river to set an arrogant seal upon its meaning (although one of the first air raids to hit German soil in the Second World War was mounted in 1940 by the Luftwaffe itself, which mistook Freiburg im Breisgau for Colmar on the other side of the Rhine …).
Strasbourg, a few miles back from the river in the French province of Alsace, is a comforting place to escape from these absurd old enmities. Sometimes it has been French, sometimes German, as the tide of rivalry has swept this way and that across the Rhine – 1870 French, 1871 German, 1918 French, 1940 German, 1945 French. It has been a city of war, violence, oppression and furious patriotism. Bismarck said that Strasbourg, with the rest of Alsace, was no more than a glacis for the defence of Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II unleashed his most Germanic architects upon it. General Joffre announced, when his armies entered Alsace in 1914, that it would now be French for ever. Hitler declared, in 1940, that it was to be considered ‘part of the German Fatherland itself’, banned the French language, and Germanized everyone’s names. Nowadays Strasbourg looks to me about equally German and French, and people appear to speak the two languages indiscriminately, and divide their diet equably between sausage and coq au vin. Voltaire once wrote of Alsatians that they were ‘half-German, half-French and completely Iroquois’; but today the passions are calmed – for the moment anyway. Nobody is going to scalp you as you wander Strasbourg’s handsome streets, and overlooking a park in the Avenue de l’Europe, providing an optimistic conclusion to the long bitterness of the Rhine, in 1979 there was opened for business the glassy assembly house of the European Parliament, with the flags of half Europe fluttering side by side outside – enough to make those ferocious old nationalists of the Rhine, the Bismarcks and the Joffres, the Kaisers and the Adolf Hitlers, squirm in their graves.
3 At the front
For them a frontier meant more or less the same as a front line, and so it did in Roman times. The fortified frontier of the Roman Empire in Europe, the Limes (‘path’), marked the northern boundary of certainty, beyond which anarchy reigned. It still vestigially exists, in fits and starts from Scotland to the Black Sea. At its western end stand the windswept masonries of Hadrian’s Wall, undulating across the bleak landscapes of the Anglo-Scottish border from the Atlantic to the North Sea. At the other end old maps still show it, in castellated conventional signs, marching past the Danube estuary to the Black Sea (where the poor poet Ovid, exiled in AD 8 by the Emperor Augustus to the hell-hole now called Constanta, dreamt of home and happier times almost within sight of it). Between these two extremes, the desolation of the West, the melancholy of the East, here and there across the sweep of Europe there are still traces of the Limes, sometimes in stretches of wall, sometimes in turf-covered dykes and ditches, sometimes in the form of advanced outposts thrown across a natural barrier – at Budapest (Aquincum), for i
nstance, where unfortunate pickets were posted to forts on the wrong side of the un-bridged Danube.
The line ran a few miles north of Bad Homburg in Germany, and in 1899 Kaiser Wilhelm II had one of its frontier forts meticulously reconstructed. He claimed to have done the work, so it says in Latin above one of its gateways, in pious memory of his parents, but there were doubtless political motives too. His own home kingdom of Prussia lay north of the line, in barbarian country, and he had barbarian yearnings himself, sponsoring neo-pagan monuments and encouraging his soldiers to fight like Huns; but he also loved to see the emergent German Empire in classical terms, sometimes Grecian, sometimes Latin, and when he and his entourage attended the official opening of his pastiche the courtiers were obliged to wear togas. Purists scoff at the reborn fortress of Saalburg, and think it grossly overdone, but when I once spent an afternoon there I thought it truly evocative. It stands on the edge of a wood, and, although it is a popular place for an afternoon’s outing from Frankfurt, still manages to feel fairly remote and frontier-like. Everything is in place, carefully restored or rebuilt, down to the water-wells and the baking-ovens; I could fancy the tramp of Roman sandals and hear the commands of centurions (though I dare say I got their imperative moods wrong). Snow was on the ground when I was there, in wisps and slivers among the trees, and I even managed to feel a little homesick, imagining myself posted there for frontier duty from warmer, easier places. A mile or so away, through the woods, runs the grassy mound that is the Limes, the end of all order: beyond it, away in the mists of the ominous North, strangers waited.