Europe
Page 10
27 By the way
By the way, I recently went back to Schnackenburg, and found that by the fishing-harbour they had created a little Museum of the Border Zone, to commemorate the bad old days. It was closed when I was there, but a peer through its window gave me a nasty turn. In the gloom of the half-shuttered room there were life-size dummies of Communist frontier guards, as they used to be. One rode a motor-bike, and had an automatic weapon strapped across his chest. One was evidently a general and was being driven by his orderly in a sort of Russian jeep. There were flags around, and rusted notices saying ‘HALTE!’, and seen so indistinctly through the window those grim mannequins looked truly sinister. A bare wooden table stood in the middle of the room, as though for interrogations; and outside, on the slipway, high and dry on props stood that grey DDR patrol boat.
In his book Apples in the Snow (1990), Geoffrey Moorhouse has a brilliantly prophetic passage, almost surreal, about the toppling of all the hundreds and thousands of public statues of Lenin in the USSR creating such a mighty surplus of bronze that the whole world’s metal markets would be knocked askew. During the Communist hegemony in eastern Europe there were almost as many public statues of Stalin, and these too were one and all eliminated in a couple of years. The very last of them survived into the middle 1990s in Tirana, the capital of Albania, where it stood prominently on a plinth beside the main avenue of the city, second in importance only to the mighty bronze of Enver Hoxha, the local dictator, in the great square up the road. Stalin’s effigy was removed when the regime fell, but in 1996 it still existed, in a shed on the city outskirts. I went and saw it there. It looked in good order, the old tyrant standing in the approved posture of commanding benevolence, but I saw no future for it.
28 The end of the frontier?
Frontiers in Europe are losing much of their meaning now, and with luck they may fade away altogether. In some ways I shall be sorry to see them go. The frontier has been an essential part of the European ethos, after all, throughout my fifty years – when I first travelled from England to Italy as a civilian, I had to get a transit visa to cross France. But before long, I suppose, the queues of trucks lining up at Europe’s frontier posts will be no more than a folk-memory, like my steam engines coughing at Dôle, and already most customs officers, in most parts of Europe, wave the motorist through without a glance. Ernest Bevin, the British Labour Foreign Secretary, once said that the ambition of his foreign policy was to enable a Briton to go down to Waterloo station and take a train to Paris without needing a passport. I suppose it is only natural that by the 1990s the surliest frontier in western Europe was his own, the frontier of an island kingdom which had maintained its pride and its sovereignty for nearly a thousand years by reason of its insularity. It was a disagreeable experience, all the same, to observe the merciless faces of Her Majesty’s customs officers, interrogating some unfortunate black traveller with a baby on her arm, or rummaging through the backpack of a student vacationer, beneath the unforgiving lights of the green channel.
29 Bits and bobs
Wandering one day in the 1960s through the French department of Roussillon I suddenly and quite unexpectedly found myself confronted by a frontier post with a Spanish flag above it, and an announcement that I was entering Llivia, in the Spanish province of Gerona. It was hardly more than a small and shabby village, connected by a dead straight, specially constructed and officially neutral road with the nearest Spanish city, Puigcerdá. The place was unmistakably Spanish, in architecture, language and spirit, and turned out to be a kind of historical quibble. The region had been divided between France and Spain in 1659, and this countryside with all its villages was assigned to the French: a canny Spanish argument maintained that Llivia was not a village but a town, and so for ever after its people were connected with their fatherland only by that geometrical umbilical, from which even in my day it was forbidden to stray.
Even in a Europe without frontiers, such bits, bobs and anomalies of history will always survive. For the moment they are almost inescapable. There is a Slovakian enclave on the Hungarian side of the Danube. At the southern end of Spain the British flag flies over a colony largely inhabited by people of Italian, Spanish, Maltese and North African descent. An infinitesimal strip of Bosnia-Hercegovina runs through Croatia to the Adriatic. A curious pocket of Germany exists at Büsingen, on the Swiss side of the Rhine, where the currency is Swiss but the postage stamps are German – a delightful mixture of old river town and spanking modernity, where nationality seems to have lost much of its meaning.
Luxembourg (population 407,000) has been an independent Grand Duchy only since 1867, but when you drive into its spiky capital you certainly know you are entering a sovereign State: as one of the richest cities of Europe and a centre of Europeanism, it is an exhibition of nineteenth-century grandeur and twentieth-century excitement. Before you can become a citizen of San Marino (population 24,000) you have to have lived for fifty years (which Heaven forbid) in that minuscule, steep and touristy mountain republic in the middle of Italy, which has maintained a sort of independence since the fourth century AD. The chief executive of the State of the Vatican City (population 1,000) is the Pope: it has its own railway, heliport, newspaper, university, diplomatic service and radio station, broadcasting in thirty-four languages. Half the world scarcely realized that Monaco (population 30,000) was an independent State at all until the marriage of the actress Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier in 1956: in fact it has been ruled by the same princely dynasty since the thirteenth century, within just the same territorial bounds (except those extended by profitable landfill), and finding it there today, as you drop out of the French Maritime Alps into the arid glitter of its skyscrapers, yachts, hotels and jet-set villas, is one of Europe’s most curious moments of historical paradox. The first time I drove to the Republic of Andorra (population 62,000), up the twisting highway through the Pyrenees from France, the compass in my car went berserk. Its needle swung hilariously this way and that, affected I suppose by deposits in the stark mountains all around. This was apposite, because the little State seems to exist outside natural laws. Its titular heads of State, the Co-Princes of Andorra, are the President of France and the Bishop of Urgel, a small diocesan city in northern Spain, and for 700 years it has maintained its improbable but generally imperturbable independence, living in recent years by the profits of tourism and obliging tax arrangements, but officially denied recognition by the Government of Japan. No wonder my compass floundered.
30 Fürstlichkeit
Then there is the mountain Principality of Liechtenstein, which lies between Switzerland and Austria. Liechtenstein (population 31,000) is like a drift on the map, so unobtrusive that on the motorway through Switzerland from Bad Ragaz to Lake Constance you can easily pass it by without noticing – especially since, as Switzerland handles its external affairs anyway, the only frontier or customs posts are on the Austrian side. It is, however, a sovereign State of a most particular kind. It is the epitome of Fürstlichkeit – princeliness. From the jumbled centre of its only city, Vaduz, a lively cacophony of restaurants, banks, tourist shops and car parks, you may see high on a rocky outcrop above, as in legend or allegory, the castle of its ruling prince – as I write, Hans Adam II. His dynasty has provided sovereign rulers of this place since 1719, and there is no ignoring it. Princes and princesses abound, not only Prince Hans Adam himself and his wife Princess Marie, but their children and daughter-in-law the Princes and Princesses Alois, Maximilian, Constantin, Tatjana and Sophie: without even counting uncles, aunts and cousins that I know not of, this amounts to one Royal Highness for every 4,500 inhabitants, and constitutes a royal presence of almost Saudi profligacy. Princely portraits are everywhere, princely crowns and princely crests, pictures of princely weddings, princely banners, princely epithets and princely honorifics. The stamps, of course, have princes on them. The currency would too, if there were a currency – Swiss francs are used in Liechtenstein. Even the wine comes from princely vin
eyards, by way of princely-employed retailers, and is likely to have a princely title on its label, and an embossed crown, and a crest with eagles and an orb.
I spent a few days in Liechtenstein in 1996, and thought that on the face of it nowhere could be much happier. There is no poverty, and when one Sunday I went up into the mountains for an alfresco lunch, beside the little lake at Steg, the crowds of jolly well-behaved people up there, messing about in boats, cooking barbecue meals, striding away up mountain paths, drinking steins of beer at café tables, seemed to me most enviable. It turned out, though, that all was not entirely content in Liechtenstein that week. Almost for the first time in history, among the legislators in the modest Parliament building, almost directly below the castle, there had been stirrings of anti-Fürstlichkeit. As a republican myself I was not, of course, surprised. Despite what the publicity brochures said (‘the prince and the people rule together’), Liechtenstein was an all-but-absolute monarchy. The allegory of the castle on the hill was perfectly true. All those crests, titles and flags were not mere ornament. Liechtenstein’s economy depended partly on a thriving industrial sector, and partly upon one of the world’s most successful banking and financial structures, and in the entire national enterprise Prince Hans Adam II was by far the largest shareholder. What the Prince said went!
Since then I have watched the papers for news of more general dissent in Liechtenstein: but when I remember that sunny lunch-time by the lake, the cars streaming up from Vaduz (in Liechtenstein there is one for every two persons, young and old), I don’t seriously expect to find any.
31 On the Rock
I suppose the most surprising of these anomalies, during my half-century, was that of Gibraltar, still a British Crown Colony when the rest of the British Empire had all but disappeared. By the 1990s it was propagating an image of itself as a sunny if not ritzy tax haven for the very rich, but when I was working in Spain thirty years before I used to think it a gloomy relic indeed, standing there vastly humped across Algeciras Bay, or looming darkly over Andalusian landscapes. To generations of Britons, and to many foreigners too, it had long been instinct with imperial romance – one of the great fortresses by which the island people had sustained their maritime supremacy around the world. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) likened it to a great blunderbuss, seized by the British ‘and kept ever since tremendously loaded and cleaned and ready for use’. Richard Chevenix Trench (1807–86) said ‘it made the very heart within one dance’. ‘At this door,’ wrote Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922), who hated almost everything about the British Empire, ‘England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze, and at the summon of the rock gun’s roar to see her redcoats marching from the hill!’ Even Joyce’s Molly Bloom had proud memories of Gibraltar, for it was there that she was kissed by Lieutenant (or so she fondly thought) Mulvey, Royal Navy, beneath the Moorish wall.
Nobody has been more susceptible to the imperial aesthetic than I have been, but still Gibraltar always struck me as a sorry disappointment. It might look heroic from the deck of a passing ship, standing there so terrifically with Union Jacks all over the place, but on the ground it was just a shabby barracks-town, with dingy shops and nasty little pubs where the soldiers drank, and vast bare slabs of granite rising everywhere. Even the Rock Hotel, a flowered oasis in the midst of all this drab stoniness, could let the imperial aficionado down. I once overheard two very old-school American matrons commenting upon the grumpy hotel porter who had just dumped their bags unceremoniously on the lobby floor. ‘What an unpleasant man!’ said one. ‘What can you expect?’ responded her Sister of the American Revolution. ‘He is British, my dear, and male.’
32 Looking for Wends
There are innumerable ethnic muddles and anachronisms, too, which are generally noticed only when they flare into violence – Serbs in Croatia, Albanians in Yugoslavia, Croats in Bosnia, Germans in Romania and the Czech Republic, Kashubians in Poland, Finns in Sweden, Greeks and Albanians in southern Italy, Austrians in the north, Russians and Tartars in the Baltic countries, communities of many origins scattered still along the eastern marches of the continent. The district called the Vojvodina in Yugoslavia is home to Hungarians, Romanians, Macedonians, Serbs, Slovaks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Gypsies and according to some authorities at least a dozen lesser ethnicities: in 1991, well before the break-up of the old Yugoslavia, less than 7 per cent of its people thought of themselves as ‘Yugoslavs’ (which only means ‘South Slavs’ anyway).
In Germany, near the Czech and Polish borders, there are some 50,000 Slav people called Sorbs, who speak Sorbian and have a literature of their own. Somebody told me that others, calling themselves Wends, still talked their language and pursued their customs in the very heart of the country. The Wends had once been a powerful group of tribes, so irredeemably heathen that in the twelfth century the Roman Catholic Church authorized a crusade against them: this culminated in the destruction of a gigantic figure of their god Światowit, whom we met on page 17: the image stood at the tip of the off-shore island of Rügen, and the soldiers of Christ toppled it ceremoniously into the sea.
I was intrigued to think that a pocket of this people might have survived deep in western Germany, so in 1995 I went to the corner of Lower Saxony still called Wendland to see if I could find them. It is a sweet triangle of farmland well outside the usual tourist route, and on the map it was certainly littered with some encouragingly Tolkienian place names – Satemin, Mammoisel, Gohlefanz. I was not really surprised to learn that the Wendish language was last heard here some time in the 1800s, and it soon became clear to me that under the Nazis, who categorized Slavs as subhuman, many citizens had preferred to forget their Wendishness: but I was delighted to discover that the old pagans, long since assimilated into German Christianity, had left behind them a series of villages peculiar to themselves. They are roughly circular assemblies of brick timber-framed houses, grouped around village greens, generally with a church just outside the circle. They suggested to me extremely sophisticated, advanced and comfortable Zulu kraals. No straggly suburbs spoil the elegance of the Wendish Runddorf, which may be no more than five or six houses anyway: it stands there in that green landscape wonderfully serene, with holy texts inscribed on its housefronts, and the names of long-dead burghers.
Very few of the inhabitants claim Wendish origin, which I had rather expected to find trendily fashionable, but the misty identity of the Wends is not entirely dispersed. When I was there the German authorities were proposing to dump nuclear waste in a disused salt-mine in the country. The people were up in arms against it, a Free Wendland Republic had been declared, and the Wendish slogans that greeted me everywhere, the unfamiliar flags that fluttered, must have amused the shades of those vanished indigenes (though the waste went into the salt-mine anyway).
33 Finding the Karaim
I did better with the Karaim (or Karaites), one of the smallest and most interesting racial and religious minorities in all Europe. They are Jews of a very particular kind, who originated in Baghdad, or perhaps Persia, and. broke from the main body of Judaism in the eighth century, maintaining that nothing but the Bible itself was holy, that the Talmud was impious and rabbinical religion false. Sober and ascetic, with a rich literature, they held themselves austerely aloof from Christians and Muslims alike. Many Karaim found their way to the Crimea, and there at the end of the eighteenth century they were befriended by the Empress Catherine II of Russia, who transferred some of them to her territories in Lithuania on the Baltic. I had read that they had provided guards for the Grand Dukes of Lithuania at their castle of Trakai, set among a sequence of lakes near the centre of the country, so in 1996 I went there to find them.
Trakai is a spectacular place. The fifteenth-century Gothic castle, heavily reconstructed, stands on an island at the head of a peninsula, attended by a small town largely made of wood – streets of elegantly shabby planked houses interspersed with beech trees along the water’s e
dge. There were plenty of signs of Karaim occupation. Many of those houses, I was assured, had been put up by the Karaim. A street was named for them, and so was an island near the castle, presumably where the Duke’s bodyguard had been quartered. But when I followed my map to the Karaim Museum, a little square building like a village hall, I found it all abandoned; and the Knessa along the road, the Karaim equivalent of a synagogue, was in the hands of decidedly Gentile workmen. ‘Karaim?’ I asked the doorkeepers at the castle, but they firmly shook their heads. Were the Karaim all dead, then? Had the damned Nazis murdered them?
No, it turned out. Among anti-Semites they had never been regarded as entirely Jewish – rather odd, as the Karaim believed themselves to be more truly Jewish than anyone else. The tsarist Russians had given them full citizenship. The Nazis decreed that they were not biological Jews but only converts from other races, and though in the event this did not prevent their general massacre in the Crimea, it apparently saved them in Lithuania. Where were they, then? Where were the Karaim? I asked everyone I met in the streets of Trakai, and eventually I found them, in the persons of two extremely jolly, very healthy-looking, wonderfully extrovert middle-aged women, living in two of those old wooden houses.
They were not at all what I expected – not in the least sober, ascetic or aloof. About 150 of their people, they told me, still lived in Trakai, in the very same streets to which they had migrated from the Black Sea two centuries before, and they led me to a shop where I could get a true Karaim delicacy, a kind of pie called a kibini. However horrible it might prove to be, I jumped at the chance to taste it. Could anything be more romantic, I thought, than to sit beside the lake, looking across to the castle, eating a pie which had come to this corner of Europe by way of Baghdad, the Crimea, the patronage of the Empress of Russia and the employment of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania? The Karaim ladies laughed at my enthusiasm, but the kibini turned out to be delicious – though not very different, actually, from a Cornish pasty.