Europe

by Jan Morris

  I had a pre-Christmas luncheon at Guiseley in 1995, and England was certainly English then. All the customers were the real thing – not an outsider among them (except me), only celebratory office parties hilarious over Harry’s Challenge, and amiably extended families with grandmothers in hats, and burbling children with hand-held video toys, and not a few stout parties who would have done better to cut down on the Steamed Ginger Pudding. At one o’clock precisely there arrived outside the front door the Scissett Youth Band of Huddersfield, to serenade us lustily with all the good old carols – none of your fancy ecumenicals – setting many a sensibly shod foot tapping to their rhythms, and inciting me, as an inveterate whistler, to join in messily over my mushy peas.

  103 From Harry Ramsden: The Uncrowned King of Fish and Chips, 1989, by Don Mosey

  Harry stood at the Pearly Gate,

  His face was worn and old.

  He meekly asked the man of fate

  Admission to the fold.

  ‘What have you done,’ old Peter asked,

  ‘To seek admittance here?’

  ‘I owned a Guiseley Fish Shop

  For many and many a year.’

  The gate flew open sharply, as

  Peter touched the bell.

  ‘Come in old man, and take a harp,

  You’ve had enough of hell.’

  104 Doubts

  Rationally, people even half a century ago knew that England was not really a Power of Powers any more. The vastly superior strength of America was apparent to anyone who cared to think about it, and I remember the subalterns of my regiment, when we were still in Italy, fantasizing about a ceremonial end to the island kingdom, becoming the forty-ninth State of the American Union perhaps, or marching four abreast, all 40 million, off the peninsula of Land’s End into the oblivion of the Atlantic. For the most part, though, the nation put its decline out of mind, and in this it was helped by the continuing jingoism of the media and by a wistful tendency to dream: when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, the event was generally hailed as the dawn of a new Elizabethan era, in which an England recovered from the traumas of war would resume its triumphant panache.

  I suppose I shared some of that fantasy when, in June of that year, I went to Buckingham Palace with the members of the British expedition that had just achieved the first ascent of Everest – I had been the news correspondent with the team, and my dispatch reporting the success of the climb had reached London on the night before Elizabeth’s coronation. It was my only meeting with the Queen. She was just my age, and although I was already something of a republican, I would have been less than human if I had not been moved by the meeting. I asked her how the news had reached her, and she said it had been brought to her in her bedroom in a red dispatch-box. How marvellous it was, I thought, to imagine the progress of my little message – in my own hands down the slopes of the mountain, into the lowlands in the pouch of a Sherpa runner, winged across the continents, and finally delivered into what I imagined to be the heavily gilded, curtained, eiderdowned and doubtless four-postered apartment of the Queen of England!

  Not long afterwards I was walking down the Mall in London, the capital’s one ceremonial highway, when the Queen came by on a tall charger. It was the day of Trooping the Colour, a splendidly obsolete military manoeuvre which was performed simply for the show of it every summer. Flags flew, a band played somewhere, jangling cavalry processed, three strange old gentlemen rode past, weighed down beneath fat bearskin hats, with huge swords bouncing at their side. The street was lined with those fresh-faced troops, apparently younger than any others, who used to give a touching sense of innocence to the British Army. Jolly women thronged the pavements, waving little flags, while policemen figuratively rocked on their heels. When the young woman herself passed on her lofty horse the crowd watched her with a kind of exalted compassion. But I already thought it had lasted too long. The Queen herself looked tired, and the whole panoply of the parade, all that starch and polish, all that unchangeable ritual, seemed to me the dying display of an exhausted tradition: year after year, century after century, the same beat of the drums, the same fluttering plumes, the same bent old courtiers on their horses lurching generation after generation down the Mall.

  105 The coachman

  A friend and I were driving one day along a quiet Oxfordshire road when we saw a picturesque sight in front of us. A fine old four-in-hand was running along at a spanking pace, driven by an elderly gentlemanly-looking coachman on his high box. There were passengers behind him on the rooftop, and it looked a perfectly workmanlike, everyday equipage. ‘D’you see the man driving it?’ said my companion. ‘That’s the most hated Englishman alive.’ It was perfectly true that if the Germans had won the Second World War that coachman would probably have been smuggled out of the country by underground routes to Australia or the Falkland Islands. Not only his enemies hated him, either. Thousands of his own countrymen considered him a war criminal. When I heard who he was, I myself looked up with distinctly mixed feelings as we overtook his coach. Should he have done it, I asked myself? Had he any choice? Was the slaughter justified? Had his men, who had come from the world’s four corners to serve under him, wasted their courage in an evil campaign? Did the cause of a righteous victory justify the means of murder? Even Winston Churchill had doubts.

  That coachman was Sir Arthur Harris – ‘Bomber’ Harris. He it was, during the Second World War, who had unleashed his vast fleets of black thudding aircraft, manned by crews from every country of the old British Empire, to devastate scores of German cities and kill hundreds of thousands of German civilians. I stared rudely at him through our rear window as we left those trotting horses behind, but he looked a jolly enough old fellow, up there behind the reins.

  106 The lost kingdom

  There is a statue of ‘Bomber’ Harris in London now, at the tail-end of the century, but although the Queen of England still attends the Trooping ceremony, she no longer rides a horse there. The courtiers and the drum-majors ride by, but the police have a meaner look these days, the soldiers look more loutish, the crowd is no longer like the flutter of neighbours around the church gate at a wedding, and it is no longer heretical to think the whole royal charade a symptom not of pride and unity but of decline. The national characteristics of the English had been universally recognized in the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1980s the English had no national characteristics. They had been obliged to think of themselves as multi-ethnic, multicultural, so that the very word ‘English’ had almost lost its meaning. They had been taught to be ashamed of their lost empire. They had been so bewildered by incessant legislation that they had almost forgotten the basic principle of their own law – that when the law is silent the citizen is free. One by one their most cherished institutions had been deliberately discredited, if not by politics, then by satire. They were almost comically subservient to American models: every youth craze, every semantic or artistic trend was copied, and from the passion for litigation to the style of television news-reading, in foreign policy as in social attitudes, slavishly the English tracked the footsteps of the Americans – whom, at the same time, in a grotesque echo of old supremacies, they all too often professed to despise.

  The English, in short, were in a transient limbo. It could actually be said that they were suffering from an inferiority complex – who would have believed it possible when I was young? Actually I think they had lots to be proud of. In the arts, in show business, in popular fashion, in horribly brilliant tabloid journalism, in finance and commerce, even I suppose in the brutal kind of undercover soldiering that the British Army had made its own – in all these things the English were still pre-eminent. Their new racial mix, as a melting-pot State, often made them seem more modern than most of their continental peers – as though, chrysalis-like, they would presently emerge as a new sort of nation. But to most of the English themselves England seemed to be supreme at nothing any more, except when now and then some American magazine decided that Londo
n was swinging or cool, momentarily raising the islanders’ morale. Yearning for the great days of their Powerdom (vicariously, for there were few alive to remember it), they had always viewed the prospect of a more integrated Europe, still more a federal Europe, with suspicion and distaste. Within a European union, they feared, they would no longer be special. They would be one among many. They would be losing their sovereignty. Continental trickery, the profoundest national conviction seemed to say, would gang up to humiliate them. The Nation-State, the Nation-State!

  But they would doubtless get used to the idea of a united Europe, if it ever came about, just as they very soon got used to the existence of the Channel Tunnel, for years opposed by English opinion as being an obvious thoroughfare for hostile armies, nasty foreign ideas, noxious beetles and rabies. When I telephoned London from Wales to book a ticket on the Eurostar train to Brussels, almost as soon as the service had begun, the booking-clerk at the other end sounded to me almost stagily English – middle-aged and motherly – but not in the least surprised or excited by the revolutionary nature of her job. A ticket under the English Channel! ‘Oh, you’ll have a lovely trip, dear,’ she said in the homeliest way, and after suggesting that I might travel first class, just to give myself a treat, she said goodbye to me for all the world as though she had just sold me an excursion ticket to Weston-super-Mare. One gets used to anything.

  107 The fulcrum

  Germany is the only place to end such a random tour of Europe’s States, through fifty years of time, 10 million square kilometres of space. ‘Europe,’ as one of Dostoevsky’s characters puts it – ‘the everlasting Germany!’ Germany is the fulcrum of this continent; my entire European generation, and my father’s and grandfather’s too, has lived in response to the energies of Germany. As German patriots have so often argued, unfortunately for the rest of us, their country occupies the continent’s commanding position, bang in the middle, the richest, the most powerful, the most persistently dynamic of the European States, sharing frontiers with France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. It is like a generator, or alternatively an incubus. As we reach the end of the twentieth century, which the Germans themselves did so much to make dreadful, it is also a powerfully cohesive country, a federation of semi-autonomous Länder but a community still assertively conscious of its national and racial unity. Before the Second World War Germany was claiming rights of sovereignty over territories inhabited by Germans anywhere in Europe: since then Germans of the diaspora have returned to the Fatherland in their hundreds of thousands from Poland, from Czechoslovakia, from Lithuania, from Romania, from the Ukraine, from Russia, and the 16 million citizens of Communist East Germany have been reabsorbed into the unified Federal Republic. It has been a mighty feat of adaptability, on the whole stoically performed.

  Yet in some ways Germany still strikes me as being more vulnerable than most of the European States. ‘Germany, where is it?’ asked Schiller in 1797, and to me there is something orphan-like about it still. Sometimes even now it feels almost pitifully detached from the greater world, the world in which other peoples have moved so profitably and comfortably. The Germany into whose baleful presence I was born (only eight years after the First World War) was a State already humiliated and soured by history. The British, the French, the Dutch, the Italians, the Swedes, the Danes, the Spaniards, the Portuguese had all in their time possessed big overseas empires, long accustoming them to the wide horizons. Even the Russians had a Pacific coast. The Germans had entered the imperial competition, with fretful interventions in Africa and China, only when the imperial idea was almost dead. Not for them the scented shores of Malabar, or Carib palms and strands! The Germans were dissatisfied with destiny, and their energy curdled into malice. In neither world war were they beaten in straight combat, by equal force of arms: in a symbolical way it was power out of the sea that had frustrated them – the power and wealth that had been amassed by more fortunate peoples, organically more free, with more friends, collectively demonized by the Germans themselves as those old bogies of Christian Europe, the Elders of Zion.

  Fifty years of peace have calmed the German neuroses. The Germans are now as familiar with the rest of the world as anyone else – they may never have ruled those distant shores and strands, but they sell their products there more successfully than any other Europeans, and sunbathe there as assiduously (though, by an inhibition that I take to be a remnant of old uncertainties, disproportionately seldom staying in the best hotels). The overseas empires are dead and gone, and by a paradoxical change of fortune Europe now looks back to Germany’s own kind of imperium, an older kind – the days good and bad when Germanness was the master-force of Europe itself.

  108 The scene of an accident

  My goodness, I certainly did not feel this way on my original visit to Berlin. I thought then that never in my lifetime could it be a great capital again. Such terrible things had lately been ordered there, such nightmares almost beyond imagination had been concocted, that it seemed less like a city than a chamber of horrors. It was mostly in ruins still, but among the shambles fearful monuments remained. Hitler’s bunker was pointed out with a shudder, an indistinct mound among the rubble. Goering’s Air Ministry still stood, and the headquarters of the Gestapo, and I stayed in the last rickety remnant of the burnt-out Adlon Hotel, where once the Nazis had mingled insidiously with the haut monde beneath the potted palms, and a thousand corruptions had been arranged. Down by the Wannsee was the villa in which they devised the Final Solution, the mass murder of the Jews of Europe. What an awful city! Even among the shattered palaces and broken churches, the streets blocked with rubble, the gaping Reichstag and the boarded-up wrecks of theatres, a fearful potency seemed to linger. Until the very last shades of Hitler’s capital were exorcized, I thought then, Germany could never be easy again.

  Then the Berlin Wall went up, and the city seemed unreal in a different way. Now it was like a dual exhibition. East of the Wall Communism paraded itself in mammoth boulevards, gigantic apartment blocks, State shops and propaganda posters, all the grim paraphernalia of autocracy and secret police. On the tall mast of the television tower a bulbous observation capsule looked down like an eerie eye on everything below. West of the Wall all the gallimaufry of contemporary capitalism pranced and preened itself: neon signs, jukeboxes, Time magazine, pony-tails, paperback thrillers, dry Martinis. One side was dour and relentless: the other side mercilessly glittering. In those years the city seemed to have little to do with Germany. Its two halves were implants of distant Powers: the one of America, the other of the Soviet Union. The hideous ghosts of Nazism gradually receded, but nothing indigenous had come to replace them, only those drear or tawdry exhibitions of other nations’ values.

  109 O Berlin!

  Only when Communism failed, and the Wall came down, did I come to feel that Berlin was a proper city, like any other. Then year by year I watched with pleasure its revival. I took to staying on the eastern side of the old divide, in one of the hotels which attended the Unter den Linden and which, while hardly up to the sinister pre-war dazzle of the Adlon, at least aspired to the standards of the capitalist West. From here I could walk out into the very focus of the awakening city. Bit by bit the crumbled and blackened boulevards were restored; smile by smile (I sentimentally like to fancy) the spirit of the old Berlin came to life again. Eating Apfelstrudel and cream in the Operncafé, while the sparrows played at my feet and the students laughed beneath the trees, I felt at one with all the generations of happy Berliners who had fattened themselves on the same spot. And once, hearing celestial music sounding through a basement window at the back of the Schauspielhaus, I peered inside and met the preoccupied eye of a young violinist of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, jacketless in his white tie as he warmed up for that evening’s concert. He seemed to me Berlin eternalized: but many years would pass before the Germans decided what kind of city they wanted their new Berlin to be, the n
ew capital of a united democratic Germany, and recruited all Europe’s architects to plan it.

  110 Executive prisoners

  The first Germans I met myself, in any numbers, were prisoners of war employed as mess servants and general handymen by their captors, the British Army. There were thousands of them in Egypt. They seemed to me almost servilely disciplined, but they also seemed at once simpler and better educated than our own soldiers. On the one hand they were often excellent craftsmen, and could mend things, or build things, in a way British soldiers seldom could: on the other hand they seemed intellectually more confident, as though a German private could read a map, for instance, or devise a timetable as competently as any British officer. I got the feeling that a large proportion of those prisoners were what the British would call ‘officer material’: and, since they seemed much like our own men in physique and temperament, I could only assume that education had made them so. Their Germany, the Germany that disappeared in flames in 1945, was a country still of aristocrats and peasants: at the one end scores of petty princelings still on their ancestral estates, at the other a large agricultural proletariat living in the old way even into the 1940s, ploughing with horses, dressed in quaint costumes. Yet those soldiers seemed like educated men, liable I dare say to atavistic excesses of cruelty as of courage, but quick to learn and reason. When, decades later, Germany had once again become the wealthiest and most powerful State in Europe, I sometimes remembered those diligent and clever prisoners of ours, so humbly serving us our dinners in the mess, and wondered how many were now sitting amply in swivel chairs at corporate desks in skyscrapers.