by Jan Morris
111 An oblation
It was the Germany of the Kaisers that my mother had known. Like many Britons at the time, her father avidly admired its culture, and halfway through my mother’s time at Leipzig he eagerly went out to visit her, taking with him a brace of Monmouthshire pheasant as an oblation to Robert Teichmüller, her eminent professor. Eighty years later I went there myself, to see just where she had spent those happy years of her girlhood. I imagined her arriving, excited but a bit scared, on the platform of the great railway station – in her time the biggest in all Europe. I relived her merry student evenings in open-air cafés. I heard as she did the strains of Bach ringing from Bach’s own Thomaskirche. I walked through her parks and gardens, and fancied her hurrying to the concert hall when, forbidden to attend a performance of Richard Strauss’s unsuitable opera Salome, she jumped out of a window to go anyway. Finally I found my way to the Conservatorium itself. It looked to me just as it did in the engraving on my mother’s graduation diploma – the very acme and epitome of a German music academy. In I went, and there were the statutory bearded busts of famous musicians, and students hurried past with cellos and music-cases, and notices of recitals or rehearsals fluttered from noticeboards as they had doubtless fluttered constantly since my mother’s day.
Nothing had changed, so far as I could see, through two world wars, the end of the Kaisers, the birth and death of Nazidom, the coming and going of Communism. Beside each door was a list of the Herr Professors, and I would not have been in the least surprised to see the name of Teichmüller among them. When we went into one of the practice-rooms, where a student was hard at it with a Chopin prelude, just for a moment I thought it was my mother, young and smiling, looking up at us expectantly from her keyboard: on the window-sill, I am almost sure, lay a brace of pheasant, wrapped in a copy of the Monmouthshire Beacon.
112 By the lake
Through the window of a lakeside restaurant at Mölln I watch four German children playing. Their families are having lunch inside, and I would guess the children to be between six and ten years old. The two boys are always in the lead, dashing here and there, throwing stones into the water, waving to passing boats. The girls follow dutifully but enthusiastically behind. One is slim, blonde and pretty, and wears a long floral dress which she likes to flounce about. The other is very plain, short and fat, and wears a blue anorak, with sleeves too long for her, over a short tartan skirt. The plain girl is always last. She can never quite keep up. When they run out to the end of the jetty, she is always left behind. When they rush helter-skelter into the restaurant to speak to their families, who are lazing over beer and pipes at the end of the room, the door closes behind the other three and there is a long pause before, panting heavily, the short fat girl opens it again with difficulty and stumbles in. I like her best of the quartet – she tries so hard, smiles so gamely, struggles so constantly to tuck up the sleeves of her anorak. I feel for her, too. Her family take little notice of her, and the other children treat her as one might treat a puppy-dog. However, when they all scamper out again once more, and I offer her a smile as she passes my table, she returns me a most malevolent glare.
113 Sorry for the Germans
Sometimes I have felt sorry for the Germans – notably at Passau in northern Bavaria, a delightful town which stands on the Danube at its dual junction with the rivers Inn and Ilz. With a number of literary colleagues I was once kindly entertained there by a young German professor of English literature. He posed us on his balcony while he ran down to his garden to take our photograph, and this gave me a chance to look around his apartment. It was Schubertian. Simply furnished, spare and sweet, it was decorated with artists’ proofs and littered with paperbacks, and still on the roller of an old manual typewriter there was an uncompleted poem. Through the window the light of the river palely gleamed. ‘Ready!’ cried the young professor. There he was below us, beneath the flowering cherry of his little garden, on a lawn thick with dandelions. He focused his lens, we braced ourselves, a blossom fell at his feet, and suddenly I felt sorry for the Germans.
We were five of us up on the balcony – two from England, one from South Africa, one from Scotland, one from Wales – and it felt to me as though we were visitors from some altogether freer, easier, fundamentally happier world. Passau stands very near the heart of Europe, profoundly landlocked. The Alps block its way to the Mediterranean; the whole expanse of Germany stands between it and the Baltic. Even as the crow flies it is some 700 miles to the Bay of Biscay. The steamers on the river sail to Bulgaria, Romania, Russia – mile upon mile among the flatlands, through the Iron Gates of Illyria, before they reach the Black Sea. That day I felt some of the sense of unfairness that the Germans used to cherish. The charm of Passau, the flowers on the cherry tree, the young professor with his poem and his typewriter – all suddenly moved me. When he looked out from his balcony, I thought, he saw only the enclosing ramparts of Germany, and the river-boats sailing away into loveless territories of the Slavs. When we looked out from ours, we looked out across the continents, and when our ships slipped away from port they were bound not for the Iron Gates or the awful Sea of Azov, but for all the world’s wide oceans. Hitler lived in Passau for a time, and I found it easy to suppose him brooding out of his window over the river with some of the same thoughts. How remote New York or Sydney must have seemed to him, and how gloriously enviable the spectacle of the British Empire, ranging the hemispheres with such arrogant ceremony!
‘Smile, please,’ said the young professor. We all smiled, but my smile was the sickliest.
114 From Buddenbrooks, 1901, by Thomas Mann, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter
‘We want freedom,’ Morten said.
‘Freedom?’ she asked.
‘Yes, freedom, you know – Freedom!’ he repeated; and he made a vague, awkward, fervent gesture outward and downward, not toward the side where the coast of Mecklenburg narrowed the bay, but in the direction of the open sea, whose rippling blue, green, yellow, and grey stripes rolled as far as eye could see out to the misty horizon.
Tony followed his gesture with her eye; they sat, their hands lying close together on the bench, and looked into the distance.
115 ‘The world will notice us’
In 1995, with the blessing of the German Government, the Bulgarian-American artist Christo Jaracheff performed one of his transformation displays at the Reichstag in Berlin – which is to say, he covered the entire building in a grey plastic wrapping, bound with blue ribboning. This struck me as not simply foolish but actually degrading – imagine the US Capitol, for example, being similarly muffled – but I was astonished to discover that the Germans loved it. They treated the whole thing as an entertainment, the unfortunate building being surrounded by food stalls, hot-dog stands, picnickers, performance artists, buskers, bands and a tented restaurant, like a fairground. Biplanes and helicopters circled overhead. Hardly anybody I met found indignity in the spectacle of the historic old structure wrapped up like a Christmas parcel, with odd protrusions apparently threatening to break through the plastic. Indignity? Dignity was the last thing they wanted of their rulers. They wanted Governments that would be close to the people, not lofty or distant, not dignified. They wanted fun. They wanted modernity. They had been brought up, after all, to suppose the tinsel capitalism of the old West Berlin a civilized epitome, and they thought it was good for Germany that the national assembly should be made to look silly. ‘It will make the world notice us.’ But I was sorry for them, again.
116 Feeding the ducks
Foreigners can still feel very foreign in Germany, especially I imagine if they are Asian. Through the windows of a riverside restaurant at Lüneburg we watch one now feeding the ducks from a bridge nearby. He looks Iranian, perhaps: his eyes are dark and his face is sad. With tender melancholy gestures he throws his crusts of bread into the water below, out of a white plastic shopping-bag, against a background of a hefty medieval tower and a row of half-timbered Hanseatic inns –
as German a background as could be. His every movement seems to speak of isolation, mingled with a yearning for affection. He is like a prisoner feeding his only friends, quacking and squabbling in the brown water below. The townspeople, crossing the bridge behind his back, take no notice of him. When all the bread has gone he scrumples up his bag and prepares to go, but finding one last fragment inside he tosses it to a solitary pigeon which has been hanging about hungrily at his feet. Then, lighting a cigarette, he disappears into the gateway of the tower, and we shall never see him again.
117 Happy hour
Because of Wagner, Hitler’s favourite artist, I always used to think of Bayreuth as a Lourdes of Germany, a place of pilgrimage for those in search of the German soul. Here had been put into music all the Germanic grandeur and mystery. Here the heroes and demons of German myth came face to face with the triumphs and despairs of German reality. I did not get to Bayreuth, though, until the early 1990s, by which time the tragic Germany of my youth had been brought back from the abyss: and what I found then in the famous town was less like a divine immolation than a Happy Hour.
The longer I sat in Maximilianstrasse, the main square, the harder I found it to imagine Wagner lording it in these streets, still less Hitler and his minions sweeping through in their black convertibles. The square was grand enough, and handsomely embellished with baroque fountains and façades, but there was certainly nothing Wagnerian about it. There was a McDonald’s on one side, and the shopping street that led away to the west had been pedestrianized and taken over by chain stores. I had my coffee in a standard café that might just as well have been in Holland or England, and very likely belonged to the same conglomerate. A few miscellaneous louts messed about the place, and a drop-out lay feet up on a bench, and rock music thumped somewhere, and there was a general prevalence of well-disposed middle-aged women doing the family shopping. Yet here the gods had seen their twilights! Napoleon passed through here, and Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Hitler, and then the United States Army stormed in, and for forty years the Iron Curtain was slammed down a few miles to the east, making this a frontier town between the ideologies. And by then Richard Wagner himself had come and gone, so that almost anyone in the world, asked to think of Bayreuth, would think of thundering harmonies, flaming Brünnhildes, heart-rending Tristans, helmets and breastplates and Hitler himself, with his hair slicked down and swastikas on his arms, wild-eyed in the stalls.
Now the Happy Hour had come. Bayreuth could afford to linger over its beers at the trestle tables in the square, while the shadows lengthened towards McDonald’s. It was a rich little town, well-run, well-fed, proud of its famous festival. It had not forgotten its gods and demons, all the same. I stayed at an old post-house whose previous customers, the landlord told me, had included Napoleon, Ludwig and Hitler. And which of the three, I asked him, would he most like to have as a guest again? He did not smile. ‘Alle shit,’ he said.
118 City of Culture
What a pleasure to stroll through the streets of Weimar, a little German city whose distinction has traditionally been elegantly cultural! In the late eighteenth century the young Duke Carl August made his capital a happy retreat for artistic geniuses, and ever since Weimar has basked in the memory of their names. There is a pleasant restaurant, you will be told, behind the Liszthaus. Turn right at the Goethehaus to get to the bus station. You want the Schillerhaus? That’s easy: just go straight down Schillerstrasse from the Goethe and Schiller statue. And agreeable indeed it is to amble around the town among these illustrious shades, now and then taking an ice-cream beneath its trees. The streets are mostly quiet and gentle. Small boys wade across the little river Ilm with fishing-rods. Street musicians agreeably play. Delectable parks and gardens are everywhere. It is easy to imagine young Carl August promenading with lyricists on each arm, bowing right and left to his affectionate subjects.
But here’s a terrible thing. As the literary capital of Germany, the repository of its immortal poetic spirit, a retreat of nature-worship and mythic dreams, Weimar became beloved of the Nazis, and it loved the Nazis in return. Its mixture of Hitler and Goethe, wrote Thomas Mann fastidiously in 1932, was ‘particularly disturbing’. In the market square stands the Elephant Hotel, and all the waters of the Ilm cannot wash the taint from this unfortunate hostelry. It is a handsome 1930s building, but redecorated inside in a glittery, chromy style that irresistibly suggests the imminent arrival of swaggering gauleiters and their women. This impression is all too true. Hitler and his crew were particularly fond of the hotel, and more than once the Führer spoke from its balcony to enthusiastic crowds in the square outside.
So enamoured were the Nazis of Weimar, in fact, that they erected there one of their most celebrated and characteristic monuments. The site they chose was on the lovely hill of Ettersberg, just outside the city, which Goethe himself had long before made famous – he loved to sit and meditate beneath an oak tree there. One evening I paid a reluctant visit to this place, now a popular tourist site well-publicized in the town. My taxi-driver, a gregarious soul, chatted cheerfully to me all the way. Had I enjoyed my stay in Weimar? Did I visit the Goethehaus? What did I think of the food? Did I know that Weimar was to be the European City of Culture in 1999, at the end of the millennium? ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Recognition once more for the city of Goethe and Schiller.’ ‘Exactly,’ said the taxi-driver, and just then we turned up the side-road to Buchenwald.
119 Country style
In the days of the Communists, East Germany seemed to me one of the most terrible places of all, and the legacy of industrial pollution was to linger for years and years. On the other hand, the Communists having been less than advanced in their agricultural methods, the wide plains of the Brandenburg countryside were mercifully unsterilized by chemicals, which left them wonderfully fresh and natural – unkempt, since half the fields had gone to seed, and half the trees needed trimming, but still gloriously organic. All day long the skylarks sang above my head when I travelled among those lovely landscapes, and there were meadows full of poppies, and long avenues of fruit-laden cherry trees, and now and then storks’ nests, those fairy-tale emblems of old Europe, comfortably on chimneys above cobbled hamlets. Once I saw three storks flying high and majestically over Berlin itself: I suspect mine is the last generation ever to see such a sight.
120 Ashamed
One day in the 1980s I found myself a trifle lost when driving through Rostock, on Germany’s Baltic coast, and I faltered and swerved as I tried to find my way on the street map. Immediately there was an irritable blast of the horn from the car behind. Rostock was notorious at that time for recent racist attacks upon Turkish immigrants, and my blood boiled. ‘Damned Germans,’ I found myself saying, ‘they never change. Can’t the brute see I’m a stranger here?’ – and I turned around in my seat prepared to give him that rude gesture of the Welsh archers, as in Vienna. Gott in Himmel, he was a very intemperate Asian! I blushed, even to myself, especially as I have myself experienced almost nothing but kindness from Germans of all sorts, under Communism as under capitalism, during my fifty years of Europe.
I am a child of the wars, though, and have not always been so generous in return. With a pang I remember still the young Germans I met at a party in Baden-Baden in the early 1950s, when the nation was still sunk in shame and disillusion. They were about my own age, bred by Hitler Youth out of defeat, and our conversation was wary. We skirted around recent history, we evaded questions of morality, but even so I found, when we parted company at last, that one woman was in tears – tears of mortification, to compare her self-doubts, her guilt and her sense of undeserved bad luck with the unabashed pride of nation which in those days I could not help displaying. Thirty years later I made a television film with a German television crew, travelling through several European countries. Strangers often asked us what we were up to, and I always made a point of saying that, while the director and his crew were German, I was from Wales. ‘You are ashamed to be thought one
of us,’ the director accused me mournfully one day: and, though I declined to admit it, so I was.
These are people of God, too. More than any other European people they have been the instrument of the most divine of the arts, music, perhaps because of the special rhythms of their language, perhaps because Martin Luther, their greatest prophet, made music intrinsic to his religion. Even at their most degraded they have honoured this spark within themselves – even sadistic officers at concentration camps felt the necessity, whether in truth or in charade, to show themselves lovers of music. Out of the tormented and often cruel national psyche have come the glories of Bach and Beethoven – a cliché indeed, but still a mystery. Nothing moves me more than to enter one of the great German cathedrals, very likely in its day a positive cauldron of racialism, and to hear one of the tremendous Bach chorales thundering down the nave – an ultimate expression, to my mind, of human aspiration, and a supreme glory of Europe.
I went to Berlin in 1991 for the two-hundredth anniversary of the Brandenburg Gate, an anniversary of awful possibility. The Gate was a triumph of Prussian vainglory, undeniably an arch of hubris. It had been restored at last after the mutilations of war, and its shining quadriga was once again equipped with the Iron Cross and Prussian Eagle pointedly absent during the Communist years. Through it overblown victory parades had passed, and the plumed pageantries of State visits, and the railway coach from Compiègne was towed in vindictive triumph. The long anniversary celebrations ended with a performance of ‘Deutschland über Alles’, and what a nightmare that might have been! I prepared to scowl. But it was played by a string quartet, in Haydn’s delicate last version of the melody: and its gentle cadences, drifting over the silent crowd, through the lights of the great reviving city, were enough to melt a Junker’s heart.