by Jan Morris
The three chief Hanseatic cities of Germany, Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg, remained stoutly independent and internationalistic long after the end of the Hansa. When in the 1890s Kaiser Wilhelm II set about arousing public enthusiasm for a German national navy, he was advised not to expect much support from the Hanseatic seaports, ‘because of their particularist tendencies and parasitic standpoint about foreign trade’. They kept a sort of nominal independence, and were officially known as Hansa towns, until the Nazis abolished their ancient privileges in 1934: Bremen and Hamburg are still self-governing Länder within the German federation, and all three carry the letter H on their car number-plates to this day.
43 Cities of trade
Of course traders criss-crossed Europe long before the birth of the Hansa, and long before the emergence of Nation-States, too. Near Schleswig in Germany there is a Viking settlement which powerfully illustrates the meaning of trade in ancient Europe. Hedeby was the greatest trading centre of the Vikings, their principal entrepôt. It was built at least 1,000 years ago on the very narrowest point between the Baltic and the North Sea, allowing portage for Viking trade routes that extended eastward to Russia and the Black Sea, westward to the British Isles, Iceland and Greenland – just thirty miles north of the site of the Kiel Canal which performs the same service now. For security it was tucked away beside a fjord within a fjord, in a lonely, safe and reedy place, and you can go there today by ferry from the old city of Schleswig. This is a haunting experience. A semicircular rampart surrounds Hedeby still, on the landward side, and within it at the water’s edge all the paraphernalia of a trading city arose as early as the ninth century – the warehouses and the jetties, the offices and the dwelling-places, the shipyards, doubtless the taverns and brothels, and even a church for Christian merchants. You can imagine it all as your boat sails in. Though empty and marshy now, with a Baltic wind often whistling through those reeds, it still suggests to me a confident, self-sufficient and outward-looking sort of place – an archetype, in fact, of the great mercantile cities built by traders and merchants down the centuries across the continent.
44 Euro-cities
Europe is littered with such cities, and often they seem more compatible with each other than political capitals do. The twinning of European cities, which sometimes seems mere sentimentality and sometimes little more than an excuse for aldermanic bingeing, and is sometimes so profligate that it becomes civic quintupling or even sextupling – this late twentieth-century practice rings more true than usual when one venerable trading centre reaches across the frontiers to proclaim its affinity with another. In 1996 sixty of them were members of a kind of pseudo-Hansa called Euro-city, dedicated to the maintenance of civic rights and responsibilities. For centuries the trading fairs which thrived in such places were a prime unifying force of Europe. They brought merchants from all parts of Europe into contact with one another: Ulm, Venice, Augsburg, Frankfurt, Leipzig formed a familiar working circuit for businessmen of the time. Some have remained international fair-cities to this day. Through all the fluctuations of history, Leipzig in East Germany, Plovdiv in Bulgaria, Zagreb in the old Yugoslavia were still frequented by Western entrepreneurs during the chilliest stand-offs of the Cold War. Venice, in the Middle Ages one of the most dazzling of exchanges, as the home of the Biennale is still one of the world’s main centres of the art trade. And Frankfurt am Main, the greatest fair-city of them all, draws hundreds of thousands of businesspeople to the international exhibitions in its vast modern fair-grounds.
Frankfurt is the business capital of Germany, and it seems only proper that the modern buildings of its ancient fairs, the foundations of its prosperity, should stand in the lee of the skyscraper blocks that are the headquarters of the Deutschmark. The traditions of the fairs, which were first held in the eleventh century, are never forgotten here. The chief square of the Altstadt is still called the Römerberg, after the travelling merchants from Rome who used to set up shop there; at official receptions foreign delegates are given a pretzel, descended from the welcome-offerings that were given traders in medieval times (though now wrapped in Cellophane). This is the apex of European commerce. Frankfurt’s Book Fair has been held since 1480! Shylock bought his diamonds at Frankfurt! Schopenhauer loved Frankfurt because there were so many English businessmen about! The grand old Frankfurter Hof Hotel, in the middle of town, is the epitome of a merchant caravanserai, always full of complacent elder tycoons and eager youngish executives: when I once sat down in one of its lounges to write a lyrical essay on my laptop I was assumed to be a Toshiba demonstrator.
45 City-States
Some of these big provincial cities, built upon commerce, feel like City-States still – more so, some of them, now that they are fenced in by ring roads, as by city walls. Bremen really is one, as a German Land of its own, and everything about the place breathes a spirit of merchant independence – the civic motto is ‘Far away or at home, risk or win!’ Bremen’s prime image is the huge fourteenth-century figure of Roland, Charlemagne’s nephew, which stands in the main square, thirty feet tall and brightly belted, with a sword in his hand, an eagle-headed shield and a decapitated head at his feet. He is Bremen’s symbolic champion against the overpowering authority of Church or State, and for six centuries he has looked with a slightly sarcastic smile across the square to the cathedral – smiling more ironically still, I don’t doubt, when in 1989 the Bremen municipality removed from inside him a time-casket of propaganda documents inserted by the Nazis in the 1930s. Bremen is full of quirks and old traditions, tales and fancies, and has a long tradition of merry radicalism. I relish the egalitarian, opportunist spirit of it. Beside the cathedral there stands a pompous equestrian figure of Bismarck, the antithesis in every way of Roland down the way. The Iron Chancellor is unnamed on his plinth, and in 1995 I asked every passer-by to identify him for me. Not a soul could, and how we all laughed, all of us, as one after another those loyal citizens, looking up at the grim old statesman on his charger, had to admit they had not the slightest notion who he was. Roland laughed too.
Venice, for a thousand years a sovereign Power, still feels unmistakably like a City-State, and in Croatia the little city of Dubrovnik, ex-Ragusa, though knocked about a bit in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, bears itself within the glorious circuit of its walls as though it still rules its own fortunes. Milan is almost its own capital. Barcelona hardly feels subject to the Kingdom of Spain. Hamburg retained its liberal Hanseatic outlook throughout the Nazi period. Antwerp is the most truly polyglot city in Europe, and its people are called, uniquely in Belgium, sinjorenz – signors. Bruges, too, seems to me more consequential than Brussels. Riga in Latvia, seen from across its river, wonderfully suggests a City-State in an old engraving – castle, cathedral, spires and towers laid out in proud esplanade along the quays. Lyon and Marseille are far more than just French provincial cities, and the rugged old Scottish city of Glasgow, once the second city of the British Empire, always feels as though it ought to have its own Government, conducting its own foreign relations and flying its own flag (in fact in 1919, when radical discontent flamed there, it did fly the Red Flag above its City Chambers).
When I first went to Glasgow, soon after the Second World War, it was grimy, slummy, bombed, crime-ridden but high-spirited, and was still building the world’s greatest merchant ships on its River Clyde; when I was there in the 1960s it was in a state of profound economic depression, its industries in decline, its buildings all blackened and decaying; when I went again in 1990 it had been declared Europe’s Cultural Capital, and had been transformed into a kind of glitzy reincarnation of itself in its glory days. Through it all the city had remained colossally proud and fond of itself. The bookshops were always full of books about Glasgow, the museums were stacked with Glaswegiana, there were songs about Glasgow, poems about Glasgow, acres of Glasgow paintings, and more than one dictionary of the impenetrable Glasgow dialect. It was as though the place were altogether separate from the events th
at swirled about it, making it sometimes rich, sometimes poor, sometimes famous for its shipyards, sometimes for the slinkiness of its boutiques or the trendiness of its art scene. ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ was the civic slogan in 1990, ‘Glasgow Belongs to Me’ was a sort of civic anthem in the 1940s, but they both meant much the same: as a Glaswegian lady said to me on my last visit, when I remarked upon the vast publicity the city was getting then, ‘Ay, well, they talk a lot, but they haven’t changed much really.’
46 Hear, hear
I always thought the best municipal text for such a City-State would be an enigmatic medieval slogan that is incised on the walls of the ancient Marischal College at Aberdeen, another pawkily independent Scottish burgh. ‘THEY HAIF SAID,’ announces this gnomic graffito, and answers itself: ‘WHAT SAY THEY. LET YAME SAY.’But the very name of Nehaj, in Croatia, is perhaps better still. It is simply a contraction of ‘ne hajem’, which means ‘I DON’T CARE.’
47 The brothers
Sometimes private people, rather than statesmen, conquerors, cities or institutions, have contrived to tighten the internet of Europe. Stand with me now with our backs to the river beside the Untermain Bridge in Frankfurt am Main – not far from the Römerberg, where the medieval merchants gathered. In an elegant terrace before us, facing the river, we may see a large white house. It is a fateful house. Over the rooftops behind it rise the stupendous towers of the Westend, the financial quarter – spiked, black, mirror-glassed. In front of it a busy road runs, and before that again are the lines of the freight railway which connects one part of the river docks with another. Yet in my mind’s eye, anyway, the house, which is substantial but hardly a palace, seems to command the view, like one of those personalities upon whom every eye is turned when they enter a room. It is the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt, once among the great Jewish cities of Europe; also the house from which the Rothschild banking family extended its activities and influence with such skill, wisdom, cunning and tenacity that it became one of the supreme economic forces of Europe.
Until 1848 the Rothschilds lived and worked in a more modest home, a rambling half-timbered house in the Jewish ghetto, which stood over there, behind the Deutsche Bank, but is now all but entirely obliterated. Meyer Amschel Rothschild moved into Untermainkai 14 only when he was sufficiently powerful and respected – sufficiently salonfähig, drawing-room-worthy, as the Frankfurters used to say – to move among the Gentile ruling classes on their own terms. ‘Money is the God of our age,’ wrote Heinrich Heine, observing this progression, ‘and Rothschild is his prophet.’ Having made the family bank the richest in Germany, the patriarch sent out his four sons to establish branches elsewhere in Europe: in Vienna, in Naples, in Paris and in London. The network they established came to stand above diplomacy, above monarchies, above States and even Powers, and the Rothschilds became all but royalty themselves. They had before them the example of the Florentine Medicis, who had dictated the fortunes of seventeenth-century Europe by their financial acumen. The Medicis’ simple motto was ‘Semper’, ‘Always’, and the Rothschilds too aimed at eternity.
They were immensely influential all over the continent (though the Naples branch was presently closed, the Kingdom of Naples proving to be of insufficient clout), and their incomparable courier service, as an agency of intelligence, proved invaluable to many Governments. In nineteenth-century London, then the richest of capitals, their power was greatest of all. It was to his friend Baron Lionel de Rothschild that the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli turned when in 1875 he needed money to buy the Khedive of Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal – a colossal sum of money, to pull off one of the greatest political coups of the century. Disraeli’s private secretary, Montagu Corry, was sent to Rothschild’s office to ask for a loan of £4 million – more like £400 million by today’s values – and left his own famous account of the occasion. ‘When?’ asked Rothschild. ‘Tomorrow,’ said Corry. Rothschild paused to eat a grape and spit out the pip – not perhaps a very salonfähig gesture. ‘What,’ he then asked, ‘is your security?’ ‘The British Government.’ ‘You shall have it,’ said Rothschild, and that was that.
To this day the Rothschilds are a European clan of legendary financial and intellectual eminence, with their banks still in London and Paris, their titles bestowed by France, Belgium and England, their vineyards in France, their family members distinguished in many callings. Even the Nazis were never able to humiliate this mighty Jewish dynasty. If you would like to see what heights history brought it to in the end, come with me now to the house called Waddesdon Manor, in the English shires, which was their English family headquarters until in 1957 James de Rothschild bequeathed it to the National Trust. ‘Manor’ is really hardly the word for Waddesdon. A long, long drive leads through parklands, past estate houses and handsome stables, past fountains mythologically spouting, past statues and ornamental urns, until it comes into the straight, as it were, and approaches the house itself.
Which really is a palace, or a château in the Loire manner – not gigantic, but tremendously, exhaustingly grand, with all the statutory cupolas and mansard roofs and turret windows of its kind. Nothing would induce me to live in such a house, but by the time it was built, in the 1870s, the Rothschilds had become, as it were, honorary royalty: and sure enough even today there flies from the highest rooftop of Waddesdon the family ensign – against a blue field, five arrows, representing those five original banks, in Frankfurt, Paris, London, Naples and Vienna.
48 Academe
The universities of Europe used to constitute a network of their own, so that medieval scholars like Erasmus could move easily with his ideas from one to another. They still do, I suppose, but to the outsider it does not feel like it. Intellectually Europe’s myriad places of learning may still be meshed; stylistically they seem to have little in common any more. They used to share not merely a religion and a language, but a sense of taste and history. Only in a few of the most ancient and conservative foundations do I sense any aesthetic kinship now: Salamanca, Coimbra, Oxford and Cambridge, Uppsala, St Andrews, Vienna, Heidelberg, Bologna, Padua – all places where old buildings are lovingly preserved still, rituals have survived the homogenizing of scholarship and the interference of politics, and scholars and students may wear peculiar costumes from olden times and obey their own strange rules of conduct. Does it matter, anyway? If the power of thought is strong and free, a university can be as important in a concrete blockhouse, conducted in dishevelment, as ever it was in a lovely Renaissance palace, stalked through by men of learning all in gold and crimson. The Sorbonne in Paris is probably the most influential university in Europe at the end of the twentieth century, the one whose ideas have been most eagerly absorbed throughout the continent; and, although it is among the most ancient of them all, anyone who has wandered through its purlieus on the Left Bank knows what an unlovely mess it is.
But then conceptions of higher education itself have drastically shifted in my time. When I edited an undergraduate newspaper I wrote to various famous people asking them if they thought that in the world of the 1940s it was still worthwhile going to Oxford. Field Marshal Lord Wavell, lately Viceroy of India, replied that ‘the traditions of Oxford, the dignity and beauty of the Colleges, the associations of the place must have a deep and lasting effect on all who go there – quite apart’ (he added, more or less as an afterthought) ‘from the education’. Fifty years later, how many of Europe’s educationalists would dare express such a view?
49 Monsters of the sea
Despite all these ancient links, civic connections and scholarly interchanges, fifty years ago most of the peoples of Europe scarcely knew each other, except in war. Only the rich could travel for pleasure then, and nothing has changed the continent more, or made its nations more mutually familiar, than popular tourism. Familiarity does not always breed content, and there are parts of Europe where indigenes and tourists, however fulsomely they address each other, really loathe each other’s guts: but they are no l
onger total strangers. They have learnt to speak each other’s languages, if only a few words of them, to eat each other’s foods, if only with suspicion or indigestion, possibly even to learn a little of each other’s history. Some people are more diffident than others in their approaches to foreign parts, and so far it is only the people of western Europe who travel en masse across the continent for their holidays. But at least, during my half-century, a continent of warring soldiers has been metamorphosed into a continent of pleasure-seekers.