by Jan Morris
35 Haunted
Hitler haunts us all still, and nowhere does his presence linger more disturbingly than at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn, near the German border of Austria. This is an adorable little town, compact, very old, with a fine wide market street, friendly cafés, and a picturesque city gate. Hitler never forgot his origins here. He was proud to have reunited Austria within Greater Germany, and hoped to be honoured always by that great cultural complex along the road at Linz, which would doubtless have been named for him. At Braunau his memory is treated with studied matter-of-factness. ‘Just down the road,’ said a man in the bookshop, when I asked where the birthplace was – ‘beyond the arch, on the left-hand side.’ ‘The yellow house over there,’ said the policeman – ‘the one with the big stone outside.’ The stone turned out to be a memorial to some of the millions who were victims of the Nazis, but I detected no embarrassment or shame when I asked citizens about the Führer connection. They seemed to think it more a curiosity than anything else. I could not help imagining, though, how Hitler would be remembered in Braunau if he had won the Second World War. What plaques and memorials would mark the birthplace today! What a plethora of memoirs and sycophantic biographies would fill the shelves of that bookshop! Statuettes and medallions would be on offer in the souvenir shops, and a tall statue of the Leader would dominate the lovely market street, hand outstretched in perpetual salute, kept forever garlanded by sweet old ladies.
36 ‘At your feet …’
Unfair, perhaps. These are generational responses, the last echoes of suspicion in a mind tempered by a wartime youth. Remember that German TV crew I travelled with, back on pages 230–31? When we were filming in Venice I saw the producer being rowed along the Grand Canal with his young assistant. The producer sat in the sedile nobile, facing the prow, and looked positively majestic, with his coat slung over his shoulders in the impresarian manner, and his eyeglass on a cord around his neck. Opposite him, with his back to the prow, his assistant sat in a posture of profound respect.
The gondola disappeared behind a house, and when I next caught sight of it, further up the canal, the two men had changed places. Now the assistant sat in the grander seat, looking suave and self-possessed. The producer was altogether deflated by the exchange, his coat huddled around him now, his eyeglass askew, his attitude almost cringing. ‘At your feet or at your throat’ – God forgive me, I remembered the Churchillian saying.
37 The sixth spasm
My last spasm of unity is different in kind from all the others, and must bring my book to an end just as it concludes Europe’s twentieth century. The Zeitgeist of the time, a millenarian stress perhaps, is an exhaustion with almost every kind of violence, racism, sexism and nationalism: the often floundering efforts of the late-twentieth-century Europeans to unite are instinctive impulses towards a friendlier, quieter life for everyone. I was not terribly impressed, all the same, when for the first time in my life I visited the headquarters of this movement, successor to Hitler’s Berlin, Kaiserstadt, Napoleon’s Paris, the Habsburgs’ Vienna, all the way back to the Aachen of Charlemagne. The centre of the European Union turned out to be an unlovely conglomeration of buildings in a charmless quarter of Brussels. The most pessimistic Euro-sceptic need hardly fear, I thought, that this colourless congerie could ever replace in our diverse affections the Palace of Westminster, the Élysée Palace or the Reichstag by the Spree. Only a few flags flew listlessly that day in the capital of Europe, coveys of bureaucrats scurried morosely by, and when I reached the Palais Berlaymont, the famous home of the European Commission, designed to be the crown of a continent, I found it all deserted. It was having the asbestos ripped out of it. The sunken garden all around was littered with rubbish, and because of the drizzle I could hardly see the memorial to Robert Schuman, the Father of the New Europe, among the unkempt dripping trees. It was going to cost countless billion francs, a passer-by told me, to do the place up. ‘The price of history,’ I said sententiously. ‘Yes, and who’s going to pay it?’ said he.
The Europe of the fin de siècle has at least achieved this: for the first time in the history of the continent all its States share, at least in theory, a single ideology – capitalist democracy, which has overcome theocracy, monarchy, Fascism and Communism alike to give every capital in Europe a more or less freely elected Government. This means that my sixth spasm, though much the most promising – the most benevolent too – is easily the dullest. Officially it proceeds slowly and fitfully, by vote, debate, conference and referendum. All the other attempts to make a unity of Europe have been, one might say, aesthetic attempts: high-flown, richly coloured, inflamed with hate, violence, faith, the love of glory or illusion. Even Hitler’s manic dreams had to them a ghastly symmetry, and nobody could deny Napoleon a painterly breadth of vision – as if he saw the whole continent, all its armies in the snow, all its marshals and kinglets, through the eyes of a David or a Delacroix. As for the parade of the dynasts, those hyphenated princesses and plume-helmeted archdukes, processing this way and that across Europe in an endless succession of marriages, conspiracies and family conflicts, at least in retrospect they contributed something to the gaiety of nations. Churchill called magnificently for a United States of Europe, based upon ‘the resolve of millions to do right rather than wrong’, and there was nobility too to Schuman’s original conception of a twentieth-century united Europe. It might have been presented at the start as a matter of coal and steel, but it was really a dream of reconciliation between those two great enemies of the Rhine, France and Germany, which would develop over the years into a far wider comity – and so it did develop, too, if only in nomenclature : first into the European Economic Community and then into the lofty abstraction of the European Union, so inadequately represented for me on that drizzly day in Brussels.
But all the man said was, Who pays?
38 From ‘We are the Music-Makers’, 1874, by Arthur O’Shaughnessy
They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going …
But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see …
39 Towards the great republic
Of course we would all rather have our affairs run by economists than by geneticists, religious zealots or even genealogists. Even so, for a temperament like mine the European twentieth century, which had developed in such fire and tragedy, had promised such hope and vision, seemed to be ending bathetically. Like most Europeans I had gone through mixed feelings about my sixth spasm. ‘Are you for or against united Europe?’ a Canadian had asked me in London not long after the war, when it was first dimly realized that something called the European Coal and Steel Community might well develop into the latest Holy Roman Empire. ‘Would it make Britain more or less interesting?’ I asked him. ‘Decidedly less.’ ‘Then I’m against.’ But almost half a century had passed since then, and I had long been seized by the grand romance of the idea, the prospect of all our peoples united in comradeship at last. I had matured from Britishness to a passionate Euro-Welshness. I was thrilled to feel, as I wandered around Europe, that the old antipathies really were fading. I still remember with delight the very first time when, as I drove my car off a ferry at Cherbourg, the French customs officer did not even bother to look at my passport – half a century ago one needed a visa just to make a day trip to Boulogne! I flaunted a European car sticker on my car, beside the national emblem of Wales, because I had come to think that the best chance for all the peoples of Europe, for the Powers as for the impotent minorities, lay in the creation of a single confederal community, a Europe of all the regions, ‘a kind of great republic’, as Voltaire called it two centuries ago.
But the States stubbornly hung on. The Powers remained incorrigible. If here and there the minority nations seem
ed to be achieving some autonomies at last, for the most part the old sovereignties were paramount still. The cruel war in Yugoslavia, yet another European civil war, had been a sad disillusionment. In the former Communist countries organized crime had become almost a Power in itself. Party rivalries degraded and impeded everything. Above all, the dismal science had taken over. ‘Poor Rome,’ as the Emperor Augustus said about his stodgy successor Tiberius, ‘to be chewed between those slow jaws!’ Dull materialism had proved the most powerful ideology of them all, embourgeoisement was the general trend, and the finance ministers in their chancelleries, the bankers in their banks, the economists in their lecture halls, the corporational executives in their suites spoke for Europe more insistently than any poets, idealists, music-makers or fond romantics.
Never mind, my sixth spasm was happening anyway, with or without benefit of Government. Euro-sceptics resisted in vain. It was no grand revolutionary splurge, no splash of colour, but slowly those regions really were becoming less alien to one another, learning each other’s tongues, watching each other’s TV programmes, surfing the same net. The growing power of women everywhere was breaking down the rigidities of machismo. Young people all over Europe were discarding false loyalties and national taboos. It was an irresistible organic process, beyond politics, beyond economics, beyond States or Powers, developing inescapably all across our nations, and only waiting for Voltaire’s republic to catch up.
AN EPILOGUE
*
1 Back on the Audace Jetty
So you find me, half a century on, back on the Molo Audace in Trieste. What’s become of Waring? I still live in Wales, and always shall, but hardly a year has passed since the end of the Second World War when I have not returned to spend a few days here at the cusp of Europe, where the races meet, where I can look one way towards Rome and Paris and London, the other towards Belgrade and Bucharest and Athens. Trieste has not greatly changed during my half-century’s acquaintance with the city. The traffic of tourism has swept through it, generally without stopping; fearful wars have flamed nearby; it spent many years in political flux and economic limbo. But in character, in temperament and even in structure it remains much the same place as it was when I sat on my bollard here, all those years ago, to write my essay about nostalgia.
It has never quite refound itself. There is something wistful to the place that touches me still, as it touched me when I first travelled here across the ravaged continent of my youth. This is another reason I like to come back to Trieste, and why I see it still as my personal epitome of Europeanness: for at the end of the twentieth century, as the nations of the old continent so fitfully grope their way towards comity, there is something wistful to the spectacle of Europe too. I am young no longer, and, just as I am yearning for the fulfilment of my small country, so I am impatient for the unity of my great continent, an end to its silly differences, and the creation of a fraternity in which all its peoples, great and small, will render unto Caesar the things that should belong to Caesar, but cherish for themselves those matters of faith and language, ways of living, ways of loving, that properly belong to God. I know now that I shall not see it in my own lifetime, and that even my grandchildren will probably grow up amidst the same bickering prides of States and Powers that have so long disfigured this continent – Goethe’s ‘superfluous memories and futile frays’. The nostalgia that I felt here fifty years ago was, I realize now, nostalgia not for a lost Europe, but for a Europe that never was, and has yet to be.
2 Viva Europa!
But we can still hope and try, and be grateful that we are where we are, in this ever-marvellous and fateful corner of the world. ‘Better fifty years of Europe,’ Lord Tennyson thought, ‘than a cycle of Cathay’! One evening years ago a friend and I went aboard a sailing-vessel from Split, down the Dalmatian coast, that was lying in the bay of Trieste. There are no such ships now. It was one of the very last generation of European working sailing-ships, blunt-prowed, broad of beam, with red sails and big painted eyes at its bows, to bring it luck. We took with us a few bottles of cheap sparkling wine, not being able to afford anything better, and there in the wide harbour, as the ship gently rocked, we shared them with its captain: while he, lying back against a coiled rope, opening his heart to the assembling stars, sang sad Puccini arias into the evening. I agree with Tennyson. ‘Viva Europa!’ as I cried to so little effect that day at Epidauros.
INDEX
Aachen, Germany 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Adenauer, Konrad 1, 2
Aegean islands 1, 2
Africa 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
air travel 1, 2
Åland islands, Finland 1
Albania 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; emigration 1;
Gypsies 1, 2, 3;
Stalin’s statue 1, 2;
see also Tirana
Albrecht, Prince of Bavaria 1
Ålesund, Norway 1, 2
Alexander, King of the Yugoslavs 1, 2
Alexander Bey 1, 2, 3
Algarve, Portugal 1
Alperovici, Boris 1
Alps 1, 2, 3, 4
Alpujarras region, Spain 1
Alsace 1, 2, 3, 4
Amsterdam, Netherlands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Andalusia, Spain 1, 2
Andechs, Bavaria 1, 2
Andersen, Hans Christian 1, 2, 3, 4
Andorra 1
Anglican church 1, 2, 3, 4
Anglo-Irish 1, 2
animism 1
Anna, Sanctuary of Sant’, Lombardy Pass 1
anthems 1, 2
Antwerp, Belgium 1, 2, 3
Appian Way 1
Aragon 1, 2
Argonauts 1
aristocrats 1
art, influence of 1, 2
Athens, Greece 1, 2, 3, 4
Atlantic Wall, France 1, 2
Augsburg, Germany 1, 2
Augustinian order 1
Augustus, Roman Emperor 1, 2
August-Wilhelm, Prince, of Prussia 1
Auschwitz 1, 2, 3, 4
Austria 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; and Germany 1, 2, 3, 4;
see also Habsburg Empire and individual places
Austro-Hungarian Empire 1; see also Habsburg Empire
Avignon 1, 2, 3
Bach, Johann Sebastian 1, 2, 3
Bad Doberan, Germany 1, 2
Baden-Baden, Germany 1, 2, 3
Bad Homburg, Germany 1, 2
Bad Kreuznach, Germany 1
Baedeker’s guidebooks 1, 2, 3
Balchik, Bulgaria 1
Balearic Islands 1, 2, 3
Baltic Sea 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Baltic states 1, 2; see also Estonia;
Latvia;
Lithuania
bands 1, 2, 3
Banfield-Tripcovich, Barone Rafaelle Douglas de 1
banking 1
Barcelona, Spain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Basle, Switzerland 1, 2
Basque country, Spain 1, 2; see also Barcelona
Bath, Avon, England 1, 2, 3
Bavaria, Germany 1, 2
Bayreuth, Germany 1
BBC World Service 1
Beerbohm, Max 1, 2
Beethoven, Ludwig van 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Belfast, Northern Ireland 1
Belgium 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; European Union 1, 2, 3;
national pride 1;
royal family 1, 2
Belgrade, Serbia 1, 2
bells 1
Benedictine order 1, 2, 3
Bergen, Norway 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Berlin, Germany 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Gypsies 1;
Jews 1, 2;
Nazi plans 1, 2;
Reichstag 1, 2, 3, 4;
Wall 1, 2, 3, 4;
Wilhelmine city 1, 2, 3, 4;
World War II 1, 2, 3, 4
Bernadette, St 1, 2
Beuno, St 1
Bigouden (Bro Vigouden), Brittany 1
Bismarck, Prince Otto von 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Black Sea 1, 2
Blanc, Mont, France 1, 2
boats
1, 2, 3, 4
Bohemia 1, 2
Bosnia 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; war 1, 2, 3
Bourdzi castle, Nauplia, Greece 1, 2
Bracchi brothers 1
Braşov, Romania (Kronstadt) 1
Bratislava (Pressburg, Pozsony), Slovakia 1, 2, 3, 4; Habsburg era 1, 2, 3;
post-Communist 1, 2
Braunau am Inn, Austria 1
Bremen, Germany 1, 2, 3, 4
Brenner Pass 1
bridges 1, 2, 3
Brindisi, Italy 1, 2
Brissos, church of São, Portugal 1
Britain: anthem 1; attitudes to Europe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;
British abroad 1, 2, 3;
empire 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7;
food 1, 2, 3;
influence 1, 2;
islands off 1;
minorities 1, 2, 3;
Parliament 1, 2, 3;
royal family 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6;
and Suez Canal 1;
Union Flag 1, 2;
Viking trade routes 1;
World War II 1, 2, 3, 4;
see also individual countries