Although Romanticism went out of fashion—replaced by Realism, especially in literature—it managed to linger in the imagination. The effect of this lingering could be innocuous, as in the erotic charge still felt on beholding unforgiving mountain scenery. One need only remember the couples clutching and caressing each other in the aerial tramway on its way up to the Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix. Yet the lingering of Romantic sentiment could also be destructive. In Germany, Romanticism in its dotage rotted and turned nasty. All of the aspects listed above—about the movement as a force for good—have their flip side as well. Embracing the irrational can lead to desperately dangerous thinking. Nature can be overidealized, and a reinvented past can be twisted out of recognition to serve a dark purpose. Nationalism, if excessive, can lead to xenophobia and war. And emotion can chase reason out into the wilderness.
It has been argued, most notably by historian Modris Eksteins in his brilliant Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989), that the Nazis were quintessential Moderns, enamored of technology and the irrational. The wrecking ball that was World War I caused a lot of nineteenth-century certainties to collapse—to wit, a belief in progress, in God, and in Western cultural superiority. Moral codes came unbuttoned, traditional sexual roles were shaken up, class distinctions faded. Peering into this cauldron, many on the Left divined the evil of capitalism and embraced Communism. On the Right, a curious hybrid emerged, one that plucked inspiration from the past and the future. Romanticism coexisted with the Modern.
For all their autobahns and state-of-the-art aircraft, the Nazis fashioned a resolutely Romantic viewpoint. Susan Sontag observed that the Third Reich was “the grotesque fulfillment—and betrayal—of German Romanticism.” A mythologized past for the Volk (the nation), consisting of virtuous and pure peasants and laborers, was set in a state of nature polluted only by non-Aryans. The cult of death, so prevalent in Romantic works of art, pervaded Nazi ideology, even down to the death heads on their uniforms. Bergfilm, derided as mawkish by bourgeois film critics, made the chest of the Nazi “New Man” swell with pride. And nationalism, Romanticism’s political spearhead, took on a demonic dimension under the Nazis, with the nations of eastern Europe thought worthy only of enslavement in an ever-expanding Lebensraum (living space) for the German people.
There was no finer observer of the historic subversion of German Romanticism than the late Italian film director Luchino Visconti, as noted in cinema expert David Huckvale’s Visconti and the German Dream. Visconti’s Ludwig chronicles the life of Ludwig II, the Romantic builder of Neuschwanstein. It is no coincidence that Adolf Hitler counted himself one of King Ludwig’s most ardent admirers. In The Damned (1969), Visconti portrays the hellish descent into decadence of a wealthy German family during the Nazi years. In his reimagining of The Night of the Long Knives in the film, hundreds of SA arrive in Bad Wiessee and proceed to get riotously drunk. As the night wears on, a homosexual orgy takes place, while a lone SA in the bar sings the “Liebestod” (love-death) aria from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. In the opera, Isolde sings the aria over the body of her dead lover. Thus, in this barroom performance the apex of Romanticism meets its nadir. The SS then arrive, hustle dozens of naked young men into courtyards and dining rooms, and turn their machine guns on them. In point of historical fact, only two men were shot at Bad Wiessee—a senior official found in bed with his eighteen-year-old boy lover—while the rest were herded into the hotel’s basement laundry room to await transport to Munich and almost certain death. No matter, in Visconti’s vision a worldview is being executed here. However grotesquely distorted that worldview was in its Nazi iteration, it—Romanticism—could be said to have been born and to have died in the mountains.
The Alps giveth and the Alps taketh away.
THE ROAD LEADING AWAY from the Tegernsee promises more Bavarian beauty. At the lake’s northern end stands the picturesque village of Gmund. The church here has a sturdy white steeple topped by a black ball, like a pearl onion. I decide that today I will ignore the horror stories of the 1930s and concentrate instead on the pleasures to be found in the meeting of man and mountain. With this in mind, I forgo the temptation to peer at Heinrich Himmler’s former house in Gmund. It is in private hands, so any attempt to snap pictures would result only in postcards from the hedge. Besides, there are websites for that.
Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I am doing a disservice to my Bavarian hosts, especially given the Nazi associations of my ultimate destination, Berchtesgaden. The Germany that I have visited many times is a welcoming and tolerant place, far removed from a nightmarish past almost beyond the horizon of living memory. And the Germans whom I have met in France and America have all been decent, principled people, vehement in their belief in the primacy of human rights. Why rub their noses in the sins of their forefathers?
Yet mention of the nightmare has to be made, I conclude as I drive westward from the Tegernsee along the Deutsche Alpenstrasse. As noted before, a distinct leitmotiv of the Bavarian Alps, vis-à-vis human geography, is excess. Village, church, castle, and king here—all exhibit a penchant for the overstated and the outlandish. In physical geography, the mountains here are far lower than their terrifically tall cousins in Switzerland and France, but the people living in their valleys and on their slopes are far more exuberant, as if making up for their homeland’s Alpine modesty. When that exuberance turns to the dark side, as it did eighty years ago, the result is not mere unpleasantness but utter madness, of a kind we hope never to see again. Nonetheless, it is part of the region’s pageant of excess.
From Gmund, the road rises through fields dotted with roofed hayracks. These give way to the outlying foothills of the Mangfall range of the Alps. The road steepens until it reaches the lake town of Schliersee. Off to the right, the waters gleam bright blue under a sky of the same color. The road westward then twists and turns upward until a massif of three peaks rises directly ahead of me. The pair on the left, table-topped, have had their summits sliced off by some heavenly cleaver. The peak on the right is the fair sister of the trio, a graceful triangular pinnacle of stone enrobed in a cloak of the deepest green.
I go around this threesome to enter a broad upland valley walled in by soft and gentle mountains. At a village named Bayrischzell, I stop and walk down to a coffee shop/bakery. A group of Bavarian burghers sits on a terrace outdoors, their tables groaning under individual servings of creamy cake cubes the size of cinder blocks. I look away from this latest excess to take in the view. The trio massif has its back to us in the distance, preceded by a long mountain meadow made white by a profusion of Queen Anne’s lace. I raise my phone to take a picture, but a large fellow steps in and blocks the view. The back of his black T-shirt is adorned with a grinning death’s head above the words GOOD EVENING BITCHES.
After this Bavarian sight, the road narrows and rises abruptly through a series of switchbacks until the Sudelfeld Pass is reached in the trees. By the roadside, a very large bratwurst of German bikers disport themselves in the sunlight, whipping their long hair like Spartans at Thermopylae. The ride down is surprisingly hair-raising. Before each switchback stands a sign with a motorcycle graphic and an announcement that rumble strips lie ahead. Apparently the highway patrols here are tired of fishing lifeless bikers out of the trees far below on the valley floor. I later learn that the Sudelfeld, although only 1,123 meters in elevation, is the Bavarian pass most favored by two-wheeled road warriors, given its level of difficulty.
Beyond a town called Wall, an astonishing perspective opens up. In the foreground lies a green valley punctuated with hillocks, to be followed by hills, then foothills, then emerald mountains backed by the soaring gray stone walls of the Austrian Alps. It is a jaw-dropping sight, a colossal 3-D Romantic engraving stretching for scores of kilometers. Such is its beauty that I forget to be scared.
Eventually I rejoin the valley of the River Inn. At a charming, overdecorated town called Oberaudorf, a smorgasbord of bi
kers sprawls at outdoor beer gardens swilling from tankards suitable for weightlifters. As in most Alpine towns, the hotels here sport unilingual English signs that proclaim BIKERS WELCOME! At Oberaudorf that message has been heeded.
The dread UMLEITUNG sign appears. Mercifully the detour message does not come accompanied by mysterious initials, as it sometimes does in France. The only other sign in view announces HEART ATTACK PAINTBALL, complete with a helpful directional arrow. I go the other way. Unexpectedly, the Deutsche Alpenstrasse suddenly umleitungs me all the way into Austria, another country—to Kufstein, the second largest city of Tyrol. A massive medieval fortress dominates the town, which seems otherwise to be a smokestack convention. Unwilling to desert my Bavarian dreamscape even for a few moments, I head to the autobahn for a quick hop back to Germany. It occurs to me what a relief it is that almost all the customs houses I’ve seen on this trip have been deserted, that I never have to wait at borders, that it is clear sailing all the way. When I was growing up, such effortless passage had been the norm between my native Canada and the United States. Now that has all changed, with endless backups caused by unsmiling and suspicious border guards. Europe has gone in the other direction, leaving the New World looking very much like what the Old used to be.
On the entrance ramp stands a figure with his thumb stuck out, the first hitchhiker I have seen thus far. He is irresistible, looking like Santa Claus on a budget holiday: white beard, red face, and green suspenders holding up tattered trousers. I have to stop. He gets in.
I introduce myself first, in English. He replies, “I’m Reinhard, the last of the hippies.”
I appraise him. He could very well be the last one, as he appears to be in his late sixties, early seventies.
He explains that he has been all over the world, taking pride in his status as the last stoner out of Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion. Reinhard has a place to stay in his hometown of Graz, Austria, but he prefers life on the road, on a permanent magical mystery tour.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“Berchtesgaden.”
“Sounds good!”
The frontier flashes by. I give voice to my thoughts about the advantages of a borderless continent and the dismal developments in post-9/11 North America.
Reinhard smiles at me. His look tells me that he thinks he is talking to someone as mindlessly sunny as Voltaire’s Candide.
“Just wait for the next crisis,” he chides. “Then you’ll see.”
I take this to be typical European pessimism, until the migrant crisis of the following summer proves Reinhard absolutely right. The delicate borderless framework of the Schengen Agreement, approved in 1985 and fully implemented in 1995, strained to the breaking point in Europe as refugees headed northward overland from the Mediterranean. Then terror attacks in the fall and the spring put it in intensive care.
After about a half hour of guilty expressway pleasure, we rejoin the Deutsche Alpenstrasse at Bernau. Reinhard has given me an entertainingly opinionated overview of his homeland. What does he think of Tyrol? “Too Catholic.” Salzburg? “Too bourgeois.”
I mention that I plan on visiting Klagenfurt, in the southern region of Carinthia.
“Carinthia!” he exclaims. “Oh no, God no, don’t go there. They’re all a bunch of Fascists.”
The villages in the Chiemgau region of Bavaria parade past, a succession of tiny gems nestled at the foot of the mountains. Reinhard’s mention of Fascists reminds me of my misgivings about spending so much of this stage of my journey thinking about the Nazis. I tell him as much.
He remains silent for a long moment. “The Bavarians like life. They like to laugh and sing. They are my cousins,” he says, before continuing. “In the north they are cold people, very hard.” I am put in mind of the U-boat captain in the church whistling for his wife. “I will travel everywhere,” Reinhold concludes, “everywhere but Saxony. In Saxony I would get beaten up, maybe even killed. Too many neo-Nazis, they hate hippies like me.”
He lets this sink in.
“Are you serious?” I ask at last.
“Yes!”
His piercing blue gaze confirms his conviction.
We travel along in silence for a long moment. At a pretty village called Reit im Winkl, I pull over. I cannot resist the name. Reinhard and I agree to meet back at the car in half an hour. He fires up a spliff and then drifts farther into the parking lot.
On the town’s main street, horse-drawn carriages festooned with flowers take visitors for leisurely meanders through the old quarter. In a square, a tall Maibaum (Maypole), painted the white and blue of Bavaria, stretches high into the sky. It has several dozen silhouetted figures attached to horizontal tabs, each depicting a traditional craft or trade. Reit im Winkl takes obvious pride in its past and would not like to see its Maypole stolen. That was a fairly common occurrence in the past: A neighboring village would steal a neighbor’s pole then demand a ransom, usually beer and sausages. But sometimes the theft went well beyond the quaint. In 2004, a group of pranksters aboard a helicopter swiped the Maibaum planted on the peak of the fearsome Zugspitze. This, despite a directive from the park manager to his staff, urging them “to protect the pole as if it were their own eyeballs.” As ransom, the thieves demanded four sandwiches, four train tickets, and an unspecified amount of beer.
I notice an announcement on a display board extolling the virtues of the Hindenburghutte. Wondering what a Hindenburg Hut is, I push open the doors of the tourist office.
A young woman tells me the Hut is a mountain hotel-restaurant with many amenities and activities, winter and summer, and that no, she does not know why it is named after Paul von Hindenburg, field marshal during World War I and president of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Maybe he came here once? I also learn that Reit im Winkl, thanks to a microclimate, is one of the snowiest places in all of Germany and that there is a four-kilometer-long natural toboggan run starting at the Hindenburghutte. I think fondly of one of my favorite authors, Robert Louis Stevenson, who loved tobogganing as much as his friend Arthur Conan Doyle loved skiing. Given the tourist treasure expended at snowy Reit, it is doubtful that its inhabitants indulge in the Bavarian ritual of Aperschnalzen, or competitive whipcracking. Contests usually take place in February and are thought to have originated in pagan times as a ceremony to whip away the snow. Aper is a Bavarian word for a snow-free place, while schnalzen means “flicking.” The town fathers of Reit would have to discourage such economic self-destructiveness.
As for the town fathers, do they put up the Maypole? I tell the hostess that it appears to be a difficult task.
She looks me in the eye and says, “In the spring, when the time comes, the strongest young men of the village erect the pole.”
I watch as her full lips form a pre-Freudian smile and she moves off to torment the next tourist.
A MELLOWED REINHARD and I plow through the trees and mountains on our way eastward. When we cross a low pass entertainingly called Schwarzbachwachtsattel, Berchtesgaden is not far off. I rouse my snoozing companion and tell him that we have almost arrived. Where does he stay on his travels?
“Cemeteries. Sometimes churches.”
I happen to know something about the old cemetery in the center of Berchtesgaden. I tell Reinhard the sad story of Toni Kurz, the native of Berchtesgaden who dangled to death on the north face of the Eiger. He is buried there. So is Hitler’s sister, Paula.
When we near the cemetery, which stands behind a Franciscan church, Reinhard signals for me to stop. He grabs his rucksack from the backseat, gets out of the car, and executes a wistful wave. With that, the last of the hippies rounds a corner and disappears from view.
Berchtesgaden turns out to be diverting. The first thing I notice at the cultural center is an exhibition devoted to the actress Romy Schneider, who spent her early school years here. To my relief, the only Nazi gewgaws on offer are books devoted to the town’s dark past. There are no postcards of the Duke and Duchess of Winds
or visiting here in 1937, or of Neville Chamberlain’s ill-starred sojourn the following year. In the main square near the old cathedral and town hall, a striking mural painted in the 1920s honors the dead of World War I. It was repainted—deNazified—in the 1950s; its frozen action figures, soldiers and peasants, serve as the town’s permanent antiwar billboard. In the arcades are plaques listing the names of the Berchtesgaden men who fell in both world wars. The number of names, in this region of a hundred thousand inhabitants, is truly horrifying. As if to underscore this sentiment, a sculpture exhibit nearby features standing skeleton figures, fashioned from black metallic scrap, aggressively pointing mean-looking machine guns at passersby. Bavarian excess, once again.
As a totem of a sinister past, Berchtesgaden differs from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. There, the Olympic Games served, despite the propaganda distortions connected to them, as a celebration of youth and, at base, an athletic competition. But Berchtesgaden played host to the heart and soul of the Hitlerian project. The Führer and his henchmen spent more time here than they did in Berlin, and the decisions made near this sleepy mountain town led to the deaths of millions. The region may now brand itself Die Perle der Alpen (The Pearl of the Alps), but many generations will have to come and go for its historical infamy to be erased.
Breakfast at my hotel is taken in a sunny room rendered sepulchral by pairs of elderly German husbands and wives not talking to each other. I spear several pig products while reading my guidebook to The Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s aerie in the mountains. The cynosure of Nazism was not in the town of Berchtesgaden but in the province of the same name, at a place called Obersalzberg.
The road to Obersalzberg is steep and twisted, so much so that a waffle of Belgian bikers expends five frustrating minutes to overtake me completely. We climb 365 meters in three kilometers. The parking lot at our destination is a sea of German tourists. When I pull in beside one family, my French plates inspire baleful glares. Already queasy at being here, I try smiling at them to appeal to their better angels. It does not work.
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