by Ian Buruma
The most deliberately democratic garden is probably the Englische Garten in Munich, with its wooden Chinese pagoda and its beautiful lake. Its architect, an American by birth named Benjamin Thompson, but better known by his later German title, Reichsgraf Rumford, had originally planned the park for the Bavarian king’s army. But the storming of the Bastille in 1789 made Rumford and his colleagues so nervous about the possibility of popular unrest that the English garden was redesigned as a “people’s park.” This concept was not so strange, considering that most seventeenth and early eighteenth century British landscape gardens had been open to the public, precursors, in a way, of the theme parks that would attract millions of tourists two hundred years later.
The finest English garden in Germany was built before Prince Pückler was born, not far from Muskau and quite close to Branitz, where he died. I visited Wörlitz on a freezing December day in 1995. The ground was hard; the grass felt flinty. A powdery frost stuck to the Doric temples and Gothic follies. The lakes were frozen, so I couldn’t take a boat to Rousseau Island, where a replica of Rousseau’s tomb was placed to commemorate the philosopher of “nature, pure nature.” There was also a replica of Vesuvius, called the Stein, which had once had regular eruptions of artificial fire. It was being restored, so I could not look inside to see how the fireworks actually functioned. I was almost alone in the vast park, with its acres of farmland, its lakes, and its mazes. There was hardly a sound, except from the odd flight of geese and the crackling of frost under my shoes. Wandering along the “belt” coiling round the garden-park from folly to folly, vista to vista, it was still possible, even in midwinter, to share Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau’s vision of paradise.
Prince Franz had visited England several times in the 1760s and 1770s. He knew Horace Walpole and had met the Adam brothers, as well as the European idol of that time, Laurence Sterne. He saw Kew Gardens, of course, as well as Blenheim, Stowe, Castle Howard, and other great estates. Franz liked England so much that he had wanted to stay forever, but he was called back home by Friedrich II, so he built “my own England” in Wörlitz instead.
Franz’s idea of England, expressed in this Arcadian garden-park, combines all the elements that had made English parks famous. A Chinese bridge shows the contemporary fashion for chinoiserie. Mock ruins of antiquity illustrate the ravages of time, as well as the continuity of history. A miniature version of the iron bridge over the Severn spans one of the canals, leading to the lake, where a hermitage offers the chance for solitary contemplation. Grottoes built, like Piranesi dungeons, of large weatherworn stones and classical temples of Venus and Flora testify to the prince’s love of Italy and ancient Rome. There are echoes of Stourhead in the redbrick “English” Gothic facade of a country house, whose other side, in cream and white, is designed in the Italian Renaissance manner. A miniature of Sir William Hamilton’s villa in Naples stands next to the model Vesuvius. The main house is the first example in Germany of Palladian architecture. And then there is my favorite place: the “view of tolerance,” Toleranzblick. Standing back from a classical urn, your gaze is directed along a canal to a distant view of a late Gothic church steeple, standing next to a synagogue modeled after a Roman temple.
It is a moving vision, this mixture of classical, Renaissance, and Gothic styles, this English garden in the flatlands of eastern Germany, this Arcadia of Enlightenment. More “democratic” than most English estates, since anybody was allowed to enter through its unguarded borders, the Wörlitz park is more than a fantasy of England; it is a fantasy of Europe, for it is a German vision of an English vision of antiquity, based not only on Milton’s poetry and Rousseau’s ideas but on the classical landscape paintings of Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Strolling through this garden paradise is meant to be an emotional as well as an intellectual experience. You reflect on art and nature while enjoying fits of melancholy, or joy, or whatever is appropriate to the genius of place—another concept popularized by Alexander Pope.
Goethe called Wörlitz the Elysian Fields. He wrote a letter about it to Charlotte von Stein. The words are carved on the wall of the Nympheum, a little Greek temple embedded in the mock ruin of an ancient wall. Goethe was touched by the way “the gods had allowed the princes to create a dream.” It was like a fairy tale, he added, of the purest loveliness. There is a poem by Auden in which he makes a distinction between Utopias and Arcadias: the former look toward the future, and the latter to the past. Both are dreams: the Arcadian past never existed, any more than the Utopian future ever will. There is an odd ambivalence, or even contradiction in the aristocratic dreamscapes of Wörlitz, or Stowe, or Muskau: they are progressive and nostalgic, liberal and conservative; they celebrate natural freedom, as well as natural order. If it is natural for man to be free, it is also natural for princes to rule, not absolutely, as in France, but liberally enough to accommodate ambitious new blood and retain their privileges.
Various images and memories came to me as I sat in the Nympheum, stamping my shoes to stay warm. I thought of Bernardo Bertolucci’s early movies, with their ambivalent mixture of faith in revolution and nostalgia for aristocratic style. I thought of a lunch party I once attended in London. There were several German guests with famous names, a Bismarck, a von Moltke, and I think a von Trott, all “good” liberal Germans, whose fathers and grandfathers had been opposed to Hitler. (Helmut von Moltke was executed for his role in the 1944 plot to kill Hitler; on her prison visits, his wife brought him packets of English tea.) One of these good liberal Germans, dressed in a beautifully cut English flannel suit, remarked—prompted by what?—that England was “really the only place one could still live.”
Above all I thought of my grandparents’ garden in Berkshire, my childhood Arcadia. My grandmother cultivated it with Germanic fastidiousness. She would agonize about the flower beds, and the trees, and the lawn. In letters she wrote to my grandfather during the first anxious year of the war, when he was abroad in the army, the state of their roses was discussed in much detail. I roamed in that garden with a heady sense of freedom. My grandparents’ garden, to me, stood for England, an ideal of England. To my grandparents, I think the garden meant something more profound. Owning that patch of land meant they belonged. It was their piece of England. They, the children of German-Jewish immigrants, had domesticated it, made it their own. They could afford to laugh about the colonel down the road, in the twee little cottage past the old parish church, who said, when they first moved in: “Don’t like the name, don’t like the money.”
Domesticated landscape, privately owned: it is an idea of England that goes beyond my childhood idyll, or my grandparents’ sense of belonging. My great-grandfather Hermann Regensburg, who had come to London as a young man, liked to spend his holidays in his native Germany, where he would make straight for the Black Forest with his German friends. The untamed forest remained part of his idea of Germany. The English countryside is cultivated. Pückler found it “too cultivated, too complete, and so in the end wearisome.” Men cannot live with undisturbed bliss all the time, which, he said, “is perhaps why the dear Lord drove our ancestor Adam out of paradise so that he would not die of boredom in the place.”
Much land on the Continent was in private hands, but the noble ideal of country life, of owning property and cultivating the garden, however small, became a bourgeois ideal in England earlier and more intensely than anywhere else. If it was natural for my great-grandfather Hermann to return to the Black Forest, it seemed natural to my grandparents to cultivate their own bit of Berkshire. My childhood Arcadia was a bourgeois version of an eighteenth-century idea of “natural order.” So far as landownership is concerned, wrote Pückler in 1833, “England is at least a century ahead of us in the scale of civilization.”
WHEN PÜCKLER ARRIVED in England in 1826, for his second and longest stay, the great garden-parks were less open to the public than was usual a hundred years before. Some parks of the early eighteenth century, set in vast estates, grown even vaster throug
h enclosure acts, were designed to demonstrate the Roman grandeur of Whig grandees. Castle Howard was such a place, or Robert Walpole’s Houghton Hall, in Norfolk. Lesser gentry and landowners in opposition to the Whig establishment favored garden-parks that illustrated the ancient liberties of country squires; hence, for instance, the Gothic temple at Stowe. Called the Temple of Liberty, it celebrated such fond icons of ancient English liberties as King Alfred and the Magna Carta. “Thank the Gods that I am not a Roman” is Viscount Cobham’s motto engraved above the temple door. But the division between Whig grandees and Tory gentry shrank. The real gap was between those who owned land and those who didn’t. Those who did liked to seal themselves off from what was often the source of their new wealth: the ugly sight of industry.
Riding outside London in August 1827, Pückler was attracted by a fine house and grounds. He dismounted and asked the porter whether he could take a look inside. After some hesitation, the porter let him in, whereupon a fat man appeared from the house, in a rage. “Qui est-vous, monsieur?” he shouted. “Que cherchez-vous ici?” Pückler apologized for his intrusion, mounted his horse, and rode off, laughing at the fat man madly shaking his fist. He later noted: “The anxiety with which the rich English shut up their property from the prying eyes of the stranger is sometimes truly amusing, but may occasionally be painful.” He later returned to the house and found to his dismay that the porter had been dismissed with his wife and children, after many years of service, for having allowed a stranger in without permission.
The reason for Pückler’s second visit to England had nothing to do with gardens. He went looking for a wife. Not that there was ever a shortage of women in his life. He was a legendary libertine, whose first sexual conquest (of his cousin) took place when he was ten. A tall, handsome man with a rakish little mustache, a rosebud mouth, and a hawk’s nose, he seduced women by the thousands—or so his carefully cultivated legend had it. Flattery was his preferred technique. He even wrote love letters to his own mother. But his present difficulties stemmed from the fact that he had run out of money or, rather, that his creditors were no longer willing to lend him more.
He had always been a spendthrift, that was part of his style, but a sudden crisis had occurred. Of his many mistresses in Berlin, he chose Lucie, née Hardenberg, then the countess von Pappenheim, to be his wife. She was nine years older than Pückler, and physical passion was not the main point of the romance. Lucie was not only wise and amusing company, but her father, Prince von Hardenberg, was chancellor of Prussia, and Pückler was keen to keep his wife in the style to which she was accustomed—with her money. They got engaged even before she was divorced from Count von Pappenheim. Coaches and horses were ordered from England, and English grooms and an English coachman to go with them. (The coachman, a man of giant proportions, proved to be headstrong and had to be sent home.)
Expenses for the wedding party were colossal: mounds of goose-liver pâté were imported from Toulouse and crates of chocolates, tartines, and other confections from Paris. Long silk evening gloves were ordered from Berlin for the ladies from Muskau. Hundreds of workmen were laboring in the gardens to get them ready in time for the feast. Carpets and furniture arrived from Paris and London. And all the bills were sent to Lucie, who balked only when Pückler asked for more money to build a zoo in the castle grounds. But she adored him, and the wedding party was splendid. Lucie’s father, however, was so disgusted by his new son-in-law that he broke off relations, disinherited Lucie, and left Pückler without a ready source of income. The solution, arrived at in 1826, was unorthodox. The couple decided to get divorced so Pückler could find himself a rich wife, who would keep them all in style. The obvious place to find such a person was the richest country in Europe: England.
Before his first trip in 1815, Pückler had not thought all that highly of the British, as opposed to their gardens and their politics. He was, as I said, a Francophile by inclination. Even though he had fought in the “Liberation War” against the French, he had a certain regard for Napoleon. His German would continue to be permeated with French, or Frenchified expressions. But he had been impressed by a show of British power in 1806, when he visited Naples. Just as he was about to sit down for dinner at the house of the Russian ambassador, Count von Bibikoff, an Anglo-French battle started up in the bay. Von Bibikoff ordered his servants to serve dinner on the terrace so his guests could watch the British flagship shoot a French frigate to pieces. A cannon-ball almost landed on the table, an event to which the guests affected an air of supreme indifference.
We know precisely what Pückler thought of Britain in 1826, because he recorded his adventures in wonderfully detailed letters to Lucie, whom he addresses as Schnucke, “Little Lamb.” (Pückler was Lou.) These letters, published in 1830 as Letters from a Dead Man, made him famous all over Europe and North America. Deservedly so. It is still one of the sharpest and wittiest accounts ever written by a foreigner about Britain. Too critical to qualify as an Anglomane document, Letters from a Dead Man still shows signs of a common strain of Anglophilia: admiration tinged with disillusion. Pückler, like Voltaire, loved the idea of England better than the real thing. During his first visit, in 1815, he was a fox-hunting, whist-playing dandy. Regency London was the ideal place for him then. But in 1826, he noted a discrepancy between the pretensions of an arrogant and, in his eyes, hidebound aristocracy and an increasingly commercial society, run by an energetic bourgeoisie. His sympathies were with the latter. But there are hints of regret in his letters, of nostalgia for an eighteenth-century ideal of nobility, free-spirited, cultivated, liberal, a Whiggish ideal that nineteenth-century English aristocrats were rarely able to match.
Much had changed in England over the last fifty years, even without a revolution. But the commercial, industrial nature of society was often disguised in the trappings of a preindustrial past. Like Voltaire, Pückler visited the Royal Exchange. His guide in the City of London was a Swiss entrepreneur who published a Russian newsletter and owned Napoleon’s coronation robe, which he showed for a fee of five shillings. Voltaire had been impressed by the way men of different faiths did business at the exchange, “as though they all professed the same religion.” Pückler noticed the historical appearance of the place: the statues of English rulers, “as well as the ancient and venerable architecture,” which “awaken poetic feelings, to which the thought of the world market, of which London is the centre, lends an even deeper significance.” Then he looked at the people working there, and he saw “self-interest and greed gleam in every eye.” They were like a “restless, comfortless throng of damned souls.”
Many others have said the same thing about Britain and, of course, America. Theodor Fontane, the Prussian poet and novelist, lived in London in the 1850s. He found that speculation and the rush to make money were the main English occupations. Rich people were worshiped: “The cult of the Golden Calf, that is the great disease of the English people.” Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in England four years after Pückler left. It is interesting to compare his observations with Pückler’s, for the two men had much in common. Both were free-spirited aristocrats, attracted by British liberties. Tocqueville observed the English passion for making money too. But he had already been in America, which inspired his remark “I know of nothing more opposed to revolutionary attitudes than commercial ones.” And yet, on his first trip to England in 1833, he thought an English revolution was still bound to come.
On his way to London, Tocqueville was struck by something that is still striking when you land at Heathrow on a clear day: the grand houses, the large estates, the vast, green lawns. Everywhere he went, he saw the “aristocratic spirit”: at the House of Lords, with its “parfum d’aristocratie,” and also at the ancient universities, which still retained their “feudal” privileges. Nowhere, he wrote two years later, “do I find our America.” And so far, miraculously, the “French spirit” of revolution had passed this island by. Like Pückler, Tocqueville felt a romantic attachment to a
noble past, even as he worried about the inevitable revolution that would sweep it all away. At Kenilworth, he thought of Sir Walter Scott and “fell into a kind of trance, while it seemed that my soul was drawn toward the past with tremendous force.”
Six years earlier, Pückler had similar reveries about Sir Walter Scott at Warwick Castle. He was inspired by the landscape, the medieval walls, the battered armor and ancestral weapons in the hall: “Is there any man so lacking in poetry that he does not see, even today, the glory of those memorials shining around even the most unworthy representative of such a noble line?” But at Kenilworth, the next day, he fell prey to different emotions. He saw in those ancient stones a “noble monument to annihilation.” He thought about how much had changed and reflected, in the evening gloom, on the “shrieking contrast between the lifeless ruins and the prosaic bustle of a crowd, busied only with gain, in the steaming, smoking, swarming, teeming factory town of Birmingham.”
Tocqueville visited Birmingham in 1835. There, at last, he found a scene that reminded him of America. He observed wealth that was not rooted in the land. Industrial and middle-class England was leading the way to a new world, just like America. “These folk,” he wrote, “never have a minute to themselves. They work as if they must get rich by the evening and die the next day. They are generally very intelligent people but intelligent in the American way.” Since he was French, the Revolution was never far from his mind, and the question that haunted him was how the English aristocracy had managed to hold on to power for so long. Democracy was surely inevitable in England too. And surely aristocratic rule was incompatible with democracy. When he saw a rough crowd heckling a Tory candidate at a London by-election, jeering like “savages in North America,” he thought he was witnessing the stirrings of revolution. He found it extraordinary that his English friends were “still convinced that extreme inequality of wealth is in the natural order of things.”