Perhaps there is no acceptable state in which to contemplate the essential and fundamental attributes of the ur-German. Take Black Forest-dwelling Hans the woodchopper, who divides his time between providing for his family and pet bear, and composing impenetrable poetry which probes, broods at the tense core of human existence. It is a pity that he and his country must suffer the burden of the 20th century. I am haunted recently by a letter, and my own recollections, that disturb in their own way the Germanic Question.
DON’T. MENTION. THE WAR.
It is too late. The Question is knocking at the door now, and as I type it’s smuggled quickly inside by its friend, Taboo. It will get quite heavy from here on in – the kind of rumination that must be conducted by greasy candlelight amid stacks of dusty parchment scrolls.
The city of Trier nestles up to the River Moselle on the western edge of the Rhineland-Palatinate, near to Germany’s Luxembourgish border. It is a point in the valley that could stake a claim to the most colourful history of any city in Europe. Lying in a strip of land fiercely contested, occupied and re-claimed over the centuries, it has been at various points the most powerful settlement in the Western Territories of the Roman Empire, marshalling a wing that stretched from North Africa to Britannia – and at others, the subject of sackings and claimants: Germanics; Franks, Huns, Vikings and, naturally, Vandals. Thus the city’s atmosphere is one of permanence, the passion of uprising and rebellion in the face of repression. On the facade of the Red House of Trier is inscribed a grain of this obduracy:
“ANTE ROMAM TREVIRIS STETIT ANNIS MILLE TRECENTIS. PERSTET ET AETERNA PACE FRVATVR. AMEN.” (“Thirteen hundred years before Rome, Trier stood. May it stand on and enjoy eternal peace. Amen.”)
In a letter written in 1928 by D.H. Lawrence and published in 1934, the writer recounts a bleak trip back to the Germany through the Rhineland that he does not quite seem to know any more. I cannot shake off the creeping horror of the landscape’s description, as Lawrence evokes the interwar ravage the area has suffered, now under French occupation – all its Teutonic soul sucked away under the eaves of the Black Forest. He feels it already escaping and regressing, Germany’s life-force retreating towards the evil of “Tartary” in the East. But as he wrenches from the numbing practical effects of the Great War, his thoughts turn to the Forest he is journeying near. With chilling prescience:
But at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness, strange feelings stirring out of this still-unconquered Black Forest. You stiffen your backbone and you listen to the night. There is a sense of danger. It is not the people. They don’t seem dangerous. Out of the very air comes a sense of danger, a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger.
Something has happened. Something has happened which has not yet eventuated. The old spell of the old world has broken, and the old, bristling, savage spirit has set in.
One can sense the great impasse that this civilisation has come to. There is no progress. The crippling economy heads towards destruction and all the while the menace of the forest hints an inconceivably ancient barbarism. Lawrence’s depiction of a medieval tribalism poisons the image of youth and education, it reduces the students of Heidelberg and their alien, forced socialism to feudal savages “like loose, roving gangs of broken, scattered tribes”.
The imagery of a void, a social vacuum is hard to evade. It prompts Lawrence to recoil in fear at the ends to which this old force seeks. He is sensitive to greater movements and shifts in Germany: of cultural memory, of the Empires that were, of Time itself.
And it all looks as if the years were wheeling swiftly backwards, no more onwards. Like a spring that is broken and whirls swiftly back, so time seems to be whirling with mysterious swiftness to a sort of death. Whirling to the ghost of the old Middle Ages of Germany, then to the Roman days, then to the days of the silent forest and the dangerous, lurking barbarians.
And so we move solemnly towards the crux and the horror, the great rending of the 20th century. Who are the “lurking barbarians”? They are not a people who exist in today’s central Europe. Yet if there is nothing tangible, then what remains – an ever-dimming echo of resistance; rebellion? Did or does Lawrence’s tribal “ghost” exist? The answers are no more clear from a social, geographic or anthropological perspective. I suspect that to understand is to be in the quiet deeps of the Wald, the dark and opaque breed of forest that contributes to Germany’s fame. That is the ur-setting that bred many of the dark tales that much of the western world sanitise and nurture their children with to this day.
At the beginning of the 19th century the Brothers Grimm dedicated themselves to collecting memories. They drew from the oldest depths of Germanic folklore and language and created, in the midst of a romanticist wave, a set of Märchen, fairytales that could be canonised and appropriated by the German spirit. Influenced by the writings of Herder and their law professor Friedrich von Savigny, they yearned for a unified Germany and hoped that their contributions to the language and philology of their nation would aid this. But they reveal in their tales both the beautiful and cruel shades of existence, a mixture of the pastoral idyll and the underlying cruelty of adults that grow up to oppress and rule. Witches and wolves, innocence and deceit.
Unification would meet with bitter resistance from all corners of a huge, dynastic sprawl. The enormously wealthy Bavaria not least, for it represented and continues to resemble the fairytale kingdom itself – a bountiful country within a land of countries. Again I hear the whispering echo on an icy winter wind that Lawrence perceived, of insurrection to a centralising force – to Rome, to the Emperor. How endures it? The answer to this one I believe is clearer. The area that was Germania before it was Germany is vast and feudal. The lesser kingdoms and city-states grew to desire solidarity; the larger to expand and claim territory. This tension holds within it fear, brutality and wildness. Two millenia ago the central power was Rome, its weapon of choice: a beautiful, pure Christian mission enforced by the Lord’s righteous yet surprisingly bloodthirsty blade. Resistance grew and the Empire diminished. Swords and sandals were usurped by the ancient power of the woodland barbarian. Yet Christ’s seed was sown. The second, Holy Roman Empire followed when the mantle was lifted up from the remnants of the West Roman Empire. Otto I was crowned King, Kaiser, Caesar, Emperor of the civilised world.
Then a glorious reign and unbroken descent of Emperors for 800 years. Yet all the while, central power diminished. The ruling powers could not support the weight of such numbers of territories. Thus kings, dukes and bishops clawed back dominion and influence. It was this allowance that marked the Empire’s success and longevity – instead of smashing heads until they fell in line, devolution allowed for cultural diversity and tribal identification.
Modernity would change this. The industrial revolutions would break the old-money, medieval alliances. Dynasties with such grandeur of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns would topple.
And all the while our friend Hans sits by his log-cabin window and wonders at the stars. He jots a quick line or two on the mercurial moon as it slips out from a cloud, dappling the floor of fallen needles; turning his black forest silver. Next morning, after waking and filling Herman the Bear’s water bucket from the stream, he kicks back on his porch and sniffs at the sweet pine scent of his home. Eva brings out a nettle-tea and the paper. It is Sunday, after all. The Süddeutsche Zeitung has a strange piece running today. There have been riots in Munich after a radical zealot attempted to storm a beer hall and seize national power. Lines crease across Hans’ forehead and he stares silently into the forest.
As is the case with all good fairytales, surely the story of the third Reich, the one that this time would last for ten hundred years, must have a happy ending. It actually had a number of different endings, but they are stories for another chilly winter night, and none of them are filled with mirth. At this point the Germanic Question is becoming uneasy, and even Taboo is shifting in his chair, so allow me to turn over the last leaf. For towards the end, Mr. Lawrence’s letter betrays a sentiment that wrongs Hans in his peaceful, wooden hut:
Something about the Germanic races is unalterable. White skinned, elemental, and dangerous.
Here he could not be more wrong.
It is the landscape, the very bones of the Wald, that are elemental and dangerous. It is the distant, grey memory of kingdoms and empires past that is elemental and dangerous. They linger and speak to the soul, awakening a primal fear. National Socialism was no product of its people, but of the physical, political and economic landscape which allowed Germany to be poisoned.
After the end of the Second World War, the Allies gathered the defeated German generals and drove them purposefully through the city of Trier. It had been heavily bombed, and they would have been confronted by the crumbling, battered ruins of Ancient and Holy Roman rule – a lesson in the history of oppression that few could forget. I wonder if, rumbling past these decaying symbols of a long-forgotten dominion, they happened to discern an inscription, etched defiantly on the front of the Red House.
Am kurzen Ende der Wrangelstraße 