reading

Maps

Introduction: Monuments and memories

Part One Where is Germany?

1 The view from the Gate

2 Divided heaven

3 Lost capitals

4 Floating city

5 Fragments of power

Part Two Imagining Germany

6 A language for all Germans

7 Snow White vs Napoleon

8 One nation under Goethe

9 Hall of heroes

10 One people, many sausages

Part Three The Persistent Past

11 The battle for Charlemagne

12 Sculpting the spirit

13 The Baltic brothers

14 Iron nation

15 Two paths from 1848

Part Four Made in Germany

16 In the beginning was the printer

17 An artist for all Germans

18 The white gold of Saxony

19 Masters of metal

20 Cradle of the modern

Part Five The Descent

21 Bismarck the blacksmith

22 The suffering witness

23 Money in crisis

24 Purging the degenerate

25 At the Buchenwald gate

Part Six Living With History

26 The Germans expelled

27 Beginning again

28 The new German Jews

29 Barlach’s Angel

30 Germany renewed

Envoi

Illustrations and Photographic Credits

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

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Introduction:
Monuments and memories

Monuments in Germany are different from monuments in other countries.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the visitor to Paris, London and Munich has been greeted in each city by a triumphal arch in the grand Roman style commemorating national triumphs in the convulsive European wars of 1792–1815. At Hyde Park Corner, the British erected the Wellington Memorial Arch, capping it nearly a century later with the huge bronze quadriga. It stands not just at what was then the western edge of London, but in front of the house of the victor of Waterloo himself. The Arc de Triomphe, colossal and over-scaled, carrying scenes of soldiers setting off to battle, is set at the centre of a star of broad avenues, three of them named after great Napoleonic victories over the Prussians and Austrians.

In Munich, the Siegestor, or Victory Gate, was built in the 1840s to celebrate the valour of Bavaria in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Like its Roman model the Arch of Constantine, the Siegestor is richly decorated, its two upper registers on the north side adorned with relief sculpture. On top stands the bronze figure of Bavaria in her chariot drawn by lions, proudly facing north, the direction from which most visitors enter the city. Below her is the inscription ‘Dem Bayrischen Heere’ – ‘To the Bavarian Army’ – to honour whose feats the arch had been erected.

The Siegestor, south side

So far, so completely conventional. At first sight you might think that the Wellington Arch, the Arc de Triomphe and the Siegestor are all doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. But what makes the Munich arch so interesting is its other side, which tells quite a different story. It was badly damaged in the Second World War, but its restoration makes no attempt to reconstruct the sculpted classical details that were destroyed by bombs. The top register on this side of the arch is merely a blank expanse of stone. Underneath this uncompromisingly empty space are the words ‘Dem Sieg geweiht, vom Krieg zerstört, zum Frieden mahnend’ – ‘Dedicated to victory, destroyed by war, urging peace’.

The Arc de Triomphe, Paris

The Wellington Arch, Hyde Park Corner, London

Where the London and Paris arches look back only to moments of high success, presenting a comfortable, if selective, narrative of national triumph, the Munich arch speaks both of the glorious cause of its making and the circumstances of its later destruction. Unlike the other two, its original celebratory purpose is undercut by a very uncomfortable reminder of failure and guilt. It proclaims a moral message: that the past offers lessons which must be used to shape the future. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the role of history in Germany today is that, like this arch, it not only articulates a view of the past, but directs the past resolutely and admonishingly forward.

If German monuments are different from those in other countries, it is because German history is different. Both Britain and France, shaped by centuries of strong central power, can (more or less) credibly present their history as single national narratives. The long political fragmentation of Germany into autonomous states makes that kind of history impossible: for most of German history there can be no one national story. Although the Holy Roman Empire, which encompassed most of German-speaking Europe (Map 1), offered a framework for a sense of German belonging, it was rarely in a position to coordinate, let alone command, the many political units that made up the Empire. In consequence, much of German history is a composite of different, sometimes conflicting, local narratives.

Perhaps the clearest example of this conflict is the figure of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia in the middle of the eighteenth century, whose military successes would in other countries have ensured his status as a national hero. But Frederick’s victories – certainly most of his territorial gains – were in large measure won at the expense of other German states. A hero in Berlin, he is a villain in Dresden. In the course of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) Prussia roundly defeated Saxony and in 1760 Frederick’s troops caused huge damage in the Saxon capital. Bernardo Bellotto, whose paintings of baroque Dresden captured one of Europe’s most beautiful cities (see Chapter 23), also recorded the Kreuzkirche reduced to ruins by Frederick’s bombardment. As a key ally in the Seven Years’ War against France, Frederick the Great was both celebrated and revered in Britain: the Worcester factory produced a whole series of tributes in porcelain and as late as 1914 there were still pubs across England proudly called The King of Prussia. But there can be no pan-German view of Frederick the Great: Dresden porcelain unsurprisingly failed to celebrate Frederick and no Saxon hostelry bears his name. A similar ambivalence lies behind the Munich Siegestor. It is dedicated carefully ‘To the Bavarian Army’, leaving unstated the uncomfortable fact that that army, for most of the Napoleonic Wars, fought with the French against other German states. So the Siegestor is a doubly ambiguous monument: not simply an untriumphal triumphal arch, recording defeat as much as victory, but also the troublesome fact that the enemy could be German as easily as foreign.

The history of Germany is thus inevitably, enrichingly and confusingly fragmented. There is a strong awareness of belonging to the same family, but until the unification of Germany in 1871, there was only a flickering sense of common purpose. There are, however, a large number of widely shared memories of what Germans have done and experienced: evoking and engaging with some of them is the purpose of this book. It does not attempt to be – it cannot be – in any sense a history of Germany, but it tries to explore through objects and buildings, people and places, some formative strands in Germany’s modern national identity. The earliest object is Gutenberg’s bible of the 1450s, perhaps the first moment at which Germany decisively affected the course of world history – indeed laid one of the foundations of all modern European culture. The latest is the very recently restored and refurbished Reichstag, seat of the German Parliament. Of the making of memories there is no end: I have tried to select those that seem to me particularly potent, likely to be shared by most Germans, and especially those that may be less familiar to non-Germans.

Many of those memories are of course also shared by the Swiss and the Austrians, but this book is about the Germany that came into being twenty-five years ago and the memories of those who now live there. Switzerland began to separate politically from the rest of Germany at an early date; its neutrality in the two great wars of the last century has left it with a radically different past. Austria, whose story has been far more closely intertwined with its neighbour’s, is dissimilar in many defining respects. It was not permanently split by the Reformation; its response to the Napoleonic invasions was not to articulate national particularism so much as to consolidate the ancestral Hapsburg lands; and it did not experience the long Cold War division of the state, with all that has since flowed from that for Germany. Above all, Austria has not carried out the public, painful examination of memories and responsibilities in the time of the Nazi Reich with anything like the rigour and integrity of modern Germany. A book which included Austrian memories would be very different.

The ruins of the Kreuzkirche, Dresden, destroyed in 1760 by Prussian bombardment. Bernardo Bellotto, 1765.

All major countries try to construct a reading of their history that leads them, reassured and confident, to their current place in the world. The United States, strong in its view of itself as a ‘city on a hill’, was long able to affirm its manifest destiny. Britain and France in different ways saw their political evolution as a model for the world, which they generously shared through imperial expansion. After Bismarck had welded the different constituent states into the German Empire in 1871 and then into the leading industrial and economic power of the continent, Germany might have been able to devise some similar national myth. But defeat in the First World War, the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the murderous criminality of the Third Reich have made any such coherent narrative impossible. German scholars have struggled in vain to piece the different parts of the jigsaw together, but none has been able, convincingly, to fit the great intellectual and cultural achievements of eighteenth- and nine-teenth-century Germany and the moral abyss of the Nazis into a comprehensible pattern. This is in a profound sense a history so damaged that it cannot be repaired but, rather, must be constantly revisited – an idea powerfully visualized by Georg Baselitz’s tattered and confusedly inverted national flag.

Inverted Eagle with the Colours of the German Flag, by Georg Baselitz, 1977

However diverse the experiences of the different regions and states of Germany, all have been marked by four great traumas that live in the national memory.

The first, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), saw every German state, and troops from all the major European powers, fighting in Germany. It was devastating for the civilian population and for the economy. As armies criss-crossed the country they spread terror and plague. Jacques Callot recorded the brutal impact on villagers in Lorraine (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) of the arrival of a pillaging army. Similar horrors were experienced across all Germany, and were never forgotten. It is generally conceded that the economic consequences of the war were still discernible well into the nineteenth century. In early May 1945, Hitler’s successor, Admiral Dönitz, ordered the German armed forces to stop fighting. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Armaments Minister, rationalized the capitulation by explaining:

The destruction that has been inflicted on Germany can only be compared to that of the Thirty Years’ War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the scale of that epoch.

The Hanging, from The Miseries and Misfortunes of War, by Jacques Callot, 1633

The outbreak of European war in 1792 saw French Revolutionary armies invade the Rhineland and occupy large parts of western Germany. Many historic cities, including Mainz, Aachen and Cologne, were incorporated into France and were to remain French cities for nearly twenty years. In 1806, after routing the Prussian army at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt, Napoleon entered Berlin in triumph. By 1812 the French had effectively occupied all Germany from the Rhineland to Russia. There was no effective military resistance left on German soil. Every major German ruler was compelled to send troops to fight with the French in the Russian campaign. It was a humiliation deeply felt, but one that eventually stirred the nation to define itself in a new way and to unite in resistance against the invader. The memory of the great humiliation of 1806 was burnt into the consciousness of all Germans, enduring to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Germania, by Adolph Menzel, 1846–57

Children’s cut-outs, c. 1935

The most devastating and intractable of the four traumas was the Third Reich. This child’s cut-out paper model of Hitler reviewing the Nazi Brownshirts exemplifies the extent to which the Nazi regime infiltrated and contaminated every aspect of German life. The crimes committed by the Third Reich, both in Germany and across Europe, and the part played in those crimes by members of almost every German family, are a widely shared memory – in many cases a shared silence – still highly charged today and still far from being exorcised. The terrible price paid by the German population, flight and expulsion from the east, and the destruction of cities like Hamburg and Dresden (Chapter 27), are a second memory which the Third Reich has bequeathed to almost all Germans.

Hamburg after the Allied bombing raids of 1943

The ultimate consequence of Nazi aggression was the invasion and occupation of all Germany by the four Allied powers, and its long division between the Federal Republic in the west and the German Democratic Republic in the east. It condemned East Germany to a further forty years of dictatorship and oppression. The human cost of that division, epitomized by those who lost their lives desperately trying to cross the Berlin Wall, is still being assessed.

It is now twenty-five years since the Wall came down and nearly twenty-five years since a new Germany was born. In that time Germans have made enormous efforts to think clearly and courageously about their national history. The re-unification of Germany coincided with a more clear-eyed historical investigation into the complicity of much of the German population in crimes long simply ascribed to ‘the Nazis’. As Berlin has been rebuilt there has been a conscious attempt to make public the most painful memories, the supreme example being the Holocaust Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. In this also it can be said that German monuments are not like those in other lands. I know of no other country in the world that at the heart of its national capital erects monuments to its own shame. Like the Siegestor in Munich, they are there not only to remember the past but – and perhaps even more importantly – to ensure that the future be different. As Michael Stürmer, a distinguished political commentator, observes: ‘In Germany, for a long time, the purpose of history was to ensure it could never happen again.’

Peter Fechter, aged eighteen, the first person to be shot dead climbing over the Berlin Wall, August 1962

The photograph on the following page shows three great monuments at the centre of modern Berlin. To the right in the middle distance is the Brandenburg Gate, subject of my first chapter. Behind it is the Reichstag, the subject of my last chapter. In the foreground is the Holocaust Memorial, which commemorates events discussed in the later sections of the book. These three monuments and their meanings together convey much of modern Germany’s unique attempt to wrestle with its historical inheritance and its complex and changing memories.

1 The view from the Gate

If the modern state of Germany can be said to have a village green on which communal events are marked and celebrated, then it is the area around the Brandenburg Gate. It has long been Berlin’s preferred setting for the city’s meetings and rallies, but since the reunification of the two Germanys, the severe neo-classical gateway has become the natural backdrop to all great national events.

Professor Monika Grütters, the German Federal Minister of Culture, says:

‘It is the national monument. There is no other that can compete with it. It is of course the symbol of the Berlin Wall, of a world divided into East and West. And it is at the same time the symbol of the fall of that Wall and of liberty regained. It stands for the division of Germany, and the division of the world, into two blocs: two ideas of society. It reminds us of the loss of freedom; but it is in itself also the great symbol of freedom regained. It is the national and the international monument of freedom and unity.’

Monika Grütters is talking about the meanings that all across the world have attached to the Brandenburg Gate since the Wall fell twenty-five years ago, but the history of the Gate, its own experiences and its far-reaching associations, go back ten times longer than that.

Originally the site of one of a number of gates around Berlin, at which customs dues were collected from goods wagons entering the city, it was rebuilt in the 1780s on the orders of the Prussian king, Frederick William II, to a grand neo-classical design by C. G. Langhans. Based on the gateway to the Acropolis, it was conceived as a monument to peace, and it was one of the first architectural signals that Berlin – which under Frederick the Great had acquired a magnificent library, opera house and other similar institutions (see Chapter 30) – now felt entitled to proclaim itself a cultural and intellectual city in the Athenian tradition.

The Brandenburg Gate stands at the western end of the long avenue Unter den Linden (Under the Lime Trees), which, rather like the Champs-Elysées in Paris, runs from the edge of the city down to its very heart. At the end of the avenue, closing the vista, was the Stadtschloss, the palace of the Hohenzollern kings. Some time after the Gate was built, a bronze figure of Victory, her chariot drawn by four horses, was placed on top, giving it the appearance of a triumphal arch.

The Hohenzollern Stadtschloss, 1700–1950

The first person actually to use it for a triumphal entry was not, however, the King of Prussia, but Napoleon Bonaparte. After the defeat of Austria at the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, the only German state still offering serious resistance to the invader was Prussia. But on 14 October of the following year, Napoleon humiliatingly routed the Prussian army at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt. Two weeks later, on 27 October 1806, the French emperor entered Berlin in triumph, leading his troops through the Brandenburg Gate, marching them down Unter den Linden towards the palace of the king. The royal family fled to the eastern city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), where they began to plan Prussia’s survival and recovery. Berlin was abandoned to French occupation. Napoleon, eager to demonstrate that his authority was now absolute and the Prussian king powerless in his own capital, removed the bronze quadriga from the top of the Gate and carried it away as a trophy, to be exhibited as war booty in Paris. For eight years the Brandenburg Gate was without its crowning sculpture.

Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Berlin, at the Brandenburg Gate, 1806

In Königsberg the king and his advisers effected a complete reordering of the Prussian state, enabling it ultimately to take the leading part in resisting and expelling the French. In 1813, Prussian and Russian troops together forced Napoleon out of Berlin, and pursued him and his army all the way to Paris. In 1814, to scenes of public jubilation, the quadriga returned to the Brandenburg Gate. It was, however, modified before being reinstated. In the bronze chariot you see today, the statue of Victory is accompanied by the Prussian eagle, and her lance proudly bears the Iron Cross (see Chapter 14), the decoration awarded by the King of Prussia to those who had fought with valour against the French invader. The chariot makes clear that Napoleon had been defeated by a Germany which his invasion had largely created. The Gate had become a Prussian triumphal arch.

The Brandenburg Gate is not just a monument to which history has added layers of meaning. It is also a remarkable standpoint from which to view some of the key moments in German history. In fact, from this place alone, you can see evidence not just of the Napoleonic Wars, but of many other great events that have shaped the German national memory.

If you turn west and look along the broad avenue that leads to the royal palace at Charlottenburg, you see another figure of Victory, this time gilded and alone, standing on top of the 200-foot-high Siegessäule (Victory Column), designed in 1864 to celebrate the Prussian victory over Denmark, which began the process of German unification. By the time it was finished, Prussia had also trounced the Austrians in 1866 and defeated the French in 1870 and the base was decorated accordingly to mark the triple triumph. Under Bismarck’s guidance, the King of Prussia had become the German emperor, head of a united Germany which was the leading industrial and military power on the continent. The Victory Column’s inauguration in 1873 signalled Berlin’s new role in Europe and the world. In 1945 the French insisted on the removal of the sculpted plaques showing their defeat, but the column is otherwise broadly as intended, and still speaks today of the confident optimism of Berlin in the 1870s.

The Siegessäule, by Heinrich Strack, 1864–73

You could say that the westward view from the Brandenburg Gate is a view of Germany’s place in the world as it actually was between 1870 and 1914. If things had gone as Hitler and Albert Speer had planned, the view north in the late 1940s would have shown their idea of what that place ought to be. Speer, Hitler’s cherished architect, designed a colossal Volkshalle, a Hall of the People. An enormous dome, over 1,000 feet high, crowned the assembly room in which 180,000 people could gather to listen to the Führer. It would have dwarfed completely the nearby Reich-stag, and been an uncomfortable, megalomaniac neighbour to the Brandenburg Gate, itself a favourite site for Nazi marches and rallies. It is a strange experience, to stand on the spot from which you would have seen Speer’s dome, had history turned out differently, and from which if you turn south, you can today see the approaches to the Holocaust Memorial.

Albert Speer’s model for the Third Reich’s giant Hall of the People, with the Brandenburg Gate in the foreground

But the views west, north or south from the Brandenburg Gate were always intended to be secondary. In a virtuoso piece of urban scenography it was the view east that mattered, down Unter den Linden, past Frederick the Great’s library and opera house, and on to the end of the vista and the Stadtschloss. The Schloss, a huge baroque city-palace, was completed around 1700 and effectively designed to make one great statement: after seventy years of turmoil, in spite of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), in spite of Swedish invasion (in the 1670s), Brandenburg – the modest state of which Berlin was the capital – had not only survived, but had emerged as a serious European power.

Its survival was remarkable. It is reckoned that in the 1630s the urban population of Brandenburg declined from 113,500 to 34,000, while its rural inhabitants fell from 300,000 to 75,000. Something like three quarters of the population had died or fled. After the war, the position in both town and country was stabilized and prosperity slowly began to return. In the 1670s the Swedes, the great military power of northern Europe, had invaded again, in alliance with the French. The then Elector of Brandenburg, known to history as the Great Elector, had brilliantly outmanoeuvred and defeated them. In a pleasing twist of political and economic revenge, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and expelled the Protestants from France in 1685, many of the most educated and most skilled of the Huguenots came to work in, and to enrich, Berlin. Among them were some of the craftsmen who shaped and embellished the palace. The Stadtschloss told the world that you did not mess with Brandenburg.

But as you look down Unter den Linden today, you can’t see it. Badly damaged by bombing, it survived the Second World War, and could well have been rebuilt. The Soviet authorities decided instead to bulldoze the Hohenzollern Schloss, which they regarded as the physical symbol of a Prussian militarism that they now had the opportunity to annihilate. Only one small part of it was preserved – the balcony from which, on 9 November 1918, the Communist Karl Liebknecht had proclaimed the Free Socialist Republic of Germany, an attempt to create a Communist state which was rapidly crushed (see Chapter 22).

On the site of the old royal palace, the government of the German Democratic Republic built the new, modernist Palast der Republik, a steel structure clad in bronzed mirror-glass that was the seat of the People’s Chamber and a centre for cultural and leisure activities until the GDR ended in 1990. But today you can’t see that either. In the years after reunification there was intense debate about the proper future of the Palast der Republik in a new reunited Berlin, now that the people’s representatives sat once again in the pan-German Reichstag. By 2008 the Palast der Republik had been demolished, allegedly because asbestos made it unfit for future use. With it disappeared many of the happier memories of old East Berlin. Its steel skeleton was sold and used to build the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

The Palast der Republik of the GDR, 1973/6–2008, on the site of the former Schloss

Thus from the Brandenburg Gate today you can admire neither the triumph of the Great Elector nor the Socialist achievement of the German Democratic Republic. The historic vista now ends on a building site, where a reconstruction of the old Stadtschloss is rapidly taking shape (see Chapter 30). Behind it, though, still stands the other great monument of East Berlin, the thousand-foot-high Alexanderturm, a hi-tech telecommunications tower of the late 1960s designed to be unmissably visible in West Berlin and to broadcast, in every sense, the virtues of the Socialist state. Still one of the tallest buildings in Germany, it dominates the skyline across the city. Just below its summit is a spherical operations centre with the inevitable revolving restaurant. But that is not the reason why the Alexanderturm has become part of Berlin’s world of memories. By a quirk of geometry and reflection, whenever the sun shone, there appeared on the sphere a large incandescent cross – it still appears today and draws ironic smiles from the spectators at the Brandenburg Gate who remember the frustration and embarrassment the cross caused the atheist authorities in the GDR – it was quickly dubbed ‘the Pope’s revenge’.

The Alexanderturm, by Hermann Henselmann and Gerhard Kosel, operational 1969

Knocked about in the war, the Brandenburg Gate was patched up and repaired by the occupying authorities. Situated right on the boundary between the Western and Eastern zones (and later between the two states), it was one of the authorized crossing points. As in the eighteenth century, it again became an entrance to Berlin, taking on a particular, charged, significance as a place for demonstrations. In 1953 it was the scene of the first major rebellion against Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, as tens of thousands of striking workers called for free elections and tore down the red flag flying over it. The unrest was put down by Soviet tanks. On 14 August 1961, one day after the building of the Wall began, West Berliners gathered on the other side of the Gate to protest against the erection of the Wall and the division of their city. Using these demonstrations as a pretext, the East German authorities closed the checkpoint there ‘until further notice’. For twenty-eight years the Gate became a barrier. It did not reopen until 22 December 1989, when the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, walked through it to be greeted by the East German Prime Minister, Hans Modrow. There is no building or site that speaks so powerfully to Germans everywhere of the division and the reunification of their country.

Reunification medal by Erich Ott, 1989. The prison bars on one side turn into the Brandenburg Gate on the other. The prison side carries the title of the German national anthem: ‘Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit’ (‘Unity and Justice and Freedom’).

Since reunification, the Brandenburg Gate has once again been renovated and is now at the centre of a pedestrianized zone, the gathering point of choice for celebrations of all sorts. And in the summer of 2014 it was once again used for a triumphal entry into the city – not by a French invader, but by the German football team, returning victorious from the World Cup in Brazil.

World Cup celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate, June 2014

In the next chapter I shall be going down Unter den Linden towards the east, to explore some of the memories of the Cold War division of Germany. It was so effective and profound that those who lived in East and West have few memories in common. What all do remember is the difficulty of travelling from one Germany to the other and the price paid by those who tried to do so without authorization.

Neil MacGregor

GERMANY

Memories of a Nation

ALLEN LANE

Contents

THE BEGINNING

Introduction:
Monuments and memories

Part One

WHERE IS GERMANY?

1

The view from the Gate

Neil MacGregor

GERMANY

Memories of a Nation

ALLEN LANE

Contents

THE BEGINNING

Introduction:Monuments and memories

Part One

WHERE IS GERMANY?

1

The view from the Gate

Introduction:
Monuments and memories