Praising grown-up Germany in the age of Brexit

Why the Germans Do it Better

John Kampfner

 

Atlantic Books

 

If you wanted to create a more provocative title, then it’s hard to see how you could better than that for this volume, which was published late last year.

 

It will inflame hardcore, Brexit-loving exceptionalists (never a bad thing), but it also won't be particularly popular with most Germans.

The latter group does not generally want to view its country in such terms: where the past lies so heavy, nationalistic bragging is out of the question for the majority.

Rather, there is continued reflection and concern – a situation not seen in the UK, where a loud minority feels free to howl some sort of superiority and, as Iain Duncan Smith did in January, at the end of the Brexit transition period, to hail the opportunity for Britain to “dominate” the world once more.

How Christ-like can you be? And I only ask the question, since IDS is supposedly a Christian.

So the history of the UK remains largely unfaced, to be seen only as one long, glorious victory. Raising the issues of statues to slavers is, for the right-wing elements of the press, 'woke’ and, of course 'cancel culture’.

But for author John Kampfner, it has, since the end of WWII, punched above its weight morally and ethically – and therefore, it’s not difficult to see why this is a legitimate suggestion.

 

It’s actually worth stepping back a bit to start with, noting that Kampfner is the son of a Jewish father who escaped eastwards from the Nazis, where he met the author’s English Protestant mother, who was a nurse in Singapore, where he himself was born.

 

Kampfner’s own CV is seriously impressive: he has worked as a journalist for Reuters, The Telegraph (initially in East Berlin), the FT, the BBC, and has been the editor of the New Statesman and current affairs editor of the British Society of Magazine Editors.

 

In other words, we can fairly approach this work without assuming an impinging and overriding personal/political ideology.

 

It is a fascinating book, combining elements of memoir, interview, data, history and lots more.

 

From a personal perspective and as a Germanophile myself, I am probably far better read on German history than the overwhelming majority of my compatriots. Indeed, I was whooping out loud when Kampfner described the lack of German history beyond 1933-1945 being represented in most British bookshops.

 

For a couple of decades now, that has been a way in which I judge a bookshop. I am not alone.

 

However, butting into this, I would take issue with Kampfner’s simplistic comparison of Prussia with Nazism. If you want to read more on that, then I can never recommend Christopher Clark’s superb Iron Kingdom highly enough. To be fair, I'd say read it anyway – it's the best history I've read.

I would suggest that he equally wrong on the green movement in Germany – in terms of timing. As Günter Grass’s 1986 novel The Rat illustrates, Germans were first spurred into action on the environment by realising that their forests were dying because of acid rain. And for Germans, forests are a massively important issue – as Kampfner does point out fleetingly.

He also stresses that, in Germany, free issues are not just the preserve of the political left. The environment has brought many together, including conservatives – hence the electoral success of the German greens. 

However, for all my pickiness, this is a brilliant volume in so many ways. If you sit anywhere to the left of centre – and frankly, I think that many of those on the right of centre would feel the same – this is actually a clarion call for conservatism. Note the small ‘c’. And it's not a bad vision or, in Germany, reality.

 

There are many things I recognised – as well as many that were new to me – and also many that I found myself longing for.

 

Kampfner is very good on the social market and, while it’s briefer in terms of pages, he’s even better on Germany’s verein – the clubs. Apparently, Germany expects all citizens to be part of community organisations. Reading this section, I found myself longing for such a sense of community in the UK.

 

I recall a boat trip around Lübeck on a Sunday morning and seeing all the local boating clubs active. And other individuals out waking and running and running and more.

 

Nothing since has suggested to me that Germans have it, in essence, wrong – and this book provides the facts to back this up.

Kampfner is not simply rosy-tinted about his subject – he see its faults and sets them down clearly. But even while admitting to being “more of a child of Thatcher” than he would have imagined, in his impatience with the German way of doing things economically, he now points to how the country has largely stuck to its beliefs on the social market – even as many other countries now start to make at least noises about the importance of community etc.

It’s clear that Germany is aided in being more ‘grown up’ by having none of the distrust and dislike of intellectual activity that is particularly rife in English life. He describes how Angela Merkel loves to discuss high culture – and contrasts that to David Cameron, who was embarrassed to admit, at a dinner with the Kanzellor, that he just watched telly when off duty.

As Kampfner goes on, it’s a perfect was to illustrate how a liking for high culture is generally disparaged in the UK as elitist etc – where the situation in Germany is quite different (the number of small towns in Germany with opera houses is a succinct illustration of this).

But then again, German conservatism is ‘girly swot’ Merkel and here, it’s Boris Johnson and his rabble of an untalented Cabinet that happily trashes ‘experts’ at the first opportunity.

In the age of Brexit and Johnson, Kampfner’s book is an important read and corrective.

A tin drum signifying nothing very much

Günter Grass’s Nobel-cited 1959 debut novel, The Tin Drum, is a sprawling monster of a book – published as three books in one and in reality, pretty much two books. By turns epic, tragic and comic, disturbing and fantastical, anyone hoping to stage something under its name will have their work cut out.

Carl Grose decided to attempt precisely that for Cornish theatre company, Kneehigh. Staged in conjunction with the West Yorkshire Playhouse and Liverpool’s Everyman, it has been touring since October and, on the final leg of that tour, is playing at Shoreditch Town Hall in Hackney until this Saturday.

It would be as absurd to imagine that anyone could cram the entire book into a show of under three hours as to expect to see a literalist interpretation. It’s easy to realise that a range of performance styles – puppetry, song, dance, burlesqueue, cabaret etc – could be employed in such an Herculean task.

Perhaps precisely because one can see the potential, it’s particularly disappointing that this misses the mark by some considerable way.

The obvious problems are clear – and have been evident (and noted) since it opened in a different venue, but have not apparently taken on board. Many of the lyrics cannot be heard because the music is far too loud – it’s amped up to a ridiculous level. And since there so much ‘music,’ it would have been nice if Charles Hazlewood’s score had at least some variety or discernible quality. As things stand, it is largely an exercise in homogenised noise with a thumping bass.

The puppet Oskar has much going for it – an eerie quality, certainly – but the use of different actors to voice the boy who won’t grow up, miked and often from quite a physical distance, doesn’t help. This also ensures that he comes across as a sort of demon child who is utterly unsympathetic. But being able to have sympathy with Oskar is important, because it draws us in. It is part of showing us how easy it is to fall for the extremism – how easy it is to become complicit – and how we must take responsibility.

Without that, Grass’s lesson is nowhere near as powerful.

Grose decided to strip the story away from its time and place, telling us at the start that this could be about “any war”. So what is acted out before us could be the Balkans, it could be Syria, it could be Yemen. His text emphasises the idea of tribalism creating conflict and that we’re really all both different and the same – ‘viva complexity’. That’s all well and good, yet in having Sigismund Markus, the kindly Jewish toymaker, be targeted for being a Pole rather than a Jew, he rids what is served up of any specific comment on anti-semitism.

In a world where a far-right poster boy like Nigel Farage can feel confident enough to use his LBC radio show to talk of a “Jewish lobby” in the US, this is not a matter of polite semantics.

When Alfred Matzerath dies, it is no longer by swallowing his Nazi badge in an effort to avoid detection by Soviet troops – as clear a metaphor for falling for extremist rhetoric as anyone could come up with – but in gunfire. 

The Nazis have here become the ‘Order’ and could have dropped straight out of something by Mel Brooks – ‘Hitler’ is a Lady Gagaesque figure whose salute becomes a sort of voguing as she belts out something or other to more of Hazelwood’s monotone faux rock.

Grose was always going to have to substantially trim his source material, but in the context of the apparent aim of highlighting current global tensions and making a general anti-racist statement, his concentration of such a vast amount of stage time on the love triangle that is Oskar’s family background seems oddly unbalanced – not least as decisions noted above mean that the Nazi threat is frankly reduced.

If the music is rather one note, then the pace of the performance feels the same. There are good ideas on display (the chase Oskar’s grandfather leads the police is very clever) and some good performances from the ensemble cast, but greater variety of pace might also help move this from being a whirling – wearying – experience to one that actually engages the emotions.

At the present, it singularly fails to do that. This is a tin drum beating nothing more than sound and fury, signifying nothing very much at all.

shoreditchtownhall.com

A Meistersinger with plenty to feast on

Ending of Act II

One of the things that makes good art great is its endurance and its openness to reinterpretation down the years: that whatever the apparent subject, it is never just about that.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is such a beast. Weighing in at four and a half hours of music –divided here by two intervals of 35 minutes apiece, allowing audience members the time to unpack the Tupperware and enjoy a leisurely picnic – it might be Wagner’s one mature comedy, but that should not be read as suggesting it lacks intellectual meat.

Indeed, one of the pleasures in watching is in noting the themes – and also how the production works with (or against) them.

The downside with such works is that they can also be open to people attempting to foist interpretations on them.

In the case of Meistersinger, there has been a determined effort by some to suggest that Beckmesser is an anti-Semitic character (who has to be defeated by an Aryan).

Nobody has ever been able to concretely prove that any character in one of Wagner’s operas is Jewish. Wagner’s anti-Semitism is a well-known fact, but that doesn’t mean that his dramas are filled with anti-Jewish tropes. 

Here, the name of Sixtus Beckmesser is thoroughly German and what he quite clearly is is Wagner’s Malvolio, right down to the thin-soled shoes he has badgered Hans Sachs to finish being his yellow stockings, cross gartered.

Why does he have to suffer defeat and humiliation? Because he’s a jealous snob; a petty guard of the petty rules that govern the Meistersingers’ guild – the sorts of rules and attitudes toward art that Wagner himself railed and reacted against.

Further, he has the temerity to imagine that he would be a suitable match for the much younger Eva, who has been promised to the winning Meistersinger at the city’s midsummer festival. The widower Sachs has the decency, self-awareness and basic humanity to know he’s too old for her, even though the idea is not unattractive.

But Wagner is not quite so simplistic: while Sachs comes to see the limits of the rules, he doesn’t represent artistic anarchy, but wants to find an equilibrium between tradition and moving forward.

The idea of wahn – one of those German words that contains a whole philosophical concept; in this case, meaning far more than simple ‘madness’ as it is literally translated – permeates Sachs’s (and Wagner’s) fears, yet it can be a positive force in creativity. The conflict between strict rules/convention and artistic evolution reflects similar tensions in the wider world between the status quo and change. We all face this and most of us probably take comfort in what of the former suits us and believe only in limited change. Thus understanding Sachs’s fears and dilemma is not difficult.

However, when he pays homage to tradition in the final act, it is often considered a difficult piece of nationalistic fervour. 

But historical context means a lot. When it was penned in the 1860s, Germany was on the cusp of becoming a reality, offering its peoples an increased security in the face of competing and established nationalisms from east and west in particular. It is easy now to forget that nationalism was not considered inherently negative in the 19th century: specifically, we don’t consider Italy’s move toward nationhood at the same time as anywhere near so problematic. German nationalism of the same period, though, has come to be viewed through the prism of what happened decades later and is thus treated as unique.

And it’s hardly as if we in the UK don’t like more than a spot of wildly bombastic pomp and circumstance – and not just at the Last Night of the Proms.

Hans Sachs and Sixtus Beckermesser

It’s also worth remembering that while Wagner himself might have been a nationalist in ways we think of today, he was also anti-militaristic and anti-imperialistic: today’s definition of nationalism usually includes militarism and, at a time when the UK government is planning ‘empire 2’, some on these islands at least hanker for imperialism.

On a cultural level, German-language opera existed, but German composers such as Handel and Gluck had preferred Italian, just as the court of Frederick the Great spoke French – a point referenced in Sach’s hymn to German art. That’s the context for artists striving for a German voice in art.

Royal Opera House director of opera Kasper Holten leaves the job with this new production. And it has left some to grumble – not least about how he’s changed the ending. But then, isn’t breaking the rules what this is all about?

Here, after Walther is accepted into the meistersingers’ guild and, in turn, accepts that, rather than fall into his arms, Eva storms off – presumably angered by his apparent rejection of rebelling against the rules and/or his acquiescence with the nationalism most usually perceived.

It does no damage to the whole, however you look at it.

Mia Stensgaard’s set has come in for criticism too – particularly in the second act, where something more pastoral might be welcome. This is certainly a point.

We start with something like a vaguely Deco series of boxes; angles everywhere, with staircases that go nowhere and a door like the aperture of a camera. It could remind one of Escher’s nightmarishly impossible architecture and indeed, at the climax of the second act, it becomes a nightmare. In a clever move, it only really resolves to full symmetrical neatness in the final act.

In between, during probably the slowest revolve in theatrical history, we see the back of the main set, rigged out as though it were backstage. But as Sachs plots to turn the madness to sanity, it also sees him ‘outside’ the world of which he has been such a part; a clique; an elite with its endless rules that help to preserve that elite.

Resolving the issues is what allows him to return inside, but only as he also helps to at least partially break the strangulating hold on artistic freedom. This is like Wagner’s personal manifesto – as is Sachs’s belief in democratising art by calling for the meistersinger to be chosen by popular vote and even his own determination to match words and music completely, which Sachs mentions in the libretto.

Dress is modern and includes nods to modern elites such as masons – the production poster adds business/City types as another elite.

It’s been noted that Walther is dressed scruffily, with a rock ‘n’ roll t-shirt – unfitting for a noble. But actually, it fits perfectly: the artisans in the guild are the ones for whom such things as appearance are central to their cultivation of their own sense of being an elite. An aristocrat has no need of such symbols because he’s already a member of a ‘real’ elite – though there is irony to his being the one trying to break into a very different sort of establishment.

Sachs, Eva and Walther

If Meistersinger, lacking the sturm und drang impact of Wagner’s great Romantic works, never quite hits the emotionally devastating notes of, say, the last minutes of Tristan und Isolde, it is perhaps his most consistently beautiful and melodic score.

The orchestra was in fine form under Antonio Pappano, if a tad too loud during some of the conversational moments.

Bryn Terfel might not be quite the baritone he was a few years ago, but his is an easy charisma and he brings a straightforward honesty to Sachs that is perfect for the role.

Johannes Martin Kränzle as Beckmesser deals with the comic elements delightfully, while Gwyn Hughes Jones as Walther and Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Eva, and Allan Clayton and Hanna Hipp and Sachs’s apprentice David and Eva’s maid Magdalene, all give fine performances.

The ending, with two choruses cramming the stage, is a theatrical barnstormer. The music resolves as it does at the end of the overture – and a glorious resolution it is too.

Meistersinger is a comedy in the same way that the likes of Twelfth Night is: there are laughs and chuckles, but there is much more to take away when the final chord has sounded.

Wooden it be nice?

Nature's own sculpture

Not only do I not fly very often (thankfully), but it seems to have been a very long time since I sat next to an airplane window, in daylight, on a clear day.

But that happened when we flew back to the UK from Germany last week. And as we headed north west, the world below offered further evidence of something I’ve been aware of for a few years now: German towns and villages are never far from woods and forests.

Not only are forests at the heart of the German psyche, but it’s also reflected in the country’s love of wood as a material – and in particular, as a vehicle for art.

My maternal grandparents visited the Alpine region in the years after WWII and brought back a few small pieces, which my mother still has. So I’ve been familiar for years with the angular planes of wood on a carved mountain goat.

In 2000, my own parents went to Germany – the trip was my father’s retirement gift from his parishioners, and included tickets for the Oberammergau Passion Play.

They brought me back a pair of carved edelweiss flowers and a man with lantern and donkey, which owes something to the sentimental style of porcelain Hummel figures (if memory serves, my mother has a couple of those stashed somewhere too).

The central part of the Holy Blood altarpiece

When we headed into Bavaria for the first time last year, I expected to see plenty of wood carving, but in the event, the only obvious thing to be seen was cuckoo clocks.

This was not a trip where we were able to spend any time wandering in woods, but one of the specific things that we had penned in to do was to visit the Jakobskirche for some rather more polished wood.

The city’s main church, it’s Lutheran, although part of the many official pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.

Built between 1311 and 1484, in 1525, the church saw the peasant leader Florian Geyer (a Franconian noble) read aloud the articles of the revolting peasants during the German Peasant’s War.

But if you climb up the stairs to a gallery behind the vast organ, you’ll find a Holy Blood altarpiece, carved by Tilman Riemenschneider between 1500-1505.

The raw material

Riemenschneider has been dubbed ‘Germany’s Michelangelo’ and his work is always worth seeing. This is one of his seminal pieces – Andrew Graham-Dixon goes into some detail about in in his TV series, The Art of Germany. The artist’s ability to create highly realistic faces that seemed to have an inner life puts him head and shoulders above many others.

The church is also home to a high altar created in 1466 by Friedrich Herlin, a pupil of Rogier van der Weyden, but the Riemenschneider is the undoubted star here.

Flanked by two relief panels showing scenes from the Easter story, the central section of the altarpiece is a vast, 3D representation of the Last Supper. But what lends this version so much power is the figure of a disciple looking away from Christ and down toward us. As Graham-Dixon explained, it is a direct challenge to anyone looking at it.

Art historian Kenneth Clark considered that Riemenschneider’s works showed an idea of German piety in the 15th century and were harbingers of the coming Reformation.

Wooden woodsman and mushroom

The challenge created by the disciple breaking through the fourth wall (in effect) is a personal one that can be seen as indicative of the ideas of a personal relationship with God that would develop.

Away from religion, we did spot one or two wood carvings – although one small shop was still closed for the winter.

But I did find a small woodsman, which has now safely made the journey back to London, where he’s joined by a small wooden mushroom, which I was charged just €1 for, after the woman in the shop we were in was so delighted by The Other Half making a substantial Christmas decoration purchase.

However, aside from wooden Christmas decorations that were purchased away from Käthe Wohlfahrt, Germany’s biggest Christmas decoration manufacturer, which has its headquarters in Rothenburg, together with a number of shops and a Christmas museum.

One visit convinced us that it is grossly overpriced and nowhere near the best quality around. Indeed, the owner of one independent shop told us that the company, via marriage, was effectively in Japanese hands and that Japanese tourists expect things to be expensive as a guarantee of quality.

Nature and time, wrought in wood

What we did come away with – well, what I insisted on coming away with – was a cuckoo clock: a genuine, hand-made one from the Black Forest (which isn’t that far away).

I picked the smallest one I could find; not one made to look like a chalet; with no painting on it. Not only is it made from wood – the traditional design reflects the woods and forests.

Back in London, I took my time getting it out of the box and mounting it on the wall. There is something ridiculously fascinating, in these technological times, in having something that requires no batteries or plugs – it’s almost a revelation that leaves you wondering how anything can work without that confounded electrickery.

It delights me that it’s properly hand made; that when you open the back, the inside reveals once more how it not mass produced. It is, then, thus evidence that real craftsmanship has not been lost.

It’s hardly a Riemenschneider, but it is an authentic piece of Germany in its own way, and in an era of  smart this and smart that, it’s a real pleasure to have.

In search of the world of the Brothers Grimm

The iconic Plönlein

The tour party flowed into the town square, streaming past their guide, leaving him standing rather lamely on the cobbles holding aloft a little paddle so they wouldn’t get lost; a 21st-century pied piper whose tune had – temporarily at least – lost its power.

There would be little time to see much. If they were quick, they’d be able to snap off a couple of selfies on Plönlein, where the road splits in two and exits the old city through different gates, and in the square itself, where the Rathaus stands on one long side and two large, half-timbered buildings make a perfect medieval corner.

It is doubtful that they would be able to make it into the Jakobskirche to see the wondrous wooden altarpiece by Germany’s Michelangelo, but there would doubtless be the opportunity to nip into one of the town’s many Käthe Wohlfahrt shops to pick up some extremely overpriced Christmas decorations as a souvenir as an arranged part of their trip, before heading back to the coach and the next stop on their whistlestop tour of Germany or Europe ...

Market place – Rathaus to the right

Such tourists bemuse me: it’s the same as with people in galleries, taking selfies in front of famous paintings – what do they honestly get out of it?

There may be a reason that Plönlein comes up as the main result in a Google image search for Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

You could be forgiven for imagining that it was the main (if not only) medieval vista in the old city. But to find some of the others, you have to scroll down further on that search – and you need to spend longer in the city itself than a coach visit will allow.

US travel writer Rick Steves has noted that, while millions visit Rothenburg, far, far fewer spend even a single night in the city.

For those who do, the benefits are obvious: whatever time of the year, after the tour guides pipe their charges back aboard buses, the city is yours as the sun falls.

Steves says that, after dark, you can almost feel the past. I beg to differ, but only ever so slightly: there were moments in the daytime when the centuries seemed to spin past, leaving me almost dizzy with a sense of times long gone.

Markusturm – complete with storks' next

Rothenburg ob der Tauber – there are other Rothenburgs, so its relationship to the river Tauber is important – is somewhat on the old side.

A prosperous, independent city state, it was besieged during first the Peasants’ War and then the Thirty Years’ War, before a subsequent burst of the Black Death effectively halted its development, leaving us with the most perfectly intact medieval city anywhere.

‘Rediscovered’ in the 19th century and, in the 1930s, it was raised by the Nazis to a semi-religious level as a perfect, idealised German town.

In 1945, bombing did much damage, but it was spared worse when the German commander defied Hitler’s orders and accepted a US army promise that surrender would spare the city.

It is one stop on Germany’s Romantic Road, a 350km route through the forests and mountains of Baden-Würtemburg and Bavaria.

Starting in Würzburg, it ends in Füssen, where we spent a few pleasant days last March, walking in the Alps and visiting Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein – a visit that had led directly to this one.

Old bridge

We left London early on a Thursday evening, and spent the night comfortably in a hotel at Stuttgart airport before setting off the following morning by train – first to central Stuttgart and then, from there, to Bavaria and Rothenburg ob der Tauber itself, via three trains.

Our hotel was in the centre of the old city, just above an ancient gate leading to a park and, after unpacking as rapidly as possible, we set off for a first orientation.

It’s impossible not to be instantly struck by the city. Plönlein actually feels rather understated in medieval terms, such are the other sights to be encountered, but in general, this is like walking through a fairy tale.

Hardly surprising, indeed, that MGM’s Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was filmed here in 1961, while the village scenes in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were also shot in its streets.

A view from the city walls

The latter, incidentally, also saw filming at Neuschwanstein, adding another sense of continuum to this trip.

If Neuschwanstein gave Disney the template for its castle, then Rothenburg gave Hollywood as a whole an architectural aesthetic for fairy tales.

The half-timbered, slanting, sloping, tiled buildings are what you expect. You’ve seen it all before before – on a small or a big screen – but wandering around, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is no theme park, but a real, living town, full of real, living people.

The Markusturm is one of the city’s gates, surrounded by half-timbered buildings in bright colours. Perched atop an adjoining roof is what looks to be a metal wheel, lying horizontally.

Burgator, leading from the garden to the city

In fact, it’s a frame for a stork’s nest: these huge birds have returned to the area in recent years and a couple of days before our arrival, a pair had just returned from their winter sojourn to Africa, triggering excitement among local people.

The previous year, “Mr and Mrs Stork” had produced four chicks, to the evident delight of the community. Another nest, opposite our hotel room, was still awaiting birds when we departed, but the sight of the birds taking off and returning to their nest at the Markusturm could only add to the magical sense of the place.

Anyway, after that initial stroll into the past, our first night’s repast in Rothenburg saw us dine at an old tavern, filled with local people and with a waitress dressed in a dirndl, serving properly hearty German food.

For me, that was a piece of pork shoulder, flaking off the bone and accompanied by red cabbage, gravy and potato dumplings, with a dunkel (dark beer) on the side.

And then we slept in the peace of our centuries-old hotel, dreaming the dreams of fairytales all around us.