'Germany - memories of a nation'

I've been signed off work while recovering from surgery. So with time hanging heavy on the sofa, I went to the iPlayer and downloaded all 30 of Neil MacGregor's programmes on Germany - Memories of a Nation. The series ended yesterday, and inspired me to blog about the part Germany has played in my own life. 

I've no hesitation in saying that this series has been among the very best radio listening this year. BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and the World Service all give me huge enjoyment each day, so that's a big claim to make. Neil MacGregor is a consummate radio performer - suave, authoritative, interesting, personable, and with just the right degree of tentativeness in his judgments that makes you want to go on thinking about what he has said. Whether it is the Holy Roman Empire, Dürer's engravings, the death camps, hyper-inflation or beer and sausages, he has the gift of a born educator which is to make us curious. I hate to invoke what's rapidly becoming a cliché, but it does seem to me that he is something of a national treasure.

So what do I take away from these excellent programmes? Here are three (tentative) observations about Germany that have been taking shape in my mind as I've been listening. 

First, the infinite capacity of the German people for invention. I guess that what inspired MacGregor to embark on this series was the endless creativity of Germans in the arts, whether it is literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, music or performance art. Most of the 'objects' which act as focal points of the German story are art-works of various kinds: the coins of the Hanseatic city-state of Hamburg, the imagery on Weimar bank notes, a painting of Goethe, Gutenburg's Bible, Ludwig of Bavaria's Valhalla presiding over the Danube, the exquisite sculptures of Riemenschneider and Barlach, the Meissen porcelain hippopotamus, Bauhaus design, even the Volkswagen. The list is endless. Add to that a soundtrack drawing on German music from Bach to Weill and you have a true Gesamtkunstwerk, a 'complete art work' that embraces virtually all that human creativity is capable of. 

Of course, Germany is not unique in this respect. The same could be said of France, Italy, Spain, Britain and the Americas, not to mention the great civilisations of the Middle and Far East. We shouldn't try to evaluate the cultural achievements of one people against another. This was precisely the mistake Germany made under the Third Reich in its mindless pursuit of Wagner's 'holy German art' and its purge of all that the Nazis reckoned to be 'unGerman'. MacGregor quotes Heine's prescient saying, 'where today they burn books, tomorrow they burn people': what other people has ever treated its own heritage so callously? But no one is going to deny that the contribution of German-speaking peoples to the world's cultural legacy has been immense. Without it, we would be immeasurably the poorer. 

My second observation is perhaps a special case of the first. It's the German propensity for myth-making. It takes a certain kind of mentality to invent stories about your people that turn out to be pervasive and formative. In this, the Germans have been past masters. I'm thinking of how, after the collapse of Roman civilisation in Northern Europe, it was a 'German' (yes, I know it's an anachronism to use that word) who reinvented the idea of a people united under a single figurehead and bound to one another by common values and traditions. Charlemagne, or Karl der Gross (depending on whether you tell the story the French or the German way) created the notion of a Holy Roman Empire that gave identity and meaning to the disparate Allemanic world for more than a thousand years. His coronation at Aachen in 800AD launched a myth that even today has not lost its potency. 

This was just the beginning. In his turn, Luther's Bible helped fix the German language into a vehicle that could articulate the voice of a whole people, just as Shakespeare and the King James Bible did for England. The poetry of Goethe, the paintings of Kaspar David Friedrich and the folk-tales collected by the Brothers Grimm helped create the romantic idea of Gemany as a mythical northern land of forests, mountains, light, shadow and far horizons. Next came Bismarck whose Prussian determination forged the new myth of a United Germany, fought for with 'iron and blood', 'Deutschland über alles', meaning not world domination so much as putting 'Germany' as a nation above all other loyalties to region, state or locality. The Nazis' consummate myth-making about Aryan supremacy was only another iteration of a long series of imaginative re-inventions. Which is why, if I have a criticism of the series, I missed a programme about Wagner and his own capacity for mythologising, surely a key influence on the distorted vision of Hitler and the Third Reich.

My final observation is something I hadn't thought about before listening to these programmes. It's a throw-away remark MacGregor makes that while the public art of other nations celebrates their victories and honours their citizens' achievements, so much 20th century German art does the exact opposite. It memorialises shame, sorrow and defeat. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Topography of Terror where the SS once had their headquarters, Barlach's grieving soldiers in the war memorial at Magdeburg, Käthe Kollwitz's heart-searching etchings of bereaved mothers are among many Gedenkstätten where contemporary German art memorialises the tragedy of its own story. There is a strain of melancholia in the German psyche that is exactly captured in Dürer's famous etching of that name, and which perhaps helps explain the paradox of its people. If every nation has its archetypal flaw, perhaps this is Germany's. (It raises the question of what the British or French flaws might be.... Scope for another blog?)

I was especially struck by one programme that focused on the gate of Buchenwald concentration camp, the 'beech woods' where Goethe used to walk. The inscription says, not 'Arbeit Macht Frei' as at Auschwitz, but 'Jedem Das Seine', 'to each their own'. It's a Latin saying quoted by Luther; Bach wrote a cantata with that title. The elegant contemporary lettering was designed by Franz Ehrich, an inmate who had been a Bauhaus artist. This to me captured the paradox of Gemany: how a dark shadow falls even in places of inspiration and beauty; or put it the other way round, even in the terrible crucible of suffering and death that Nazi Germany became, the creative instinct could never be extinguished. Someone bothered to affirm the best a human being was capable of, an unconscious protest against all that diminished and demeaned.

Today, 25 years after the Iron Curtain was torn down and Germany became a united nation once again, there are still painful memories of a dark past to be healed. In this respect, I think Germany has found a language with which to acknowledge, 'own' and speak about its tragedy and shame in a way that France, with its own conflicted story of defeat, occupation, Nazi collaboration and anti-semitism has found much harder. Armistice Day can help us all to feel and remember, not just loyally but accurately. That MacGregor's fine series concluded at the Reichstag on the threshold of Remembrance weekend and the anniversary of German reunification is surely an intended part of the narrative. It has certainly made this listener think - and be grateful. 

Germany - memories of childhood

Neil MacGregor's wonderful 30-part BBC Radio 4 series Germany: Memories of a Nation came to an end today. 

Germany has always been part of my life. My very earliest childhood memories are of Germany in the early 1950s. As I've written before, my mother was born into a German Jewish family. She came to England as a refugee in 1938. After the war my parents needed to go back to Germany to sort out the family's affairs. I recall that on one of these trips we were in an attic room in some modest B&B. I was lying in a cot which tells you how young I must have been. Through the little window across the street was a church with a huge copper-green spire. Its two bells were tolling a semitone apart; to me even as an infant, the elemental sound somehow bore into my soul, seeming to be filled with both an ethereal beauty and a profound longing. 

The fact that my very first memory is both musical and religious makes me stop and think. Then I remember playing with toy cars and bulging pine cones on the rush floor under the tables of our Gasthaus restaurant. I could make out the tips of pine trees outside, so it was either the Harz Mountains or the Black Forest where I know from photographs we spent time. Another recollection is of the island of Nordeney in the North Sea. I was amazed and not a little alarmed by the artificial wave machine in the local swimming pool, my first experience of reliable German 'Vorsprung durch Technik'. 

My mixed parentage made me a European: the first five years of my life seemed happily suspended between two languages, histories and cultures. My mother had become a fluent English speaker as a nurse in London during the war, and my father learned German when he met her. So our home was bilingual: I'm told I spoke German with a distinct North-Rhine accent (my grandmother was from Cologne and my mother from Düsseldorf). I was read to and sung to in German as well as English. My father found German music stations on the immense wireless set that stood proudly in the corner of the living room and whose valves took many minutes to warm up and start buzzing and glowing. 

What was never spoken of (after all, I was under 5) was what my mother's family had undergone in Nazi Germany. I only gradually began to piece this together and even now am learning about aspects of it that I had not known before. The first stirrings of awareness happened when I went to school. I must have picked up early on that in 1955, a mere 10 years after the end of the war, it didn't do to be heard speaking German in the street. When I was collected at the school gate, I insisted that we always speak English. Soon I had dropped German altogether. I never quite lost an intuitive understanding of how the language works, but in adult life it felt as though I needed to learn it all over again - one of many regrets as I look back and think about what has been lost.

As a teenager I fell under the spell of France where I spent my gap year. The nearest I got to Germany was in its eastern province of Alsace where I worked for a few months near the beautiful city of Strasbourg. I lived with a Protestant family whose Grand' Maman could recall German and French battle lines drawn on opposite sides of the road in her village during the Great War. Alsace had been part of Germany following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, to be liberated and French again after 1918. The church services were mostly in German, and everyone spoke the local Alsatian patois, a Germanic dialect incomprehensible to all but the natives. In a land so fought-over, it was understandable that attitudes to Germany were ambiguous. Maybe, I reckoned, you could be a Francophile or a Germanophile, a Romantic or a Teuton but not both.

Since those days I have been back to Germany many times to preach and take part in events in the Rhineland, Bavaria, Dresden (in the days of the Democratic Republic), Berlin and on the Baltic Coast of Schleswig-Holstein. I began to re-connect with the country, acknowledge my roots, and recognise my debt to it for the way it has shaped so much of my life, often unconsciously. This hasn't always been easy when its history is so coloured by terror and shame. 20 years ago in Düsseldorf, I went to the Goethestrasse where my mother's family had lived. It is a street of fine 19th century villas, but where her house should have been, there was a gap. An allied bomb had scored a direct hit; now an unlovely block of flats had been built on the site. It was a painful discovery (though if by some miracle my mother had still been living there, that bomb would have seen to it that neither she nor I would be here today). 

These are among the reveries that have been reawakened by Neil MacGregor's series on Germany. This blog started out as a response, but it rapidly turned autobiographical. Should I apologise - or is this part of understanding why I've found these programmes so stimulating - and, to my surprise, moving? I'll write a Part 2 that tries to reflect on some of the issues this series has raised. It feels timely. This weekend sees not only Remembrance Sunday in this Great War centenary year, but also the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Germany in 1989, not to mention the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938 which many see as the true igniting of the Nazi Holocaust. Food for thought during the coming days. 

Meanwhile, you'll find all the broadcasts on the BBC iPlayer where I think they will be available for a year. Well worth tuning into.