Germany: Memories of a Nation
By Neil MacGregor, Allen Lane, 640 pages, $30.99
The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, an event followed more quickly than anyone expected by German reunification. The fears about a resurgent Germany expressed at the time in Moscow and Warsaw and by Margaret Thatcher turned out to be groundless. The worst thing to be laid at the door of today’s decision makers in Berlin is a stubborn pursuit of economic policies that have hampered European economic recovery. The new Federal Republic, like the old, remains an economic giant that refuses to throw its weight around politically.
The reasons for that are historical. Germans have a special relationship with their own past because of a broken, discontinuous history. German borders have been fluid, expanding and contracting over time like a concertina. Entire polities, such as the Roman Empire and the Prussian state, have disappeared — the latter abolished with a stroke of the pen by the Allied occupying forces in 1947. New, hyphenated states (Baden-Wurttemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia) have existed only since the post-war years, although they have gradually acquired their own patina of tradition.
The central reason for the difficult German relationship to the past is, of course, the shadow still cast by the Third Reich.
Neil MacGregor’s immensely readable and sharply intelligent book is a progress report on where things stand today. Published in conjunction with his recent BBC Radio 4 series and a major exhibition at the British Museum, “Germany: Memories of a Nation” explores how Germans have fashioned and refashioned their identity out of the materials bequeathed by the past. MacGregor refers at one point to the “painful difficulty of constructing a German history, of the compulsion to recover — to create — memories that can nourish”.
The passage in question gives a good idea of how the book works. It comes from a chapter on the great south German limewood sculptor, Tilman Riemenschneider, which is centrally concerned with a work called “The Four Evangelists”, part of a late 15th-century altarpiece and now in Berlin’s Bode Museum. MacGregor looks closely at these magnificent carved objects and brings in the director of the Bode to offer further commentary. He also uses the work as a jumping-off point for a history lesson in miniature on the Holy Roman Empire, the reformation and the peasants’ war of 1525, in which Riemenschneider found himself embroiled.
Fast forward to the 20th century, and we find Thomas Mann making a speech to the US Congress that presents the sculptor as an example of the “good Germany” to set against the evils of National Socialism. Riemenschneider becomes, with some rearrangement of the evidence, a “fighter for liberty and justice”. MacGregor doesn’t stop there, but shows how both post-war German states tried to claim Riemenschneider as their own, putting him on coins or stamps.
This is the pattern of the book. MacGregor’s chapters move boldly and fluently across time, held together by his own assured, but attractively conversational voice, supplemented by experts who elaborate on this or that point — historians and museum curators, for the most part, although historical novelists Daniel Kehlmann and Hilary Mantel also appear. The starting point is often something material, such as Riemenschneider’s four evangelists, reprising the successful formula of MacGregor’s wonderful and much-imitated “A History of the World in 100 Objects”, a previous cooperative venture between the British Museum and the BBC.
The objects considered in the present book include things you would expect: Gutenberg’s printing press, Luther’s German translation of the Bible, Meissen porcelain, a modernist cradle and ceramic vases from the Bauhaus and the Volkswagen Beetle. Other objects might be more surprising to readers. The coinage of the Roman Empire and the no less impressive diversity of German sausages both serve to illustrate the historic fragmentation of the German lands, a major theme of the book.
A chapter on the Iron Cross tells the story of a military decoration that symbolised the short-lived alliance between Prussian monarchy and liberal nationalists during the resistance to Napoleon, and it ends by pointing out that the name lives on in one of Berlin’s funkiest multicultural neighbourhoods, Kreuzberg (“Cross Hill”), which grew up around Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s 1821 war memorial.
A later chapter is concerned with the aftermath of a different war. It shows us the scarred urban landscape of Germany in 1945 by focusing on the piles of rubble and the famous “rubble women” who cleared the cities, brick by brick. This book is filled not just with objects, but with places of memory.
There is a fine chapter on the forest and its place in the German imagination, which draws on the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm and the work of Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, and takes the story up to the present day and the new meaning of the forest within a green Germany.
MacGregor writes especially well about monuments, such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column in Berlin. He is adept at showing how monuments bear witness to the constant reworking of German history — the work of salvaging, even.
The Victory Gate in Munich, for example, was built in the 1840s and dedicated “to the Bavarian army”. In form and purpose it closely resembled the Arc de Triomphe and the Wellington Memorial Arch at Hyde Park Corner. But after it was damaged in the Second World War, the Victory Gate received a new inscription: “Dedicated to victory, destroyed by war, urging peace.” Not surprisingly, the memory of war plays a large part in the book, from the destruction caused by the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century to the flight and expulsion westward of millions of Germans in 1944-1947, eloquently represented here by a simple object, a handcart of the kind pushed by many refugees.
An early chapter looks at two “lost capitals”: Prague, seat of the oldest German-speaking university, and Konigsberg, the city of philosopher Immanuel Kant, today Russian Kaliningrad, both reminders of the centuries-long German presence in central and eastern Europe. Another chapter is devoted to Strasbourg, a centre of German Renaissance humanism and the city where Goethe studied. Strasbourg changed hands many times, going back to Louis XIV’s time, until it became definitively French after 1945. As one of MacGregor’s historical experts tartly observes: “It is often said that the Germans achieved in four-and-a-half years what the French had failed to achieve in the previous 20 years, which was to turn the population of Alsace into Frenchmen.”
Many chapters lead through the Third Reich, but MacGregor’s light touch means that we never feel as if we are being hurried along to a predetermined destination, not even in the section called “The Descent” that takes us from Bismarck to Hitler. There is some artful foreshadowing in earlier chapters.
One, which examines German expertise in the making of precision instruments, is called “Masters of Metal”. I made a note that the phrase called to mind a famous line from “Death Fugue”, the Paul Celan poem: “Death is a master from Germany.” Sure enough, 150 pages later, MacGregor quotes the line, with a reference back to the earlier chapter.
He devotes two chapters directly to the Third Reich. One looks at the exhibition of “degenerate art” that the Nazis organised in 1937, the other focuses on Buchenwald, the concentration camp constructed just a few miles outside Goethe’s Weimar. Once again, MacGregor shows his skill at making objects speak. He wants us to look at the camp gates, which bore the slogan “Jedem das Seine” (“to each what they are due”), pointing out the noble lineage of words that had once signified an ideal of justice, words that Bach used as the title of a cantata.
As he notes, here we come up against a central question of modern German history: how can we fit the great humanistic traditions of Germany into the same picture with Nazi barbarism? MacGregor also points to something else: the clean, elegant lettering of the words above the gate was a result of their being designed by an inmate, the Communist and former Bauhaus student Franz Ehrlich, and could be read by fellow inmates as a subtly subversive message that the SS would eventually receive what was due to them.
There are many brilliant vignettes in this book, too many to mention in a review. Different readers will regret the absence of one thing or another. Music has a surprisingly small place — there is no score, no musical instrument, no bust of a musician, none of the many German paintings that depict music-making.
MacGregor’s emphasis is on the modern and urban,from the cities of the Hanseatic League and Durer’s Nuremberg to 20th century Berlin. He has less time for the rural and provincial or what the Germans call spiessig — the philistine. That is perhaps in keeping with the high-minded, cosmopolitan tone of this beautifully illustrated book. MacGregor is an engaging guide who never talks down to readers. He has written a remarkable set of reflections on the objects and places of German memory.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
