A Time of Gifts (14 page)

The first sight of the Danube! It was a tremendous vision. In Europe, only the Volga is longer. If one of the crows that were fidgeting among the crockets below had flown to my next meeting place with the river, it would have alighted two hundred miles east of this steeple. The blast was whistling louder through the perforated stone of the spire and clouds were advancing fast.

The empty nave, lit only by the marvellous deep-hued gloom of the glass, was dark by contrast. An organist, rapt with improvisation, was fluting and rumbling in his high lamp-lit nest under a display of giant pan-pipes. The clustered piers, which looked slender for so huge a place, divided the nave into five aisles and soared to a network of groins and ribs and liernes that a slight architectural shrug would have flicked into fan-tracery. But it was the choir-stalls that halted one. A bold oaken outburst of three-dimensional humanism had wrought the finials of the choir-stalls into the life-size torsos, in dark wood, of the sybils: ladies that is, dressed in coifs and wimples and slashed sleeves and hatted in pikehorn head-dresses like the Duchess's in
Alice in Wonderland
. They craned yearning across the chancel towards Plato and Aristotle and an answering academy of pagan philosophers accoutred like burgomasters and led by a burgravial Ptolemy wielding a wooden astrolabe. The vaulted hexagon under the spire was used as a commemorative chapel. The laurel-wreathed and silken colours of Württemberg and Baden regiments from 1914 to 1918 were hanging there in rows: banners bearing black crosses on a white background. The battle-honours inscribed in gold on the fluttering ribands—the Somme, Vimy, Verdun and Passchendaele—were all familiar.

The coloured windows died like fires going out. The clouds had closed over again and the sky presaged snow.

* * *

I was haunting cathedrals these days. Only a few hours later I was inside yet another, munching bread and cheese and an onion in one of the transepts. The day's march had been a repetition of yesterday's: I had crossed the Danube bridge; base clouds pursued me with their rotten smoke; the clouds broke and the east wind, once again blurring all in a maelstrom of flakes, had practically brought me to a standstill. Then a benefactor had come to the rescue and deposited me in Augsburg in the late morning. I hadn't expected to reach it till long after dark, if then.

On these Augsburg choir-stalls, highly polished free-standing scenes of Biblical bloodshed ran riot. For realism and immediacy they left the carvings of Ulm far behind. On the first, Jael, with hanging sleeves and hatted like a margravine, gripped a coal-hammer and steadied an iron spike among the sleeping Sisera's curls. Judith, likewise dressed in high Plantagenet fashion, held the severed head of Holophernes in one hand while the other buried a sword in the small of his back. Cain's axe was splitting Abel's temple wide open, and David, stooping over the steel-clad figure of Goliath, had all but sawn his head off. These wooden duets were only slightly grotesque. Flemings and Burgundians compete with the Germans in wood-carving but they can't catch up with this blunt realism. On tombs and slabs, the figures of highborn laymen—broad- and hard-faced men in full plate armour with their hair clipped in fringes—were outnumbered by the prince-bishops and the mitred landgraves that once ruled in this war-like see. Some were mailclad, some vested in chasubles; and the stone hands joining in prayer were gauntleted or episcopally gloved with gems in a lozenge to mark the points of the stigmata. Tonsured on cushions or bobbed on helms, identical frowns of dominion stamped those rectangular heads, and lances and crosiers were interchangeable at their sides. Under one prelate in heavy pontificals lay an effigy of his skeleton when the worms had finished with him. Further on, from a hanging jaw under the hollow cheeks
and eye sockets of an aquiline zealot, the death-rattle was nearly audible.

Stark mementoes. But, in compensation, four ravishing scenes from the life of the Virgin hung behind side-altars. ‘Hans Holbein,' the brass plate said; but they were more like Memling in costume and feeling; much earlier in date than the royalties and ambassadors and magnates we all know. They turned out to be by the father and namesake of the best-known Holbein, patriarch of a whole dynasty of Augsburg painters.

* * *

I must resist the temptation to enlarge on the fascinating city outside: its abundance of magnificent buildings, the frescoed façade of the Fugger house, the wells canopied with wrought iron. I was pursuing a more general quarry as I munched: no less than the whole feeling and character of pre-baroque German towns. We have been through a number of them; there are more to come. A theory had been forming and clumsy tuning notes have sounded on earlier pages, so I may as well get it off my chest.

The characteristics I have in mind, though of course I didn't know the details, stretch further afield than South Germany: they advance down the Danube, through Austria and into Bohemia, across the mountains of the Tyrol to the edge of Lombardy and through the Swiss Alps and across the Upper Rhine into Alsace; and the real secret about the architecture of these towns is that it is mediaeval in structure and Renaissance—or the Teutonic interpretation of the Renaissance—only in detail. A great wave assembled in Lombardy and Venetia. It mounted, gathered speed, and at last rushed northwards through the passes and down into the plain to break over the German mediaeval bulk in vast distintegrating fans of spray. Curves like the slits in a violin began to complicate and soften the zigzags of the gables, and, from the burgeoning crow-steps, florid finials and elaborated obelisks were soon shooting up. Structurally, the new arcades were mediaeval cloisters still, but the
detail that proliferated all over them turned them into elaborately sheltered loggias for a prosperous laity. The barn-like mediaeval roofs remained, but, from the arcade to the eaves, projecting oriels soared in tiers of mullions and armorial glass as ornately as galleons' poops. They even jutted in spiraling polygons and cylinders at street corners, abetted in their extravagance by tangles of carved stone and wood. The same ebullient trend broke loose everywhere...

I had been fumbling for a symbol that might hit off this idio-syncracy and suddenly I found it! In the girls' flat in Stuttgart, turning over a picture book of German history, I stopped at a colour plate depicting three arresting figures. ‘Landsknechts in the time of the Emperor Maximilian I,' was the caption. They were three blond giants. Challenging moustachios luxuriated over the jut of their bushy beards. Their floppy hats were worn at killing angles, and, under the curl of ostrich feathers, the segmented brims spread as incongruously as the petals of a periwinkle. Two of these men grasped pikes with elaborate blades, the third carried a musket; their hands on the hilts of their broadswords tilted up the scabbards behind them. Slashed doublets expanded their shoulders and quilted sleeves puffed out their arms like Zeppelins; but on top of all this, their torsos were wrapped slantwise in wide ribbons, loosely attached to their trunks by a row of bows at an opposite slant, and bright bands fluttered about their already-voluminous arms in similar contradictory spirals: scarlet, vermilion, orange, canary, Prussian blue, grass green, violet and ochre. From buttocks and cod piece to knee, their legs were subjected to the same contradictory ribbon-treatment, and, with cunning asymmetry, the bright bands were arranged differently askew on each leg. They were fluttering criss-cross cages of colour, like maypoles about to unfurl. The tights below, which ended in wide slash-toed duck-bill shoes, were striped and parti-coloured. One soldier, with a breast-plate over his finery, eschewed all ribbons below the fork. Instead, his legs were adorned with tiers of fringes as far as mid-calf—square-ended tapes that sprang out like the umbelliferous rings of foliage on those marsh plants called mare's tails.

They were swashbuckling, exuberant and preposterous outfits, yet there was nothing foppish about the wearers: under the flutter of this blinding haberdashery, they were grim Teutonic soldiers, and mediaeval still. All this slashing which caught on everywhere, was a Teutonic thing. It began in the late fifteenth century, when miles of plundered silk were sliced up to patch the campaigning tatters of some lucky mercenaries: they went berserk among the bales; then, carried away, they started pulling their underlinen through the gaps and puffing it out. Once launched, the fashion spread to the courts of the Valois and Tudors and Stuarts and broke at last into its fullest flower at the field of the Cloth of Gold.
[7]
But the Landsknechts were objects of dread. They swore and hacked their way through all the religious and dynastic wars of the Empire; and, while they plied their pikes, buildings were beginning to go up. When Charles V succeeded Maximilian in 1519, the meridian splendour of the Landsknechts coincided with a generation of glory that the Holy Roman Empire had not seen since Charlemagne and would never see again. Through inheritence, conquest, marriage and discovery, Charles' Empire reached north to the Baltic settlements of the Teutonic knights, to the old Hanseatic world and the Netherlands; it stretched south to include the Duchy of Milan and swallowed up the outpost kingdoms of Naples and Sicily; it marched with Turkey on the Middle Danube and expanded to western Burgundy; then, skipping France—whose King, however, was the Emperor's prisoner in Madrid—it leapt the Atlantic from the Pyrenees to the Pacific shores of Peru.

Once I had got hold of the Landsknecht formula—mediaeval solidity adorned with a jungle of inorganic Renaissance detail—there was no holding me! It came into play wherever I looked: not only in gables, bell-hampers, well-heads, oriels, and arcades—in the woodland giants that wrestled in coloured tempera over fifty
feet of façade—but in everything. In heraldry, which haunts all German cities, it was omnipresent. The coats of arms that encrust those South German walls were once as simple as upside-down flat-irons with reversed buckets on top: at the touch of the new formula, each shield blossomed into the lower half of a horizontally bisected 'cello, floridly notched for a tilting lance, under a twenty-fold display of latticed and strawberry-leaf-crowned casques, each helmet top-heavy with horns or wings or ostrich or peacocks' feathers and all of them suddenly embowered in mantelling as reckless, convoluted and slashed as spatulate leaves in a whirlwind. The wings of eagles expanded in sprays of separate sable plumes, tails bifurcated in multiple tassels, tongues leapt from beaks and fangs like flames; armour broke out in ribs and fluting and flares and inlaid arabesques. All was lambent. Was it the Landsknecht principle, spreading to typography, that contorted capital letters, twirled the serifs and let loose, round the text of post-Gutenberg blackletter, those reckless, refluent, never-ending black flourishes, like ribands kept in motion on the tips of sticks by a conjurer? Typography, bookplates, title pages, headlines, woodcuts, block-engraving.... Dürer, encastled in mediaeval Nuremberg on his return from Renaissance Venice, spurred it on. The hard outline in German art, the love of complexity.... And Holbein? (Not Cranach. I'd been looking at him that morning in the museum.) Taking their cue—subconsciously, perhaps—from those soldiers, the masons and smiths and joiners must have conspired together; everything that could fork, ramify, coil, flutter, fold back or thread through itself, suddenly sprang to action. Clocks, keys, hinges, door-bands, hilts and trigger-guards...centrifugal lambency and recoil! The principle is active still.

We have all invented a half-bogus golden age to embower us when we eat and drink away from home. Judging by pubs, this is represented in England by the reign of Elizabeth, with the Regency following close. France's dream dining-land is Rabelais'
Thélème
and the chicken-in-the-pot world of Henry IV; and South Germany's lost paradise covers roughly the same epoch:
Landsknecht-time, in fact. Their armies marched and counter-marched; but it was not only a time of military and territorial triumph. The stimulating ding-dong of the Reform was at work. The Counter-Reformation was limbering up for a return bout. Luther was fulminating, Erasmus, Reuchlin, Melanchthon and Paracelsus were stooped over their desks; Germany's greatest painters were busy in their studios; books and ideas were on the move. Then, when the Thirty Years' War broke out and the deadening years lengthened into decades, all building stopped and artists and writers fell back into eclipse. The Empire was soon sinking into dotage among the cinders. The Landsknechts' high noon was over. The penultimate sparkle of Maria Theresa was only a reprieve, and the perverse and cerebral wonders of Baroque, that flowered among the princes like a springtime in autumn, faded all too soon. (Death came with the Revolution; and the only hope of revival for the Teutonic world lay far away in the north, with the star rising in the Mark of Brandenburg. But the southern Germans and the Austrians never cared for Prussia.) No wonder, then, that the reigns of Maximilian and Charles V should remain the care-free dreamland of the German-speaking world. (Not Valhalla or Asgard at all; these always send them off the rails.) Wine-cellars, taverns, beerhalls, coffee houses—hundreds of authentic ones were still intact; and the new ones automatically echoed them. So it is not the vomiting crossbowman of an earlier age that haunts such premises, still less the introspective toper after the Thirty Years' War. That periwigged figure was morosely waiting for the coloured pastorals to cohere among the gesso tendrils overhead and for the string quartets to begin tuning.

No. It's the bearded guzzler in his harlequin haberdashery, recruited in Swabia, twirling his whiskers and shouting for another bottle. He is the walking epitome and his influence is everywhere: in the tapering coloured globes that form the stems of the wine-glasses, in the labels on the green and amber bottles, in the hanging metal signs that creak outside on wrought-iron stanchions; in the unfolding of the carved brackets and the iron involution
of banisters, in the folds of the panelling and the calligraphic flourishes of the mural mottoes; in the heavy Bacchic riot of the hewn wooden ivy that inter-twines with the vine shoots and the leaves and the clusters. He is present in the perforation on bench-backs, in the stretchers of the tables, and in the wood and plaster coffering overhead; the tiered tops, the hinges and handles of the stone tankards, the coiling lead that honeycombs the circular window-panes together, the tiles of the stoves looted from the Spanish Netherlands, the very lids of the painted china pipe-bowls—all are his. It is the corroborative detail of dreamland.