Rail Travel, Monuments and Vanished Frontiers

As we get our breath back after the momentous events of last week, I thought I would touch on one or two of the things I would have written about,  had I not felt it necessary to oppose British participation in the planned attack on Syria (and rebut the claims of Ms Charlotte Vere, who seems to have gone quiet).

 

I might add at this point that I may soon need to write at length on an unexpected personal side-effect of that Syrian matter. But I am still hoping that I may be able to resolve it without mobilising.

 

I had just spent several days in Germany, which regular readers here will know is a country whose current arrangements I rather admire, and which I think one of the most interesting in the world. I’m also struck by how little most British people know about it, and how seldom they travel there.

 

I went to Berlin by train, a journey you can now do in one very long day, though I stopped in Cologne on the way out and in Aachen (or Aix-la-Chapelle if you prefer) on the way back.

 

This is not, alas the best stretch of landscape in the country, though the traveller sees the Rhine (and can glimpse the haunting, Wagnerian hills near Bonn if he climbs the spire of Cologne cathedral, as I did). He also sees  the Weser and the Elbe, the venerable monorail at Wuppertal, once the height of modernity, now a rarely-imitated curiosity, and one or two of those very Germanic hillside monuments including a vast and brooding statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I,  near Bad Oeynhausen.  I agree that there are quite a few rather large statues of Buddha, rather paradoxical given Buddhism’s general modesty. But if you leave those out of the argument, only the Russian Communists and the North Koreans have outdone this German frenzy for such things.  The Chinese aren’t keen. The allegedly biggest statue of Mao in Shenyang, gateway to North Korea,  is nothing by comparison.

 

I’ve still not seen the Stalingrad monument, but I have seen, and been impressed and rather overpowered by, the 203 foot statue of the Motherland at Kiev, and the Soviet war memorial in Treptow, Berlin (much smaller but still powerfully disturbing). It is an interesting exploration of national character to try to work out why such things have never been a feature of our culture or countryside.

 

I’ve always rather wished I could have seen the immense monument the Germans put up on the site of Tannenberg, the site of which is now deep in Poland. This is partly because this forgotten battle probably decided the fate of the world, by diverting German forces from the West and so ensuring their failure at the Marne in 1914; it is partly because that strange part of the world is full of disturbing contradictions and unsettling transformations – I have still never got over a brief visit I once made to Soviet Kaliningrad, now a sort of Russian Gibraltar cut off from Russia by Lithuanian territory.

 

Almost every trace of its German past as Koenigsberg had been deliberately erased, during a long period when it had been utterly closed to westerners. The German inhabitants themselves had been expelled long ago. You could still see a few pleasing pre-1914 houses, the tomb of Immanuel Kant by the redbrick cathedral (then locked)  and an obviously Germanic railway station, but I found little else.The old citadel had been flattened in an act of Soviet vandalism, and replaced by an incredibly hideous brutalist modern block.  Old maps of the former city could be obtained, and it was amusing to discover that Goeringstrasse had become Ulitsa Gagarina (Yuri Gagarin Street). There was also a rather haunting seaside resort on the Baltic coast, utterly unmodernised and redolent of the Weimar republic. I wonder if that seaside resort has survived among its pines, or become a tatty modern dump?   

 

Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander had signed the Treaty of Tilsit near here in 1807, in a pavilion in the middle of a river. The place was crammed with awkward history, but war and ideology had wiped out most of the traces of it.  Even Tilsit is now called Sovyetsk.

 

A trip to Tannenberg topday would find even less. Between them, the retreating Germans, the advancing Red Army and the re-established state of Poland completely destroyed this once-enormous structure, a sort of hilltop castle, later adapted by Hitler into a tomb for Field Marshal von Hindenburg, whose remains then had to be moved in a hurry to stop them being captured by the Red Army.

 

What, by the way, happened to the huge wooden statue of the Field Marshal in Great War Berlin,  into which loyal Germans paid to hammer nails, to raise funds for the war?  This odd practice was endlessly mocked in the British newspapers of the time, but I can find almost no references to it now.

 

There’s no doubt that architectural memorials to dead regimes can be very instructive, first in an Ozymandias way, as one see how what is now fallen and derided was once mighty; and secondly because architecture gives a better key to the past than any other art. The remains of the National Socialist parade ground at  Nuremberg, now a sort of lorry park, are very instructive, especially in light rain on a grey winter’s day. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. So is the Olympc Stadium in Berlin, tactfully stripped of any overt National Socialist markings, but obviously the work of a Utopian mind.

 

Nothing gives a better idea of what Stalinism was actually like than the great Gothic towers which he caused to be erected all over Moscow, strikingly like American mid-century buildings in some ways, but also deeply different because of their overt Communist symbolism. They’ve mostly been rather well-restored in recent years, and act as an enduring monument to an era of dark and secretive power that beguiled almost as many people as it murdered.   

 

I hadn’t visited Cologne Cathedral for about 30 years, and , while impressed by its grandeur, its glass and its scale, and by the living bridge it provides to the middle ages,(the story of the completion of the cathedral from original designs, in the 19th century, after centuries of neglect, is astonishing) I felt it was a much more secular building than the first time I’d seen it on a winter’s morning, far darker, patrolled by stern beadles in unreformed 18th century garb.   Christianity has shrivelled in Germany as elsewhere in Europe.

 

The Cathedral at Aachen, a much smaller and odder building, suffers from the same problem of secularisation. It is amazing how much more of a religious feeling is retained in most of the English cathedrals, especially given the retiring, self-effacing nature of the Church of England. But two great wars have utterly wrecked the spirit of Christian Europe. I saw photographs of dense, impassioned crowds attending an exposure of relics at Aachen in about 1900.  It was (just) in modern times but could not conceivably have happened after 1914, let alone after 1945. It was like looking at a photo album of the lost City of Atlantis.

 

Aachen is a border city and you can walk, in about an hour, from the heart of it into the Netherlands or into Belgium. I chose the Dutch option, and was - as I always am – utterly amazed to be able to walk into another country without any passport formalities, or change of currency. I know I’m supposed to be pleased by this, but I’m alarmed by how such a huge thing has happened without anybody seeming to care.

 

If the Second World War was fought to preserve the borders of the Versailles settlement (which as far as I know, it was) how come most of the borders of 1919, or indeed 1939, are now no more significant than the boundary between East and West Sussex?

 

My journey also took me through Liege (which now has an astonishing new railway station, whose giant concrete ribs resemble the skeleton of some immense alien monster). I pondered that, 99 years before, the great battle to destroy and capture the Liege fortresses had just finished, and that many of the objectives of the German armies which had then marched on towards Brussels have in fact been achieved. Air travel tends to befuddle us. But stay at ground or sea level, and you will learn much, much more.