LONG LIVE KARL THE GOOD
. . . and his wife, Kamilla. Jan Morris
on a ducal couple's happy life had the Hanoverians not come to reign over us
Celle, Germany NOW and again, I am told, Prince Charles pays a visit to Celle, a middle-sized, pic- turesquely wood-framed town more or less in the middle of Germany. I assume that, like Alex Haley's black American looking for his roots in Africa, Charles comes in search of his origins. It was from here that
his great-great-great-great-great-great- great-grandfather George Ludwig, Elector of Hanover and Duke of Celle, set off for London to become king of England.
If history had gone in other ways, Charles might now just be Duke of Celle living in his agreeable white schloss at the head of the town. Since it is a public holi- day here today, and I have all the time in the world to walk about the place, I find it easy enough to imagine that he is.
How content he would be, the beloved and respected sovereign of his little state, Karl Philip the Good of Celle! No ravish- ing English aristocrats to upset him, no tabloids to mock him, no paparazzi to haunt him, only his dear Duchess Kamilla to stroll arm-in-arm with him through the gabled streets of his capital, like a prince and princess in a fairytale, to visit the ducal studfarm or the State Institute of Bee-Keeping (talking to the bees being, as is well known, one of his Highness's little foibles).
For Celle really is a kind of story-book capital. The schloss itself, white, four- square and multi-turreted, stands moated in a park through which the ever-loyal citi- zenry is encouraged to wander, and out- side its gates the whole town seems to bear itself with a proper deference, await- ing the palace's wishes. There are moments, as I wander around Germany, when the country seems to me so amor- phous as to be scarcely a nation-state at all, only a kind of modern Holy Roman Empire, confused of history, uncertain of patriotism, only to be pulled together by a Bismarck or a Hitler. Never in Celle. Celle knows just what it is, and where its loyal- ties lie. It is like a very large estate village in England, looking no further than the manorial lodges for its allegiance and its welfare. I have not yet actually seen their Highnesses come strolling through, but I am prepared to bet that men take off their hats, and women bob a curtsy, when Karl and Kamilla come by.
The Duke's mild Germanic eye misses little, and as an architectural purist he can only be pleased by what he sees on his promenades. Apart from a couple of mod- ernistic disfigurements that undoubtedly make him wince, Celle is a paragon of tasteful conservation and town planning. With the schloss at its western end, it is built in an easy oblong of parallel streets, each more pleasing than the last. Opposite the palace gates, like estate offices, stand the civic buildings, the Rathaus with its cellar restaurant, the museum, the Stadtkirche, up whose tall steeple the town trumpeter climbs twice a day to blow his call across the little city. I wish I could tell you what he plays, but, as I say, today is a holiday, and he gets the day off like every- one else. So harmoniously is the place laid out behind, each street leading so gently into the next in a concert of black-and- white façades, many-paned windows, carv- ings and tall gabled roofs, so emollient is it all that one might almost suppose Karl had commissioned one of his own favourite architects to create the whole thing for him!
Mind you — come with me now into the FranzOsische Garten, which has lovely avenues in it, and a pond with ducks, and lots of children and elderly ladies in felt hats — mind you, Celle was not always so decorous. Back in the 1700s, there was a terrible scandal concerning George Ludwig himself. His wife Sophie Dorothea took a lover, and when Prince Charles's great- great-g rea t-great-gre at-great-great-grand- father found out about it he divorced her and banished her for the rest of her life to another castle of his, never again allowing her to see her children.
Ah yes, like most German towns Celle has its cupboard skeletons. Not far to the north of here is Bergen-Belsen, the concen- tration camp whose terrible scenes of suf- fering — revealed and photographed when the British Army liberated it — brought home to the world for the first time the full horror of Nazism. Karl is too young to remember, but he would have had to face some terrible moral challenges if he had been in the schloss in Hitler's day — for a time it was the seat of something ominous- ly called 'a court to investigate the ancestry of farms' And if he were really in it now, instead of residing there only in my fancy, how would such a benevolent German cello-playing patrician view the condition of Germany, and of Europe, in 1996? Would he be working towards a European State, a Fourth Reich perhaps? Or would he be hoping for a revival, in one kind or anoth- er, of that patchwork of petty princedoms, duchies, margraviates, episcopates that was the body of Europe in George Ludwig's day? Which would one rather have, Bergen-Belsen or a scandal up at the schloss? Europe the superpower, or Europe of the sovereignties, big and small? But hush, look, over there by the garden café — there they are Themselves, and coming this way too! See how the waitress- es wave and simper! See how their High- nesses pause to watch the ducks! The children stare, sucking their thumbs. The elderly ladies really do curtsy. Not a word about George Ludwig, now. `Guten Tag, your Highness, a lovely day in Celle!' Karl the Good smiles sadly at us, `Ah so, I do not — er — speak very much English, but it is, how do you say, er, terri- bly nice to see you here — is it not so, mein Liebchen?"Terrib6, nice,' says the Duchess, `we've been down to see the bees.'
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