Sadism and sentimentality
Emily Laughland
Frau Heigl opened the door of the Blue Goat Inn with a scowl on her face. Looking for a Narnia-esque winter wonderland, I had decided to spend Christmas in southern Bavaria, and I certainly found a land of impenetrable forest, knee-deep in snow and peopled by unfathomable beings, not the least of whom was Frau Heigl. Throughout my stay, I felt like Oliver Twist to Frau Heigl’s Mr Bumble, my knees knocking together at the very sound of her footstep. With her spiteful smile and her bodice embroidered with a thousand charming alpine flowers, she embodied what I came to realise was a rather German cocktail: an uncanny mixture of sadism and sentimentality. Mawkish, stomach-turning naffness (Spiessigkeit) in the form of national costume-wearing, and an infantile attachment to cheeky catchphrases and napkins in the shape of angel wings, is coupled with a rare emotional flatness and lack of humour. That was one thing that put my brain into a spin. The other was the incompatibility of Bavaria’s grim stolidity with the playfulness that produced a sublime flowering of baroque architecture, wonderful music and an obsession with fantasy for fantasy’s sake.
The Blue Goat Inn sits at the foot of the Alps in a beautiful village called Ettal at the centre of which is a huge 18th-century Benedictine monastery. The scenery is breathtaking: the soaring Alps, quivers of pine forest, gigantic, quiet lakes and the clouds creeping in weird blue swirls between the peaks. It is here that Ludwig II created Linderhof, his fun-sized Versailles. He surrounded himself with portraits of the Sun King’s courtiers, fabulous gilded mirrors and chandeliers made of ivory; when he took dinner, he would sit on a throne as his dining table rose up through a trap door concealed in the carpet. In the summer months Ludwig would float in a golden, conch-shaped boat through his grotto, a recreation of the one in Tannhduser. It is one of the many bizarre monuments the lonely monarch erected to the man he worshipped as a demigod, Richard Wagner. Wagner sought to recreate a mythological parallel reality, and it amuses me to think of these two arch-fantasists in the land of remorseless practicality and impossibly heavy semolina dumplings.
But there are places where fantasy and reality, rather than standing awkwardly side by side, make common cause. For example, there is the village of Oberammergau, home to the famous Passion Play performed every ten years. Although the play is performed inside a theatre, the village itself plays at being a Germanic mini-Jerusalem all year round. Different buildings have been given roles such as ‘Pilate’s house’ or ‘Judas’s house’. Fairytale and scripture are rolled into one in vibrant frescos covering most of the houses’ façades, showing scenes from the Gospels and the Brothers Grimm so that you feel you are strolling through a perpetual pantomime. The marriage of stout Alpine architecture with floaty egg tempera wall-paintings is an unexpected one, but it works.
There are other outcrops of passion, too. The Wieskirche, Dominikus Zimmermann’s masterpiece, stands in the middle of a field, several miles off the beaten autobahn. Even if you think you don’t like baroque you cannot fail to like this place, which looks like an enormous and intricate piece of pâtisserie waiting to be plucked up into the heavens for a celestial tea party. Inside, it drips with putti and birds of paradise; sugar-pink marble columns frame scantily clad saints, quite inappropriately dressed for the long, cold Bavarian winter.
In some way, though, these things make the lack of fantasy in everyday life all the sadder. Bavaria couldn’t be more plodding and the Bavarians couldn’t be less fey. Arabs often wring their hands and invoke Allah’s help with a true sense of life’s mystery; the Bavarians, meanwhile, look out of their triple-glazed windows, tut and turn up the already baking radiators. Is it an intrinsic thing, as Nietzsche would have it: ‘Everything ponderous, viscous and solemnly clumsy, all long-winded and boring types of style are developed in profuse variety among the Germans’? Or have 60 years of criminalisation numbed the Germans’ collective emotions in the process of bringing their collective guilt endlessly to light? It certainly seems that every time Germany comes up for air, it finds a foot on its head: of all the crimes perpetrated during the second world war, only the Germans are constantly reminded of theirs. When was the last time Hollywood produced a film about the Gulags? .
I hoped to find solace from these dark thoughts in that age-old comforter, a good dinner. But German food — how can I put it? Perhaps it is best explained in terms of onomatopoeia. For example, when you see the words Mousselines de volaille aux champignons, you just know it’s something you might like to eat. But when you see the words Schweinshaxe mit Semmelknödeln, Schlagrahm und Preiselbeerensosse you are not so sure. Hunks of tasteless meat arrive, the muscles in the waitress’s arms flexing under the weight. It is staggeringly overcooked and salty; you saw at it with your feeble knife and fork as it slides from side to side. Were it not for the pretentiously named and biliously coloured sauces, you might at least be able to imagine yourself sharing the culinary experience of, say, King Harold before the Battle of Hastings, but even that pleasure is denied you. Instead, you feel you have stepped out of a time machine in 1970, or whenever it was that Oxo cubes and gelatine sheets really got going and undercooked vegetables were still considered a danger to one’s health. Needless to say, there was no question of having a word with Frau H. about the food; not without the necessary judo training, anyway.
Feeling the need to avoid scurvy, I made a trip to Munich, the super-self-consciously trendy Bavarian capital. And I certainly got soul food: Munich has a great concentration of wonderful art per square foot of city. Its Alte Pinakothek rivals the National Gallery, impressive in a city a fraction the size of London, while the sheer generosity and quality of their temporary exhibitions put British curatorship to shame. Recently the Lenbachhaus showed a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Franz Marc, an important avant-gardist and close friend and colleague of Kandinsky’s. Unlike Kandinsky, though, Marc’s work is humane even at its most abstract. Marc only ever painted animals and, as I discovered, he often worked at the foot of the Alps, very near the Blue Goat Inn. I went in search of his sources of inspiration: in the valley, at the end of a snowy alley of pines is a small wooden hut where you can sit as the light fails, mulled wine in hand, and watch a silent herd of deer float into the field in front of you to feed. My soul soared.
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