Bavarian reflections
Christopher Booker In the muggy heat of Nuremberg, it proved surprisingly difficult to discover the scene of the great September rallies of forty years ago. It must be the best-known. historical relic in the world not to be trail-blazoned with signposts. Fortunately an enigmatic reference in our Michelin to 'sportsfields and stadiums' on the south-west of the city.led us out on the road to Regensburg. And there, towering over the pinewoods, we came first to a vast structure, like a Colosseum in what Osbert Lancaster called 'Third Empire' style. Inside, a gigantic open space, surrounded with gaunt eighty-foot brick walls„ was filled with municipal rubbish, making the whole place look infinitely more neglected and forgotten than many a Roman ruin 1.800 years older. Clearly it was not the scene of the Nazi rallies ( we later discovered it was the relic of Speer's Kongress Halle, designed to hold 100.000 Nazis under a never-completed dome). But then, across a peaceful lake, we saw, like some distant Aztec temple, the unmistakable low, white marble outlines of the Stadium itself.
Thz present-day rulers of Nuremberg have cunningly devalued the mystiqueof the central shrine of Nazism by filling it with practice football pitches, and by driving through it a humdrum road filled with workaday traffic. Indeed so pointedly is it ignored by most passing Germans, that one feels almost shamefaced clambering alone up the broad stone steps to the columned podium where Hitler enjoyed his fiercest joys of idolatry. Looking out over the weeds, and the wire fences round the sports grounds, it is hard to conjure up even the faintest illusion of what that concentration of evil must have been like at the height of its spell.
Nevertheless as one drives across the endless, rather claustrophobic rolling plains of central Germany forty years later, it is impossible not to be haunted continually by the consequences of what was set in train from this disregarded little field. Nowhere else in Europe is one so forcefully reminded in every town and city of that catastrophe. and of the forlorn attempts that were made after the war by loving restoration and rebuilding to reforge sonic kind of link with that civilisation which first flowered in the late Middle Ages, and which still as late as 1943 had left some of the most wonderful town centres in the world. Nowhere else does one feel more poignantly the classic twentieth-century yearning to cling on to the physical remains of that lost civilisation, in a desperate attempt to believe that we are still part of it.
The Altstadt of Nuremberg itself, the beautiful late-Gothic city of the Meistersingers and Veit Stoss and finally of Leni Riefenstahl, razed to rubble in 1944 and 1945, may have been painstakingly rebuilt stone by stone--but it has all that horrible dream-like deadness of all such attempts to rebuild in replica on a large scale. Even so, it cannot be more depressing than Rothenburg, the totally preserved, walled mediaeval town forty miles to the west, where scarcely a single new building has been allowed since the nineteenth century. where the huge, airconditioned Scenicruisers now squeeze past each other in the narrow, over-picturesque streets, and there is scarcely a single shop or inhabitant not given over to that most deadening of all trades, mass-tourism.
Indeed the only things in Rothenburg which give unalloyed pleasure are the quite astonishing woodcarvings in the Jacobkirche by Tilman Riemenschneider, finest of all the late fifteenth century woodcarvers, whose work makes the journey down the so-called 'Romantic Way' from Wurzburg„ thirty-odd miles to the north, one of the great artistic experiences of Europe. R iemenschneider's altarpieces here, and at the little village churches of Creiglingen and Detwang, rank with the Altdorfers of St Florian in Austria, the Cranachs of Budapest, the magnificent cycle of green-chalk drawings by DUrer in the A I bertina among the greatest expressions of that profound spiritual flowering which took place in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century south Germany. The central obsession of these artists was the Passion—endless reworkings of the Last Supper, the Agony in the Garden, the arrest, the trials, the journey to Golgotha— portrayed with infinite sympathy, and invention that is moving in a totally different way from the beautifullycomposed theatrical settings of the Italian quattrocento. • In Germany (as in. Bach's Passions 200 years later), the emphasis is laid in a uniquely personal manner on the suffering of the central figure-the inward agony of Gethsemane, the physical agonies which followed.
Is there any link at all between the Bavaria which produced these miraculous meditations on personal suffering, and that which 400 years later itself imposed suffering on unequalled scale? I was tempted to think not, until a few days later we missed our way, and found ourselves emerging on the banks of the Danube opposite a pretty little riverside village. We discovered from the map that it was called Mauthausen. Travelling up into the hills behind we came to the granite quarries where the Austrian government still preserves as a national monument the remains of one of the most terrible of the Konzentrationslager (according to documents in the museum, originally set up in 1938 by Speer to provide him with building stone, and later transformed by Himmler into a full-scale extermination camp). Anaesthesia against the reality of what was still happening here only thirty-one years ago is almost complete. Birds do sing in the surrounding woods, Austrian families laugh and picnic with their children around the walls, Dutch tourists happily snap each other on the 'Stairway of Death' where tens
of thousands of exhausted pfisoners died simply through being pushed back down into the quarry below. As we came nearer to the hut at the end, with its warren of basement rooms—the gas-chamber designed as a mock-shower room, the ovens, the endless refinements of personal torture that were dreamed up by the SS guards iii 1943 and 1944 (the metal scourges called 'Tibetan Prayer Mills', the hooks on the wall where people were, left hanging for days, the apparatus whereby the guards would pretend to be measuring a prisoner's height, only in order to shoot surprise bullets into him at point-blank range), I was reminded of something. It was of the extraordinary detail with which those late-Gothic artists devised endless refinements of torture for their Christ—as in the magnificent series of Passion paintings by Altdorfer in the great monastery of St Florian, only a few miles away to the south. In one painting two men are using a crowbar to press down the crown of thorns on Christ's head, just as 400 years later the SS-men would press down a Metal ring of spikes on to the heads of their prisoners. Perhaps it takes a nation which could find such imaginative delight in how to impose suffering, to be able-also to imagine fully what it is to suffer. In face, as often with individuals, perhaps one must look on the particular vices and virtues, strengths and weaknesses, of a nation so much as the opposite sides of the same coin. inextricably intertwined, that one cannot hope to have one without the other.
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