Republic or Death! (25 page)

Xaver so annoyed the Swiss, in fact, that he had to move to a Russian agricultural colony because it was the only place that would have him. It was looking like Jakob himself might suffer a similar fate until he wrote a begging letter to a local bishop, saying he would take any posting, ‘even the quietest place with the poorest flock, where no one else wants to go'. They took him at his word and sent him to Liechtenstein.

Back then, Liechtenstein was little more than a few isolated villages hemmed in by the Rhine on one side and Austria's mountains on the other. About 8,000 poor people lived there tending to a few thousand even poorer cattle. It was a sovereign state and part of the German Confederation, but it shouldn't really have existed. When Napoleon swept across Europe in the early 1800s, he had got rid of most small principalities like it, only sparing Liechtenstein because he liked its prince, Johann I. Johann was a commander in Austria's army, and a leader of numerous successful cavalry campaigns. He met Napoleon while negotiating peace between the two empires, and did such a bad job protecting Austria's interests that he was forced to resign, although he did at least manage to save his own country. Liechtenstein‘s survival, of course, also had much to do with the more simple fact that it wasn't really worth invading. It had no gold, no cities, no strategic value; nothing. It was so easy to ignore that even its princes didn't seem to give it much thought, preferring to stay in Vienna (the Liechtenstein family bought the land in 1712, but no reigning prince set eyes on it for 130 years).

Jakob Jauch didn't care that he was headed to such a dismal place. It was a final opportunity to prove himself, and he took one look at its people and decided he would do everything he could to improve their lives. Realising they needed education, he built a boys' school; realising their agricultural methods were out of date, he brought in experts from Hungary to teach modern farming techniques. Jakob sounds like a godsend, but unfortunately he did all this in much the same manner as his father would have done. Jakob had a ‘choleric' personality, Josef says, a polite way of saying he was hot-tempered and irritable. He came across as condescending, going around telling everyone they were living the wrong way. And he also seemed to favour just a few families, awarding them contracts to build his school and ignoring everyone else's bids.

Thanks to all of this, he had soon made enough enemies in the country for there to be an active campaign to get rid of him. Villagers started to write letters to the bishop containing every slur and accusation they could think of. Jakob misspent funds, they said. He ignored his priestly duties. He insulted them. ‘After four years, the bishop decided he had to shoo him away,' Josef says. ‘He was made to leave Liechtenstein with a day's notice and was sent to Sicily. He spent the rest of his life writing letters asking to come back.'

The love Jakob had for Liechtenstein can be seen all through the five-verse song he wrote for the country (whether he wrote it while living there, or while lamenting in exile, is unknown). ‘From green rocky heights / It's lovely to gaze at: / How the Rhine's silver band / Hems the beautiful land / … Of silent bliss,' it goes at one point;

Where the chamois leaps freely,

The eagle soars boldly,

The herdsmen sing the Ave

For home.

Okay, it's a bit syrupy, but it comes from the right place. Why did he set those words to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen'? It's probably not because he was trying to write an anthem, Josef says. He would have known the tune well, having lived in London earlier in his life while working as a priest for German expatriates, and he probably just picked it because he liked it, because it was a tune so easy even an amateur musician like himself could fit words to it.

No one would actually have ever known Jakob wrote ‘Oben am Jungen Rhein' if he hadn't mentioned it in one of the many letters he sent to Liechtensteiners from exile, all in a secret code to stop his old enemies reading them. In one of these he talks of playing songs on his harp: ‘But when I started to sing [my song], my voice failed me, choked by tears for the poor folk of Liechtenstein.' Jakob died in 1869 after having two ‘very, very explosive' aneurysms, according to Josef. Thirty years later, there were reports in a local newspaper of huge crowds singing his song as if it was the most natural thing to do. The lack of records before then means no one has the remotest idea how it got this anthem status.

*

‘But why's the music never been changed?' I ask Josef.

He gives an unknowing shrug. ‘When it was written, the English melody was the mark of all anthems so it was normal, I suppose, for some people to want to adopt it,' he says. ‘And in the 1930s, when there were the Nazis, the song became so important to us because it was part of the fight against Germany. That's when this country was born really.' He goes on to say, somewhat pointedly, that it's only foreigners who have really called for the music to be changed. Some have even written their own suggestions. ‘I once organised a concert, “The Twenty-five Nicest Anthems of Liechtenstein”, where we sang a lot of them,' he says, chuckling at the memory. He reaches down to a bag filled with papers and finds a letter an American composer once sent to Franz Joseph II, Liechtenstein's prince in the 1980s. ‘I have written you a new anthem,' the American's written. ‘The words are in English so may not be completely satisfactory, but my music is far more powerful and inspiring than “God Save the Queen”. I doubt if you will find better.'

‘He included a tape with it,' Josef says, ‘and we put it on and there's this long chord, then a cracked whisky voice came in: “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, Liechtenstein!” It really is the funniest thing.'

I'm about to thank Josef for his time when I remember he's a musician too. Haven't you ever tried writing one? I ask. ‘I thought about it,' he says, ‘but then I remembered that sentence of Beethoven saying what a wonderful melody it is and I thought: So I have to be better than him? That's hopeless! A pipe dream! We're better off keeping what we have.'

*

Over the next few days, I speak to what feels like Liechtenstein's entire population about the anthem and it seems Josef is right: no one has the slightest problem having the music of ‘God Save the Queen' for their anthem. If anything they take pride in it. It's another thing that puts the country on the map – like their prince, or the fact they have no army. It helps make the country interesting and plays into the national idea of Liechtensteiners as being unusual. If they had their own music, their anthem would just be unheard and unremarkable, like those of their neighbours Austria and Switzerland.

I meet Mario Frick, Liechtenstein's greatest ever footballer, a striker once good enough to play in Italy (even if his international career statistics read 117 appearances and 16 goals). He happens to be wearing an England football shirt, which he insists is by accident, and starts reminiscing about all the ‘times we played Wales or Northern Ireland or Scotland, and there'd be our anthem and it'd be incredible, just all these whistles. Always whistles.' He puts his fingers in his mouth and blows, in case I couldn't guess what 40,000 angry Scots drowning out an anthem sounds like. ‘But we know the history, and we grew up with it, so why would we change? It's too late now anyway.' The only thing he says he'd change is how many people sing it. ‘We're a proud people for sure, but we're not like the Italians or Spanish, loud and emotional. The first time I heard the anthem as a footballer was here and I had goose bumps. But it might as well have been an empty stadium; there were only about four people singing.'

I also go and meet one of the country's most respected politicians, a cross-dressing car mechanic named Herbert Elkuch, who bluntly says, ‘It's our hymn, not yours – just look at the words,' and then spends a long time telling me that the country's taxes are too high and asking me to get that message out.

I even stalk the country's musicians in the hope one will say that they want to write a new tune themselves, but the closest I get is a composer called Marco Schädler. ‘In general, we have low self-esteem,' he says. ‘It's understandable because of our size, but it means we don't have much faith in our own knowledge and capabilities. Sometimes we act like kids who always need the help of our big brother – that's Switzerland – or our father, the prince. We have to work on that self-esteem first. Once it's reached a high enough level, the right anthem will come like the baby to the Virgin.' I ask him how long that might take. ‘It took us about sixty years to change two words about Germany,' he says. ‘So maybe another sixty.'

There is one complaint I hear a lot though. ‘The text. I don't like it,' says Jasmine Spalt, a young teacher in Ray-Bans, with a jewelled stud stuck to one of her canine teeth. ‘It's too “I love the
Fürst
”,' she adds, using the German word for prince. ‘It puts him above everyone. I'm not against him personally, I think he should be here, but I think he has too much power.'

The reason for such views is the prince's right of veto. Liechtenstein is meant to have the most developed democracy in the world; it's a country where anyone can propose a law to parliament if they get 1,000 signatures, and if the parliament turns it down, there's an immediate referendum. The only disappointing feature of the system is that the prince can step in and veto any law he wants, even if the entire country backs it. Hans-Adam II claims this ‘protects against initiatives that are too populist at the cost of the general good' but the only recent time he's threatened to use it was in 2011 when there was a referendum to legalise abortion.

‘We shouldn't have one person with so much power,' Jasmine says, ‘and he has a lot of strange conservative beliefs I don't really support.' She isn't alone in complaining. I heard the same comments almost to the letter from other young women. ‘His family doesn't even speak our dialect,' said one, who asked not to be named. ‘Yet everyone's so afraid of offending them.' She then spent ten minutes trying to explain to me the difference between Austrian German and Liechtenstein German, a conversation I really wouldn't recommend anyone enters into.

*

Prince Hans-Adam II – or Johannes Adam Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marco d'Aviano Pius Fürst von und zu Liechtenstein, to give him his full title – is standing in the rose garden of Vaduz Castle, the shadow of its turret the only thing stopping him from getting sunburnt. It's the afternoon of Liechtenstein's National Day and the silver-haired monarch is about to meet his people. He's put on free beer and finger food for everyone in his grounds and he'll soon be walking around, talking to anyone who fancies a word while presumably trying to cross the great Liechtenstein German/Austrian German language divide. Once he's finished here, he'll head down to the town centre where one of the biggest parties in the world is meant to happen: all 36,000 of the country's population drinking and dancing to every sort of music you can think of. For now, though, he's trapped in media obligations, having to tell Liechtenstein's two newspapers about the country's ‘
cashflow-probleme
' and what he's going to do about it.

As I wait my turn, I should perhaps be thinking of intelligent questions to ask him about nationalism. This is a prince, after all, who once wrote a book called
The State in the Third Millennium
about how the only way countries can survive is if they become ‘like service companies' and stop relying on national sentiment to bind people together (those services companies would be run by princes, obviously). But it's rather hard to think as all I can see in front of me is the prince, who seems to be knocking back cup after cup of lager. It reminds me of watching a groom on a stag weekend, with every cup he finishes being immediately refilled by an aide. I'm still struggling to take in the sight when I'm ushered over to meet him. ‘Are you taking photos?' he says. ‘No? Great! I can drink my beer,' and another cup is ushered straight into his hand.

We talk a bit about what makes Liechtenstein what it is today, and he laughs about how there are so few people here that of course everyone feels special. Then he talks more seriously about how the fact Liechtenstein has survived independent for so long is what's really key to that feeling. But then I get round to explaining what I'm actually doing in his country and he immediately slams his mouth shut, desperately trying to hold in a laugh. A snigger slips out of the side of his lips and he manfully tries to hold on for a moment more. But then he realises it's so obvious he might as well let the whole laugh out. He's not being rude, he has just never been asked about something as strange as his anthem before. I ask him how it feels to have a song about himself, as that's in part what the anthem is about, with everyone saluting his name. ‘Well of course it is a little bit strange. But it [became the anthem] to a certain degree when there was the Third Reich and the Führer was across the border, so we wanted to stress that the prince was our own Führer – you have yours, but we don't want him.'

‘So why do you sing it?' I ask. ‘Doesn't that mean you're effectively praising yourself?'

‘
Ja
, my wife was teasing me about it earlier!' he laughs. ‘But of course it's natural. I had to learn it in school. I've sung it for so long now I've got used to it. It's everyday.' The prince's aide puts a finger up to show I've got one more question left, and so I ask about that music. ‘It's been so popular here there's never been an idea to change it,' he says. ‘Well, maybe once or twice, but we saw what happened in those countries that did change – Switzerland – and their new anthem was not very well received, so here we said, “No, no, no, we won't.” And we're in good company with the UK. Great company, I would say.' And with that, he's pulled away to meet his people.