The Ice Museum (17 page)

Auden and MacNeice came with all the phrases of the Victorians turning in their heads. Auden even produced a mock tapestry of quotes from earlier travellers, called ‘Sheaves from Sagaland.' It was an array of bizarre sayings, compiled purely for the purposes of satire, full of profundities like ‘Iceland is not a myth; it is a solid portion of the earth's surface' or random outbursts like ‘Nowhere a single tree appears which might afford shelter to friendship and innocence, ' or slurs on Burton's obsession with polysyllables, with one of his choicer phrases—‘Ichthyophagy and idleness must do much to counter-balance the sun-clad power of chastity'—interpreted as ‘Eat more fish.' They had dipped into everyone—Burton, Mackenzie, Ketil Flat-nose and his Saga friends—and they even found Shakespeare proving that nothing escaped him, using Iceland for an insult—‘Thou prick-eared cur of Iceland'—in
Henry
IV
. They applauded William Morris, engaged in a dispute with his guide:
 
‘Hear hear!' wrote Auden.

Auden piled all these former remarks into a single chapter, mocking them gently and pushing them aside, except one. One remark jarred, having nothing to do with the Victorians' Thule holidays: ‘
Für uns Island ist
das
Land
'—a phrase attributed to an unknown Nazi. For us Iceland is
the
Country. Auden laughed at it, adding a crack about Iceland's apparently being German, but the remark dogged him as he wandered around. It was an absurd statement, but he found himself in absurd times. It was the only one of the statements that he couldn't escape from. Unlike the others, which he could parody as the excessive remarks of a former age, this blank remark was part of the world Auden was trying to escape, the world of the stiff radio commentator, announcing the end of everything. It came from the suspense lurking under the dances and the parties, the febrile nerves of the 1930s.

During his visit, Auden was surprised by the quantities of German tourists travelling through Iceland on Aryan excursions. Auden found them on the bus to Mývatn, talking incessantly about
die Schönheit
, the beauty, of Iceland. But they meant a different sort of beauty, a different kind of purity; their interests had switched from landscape ecstasy to Aryan worship. ‘The children are so beautiful, lovely blond hair and blue eyes. A truly Germanic type,' Auden heard them saying. The Victorians had admired the heirs of the Sagas, but they hardly had the same ideas as these later travellers, who applauded blond babies as part of the attractive scenery. One night, Auden shared a hotel with Hermann Goering's brother and Alfred Rosenberg. He found himself exchanging small talk over breakfast with Goering's brother, who looked, thought Auden, nothing like Goering. The Nazis, he wrote, ‘have a theory that Iceland is the cradle of the Germanic culture.' Auden and MacNeice's
Letters from Iceland
was published in 1937, as Europe prepared for war, as the last meaningless treaties were signed, and Hitler prepared to annex Austria. The poets wrote out their travels as a brief turn in a graver show: they had seen the devout Germans coming to worship at Saga sites. They observed the shift from the Victorians, trotting through Thingvellir, waxing about simplicity, to the Aryan tours of the 1930s.

The blankness of Thule could be enrolled in any schema of fantasies about the north. It was a blank white space, available for misuse, its silent ancient rocks hardly likely to protest. It was a story of a last land, which had been debated and embellished over thousands of years. In the interwar years, Thule, like so many other stories about the north, attracted German racists, brooding on the defeat of Germany in the First World War. They were compelled by Thule as a myth of a pure land, mixing it up with their own fantasies about a pure northern people, the Aryans. Their dogmatism went against the indeterminacy of Thule, which had always been a word which suggested the ends of the known world, the places beyond the power of humans to conquer and influence. The brutal ideas of the interwar period were scattered across the ice plains.

SAVAGES

. . . ANARCHS, YE WHOSE DAILY FOOD
ARE CURSES, GROANS, AND GOLD, THE FRUIT OF DEATH,
FROM THULE TO THE GIRDLE OF THE WORLD,
COME, FEAST! THE BOARD GROANS WITH THE FLESH OF MEN;
THE CUP IS FOAMING WITH A NATION'S BLOOD,
FAMINE AND THIRST AWAIT! EAT, DRINK, AND DIE!

 
“HELLAS,” PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

 
The idea of a land called Thule was taken up by a group of people meeting in Munich in the years after World War One. To disguise their activities, which were anti-Communist and anti-Semitic, they called themselves the Thule Society, and met in secret. The accounts of the Thule Society were garbled, written out by hysterical partisans, trying to make a name for themselves long after they'd been doomed to obsolescence, even by their former allies. But for a few years after the end of World War One, the Thule Society was a meeting point for future National Socialists, its guests and members including Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg and Dietrich Eckart. The Thule Society was an early expression of the Nazi fetish for ‘Aryan' tribes and northern lands, an early elision of an idea of natural purity with a belief in the racial superiority of a people. The Thule Society played a peripheral part in the agitation fomented in beer halls, the clandestine militias, the street battles, the rising suspicion of foreigners and the loathing of Bolshevism, out of which came the National Socialist Party. The Nazi obsession with northern lands was later forced onto the northern countries themselves when the German Army rampaged through Europe during the Second World War. Germanic racism, focused on Hitler, moved from ‘Aryan tours' to violent invasions and breeding programmes.

In 1918 Munich was a faction-riddled warring city, tearing itself apart after the war. A city crammed with marginal elements, shuffling towards the mainstream, fighting on the streets. It was a city full of ready recruits for extreme causes. Disappointed soldiers, returning to a Germany made poor by the conflict, wandering the streets of Munich, looking for something to do, looking for an explanation for the chaos they had returned to. Disappointed civilians, who had lost members of their family and seen it had all been for nothing. A generation felt betrayed by the establishment, as in Britain and France, but this German generation was denied even the slender consolation of victory. The elegant streets of Munich's centre were crowded with people chanting slogans, demanding nothing less than revolution. In November 1918, a Jewish journalist called Kurt Eisner led a march on Munich's city barracks and the existing order collapsed. Eisner established a Bavarian Republic and presided over sprawling partisan chaos. He couldn't grasp the city; he couldn't persuade the Bavarians to accept a socialist revolution, anti-democratic as it became, increasingly remote from any ideals Eisner might have begun with. Initial idealism was replaced by a grim struggle for political survival.

The revolution fell into acrimony and desperation; after a few months in power Eisner was assassinated by Count Anton von Arco-Valley, a disaffected aristocrat. Eisner had been preparing to offer his resignation; his party had recently suffered a decisive defeat. Arco-Valley had previously tried to enlist in the Thule Society, though they had turned him down because he was partly Jewish. There were rumours that he had assassinated Eisner to convince the Thule Society members of his commitment to their cause.

Watching from the sidelines, terrified and militant, were the members of the Thule Society. They were a coterie of pseudo-academics, feigning a scholarly interest in the Sagas, secretly agitating against the Communists, the ‘foreign elements' they thought were controlling the city, the international conspiracy of Capital, by which they meant Judaism, the enemies they feared were taking over Germany. Their leader was a faux-aristocrat called Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a man with a long nose, an indeterminate neck, small eyes like shallow indentations on his flesh. Sebottendorff's father had been a train driver with the surname Glauer, but Sebottendorff travelled widely in his early years, and claimed to have been adopted in Turkey by an expatriate, Baron Heinrich von Sebottendorff. Acquiring an aristocratic “von” was a tactic practised by the Ariosophists Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels, bourgeois Austrians both, with nothing noble about their lineage, who concocted a racist variety of spiritualism in the early years of the twentieth century. Sebottendorff managed to acquire tenuous aristocratic relatives, and with this new status he took to wandering around the Middle East, looking for patrons, reading about occultism and crafting chaotic theories about threats to the integrity of the Aryan peoples.

The Thule Society had previously been a local branch of the Germanenorden, a society obsessed with what it thought was ancient Germanic heritage, its members wringing their hands about the dilution of the German ‘spirit' through the addition of non-‘Aryan' elements to the population. Sebottendorff was an eager member of this group, having been lured by an appeal for ‘Aryan' recruits, but when revolutionary elements gained control of the city Sebottendorff wanted a more mysterious title for the branch. He chose Thule, and claimed his group was dedicated to the study of the Sagas. The name Thule was innocuous enough on the surface, said Sebottendorff, but to those who ‘knew' it gave a clear impression of the hidden agenda of the society. A clear impression because the old myths of the north appealed to extremist nationalists at the time, groups of Germans and Austrians in love with the heroes of the Sagas, leafing through tales of Viking violence. The Thule Society could have been what it claimed to be—a few scholastic Bavarians sitting around talking about the Sagas, a German version of the Viking societies in London. But the interests of Thule Society members went beyond the Sagas; their fantasy was a Germany stripped of all those elements they regarded as ‘alien.' Only Germans ‘of homogeneous blood through generations' were allowed to join the Thule Society.

The Thule Society set itself against the atheism of Communism and the materialism of modernity, claiming allegiance to an ancient spiritual force, the ancient heritage of the Germanic race. The society mixed reactionary mysticism with political agitation, and the ‘Thule
Leute
' (Thule People), as Sebottendorff liked to call them, played a role in the militant anti-Communist activities in Munich, in the activities of the Freikorps, a militia organization. Alfred Rosenberg, who went on to become Hitler's propaganda expert, spent the early 1920s editing the
Völkischer Beobachter
, the Thule Society's newspaper. In a gloomy gothic typeface bleeding across the page they flaunted their anti-Semitism, goading the city to a fight—‘Only buy in German shops!' they cried—their anti-Semitism inseparable from their anti-Communism: ‘Against the Republic! ' The Communists were Jews; Eisner's movement was an attempt by foreign Bolshevism to take over Bavaria, claimed the
Völkischer Beobachter
, fervently.

In a long line of dreams about Thule, those of Sebottendorff and his fellow ‘Thule People' were the most savage. Sebottendorff had read old Zoroastrian texts describing a lost Aryan homeland,
Airyana Vaejah
, which some thought had been in Siberia. Thule, Sebottendorff thought, was the place where the Aryans had originally lived. He imagined Thule as somewhere hardly
unheimlich
at all, far from uncanny and strange. It was, he thought, an ‘Aryan'
Heimat
, homeland. He took the Thule of the classical poets, the philosophers and the fantasists, and used its ambiguity for his own purposes, as a code word between like-minded extremists. Thule was just one of many symbols and ideas they used; the Thule Society members were fascinated by alchemical and eastern symbols: rising suns, daggers and swastikas.

By early July I was in Munich, a significant change of scene, from the shattered rocks and purple plains of Iceland to the tranquil forests of Bavaria. The sun was beginning to fade when I arrived, drifting towards the turrets and towers of the city. I took a tram from the main station, which rattled through the streets, past the concrete of Karlsplatz in the city centre. Stepping off at Sendlinger Tor, an entrance to the old city, I dragged my suitcase along a paved main street, past designer shops and organic cafés. On a warm day the city seemed sedate, a place of elegant buildings, painted pale colours, with the towers of churches rising out of the lower lines of housing. I walked along the slow streets, arriving at Marienplatz where the crowds ebbed across the square, fumbling with cameras and hats. The green onion domes of the Frauenkirche loomed above, one of the central sights of the reconstructed Old Town. Munich was severely bombed during World War Two and carefully rebuilt in the post-war years. Leering over the square was the neo-Gothic Neues Rathaus, its façade covered in gargoyles. There were a few people standing beneath, waiting for the clock to chime, when a pair of copper figures would appear, dancing stiffly.

Evening was falling across the city, across the patched-up buildings, across the reconstructed rows, the seams hardly showing. The streetlights were flickering into life, shining against the fine stones of the Residenz, the former palace of the regional monarchs, the Wittelsbachs. The trams whirred along the streets, past the cafés closing their doors and the shops with their shutters down. Neon lights blazed along Sonnenstrasse, pointing out the sex shops and cheap takeaway joints. Bells echoed from tall churches and faded monuments. Footfalls, the soft sounds of the locals going home, punctuated the stillness, and there were other locals forming orderly lines for the trams. The forests stretched beyond the city, green hills, clear lakes, miles of quiet countryside, under the cover of dusk.