The Ice Museum (18 page)

I found my hotel, an inn near a food market in the centre, run by a beaming woman who dragged my suitcase out of my hands and thrust it into the arms of her son. ‘Take it now,' she exclaimed. The son, a broad-shouldered teenager, lugged it willingly up the stairs. The room was decked in Bavarian kitsch: a dozen 1930s calendars framed along the walls, a range of wine bottles along the window ledge, dried flowers, wooden animals dangling from the light shades and signed photographs of faded celebrities. The effect was like a storeroom, hastily tidied for an unexpected guest. I found a place to put my suitcase and pushed open the window. Beneath, people were sitting in outdoor cafés in the market, eating portions of chips and drinking beers. The clocks chimed the hour around Marienplatz.

The bar downstairs was a beacon of noise, spilling jeering crowds onto the pavement. It drew me from my room. The scene at the bottom of the stairs was like a piece of performance art, entitled ‘conviviality.' The Bavarians were sitting around tables, while the hostess slammed glasses of beer into their hands. Silence was
verboten
; everyone screamed and cheered, laughter came in basso waves across the room. The tables were engulfed in noise, a sense of community so pronounced it seemed like collective madness.

I sat by the fire, and a table called towards me. ‘Who are you?' ‘Why are you here?' I mentioned Thule, and one of them interrupted, a man with a blond moustache, who told me his name was Martin. ‘Thule? But why here? Thule was in the north!' he said. ‘You should go to the north!' said another. ‘Why are you here?' another consortium of Bavarians was asking, and then the hostess slammed a vast tankard of beer in front of me, and they all forgot the question and cried: ‘Your health! Your health!'

The guttural sound of Bavarian German merged into a soft sound track—pleasantries, comments on the weather. It had rained; it would rain, everyone agreed, sounding like a lesson in the complexities of German grammar. After Martin turned back to his friends, I spent the evening reading Goethe, leafing through
Faust
to find his song about Thule:

 
In English the lines mean something like: ‘In Thule there lived a king, faithful to the grave, to whom his dying beloved gave a golden cup.' It all works out mournfully enough: the king prizes the golden cup above all his other possessions, and drinks from it at every meal, while crying for his departed loved one. And when he comes to die, he hands over his kingdom to his heirs but refuses to give anyone his golden cup. So, in his castle by the sea, he drinks for a last time from the cup and then throws it into the waves below. After seeing it disappear beneath the water, he closes his eyes and dies. It is a fairytale song, its location in Thule suggesting a faraway land, a forgotten royal house. Thule is just one among the many references Goethe toys with in his play: from inevitable reams of classical mythology to tales of northern witches, elves and gnomes. It is another cameo appearance for the idea of Thule in a tale of unmeasured human ambitions, the ambitions of Faust for knowledge, which lead him to his pact with Mephistopheles. The refusal to accept imposed limits, the interplay between fantasy and reality, compelled Goethe. He took up these themes in his first major work,
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, and Werther became an early romantic archetype, a man in love with the ‘inexpressible beauty of Nature,' a man of impetuous energies and charisma. Werther walks through valleys teeming with vapour, warmed by the meridian sun, he throws himself down by trickling streams, lying close to the earth, sniffing at plants and little insects, muttering ecstatically about ‘the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us.' But though his nature love runs to pantheism, Werther's desires are focused firmly in the human world, and when his love is unreciprocated, he falls into despair. Thwarted, his dynamism turns to destructiveness. Refusing life on any terms except his own, he kills himself.

Romanticism bubbled into the nineteenth century, poured into the paints of Caspar David Friedrich, who painted silent shores clad in mist or russet sunlight glinting across forests. Friedrich added spiritual yearning to his landscapes, making the scenery allegorical. In his paintings, he contrasted dying nature, trees decaying on a darkened mountainside, with white clouds and rising fog offering a fleeting suggestion of an invisible world. In
Sumpfiger Strand
he painted figures with their backs to a darkened shore, turned towards a cloudy sky, with traces of sunshine behind the clouds. The figures seem to wait for the clouds to lift, for the brilliance of the sun to be revealed. Carl Rottman, Joseph Anton Koch and Ludwig Richter painted heroic landscapes of hardy rustic people living simple lives in the country, praying under the trees, struggling against harsh winds. They were sometimes sentimental, like Richter painting pretty peasants decked in garlands, but then Richter could rise to moments of pity and terror, standing his rustics on tenuous mountain ledges, blasting them with winds, showing the agony in their faces. They were ecumenical: they roamed from Italy to Greece to Scandinavia; they painted any landscape they found striking. Some, like Rottman, showed a penchant for still blue Mediterranean waters and ancient ruins under a shifting sky; others preferred northern greyness. They were humbled and inspired by the vastness of the mountains, the physical embodiment of the complex workings of God, or the Life Force, or the World Spirit, finding themselves transported from the concerns of the everyday. The strain of German Romanticism had its florid moments; the nineteenth-century Bavarian king Ludwig II created the fairytale palace Neuschwanstein to the south of Munich and decked it with opulent gothic carvings, tableaux representing warriors in armour on horseback, lances at the ready, damsels with long tresses clutching their skirts. Ludwig II spent the family fortune on tapestries of Tristan and a theatre full of Wagnerian stage sets, and then succumbed to madness. A predecessor, Ludwig I, had adorned the Residenz with scenes from the Nibelungen Saga, though he tempered them with neo-classicism.

In the early years of the twentieth century, something began to shift. Reactionaries, fearful of the changes happening in Germany, turned nostalgically towards a nobler age, they thought. Extreme nationalists recalled the time when Germans were as Tacitus described them, a tribe of strawberry-blond warriors, living in the forests. At the end of the First World War there were German writers who claimed that the Germans had lost the war because they had not been rooted firmly enough in the soil. To glorify the land was to draw on the strength of unchanging ages, the vast forests and mountains, the abundance of nature, offering solace to a weak and beaten nation. The Thule Society members were transfixed by this dream of a rugged people living in the north, using it to console themselves for recent humiliations. The Nazis later dipped into this store of national myth, claiming that they followed a Germanic tradition, eliding Saga tales with Romantic ideas about the virtuous life in nature. Nazi nature love was the will to racial cleansing masquerading as heritage studies, a riot of pseudo-mysticism, rune readings and false history. They aped the Romantic transports of delight in the mountains and forests, but Nazi nature love was a form of national chauvinism—the people came first, and then the land, as the further proof of the purity of the people. Only the mountains imagined to ‘belong' in some way to the Aryan race were to be memorialized. In the hands of the Nazis the ideals of Romanticism became a partisan obsession, spawning a range of things, from Hitler youth groups to an iconography of the Führer and ‘his mountains,' though Hitler hated to walk uphill.

In Munich Nazi history seeps out from under the reconstructed stones. Hitler's rise through local faction fighting is well documented: his arrival as one of the uncertain soldiers; his meteoric ascent as an orator, addressing seething beer halls; his attempted putsch of 1923, when he tried to seize the city by force, and was imprisoned outside Munich. In the cult of National Socialism, Munich was the home of the ‘movement.' Once he became chancellor, Hitler built a vast complex of buildings in Munich, around Königsplatz, a neo-classical square created by Ludwig I. Hitler wanted Königsplatz because of the regal columns and the shapely symmetry of the buildings. The buildings Hitler added to the square were brutal copies of this earlier neo-classicism, their columns harsh and unadorned, rising into horizontal slabs. The Nazi complex spread across the streets around the square; Hitler operated a deliberate policy of expropriation, which meant that by 1939 more than fifty buildings in the area were being used for Nazi Party activities. It became a site for Nazi carnivals and demonstrations: Königsplatz was where books were burnt in 1933; two years later, the square was paved with granite slabs and turned into a parading ground for Nazi troops. The former showpiece of the Wittelsbachs became Hitler's ‘Royal Square.' By 1940 thousands of people worked there. The area had its own power supplies, warehouses for storing food, vast kitchens to serve the employed masses, its own post and telegraph offices. Underneath the buildings was an intricate network of bunkers and underground passages.

One of the main Nazi buildings was the Führer Building, where the 1938 Munich Agreement was signed, a failed attempt by a nervous prime minister to avert war. And against the backdrop of Ludwig's classical square, Hitler ordered ‘temples' to be built, to honour the Nazi cult. There were two ‘temples' for mystical ceremonies, the dramas of smoke and lights favoured by the Nazis. With these ‘temples' Hitler made Königsplatz a centre of the pseudo-religion of Nazism.

They are now ruins, these ‘temples.' In the early morning, I was standing in Königsplatz, looking at the fine white columns of Ludwig's buildings, with alcoves housing statues and pediments covered with bas-relief figures. With the Nazi buildings behind me, out of view, the square was harmonious. Ludwig's neo-classicism rose on three sides of the square, most of it created by a single architect, Leo von Klenze. Flags fluttered in the breeze; cars moved across the cobblestones. The morning was quiet and warm; the sun was beginning to break through the clouds. Yet when I turned, there were the plinths of the ‘temples,' walls about six feet high, with trees growing on the top. The Americans ordered the destruction of the ‘temples' at the end of the war, leaving only these remnants. They left the monumental ugliness of the Führer Building, which had survived the Allied bombing raids almost intact. Needing space in a devastated city the American troops used the building as a head-quarters. Next to the ‘temples' there was a board, offering a brief history of the square. It had been put up in 2001. ‘Until now,' the writing on the board said, ‘there has been no permanent reference on the site to the history of the square and its surroundings, a place where thousands took part in mass rallies to pay their respects to the cult of a death-dealing regime of terror which had no respect for human life. For a long time there was no reference on buildings which had been the architectural expression of the “capital of the movement.”' The board ended with a message to all who stood there, surveying the buildings: ‘Exhortation and commemoration of the Nazi terror must also bear reference to the sites of the perpetrators. This is the only way to ensure that the sufferings of the victims remain permanently in the public awareness.'

By the placard, I could hear a guide talking to her tour group. ‘This is Königsplatz,' she was saying. The hybrid creation of former kings and later Nazis. The opulent columns of the early kingly buildings and the gloating ugliness of the Nazi bricks, everything jarring, the Nazi buildings straining for effect, designed for corruption. ‘Please don't crowd too much around the information poster. Everyone can get a look,' added the guide.

The tour group stared round at the square. ‘In this building,' said the guide as the tour group cast a collective eye on the blank lump of stone, close to where I was standing, ‘in this building,' said the guide again, ‘the British prime minister of the time, Neville Chamberlain, signed an agreement with Hitler in 1938, the appeasement pact.' And everyone nodded slowly, staring at the bricks. Now there was a music college in the Nazi complex; it was incongruous, but from inside came the notes of a sonata, played on a piano, nearly drowned out by the roar of traffic.

‘Later,' said the guide, ‘we will walk to the Feldherrnhalle, around the corner, which was where Hitler marched in 1923, when he tried to take over Munich by force.'

It was an anti-tour, an unfortunate turn for a city tourist board to have to take. Here, the guide would say, Hitler plotted the appalling events which would embroil the country in destruction; here some political opponents were brutally killed; here a former Nazi loyalist, Ernst Röhm, was condemned to death. Here the Nazis made the complex and delicate into something monolithic and savage. There were memorials throughout Munich, and an army of these guides leading people round the streets on tours of Nazi architecture and significant Nazi sites. On the sides of Ludwig's vast art gallery, the Pinakothek, next to Königsplatz, the post-war repairs were starkly visible. The bomb damage had been filled in with plain red bricks, which stood out against Klenze's ornate pale stone. Windows had been bricked up, as if the building were awaiting more intricate repairs. It made for a mottled façade, showing how severely the Pinakothek had been bombed. The centre of the building had been devastated, and rebuilt in this chastened style, redolent of a large factory.

I walked into the Pinakothek, and found the galleries almost empty. I meandered through the cold rooms, relieved to be out of the sun. In the Rubens room, there was an art student quietly copying
The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus
, painting the pink curves of the women and Castor and Pollux on their black and white horses. The student was standing in ripped jeans, his shirt picturesquely covered in paint, dabbing his brush on his canvas. Walking past the student I found Rubens's portrait of
The Death of Seneca
, a dramatic canvas showing the philosopher preparing to die. Seneca had been accused of participating in a conspiracy and was forced by his former pupil Nero to commit suicide. Tacitus wrote that he severed his arteries and stepped into a basin of hot water. When this failed to kill him, he had himself carried to a steam bath, where he suffocated. In Rubens's painting, Seneca—a perfect muscular classical hero—is being helped by a doctor, who seems to have cut an artery in his left arm. Seneca is the quintessential Stoic, dignified and resigned, while on his other side, a scribe is writing down his last words. “VIR” appears on the page, suggesting VIRTUS. Seneca lifts his head, trying to ignore the pain of death, talking to the last about courage and worth.