The Weimar Triangle (12 page)

“We have already bought the tickets,” I said.

S
AINT
C
YRIL AND
M
ETHODIUS

We did not regret we went. The brand-new work was based on ancient Gregorian chants and Byzantine themes and was performed by a choir and soloists with a conductor. Both Hanni and I were deeply engaged from beginning to end and not at all bored. It did not matter that we did not understand a word. Incidentally, we had not known that the two protagonists were Greek missionaries who lived in the ninth century and were credited with devising the Glagolitic alphabet, the precursor of the Cyrillic alphabet.

We had a memorable conversation in a café near the Saalbau afterward. A middle-aged man with steel-rimmed glasses sat alone at the table next to ours. He turned out to be Gerhard Pachmann, a client of Hermann’s, a partner in an iron-manufacturing company that was being sued for breach of contract. Hermann had won the case. Hanni greeted him and asked him to join us at our table. She remembered him as a man passionately interested in the arts. Once again I was impressed by her lack of self-consciousness about appearing in public with a man not her husband.

She introduced me.

“So there you are in the flesh. I am happy to meet you at last,” he said to me. We shook hands. He had a typical Frankfurt face
—
a little sad and amused at the same time. “Well,
Herr
Doktor
Herzberg, this exotic work certainly gave you plenty to write about.”

I agreed wholeheartedly.

“So what would you say about it, Herr Pachmann?” Hanni asked, knowing I would never ask such a question.

“I would say that the two old missionaries
—
only one of them, alas, made it to sainthood
—
provided a good defence for Mayor Landmann when they go after him for bankrupting the city. This is modern music at its best. The organizers wouldn’t have brought all these people all the way from Zagreb if the oratorio had not been successful and popular at home, and music of the highest quality. It has a clear purpose and is certainly not unintelligible self-indulgence for a few snobs. Nor is it forcing a few wrong notes into a perfectly innocent score to make it sound contemporary. It is genuine new wine in genuine old bottles
—
what good modern art should be
—
a reflection of the time we live in and at the same time making timeless things significant. Everything good has deep roots.”

“Now you know what to write, Erwin,” Hanni teased me. “Hermann will defend you if you use that phrase of
Herr
Pachmann’s about the innocent score without permission.”

“That is good to know.” I laughed.

“I would be flattered if you do,
Herr Doktor
Herzberg. You have my permission.”

From the
Frankfurter Zeitung
:

When Richard Straus conducted
Salome
in Graz five months after its first performance in Dresden in 1906, Gustav Mahler was there. So were Giacomo Puccini and Arnold Schönberg, as well as the widow of Johann Strauss. On the train back to Vienna, Mahler was full of praise for his esteemed colleague’s work and called it a true masterpiece, a work of genius. He was also envious. He could not understand how a work of genius could also be popular.

No one would have wondered about such a thing in the days of Beethoven or Wagner. The schools in Vienna were closed on the day of Beethoven’s funeral. He was a popular celebrity in his lifetime. Wagner, too, was a famous man. It has only been in our century, right from the beginning, that much of serious contemporary music has fallen out of favour.

What is the reason? Why do we sometimes feel that composers deliberately put wrong notes into perfectly innocent scores? Or shift rhythms, like Stravinsky? Why is there a mass audience for popular music? Do modern composers intentionally put obstacles between themselves and the public because they believe if a lot of people like their work it cannot be any good?

Something happened after the death of Wagner in 1881 that has made the twentieth century unsure of itself. Our confidence has been shaken. Old certainties have been put into question. New certainties and therefore big audiences for new works have not yet emerged. First there was the fin de siècle and the all-pervasive sensation of decadence and the feeling that something invaluable was coming to an end. At the same time there was a thirst for a new beginning.

What happened after that? The shock and devastation of the war and the post-war horrors. Only now do we see the first glimmer of hope. If you listen carefully to some of the new music you can hear it. Frankfurt’s Summer of Music is a dress rehearsal. Perhaps soon large audiences, such as those who relished the oratorio
The Life and Works of Saint Cyril and Methodius
in Zagreb and in Frankfurt, will applaud Hindemith, Bartok, Stravinsky and Schönberg and dozens of others we do not yet know.

Music always reflects the spirit of the times. We are still groping. When we are in a truly good mood again, upsetting dissonance will be as meaningful and welcome as soothing consonance.

S
EX IN
K
RONBERG

A close friend of Teddy’s mother, Johanna Krieghoff, had a house and a lovely garden in Kronberg, the village north of Frankfurt in the foothills of the Taunus Mountains. For some reason she had to be in Berlin during the week after the festival of contemporary music, although it meant missing two important Beethoven concerts. I had met her a few times. She was a regular reader of my feuilletons and we got on well. Knowing that I occasionally enjoyed a few days out of town with a lady friend, she offered me her house for a few days while she was away. It included her elderly cook, Lina Wollner, whose specialty was
Grüne Sauce
, and her gardener, Ludwig Weidmann, who had lost a leg at Verdun.

It took only half an hour’s train journey from Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof to Kronberg. To reach nearby Bad Homburg you could take the number 23 streetcar. In Kronberg you were in the country, not at a spa and not in suburbia.

I loved Kronberg. I loved walking through the woods along the well-marked trails and even climbing the Altkönig mountain, which I had done a few times and intended to do again on Sunday with Hanni and her two boys. I always enjoyed a beer at the Fuchstanz rest-stop, partway up the mountain
—
twice: going up and coming down.

I had heard that one of the exiled Kaiser’s sisters resided in Kronberg, secluded in a fairy-tale castle surrounded by a park. I did not know her name. All I knew was that she was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and that on my last visit I had seen, with my very own eyes, signs posted on the fence surrounding the park that warned possible trespassers:
Achtung Selbstschuss!
[“Warning: You will shoot yourself!”]. I assumed that meant mines had been laid.

Three years ago I wrote a historical piece on the important role Kronberg had played in the Kaiser’s early history, not in the context of present attitudes toward the former monarchy but in connection with Anglo-German relations at the end of the nineteenth century. I recalled the bad feelings between Wilhelm and his mother, Vicky, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. I wrote that these bad feelings had a crucial impact on future political developments between the two countries. Wilhelm was born with a withered arm. He blamed his mother
—
that is, England. One cannot help wondering whether there would have been a world war had his mother given birth to a normal baby. The tutors and governors his mother appointed when he was a little boy prescribed cruel exercises to mitigate the effect of his physical handicap. It did not occur to her that she was doing serious damage to his psyche. His father played no role in his upbringing.

There were other reasons for Wilhelm’s antipathy to his mother. He held it against her that she dominated his father and that she had given her husband English
—
liberal
—
ideas. She hated Bismarck, the anti-liberal blood-and-iron chancellor, the legendary unifier of the Reich and, of course, the young prince’s hero.

In my article I related a dramatic incident that was not well known but had a direct bearing on German-English relations. Wilhelm’s time came in 1888, when he was twenty-nine, impatient and ambitious, after his father had died of cancer of the throat in his castle in Potsdam. The old emperor had kept diaries, sprinkled with anti-Bismarck sentiments. Immediately after his death Wilhelm had the castle surrounded and his mother put under house arrest. Any courier trying to smuggle his father’s diaries to England on his mother’s orders was to be intercepted on the grounds that the diaries were the property of the state. The wily Vicky, who knew her son well, had already sent them to her mother in Windsor.

After he assumed the throne the new kaiser needed to get his mother out of the way as soon as decently possible. So he thought of Kronberg. It was sufficiently far away from Berlin that she could not meddle. He arranged for her to design and build a beautiful castle there, in the middle of a big park, worthy of her status as the dowager empress. There she lived for another thirteen years until she died in 1901. It was called Friedrichshof, in honour of her husband and Wilhelm’s father, Kaiser Friedrich III. For some reason her youngest daughter, Margarethe, inherited it and not her older sister Viktoria. Margarethe was married to Prince Karl Friedrich von Hessen; Viktoria was the widow of Prince Adolf von Schaumburg-Lippe, who died in 1916. Viktoria often visited her sister and always stayed in a villa near the castle, inside the park.

From the
Frankfurter Zeitung
:

There are several reasons why there is so much nostalgia for the days of the Kaiser and his family and why the Republic has not yet won the hearts of many Germans. One such reason is that the conversion of an autocracy into a parliamentary democracy was achieved as the result not of a popular uprising, as in France in 1789 or in Russia in 1917, but of a constitutional move at the top. Only once had there been the possibility of such a transition as a result of a political movement at what Americans call a grassroots level, meaning from below, and that was in 1848. It culminated in the assembly in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. That attempt was nipped in the bud by the king of Prussia and his allies.

The birth o
f
the Weimar
R
epublic followed somewhat different lines.

On January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson delivered a message to the United States Congress containing the “Fourteen Points,” the fundamental conditions for peace. One of these was the establishment of parliamentary democracy in Germany
—
not, incidentally the abolition of the monarchy. Berlin did not reject these conditions outright but treated them as a basis for negotiations. On September 29, Ludendorff, after the failure of the spring offensive, afraid of an allied breakthrough, asked for a truce and for the formation of a new government in Berlin, with the participation of the majority parties in the Reichstag. This was designed as a step toward meeting President Wilson’s conditions. Its implementation turned out to be the genesis of German parliamentary government, a desperate concession initiated by the military at the end of its tethers. It was the beginning of the process that led to the Kaiser’s abdication on November 9. Meeting the president’s condition had the great advantage of making it possible for Ludendorff subsequently to make democrats the scapegoats for the failure of his own leadership.

No doubt the nostalgia for the Kaiser’s days would be even more acute if the Kaiser had done what many wished him to do, namely, as a final act of grand Wilhelmian heroism, sacrifice his life on the battlefield to save the honour of the nation and the crown. Personally, I do not blame him for not complying. From the beginning of his reign he had had a strong sense of theatre. He had always been acting. The tragedy was that most Germans did not understand that. He did. At the end of
Hamlet
only Hamlet is dead, not the actor playing Hamlet.

Also, he thought not everything was lost. He hoped the day would come when the curtain would rise again.

The cook, Lina, was a pleasant woman in her fifties, with bright blue eyes and a permanently red face. Her grey hair was tied together in a bun at the back. She treated us tactfully, dutifully pretending we were a married couple.

On our second day she cooked us an excellent dinner
— Sauerbraten
with red cabbage and
Grüne Sauce,
followed by chocolate pudding.

She could hardly wait for the meal to be over to give us the news.

“
Do you know what everybody in the village is talking about? Our princess Viktoria got married!”

“Do sit down, Lina,” Hanni said, “and tell us more.”

Lina sat down on a chair near the window facing the Altkönig mountain. The choice of the possessive pronoun “our” made it clear where Lina stood ideologically. She was
kaisertreu,
loyal to her Kaiser and his sister.

“Wasn’t she married before?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. But now she is a widow.”

“No children?” Hanni asked.