Worlds Elsewhere (12 page)

Nielsen had founded her own production company to make the film, basing its script on material drawn from one of the earliest sources of the play, the early-medieval chronicles of Saxo Grammaticus. This she combined with a cranky book from 1881 by the American academic Edward P. Vining – dedicated, it so happened, to Horace Howard Furness – which argued that young Hamlet had been born a woman, a fact which has been hidden from the Danish court by Gertrude because of her fears about leaving the throne without a male heir. Brought up a boy, s/he roughhouses with Laertes in Wittenberg and befriends her/his princely contemporary, Fortinbras. More teasingly, s/he develops complicated feelings for Horatio (far stronger than those s/he develops for Ophelia). Her identity is only revealed on the point of death, when Horatio clutches the hero's body and realises she is in fact a heroine. (‘Death uncovers your tragic secret!')

Filmed in modishly expressionist black-and-white, the film was above all a showcase for Nielsen's acting, underlining her wistful sense of tragedy as well as her mercurial comic timing. This was one of the funniest
Hamlets
ever committed to film. Ophelia was dispatched with one sardonically elevated, pencil-thin eyebrow (‘Oh,
her,
' it seemed to
say), Polonius had his beard tugged mercilessly, and during the mad scenes Nielsen loped around, rubber-limbed, like a cat on tranquillisers. It was an electrifying performance, and put me in mind more than once of
Der Bestrafte Brudermord.
One could see why she'd inspired both Garbo and Katharine Hepburn.

There was a mischievous hint of subversion at work, too. Whereas Vining's thesis about Hamlet's gender was a misogynistic attempt to pathologise the Prince's fears of action (‘in very deed a woman, desperately striving to fill a place for which she was by nature unfitted'), Nielsen placed herself in a much bolder and braver tradition, making herself the star attraction in the mode of nineteenth-century leading ladies such as Charlotte Cushman and Sarah Bernhardt, both of whom played the Dane. Athletic yet gamine, both androgynous and tantalisingly bisexual, she caught the character's flitting, gossamer contradictions more fully than any other actor I'd seen.

There was another reason it felt appropriate to watch the film in the city that gave its name to the Weimar Republic. During the 1920s, when Nielsen's fame was at its zenith, Germany and its cabaret scene had been the crucible of exactly the kind of avant-garde drama
Hamlet: Ein Rachedrama
put on screen – gender-bending, quizzically exploratory in its examination of sensual and sexual identities. I wondered if any of the straighter-backed members of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft had seen the movie when it first came out, and if so what they thought. Alas, I could find no mention of it in their yearbook.

Morning was perfect: crisp and clear and still, a sky of powder-blue with clouds as fluffy as poached egg white. As I crunched along the footpath next to the River Ilm, early leaves were starting to show on the linden trees, pointillist dots of pale yellowish-green. The birds were loud, the scent of wet grass and earth strong on the breeze. I felt in a dangerously good mood.

For once, I knew exactly where I was going. It was the morning of 23 April, Shakespeare's birthday: a year since I'd begun plotting my travels. A few minutes' walk from my guesthouse was the most famous Shakespeare monument in Germany, the Shakespeare statue in the Park an der Ilm. I'd been holding off seeing it until now.

The park was begun in the late 1770s by Duke Karl August, who,
weary with Frenchified formal gardens (as everyone else was wearying of Frenchified literature), wanted something in the style becoming fashionable in England. Goethe – who else? – happily complied, busying himself with studying botany and drawing inspiration from a visit to Wörlitz near Dessau, one of the first English-style parks to be created in Germany. In Weimar, Goethe created a rugged, proto-Romantic scheme, groves of maple, ash, linden, chestnut and hornbeam draped around the river with a rough patchwork of lawns and paths leading up the hill to the other side. Goethe was careful to ensure that the Gartenhaus – the small dwelling where he had first taken up residence – was a central feature. Both writer's retreat and picturesque adornment to the landscape, it effectively made the
genius loci
Goethe himself. I could just about glimpse the Gartenhaus through the trees, a modest grey cottage with a sharply sloping roof like a witch's hat.

Into this artfully curated piece of artlessness the Shakespeare-Gesellschaft inserted their statue in 1904, a fortieth birthday present to themselves. The site was on the opposite bank of the river, giving it a generous view over the Gartenhaus and ensuring that – lindens permitting – Shakespeare would forever be facing Goethe (and vice versa). The sculptor was chosen with similar care: he was Otto Lessing, a descendant of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the man who had made many Germans aware of this miraculous English poet. Like the society, the monument was a first: the first statue to the poet raised in continental Europe.

I rounded the corner and there he was: bone-white, a little larger than human size, on a grey stone dais. For a man just turning 449, he wasn't looking so bad. Lessing had caught Shakespeare as a decisive-looking forty-something, perched casually, one leg lifted, on what might have been a country wall. Tucked under his loose gown, his right hand crooked against his waist, was a scroll –
Hamlet,
perhaps, freshly revised and about to be sent to the compositor. His left hand toyed with a single rose, his left foot resting on a fool's cap within which there was a skull (Yorick's?). The overriding impression was of a seasoned, somewhat blokeish member of the literati shortly to be interviewed for a late-night arts programme.

His expression was trickier to gauge. Lessing had sculpted it so that, as one circumnavigated the statue clockwise, Shakespeare's countenance brightened: an effect achieved by shaping the left side of his face into a
stern frown while the right side bore a soft smile. It was a clever device – comedy and tragedy, I supposed – but, viewed from some angles, it had the unfortunate result of giving him a condescending leer.

I decided not to be too hard on Lessing's work: I was journeying in search of Shakespeare translated, reinterpreted, reconfigured; of Shakespeares that looked different from the British version. Leer notwithstanding, this was what difference looked like.

Normally the Gesellschaft held a ceremony here on the morning of 23 April: a short speech at the statue, then the laying of roses. This year, however, I was on my own. The annual Shakespeare-Tage festival was being held in Munich, my next destination, and the Weimar tradition was on ice. Apart from the fluting of the birds and an occasional jogger scuffing along the gravel, it was deathly quiet. The only person who'd come to bid Shakespeare happy birthday, apparently, was me.

I settled down nearby and tried to get further into
Wilhelm Meister,
hacking my way through the thickets of its prose. It had seemed somewhat inauspicious that the elegant cloth-bound 1894 edition I'd brought with me from England had only half its pages cut; its previous owner had obviously given up halfway. I'd gone at the rest with a vegetable knife I'd borrowed from the guesthouse.

‘Wilhelm had already been for some time busied with translating
Hamlet …
What in Wieland's work had been omitted he replaced; and he had at length procured himself a complete version, at the very time when Serlo and he finally agreed about the way of treating it …'

Serlo and Wilhelm were about to get stuck into a thorny debate about the ethics of translation; what should be preserved and what changed, whether there was any such thing as the original. The subject was entirely pertinent to my travels, but, try as I might, I couldn't focus. I kept drifting to birdsong, the scent of wet stone, the sun creeping slowly between the trees, the sound of the breeze crackling in the grass. Indistinctly, I wondered how Goethe had coped with the same distractions in the Gartenhaus. Maybe that was why he left so many unfinished projects.

I heard voices on the path nearby, and started: I'd been dozing. Shamefacedly I stood up and made a show of fussing with my notebook and placing a bookmark in
Wilhelm Meister.
I hadn't even brought roses.
In lieu of a birthday party, a spot of improvisation was required. Professor Tobias Döring, the president of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, was based in Munich (hence the venue for this year's conference), but he put me in touch with one of his Weimar colleagues. Roland Petersohn was a DSG stalwart, the principal at a school near Jena. He could tell me more of the society's backstory, including its history in the former East Germany.

At precisely 4 p.m. Petersohn and I solemnly toasted 449 years since the birth of William Shakespeare – and 149 years since the founding of the society – in the only way that seemed appropriate, with bitter black coffee and kirschtorte at the Residenz Café near the Schloss Belevedere, where Marlene Dietrich once sang.

With his dark green jacket, tufting moustache and spade-like handshake, one could picture Petersohn leading his charges on hearty expeditions through the Thuringian forests. As well as having been vice-president of the Gesellschaft in the 1990s, he had published academic studies of Heiner Müller, the GDR's most celebrated playwright, another German heavily influenced by Shakespeare.

Through mouthfuls of torte, Petersohn told me his own history. He had first joined in the early 1980s as a student of English and German literature in Jena. Germany was then buried beneath the permafrost of the cold war; Weimar, of course, lay on the eastern side of the border. In the early 1960s, relations had broken down between members based in the East and their erstwhile colleagues in the West. The crunch came in 1963, when instead of celebrating the forthcoming 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and the society's centennial, the decision was taken to divide it. The Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (West) would be based in Bochum on the outskirts of Dortmund, while the Ossies retained their historic home in Weimar. As with almost everything else in postwar Germany, the two wings had eyed each other with disdainful suspicion.

The penny dropped: I'd been wondering why the
Jahrbuchs
on the shelves of the DSG offices had multiplied between the 1960s and 1990s, one set in Prussian blue, the other scarlet. For nearly forty years there were two different
Jahrbuchs,
West and East, commissioned by two societies with two competing ideologies.

It was the cold war in Shakespearian miniature. For thirty years, each Shakespeare-Tag there were rival celebrations, with theatre companies from the Soviet bloc making their way to Weimar and those from the
west appearing in Bochum. At one stage, among a coterie of radical Anglo-American scholars, it was a badge of honour to receive an invitation to the DSG (Ost) and peep behind the Iron Curtain.

‘Stephen Greenblatt came to talk to us,' Petersohn said, waving his cake fork triumphantly. ‘He did not go to West Germany. They couldn't afford him.'

The two societies had formally rejoined in April 1993, three years after the reunification of Germany itself. The process had been every bit as protracted and painful as it was at federal level. Rival negotiating teams were sent to thrash out terms on neutral ground, including in Stratford-upon-Avon (which, given the events of 1864, struck me as an irony worth cherishing).

It sounded like something from a spy novel, I said.

Petersohn gave me a long look. ‘It was the strangest of times.'

It was in this period that he had been vice president, attempting to heal the divisions. ‘It wasn't easy. There were strong feelings on both sides – a lot of cold warriors, hardliners,
ja
? There had to be a lot of agreements not to talk about the things that happened in the 1960s.'

I was curious about his perspective on the DSG's origins. What did he think lay behind Oechelhäuser's determination to set up a society in Shakespeare's name?

‘I think popularisation, most of all. He admired Shakespeare, he wanted people to watch Shakespeare in the theatre and read Shakespeare's plays. He was a man of business, and he was looking for a project. Shakespeare was the project.'

I said I found it striking how rapidly the Gesellschaft had attempted to claim Shakespeare as a German classic.

He chewed thoughtfully. ‘What you have to understand is German history. In 1864 Germany was still in the process of becoming one country. In 1871 the Deutsches Reich is founded under Bismarck, the first time there is a specific German state, German national thinking. That is partly why you get the founding of the other literary societies in Germany at this point – the idea of uniting Germany through culture. You have Goethe, you have Schiller and then you have this English writer also, who is almost more ours than theirs.'

So in his view there was definitely a political impetus?

‘Ja.
I think so. A few people think of nothing else. They say, “OK, Shakespeare must be German.” It is a way of owning him.'

But why Shakespeare, of all writers?

‘Of course there are Goethe and Schiller; by paying tribute to him you are also paying tribute to them. Then there's an admiration for the complexity of his plays, this envy – a kind of positive envy, if that is a concept, for Englishness and what it means. Maybe if Shakespeare was French, or Serbo-Croatian, it wouldn't be quite the same.'

He leaned forward, his voice low. ‘This is my private opinion, but I do think there is the German character trait of being fascinated by something that works perfectly, like in engineering. You see something that is so smooth, so fascinating, that can't be destroyed by time or ideology. This sense of perfectionism, you know.' His green-grey eyes were wide. ‘Wow!'

Vorsprung durch Technik,
almost?