The Pursuit of Laughter (40 page)

All this pads out the book, but we might have been spared pages of potted history of Paraguay from the sixteenth century to a few decades ago when war criminals and train robbers hid round about. It is totally irrelevant.

Soon after her husband’s death Frau Forster, hearing that her brilliant brother was gravely ill, went back to Germany to look after him. Friedrich Nietzsche cannot have been overjoyed to see his sister, who was ‘the embodiment of precisely what her brother fought against.’ She was a Christian, an anti-Semite and a nationalist. He was none of these. But he was desperately ill, and was certified insane until his death in 1900.

The bossy sister took charge of the many books he had published, some at his own expense, and of the archive of notes, jottings and fragments he left. With the help of his disciples she pushed his books, and they sold. He became world famous, translated into many languages, and she was sought after as guardian of the archive. She was detested by most Nietzscheans, and accused of tampering with texts. But at least she did not burn. She revelled in his fame.

Frau Forster-Nietzsche looked back upon days with her brother and the Wagners, before the famous quarrel, as the happiest of her life. Reading Cosima Wagner’s diary, it
is easy to see why. At Tribschen there was a lovely house in beautiful country, music, books, and the company of two geniuses.

Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche
, Macintyre, B.
Evening Standard
(1992)

When Goethe was told there was a dispute as to whether he or Schiller was Germany’s greatest poet, he said why not be pleased there are two poets, and left it at that. The same applies to Furtwangler and Karajan; both were supreme musicians, albeit with very
different
characters. Frau Furtwangler is quoted as saying: ‘It’s a blessing having a husband who isn’t vain.’ Karajan was absurdly vain. Not about his music, where any amount of pride and vanity were in order, but about his appearance, or his driving of fast cars or
speed-boats
, and other irrelevances.

The Karajan Dossier
is a collection of interviews, reminiscences and reviews of great
fascination
. Round about the time when the maestro reached the preeminent position as Furtwangler’s successor with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, what he called the ‘music explosion’ occurred. Great conductors have always been idolized in Germany, but now they became world idols, and their recordings brought immense riches.

It is the orchestra which chooses its artistic director and conductor, and when Furtwangler died in 1954 the Berlin Philharmonic voted unanimously for Herbert von Karajan. He was 46, and very experienced. For seven years he had been Aachen’s music director, he had conducted at the Bayreuth and Salzburg festivals, and at the Vienna State Opera, and had been guest conductor at the BPO a few times. Together they made
wonderful
records and videos with Deutsche Grammophon and Sony between concerts and world tours. He is said to have left 500 million marks to his family when he died.

He and the Berlin Philharmonic were a splendid team, but there were frequent
disputes
behind the scenes. When Karajan wished to annoy his great orchestra he cancelled their concerts and went down to Vienna, where he was also artistic director of the State Opera, or to Salzburg, and stayed there.

Intelligent and articulate, everything he has to say about conducting and music is deeply interesting. Thanks to modern recording everyone can hear the perfection of sound he and the Berlin Philharmonic achieved. As a young man Karajan joined the Nazi party, not once but twice. He was not interested in politics, but it was necessary for his career. This earned him a few little hostile demonstrations when he took the orchestra to America.

He was an extremely brave man, often conducting when in acute pain from operations for intervertebral discs. He carried on right up to his death aged 81, when once again the orchestra had to choose its conductor. It voted unanimously for Claudio Abbado, who
when he heard the news ‘for two minutes I couldn’t breathe,’ so overwhelmed was he by the honour of being chosen by the greatest orchestra on earth.

There is not a dull page in
The Karajan Dossier
, and Klaus Lang has found a superlative translator. Stewart Spencer reads like a first class English journalist, with never an awkward sentence.

The Karajan Dossier
, Lang, K., trans. Spencer, S.
Evening Standard
(1992)

It is arguable that the Allies, in a back-handed way, were largely responsible for the ‘German miracle’. When, after nearly six years of war, they had defeated and over-run their great enemy, they tried to ensure that Germany should never rise again, or at any rate not within the lifetime of the allied politicians then in power. Roosevelt died just as the war was ending, and he died happy in the thought that Germany was a heap of rubble. His ‘experts’ told him it would take thirty years to rebuild the cities, for a start, and he doubtless relied on his Russian friends to see that it should take longer still. Roosevelt said that if he had his way he would ‘keep the Germans on the breadline for twenty five years’. The idea, heard with monotonous frequency during the war, that it was not the German people but their leaders we were fighting, turned out to be just Allied propaganda. Probably the Germans had no more believed it than had the men who broadcast it.

The Morgenthau plan, which an enthusiastic Roosevelt induced Churchill to initial, was to deprive Germany of all its heavy industry. It would have entailed the death of
millions
. Part of the plan, the dismantling of factories and the stealing and using of patents, was in fact carried out. The armies of occupation behaved to the civil population in a way nobody has reason to be proud of; Aidan Crawley describes torture and starvation in the prison camps, and brutally undisciplined behaviour in general. De-Nazification, he says, ‘lost all semblance of purification and became an act of indiscriminate vengeance’. He adds that ‘more Germans died in the first two years of the occupation than had been killed in nearly six years of war’.

In the millions who survived, however, this bitter challenge evoked a brilliant response. They re-built their towns, their infra-structure and their factories in a very short space of time, being not only hardworking but skilled and inventive. The dismantling, which had seemed to the Allies at the time to be a clever way of punishing them, turned to the
advantage
of the Germans, who were not burdened with out-of date machinery. Before Roosevelt’s twenty five years were up, Germany had become the richest country in Europe and the deutschmark was giving a helping hand to an ailing dollar.

The Allies had helped in another way too. Konrad Adenauer, mayor of Cologne under Weimar, was elected mayor once more after the defeat. An English brigadier earned
himself
a footnote in history by dismissing him from this office for being obstructive. Thus a small-scale dictator bestowed upon Adenauer the status he needed among his fellow-
countrymen
, which shot him into politics. As Chancellor he served his country well. He was a good European, and he chose in Erhardt, a professor of economics from Munich, the very man to preside over Germany’s vertical take-off from rags to riches.

Fate helped the West Germans in other ways besides dismantling and the general behaviour of the occupying powers, though these gave a great impetus to the effort. Refugees from Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, Saxony and other provinces, fleeing from
communism
, arrived in their millions. To begin with they were an additional burden, but they speedily became a precious asset.

When, as was inevitable, the Allies fell out amongst themselves and the cold war began, there was an inexorable tug-of-war for Germany. By far the most interesting part of this very intelligent book is the chapter dealing with communist subversion in West Germany.

The Russians never abandoned the hope of creating a united communist Germany with satellite status. They shrink from atomic war and attempt to attain their objective by other means. Blackmail is a powerful weapon, and a deadly threat to their relations in the DDR has induced many West Germans to work for the Soviets.

Besides blackmail there have been kidnappings and murders. Unlike the kidnappings in South America, they seldom make the headlines. In a very real way, the Germans have lived with fear. Now that the DDR has been able to install consulates in West German cities, and the West German Communist Party has been revived, things have been made a good deal easier for the Russians. ‘The object of this underground warfare, which was
carried
on by thousands of Russian and East German spies, agents, and even assassins, was to undermine morale so completely that West Germans would come to prefer a reunited country under communist “protection” rather than live in a perpetual state of fear and suspense’, writes Aidan Crawley.

In his summing up, Mr Crawley tries to sum up the Germans. He says they eat a good deal; so do the French, and so does anyone in his senses if the food is worth
eating
. Their houses, unless built before 1850, are not very beautiful. Unfortunately the secret of building beautiful houses was lost everywhere at about that date. At least the Germans have repaired their cathedrals and not let loose any local Sir Basil Spences.* They are very polite, but do their good manners come from the heart? They call the
rectors
of their universities Magnifizenz, and Mr Crawley is not too sure whether this might not be a sign of ‘supine’ respect for authority. (Yet it is only a relic of medieval times, the equivalent of calling a king who may be anything but majestic, ‘Your Majesty’.) He doubts that the Germans have acquired a ‘passionate belief’ in democracy. But what is this democracy? He approves of the fact that although an estimated eighty per cent of the population want the death penalty restored, the Bonn parliament refuses to pay any attention. Passionate believers in democracy might attempt to define it, since it by no means coincides with the will of the benighted majority.

Whatever the Germans turn to generally turns out to be wrong in the eyes of
Anglo-Saxon
commentators. One can easily imagine the strictures if the opposite of the
behaviour
here criticised chanced to be the norm. Mean and ascetic, hoarding their riches, rude to foreigners, insulting to the dons at their universities (incidentally ‘don’ is quite out of tune with modern egalitarianism. The Oxford Dictionary gives ‘a Spanish lord… a
distinguished
man, a leader. Hence, in the English Universities…’). No wonder the Germans are inclined to laugh at foreigners who are so ready and anxious to teach them the ABC.

They have performed one ‘liberal’ act which is little short of sublime: they allow their Turkish guest-workers to use Cologne cathedral as a mosque. However surprising for the crusaders buried there, this must be gratifying to anyone inclined to wonder how
broadminded
they really have become.

Germany is not just a chunk of materialist America planted in Europe. The Germans would probably rather be rich than poor, it is one worry the less, but there are plenty of tragic things to worry about in Germany, even in the Federal Republic, now and in the foreseeable future. Awareness of this fact is the great merit of Aidan Crawley’s book.

* In charge of the modernist rebuilding of bombed Coventry Cathedral.
The Rise of Western Germany 1945-1972
, Crawley, A.
Books and Bookmen
(1973)