A Writer's World (54 page)

The centre of civil life today is Augustusplatz, mostly wrecked in the war and rebuilt during the years in which Leipzig was the second city of communist East Germany. My mother would have preferred not to notice it. It is brutally dominated by the 34-storey tower of the University, which has emerged from its ignominy as Karl-Marx University but still presents to the world the usual drab pomposity of communist academia. At the north end of the square is a lovelessly restored Opera House. At the other end is the modernistic new Gewandhaus. Gigantic Moscow-style apartment blocks stretch away to the south, and there is the usual parade of nasty curtain walling. It all looked pretty bleak to me that day, but I soon cheered up; only a few steps out of Augustusplatz I was in a Leipzig my mother would instantly have known and loved.

Some of it would have been physically familiar to her, because many relics remain from the bombed and bombarded Altstadt, and have been lovingly restored. The Renaissance Old Town Hall looks as good as new beside the market square; there are lavish burghers’ houses here and there; church steeples stand as they always stood above high-pitched roofs and little squares; the Haus zorn Kaffeebaum serves coffee just as it has served it since the sixteenth century. More to my point, within the circuit of the vanished city walls there flourishes still the Saxon
gemütlichkeit
that so seduced my mother long ago.

I took to eating my suppers along there, alfresco at a self-service restaurant in the Naschtmarkt. The baroque Old Bourse looks genially down upon this little piazza, and my evening meal generally consisted of mushrooms, potatoes, strawberries and white wine. The place was full of people to talk to, the wine went down very nicely, I habitually indulged myself with second helpings of strawberries, and what with the music of a busking accordionist around the corner, and the evening sunshine warming the back of my neck, I soon began to feel myself agreeably among
friends. (The only unpleasant Leipziger I encountered during my entire stay was a man who brazenly crashed a queue for concert tickets: and him I successfully tripped up,
pro
bono
publico
, as he swaggered away.)

So despite all that has happened to Leipzig since my mother’s time, her rosy half-dreams of the city were confirmed for me. The German Empire had come and gone, the nightmare of the Nazis had passed, the Americans had stormed through with fire and chewing gum, the chilly communists had clamped their dogmas on the place, and only five years ago did liberal standards return to the grand old city. Yet I was unexpectedly at my ease there, even in the bleak Stalinist quarters where skateboarders clattered over concrete paving stones, and graffiti proclaimed ‘The Universal Zulu Nation’. Leipzig is a fine place to be, even now. In the 1990s, as in the 1900s, it is a great thing to walk into the Thomaskirche (having knocked off an ice, perhaps, in the café immediately opposite its main door) and to feel oneself instantly in the company of its mighty organist and choirmaster, Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach stands in effigy outside its façade, sternly surveying the ice-creams. Bach sounds tremendously in the music of its organ. Bach lies for ever (we hope – he has been moved once already) beneath his monumental slab in its chancel. And in the Leipzig of today, who could not be moved by the nearby magic of the Nikolaikirche, the very church where the massed will of the Leipzigers, expressed in prayer and candle-lit vigil, led directly to the fall of the communists, the collapse of the whole dread system and the re-unification of Germany?

As to the little cottage where Schiller wrote the ‘Ode to Joy’ (in Beethoven’s setting, the anthem of the European Community), it stands in a particularly joyless quarter of the city, one of the streets that still speaks gloomily of Honecker and the Stasi, surrounded by drear red-brick blocks with bomb sites, broken windows and sagging lintels; but upon it there is a commemorative plaque done in such a gloriously festive baroque, all gilded high spirits, that the house stands there like a defiant declaration of happiness, come what may.

My mother’s Leipzig was most particularly the academic Leipzig to the south of the Old City, where every kind of intellectual institution sprang into existence in those heady days of Wilhelmine confidence. I had no idea how much of it had survived the war, but I knew that the Conservatorium still existed somewhere as the Hochschule für Musik Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, so I set off one morning to find it, guided
by the splendid maps in my 1913 Baedeker
North
Germany
– splendid, but alas now largely useless. In that part of the city, whole areas have been transformed. Where was the Anglo-American Episcopal Church (‘Plan 4, B4: Chaplain – Rev JHM Nodder’)? What had happened to the König-Albert Park? One of the few things I
could
find was the Schreber-Strasse Swimming and Bath Establishment (‘Plan 1, B4’), and there I asked at random, among the sunbathers by the pool, where everything else was. A young man volunteered to guide me to the Conservatorium, where he happened to have been a student himself. I put my Baedeker away, and we set off across my mother’s landscapes.

Here was the Johanna Park, very dear to her memories, where she had once seen small frogs (or was it fish?) falling out of the heavens during a sweet Saxon shower. Somewhere over there, across a weedy wasteland, must have been her lodgings, whence she escaped to see
Salome
, and where my grandfather no doubt buttered up her chaperone during his visit of inspection. Over the road was the school house of the Thomaskirche boys’ choir, Bach’s own choir – frequently in my mother’s mind, I do not doubt, when she went home to play her own organ in Monmouth church.

My guide turned out to be one of the Thomaskirche choirmasters, in line of descent to Johann Sebastian himself, and as we walked through the city together I began to feel I had achieved some sort of apotheosis, and really was back in the Leipzig of Nikisch and Teichmüller. My companion, give or take a T-shirt and a pair of trainers, was just how I imagined the students of my mother’s nostalgia. No frogs fell from the skies, but the Johanna Park was still green and full of young life. Horn music greeted us faintly from somewhere out of sight, and when we came to a big green space, and my companion announced it to be the site of the old Gewandhaus concert hall, bombed in the 1940s, we stood for a moment in properly reverent silence, thinking of Mendelssohn and my mum.

And here at last was the Königliche Conservatorium itself. It looked to me just as it does in the engraving on my mother’s diploma: the very image, acme and epitome of a music conservatoire. In we went, and there were the statutory bearded busts of eminent musicians, and students hurried past with cellos and music cases, and notices of recitals or rehearsals fluttered from noticeboards as they had doubtless been fluttering constantly since my mother’s day. ‘We shall enter’, my guide courteously announced, ‘the Piano Department’: and there, up a winding staircase, we were back in the Conservatorium of the 1900s. Nothing had changed, so far as I could
see or feel; nothing was missing. Beside each door was a list of the Herr Professors, and I would not have been in the least surprised to see the name of Robert Teichmüller among them. And when we went into one of the practice rooms, where a student was hard at it with a Chopin prelude, just for a moment I thought it really was my mother, young and smiling in a lacy dress, looking up at us expectantly from her keyboard.

On the windowsill, I am almost certain, lay a brace of pheasant, wrapped in a copy of the
Monmouthshire Beacon
.

I am ashamed to admit I had never heard of the composer Benedetto Marcello, although I now know him to have been a seventeenth-century Venetian governor of Pola in Istria, and when I saw his name on the cover of the score on the music-stand for a moment I wondered if he were no more than a student fancy. The whole episode seemed rather hallucinatory. There I was on my first morning in Weimar, walking all alone through the leafy park on the Ilm, when I came across a charmingly unorthodox pair of student buskers. The boy played the trombone, the girl played the cello, and together they were working their way hard, oblivious to me or to any other passer-by, through the Marcello sonata that was propped on their old-fashioned brass stand. What a delightful conceit, I thought to myself! How romantically German! How proper to Weimar, City of Art and Music! The path was dappled. Insects hummed beneath the trees. The river splashed away beside us. The Marcello was melodious. I popped some money in the buskers’ collection box, but they didn’t seem to notice, so engrossed were they in their performance.

But then Weimar is not an avaricious sort of town. On the contrary, its distinction has traditionally been elegantly cultural. In the late eighteenth century the young Duke Carl August turned his city into a kind of aesthetocracy, an alliance between the aristocratic and the creative. Beauty ruled! Bach and Cranach the Elder had already given the place artistic cachet, and they were to be followed over the years by a regular flood of artistic geniuses – Schiller, Liszt, Richard Strauss, Gropius, Mann, and above all Goethe, who became a kind of wazir to the star-struck duke and did everything from designing public buildings to inspecting the dukely mines. For generations Weimar was a dream of Germany. Madam de Staël
reported that it was not so much a small city as one large, liberal and wonderfully enlightened palace.

To this day it is bathed in the light of those great times, when artists and monarchs were equals. Carl August lies in his mausoleum flanked not by his generals, but by his two great poets, Goethe and Schiller, and the names of artists still provide terms of reference for the city. There’s a pleasant restaurant, you will be told, behind the Liszthaus. The tourist information centre is next door to the Cranachhaus. Turn right at the Goethehaus to get to the bus station. You want the Schillerhaus? That’s easy: just go straight down the Schillerstrasse from the Goethe and Schiller statue – itself, so one local guidebook tells me, ‘the world-renowned symbol of Weimar, like the Eiffel Tower for Paris’.

And agreeable indeed it is to amble down the Schillerstrasse and take an ice-cream beneath its avenue. It is a lovely gentle street, as free of motor traffic today as it was when Schiller lived in his unassuming house at No. 12. There is a good antiquarian bookshop. There are pleasant cafés. The tourists are mostly German and greet you with wreathed smiles. A street musician plays agreeable guitar music in the shade. The ice-cream is excellent, and it is easy to imagine the young Carl August promenading past with lyricists on each arm, bowing right and left to his dutiful subjects.

After the Schillerstrasse, a stroll perhaps up the road to the Architectural High School – the original Bauhaus, a little shabby and run-down now, but still a place of fateful importance for the Western world. And after that back to the green park beside the river, where Goethe had his garden house, and the oldest statue of Shakespeare in continental Europe basks upon its terrace, and small boys are wading across the river with fishing-rods, and the music of the cello-trombone combo still echoes diligently among the trees.

Goethe wanted Weimar’s visitors to see the little city and its parks as ‘a series of aesthetic pictures’. Certainly I know of no city so instinct with the idea of beauty as a political conception, as part of the established order – and not the beauty of pomp and majesty, either, but an amiable, entertaining, chamber-music kind of beauty. It was in the theatre at Weimar, in 1920, that the constitution of the brief Weimar Republic was drawn up, creating for the first time a united Germany that was free and potentially fun.

So I felt on my first morning in Weimar, but after a while things began to curdle. The first rebuff to my euphoria happened in the church of St Peter and St Paul, just off the market square. This fine old church possesses
Lucas Cranach’s celebrated altarpiece of the Crucifixion, Weimar’s greatest work of visual art, and I eagerly joined the cluster of tourists around it. It is certainly a marvellous thing – vibrant, full of fancy, with Luther and Cranach himself boldly introduced to stand at the foot of the cross. But for my squeamish tastes something distasteful coarsens the scene: a thin stream of blood, emerging from the wound in Christ’s right side, arches across the picture to splosh upon the artist’s head. Yuk, I could not help thinking: and although I knew it was allegorical blood, the merciful blood of Christ, still I wondered if it perhaps said something unexpected about the sensibilities of sweet Weimar.

It was partly hindsight, I confess. I had already discovered, during my ice-cream reading in the Schillerstrasse, that when Carl August had gone to his mausoleum the enlightenment of Weimar was never quite so absolute again. The dukedom of artists lost some of its delight when Goethe was no longer there to supervise the aesthetics, and it was symbolic that by 1860 a large and showy Russian Orthodox church, built with golden onion domes by a Russian grand duchess, grossly overshadowed the delicate mausoleum of the young duke and his poets.

Besides, the dukely court might be liberal, at least in artistic matters, but the populace was often boorishly Philistine. ‘Unbelievably small and narrow,’ the dramatist Friedrich Hebbel thought Weimar society when he came here in the 1860s. Poor old Liszt, who became the city’s director of music, found himself altogether too avant-garde and patrician for the local petit bourgeoisie, and the cool amateurism of the ducal house became institutionalized, as the nineteenth century passed and the court became more Prussian, in foundations and societies and museums and art schools and all the other heavy expressions of the Wilhelmine Reich. When some nude drawings by Rodin were exhibited in the Museum of Arts and Crafts, the court itself forced its director to resign. As for the Bauhaus, the people of Weimar so despised it and all its works that mothers used to threaten their recalcitrant children with banishment there.