Another Green World (38 page)

He looked at Ingo but his thoughts were swirling within. It was easy to imagine him teetering with an expression like this before a roomful of undergraduates. Dotty old Cheruski, they must have thought.

“Now straight off, in this sort of inquiry, one faces a problem. It's easy enough to say—I have just said it—that we Germans and you Anglo-Americans are, in essence, the same people. That is true, it is a biological fact. We belong to what Professor Steiner calls the same root-race. Yet we speak different languages, we govern ourselves in different ways, and now a terrible war lies between us. Clearly then, from our common racial root has grown, in a manner of speaking, a widely branching ancestral tree.
So”—
crisply now, with a slap on the knee—” what one first must do is to locate precisely the point of division, the historical moment at which our respective national limbs began to diverge.”

“And you've done that?”

“I have. Were there a slate board, I could draw you a diagram. But I can tell you, with a high degree of specificity, on the strength of detailed inquiry, that the break occurred around the year 1203, along a fault line that corresponds approximately with the rivers Rhein and Donau.”

For an instant, Ingo wobbled at the edge of laughter. But having heard wilder theories at the bar of the Rusty Ring, he managed an encouraging nod.

“Do not imagine,” Cheruski warned him, leaning forward, “that I am blind to your reaction. Listen to this old crack-brain, you think.”

His eyes took on the sage look that comes to some men when they are about two-thirds drunk. The trajectory from that point is predictable. Were there a slate board, Ingo could have drawn a chart of his own.

Cheruski eased back in his chair. “I cannot, of course, lead you through the entire chain of reasoning—this is a technical matter, it would take up a full university course. But you have read Platen, you speak rather intelligently, I'm sure you can follow the basic thrust. My research has come to focus upon two things: the Matter of Britain and what I choose to call, by analogy, the Matter of Germany.

“With the first, you are no doubt familiar. It comprises a body of material known popularly as the Arthurian romances—though that term is inadequate, there's more to it than the frivolous business of the Round Table. The tales themselves, in their earliest versions, seem to be quite older even than the historical Arturius, who was a general, not a king, and whose task was to defend the island in the wake of the sixth-century Roman withdrawal. It appears that this Arturius or Arthur became a convenient national figurehead upon whom to drape a body of legend that had existed long before him, whose origins are now obscure. By the time the source material got cobbled into something like canonical form—that is, the form in which it comes down to us—it encompassed matters as diverse as courtship rituals among the ruling classes of feudal Europe, the life and teachings of a Druidical figure called Myrddin or Merlin, exciting battle stories, reports of jousting tournaments, an allegory about the slaying of the Green Knight, another about an incestuous union and a mystical, messianic birth, and—most puzzling of all—the distinctly eerie and symbolic quest for the Holy Grail. This mishmash is called the Matter of Britain because…well, what else could one possibly call it?”

Ingo wasted a moment pretending to think it over. “And the Matter of Germany, that would be what—Siegfried, the Ring, all that?”

Cheruski raised his nose, like a snob on the sidewalk. “Please, put every thought of Wagner out of your mind. Every note, every syllable of that outlandish opus, whatever their musical merits might be—of that I can offer no informed opinion—is the grossest imaginable corruption of an ancient, untainted and astoundingly well-preserved body of national mythology. Unlike the British material, whose origins are lost in prehistory, our Germanic legends have been passed down in something very like their original form, in such rich sources as the Nordic lays, Snorri's
Edda
, the early heroic poems and ballads, and above all, the
Song of the Nibelungs—
a medieval masterwork that, as my colleague Professor Burdach in Stuttgart points out, succeeds so wonderfully at invoking the spirit
of its subject matter that it promptly dispatched all other contenders. It alone has come down to us.” He rapped on the table, as if to make sure he had Ingo's full attention. “It is
here
that we come to the break point. This is precisely where we part company with our oceanfaring cousins.”

The Professor poured himself another cognac. Ingo did likewise: why not? It was getting late; they were sitting in a drafty old mansion, rambling on about literature; they had passed, some while back, the last road marker of objective reality. The scene took him back to his last year at Catholic U., after coming home from Germany, when he discovered the tonic and mind-cleansing properties of alcohol. Sure, one more, a nightcap. Then off to our lonely bed.

“It is a remarkable fact,” Cheruski said, twirling his glass in the firelight, “one of those coincidences that occur not infrequently in the history of ideas, that this masterwork was written at precisely the same time as the greatest, most elegant and comprehensive account of the Matter of Britain—and written moreover in very nearly the same place. Certainly the same
kind
of place. I refer of course to Wolfram's
Parzival
, which was begun around the year 1200 and finished no later than 1205. Its most crucial passages, recounting the Grail story, were composed in the winter of 1203–04 at the castle Wartburg in Thuringia, in honor of Wolfram's patron, the Landgrave Herman.”

Thuringia, Ingo thought dreamily. A castle in Thuringia.

“Simultaneously, the
Nibelungenlied
was being composed by another court poet a short distance to the south, near Passau. In this case, we do not know the poet's name—and that is a cardinal point, because the anonymity was deliberate. By this time, you see, it was commonplace for a court poet, even an ordinary minstrel, to be identified with a particular work. We know about Chrétien, about Otto of Freisling, about Walther and Lucidarius. We know about Wolfram. But the man from Passau chose to hide himself, as it were, behind the work. And by so doing, he makes clear his connection with an older and more purely Germanic tradition, that of the tribal bard, the imbiber of Wotan's mead of poetry, who, in singing the great stories of his Volk, becomes, in effect, the voice and the memory of his people. That is the first point of divergence.

“The second is more blatant. Even at a casual reading, the two works could not be more distinct. You begin with roughly the same raw subject matter—kings and queens, oaths and champions, sacred objects, castles besieged, realms ravaged and restored—yet in each poet's hands, the material is fashioned into radically distinct form. In simplest terms,
Parzival
has a moral. The
Nibelungenlied
does not.

“All the Arthurian material,
Parzival
included, reflects the great change that had come over the European mind during the preceding three centuries: in becoming Christianized, it trained itself to think in dichotomies, good and wicked, sin and salvation, now and Hereafter. This binary thinking is present, often in quite explicit form, but always there at bottom, in even the most simple of the British legends, the pure diversions. Dragon meets slayer. Black Knight versus White Knight. The stories are quite varied but the moral is approximately the same, and it is the fundamental teaching of Christianity: If you do something good in the here-and-now, then you will be rewarded at some time in the future.

“Not so with our German legends. This is not to say they negate or deny such a meaning. It is simply that the question of lesson-teaching, or moral-drawing, or indeed any line of thought pointing to a reality outside the story itself, does not arise. The legend of the Nibelungs simply
is.
This is who they were, this is what they did, this is how it ended.
Finis.
At no time during all those adventures and surprises and betrayals and bloody disputations does any participant pause to give thought to any larger issue— neither the morality of his actions, nor the effect of those actions upon his own eventual fate, still less the fate of others. Above all, there is no thought whatever to the possibility of an afterlife, heavenly or otherwise.

“Günter desires to marry Brunhild. Is he worthy of her hand? We do not know; the question has no meaning. He arranges, by deceitful means, with Siegfried's help, to satisfy his desire. Siegfried lets Kriemhild in on the plot. Later, in a moment of pique, she comes out with it. Brunhild is shamed. She has quite a temper and vows to get even. The poet's sympathies appear to be with her, but that is no matter. She enlists Hagen to exact revenge. It is quite straightforward: they must murder Siegfried. Not so easy, but the deed is done. And now, of course, further revenge is required, and that brings the House of Burgundy crashing down—that's how things go, history proves it again and again. In the end, all the principals are dead, and the only thing one can say is, Well, now
that's
over. Who were the heroes? Who the villains? What are the lessons here? There are none. There can be none. It is only a story, a great story—a German story.

“Which of course is the astonishing thing. A full two centuries after the last bulwarks of heathendom were smashed in Europe—which campaign, incidentally, was directed by German emperors, Otto and his successors— we find this profoundly non-Christian epic being penned in the very heart of the Holy Roman Reich, commissioned by a duly christened noble, even as Wolfram, two days' riding north, was penning his
Parzival.
That is the second, really quite striking point of divergence.

“There is one other. And you may think it odd, but I have come to think this may be the most telling of all.
Parzival
was written to be spoken aloud—memorized and then recited. The
Nibelungenlied
, in contrast, was composed to be chanted or sung, to the accompaniment most probably of a lyre. Thus the former is an early work of modern literature, whose author we know, whose artistic intent is fairly clear. The latter is neither modern nor literary. Though beautifully worded and filled with compelling scenes, arresting images, even the sort of nuance we would now call psychological, it is not, in the end, a work of the mind. It is a pure matter of the heart, the blood, the enraptured consciousness. The author is nameless because the story springs from deep in our folk-soul. It is the Matter of Germany in the purest possible sense.

“So there”— setting his glass down, folding his hands, a monkish gesture, as though laying aside the quill—” in brief, is the problem I have undertaken to solve. How does one speak, how can one put forward a proposition of the utmost delicacy, to a nation of people who think in categories, who look for morals and believe in consequences, on behalf of a nation that does not?”

A fair question, Ingo thought. “So,” he said, “how does one?”

Cheruski stared, eyes bleary now. He weakly waved an arm. “I have thought…well, you know, they were both
Germans
, it's hard to get around that. Maybe something about the Grail, the deepest mystery, the hidden truth… strip away the Christian stuff, it's pagan at the core—the sacred goblet, only a youth can approach it, an innocent, ‘slender and pure as a flame’—”

“That's George, not Wolfram.” Ingo sighed. Cheruski had seemed to be making sense there for a while. Now he was babbling, a tired and deluded old man.

“But I know,” the Professor said, fixing Ingo with a darkly impassioned stare, “what you're wondering is, do I have anything for the Reichsführer? Have I found
an equation, something scientific
? No, I have not. It is such a pity. For if only the Anglo-Americans could be made to understand us, then we might put an end to this needless war. Our generals could turn to the true enemy in the East. And people like you and me, Herr Müller, could take off these uniforms and get back to our books.”

Ingo slept fitfully, twisting beneath heavy blankets and coming partly awake again and again, unable to separate the strands of reality and
dream, each as strange, as haunted, as the other. Footsteps echoing down cold hallways. A boy lifts a heavy cup to tender lips. A hunter rears on his steed, armor black and shiny as an automobile. Cries of terror, dragon's fire, a castle standing empty, a countryside left barren. Ingo is lost in an edgeless forest. His legs move but carry him nowhere, only deeper among the trees. There are furtive noises all around, invisible scurrying. Then a hush: the air is shot through by a hunter's horn, blazing clear and hard-edged as the sunlight.

He opened his eyes. The curtain of the cupboard bed was closed but the window drape must have been open because the coachman's room was flooded with light. He lay there blinking with the dream still in his mind, coloring his awareness. The echo of the
Jägerhorn
seemed to linger between these heavy plaster walls. Then he heard the snorting of a horse, and he could not have been dreaming that.

He thrust the curtain aside and struggled free of the blankets. The room was winter-cold. Outside the high window lay a hillside of naked trees whose branches, etched in white, shivered against a sky that was deep and achingly blue. The frost on fallen leaves was so heavy it looked like snow. Ingo pressed his forehead to the pane; his eyes probed the woods as if trying to locate the center of a maze. He thought of the Friedrich print hanging on the wall of the Rusty Ring,
Landscape with Oaks and Hunter.
The painting was a visual riddle, as this was, the question being: Where is the hunter? Because the oaks are plain enough, great craggy things with limbs broken by storms, and you can see a passing companionship of birds, the sky turbulent with cloud, a far meadow stretching pale green to glimpses of water… but in that expanse of
charakteristisch
Germania, can you spot the hunter? Long-standing patrons of the Ring had won rounds of drinks this way.

“Of course he's there, look at the title. All you have to do is find him. Tell you what, I'll give you an extra minute, starting—
now.”