Republic or Death! (26 page)

Later that night, I walk around the party hoping to bump into the prince again to ask him a few more questions, but he's not at the ‘hip-hop und pole dance' show, and he's not twirling his wife around at the ‘salsa und reggaeton' stage either. I don't even see him at the fireworks display, which lasts half an hour and involves bangs echoing down the valley so loudly they turn Liechtenstein temporarily into a war zone. It climaxes with rockets exploding to the anthem's soaring strains and the words ‘
Für Fürst, Gott und Vaterland
' – ‘For Prince, God and Fatherland' – beamed on to the side of the castle. The prince is probably fast asleep after all that lager, but I like to imagine he was actually sitting somewhere with a guitar having thought about my earlier question and decided that perhaps Liechtenstein does need a new melody after all.

*

The next morning, somewhat worse for wear, trying to keep down the apple concoction the landlady has made for my breakfast, I'm hit by the thought that perhaps I shouldn't have gone to Liechtenstein after all; that I should have stayed in London. Not so I could have had that dreaded personal journey, but because the country that's actually most likely to give up the melody of ‘God Save the Queen' first isn't Liechtenstein, but the United Kingdom.

There have always been people in the UK who have hated the song, even in England. In 1902, a barrister called Stringer Bateman went to the trouble of surveying the great and the good of British society to see if they thought any improvements could be made to this ‘illiterate anthem'. George Bernard Shaw told him the song was ‘absurd from the literary point of view', while William Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, called it ‘contemptible doggerel', adding, in case his views weren't clear enough, ‘I don't think it could be effectively patched [up]. There isn't a convincing line in it.'

It's the second verse that has normally got people worked up – the one about frustrating enemies' ‘knavish tricks' and ‘confound[ing] their politics'. Newspapers used to regularly run competitions for new words to it, their letters pages filled with debate about such aggression's suitability outside the 1800s. Queen Victoria was once, allegedly, even presented with an alternative verse for approval about ‘Bless[ing] England's enemies / And mak[ing] them good.' She's meant to have replied, ‘I wish to confound their politics, thank you very much.' (Her love for the song was well known – she was once presented with a dress that played it every time she sat down.)

Today so few people know the second verse of ‘God Save the Queen' that there are no longer concerns about those words. In fact, most people in Britain, including myself, seem to see the anthem as so unrelated to their lives it's not worth their time at all, just like people in most other European countries feel about theirs when external ‘threats' are no longer immediate enough to push people towards nationalism. But despite that, the anthem still seems to have plenty of detractors. You don't have to look hard to find a newspaper commentator or politician pointing out that the Welsh have their own anthem – the wrenching ‘Land of My Fathers' – while the Scots have several they could pick from, with ‘Flower of Scotland' being the people's choice. ‘Why isn't there an English anthem for English people to sing proudly at sports events too?' They say that without perhaps realising that adopting an English anthem would effectively turn ‘God Save the Queen' overnight into simply a royal anthem, one only heard at royal weddings and on state visits – one even further away from the public than it is now. But it's not hard to envisage a scenario when those calls grow stronger and wider. Just think of when Elizabeth II's reign ends and Prince Charles is crowned king. He's a man who hasn't exactly received unanimous love from the British public, and when people go to the next England football match, and the anthem is played, are they going to bellow out ‘God Save the King'? I think they'll more likely keep on singing ‘Queen' as the final word, part in tribute, part as protest. Even if they do happily move on, everyone will find the experience of changing that one word bizarre, just as I found it bizarre to hear Liechtensteiners singing it with German words. It will feel like hearing their anthem for the first time again. Fresh. New. And it might make some wonder if they want to keep it much longer.

What could take its place? The usual suggestion is William Blake's poem ‘Jerusalem', set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916 for an ultra-patriotic campaign (he preferred it when the suffragettes adopted it as theirs a year later). It's a song that evokes the legend of Jesus walking across England's ‘green and pleasant land' and is an undeniably beautiful hymn. But the first verse is also a series of four questions, the answer to all of which is ‘No'. (‘And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green? / And was the holy Lamb of God, / On England's pleasant pastures seen?') The second verse goes some way to clarify them – ‘I shall not cease … / Till we have built Jerusalem, / In England's green and pleasant land' – but does England really want to dump ‘God Save the Queen' for a song that's so easy to make jokes about? Surely there's a better option. I mean, if there really is no problem taking someone else's tune – as Liechtenstein shows, and Finland, Estonia, Greece and Cyprus do as well, for that matter – then why doesn't England just steal the tune from another, better anthem and change the words? What could possibly go wrong with that? Germany wouldn't mind, surely?

 

I SHOULD HAVE
realised that Dušan Šesti
ć
, the composer of Bosnia and Herzegovina's anthem, wouldn't exactly have a joy-filled story to tell. The clues were there. Bosnia's history, for a start: the war that started just weeks after it declared independence from Yugoslavia and which no one – Bosniak, Croat or Serb, Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox – got out of untouched. Then there was the phone call from Bosnia's embassy in London after they tried finding him for me. ‘The good news is I've found his wife,' one of the secretaries said happily. ‘The bad news is she doesn't know where he is and never wants to hear from him again. Why didn't you tell me this would be so much fun?' But somehow I didn't realise; not until the moment I saw him.

I was waiting outside a sleek bar in Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska – the Serb-dominated country-within-a-country that makes up almost half of Bosnia's territory, and even has its own postal service. Banja Luka's one of the few cities in Bosnia that doesn't show any signs of the war: its buildings aren't splattered with shrapnel holes like Sarajevo's; its historical monuments aren't cheap reconstructions like Mostar's. It was a bright October day and the bar's patio was filled with people smoking and throwing back coffee, basking in the last sunshine of the year. But there was one person who I couldn't take my eyes off, a man in his sixties wandering between the tables as though he was lost. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled down so tightly it looked as if he was trying to crawl into it, and his gaze was fixed on the ground, apparently in the hope that no one would be able to see him if he didn't look up. He pulled out a phone, dialled a number and my phone immediately rung. This was Dušan.

I offered him a seat, but he preferred one in the bar's empty inside, as far away from everyone as possible.

Dušan wrote Bosnia's anthem, known as ‘Intermezzo', just three years after the war, when the fighting was still, unsurprisingly, weighing heavily on everyone's minds. The war had begun in April 1992 when Bosniaks and Croats voted for independence and the Serbs reacted by taking control of much of the country (helped by soldiers from Serbia itself). It soon descended into one of the most vicious and confusing of conflicts, at some point Bosniaks bizarrely fighting alongside Serbs, at other points factions descending into in-fighting. It was the war that introduced the idea of ethnic cleansing to the world, when Serbs forced all Croats or Bosniaks out of villages so they could claim the territory as their own, murdering many of those who refused to go (Croats and Bosniaks eventually did the same). It was also the war of atrocities like the Srebrenica Massacre (where Serbs executed some 8,000 men and boys who were meant to be in a UN safe haven) and the Siege of Sarajevo (where they surrounded, bombed and sniped at the city for over three years, killing thousands) – events it's hard to believe occurred in 1990s Europe. The war ended only once NATO stopped trying to negotiate a peace and instead bombed Serb positions, but the years immediately afterwards didn't prove much better for anyone who had been hoping a unified country could still emerge. Bosnia was now effectively split into two parts (Republika Srpska on one side; a Croat and Bosniak federation on the other) all governed by Byzantine political processes meant to ensure no one was undermined. Unfortunately, most politicians quickly realised they could use those processes to carry on stoking ethnic tension and block anything useful from happening.

That political inertia even ran to choosing an anthem. In 1998, the country's internationally appointed High Representative launched a contest for a new one because he'd become so fed up with politicians failing to do so themselves. Dušan, then a violin teacher and film composer, didn't pay any attention to the competition at first – he didn't feel Bosnian, more a Yugoslav living ‘in the ruins of a once great country'. But then he went to the seaside with his children for their first summer holiday in almost a decade and realised he was desperately short of money. The competition offered 2,000 marks to each of the top three entries. That was only about £700, not much even then, but it was better than nothing. ‘So I thought: Why not? Why shouldn't I try composing something? There was no other motivation except money,' he said, between drags on a cigarette once we'd finally got seated. ‘Money, money, money,' he added loudly in English, rubbing his fingers together in the internationally recognised sign, in case my interpreter wasn't getting the message across. ‘I just wanted to write a composition good enough to get in the top three. I wanted to be anonymous, put the notes in my wallet and move on, but it turned out to be different.'

The song DuÅ¡an won with is odd for an anthem: it's graceful and understated rather than boisterous and proud, and it carries an air of nostalgia, as if meant to soundtrack Bosnians abroad tearfully reminiscing about their country. It's well written and beautiful, certainly, but it's not what you'd think of as traditionally anthemic and you can tell why DuÅ¡an didn't really expect to win with it and certainly why he was surprised by the trouble it brought him once he did. ‘Immediately I was no longer good enough for my people – the Serbian side,' he said wearily. ‘There were many insults, lots of name-calling from those who were opposed to the existence of Bosnia. “You're a collaborator.” “Traitor!” All that. Then there was a big opposition from the Muslims, because here was a Serbian writing their anthem. The Croats didn't like that either. So I was no longer welcome anywhere. Getting any kind of serious work after that was impossible.' DuÅ¡an wasn't even invited to the anthem's unveiling. I decided to ask, somewhat rudely, if the anthem was the reason his marriage had ended. He sat back in the plump leather chair, propped his hand under his nose and thought. His silence lasted an unnaturally long time (eighteen seconds, I discovered when I checked the recording later). ‘No, I don't think so,' he said, finally. ‘But of course when there's no money, love escapes through the window.'

Even when the public's appetite for ethnic strife seemed to drop, Dušan's problems did not. About ten years after he wrote the anthem, someone discovered its melody was almost exactly the same as the theme tune to
National Lampoon's Animal House
, a 1978 film about an American university more notable for its jokes about underage sex than its music. Newspapers ran articles calling him a thief and demanding he give his winnings back; one even went so far as to contact the original composer's family and encourage them to sue. There were calls for his anthem to be dropped.

Dušan insisted there was no plagiarism – ‘If I was a thief I'd be a politician and doing far better in life,' he laughed – but admitted the resemblance, saying that ‘perhaps as a young man I'd seen the movie or heard the theme and it stuck in my brain somehow'. At the time, he pointed out to anyone who'd listen that there were some differences between the tunes. Legally, it couldn't be classed as plagiarism, he said. But after that, any vestiges of his career as a musician were gone. I asked why he doesn't leave the country; he'd studied music in Belgrade when he was young and lived in Croatia too while he was a military musician – he could always try his luck in those places. He'd also told me that he was in love with the sea. Move to the coast somewhere and retire, I said – take your violin and enjoy the sun. ‘I've thought about it, but I can bear this,' he said, his whole demeanour – body slumped in his seat, cigarette butts screwed into the ashtray in front of him – suggesting otherwise.