Roads to Berlin by Cees Nooteboom

Author:Cees Nooteboom [Nooteboom, Cees]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / Germany
ISBN: 9781623650988
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

XIII

Quedlinburg, Stolberg, the Germany of picture postcards. A lick of paint and then the coach parties can come. Some places were built for tourism centuries ago—timbers in the walls, crests above the doors, money in the tills. Anyone who lives in these places must be perm-anently scarred: they become scenery, bit-part actors, their bartered souls wandering through thousands of anonymous photographs in albums in Tokyo, Saint Louis, Düsseldorf, a population nourished by the nostalgia of other people. This is how we imagine history; this is how the past should behave. I drive in and back out again, impressed yet resentful. This is other people’s idea of the picturesque, a museum of the living, unbearable.

But Nature could not care less. There is very little industry here, the fruit trees are in blossom, and the landscape rolls and arches into view. It is all pleasant enough, but charming is not my territory, and certainly not when it goes on for too long. I would rather have a chunk of desert or a slightly seedy metropolis; I have never imagined paradise as perfectly raked and tidy. Many of the roads are still cobbled, which at least prevents that gentle, soporific rocking. The landscapes in the other part of the Harz, over the border, have already been tamed for good. All of the locals appear to be pensioners, and before long it will be the same here too: unification as homogenisation. Leaden clouds, the occasional shower, bright spells that make the green look garish: this weather is setting the tone for my destination, the Kyffhäuser, a landscape of mountains, where, according to legend, the restless spirit of Emperor Barbarossa lies in a cave somewhere, waiting for German Unity. It no longer matters that this legend was originally not about him, but about his grandson Frederick II (known as “stupor mundi,” the wonder of the world). Of course, Barbarossa was a better fit for the nationalists who were striving for unity at the beginning of the previous century; he was, after all, the last leader under whom the Reich had apparently still meant something. He had, admittedly, gone to Venice in 1177 to kiss the feet of Pope Alexander III (nations have long memories, and the popes of Rome would pay for that kiss during the Reformation; nothing is ever lost, not only in the material world, but also in history: every atom of insult and humiliation is accounted for and remains in existence somewhere), but still he had strung the republics of Italy in a long line after his name while, at the same time, working from his Swabian and Burgundian territories to rally the German princes to his crown by means of a cunning game of give and take.

In his essay “De toekomst van gisteren,” Yesterday’s Future, Mulisch sees this Hohenstaufen as a link in a chain (Hermann—Barbarossa—Bismarck—Hitler), but that is projecting the nineteenth century onto the twelfth, a process that works the other way round too. If the Staufen emperor had succeeded—like

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