kills the Jews.”
8
THOSE WHO regard German history as a tragic love-story in which State and spirit constantly seek and almost never attain each other will find a symbolic date in the thirteenth century—indeed, two such dates. The Interregnum, the period of greatest anarchy, is framed by two of the finest monuments of contemporary art. The foundation stones were laid for the Cologne and Strasbourg Cathedrals.
Like symbols in stone these gray towers rose. And those of Ulm, Trèves and Freiburg, of Bamberg and Naumburg, rise like beacons from the mists of the German Middle Ages in equal beauty; and if the heaven above them is not forever blue, it is heaven none the less. The endeavor of the German soul has found a truly Faustian expression in the pointed arches of the Gothic. This art form came from France where it had found perhaps even more perfect expression. To us it seems that there is no nation to which Gothic art is better adapted than to the Germans; for it is ponderous and yet soaring, dusky and musical, earth-bound and mystic—just as is the German spirit in its manifestations.
How well these early German artists mastered the art of picturing man in images of stone—saints, kings or patrons placed close to the walls, gray against gray, stone images before stone walls! There they still stand today, against the walls of the Bamberg Cathedral—knights who might well have been poets and perhaps were; princes gazing into faraway distances, perhaps to the South; and between them the Sybil with the terribly beautiful head of an Orphic priestess or of a woman possessed. And far away, in Strasbourg, stands that other Sybil, later known by such strange names; and then there is the princely couple of Meissen, placed against the wall of the Naumburg Cathedral.
TWO MEDIEVAL STATUES ON THE CATHEDRAL OF
STRASBOURG
Close by rise the most beautiful structures of all, or at least those most peculiar to the Middle Ages: the town halls in which the citizens manifested their new-found freedom. They hardly dreamed that their descendants six centuries later would still admire their handiwork. We choose as an example the splendid Town Hall of Breslau, in the shadow of which the present author spent his youth. There a dream of grace seems to rise on the solid vaulting, as though a powerful man were carrying a dainty woman across the market place. It stands free in the middle of the main square—called Ring in Silesia—while many another town hall, pressed into narrow streets, overshadowed by tall churches, is unable to unfold its full beauty. The first glimpse of the Breslau hall’s upper part, moreover, is a vivid one. Clay tiles shine down in red, green and white from the roof of the huge center gable. The searching eye finds itself following the irregular lines and windows, which create a sense of freedom, color and mood that spreads delight. Gradually the eye distinguishes the square ground-floor windows of the façade, and above them the Gothic windows of the second floor, one of them built into a graceful lookout, again off-center. Above the large colorful sundial extends the gable masonry—delicate, like Christmas pastry. The architect’s imagination spends itself in the contrast between the tall lower windows of the wings, which are in the Gothic style, and the upper ones, which lean toward the Renaissance, and in a charming corner alcove.
The whole structure is surmounted by an octagonal tower, plain and a little grumpy, looking down with the severity of a schoolmaster on all the antics below, especially on the statues of the drunken man and woman flanking the Ratskeller. But there is one thing that seems to please the glum tower—the curious black column facing the entrance, which once awaited the evildoers who were there publicly flogged and sometimes executed though innocent.
And from the cathedrals and marketplaces, from the town halls and village greens, there sounded music. The German people, who in the Middle Ages revealed themselves in buildings still frequented today, at the same time conquered a second art that lifted them from the obscurity of their daily life into that higher world of the spirit. German song and German poetry had their beginnings, and as so often in the history of the arts, the very dawn of this, their great endowment, burst into bloom of unfading beauty.
A non-German chronicler of the time of the Crusades relates that Bernhard of Clairvaux grew sad when his German companions left him, for with them song also departed. It is a brief and touching line. Seeking to recapture the strains of this old German music in the reports, letters and rhymed histories, one concludes that it belonged not to a single dass but truly to the people. “They sang,” says another beautiful reference, “while sowing, praying and fighting.” Those companions of the French Crusader were not minstrels and poets, but simply burghers and peasants under arms, unknown soldiers. When the Emperor Lothaire sought to conquer Apulia, one of his generals who sought to dissuade him had the troops strike up a nostalgic tune that signified the homeward march, and the soldiers could no longer be persuaded to fight.
To this very day German music springs from the depths of the German heart. Almost a thousand years after those singing crusaders, whole companies of young German soldiers in the World War were seen to go over the top with songs on their lips. That the German nation has become as a nation of warriors and musicians is readily understood from its character and history.
The Germans had led the life of hunters, risking their life every day in the trackless Teutonic forests in pursuit of the aurochs; theirs had been the life of warriors who did not know, or shunned, the peasant’s peaceful life. Later their adventures and the rigors of their punishments had far surpassed the general level of medieval cruelty; they had reveled in the destruction of prisoners, gloried in revenge. Must not all this have left one part of the human heart unsatisfied? What outlet was there for the sentiments with which we all are born? Among the Greeks Orpheus and Arion beguiled the wild beasts of land and sea with their music; and whenever music sounded in the Germans’ ears, this warrior people too was shaken to its depths. Indeed, the Germans created their own music, and all the learned explanations that German song is derived from France and the Troubadours pale into insignificance before the fact that from it grew the German folk song and, later on, a music the like of which the world has never heard.
TOWN HALL IN BRESLAU
For those German companions of the French Crusader were but the forerunners of all the Germans, who today still excel all other nations in music. They cannot do without it and play with skill and endeavor in their own homes, which is the sign of the true music-lover. Not even among Bohemians and Hungarians is music fed from such rich springs into so many thousand channels as among the Southern Germans, then as now. Here we are able to see right down to the roots of the German character.
Their history has made the Germans a nation of warriors and musicians. Their military discipline, their passion for commanding and obeying, their Spartan training and frugal life, suddenly flaring into excess and drunkenness—the compulsion to which an entire nation surrendered with such true passion was bound to seek some social outlet, an activity where all that dropped away. Mars relieved by Cupid of his arms, as painted by the great Italians, is a symbol for this need. Yet it was not the rulers who fled from their world of brute force into that of art. It was the people who created enduring works—works that were at their best when the confusion all around was greatest.
Whither else could the German burgher have fled—into what form of the spirit could he have escaped from the all-powerful State? In other lands commoners at an early stage began to take part and distinguish themselves in public affairs; but in Germany participation in government was denied the burgher, who was kept in order or in disorder, as the case might be, by princes and nobles, clerical and secular. Not only in the Middle Ages but down to the nineteenth century the best heads were excluded from the management of public affairs. The talented and cultured citizen turned
