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| The Golden Madonna, Essen |
Travelling last week across North Rhine-Westphalia,
I flew to Dusseldorf and thence by train to Essen, Münster and Bielefeld at the invitation of a group of Anglo-German
Associations (variously the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft , the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft and the Deutsch-Britische Freundeskreis) to
lecture on ‘Cambridge Writers and Cambridge Writing’. This was the fourth time
I’d accepted such an invitation. As ever, my hosts were welcoming and generous
with their time, and my audiences were varied, interested and interesting. The
A-V equipment worked at each location. No itinerant lecturer can ask for more.
In Essen, a third time, I visited the Dom
to pay my respects to the Golden Madonna, the earliest known carving of the
Virgin and Child in the world. She sits, piercing-eyed, in a specially
protected chapel on the north side of the Chancel. Essen, like the other
industrial cities of the Ruhr, was heavily bombed during the War, and the
Golden Madonna was hidden away for safety. After 1945 it was a British soldier
who rescued and returned her to her rightful home. Whenever I see her, I recall
Lawrence Durrell’s description of the Marine Venus, recovered after the same
war from her underwater hiding place off the island of Rhodes:
She sits … now,
focused intently upon her own inner life, gravely meditating upon the works of
time. So long as we are in this place we shall not be free from her. (Reflections on a Marine Venus, Ch. 2)
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| The Nikolaus Gross Chapel, Essen |
On
the other side of the cathedral, by stark contrast, is a small chapel dedicated
to Nikolaus
Groß,
a local miner who became a trades-unionist, journalist and outspoken, heartfelt
critic of Nazism. His writings on religion and politics led inexorably to his implication
in the July Plot to assassinate Hitler, and thence to his arrest and execution
in Plötzensee
Prison, Berlin. (I have been to Plötzensee: its hanging chamber is the
coldest, bleakest room in which I have ever stood.) Essen’s Nikolaus Groß Abend-gymnasium is named in his honour, and its Director is a
good friend of mine. The pictures on the walls of his office embody the tensions
and ambiguities of the past century: photographs of Nikolaus Groß, of Winston Churchill, and of Ernst Barlach’s Magdeburger
Ehrenmahl - for me one of the most eloquent and discomforting of all
First World War memorials.
War memorials are much on my mind at present. I
have contributed a chapter on British and German memorials after the Armistice
of 1918 to a book due out next year, and in the autumn I shall be speaking in
Oxford about memory and memorialization at a conference on memorials of the
Great War. However, Münster, my next stop, appeared at first to have none. Not
surprising, of course, since the city had been flattened by allied
bombing. Still, I liked Munster a lot:
it felt at ease with itself. I liked its bicycles and traffic-free streets, its
sensitive post-war reinterpretation of the medieval city. Above all, I confess,
I loved its asparagus. The annual Spargelfest was in full swing: my meal of spargel mit westfälische schinken on
Tuesday night and the vast stacks of white asparagus spears in the Domplatz
market on Wednesday morning will linger happily in the memory.
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| Asparagus on sale in the Domplatz Market, Muenster |
But I was wrong about the war memorials.
Straying further than I’d intended, I found my way to the Liebfrauenkirche
Überwasser, a wonderfully light and spacious church. The main porch,
under the tower, appeared to be screened off by heavy glass doors; but seeing
someone else exit that way I followed, finding myself in a wide whitewashed
vestibule. I don’t know why I didn’t simply walk out of the door straight
ahead, but for some reason I turned and saw, on either side of the tower arch,
a pair of tall wooden panels. Each one had two figures carved in relief, almost
life-size, almost Expressionist in style: on the left, Ss. Michael and
Sebastian; on the right, Ss. Barbara and Theodore. I couldn’t make out the
texts above the figures. Then I saw each panel consisted of two shut doors –
like an altar triptych closed for Lent. No one was looking, so I opened them
out and there, no longer hidden from view, was the roll of the Münster dead
from 1914-18. At the head of the list was the inscription Es opferten Ihr Leben: ‘They sacrificed their life’.
Hidden from view – though in quite a different
way – was the war memorial at Bielefeld I visited on the last day of my tour.
Bielefeld lies in a valley and I had been told there was a memorial, often
disfigured, somewhere on the Johannisberg
above the city. I needed help to find this and Janette, my guide, led the way across
the railway, up the hill and away from the city. At the top of the hill, a
hotel: beyond the hotel, a path leading into a wood, the Teutoburger Wald. You have to leave the path and head towards the
trees in order to reach the memorial. Further from the centre of the city it
could not be: it seems astonishingly, willfully, misplaced.
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| The Johannisberger Memorial, Bielefeld |
And yet it isn’t. The memorial shows a soldier
in uniform but without rifle or helmet. He kneels with his hands raised
awkwardly behind him. Only when you come close can you see he is bandaging his wounded
head: there is no one to do it for him. Left behind, but at least left alive,
he has to fend for himself – it’s as if he has taken to the hills to hide. His
gaze is stern and distant: is he looking through the trees, scanning in vain
for his dead companions? Is he looking back at the city, reproaching those for
whom he fought but who have now abandoned him? This statue, significantly, was
erected not by the townspeople but by the army veterans of Bielefeld. I have
never seen a lonelier memorial.
This sense of loneliness and separation finds its
counterpart in a WW2 memorial back in the city centre. Outside the Rathaus, inconspicuous against the flambuoyant
architecture of the rebuilt town hall, stands a plain square column, really no
more than a tall plinth, with a copper bowl on top. It looks as if an
everlasting flame ought to be burning in the bowl, but no. There is in fact
nothing to indicate that this is a war memorial at all, just four words on the
side of the column: WIR WARTEN AUF EUCH
– ‘We wait for you’.
Few things reflect more powerfully than war memorials
the conflicted relationship, the similarities and differences between Britain and Germany during the twentieth
century. Think about it. So, if I’m invited to come back and lecture a fifth
time, with the centenary of the Great War fast approaching, it is about this subject I’d like to speak.
Adrian Barlow
