Germania; its courts, camps, and people

Front matter

GEEMANIA; ITS COURTS, CAMPS, AND PEOPLE. BY THE BAEONESS BLAZE DE BUEY. " Esa, Senores, es la historia de las Asambleas Alemanas ; y sabeis porque murieron asi ? Yo os lo dire. Murieron asi, porque ni dejaron hacer, ni hacieron ; murieron asi porque ni dejaron gobernar ni gobernaron ; murieron asi porque despues de mas de un ano de discusion nada sali6, o sali6 humo solo de sus interminables discuslones." — speech of donoso cortes, 30th jan. 1850. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LONDON: HENRY COLBURN, PUBLISHER, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1850. "Here is the history of the German Assemblies. Do you know why they died as they did ? I will tell you. — They died because they neither acted nor let others act ; they died because they neither governed nor let others govern; they died, because after more than a year of discussion, nothing arose, or there rose only vain vapour and smoke, from all their interminable discussions." — speech of donoso cortes, 30th jan. 1850. LONDON : Printed by Schulze and Co., 13, Poland Street. CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

Appendix

. NO. I. VERSES ADDRESSED TO THE EMPEROR FRANZ JOSEF, BY THE " YOUTH OF LINz" ..... 452 NO. II. LETTER FROM THE PATRIARCH JOSEPH RAJACIC TO GENERAL HRABOWSKY ....... 452 NO. III. PROCLAMATION TO THE CROATO-SLAVONIANS . . 456 PROCLAMATION TO THE MAGYAR NATION . . 459 NO. IV. LE CHŒUR DES JACQUES ..... 460 NOv. ODE TO RADETZKY ...... GERMANIA.

Chapter I. The Snow

" Travelling is so easy now-a-days !" that is the phrase one hears on all hands. " Since the establish ment of railroads, there are no distances." Granted. It is easy to go to Egypt, and the journey up the Nile is a mere nothing. Shooting parties may be accepted on the borders of the Mississippi, and from the Havannah to Liverpool you may cross in a fortnight. I met a gentleman last winter who told me of the great railroad by means of which we shall go to Calcutta in eleven days, passing through Persia and Asia Minor, (fancy the " Babylon Station !") and as to the Holy Land, why it will soon be our nextvol. II. B GERMANIA. door neighbour : all this I do not dispute, and it may, for aught I know, be very easy to take one's " tea And toast upon the wall of China," but it is not easy to go from Munich to Vienna.

The cold came on suddenly ; on the 1 9 th of No vember, the warmth was so great, that the only expla nation of it was, that " the sweet South," in its passage from Italy, had not had time to cool itself by the contact with the Alps ; on the 20th, early dawn saw Munich swathed in snow ! And now, get away as you can. No railroad connects Bavaria and Austria ; the Danube is frozen over — what is to be done ? It is provoking to be obliged, in the nineteenth, to do as people did in the seventeenth century, and travel a petites journe'es, neither more nor less than Madame la Marquise de Sevign£ used to do when she went from Paris into Brittany, in the year 1670. I would almost as soon contemplate a voyage en litiere, which she declares no two persons, however friendly, can accomplish without hating each other at the end.

" You had better stay here," said our kind Munich friend. " I must be in Vienna for Christmas." "They are going to give Lachner's opera of ' Catarina Cornaro' on Wednesday, mit fesllich GERMANIA. beleuchtetem Hause,"* objected the pretty Madame de W . " There is to be a concert at the Odeon, for the benefit of the soldiers wounded in the Schleswig- Holstein campaign, and the whole Court will be there," added the Countess M . " But we must go to-morrow." " You will be snowed up." " The carriage must be put upon a sledge." " You will be blown over a precipice." " The wind may change." " You will be overturned in a ditch." " Ditches are dry." " You had better go home through Italy," ad vised a worthy countryman of mine, who thought " comfort" the first consideration in life, and who was, besides that, a little " hard of hearing."

" I am dying to see Radetzky." " You could go by Roveredo and Milan . . . ." " But I want to make acquaintance with Jellacic." " Or by Venice and Bologna, and then, from Leghorn by sea, to Marseilles . . . ." " But we have letters to Schlik." "The land-road is the most interesting; but the steamers from Leghorn are so comfortable that they compensate for . . . ." * What the Italians style an illumination a qiorno. B GERMANIA. " The Ban !" cried I, in my obstinate friend's ear, "they won't compensate for not seeing him — de mandez a ces dames." He was, as I found out afterwards, of north country origin, and might have gone maundering on till now if I had not stopped him. As it was, he shrugged his shoulders, pulled down his wristbands, settled his ruffled feathers, and decidedly " giving me up" as incorrigible, walked to the tea-table, remarking, in the sort of tone one would adopt to warn a man from " wicked courses :" " You may depend upon it, it is impracticable ; you don't know what the inns are."

Bless Eothen ! how his eternal " Oui ! je sais," recurred to me. I never met this excellent " borderer" before, and probably never shall meet him again ; but he was not altogether wrong in representing the hostelries of the Austro-Bavarian frontier as places not to be imagined in this our civilized age. Nevertheless, all things must have an end, and so it was with our pleasant stay in Munich. Our last day was employed in admiring the rare collection of drawings, medals, engravings, books and paintings, belonging to the Baron de Lotzbeck ;* and when, in * M. de Lotzbeck is a Peer of Bavaria, and possesses one of the most valuable collections of the works of modern artists GERMANIA. the middle of the chilly night, I found myself rolling on towards Landshut, I could not chase from my mind's eye a certain delicate Spanish jessamine, whose branching tendrils I had seen in the morning wreathed round a table of Florentine mosiac.

Flowers of stone ! it was such a meet vegetation for the frozen earth around me ! they might have clung to the icy trees, or climbed round the snow-laden casements of every cottage ; I could fancy I smelt their perfume. Snow ! yes, this is snow ! — the pure, unpolluted, diamantine crystallization of Heaven's damps, and not the dark, dingy, cafe'-au-lait kind of looking mud, that we dignify with the name in more southern lands. How it glitters ! how it shines ! how it sparkles ! You may walk upon it, nor leave more than a vague foot-print behind : it is hard, and crackles sharply as it is trampled down by the rolling wheel, or the horse's hoof. By the side of the road, the tall trees assume a ghost-like shape, and to every throughout Germany. At his residence of Weyhern, he has the famous Sucontala of Riedl, and the Mignons of Aryscheffer, and at his house in Munich the dining-room is decorated with twelve illustrations of the Gospel, original drawings of Over beck's. The table I have mentioned is a wonder of Florentine art, and cost five hundred guineas, besides taking ten years to make.

Toute proportion garde'e, M. de Lotzbeck is the Due de Luynes of Bavaria. GERMANIA. branch hang girandoles of nature's own manufac turing. I had not then seen that wondrous chan delier of the throne-room in Berlin, or I should have found its model in this frozen dew. We have seventeen degrees and a half; and in one of the carriage pockets, a bottle, filled with vin de Bordeaux and water, presents nothing save a mould of ice ! The snow stretches over everything — fields, hills, and villages. Waggons standing in court-yards are but huge masses of snow, and the postilion's hat and cloak are white — white, and glistening ; I wonder if his horn be frozen, that he does not blow it, but goes on, trot, trot, in silence, upon his steaming horses, as though he were a native of any other nation. I would ask him, only I have a kind of notion that his voice must be iced, like our wine.

And then, on we go again, through the still, deep, blue night ; and the yellow stars in heaven are less numerous and less bright than those with which earth is spangled over. The moon shines brilliantly, and throws over the whole a kind of azure splendour that is fantastical ; and, ever and anon, the breath of the wind stirs the latest-fallen snow, and a cloud of dew-dust obscures, for a moment, the whole scene, and wraps it round in a mantle of frozen smoke. Upon the wide expanse GERMANIA. 7 of what once were corn-fields, see how the hares assemble ! Under the furry covering of their eternal pelz* they mock at winter's harshness, and skip, and spring, and bound about, after such an insane fashion, that it suggests to my mind the propriety of changing the proverb, and substituting, for " Mad as a March hare," the phrase, " Mad as a hare in De cember."

Poor puss ! she probably thinks that hunters and dogs are frozen too ! How Schubert's Winter Reise comes to one's memory ; and as one clatters over the deserted street of some silent country town, how one remembers the lone traveller, who reaches his home in the night — the home he has not seen since his boyhood, — and whom none are waking to welcome. He draws his cloak tightly around him, for the cutting wind whistles sharp, and takes his way to the village church ; and on his road, he wonders what has become of the large pond which lay upon the green, and where, as a child, he had used for hours together to loiter away his time in launching boats he had made himself. The pond has disappeared — all is altered. What wonder? Fifteen years and more have passed — and he goes on ; but, all at once, the * No German exists, I beheve, who has not one or more of these fur-trimmed douillettes, which often have very costly fur both in and outside.

GERMANIA. hard pavement ceases beneath his tread, and his foot sinks deep into the snow — deep, deep, and deeper still, and a sudden crash tells of ice that has given way. The old pond was there, but the snowy cover ing, that rested upon its congealed surface, hid it treacherously from view. The traveller sinks : he cries aloud for help, but none hear; he stretches forth his arms, but no one comes ; the cold seizes and benumbs him, biting at his very heart, as with steel-teeth; he sinks, and the broken snow marks the spot where he disappeared — lost, in view of the home he sought, and of the church where first he learned to pray ! His body will be found when the snow melts — perhaps in spring. What a spring-time for the mother who waited for him ! Ah ! Schubert, thou wert a great master, and didst reign supreme over the ballad empire !

" Where do you find the beautiful melodies, the strange fantastic ideas, which abound in your works ?" asked, one day, of the composer of the " Eri King," a person of my acquaintance. " I know not," was the answer, in the gentle, dreamy tone so peculiar to him, when speaking; " they come to me somehow." But, to appreciate the unassuming naivete', the child-like simplicity of the reply, one must hear it in Schubert's own idiom, his own native Vienna dialect, GERMANIA. 9 " Esfdllt mir halt so ein I" None but an Austrian would say that ! A bell in the distance strikes twelve, and you are surprised — surprised that it should retain life enough in its brazen lungs to give forth sound; and then sleep begins to flap its wings around you, and your closing eyes see all sorts of fantastical shapes ; the hares become elves, and the trees look like white giants, whilst the postilion seems to be leading you some fearful dance into the midst of an unknown land ; now you fancy you are whirling round in Lenore's skeleton polka, and anon the earth seems to you but a huge bride-cake, the frosting of which you are ruthlessly cutting through.

You pass by a church-yard — a "court of peace" they call it here — and ask yourself what those particular graves do there, since all earth is now but one tomb, and nature lies stiffening before you, swathed in her cold, colourless winding-sheet. You do not, in this universal burial, comprehend the meaning or the necessity of any one having a grave to himself; and your brain is now in a sleepy whirl of warring fancies, which pass before you, strange, motley, and indistinct, as though they were dropping through the ever-changing round of a kaleidescope ; and then all fades and ceases, or is transformed ; and the first sound or circumstance which calls you from the spirit-world, finds you, for GERMANIA. one second, as utterly foreign to the world of reality, as if you had never been born ; it is but a moment — gone ere it can be recognized ; but in that moment, you have comprehended unconsciousness, and a total separation from yourself.

" Caffee oder Bier ?" that was the very unpoetic call which woke me from my slumbers, on arriving at Landshut, at six o'clock in the morning. I imagine my vacant stare must have expressed considerable surprise, for the Kellnerin rejoined in a half-offended tone, as though she thought a doubt of the quality of her " malt liquors" must be the only reason of my inquiring look. " It is genuine, not Munich, but Seefeld beer, the best in Bavaria." I had been dreaming of the drowned traveller, and with the weird maladies of Schubert echoing through my memory, was suddenly awoke and called upon to " chronicle small beer !" Ce sont les chances du voyage — set des reves surtout !J My north country friend was right, and the inn at Landshut proved it. A long, low room, into which light from half-opened shutters filtered lazily, shaming a foul smelling lamp, whose red glare had flickered through the night — thick wooden tables, primitive as those whereat Cedric the Saxon entertained his guests, and retaining signs of the previous night's potations ; these were the objects which met my eye, GERMANIA. 11 as I accepted the invitation to " come in and warm myself."

This was not easy, for there is about the cold of the morning something which far surpasses that of the night. It is not so intense ; but it is more penetrating, and clings to you with a damp corpse like hold. After an hour spent in attentively gazing at the enormous tower of the church, which looks like a giant-extinguisher put upon the whole town, and in reading the feuilleton of a radical paper, full of lies to the glory of Dembinski and Bem, the moment for departure arrived, and as the sun was beginning to gild the horizon, we re-entered the carriage. But how different was the whole scene ! On reaching the high hill which rises behind Landshut, the grandeur of what winter can be in the north, burst upon us in all its magnificence. The sky was blue, as though heaven's dome were made out of one immense sapphire, and not a single cloud obscured the brightness of the golden rays which poured flood-like down upon the earth.

The sun was not only genial, it was warm, very warm. Yet still, all its warmth failed to melt one crystal from the boughs, and upon the carriage windows the congealed atmosphere was iced still into a thousand curious traceries. But if the heat were GERMANIA. powerless against the chill covering wherewith Nature had wrapped herself round, the effects of the sun upon her icy garb were no less strange and beautiful. The blue radiance of the night was changed into a brilliancy which the eye had some pain to support, and every tint that can be conceived, red, lilac, yellow, green, passed over the earth's virgin robe, spreading rainbow-like carpets upon the ground. No breath of wind was stirring, no bird or insect speckled the air, no sound of living thing disturbed the echoes. Solitude was complete around, and in those eternal plains, whose untrodden surface attested the absence of man, there was a palpable evidence of solitude that made you feel as though you had entered an uninhabited universe.

This endless expanse of snow is desolate in its vast loneliness, as the wide sandy waste of the desert ; and when it is without trace of the passage of man, it is even more melancholy still. Nothing that we know of can give an idea of what winter is in the North, when it assumes this degree of severity ; it has hoiTors and beauties of which we do not dream. But in its terror there is sublimity, whilst its beauty is allied to sadness. A spot which is familiar to you, when you see it for the first time in this garb, pro duces the impression of the statue of some one you have loved, made to ornament a tomb ; the features GERMANIA. 13 are there as you knew them, but they bring to you the idea of death. The day ought to have been a gay one ; it was a shining, brilliant, and what in any other season would have been a joyous, laughing day ; and yet as you passed along you felt as though you were alone — quite, utterly, entirely alone !

Neumarkt, where we dined, or tried to persuade ourselves we had done so, corroborated still further the truth of what the bor derer had said ; and I began to feel uncharitably towards him, as one does towards those who have told you something unpleasant, the truth of which you are obliged to admit. I confess that the little black lumps of parchment and powder that were served to us at Neumarkt, under the name of partridges (and which differed only therein from the apples of the Dead Sea that, although ashes within, they were not " fair to look at" without), caused me to hold my innocent compatriote in increasing disfavour ; nor was this feeling mitigated when, some few hours later, at Alt Œtting, we cast our despairing eyes over what the natives called a table, and over the dishes upon it, which they inno cently denominated supper.

The day was waning fast, and it was now a matter of discussion whether it would be safe to go on GERMANIA. through the night ; but the impossibility of sleeping in the place we were then in, and the assurance of the driver that, with such a moon as was likely to rise, he would answer for no accident happening, determined us to proceed. Something having become loosened in one of the wheels we were forced, during the time it was being mended, to take refuge, on account of the stove, in the dining-room of the inn. Bad enough it was, to be sure, and full of noise, smoke, and unpleasant smells of diabolical culinary productions. The vast space allotted to the purpose of feeding was divided into two compartments. To the left lay the portion destined to receive the vornehme Gdste, and on the right-hand opened a long chamber, allotted to the guests of an inferior description.

In the former room were congregated a few voyageurs, just come in with the Eilwagen (which ought to have arrived on the previous night), and some half-dozen Bavarian officers. In the latter were a crowd of peasants, some in the attire of the neighbouring Tyrol. Whilst I was turning over the pages of the Deutsche Zeitung, lying before me on the table, my eye was caught by some verses, such as it was frightful to think any human imagination should have GERMANIA. 15 invented, but which I will quote here, in order to show what were the men who, after the revolution of February, tried to seize upon popularity in Germany, and bring over the mass to their infamous doctrines.* Here is the passage : (it is headed Berne.) " All religion is superstition, and must be eradi cated before the freedom of the people can take root."

" These are the precepts inculcated by Heinzen and his disciples ; alas ! not entirely without effect," observes the Deutsche Zeitung, " for the greater number of the German refugees make themselves remarkable for the most disgusting and absolute atheism. As an example of this take the following : at the anniversary of Robert Blum's death, in Zurich, an individual, in the assembly of refugees, who had met together for the occasion, said, ' Of the triumph of liberty in Europe there can be no hope, so long as the belief in God and eternity is forced upon the population by a set of priests. This wild illusion' (namely, religion) ' must be torn out of the souls of the people before the universal overthrow of thrones and kings can break the chains of slavery. In order to ' come at' the princes we must first get rid of the priests !' Here now, resumes the newspaper, is a * See what I have said of this party and its leaders, Blum, Vogt, &c, in Chap. in.

Vol. I. GERMANIA. specimen of atheistical poetry, such as it flourishes ist the popular reunions and circles of which the operaives are members : " ' C d be that G — , the unseeing, unhearing. To whom our belief bound us, praying and fearing ; We have waited and hoped in our want and our pain, He has mocked us, our hopes and our patience are vain ! We weave on ! we weave on ! " ' Cursed be the Fatherland, where our sole dower Is poverty, shame and despair at each hour ! Germania ! we work at thy winding sheet, And a threefold curse thy decay shall greet. We weave on ! we weave on !' " I had hardly come to the end of this impious rhapsody, when a strange sort of psalmody issuing from the inner apartment struck my ear. At first, I could not distinguish exactly what it was ; but, after a moment's attention, the words, " Pray for us, miserable sinners, now and at the hour of our death !" revealed to me the Invocation to the Imma culate — the Salutation, at parting-day, to the Virgin — the Mother !

It was the hour for the Angelus, and, in the room set aside for the lower class of visitors, a peasant woman, standing before a copy of the Ave Maria, GERMANIA. 17 which hung framed against the wall, recited the prayer, of which each separate phrase was repeated in chorus by the rest of the assistants. All the guests, in both rooms, were standing and uncovered, and remained in that attitude till the end of the evening prayer. And this, I could not help thinking, is the race they are labouring morally to destroy, and here, as my eye fell once more upon the newspaper before me, are the destroyers ! We resumed our route by the same brilliant moon as the night before, but our way lay now through less cultivated scenes : rocks, streams and woodland wilds, all lay swathed in snow; forests, as though carved in stone, rose massive and over-loaded w'th white wealth ; the course of rivers was no longer marked, or was only pointed out by a dark line where the current had been torrent-strong, and had rebelled against the grasp of the mighty frost.

As we passed over what we recognized as a very long bridge, our driver knocked at the front glass of the carriage, saying, as he pointed to a black line like what I have mentioned : " There is the Danube." From village to village, or, as the peasants there- VOL. ii. c GERMANIA. abouts call it, from " market-place to market-place," we searched that night for a bed wherein to rest, and at last, at one o'clock in the morning, we were obliged to be content with a hovel. We stopped at a picturesque " iw-conveniency" called Simbach, and came to a halt in despair. GERMANIA. 19

Chapter II

A FRONTIER TOWN. There are places which not only produce a disagreeable impression of present discomfort upon you, but which leave in your mind a memory of all that is most repugnant ; the Germans have a capital word for this feeling, they call it un-heimlichkeit, and use it to express the precise contrary of what is pleasant and homely — as though, in that one word " home," were contained all that human wishes could aim at. Z7«-homeliness, the quality of that which would appear to us most impossible as a home ; of that which physically and morally mislikes us whilst we are in contact with it ; that it is, and that was the sensation inspired in the highest degree by the road-side inn at Simbach. The country around was lovely, and, on the following morning, the view c GERMANIA. from our windows spread over a fair and wide expanse of chequered wood and wold, but the post-house of Simbach was un-heimlich, and the very creaking of the room-doors upon their hinges was more discordant than in other places.

We had but two posts more before we should cross the frontier, and we treated fatigue kindly, and rose late. But more snow had fallen towards four o'clock in the morning, and we were told we should not reach Scherding before nine or ten o'clock at night. The weather was gloomy, unlike that of the previous day, and evening faded into night, the change being only marked by the absence of light, not by any difference of colouring. As the clocks of Neuhaus (the last Bavarian village) were striking ten, the tread of our horses' hoofs sounded hollow upon the great bridge connecting the two countries. The Inn had been too rapid in its headlong mountain course to allow of winter receiving its tribute per fectly ; and its dark, rushing waves came roaring on, and angrily hurling against the piles of the bridge floating islands of ice, whose rude touch made the wooden arches shake.

Gloomy did that broad river look, as it rolled beneath the canopy of the sky, over whose surface grey clouds swept heavily, and chased away the moon GERMANIA. or only let her pale rays struggle through, from time to time, making the dark water darker by their faint light. And the voice too of the flood, was a voice of wail — a moan of angry sadness ; and the wind came down from the Tyrolean Alps, and lashed the Inn, and the Inn roared like a struck lion, and madly flung a frozen mass against the bridge, and the bridge shook as before. The gates are opened, and, by the uncertain flare of a Custom-House officer's lantern, who is settling some point with the driver of a huge waggon before us, we see the double eagle of Austria. I had for the last month been assailed by the usual predictions touching the vexatious spirit of the Austrian douane ; made, it is true, by persons who had never crossed the Austrian frontier, and I began now to tremble, not for my bonnets and dresses (I knew I had nothing that could cause suspicion to the most fidgetty functionary in all Europe), but for the reputation of a politeness I had vouched for all along.

I knew them of old, and thought they must be sorely changed if a spirit of vexation could have become in fused into them. We stopped at the door of the Custom-House, and entered the bureau. A veteran employe', looking very sleepy, fetched his chef, remarking as he GERMANIA. went, that he had rarely seen a carriage more heavily packed. The head man came ; he was tall, thin, and seemed somewhat stiff in manner. Whilst he seated himself at his office table, and prepared to examine the pass ports, the " Pelion upon Ossa " of trunks, cap-cases, and carpet bags, was built up in the outer bureau. Over the douanier's table hung a portrait. " Kaiser," said I, looking at the picture. " Ja !" said he, going on examining the passports. " Ferdinand ?" continued I. " Na ! Franzl," replied he ; and this time he looked up through his spectacles.

" Ah ! der alter Herr !"* I resumed. At this, he not only looked up again, but he cordially smiled ; and then followed that, without which, I affirm that no Austrian alive can talk five minutes to a woman — the compliment ! " Ja ! der alter Herr !" repeated he ; " but how can the gnddige Frau know that ? She was not born at that time." I laughed in turn. * "The old gentleman" was the, to our ears, somewhat equivocal name given familiarly to the Emperor Francis by his subjects. It is about equivalent to " the Governor," and is to Austrian ears highly expressive of filial affection. GERMANIA. 23 " If you are not a Wiener," I observed, " I have but small skill in discovering nationality." " Born in the Leopoldstadt," he rejoined, and he rose and presented us with chairs. He looked at his watch ; it was half-past ten.