Or A Few Thoughts From Somewhere Near Asgard
I’m writing this in Leipzig, next to the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, quite content to be here, having set off across town unable to even pronounce the interminable name, even less remember more than one or two syllables. (My mastery of German still means I systematically pull doors marked “drücken” and end up running into the ones marked “ziehen”.) Thankfully, it is visible from afar.
Also, I am writing blissfully unencumbered by any knowledge of my subject, at whose foot and in whose generous shadow I’ve found respite from a strangely summery September sun. So bear with me, when my mind packs a lunch and says see you later, I never really know where it’s heading.
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The Monument of the Battle of the Nations was built in the first decade of the 20th century to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. (The allied armies of Austria, Prussia, Russia and Sweden finally put an end Napoleon’s eastern ambitions.) The atrocious death toll (over 100,000) fuelled the desire for a monument soon after the battle, as early as 1816, but subscriptions faltered, plans were shelved, re-examined and abandoned, initiatives started and stalled, until the foundations were finally laid in 1905. The capstones were lowered into place in 1912, and it was inaugurated on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, on October 18, 1913.
Coinciding as it did with the construction of the European nation states, rising up from the ruins of a succession of fallen empires, much discussion was given to the form it should take. Over seventy proposals greeted the association, but the artistic mood had shifted from the canons of classical Antiquity, the Victorian Age was answering the final curtain calls, and some other inspiration was required. Finally, after much deliberation, a design was approved.
The result is overwhelming. At near 100 yards high, it is the biggest monument in Europe. It’s a shame such places are so often dismissed because of the history that swirls around their feet – dictatorships always love a Brobdingnagian backdrop – but such things are like a hard frost in the winter; they leave little trace. This place is about something else.
There is a little museum, which must be of interest to Napoleonic buffs. (I got the withering and dismissive stare I deserved from the guard when I took in both floors in a record 30 seconds.) The monument’s museum is little more than a gift shop and ticket counter, but the monument is thoughtfully filled with all manner of explanatory signs and panels, which, with the dedication of the ignorant, I blithely ignored. (I couldn’t read them anyway.) The uppermost phalanx of statues and the inside of the dome are invisible, swathed in scaffolding. The monument itself is undergoing a much-needed sprucing up and repair, after over half a century of dedicated neglect.
But that’s history. Today, it’s just the monument and me. I’ve come early, far ahead of the crowds that gawk from the terraces, huff and puff and clog up the several hundred steps to the viewing platform, or manoeuvre toy motorboats in the pond in front. I’m looking for something else, and for that, I need the thing to myself. (The pond, by the way, is trapezoidal, narrowing towards the monument; the forced perspective makes it seem even bigger than it is.)
The monument is a grim granite fantasy, a pile of rough gargantuan blocks weighing thousands of tons. It feels like it should await the unwary traveller in some deep valley, or heave into view over some high ridge on a lofty plateau. I wish I could lift it out of this placid park and place it in a more fitting setting. Erase the fluffy morning clouds in favour of some lowering stormbrow with a threat of thunder. A few ravens to put here and there on cornices and skylines, or throw into the sky. A precipice at Saint Michael’s feet, with a treacherous stair of a few thousand narrow, rimed steps covered in moss, and a cascade or two of wild water. No, four; one flowing to each of the points cardinal. Of course Asgard is just visible in the distance. Yggdrasil is lost in the mist, but the ground itself stirs occasionally when Nidhoggr turns in its sleep.
This is the scale for the Argonath, stern, massive, cyclopean. I am grateful to the the late 1800’s for shucking off all the neo-isms that so distracted artists over the preceding century. The avid search for exploitable autochthonous mythology, abandoning the Victorian Olympus in order to stir up the folks at home with something dug out of their soil and not broken marble hauled from a thousand miles away, resulted in a delving unseen since the dwarfs* emerged from Ymir’s corpse. In the quest for mythological and vernacular pagan imagos to have and to hold, forgotten heroes and their hangers-on were unearthed left and right, consenting cariatides and ardent atlantes of the new nation states.
This place is a pagan temple dedicated to some dim northern pantheon. I would happily swap Barbarossa for Loki or Alberich, Saint Michael for Wotan or Sigurd, weave Fafnir and Fenrir into the bas-relief. All those bristling brooding Teutonic knights could be Norns and storm giants (I’m all for equal representaiton among the sexes; shame there are no Rine maidens, though) and the Midgard serpent around the base. If we must keep the pond, then I’ll have Naglefar in place of those sputtering model boats. The squared crown at the summit is a sort of cosmic anvil, where thunder fashions bolts of lightning.
What I love most from this period is the simplification of volumes, the abandoning of the precious and self-conscious realism that the neo-classicists so adored, decking themselves out in borrowed hellenistic drapery (most borrowing avoided the Helladic and Hellenic), and any good excuse to do another nude. There is an energy of line that is extraordinary, a concentration that owes not so much to furrowed brows and hunched napes as to some renewed artistic vitality. The process is inverted, no longer a regression from the universal to anecdotal, but representation of archetypes as a focussing on the essence of myth itself.
This inversion of principle – from aristocratic style defining substance to mythological content determining form is a heartening relinquishing of sophistication and a return to a more archaic relationship to inspiration. This rediscovery of the vernacular is gratifying, and raising it in stone a hundred yards high is breathtaking. It is like being on an extravagant film set (“Forgotten Silver” springs to mind) or in one of those adventure novels where the intrepid hero suddenly stumbles on the vestige of some forgotten civilization in some lofty and ice-covered vastness. (“Sorry, I’ve been wandering,” my mind says. “Mind if I finish the last sandwich?”)
Additionally, there is a reuniting of decoration and form; after the indiscriminate Baroque plastering-on of motifs, a contest to see how much foliate stucco and putti a square foot could contain, after the borrowed smoothness of bland Neoclassicism and the often empty if masterly marbles of Victoriana – all art of empires whose collapse seems to have briefly cleaned the slate. Small wonder the figures stand so firmly planted on their prodigious feet, they are extrusions of the elusive and imponderable connections with myth. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not attempting to dismiss whole periods of art history; I love the Victorian painters to a man for their unmatched skill and early Hollywoodian sense of scale and scope, but this is much more powerful.)
And granted, it’s not exactly light-hearted, but the building of war memorials is a dour affair of resolute mourning and the impossible dream that such things never happen again. (Ironically, happen again it did, mere months later.) It is also uncomfortably close, chronologically, to fascist architecture, which extracted its stone from neighbouring iconographic quarries. Somehow though, this transcends nationalism to become a symbol something grander and grimmer. A rough bulwark to shield the frail Light against the surrounding Dark, nearer to Beowulf and Arthur than any propagandist dogma. Paradoxically, despite baptising itself Art Nouveau or Jugenstil, the foundations of the movement sought their stability in the archaic, in the same way the Pre-Raphaelites closed the shutters on three centuries of art history and gazed back in their romantic feverishness to an earlier time. Nor did it last; swept away by the great war, it was gone in a few decades. A brief dawn, a swift dusk, bequeathing a few extravagant places stranded in time. Adamantine anachronisms, fallen from grace, belonging to another world.
Perhaps it’s simply the outrageous extravagancy of things that scale. How I would love to see more myth carved in stone on an epic scale. It seems a rarity in the west; the orient was far more enthusiastic about carving cliff faces and boulders. I wonder how far I could get before being put away by the local authorities if I was to start sculpting a cliff in the Jura…
Of course I took a few million photos. Here are a few:
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Saint Michael, with his sword of flame, flanked by furies bearing firebrands, is in the center of a battlefield strewn with corpses and fallen standards. The entry to the building is through a lion’s (dragon’s?) mouth.
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Two profiles of Frederick Barbarossa frame the stairs.
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The crypt is encircled by eight pairs of grim warriors leaning on their shields in mourning. The death masks are a good twenty feet high.
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Four enormous figures thirty feet in height overlook the balcony above the crypt.
* I very nearly typed “dwarves” here. Reading the Hobbit at a tender age ruined forever my once-impeccable scores on spelling tests.
