Or All About Illustrators, Illusions and Imperial Eagles
I’m sure it’s no secret how much I enjoy the company of castles. In a former life, I’d happily imagine myself king of some regal keep – though it’s more likely I’d have been a beggar at the gates.
Haut-Kœnigsbourg is a castle I’ve always loved, ever since happenstance deposited me in the Alsace and I first saw it three decades ago. (Three decades – the space of a deep breath for a place like that.) Haut-Kœnigsbourg is a massive pile of red sandstone occupying a summit in the Vosges, casting its shadow over the valley of Villé to the north, dominating the plain and the Rhine to the east. (On a clear day, you can see the Alps to the south.)
The best thing about it, though, is that it’s not real. It’s a fairy tale castle.
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Left: The castle from partway up the mountain. It is visible from a great distance; I always used to explain to friends “Just drive south from Strasbourg, when you see a HUGE thing up on the mountain, take a right (left if you’re heading north from Basel). You can’t miss it.”
Centre: Sea of clouds over the plain of the Alsace.
Right: First sun on the eastern facade.
First chronicled in the 11th century (but likely there long before), a robber’s nest in the mid 15th, proud fortress of the powerful Tierstein family in the 1480’s, by the 19th it was a roofless ruin. The Swedes, who spread mayhem through much of Europe during the 30 Years’ War, first bombarded it, besieged, captured and finally set it alight. In 1648, the Alsace became French again and Louis XIV bestowed it on a family of local aristocrats. It passed from hand to hand and family to family over the next two centuries, to eventually end up in 1865 the property of the modest town of Sélestat, situated a few miles distant, in the plain below.
The broken ramparts were a favourite choice for Sunday promenades and picnics, and doubtless a dishevelled Romantic or two proclaimed his flame to his breathless beloved in the shadow of its ivy-covered walls. (Old engravings show it to indeed be very much a place to be loved by the Romantics – it is easy to imagine Caspar David Friedrich glazing a sky of ragged clouds against such a foreground.) Military strategists, who were rather more pragmatic, agreed it was not necessary to raze the ramparts, and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who visited in 1854, proclaimed it a fine ruin indeed, and worthy of being saved. But, in 1870, the Alsace was annexed by Germany, putting an end to his plans for restoration.
Selestat, and rather than continue assuming the ruinous upkeep, decided to get rid of it, and in 1899 the town council ceremoniously bestowed it on Frederick Wilhelm Viktor Albert of Hohenzollern, better known as Wilhelm II, Deutscher Kaiser und König von Preußen. He must have been tickled to receive such an unusual – and cumbersome – gift. Now, being an emperor, Wilhelm had considerable means at his disposal, and rather than content himself with a matchstick model in his hunting lodge, he decided to have it rebuilt.
The project was confided to the young German architect Bodo Ebhardt. Plans were drafted, archives unearthed, a railway built from a nearby quarry, and in 1901, a small army of masons, blacksmiths, carpenters and engineers imported from across the Rhine. On May 13th, 1908, the fully reconstructed castle was inaugurated in grand pomp.
It poured with rain the whole day.
Wilhelm might have taken that as an omen; six years later an archduke was shot down in Bosnia, and war engulfed Europe once more. The Alsace finally returned to France after the second war to end all wars and now Haut-Koenigsbourg is besieged only by peaceful cohorts of tourists. (As for the Kaiser, he was forced to abdicate as part of the Armistice. He went to Holland where he died in 1941. He is buried at Doorn.)
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Left: The north side, looking up at the main body of the castle from the walkway on the outer wall. There is actually a voluminous reservoir in the tower, which collects water from the roof. In a heavy rain, the overflow from the tank will send a cascade of water down the northern wall.
Centre: Sketch (done in the rain)… having a reputation (or at least illusions for posterity) to maintain, I did a few sketches for the shoot.
Right: Of course, I’ve used the castle many times, this time it was the fortress of Buckkeep in the Robin Hobb Farseer and Tawny Man novels. (The castle also furnished a good deal of the furniture in Bag End, but that’s another story entirely.)
I’ve visited the castle many times, including half a dozen in 15th century costume and another with the team of Lord of the Brush but this time I’m here for a different reason. I’m here to talk about Leo Schnug.
Try to google Schnug, you won’t find very much, which is a bit of a disappointment, as my admiration for his art is profound. And that was reason enough for me, when approached by a production company asking if I’d like to participate in a documentary on his life and work, to immediately say “Where do I sign what do you want me to say when do we shoot what where?”. So here I am, once more wandering about the place with a film crew on my heels.
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Left: The high garden, seen from the top of the main tower.
Centre: Sketch of same (with a certain artistic license).
Right: Another view of the garden, this time from the main bastion.
Leo Schnug was born in Strasbourg in 1878. When he was three, his father was interned at the asylum for the insane of nearby Stephansfeld. Leo himself would suffer a like fate. After the death of his mother in 1921, he was definitively interned until his own death in 1941, the same year as Wilhelm II. Ironically and tragically, Schnug father and son spent a short time in the same institution, but did not see or speak to each other.
Leo Schnug was a painter and illustrator. With the exception of a short sojourn in Munich to study in art school there, and several visits to Vienna, he never left the Alsace. His work is simultaneously elegant (Art Nouveau, Jugenstil and the Vienna Decadents were all the rage) and earthy; academic despite a tendancy towards caricature. He tackled principally local subjects, and by the turn of the century, he was a popular man, respected and admired. Wilhelm II quite naturally chose him to decorate the brand new banquet hall of his new castle with frescoes heroic fitting for such a setting. Schnug was the only non-German craftsman ever employed in the restoration of the castle.
Schnug loved history and costume (he was done up as a landesknecht for the inauguration of Haut-Kœnigsbourg and can be seen in photos dressed in Napoleonic uniform.) He did countless ex-librii, wine labels, postcards and illustrations. He also, alas for him, had a strong penchant for alcohol, and decorated nearly any winstub that would serve him drink. (The Maison Kammerzell, facing the cathedral of Strasbourg, has a number of walls and ceilings decorated by Schnug.) In the end, it would precipitate his undoing, and the last two decades of his work show a heartbreaking decline and inexorable loss of all his skill. He is buried in a simple grave in the cemetery of Lampertheim.
When I first visited the castle in 1976, I thought the whole thing was real, including Schnug’s frescoes. (You must remember that I learned Canadian art and history in school, so I could discourse endlessly on Louis Riel and Tlingit wood carving, but was rather vague on the rest of the world.) I had no idea it was only a decade or so older than my dad. Nevertheless, I was of course enchanted with the place. I still am.
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Castle walls are of course strewn with little apertures out of which it was possible to peek (quickly) without getting an arrow or a crossbow bolt in the eye, making for the most amusing, if severely cropped, views.
Controversy skirls around the ramparts of Haut-Kœnigsbourg like the February wind. Trench warfare has been raging between the defenders of the restoration and its detractors since the project began. (If you read anything historians or journalists pen about the castle, the main thing you retain is how cautious they are with their opinions. The recent trend is to absolve Bodo Ebhardt of any malicious historical wrongdoing and gloss over the most daring of his “interpretations”.) But quite frankly, that debate is totally beside the point. There are more important things going on here.
The question is, what do you do with history?
Totalitarians try to rewrite it; archaeologists dig it up; curators lock it in glass cases; novelists prefer it as a backdrop, politicians scrounge through it for vindication; emperors attempt to rebuild it in their image. What is an illustrator to do with it?
To me it seems there are two courses, one dealing with form the other with meaning. History can be a vast image bank, a reservoir of material out of which one may extract, if not information or inspiration, at least material to fill a canvas or page. A copy/paste approach, more akin to photoshopping than drawing. A transposing of imagery that often empties it of any meaning.
The search for meaning is far more satisfying, as it doesn’t exclude the other option. Schnug is striding firmly down this path. I’ve often stood in front of his frescos, wonder just where the devil he had lifted some particular detail of costume or weaponry, from what unpublished manuscript he drew that particular helmet or halberd. It’s clear in the way he draws that he has understood his sources; this understanding is the element that liberates the narrative itself. (Imagine a book full of typographical errors and faulty grammar. Any pleasure you have in reading it would likely suffer. To me, an illustration anchored in history with unknowing anachronisms is the same.) Schnug is searching for his own heimat, the eternal return to that place you’ve never found. He has the acuity of vision that is the bitter gift of the exile, before his ultimate exile to Stephansfeld. His characters are indicia or ancedotes, depending on how you prefer to read them.
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Left: The Banquet Hall, with those discrete, tasteful chandeliers that were in such vogue at the time. Those are Schnug’s paintings on the walls behind. (I didn’t try to photograph the paintings, it would have meant clambering atop a stepladder ON the Kaiser’s banquet table, hardly an exercise that would have endeared me to the museum staff.)
Centre: Director Alexis Metzinger and his brother Yannis, who are the team that run Cerigo Films.
Right: Production, direction, sound and camera, on the steps high garden to the bastion.
What is the most remarkable with Schnug is that his illustrations are all about searching for meaning, they are intent on making sense of things. If you look at his characters, nearly all of them have their two feet solidly planted on the ground, even those who are striding determinedly forward. On the other hand, the landscape is often far more volatile, as if it was being blown away by the wind. As if Schnug was taking root in his native Alsace by anchoring his characters in the earth and stone, while the capricious and often cruel winds of fate blew back and forth across the Rhine. (The Alsatians are very philosophical about their history; they have been invaded and occupied so many times one almost loses count.) Many of Schug’s most beautiful renderings depict an almost hypnotic and relentless movement.
It’s tempting to see Schnug’s work as that of a talented if eccentric local artist exclusively preoccupied with soldiers and uniforms. Anecdote there is, in the form of landesknechts, stern knights in armour, tippling monks and grinning grenadiers; all are characters on the stage of Schnug’s morality play, his backdrops are ever-shifting, but the characters themselves are sure of the one thing that cannot be wrenched from them: that they belong to the land on which they were born as it belongs to them, no matter where the winds of empire and invasion push them.
Poetic, melodramatic? of course. Beyond Schnug and his dear yet minuscule Elsass opens the view on the wider tapestry of humankind, of the less powerful of those who bow their backs or are swept away by the passing folly of the empires that swallow them. His landesknechts return in rags, purses empty, Dopplehänders notched and battered. His grenadiers are proud in tall hats and uniforms, but to what icy foreign plain of destiny are they about to march?
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Left: Illustration by Leo Schnug for a greeting card. (Apologies for the poor quality of the scan.) It is one of my favourite images, with the Roland overgrown and lost in the forest. (Are you familiar with the “Roland” statues in Germany? They are absolutely fascinating. The best-known one is in Bremen, but there are many others; one day, I hope to make the pilgrimage to see them for real.)
Centre: Vignette by Schnug. I bought this years ago in a flea market, I have no idea where it was published.
Right: Wall painting in a guardhouse on the south ramparts of the high garden (closed to the public). A homage to Urs Graf and his remarkable woodcuts of landesknechts, with, apparently, a play on the original German words in Alsatian which of course escapes me entirely (twice).
Castles were once built to provide shelter and safety in troubled times. Now we no longer need them to shelter our bodies, but our imaginations can find refuge there.
Of course, the Kaiser had in mind a symbol of the greatness of his empire; he wanted a different past, idealized, which could somehow exorcise an uncertain future, but the present castle is far more than that. It has none of the trite and vapid preciosity of Neuschwanstein, it is far more rugged and deeply rooted in something simultaneously harder to define, but richer and more authentic. It is an attempt to grapple with the legacy of the past and come to terms with what can be done to embody the things that link us to that past. (Or how we perceive it – the past after all is not really what happened, as we will never know for certain, but what we have retained.) It seems to me that Haut-Kœnigsbourg goes beyond a symbol of empire into the nebulous land of myth, in the same manner that Schnug’s art reaches for something beyond what is depicted.
The castle is a transubstantiation of myth, and while any physical embodiment of legend always falls short of the ideal (and Wilhelm’s castle is epicedian rather than epic), it may nonetheless provide the threshold to the meandering path of contemplation. The mythopoeic reflectance of such places is sometimes enough to make you want to shield your eyes from the glare.
Hopefully, I will have managed to express some of this in the documentary. The working title is “Le Seigneur du Château”, which means more or less “The Lord of the Castle.” Now, with Lord of the Brush and There and Back Again, I’ll at long last have a trilogy! I may have to do the box up in felt marker, but I’m going to call it “The Lord of the Castle with the Brush Who Went There and Back Again And Talked a Lot on the Way”. Or perhaps something more concise. Maybe. (I’m partial to long titles that are actually sort of already introductions in themselves and a great advocate of the use of sub-titles.)
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Left: Midmorning mist closing in on the castle. You can just make out the Imperial eagle at the top of the tower.
Centre: The ruin of Oedenbourg, a couple of hundred yards back of Haut-Kœnigsbourg and part of the same system of defence.
Right: My absolute favourite medieval chest, currently not on display. (Behind it, beyond the fire extinguisher, you have a glimpse of the Kaiser’s study.) I adore the asymmetric and seemingly random carving; absolutely marvellous. (When it was made, it would not have had the profiled inserts between the uprights and the body.)
Lastly, I have a little story for you. Wilhelm had affixed a grand Imperial Eagle to the top of the highest tower, facing the rising sun. The Imperial standard was suspended from a horizontal pole that extended from the roof just beneath the wingèd copper effigy of the Empire. Naturally, when the schloss became a château again, the French could not put the tricolour standard UNDER the eagle, so a hole was carved in the roof, and a vertical pole set in place.
Unfortunately, fickle winds would whip the bottom of the flag against the serrated plumage of the eagle’s wings, and flags were shredded to rags in no time, despite keeping a stock of them in a coffer in the tower’s attic. Clever engineers found a solution: rounded panes of plexiglas were affixed to the eagle’s wings (there was never any question of dismounting the pesky raptor, national monuments are laudably sacred in France, no matter what their provenance).
Alas, they did not do their homework very well, and thanks to his trebled wing surface, the Imperial Eagle took flight during a memorable storm one night in February 1995. The next morning, the castle caretaker was patrolling the access roads, pushing branches off to the shoulder when the short piece of wood he kicked aside make a totally unexpected hollow metallic sound. It wasn’t a stick at all, but a copper tube, hermetically sealed, which had come free when the eagle’s flight was arrested by the fork of a tree.
It had been totally forgotten, and was found to contain a parchment, signed by the Emperor himself, with a list of dates he felt were essential to recent history, and a rather peevish text reflecting his malcontent about his and his country’s place in the world.
The copper eagle has since been fully restored and is now back atop the castle. The best part: the caretaker’s last name is Vogeleisen.
