The Germans: Double History Of A Nation. Emil Grimm Ludwig

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      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.