Worlds Elsewhere (15 page)

Munich was bustling and busy, with the self-righteous glow of a town experiencing good fortune it considered to be wholly deserved. While most of Europe was still clawing its way out of the credit crunch, in the well-fed heartland of Bavaria things had barely been better: unemployment levels the lowest in Germany, a flourishing economy the envy of cities worldwide. As the taxi and I jostled through the Thursday rush-hour traffic, all I could see were new-model Audis and Mercs and BMWs. Everyone on the street seemed to be on their way
to or from the gym, possibly via the hair salon. In the evening sunlight, even the cars looked musclebound and tanned.

From modest beginnings, the Shakespeare-Tage had swelled into a multi-day jamboree, incorporating academic talks, seminars and workshops, theatre visits, trips to local attractions – a hybrid of academic conference and cultural minibreak. Usually events were held in Weimar, or occasionally in Bochum. But in recent years the society had begun to expand its operations. In Munich the theme, appropriately enough, was
Geld und Macht
: money and power.

As I climbed the stairs to the conference suite at the city's Literaturhaus, I was buzzing with questions: who actually came to events like these? And would anyone really talk to me about the subject that was uppermost in my mind, the society's awkward relationship with its past?

On the top floor, in a sleek, glass-walled atrium bathed in glossy spring sunshine, the members of the Gesellschaft were taking coffee and making small talk, preparing to go into the welcome address by Professor Tobias Döring. I inspected the room: perhaps 150 people; a reasonable density of comfortable footwear, tweed and corduroy but not as many grey heads as I'd imagined. A burly, bearded man of about my age was standing by the coffee point with a baby in a sling across his chest.

I was admiring the view, which swept out past the honey-coloured dome of the Theatinerkirche to the purple-fringed Bavarian mountains, when a woman appeared beside me.

‘It is my first time here in Munich!' she said.

Me too, I said. We exchanged smiles.

Inge was from Dessau and had been a member of the Gesellschaft since before reunification, in 1989. She was now in her sixties, she told me in flawless English; behind her large glasses, which were framed by a smooth, carefully trimmed bob, her eyes were wide. The wife of a businessman, she had been a full-time mother; now that the kids had flown the nest, she finally had time to devote herself to her own interests. Shakespeare was one.

Whereas the Shakespeare Association of America and the International Shakespeare Association were thoroughly professionalised organisations, exclusively the habitat of academics giving position papers and peer-refereed articles, the Shakespeare-Gesellschaft had stayed true to its roots. In 1869, the Gesellschaft had 190 members; these days the membership was roughly 2,000,
but only a third were scholars, with the other two thirds divided between teachers (generally of secondary-school English Literature) and members of the general public. Accountants, insurance agents, physicists, vets: the DSG roster numbered them all. The German language, precise as ever, had a noun for people who joined societies like these:
Bildungsbürgertum,
the educated, bookish middle classes.

I found the concept captivating. As a writer and critic who intermittently passed myself off as an academic I was used to attending events like this for work, but for fun? Shakespeare as a hobby, like basket-weaving or bell-ringing?

‘It is so friendly, and the Shakespeare-Tage are very interesting,' Inge was saying. ‘I have many friends all over Germany now, it is a good chance to have a reunion. People like me, we cannot get enough of Shakespeare!'

She'd made it a project to see every one of the plays, which meant frequent trips to London as well as theatres around Germany. Only Shakespeare's final, co-written
Two Noble Kinsmen
– so obscure that even the Royal Shakespeare Company had only given it a rehearsed reading in their 2006–07 festival of the complete works – had so far eluded her. One could not help but be impressed.

I glanced at the programme, with its seminars on Marxist investigations of
Timon of Athens
and the relationship between communism and Shakespearian cinema. Did she ever find the talks a bit … specialised?

She shrugged.
‘Ja,
some of them are a bit boring, some are more interesting.' Her voice lowered. ‘Tobias, when he was appointed, some of us older ones were a bit anxious that he would change things – make it more academic, you know? But he's been very good.'

We bid each other farewell, and I watched her being swallowed by the crowd swarming towards the lecture hall. Her notebook was already out; the expression on her face was of eager anticipation. I tried to stave off the sense, not wholly successfully, that she was more professional at this than me.

When I walked in, Ruth von Ledebur was already there: a slight figure in a corner of the restaurant. She was wearing a smart sky-blue top and matching cardigan. Her shoulders were rounded with age, a crown of
snowy hair cropped short around a broad, open face. As she gestured at me to sit down, her eyes scrutinised me carefully: sapphire-sharp, with more than a hint of scepticism in them. I liked her immediately, and was simultaneously grateful not to be one of her students.

Born in 1929 into an aristocratic family, Ledebur had grown up in Hanover. After marrying and training as a schoolteacher, she returned to university in her forties, completing a PhD at Bonn on the history of German Shakespeare during the cold war. She had begun to get interested in the history of the Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, which she had recently joined: what had shaped its ideologies, the way its story had mirrored and echoed the agonies and triumphs of Germany itself. She spent weeks at a time in the Weimar archives, blowing dust off files that had remained untouched for years, burrowing backwards from the second world war through the thirties and then the twenties. She asked awkward questions. She started to piece together a narrative about the society's activities in the interwar period. Making the Gesellschaft face up to its past became her life's work.

Her voice was soft but precise. ‘The dogma of the academics used to be, “We are not political, we are not political.” That was the generation before my own.' Her gaze was level. ‘But you understand everything is political, in a way.'

For an hour and a half, over an elegant lunch, we talked about the things her professors had not wanted to. For Ledebur the story went right back to 1864, and the way the society had become enmeshed with the mania for making Shakespeare Germany's national poet.

‘It's a kind of patriotism, and it develops not just in the nineteenth century but into the twentieth century too. During the first world war there was a young scientist, and he writes – I think he is already in the trenches at this time – “Germany is where Shakespeare is born a second time.”' She chuckled. ‘It's a fantastic idea: that Germany would be the better place for Shakespeare to have been born. It's going up this ladder of nostrification – not saying simply, “He is ours,” but, “It would be
better
if he had been ours.”'

The process had continued after the first world war. The humiliation suffered by Germany at Versailles was felt keenly by the conservative middle classes, many of whom were apprehensive about the Weimar Republic. In Weimar itself – a conservative town that found itself unwillingly giving birth to a radical democratic experiment – these feelings were especially raw.

Ledebur leaned across. ‘You know Weimar was one of the few towns which had a dominance of Nazi representatives before 1933?'

She wagged a finger. ‘Yes, that is very important. You have come across Baldur von Schirach?'

I had heard the name: Schirach was head of the Hitler Youth, and had saved his skin by denouncing Hitler at Nuremberg after the war.

It transpired that Schirach's father Carl was sometime head of the Weimar theatre, one of the most influential cultural figures in the town. It was he who had introduced the young Baldur to Hitler after an opera in Weimar. Carl had also been on the board of the Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, and had done his utmost to push the society towards the hard right.

Everything connected, Ledebur explained. ‘It was important to have full possession of German cultural superiority, and part of that cultural superiority was not only Schiller and Goethe, but also Shakespeare.'

When the National Socialists first came to power, they hadn't exhibited much interest in the Shakespeare Society or Weimar's other literary organisations. But the propaganda benefits of having such well-respected institutions on board began to dawn. A movement still regarded as the preserve of thuggish Bavarian louts could acquire valuable cultural capital by associating with a place such as Weimar.

Were other DSG members really believers, or was it just Schirach?

Her eyes narrowed. ‘This is a highly ambiguous matter. At the annual meetings, there used to be one speaker only. In the Nazi period, the board came to an agreement that one year they would have an academic speaker, the following year allow one of the Nazi bosses to give the talk. So they played it both ways. Appeasement, if you wish.'

Trouble really began for the Gesellschaft when funds began to run out: it had lost most of its assets in the devaluation of the 1920s, and once Jewish members and political undesirables were ejected its membership declined still further. Ledebur's smile was colourless. ‘It was the opportunity to turn the screw.'

In observing the grim proximity of Weimar and Buchenwald, I was far from alone, she explained: after the war, the relationship had become a symbol of the appalling concatenation of high art and pure barbarism.
‘Buchenwald liegt bei Weimar
' (‘Buchenwald lies near Weimar') became a rallying cry for postwar intellectuals determined that culture should never again be co-opted for political ends.

Behind this forensic quest for the truth I sensed the urge for some
kind of reparation. Ledebur had been ten years old when the war broke out. What were her own memories?

She paused for a while, her thin fingers lightly stroking the fork on the table.

‘I was partly conscious of what was going on, and I do remember my parents saying, “Don't talk about this outside the house.” When we were about ten or eleven and were forced to join the youth movements, my mother and I did not speak about politics with my father. We knew that we would be questioned about our parents, and they knew how difficult it would have been for us. So politics was not a topic, and I am sure that among members of the society it was exactly the same – they were afraid that if they voiced criticism, they would be the next to be thrown out.' She shook her head briskly. ‘But it's no excuse, it's no excuse.'

Did she feel sympathy for the position in which her predecessors in the society had been placed?

This time the pause was much longer. Outside on the street, green leaves were stirring in the sunlight.

‘When I began to research this,' she said slowly, ‘I felt horror: that there was absolutely no way of exculpating what they have done. And I am still strongly of the opinion that there were people who did resist, people who opposed.'

It must have been a gruelling area to research, I said.

‘Awful, awful. No one had handled the archives in Weimar, they were just stored away. I started my research in the late nineties. I was the first to have these dust-covered folders in my hand. I took the folder from 1933 and in that folder, I found a postcard from a Jewish member, declaring his resignation.'

This is the one I'd read on the train, reproduced in an article; I hadn't realised that it was her discovery.

‘Yes. But the really terrible thing is that the president wrote back saying, “Perhaps we will soon have happy times again and you can rejoin the society.” That was the spirit in 1933. Many thought, “Oh, it will blow over.” That was shocking.'

Did anyone know what had happened to Dr Goldstein?

She was arranging her napkin in front of her, fold by painstaking fold. ‘Probably you can guess.'

‘You know what is interesting?' she said as I helped her to her feet. ‘Once the war was over, there was again an immense enthusiasm about
Shakespeare in Germany, immense! In the theatres, in the academy – a sense that we will rebuild Germany, and Shakespeare will be a figurehead of that.'

There was an odd smile on her lips as she eased herself into her jacket. ‘It seems to creep up in German history whenever there is a change.'

ONE THING THAT
took me by surprise about Shakespeare in Germany: there are now estimated to be more professional performances of his plays put on here each year than in the UK. Partly this is a result of the country's federalised structure, where even modest towns boast their own producing theatre and resident company. Partly there is the lasting German reverence for art –
die Kunst
– which results in levels of subsidy that make British theatre-makers throb with envy. (The culture budget of Berlin alone is estimated to be €1 billion annually, more than the UK spends on culture in total, and makes the American National Endowment for the Arts look like loose change.)