if i were rich enough...

i would have some kind of courtyard in my house, with a running fountain. it would be good because a fountain would cool the air, and it would look pretty. also, people will be able to drink from it, roman-style. kinda like dip their cups or jugs or whatever into it, and drink cool running water. (though some people would at this point point out that there is a just-as-functional, probably-much-less-expensive modern equivalent, called the tap. but i say, taps are usually ugly!)

and i would have a book room so big that it could well be a library. floor to ceiling with shelves of books, reaching up so high that one would need ladders to reach the books on the top shelves, and meticulously catalogued on index cards (computer catalogues would be nice and convenient, but nothing quite beats the ridiculous romantic inefficiency of flipping through index cards looking for a particular book you want). there would be so many books that i would never even manage to read half of them. they'd just be there to be pretty. (it would be nice, however, if i did manage to read ALL of them). the shelves of course would be made of some kind of dark wood, solidly carpentered. the room would have large bay windows which would let in lots of light, and perhaps with blinds which can be let down in case there was -too- much light. the room would have humidity control installed to slow down the disintegration of my precious books.

at this point i just thought of making a point about the size and scope of a leisured class and social equality, and bring out a few cases in point, but the thought just flitted, randomly, away, like some kind of butterfly which has only a few hours more to live and is off to have sex with another of its kind.

and therefore i present to you a completely random post which was written when i should be puzzling over the fate of roman fiscal structures following 476.

BAD BOY BAD BAD BAD NAUGHTY ME.

13 days tripping in a U-shape across germany and there was lots to see. unlike britain germany is a country bombed out and built anew; the destruction wreaked by the allies in the second world war was so extensive that even today parts of the country are still under recontsruction. as a result very few things are 'real' or 'historic' in the same way that things in britain are. (or perhaps, i've just been misled by slight anglophilia and bamboozled by the monumental equivalent of a horse guards' parade). but i think at least part of it is based on fact as well; germany had suffered not just one cycle of destruction; but several, which, ensconced safely on their island home, the british never had to experience. (well maybe except the north irish, but that's quite another story altogether.)

perhaps the best illustrative example would be berlin - half east, half west; part parvenu, part old dame - a 12th century city built on a swamp which was first the capital of minor power on the very edge of germany and then grew to be - briefly - the centre of a world empire. schloss charlottenberg, the old family palace of the hohenzollerns, was built in the 17th century, plundered and looted by the austrians in the 18th because of the failures of frederick the great, rebuilt anew, bombed out again in the second world war, and then recently rebuilt again. the fate of charlottenberg is perhaps symptomatic of german history. large stretches of berlin, along the wilhelmstrasse, once one of the centres of nazi government, lie desolate like a scar along the city, reminding one of the terrors of total war, and of the rigid iron wall (on one side of which lay the no-man's land where many perished trying to cross from east to west) which divided europe and one side of berlin from the other. in munich the 'new town hall' is in fact older than an 'old town hall', because the allies had used the towering spires of the former as a sighting point to bomb out the rest of the entire city.

and yet despite all that the past is something which hangs heavy over germany, whispering out from the crannies to the visitor of old excesses and dead people. germany is a modern industrial nation which perhaps is slightly self-conscious, ever apologetic and always attempting to atone for what it perceives to be crimes against the world and against the abstract liberal principles which its revolutionaries and philosophers, in this "land of poets and thinkers", had enunciated and fought for. one sees it in the little plaques in the ground commemorating jews who had once lived in the city of cologne; in the modern monument to the plaques of the murdered weimar parliamentarians who voted against hitler's enabling act; in the concern for remembering the nazi past and rememberance, which sometimes verges (i think) on slight obsession.

and it is these reminders of the past which emphasies the peculiar circularity of german history. it is circular in a repetitive sense; it is also circular because it oscillates, with alternating progressive and regressive phases. at a risk of imposing moral judgement on the stream of time. civilisation and barbarity have always been inextricably tied for germany - though i will not go so far as ajp taylor, who famously (and rather simplistically) stated that the germans have "known no moderation". but somehow, travelling even today, years and years after memories are fading, brings all these extremes back into sharp focus. german cities show not just two faces - destruction/construction - but four: also the two extremes of civilisation and barbarity.

in berlin the brandenburg gate and the victory column, classic examples of the breast-beating hyper-nationalistic monumentalist architecture, coexist with the huguenot french cathedral; the humboldt university (where helmholtz and mommsen studied), overlooks the bebelplatz, where in the 1930s the nazis built bonfires of the most progressive authors of their day. there is a slight, if tragic, irony in the juxtaposition of militarism with tolerance, scholarship with fanaticism. leipzig, which boasts in its heritage of at least 3 great composers (bach, mendelssohn and schumann) is also disfigured by the massive monstrosity of the battle of nations monument a tribute to the jingoism which had played such an important part in the headlong rush into the first world war. nuremberg was the city and the castle of the medieval holy roman emperors, the barbarian imitators of the classical roman inheritance, who managed to build a sophisticated and creative medieval civilisation; and yet at the same time was the centre of party rallies in the 30s and 40s, the symbolic capital of the nazis who were so infatuated with the romanticism of the first reich. the empty shells of half completed rally grounds and conference halls, conceived on the grandest scale as proof of aryan superiority, stand as testament to just how many were misled by this mad vision. the nation which produced bach, goethe and schiller also elected an austrian corporal into the highest office of the land; the conscientous bureaucrats who had made united germany the envy of the world in the late 18th century put their services (quite willingly!) at the disposal of terror and genocide of 'non-germans'. german history gives lie to marx's formulation that 'history always repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce' - on the second occasion, in 1933, at least, it was both farce and tragedy; a chapter in time which future generations would view with horrified fascination.

but germany is a nation where history exerts its influence over the landscape not in brick, mortar and stone; but in dissonant, even conflicting, echoes; echoes in the landscape which remind travellers of how great and terrible a nation germany was.