Pleasure, and a timely lesson, from the Hamburgers

There are more bridges in Hamburg than there are in the whole of Venice and Amsterdam. Taken together.

How do I know that? I was told by a taxi driver. And the word of a taxi driver is not to be doubted, is it? Like the word of a US President. So I haven’t checked. I have to admit, though, that if I haven’t looked, it’s partly just because I wouldn’t want to find out that it wasn’t true.

The Elbe in Hamburg

In any case, it’s highly plausible. The city has water everywhere. It’s a great port, after all, at the mouth of the river Elbe, and with many channels of its tributary, the Alster, flowing through parts of the city centre. Water, hills and parks make a city, in my view, and Hamburg has the first and last of these.

Water, water, everywhere

Many of the waterways are lined with old warehouses, a reminder that the city was once one of the chief centres of a great trading association of northern Europe, the Hanseatic League. Most German cities like to have their car number plates identified by a single letter – B for Berlin or F for Frankfurt, for instance – because a short abbreviation indicates a great city. Hamburg insists on two – HH for Hansestadt Hamburg, recalling its long commercial traditions.

Hamburg warehouses. And more water, of course.

‘England is a nation of shopkeepers,’ Napoleon once said. I realised just what he meant, and just why he said it, when I was recently reading some material on Britain in the eighteenth-century. In the Napoleonic wars, Britain tried for as long as possible to avoid getting involved in fighting on land in Europe, preferring to limit its military commitments to the sea (trade needed the sealanes kept open, after all). Instead, it offered subsidies to its allies to do the actual fighting. It could offer those subsidies because it was a powerful trading nation, though as I argued here recently, even Britain suffered as embargoes and counter-embargoes were imposed.

Hamburg, like Britain, prospered by trade. A message Brexiters and Trumpistas would do well to remember. Erecting barriers makes nations poorer. Knocking them down makes them richer – all of them: this isn’t a zero-sum game, both sides gain from trade. And war damages them.

Alongside parks and waterways, spires help a city too. My eye was caught by a tall church tower as I was walking between meetings, but I couldn’t get to it just then – I was in the city for work, after all. However, later, having seen a colleague off at the station, I found that my route back to the hotel took me close to it. “I could take a look,” I thought.

The ruined church of St Nikolai in Hamburg

It turned out to be the tower of the St Nikolai church. Only the tower and the chancel survive. The main part of the nave was destroyed in 1943 when the Allies bombed the city, in the aptly – and vengefully – named ‘Operation Gomorrah’. The Royal Air Force bombed at night, the US Air Force by day; the RAF carpeted the city indiscriminately, the USAF targeted military works (such as a submarine factory); a fire storm engulfed the city, leaving a number of dead that has never been precisely determined, some of the corpses having been completely incinerated in the flames.

Picasso evoked the terror of the Nazi bombing of Guernica

The museum in the crypt of the ruined church makes it clear that the chief blame for the horror belongs to Hitler and Nazism, that none of this would have happened had they not set Germany on a vain road to world power, and that the Nazis indeed had pioneered the use of mass bombing of civilians before the Allies did: the museum mentions Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Warsaw, Coventry and, indeed, London, all bombed long before 1943.

That’s generous of the German historians.

However, it hardly lessens the guilt of the Allied strategists. The exhibition quotes Air Chief Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris saying ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My reply to that is that it has never been tried… and we shall see.’

Let’s be clear: the bombing of civilian targets has only one aim. In World War 2, the Allies called it ‘breaking the morale of the population’. Today we call such attempts by a single and simple word: terrorism. The destruction of Hamburg by fire was absolutely clearly an act of state terrorism, something we would do well to remember whenever we throw up our hands in horror at state terrorism practised by our enemies today.

Hamburg ablaze during Operation Gomorrah

St Nikolai has been left ruined, like the Memorial Church in Berlin or Coventry Cathedral in England. There is a quiet, stately mournfulness about these monuments to those moments when we get things wrong and build walls instead of bridges. 

Salutary in this city of so many bridges and which has suffered so much.

Are you listening, Trumpistas and Brexiters?

I suppose it would have been appropriate to have had a hamburger
among the Hamburgers. But I resisted the temptation

Ah, this modern world, how far it is from realising its ideals

Have you ever given any thought to when “modern” started? Have we been living our modern lives a couple of years? A generation? Perhaps even longer?

Think of all those museums of modern art we have. When I was a kid, we’d never have included the impressionists in a modern art exhibition. But when I first began to be interested in art, the impressionist Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette was under a century old, and today Picasso’s modernist Demoiselles d’Avignon is over a century old.

Renoir. Modern Art? Don't be silly

So when will modern art stop being modern?

Picasso. Modern art.
From 1907? Seriously?

We even have the notion of “post-modernism”, one of the more ludicrous we’ve come up with. After all, what comes after modernity? Surely it’s the future, isn’t it? So unless we have a time machine, how on earth can we know what “post-modern” looks like?

At the moment, I’m reading a book by Elizabeth Badinter, a leading French philosopher and feminist, who adds to her range of talents a profound understanding, and knowledge, of eighteenth-century history of thought. The book confirms a feeling I’ve had for some time, that the “modern period” started in the middle of that century. She traces two remarkable women of the time, Emile du Châtelet and Louise d’Epinay. They were contemporaries for a while, but du Châtelet died in 1749, and Epinay’s writing dates from the 1750s onwards.

Badinter shows that there is a real watershed between them. Du Châtelet was a leading physicist and philosopher, the first major French woman scientist, and the last before Marie Curie. Epinay wrote principally about education, in an environment where the natural sciences were beginning to lose their popularity in favour of the social sciences and moral philosophy. This trend led to the emergence of a notion of Man as opposed to classes, which would later in the century inform such ideas as “the rights of Man”, applying to all men or women, regardless of their station in life.

In Badinter’s words, “increasingly, the idea of humanity took hold in minds, previously more used to distinguishing men by their station than to bringing them together within a single concept.”

The changing view is illustrated by a story told by a certain Longchamp, a former manservant of du Châtelet’s, who claimed in his memoirs that she would undress without any kind of modesty in front of him; on one occasion, she called him to bring hot water for her bath; she opened her legs wide so that he could pour the water between them and, when he averted his eyes, she told him to watch what he was doing so that he didn’t scald her (I suppose she scolded him to avoid being scalded).

Now du Châtelet would never have behaved that way with anyone she felt she had to treat as a man, in other words, someone of her own aristocratic caste. But Longchamp was a servant; he didn’t count.

That was the kind of thinking that began to change around 1750, so that in 1776 the nascent United States could declare that they were acting on the principle that all men are created equal. To them, there is a community of man, to which we all belong, and from which are derived certain inalienable rights. A world-changing concept after 1750, it held little sway before.

Since that’s a fundamental idea of our time, I like to date the modern from then.

And yet. No changes in human mentalities is sudden. The old ideas cling on long after the new ones have begun to emerge and supplant them. Even the framers of that great Declaration of Independence were in many cases slave-owners: equality of humanity clearly didn’t extend to involuntary African immigrants to America.

Nor are we out of the woods yet. You probably saw the pair of demonstrators from the States, one white and carrying a placard asking “is my life worth more than his?”, the other black and with a placard asking “is his life worth more than mine?”

Sadly, our societies don't (yet) value them equally

The founding fathers of the United States framed a constitution in which a black man’s life was officially valued at 3/5 of a white’s. The idea should have been buried by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, but was it? Judging by the apparent right for whites, inside or outside the police, to shoot with impunity young black men in the States, one would have to say we’re not there yet.

No-one in Europe should feel any self-satisfaction with respect to the US either. If you’re Muslim, or black, or simply a foreigner, there’s a view in most of Europe today that you’re a lesser being. Your rights can be denied. If you’re attempting to enter Europe illegally and your boat sinks, you should be left to drown. Behind such thoughts is the notion that other people are inferior, not fully entitled to human rights, perhaps not entirely human.

Not caring whether such a person sees you naked may be a little degrading, but it does no more ham than that. Thinking such a person may be gunned down in the street for no offence, or doesn’t deserve to be rescued from a watery grave in the Med, is much more serious. When we reach a point where our societies no longer find it acceptable to shoot young blacks or abandon drowning migrants, we shall at last have realised the ideals that began to emerge in the eighteenth century.

So my view? The modern period did indeed start around 1750. When will it end? Oh, it has a long way to run yet...

Inescapable celebrations, unavoidable sorrows

The tourist experience is exhausting, isn’t it? I think it’s that slow walk, particularly if it’s on city streets. It leaves you footsore and worn out.

If I’m in that state at the moment, it’s because we’re back in Madrid visiting two sons and two charming daughters-out-law. Our third son, or in a strictly chronological sense, the first, lives near another beautiful city, Edinburgh. He’s the one who only had to put up with my parenting, not my genetic material, while the two here got the whole package, or so Danielle assures me.

Being in Madrid is partly a political statement, a self-exile from that wedding. This was the event that gave the British establishment the opportunity to direct a calculated snub to the two most recent former Prime Ministers, who weren’t invited, though the previous two both were. Blair and Brown, the snubees, represented Labour while Thatcher and Major, proud recipients of their embossed cards, were Tories. Coincidence? I leave it to you to judge.

Not that we really got away from the wedding. Two of our friends came with us and as one of them pointed out, ‘if we came here to get away from all that fuss about the royal family, why do we keep talking about it all the time?’ Somehow it seems to have become the unavoidable subject, and not just among us exiles – the young Spanish woman who served us in a bar yesterday had spent most of the afternoon watching the wedding on TV. She’d been a little surprised.

‘There’s been a bomb in Marrakesh, you know,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t find out anything about it – they’re talking only about the wedding. So congratulations.’ We smiled, happy to take credit for the very event we had fled.

It’s the presence of our friends that has led to our tramping the streets, though I’m not complaining. Apart from the pleasure of their company, their being here has also provided the opportunity to do some of the touristy things we hadn’t done before. That has included walking not just on pavements but on the sand and beaten earth of the great parkland of the Casa de Campo, inexplicably missed on our previous visits. It’s extraordinary to find quite so much open country in the middle of a city. At one end it’s dominated by the mass of the royal palace, where the Kings lived up until the 1930s, at which time the park was their own private grounds – a backyard the size of a small nature reserve. Come to think of it, enjoying a great popular amenity made available by a reduction in royal privilege gave us a valuable history lesson for this particular weekend.

Today it’s time for the galleries. This morning I’ve ducked out of a trip to the Prado, but this afternoon we’ll be heading for the Reina Sofia. So I’m missing a Velazquez painting of apparent domestic bliss in a royal family, instead admiring Picasso’s evocation of the bombing of civilians in Guernica.

Guernica - may capture the spirit of the times better...

... than Las Meninas and royal bliss – if that's what it shows...

Maybe that won’t be entirely inappropriate, given that despite all the distraction of the latest royal happening, there really has been a bombing in Marrakesh in the last couple of days, and it’s claimed more civilian lives.