Whose Rhine is It? the Germania statue

 OK. There's hubris and there's trying to explain the history of Franco-German border relations in one blog post.

The place that spurred the question of the title was the Niederwald Memorial in Rudesheim, Germany, a 38-meter statue that looks out over the Rhine.

In yet another post on the topic, I had pondered the angels of Germany, both on the Rhine and in the capital city.  But I had never gotten to the statue of Germania that reigns above the angel of war and the angel of peace.

Germania appears here as a strong woman, stout with strong arms: a working woman, not a woman of the court. Her gaze is stern, unlike the Statue of Liberty (which stands twice as high), she signals warning, not welcome. 

Her right arm holds up a jeweled crown--on her head she wears a wreath of oak leaves, symbols of the heroism she embodies. Her left hand grips a longsword. If you look closely, there is also an olive branch held along with the sword's pommel in her left hand. On her chest is the black eagle of the Holy Roman emperors and Frederick Barbarossa, and her tunic is finely embroidered above the knee (it looks like another eagle to me).

A clearer way to look at Germania is to see the painting made by Phillip Veit in 1848, on which the Niederwald statue is modeled. It is a treasure of a dynamic age, painted in March 1848 as republican revolutions swept through Europe, promising constitutional rights and an end to royalty. This painting was considered so significant at the time, it was hung in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt as delegates arrived for the first German assembly in May 1848.

Many elements are the same: the sword and olive branch, the oak-leaf crown, the eagle on the chest. But the difference between the painting and the statue is significant. In Veit's painting, Germania holds the flag of the German republic; the Niederwald statue replaces the republican flag with the royal crown of the kaisers.

The co-opting of German nationalism to create an empire for the Hohenzöllern dynasty is pretty blatant.

But still, Germania "worked" The statue, like the painting of 1848, captured the Zeitgeist of the German Empire (1871-1918). Germany was united. The American writer, Henry David Throeau noted in his book, Walden, ¨Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded."

Germans now knew where their country was bounded. They weren't about to forget their treatment by the French. 

When I was at the Niederwald Memorial, I walked around it, trying to figure out where the statue was looking with that look of fire in her eyes. The city of Bingen likes directly across the Rhine from the memorial. She isn't looking straight ahead to where Bingen lies, though.

She looks upstream. To me, she looks toward Mainz, about 25 miles south of the monument: Mainz, that poor city, sacked time and again by French armies, occupied, her name and street names changed by Napoleon. 

Mainz is safe now, Germania seems to imply. Germany's borders are secure. The Rhine is a German river once again.

A poem is etched into the base of the statue, below a relief of preening Prussian officers. It's called, "The Watch on the Rhine." Let's look at a video first. Note the martial music to which the poem is set:

    "The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine"

That proud line is the point of the song. With France defeated, it is a German river just as it should be, Germania seems to imply. Yet she keeps watch should an enemy approach again. Consider this line:

    "Du Rhein bleibst deutsch we meine Brust!" -- You, Rhine say as German as my heart.

I pause here to remember the millions of Germans whose lifeblood spilled to fulfill that vow.

In his book, The Rhine: Following Europe's Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps, Ben Coates writes:

Long before he became a two-bit politician, Adolf Hitler passed by [the Niederwald Memorial] with a group of fellow soldiers, and later wrote: 'As the first soft rays of the morning sun broke through the light mist and disclosed to us the Niederwald statue, with ome accord the whole troop train broke into the strains of Die Wacht am Rhein. I felt then as if my heart could not contain its spirit.'

From 1940 to 1944 Hitler made the Rhine a German river again. The Nazis oppressive occupation of Alsace and Lorraine extinguished any pro-German sentiment in that region, where many families speak German and where many places still bear German names.

Germania watches. I'd like to sit on her shoulder, just to see if I could see all the way to France. I doubt it. France reaches the Rhine about 60 miles south of here, and the river flows by France for another 80 miles to the Swiss border.

For everything overt message she tries to make about the German character, a more subversive message rings true to me today: who needs borders? Mankind is better off without them. 

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Photo Credits

Photos of the statue (me)

Germania painting (Wikipedia)