Back to the Middle Ages?

With social distancing and lockdown measures around the world to combat the spread of COVID19 we shall, I suppose, all be letting our hair grow long for quite some time. 

André Malraux, in the first section of Les Noyers de l’Altenburg (The Walnut Trees of Altenberg) writes of life in the Chartres transit camp (Durchgangslager, or Dulag) for French prisoners of war. “Dès les premiers temps de la guerre, dès l’uniforme eut effacé le métier, j’ai commencé d’entrevoir ces faces gothiques. Et que ci sourd aujourd’hui de la foule hagarde qui ne peut plus se raser n’est pas le bagne, c’est le moyen-âge.”

“In the earliest days of the war, as soon as his uniform had blotted out a man’s profession, I began to see these Gothic faces. And what now emerges from the wild crowd that can no longer shave is not the penal settlement, but the Middle Ages.”  (p.23 of the 1989 translation by A. W. Fielding)

But throughout Europe in the Middle Ages hair length was generally a sign of social status. So Malraux’s idea of the Middle Ages is, like everyone’s, skewed towards those figures who were depicted, who were of course overwhelmingly from the social layer of patronage and benefactors. 

Sumptuary laws in mid thirteenth-century Bavaria decreed that peasants had to cut their hair to their ears. In Wernher der Gartenaere’s poem Meier Helmbrecht, the eponymous hero, the son of an estate manager, after coming across the a splendidly embroidered hood, takes it into his head that work on the farmland is not for him; his family manage to buy him a horse, some armour and a sword, so he can join the service of a knight, and he grows his hair long. The poem portrays the decline of chivalry and the knights are merely a band of robbers. Helmbrecht spends a year travelling around looting and murdering, but homesickness leads him to return home. He greets his family with bad snippets of court French, Czech, and ecclesiastical Latin, showing off his new knowledge. He is arrogant, and gives stolen goods to his family. His father tries to dissuade him from returning to the robber band, but he misses the adventure, and the ‘better life’ they offer. Things go bad when after a series of robberies to fund the celebration of an arranged marriage between Helmbrecht’s sister and one of the gang, the robbers are caught at the wedding breakfast and they are all hanged, except for Helmbrecht who is pardoned according to the custom of freeing one in ten, however his eyes are gouged out and a foot and a hand are chopped off. Helmbrecht returns home but is turned away by his father, and is finally set upon by a five farmers whose lands he had previously looted and whose families he had murdered.  In his punishments Helmbrecht’s long hair is torn out in a show of class hatred.

Short hair was often regarded as a sign of servitude, and was a sign of the humility of monks. In the eleventh century Norman soldiers wore their hair short, so that in 1066 King Harold's scouts mistakenly reported back that the invading army almost entirely consisted of priests. 

Further reading: Robert Bartlett’s ‘Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 4 (1994), pp. 43-60) and Middle High German text of Meier Helmbrecht.

Bombing, the Sublime, and the minutiae of life

As a schoolboy during World War II, Walter Kempowski hoped for an Allied bombing raid on his hometown, the Baltic port of Rostock, to save him from having to hand in his Latin homework.

I dimly recall reading the story of a Greek boatman who when German Stukas dived from the sky in a terrifying attack simply stood on his deck, not seeking cover, but watching the awe-inspiring scene above him. (If anyone knows the source of this let me know).

John Colville, an assistant private secretary to Winston Churchill (and two other Prime Ministers) watched an air raid in the London Blitz from his bedroom window. His diary entry for Sunday September 22nd 1940 concludes: “The night was cloudless and starry, with the moon rising over Westminster. Nothing could have been more beautiful and the searchlights interlaced at certain points on the horizon, the star-like flashes in the sky where shells were bursting, the light of distant fires, all added to the scene. It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead, the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance, the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired, and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendour and human vileness. Later thick palls of smoke rose from the Embankment where bombs had fallen on Dolphin Square — and it went on all night long.”

And this is Charles Simic in the essay ‘Reading Philosophy at Night’ which appeared in 1987 in a special issue of Antaeus: “I remember lying in a ditch and staring at some pebbles while German bombers were flying over our heads. That was long ago. I don’t remember the face of my mother nor the faces of the people who were there with us, but I still see those perfectly ordinary pebbles. “It is not ‘how’ things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” says Wittgenstein. I felt precisely that. Time had stopped. I was watching myself watching the pebbles and trembling with fear.”

Gerald Durrell wrote regarding the autobiographical book Climax on Crete by Theodore Stephanides, the naturalist who loomed so large in Durrell’s autobiographical Corfu trilogy: “Theodore, the most unwarlike of men, was bombed and machine-gunned with the rest by the Germans. Yet who but Theodore would relate how, when the Stukas dived and machine-gunned the road, he flung himself face downwards in a ditch and was ‘interested to note’ two species of mosquito larvae he had not previously noted.”

In his brief piece ‘Spaziergang’ for the Berliner Börsen-Courier of 24 May 1921, Joseph Roth wrote “Nur die Kleinigkeiten des Lebens sind wichtig” ... It's only the minutiae of life that are important.

At least every day

„Der Mensch ist so geneigt, sich mir dem Gemeinsten abzugeben, Geist und Sinne stumpfen sich so leicht gegen die Eindrücke des Schönen und Vollkommenen ab, daß man die Fähigkeit, es zu empfinden, bei sich auf alle Weise erhalten sollte.  Denn einen solchen Genuß kann niemand ganz entbehren, und nur die Ungewohntheit, etwas Gutes zu genießen, ist Ursache, daß viele Menschen schon am Albernen und Abgeschmackten, wenn es nur neu ist, Vergnügen finden. Man sollte”, sagte er, „alle Tage wenigstens ein kleines Lied hören, ein gutes Gedicht lesen, ein treffliches Gemälde sehen und, wenn es möglich zu machen wäre, einige vernünftige Worte sprechen.” 

- Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Fünftes Buch, Erstes Kapitel

“Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. For no man can bear to be entirely deprived of such enjoyments: it is only because they are not used to taste of what is excellent, that the generality of people take delight in silly and insipid things, provided they be new. For this reason,” he would add, “one ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it be possible to do, to speak a few reasonable words.” 

- Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Book V, Chapter 

I recently heard the “at least every day” excerpt of this passage in the film Ballon delivered by an East German headmaster to the assembled school at an end-of-year concert.

Ivan Southall

“Ill-adjusted people are by no means a modern invention, even if the techniques for producing them are constantly subject to improvement.”

– Ivan Southall, A Journey of Discovery (1975) p.13