THE GERMANS GOT THERE FIRST: DONALD TRUMP & THE AMERICAN VALHALLA

 

THE GERMANS GOT THERE FIRST: DONALD TRUMP AND THE AMERICAN VALHALLA

 

One of Donald Trump’s last actions as President, on Monday 18 January 2021 (his penultimate full day in office) was to announce plans for a ‘National Garden of American Heroes’.  To use his own words, the plan is to create “a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live”, reflecting “the awesome splendour of our country’s timeless exceptionalism” (I’m pretty convinced he wrote the speech himself, including the split infinitive).  Although many aspects of the project are vague – the location has not been decided yet, and it’s unclear where the funding would come from such a large enterprise – the idea is to create a sculpture park featuring 244 statues of American worthies (all deceased, so Kobe Bryant and Whitney make the list, but not Michael Jordan or Beyoncé).

Trump’s list is, to put it mildly, a mixed bag, ranging from semi-mythical frontiersmen (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett) to Civil Rights activists (Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks), film stars (Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston), inventors (Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison), singers (Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra) and sports coaches (Vince Lombardi, Herb Brooks).  Whilst many of the choices are uncontroversial, there are others whose reputations have become tarnished due to their dubious views (Walt Disney, Henry Ford).  Some of the people on the list are very obscure, whereas others (George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, for example) probably already have more than enough statues. There are some odd omissions – looking at the selection of American writers, for example, Ernest Hemingway and Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House on the Prairie) make the cut, but not Nathaniel Hawthorne or Jack Kerouac. 

My initial reaction, on reading the story in the British press was incredulity, followed by laughter, then concern: does Trump’s seal of approval mean that it’s now officially uncool to like Miles Davis or Billie Holiday or Johnny Cash?  And there’s no doubt that this project appears to encompass a uniquely Trumpian combination of populism, jingoism and pomposity.  But then I remembered that there is already a model for such a pantheon of national worthies, back in the Trump family’s ancestral homeland - and I must admit that the German version is one of my favourite places. 

The German model for Trump’s project is called Walhalla (after the great feasting-hall where dead warriors spend their time according to Norse-Germanic mythology) and it sits on top of a hill overlooking the River Danube in Bavaria.  The Norse name seems rather incongruous given the style of the building, a huge ‘Greek’ temple which was loosely based on the Parthenon in Athens

I first came across Walhalla in John Romer’s Great Excavations television series (Channel 4, 2000) on the history of archaeology, and it promptly went on my ‘to-do’ list.  I finally got round to making my own pilgrimage there at Easter 2017.  The easiest and most pleasant way to reach it is by boat from Regensburg; after alighting on the riverbank, there are a ridiculous number of steps to climb, but it’s worth it when you get to the top. 

Walhalla was commissioned by King Ludwig I of Bavaria (no, not the fun one who built the fairytale Castle Neuschwanstein, but his grandfather).  It was designed by Leo Klenze, Ludwig’s favourite architect, who also designed the Glyptothek in Munich, the world’s first purpose-built museum of ancient sculpture.  Ludwig apparently struggled to find the right architectural concept for Walhalla until Count Haller von Hallerstein, a German archaeologist returning from an expedition to Greece, showed him some drawings he’d made of the Parthenon, dominating the Athenian skyline 

                                             Statue of King Ludwig I, the man who commissioned Walhalla

Walhalla was officially opened by Ludwig in 1842, and has been open to the public ever since, as a temple to the history of the German-speaking people. Like the Parthenon, the building itself featured plenty of architectural sculpture. The pediment sculptures depict two ‘bookends’ of German history: the northern pediment shows Arminius’s massacre of three Roman legions in the Teutoberg Forest in AD 9, whilst the southern pediment depicts a mythologised version of the creation of the German Federation (an association of 39 states, created in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, effectively the successor to the Holy Roman Empire).  Just as the west pediment of the Parthenon had featured the river gods of Athens, including the hunky River Ilissos, Walhalla’s southern pediment, facing the river, depicts the gods of the German rivers, including the Rhine and the Moselle.  The continuous frieze inside the building also depicts an idealised version of the early history of the German people. 

                     Walhalla's southern pediment, showing the creation of the German Federation

                                               Part of the continuous frieze inside Walhalla

Walhalla acts as “a shrine to the greatness of the German Genius” (John Romer), its pantheon represented in the form of portrait busts, or commemorative plaques in the case of early figures for whom no physical likeness is available (Arminius himself, for example).  The busts include plenty of rulers, field marshals and statesmen, but also writers, composers, artists, scientists and inventors. At the official opening in 1842 there were 96 busts and 64 plaques; more busts have been added over the years, brining the total to 132.  

 

The key qualification for inclusion in Walhalla (other than being a figure of historical or cultural significance) is linguistic: being a native speaker of German.  However, at the inception of the project the definition of ‘German-speaking’ was stretched to include speakers of Gothic (hence plaques for Alaric, King of the Visigoths and Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths) and Anglo-Saxon, leading to the inclusion of several figures from British history, such as King Egbert of Wessex and Alfred the Great.  I was particularly shocked by the attempt to snaffle the greatest early English historian, the Venerable Bede (whose tomb in Durham Cathedral is well worth a pilgrimage).  The changing political map of Europe over the centuries means that there are several other figures in Walhalla whom modern visitors probably wouldn’t think of as ‘German’, including the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (Polish, in modern terms) and Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics (Czech, in modern terms), even though they both spoke German. 

Perhaps a more controversial decision was to include Flemish-speakers under the umbrella of ‘German’, meaning that there are a surprising number of Dutch painters commemorated in Walhalla: Jan Van Eyck, Rubens, Anthony Van Dyke and Frans Snyders– not to mention the Dutch humanist Erasmus.  Incidentally, just as Ludwig’s Walhalla ‘borrowed’ all those Flemish painters, it could be argued that Trump’s list occasionally stretches the definition of ‘American’, for example by including the English film director Alfred Hitchcock, who only took out American citizenship at the age of 56. 

                                                   Busts of Erasmus and the painter Frans Synders

The most interesting thing about Walhalla, in many ways, is its omissions.  It probably goes without saying that the figures most strongly associated with twentieth-century German history are not represented (although I’m sure Hitler and Himmler both spent hours designing their Walhalla busts).  Despite the large number of composers (Handel, Haydn, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner), including plenty of Austrian composers (Hitler himself inaugurated the bust of Anton Bruckner in 1937), there’s no bust of Gustav Mahler or Felix Mendelssohn (or indeed Fanny Mendelssohn), so one is left with the uncomfortable feeling that some of the omissions, at least in the past, have been influenced by anti-Semitism.  

Bust of the composer Anton Bruckner, inaugurated by Hitler in 1937 (Photo Credit: Tumblr)

Arguably the two most influential political and economic theorists Germany ever produced – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – are also conspicuous by their absence.  King Ludwig, a Catholic monarch, grudgingly accepted the inclusion of Martin Luther, but there’s no place for the other Protestant reformers, John Calvin or Ulrich Zwingli.  Leaving aside the Dutch painters, it’s striking how few German, Austrian or Swiss painters are represented in Walhalla (no Caspar David Friedrich, Gustav Klimt, Angelika Kauffman or Henry Fuseli, for example).  The few German artists to make the cut include Albrecht Dürer, Winckelmann’s mate Anton Raphael Mengs (whose reputation must already have been on the wane when his bust was added) and Käthe Kollwitz (added as recently as 2018). 

                             Busts of Martin Luther and the 18th-century painter Anton Raphael Mengs

Although Walhalla is a product of its time, including the neo-Classical sculpture and architecture, its pantheon isn’t fossilised but is still being added to.  According to the Wikipedia article on Walhalla, suggestions for new additions (which also have to include a plan for funding the bust) are reviewed by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, with the final decision being made by the Bavarian Council of Ministers.

At the time of writing (January 2021) I suspect it’s highly likely that Trump’s garden of worthies will be quietly shelved by the incoming President, Joe Biden, but nevertheless it’s interesting to compare his list with the selection of busts in Walhalla.   Walhalla, for example, contains no military figures beyond the end of the 19^th century (Radetzky and von Moltke are the last two), whereas Trump has no compunction about including George S Patton Jr, Douglas MacArthur and ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf. 

Although there have been complaints that female sports stars have been excluded from Trump’s list (no Althea Gibson, for example), 27% of the figures on his list are women, a considerably higher proportion than the inhabitants of Walhalla - by my reckoning, only 2.6%.  Although very few women were included in the original collection of busts (Empress Maria Theresia and Catherine the Great of Russia), recent additions would suggest an attempt to add more women, including Sophie Scholl (who engaged in resistance to the Nazi regime through the White Rose movement, for which she was executed in 1983) and the artist Käthe Kollwitz, as mentioned earlier. 

 

                                        Interior of Walhalla and bust of Sophie Scholl

Does Britain have its own version of Walhalla?  Only in a very ad hoc way, I think, in the form of memorials in Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s and St George’s Chapel, Windsor – or even the choice of figures in Madame Tussaud’s.  Another way in which we recognise the contribution of figures from the past is the Blue Plaque scheme, which operates only in London, although there are some local variants – but as Douglas Robb, headmaster of Gresham’s School Norfolk recently pointed out (in the context of the school’s application to put up a plaque to the spy Donald MacLean, one of their alumni), perhaps the point of the Blue Plaque scheme is that it recognises historical figures without passing judgement on them – whereas once you start setting up statues and shrines you are giving figures from history an unequivocal seal of approval as role models.  

Although it can certainly be argued that this kind of exercise (drawing up a list of national ‘heroes’) offers a very nationalistic and prescriptive view of history - not least when the list is given permanent form in bronze or marble – it raises questions which are very pertinent to the current discussion over the role of commemorative statues (especially following the toppling of the statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston).  It all comes back to the question: who do we want to commemorate, and what’s the best way to do it?      

References & Further Reading

Josie Ensor, ‘Lincoln, Trump and Whitney in Trump’s ‘garden of heroes’, Daily Telegraph, Tuesday 19

                                     January 2021

 

John Romer, Great Excavations: John Romer’s History of Archaeology (London:

Cassell & Co, 2000) – published to accompany a Channel 4 television series

 

Camilla Turner & India McTaggart, ‘School ‘tarnished’ by plan to give Cambridge

spy a plaque’, Daily Telegraph, Thursday 28 January 2021

 

The Wikipedia article on Walhalla includes a full list of all the busts and plaques, including recent additions:

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walhalla_(memorial)