You may think our modern world was born yesterday
but it wasn't - not even the day before yesterday.
Democracy in the streets and the rise of people power...
..the raw passion of national belonging...
..good and bad...
INDISTINCT GERMAN SPEECH
..our obsession with the self, with our own psychology
and the dark recesses of the human mind...
..even our love of nature
and our concern for the future of the planet...
..all of this was the creation of the Romantics -
a generation of artists living and working 200 years ago
around the time of the French Revolution.
Their art was created over nearly a century of upheaval and change
and it speaks to us now with as much ferocious power as it did then.
They should have been our leaders, really,
they should have been our political leaders.
Imagine that we lived in one of the richest countries on Earth
but kids are being exploited just down the street.
The Romantics lived hard, worked feverishly,
and many of them died young
but we still think with their mind,
we feel with their emotional heartbeats,
we see with their eyes and we listen with their ears
as surely as if we saw them walking down the street.
They are still with us right here, right now.
# And did those feet in ancient time
# Walk upon England's mountain green?
It gets you every time, doesn't it,
wherever you happen to be - the songs of our homeland.
This one set to words written by the romantic poet William Blake.
# On England's pleasant pastures seen? #
There've been allegiance to monarchs and rulers before
but it was the Romantics who gave us
this intense passion for the nation
who, in their poetry, music and art,
transformed the sentimental fondness we all feel for our place of birth
into something bigger and deeper -
the secular devotion of national belonging.
# Among those dark Satanic mills. #
But that same passion
flowing through almost a century of revolution and war
also produced something much darker -
an angry twin, the hater of foreigners, the divider of us.
And then...
ANGRY PROTESTS
We are going to build the wall.
And that tribal fury is very much with us today.
But where did this feverish passion for homeland begin?
CHANTING, WHISTLING
Well, for many Romantics, it began here in Switzerland
with the diagnosis of something innocently human...
..nostalgia.
Nationalism is, above all, the emotion of longing to go back
or stay where you came from.
And if you came from here,
a spectacular Swiss Alpine Mountain Village,
of course, you would feel essentially nostalgic
for your birthplace.
It was a Swiss doctor, Dr Johannes Hofer,
at the end of the 17th century, who published a learned thesis
which treated nostalgia as a clinical medical condition.
The term itself came from the Greek "nostos" -
the deep desire to return to your native country and culture,
and "algia" - acute pain and suffering.
Now, Hofer had actually seen that the Swiss
were particularly susceptible to this.
Swiss soldiers serving abroad -
serving the King of France, for example -
could be rendered unfit for military service
by this deep, powerful wish to go back home.
And it was serious, it could rob you of your appetite,
you would shrink to absolutely nothing,
it could rob you of your sleep.
And Johannes Hofer, at any rate, thought that,
in some extreme circumstances, nostalgia could actually kill you.
To ward off this lethal malady,
Hofer suggested keeping patients away from anything
that reminded them too much of home -
food, folk stories and especially music.
HORNS PLAY
In particular for the Swiss, the sound of the Kuhreihen.
These were simple melodies played on alpine horns
that echoed around the landscape
summoning the cattle back to their home in the valley pastures.
The history of nationalism is strikingly a musical story,
its poetry, its lyrics,
and that's what I think actually makes it
an authentically popular culture and indeed still does.
You don't have to be scholarly or learned in the 18th century,
you didn't even have to be literate to feel its raw emotional power
because a feeling for fatherland above all came at you singing.
And what it sung was what you might have heard
from your father and mother -
snatches of melody, local folk dances,
ballads, nursery rhyme.
Country feeling always spoke with a sense of
your own particular distinctive culture.
It sang with the voice of your own ancestry.
More often than not, the long road to nationalism
starts with a sense of loss.
For the Romantics,
it almost always began with the overwhelming humiliation of defeat.
Nowhere was this more true than in 18th-century Scotland.
In 1707, after centuries of war,
Scotland finally lost its independence
in the union with England,
and it was a fear that authentic Scottish culture
might dwindle away or even disappear.
It was an article of Romantic faith
that art could keep the love of homeland alive.
That was certainly what a young Scottish poet
Robert Burns felt acutely.
Growing up in the 1770s in south-west Scotland,
Burns knew the union couldn't be undone.
But what he could do was to create authentically Scottish poetry
and a song book that could hold its own
against the oncoming tide of English culture
and in his brilliant hands, it worked like a dream.
# My love is like a red, red rose
# That's newly sprung in June
# My heart is like a melody
# That's sweetly played in tune
# As fair art thou, my bonie lad
# So deep in love am I... #
Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader made her name in the '80s
with her band Fairground Attraction.
And it was Burns' irresistible magnetism -
much of which he put on show in this pub in the village of Mauchline -
that she credits for pulling her back
to the music and poetry of her own country.
# My only love
# Fare-thee-weel, a while
# And I will come again, my dear
# Tho' it were ten thousand mile. #
Everyone's a bit obsessed with Burns,
they're all a bit in love with him
and they all have a bit of him in them.
I had a hit with Perfect when I was 28
and I went to France and then went to London.
I thought I'd use traditional Scottish music
as a kind of a little bridge for me to get home.
I started collecting the ones I remembered
and then it just happened to be that they were all Robert Burns songs,
I didn't realise.
SONG DRAWS TO AN END
APPLAUSE, CHEERING
And when you said, you know, it was a bridge, of taking you home,
home is the language really as well.
He spoke in his own language
and he didn't even actually know he was a good poet or a bad poet,
he just did it.
He wanted to give what he heard in the pub
and what he heard in the street and what he heard in Scotland... Yeah.
..you know, mainly in the Scottish dialect.
People are material and, you know, Bob Dylan uses people as material,
so did Johnny Rotten.
It's just kind of us, we are material.
The people that uses words,
like you would meet them driving taxis
or just a guy, a plumber that I met came up to me and he went,
"I love your Burns stuff," he says.
"My favourite one is,
"Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,
"Wha struts an' preens an' a' that.
"He's but a coof for a' that.
"For a' that, for a' that."
The way he said it to me, I just got it.
Burns knew how the people talked and sang because he was one of them.
Born into a tenant farming family in Ayrshire,
after his father's death in 1784, Robert - then in his early 20s -
took on this farm called Mossgiel, along with his brothers.
Struggling to make a living,
it was here in between mucking out the cows and threshing the wheat
that Robert first turned his hand
to writing a completely new kind of poetry,
one rooted in the experiences of ordinary Scottish life.
When you think of every kind of poet in the Romantic movement,
who hymns the beauties of nature,
but no-one who actually has to do the bloody hard lifting,
and he has to do his share of ploughing and threshing
and all the really hard stuff that goes with a farm like this.
He describes this farm as sodden and difficult.
And you think about the day of Robert Burns in a place like this
and everybody knows that when Robert is doing this very hard work,
he's dreaming poetry -
at least he must do at the end of the day in the barn.
And what he does, and only he does,
you can't think of anyone in Britain really
who feeds his daily grind, his daily experience, both of pain and joy,
into the words on the page like Burns.
To start with, he wrote his poems
to show off in a village and down the pub,
but soon they turned into something much bigger.
Taking what seemed to be the simplest subjects -
mice, haggis, cottage suppers -
their power owed everything
to being written not in the conventions of English poetry
but in the Scottish dialect,
in the rhythms and speech of ordinary working people.
In one poem, Burns turned his own experience of
disturbing a mouse's nest with his plough
into a hymn of kinship between a lowly field mouse
and the hard-pressed tenant farmer tilling Scotland's soil.
Wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Wi' bickering brattle!
I'm truly sorry Man's dominion Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion, Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!
But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief a' pain,
For promis'd joy!
At once playful and profound,
no-one had heard anything like these poems before.
When they were published in 1786,
everyone - townsmen and countryfolk alike - loved what he'd done.
Overnight, the ploughman poet became a star,
Scotland's national bard.
In 1787, followed by adoring fans,
Burns toured his country on a series of celebrity book tours.
But he also had an added purpose -
to rescue and collect traditional Scottish songs and ballads
for an anthology called the Scots Musical Museum.
He wanted, he said, to make a pilgrimage through Caledonia
to visit its castles and battlefields,
what he called the abodes of its heroes.
Riding into the north-east heartland
of his own family's Jacobite history,
Burns's journey turned into a kind of communion
with his country's heroic and tragic past.
But Scotland's historic monuments weren't just an outdoor museum.
They also spoke to its present troubles in revolutionary times.
In 1792, fired up by the French Revolution,
riots and protests broke out on the king's birthday in Edinburgh
and continued in towns and villages across Scotland,
demanding liberty and political reform.
Terrified that the fires of republican revolution
had been lit in Scotland,
in 1793, the British government arrested and tried
a group of Scottish radicals,
later sentencing two of them to death
and the rest with transportation to Australia.
Burns's politics had always been complicated
but he was an instinctive republican
and these events sharpened his feelings about the union
leading him to write his most politically charged song.
Well, this is something that's incredibly precious -
the manuscript of one of Burns's most famous,
if not the most famous poems,
Scots Wha Hae, as it's known all over Scotland,
and it's a document of uncompromising political radicalism.
And this was written at a moment of intense political crisis,
not just for Scotland but the whole of the British state
and ostensibly it's the address that Robert the Bruce gave
to his troops before Bannockburn.
But actually it's about a lot more.
Setting it to the marching tune played by Scottish troops
during what was Scotland's most famous victory
against the English in 1314
Burns turned Robert the Bruce's words
into an enduring anthem of Scottish defiance.
And so it begins as a Romantic historical piece -
" Now's the day, and now's the hour; See the front o' battle lour;
"See approach proud Edward's power -
"Chains and slavery!"
And so on.
But the end builds into something which is as close as Burns gets
to spitting in the eye of the English state.
He says explicitly that this is not just about history,
it's about Scottish liberty.
The last stanza could have come out of the mouth
of any French revolutionary.
It's a kind of Scottish Marseillaise.
"Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe!
"Liberty's in every blow! Let us do or die!"
This is the anthem of Scottish freedom.
# Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
# Scots, wham Bruce has aften led;
# Welcome to your gory bed,
# Or to victory!
# Now's the day, and now's the hour;
# See the front o' battle lour;
# See approach proud Edward's power -
# Chains and slavery!
# Wha will be a traitor knave?
# Wha can fill a coward's grave...
The song has long become Scotland's unofficial national anthem.
# ..as be a slave? Let him turn and flee! #
Burns was convinced that music could trigger
a great swell of fellow feeling
even if you were separated by wealth, rank or education.
# Freeman stand, or freeman fa'
# Let him follow me!
Everyone could sing their way to national togetherness.
# By oppression's woes and pains! By your sons in servile chains...
But above all, it's his uncanny ability
to give voice to the great chorus of the Scottish people
that explains why he still stirs such passion.
# Lay the proud usurpers low!
# Tyrants fall in every foe!
# Liberty's in every blow!
# Let us do or die! #
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Burns saved Scotland. Scotland would've been northern Britain.
That's exactly what Scotland would be.
Burns saved every song, every poem, every word,
and made us Scotland again.
In the decades following the French Revolution,
Scotland wasn't the only country brooding on the loss of culture
and tradition at a time of national crisis.
The same thing was happening in the middle of Europe
in the German lands.
In the early 1800s,
Germany was not a unified nation,
but a crazy quilt of small states - bishoprics and kingdoms.
They were united by language, but divided by everything else.
And one by one they fell like nine pins to the invading French,
led by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Child of the Enlightenment, Napoleon liked to claim
he was bringing French modernity - a new empire of reason,
sensible uniformity of institutions,
and codes of law,
all of which was poison to the romantic mind.
Licking the wounds of their military humiliation,
German writers and artists asked themselves
how they have fallen so low,
and what needed to be done.
So, driven by a mounting sense of nationhood,
they ventured deep into the woods and forests of the German landscape
in search of their ancestral past.
This is where, in a world of Frenchified sameness,
they hoped to rediscover the roots of their own native culture,
what they called Deutschtum - Germanness,
and to do that, they looked back to the work
of one of their most revered philosophers.
The inventor of what it means to belong to
what you might call a cultural tribe
was an 18th century German philosopher,
Johann Gottfried Herder.
In a number of essays and books and articles,
Herder challenged a fundamental principle of the Enlightenment,
namely that once we're all liberated from old wives' tales,
superstitions, including religious superstitions, folklore ballads,
we were free to become rational creatures.
And, once we are rational creatures, we are all the same,
wherever we lived.
Herder said, "No, actually we aren't."
We're the product of innumerable ancestral deposits of memory,
custom, dress, and especially song and folk poetry.
And he thought there was nothing to be ashamed of about that.
Yes, Herder invented the idea of Germanness,
but he didn't necessarily think it was superior to Icelandic-ness,
or something else.
He was just against the flattening of difference.
For him, difference, whether you liked it or not,
was a deep truth about human nature.
Much of what Herder had to say was a response to the anxieties
of becoming modern - of the rush into money, materialism
and metropolitan uniformity.
What he and the Romantics believed
is that what we all needed to live truly human lives
was a sense of belonging,
a connection to the traditions of our own tribe.
And, you know, I think he actually put his finger on something
incredibly important, not just for his own time,
but for our own time, too,
that the more modern we become,
the more we need anchorage.
Anchorage in memory, in dreams,
in ancestry, in myth,
in the whole universe of our connected imagination.
In the early 1800s, Herder's ideas had a profound effect
on a whole generation of artists,
not least the young painter Caspar David Friedrich.
The son of a candlestick maker,
Friedrich grew up in the small town of Greifswald,
near the woods and cliffs of Rugen Island on the north German coast.
Precociously talented,
he left home to train as an artist in Copenhagen,
then moving to Dresden to start his career.
It was while he was there in 1807
that Napoleon's troops marched into his hometown.
In the archives of the local museum, there's evidence
of just how intensely Friedrich felt
about the humiliation of French occupation.
So this is a letter written to his younger brother,
who has gone to Lyon in France in order to pursue work as a carpenter.
And it's written in this beautiful late 18th-century hand.
"Lyon" is written very hard with the quill in large capital letters.
And what he's saying to his brother,
"du selbst weist es dass es eine falsche Sache ist..." -
"you yourself know that it's a wrong thing"...
"..dass du, ein Deutscher, sind in Frankreich..."
"..that you, a German, are in France."
And he goes on to say that "the only thing that consoles me about that
"is that you yourself do indeed know this.
"Otherwise, I would doubt your Deutschtum" - your Germanness.
And then he says something even more extraordinary,
which is a very tough thing for an older brother to say.
He says, "as long as you're in France,
"I must ask you not to write to me again."
So if you want any sort of sense that Friedrich is really incredibly
invested in a patriotic sensibility about what it means to be German
in a difficult time of defeat and humiliation,
this letter really says it all.
For Friedrich, that question, what it meant to be German,
was reinforced by an even more personal loss.
For in 1809, Friedrich's father, his only surviving parent, died.
Returning home for the first time under French occupation,
Friedrich made a pilgrimage to the places that reminded him
of his family's past.
The search for his father and his fatherland became one.
At the town where his father was born, he sketched the ancient
oaks that stood guard over the fields.
And further down the coast, he drew the ruins of Eldena Abbey,
where he and his father used to walk when he was a boy.
For Friedrich, these Gothic ruins represented the spirituality
and strength of Germany's once great Medieval Christian past.
On his return to Dresden, Friedrich brought all these experiences
and emotions together in one of his most spellbinding
and eerie paintings,
The Abbey in the Oak Wood.
This is a painting, most obviously about death,
not least the dying of light.
It's painted exactly at that special moment
between the final bits of the sunset,
and the onset of evening.
At the heart of the painting, we have a shrouded group of mourners
carrying a coffin into the shattered ruin of a Gothic church.
Everything is devastated and wrecked.
And above all, the most dramatic feature of the painting itself,
are these trees.
These trees are, in effect, anthropomorphised - they're people.
This is a howling lament.
A funeral dirge.
Behind the trees, there is nothing.
There is just mist.
It's just very, very sombre philosophical reflection.
But there are all sorts of signs about a change that may or may not
happen, not least to that body.
The body in the coffin is being carried into the church,
with the body of Christ looking down.
And, of course, the death of Christ is not a death.
It's a promise of a new life.
The promise of resurrection.
So we have moments of resurrection everywhere in this painting.
Hanging in the sky is a crescent moon.
The waxing moon - day will follow the fall of night.
Spring will follow winter.
Friedrich has even taken the trouble of actually putting tiny dots
at the end of those jagged twigs,
the signs of the buds of spring.
So, despite darkness descending, there is hope of new life
round the corner, a hope of resurrection,
not least perhaps, with any luck, in the turn of history's wheel,
the resurrection of Friedrich's own nation.
The resurrection of Germany.
The question was how that resurrection was to happen.
Further south, in another German state invaded by French forces,
two young brothers thought they had the answer.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
In 1807, Napoleon made their hometown of Kassel
the capital of the new satellite kingdom of Westphalia.
He installed his younger brother Jerome on the throne,
and, believing that the French language was both more rational
and more civilised than German,
made French the official language of state.
But the Brothers Grimm knew how to resist.
As disciples of Herder,
they believed that it was by going back to the language
and folktales of the people -
the volk - that they would find the roots
of their own proud Germanic culture.
Something they hoped would contribute not just to a local,
but to a national reawakening.
In 1811, the brothers had an extraordinary idea.
They wrote an appeal...
Here it is in front of me.
..asking for researchers to fan out across the country
and listen to regular people telling stories,
transcribe them, and report back to fairy-tale command and control
here in Kassel, and the way they put this appeal is very touching
and very emotionally powerful.
"Our fatherland", they said, "is still filled with this wealth
"of material that our honest ancestors planted for us,
"and which, despite the mockery and derision heaped on it..."
- as just folk tales -
"..continues to live unaware of its own hidden beauty."
In other words, what seemed to be simple was powerful.
Whenever Napoleon could do, he couldn't tear up the roots
of that village folk culture.
And in a wonderful phrase, Wilhelm Grimm said,
"We could hear faintly blowing the horns of Elfland."
The response to that call was astonishing.
From all over the kingdom, ordinary folk offered their stories
and they came from all walks of life.
From retired soldiers and fruit sellers...
..to pastors, cooks and servants in aristocratic households.
Published in 1812, the first edition of what the Grimms called
"Children and Household Tales",
the world they uncovered was far darker than they'd ever imagined.
Well, these remind me of when I first read the Grimm fairy-tales -
maybe I was six or seven, and how absolutely scary they seemed.
The whole Hansel and Gretel thing about freshly baked children!
But I had no idea that what I was reading
was the softened, revised version, made much more child-friendly.
The original version in 1812 was spectacularly fuller of cruelty
and savagery.
Cannibalism, mutilation, death, incest.
They were horrifying.
Cinderella's ugly stepsisters, for example,
when they were trying on the glass slipper,
did not just have a tough time trying on the slipper,
they cut off their toes to make it work.
The wicked queen in Snow White was not a wicked stepmother.
It was her actual mother.
And what she asked the woodsman to do was not just to abandon
her in a forest, but cut out her heart, lungs, liver,
so it could be taken back to Mummy,
who would then cook them and have them for dinner.
Once upon a time, there was a stubborn child,
who never did what his mother told him to do.
The dear Lord therefore did not look kindly on him
and let him become sick.
No doctor could cure him,
and in a short time he lay on his deathbed.
After he was lowered into his grave
and covered over with earth,
one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air.
They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth,
but that did not help.
The little arm kept popping out.
So the child's mother had to go to the grave herself
and smack the little arm with a switch.
After she'd done that, the arm withdrew.
And then...
..for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.
The Brothers Grimm really knew what they were doing,
and it was not obviously meant for children.
It was meant for fully grown-up townsmen, often middle class,
who, after a hard day's work could come back and, in effect,
sort of switch on a particularly nasty video or TV.
It was actually fantasy horror entertainment.
They were trying to connect those hardworking, tired townspeople
with the world the romantics kept on saying
they were in danger of losing.
The dark, savage, German primeval forest.
For the German romantics, it was in the forest, they were sure,
where their nationhood was born.
A world away from modern civilisation.
This was a more primitive world of magic and violence,
of ancient wisdom,
and natural justice.
And it was here two millennia before
that the ancient German tribes had defeated the Roman army
and resisted Roman occupation.
And so it would prove once again.
In 1814, as the tide of war turned against the French army,
Caspar David Friedrich painted this.
An image of a lone French cavalrymen
facing massed ranks of German trees.
Is there anything more pathetic than a cavalry officer
who's lost his horse?
Not just lost his horse.
This French Chasseur has also lost his regiment,
and he's lost the war.
Napoleon has been destroyed not so much by history as by geography.
The snows of Russia and here, of course,
the great primeval forests of Deutschland,
of Germany.
There's nowhere to go in this particular forest.
The Chasseur, we think, must realise it's a path in the woods
in which you are doomed to get lost.
There's no way forward, and pretty much there's no way back.
And, in case you didn't get the message,
there is a raven,
the messenger of death, perched on the broken stump of the tree.
And the artist has done something amazing with the composition.
He wants to make us feel that the enemy of the German woods...
Invincible, aren't they?
..aren't just in front of him - they're behind him as well.
And our point of view is at the top of one of those fir trees,
looking down on this broken spectacle of Imperial power.
Accept the inevitable.
In the end, Germany and its trees have won.
Nearly 60 years later, in 1871, Germany finally became one nation.
But when the pendulum swung again and Germany lay defeated
in the First World War,
the power of romantic iconography proved irresistible.
The Nazis perverted everything
Herder and Germany's liberal minded romantics had stood for.
And Friedrich's forests became not just a symbol of German strength,
but of its ethnic purity.
In the Nazis' inevitable revision of the Grimm tales,
German children were taught that Little Red Riding Hood
symbolised the innocent German people
falling prey to the evil Jewish rule.
The Holzweg, the path through the woods,
can lead in two completely different directions.
One direction will take you into a universe of magic,
of enchantment, the kind of creative flights of the imagination
necessary to establish an idea of a common fatherland.
In this case, a woodland home.
But the other path can go to a very dark place indeed.
One of bloodshed and brutality.
It took some time before German artists could re-enter
the forests of German history,
and when they did, like the painter Anselm Kiefer,
they did so as brutal demystifiers,
chopping down the trees,
and staining the path with blood.
A generation on, they are still obsessively
entering the woods of memory.
But now, with a more sympathetically romantic eye.
Mariele Neudecker restages the landscapes
of Friedrich and the Grimms
in liquid-filled glass tanks that mimic the atmospheric conditions
of air, light and fog, reconnecting us not just with the darkness
but with the wonder and mysticism of romantic art.
I guess what really drew me to Romanticism
was learning about the abuse of the romantic imagery in the Third Reich.
There's been a lot of issues in post-war Germany
to sort of deal with it.
I already feel like I'm one generation down,
trying to take it on and deal with the politics that could be embedded
in something quite harmless looking.
To understand what it means to go back to romantic imagery today.
You know, it has a sort of beautiful side to it,
and also a really dark underbelly.
I want people to have a sense of wonder,
and then a sense of fear,
and it is a sort of trigger.
There's a sort of mechanism where people might sort of conjure up
memories of their childhood, of stories that they've read,
or anything like that, and in some way that's really important to me.
I'm not sure if I'm sort of reclaiming the landscapes,
but I think it's sort of neutralising somehow
that political weight on them.
And what I want is for people to question their perception
and question their understanding of those images.
During the Third Reich, every German knew just where the nation began,
deep in the forest.
Where it would end, though, was a different matter.
But further East, for sure.
It was in September 1939 when Warsaw fell,
alone with nothing to oppose the air and land onslaughts,
but her small garrison and the spirit of her people.
When Hitler invaded in 1939,
the Polish nation became almost overnight
a conquered province of the Third Reich...
..in an act of brutal nationalist aggression.
Over the next five years, it would see nearly six million
of its citizens die, and many of its cities,
most notably its capital, Warsaw, almost totally destroyed.
Never giving up hope of liberation,
the Polish resistance rallied around the figures
of their most famous romantic artists,
in particular Poland's greatest composer, Frederic Chopin.
He had given his nation its heroic soundtrack
when his people were living through the same experience
a century earlier.
When the heartbeat of Polish culture wasn't even in Poland,
but here in Paris.
In the 1830s, this was where Chopin,
alongside Poland's most important politicians,
poets and artists, had all fled into exile
after their beloved homeland had not just been conquered,
but completely wiped off the map.
With their memories of homeland sharpened by separation,
they created a Poland of the imagination in their art.
In the 17th century Poland was huge, an enormous chunk of territory,
but territory isn't the point.
It had its own culture, its own language,
its own extraordinary, idiosyncratic institutions.
No other state suffered this disappearing act.
It was chopped up and consumed by the empires around it.
Austria, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire.
In 150 years, it goes from being this enormous, powerful,
prosperous territory, to have gone. Vanished.
So the issue that all raises,
what happens when your country disappears?
Does culture then matter more?
Well, of course. It comes to be all you have.
So the whole of the romantic fruitfulness,
of dreaming the Polish dream
in poetry, in novels, in history,
and especially in music,
happens as a response to this traumatic disappearing act.
For Chopin and his fellow exiles it was ultimately a cataclysmic event
that had caused their exodus
and sealed their fate as a people without a nation.
In November 1830, while Chopin was on a concert tour in Vienna,
Polish rebels in his hometown of Warsaw mounted a doomed
rebellion against Russian rule that lasted for nine months.
Facing the wrath of the Russian tsar, the Polish resistance finally
collapsed when in September 1831, the last rebels retreated
to the village of Wola, where they were slaughtered
on the graves of their ancestors.
Incoherent with grief, Chopin identified the fate of his nation
with that of his family,
and poured out his anguish into his diaries.
My poor father, perhaps he is hungry.
Perhaps my sister has fallen to the wild Muscovite villainy.
My mother...
Perhaps a Muscovite has killed her, murdered.
And here I stand with empty hands.
I only express my pain from time to time on the piano.
I despair.
But what good will that do?
The retributions were catastrophic.
Thousands of Poles were executed, lands and homes were seized,
and Poland's name was erased from the map.
After refusing a Russian passport,
Chopin had no choice but to join his fellow exiles in Paris,
never to set foot on his native soil again.
Expressing all his longing through the piano,
over the next 18 years,
Chopin dredged up memories of the folk dances and mazurkas
of his childhood, transforming them into some of the most
heartbreaking romantic music ever created.
In exile, Chopin turned these humble melodies into masterpieces
of intense emotional compression.
By turns wistful, haunted,
even defiantly joyful.
Their intense nostalgia expresses the painful longing to return home.
So Polish people, even people who know nothing about music,
love Chopin.
You know, it's a symbol of Polishness.
It's an identity which they want to preserve
because there is no state any more.
The fact that he wrote most of his music abroad,
and most of it, you know, here in France, in Paris.
there is this longing for something that is lost. Right.
How do you feel about the Mazurkas?
I mean, how much do you feel they were something that
kind of organically came out of memory of homeland?
Definitely comes from, er, the folk idiom,
especially towards the late Mazurkas -
he really transcends all of this and he goes into crazy harmonies.
But you have still, even in the late ones, one or two mazurkas,
suddenly incredibly robust and primitive and...
..and, and, like...
HE PLAYS A BOLD CHORD
Number 66?
And so on. You remember what Schumann said, for example?
Cannons hidden in flowers, yeah? Yes.
So the flowers are always there, the decoration is there.
The beautiful form is always there, but inside it's a volcano.
Poland finally regained its independence in 1918.
But under German occupation during the Second World War,
the Nazis set out to eradicate the Polish nation and their culture.
Chopin's music was banned,
and after the capture of Warsaw,
his statue became the first public monument to be destroyed.
And in 1944,
as the Nazis brutally crushed another doomed Polish revolt,
another battle was taking place
in the semi-destroyed Church of the Holy Cross.
A battle of over Chopin's heart.
What could be a more perfect cult object
of sacred national devotion than the heart of Frederic Chopin?
Here it is, inside this enormous pillar
of the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw.
The battle this time is inside the head of the German commando,
who gloried in the name of General Erich von Bach.
The battle was between his obligation to
total military annihilation and slaughter,
and the other profound, characteristically German
instinct - his absolute passion and love for music,
including that of Chopin.
And guess what?
It was the latter which actually won out amidst all the carnage.
The general secured the heart from inside what was left of the pillar,
gave it to the Archbishop of Warsaw,
and in October 1945, when the war was over,
the heart was brought back in an extraordinary public ceremony
and re-installed where it is now.
What actually triumphed, even in the head of a Nazi commander,
was the ultimate transcendent universal power
and beauty of Chopin's music.
CROWD CHANTS
That battle between national identity and our shared humanity
speaks to us as much now as it ever did.
Years after the chaos and destruction of the Second World War,
the roar of the angry tribe
can once again be heard in the streets.
Even in Poland.
In a world convulsed by existential crises,
nationalism is perhaps our own response to the fear
that our identities and traditions are once again under threat
in an increasingly bewildering world.
MUSIC: Jerusalem
As politics everywhere has become dominated by nostalgia,
the longing to look back to some once upon a time rosy past,
culture has once again become a battleground
for competing visions of what national belonging might mean.
# And did the Countenance divine... #
When the Romantics brought all the trappings
of national devotion into the world,
flags and anthems, songs and stories,
they were creating a community of belonging
every bit as powerful as family or church.
But what they created is so viscerally powerful
that it can also bring with it a dangerous state of mind.
If the Romantics' most enduring legacy is the belief in the power
of art to connect us to deeper truths about who we are,
then its goal ultimately was not to divide us,
but to remind us that, in spite of all our differences,
every human heart is the same.
One of the messages that the Romantics left us with
is that it's possible to belong to the family of your own country,
its traditions, its stories, its ballads, its music,
its poetry, and yet belong at the same time
to humanity.
There's a wonderful line written by the German poet Schiller
in his Ode To Joy that goes like this...
"Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
"Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!"
"Be embraced, oh millions!
"With this kiss the whole wide world."
That's what the Romantics wanted -
they wanted, in the face of everything they had to deal with,
that the ultimate message might yet be harmony.