My German lessons in the fairy-tale castle
THE silver train from Frankfort to Dresden whooshes out of the woods and eases into Eisenach station, a small town in Thuringia, in the geographical centre of Germany. A few minutes later I am standing on the spotless street before the half-timbered house where Bach was born. But all my attention is above the house, on the wonder of Wartburg Castle, floating high over the town.
Imagine a spire-like rock rising from Hansel and Gretel woods. Imagine on the tip of the spire a castle out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Imagine a windy road out of The Wizard of Oz linking town and castle. Now you have a notion why Wartburg Castle and the hotel attached to it belong in a fairy tale.
Here I was to spend a week with Moonstone Labs, the European equivalent of the Sundance school, helping screenwriters from every part of Europe to polish their scripts. But how would I work with history pressing down hard?
* * *
By German standards Wartburg has a benign history. Here Elizabeth of Hungary grew from girlhood to become one of the most beloved saints of the Middle Ages. Here Martin Luther sought shelter after being condemned at the Diet of Worms (a stay which surely inspired his great hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is the Lord); here he translated the New Testament from Greek and so standardised the German language; here began the huge revolution that put conscience and the common man at the heart of Christianity and challenged the power of Popes.
Here Goethe came to holiday. Here too German democracy - and German unity - took its first faltering steps in 1817, when students assembled at Wartburg Castle to demand what later GDR communists would call "bourgeois democracy", which in turn led to German unification and the broad contours of the country we still call Germany.
Eisenach, the town below, also played an exceptional part in the evolution of German democracy. Here, on August 7, 1869, August Bebel founded the German Social Democratic Workers Party. For the following 60 years it was the most powerful democratic party in Europe - until Hitler hammered it into the dirt of Dachau in a few months.
The link between Luther, Bach and Goethe was twisted to a hangman's knot in Buchenwald concentration beyond the woods. Later still came the border between the two Germanies, whose shadow still stains the lovely landscape.
Enough already. Chekhov says descriptions of landscape should be sparing. A piece of advice I wanted to pass on to the aspiring writers whom I was anxious to meet.
* * *
Naturally what passes between Moonstone writers and advisers is confidential. But I can tell you that Irish writers were not behind the wall. As always, I was especially energised by the writers and advisers whom I met from the newly enlarged Europe.
Thankfully, many of the Poles, Serbs and Czechs seemed willing to move beyond what I call "french films". By which I mean films which emphasise mood, character and freedom at the expense of narrative, plot and necessity: Lost in Translation is a french film made by Americans.
Jean-Luc Ormieres, the director of the Moonstone Labs, an acclaimed French (as distinct from french) movie producer, is aware of my views but believes in a broad church of advisers. And I believe in Jean-Luc, who has a laconic sense of humour in five languages.
I tell him he looks a little tired from taking on too much work and ask if he was getting enough sleep. He gives a Gallic shrug and assumes the accent of a Hollywood movie producer. "I sleep like a newborn baby. (beat) Sleep for an hour and wake up crying."
* * *
First night dinner in a huge banqueting hall, festooned with Pied Piper style hunting frescoes, is a fraught affair. In spite of my svelte figure I am secretly a member of the FF society (the first F is for fat and the second starts a four-letter word) and tend to gorge on German food with its sensible emphasis on pork, pork crackling, and creamy pastries.
The stunningly talented Koljevic family from Belgrade, who shared my table, politely pretend not to notice my pigging out on pork crackling and strudel and carried on light conversation about Japanese film, JM Synge and Bach while I crackled and creamed.
The Koljevic family consists of Srdjan (pronounced Sirjan) Koljevic from Sarajevo, who looks like Orson Welles before he put on weight, and is already Serbia's most distinguished director; his beautiful wife, Melina, from Montenegro, who is writing a thesis on Synge, and their pretty teenage daughter, Katerina , who is brilliant on Bach and pretty good on blues guitar.
The Koljevics speak fluent English, know more about film, theatre and music than the entire population of the Irish republic, and are so fond of each other that I feel better simply for being in their company. Even when they finally figure out I had not been a bosom buddy of Beckett they make it clear they have befriended me. So I bask and bore until they order me to bed.
* * *
Although I am almost first down to the gargantuan German breakfast (members of the FF society often rise to eat and retire to bed for a nap afterwards if not aroused), I am still not as early as veteran American director Matthew Robbins, who promptly agrees to act as wry New York Jewish writer for the week.
When I ask Matthew if he has directed anything I might have seen, he hums a little tune. Immediately I see the little procession of Christmas-lit Coca-Cola trucks making their way through the snow in the classic commercial. Somehow it has lingered longer in my memory than Last Year at Marienbad. For Srdjan Koljevic's sake I break my iron vow to avoid any film not directed by John Ford, Sam Peckinpah or Clint Eastwood and slip into the screening of his award-studded film, Red Coloured Grey Truck, secretly fearing it would be a french film.
And in awe I watch a humanist masterpiece from the school of Fellini, a simple story of a man and a woman falling in love as they drive a truck through war-beleaguered Bosnia. It broke my heart. As it is breaking hearts all over the Balkans.
Pending us making a film like that about Northern Ireland, could some cinema please let us see it in Ireland as soon as possible ?
* * *
After all that it was hard to come home and hear that Harry Shaw of AIB had died before his time. As a young bank manager, and in the best traditions of the old Munster and Leinster Bank, Harry helped me and mine to buy a house when we had no money, and when my political reputation as a
radical rendered me a
poor risk.
From what I hear he did the same for many more. Condolences to his wife Carmel (whom we never met but whom he constantly quoted as his moral arbiter) and to his fine family. Harry was more than a good manager: he was a good man.
- Eoghan Harris
