In Europe

humiliation, ofFrench and Austrian troops sacking and looting their way through a divided Germany, the military class had become Germany's most important mass symbol. The army represented the German nation,‘the marching forest’ as Elias Canetti called it, the ‘closed ranks’. All outsiders were no longer German.
    None of this, however, meant that Wilhelm was out to start a war. For him, the military was largely a mannerism, a way to impose order on his young nation. War was something completely different; something courageous and romantic in the eyes of his generation, but not a reality. Yet in the end the adoration for Wagner, for the Romantic movement, for the
Reinheitskultur
, the nostalgia for the house in the woods, Wilhelm's fairytale world, would prevail over the logical reasoning of the strategists, managers, financiers and scientists.
    ‘If one asks oneself today, with all due care, why Europe plunged itself into war in 1914, one cannot find a single sensible reason or even a cause,’ Stefan Zweig wrote later. ‘It was not about ideas, it was not even about those little areas along the border; I can find no explanation but a surplus of energy, a tragic consequence of the internal momentum that had been building up over the course of forty years.’
    In the end, the captain from Köpenick was arrested. During his imprisonment he became so popular that, after two and half years, the kaiser granted him a pardon. His story was filmed, recorded on wax, made into a play by Carl Zuckmayer and told on countless occasions to the people of Berlin, who loved laughing at their own freak show. One of the wax records with the voice of cobbler Voigt has been preserved at the Heimatmuseum in Köpenick. I wanted to experience that magic for myself.
    On my way there I found myself in a crowd of several dozen elderly people, who had gathered in a rainy park to commemorate Köpenick's ‘Week of Blood’. The mayor read the names of the twenty-four Jews, socialists and communists who, in January 1933, had been kicked to death by the SA in this same, respectable Köpenick. Another eighty people were beaten until crippled.
    After the ceremony was over, I spent a little time talking to an elderly lady who had been with the Dutch resistance as a girl, who had fallen in love with her liaison officer in the German communist undergroundand followed him here after the war was over. Together they had hoped to help build the new, promised non-fascist DDR. ‘I spent my whole life here among the common people, sharing their lives,’ she said. ‘Because the fact of the matter is, the Devil cut us from the same piece of cloth, and it's cloth from the bargain basement at that.’ Her name was An de Lange. In Köpenick she had become old and wrinkled. She told me her story, then disappeared.
    By the time I got to the Heimatmuseum, it was closed. I never heard the captain's crackly voice.

Chapter FIVE
Vienna
    ? THURSDAY, 28 JANUARY. THE BERLIN PRAGUE VIENNA EXPRESS . outside it has started snowing. Dark grey clouds are hanging on the horizon. The Czech buffet car smells of soup and hot apple pie. For the first few hours, I am the only customer. The cook stands in the kitchen wearing his big white hat, doing nothing. As the waiter's attitude turns to one of melancholy devotion, we rumble alongside frozen rivers, past a world of rusty iron, road workers with noses reddened by the cold, past bonfires beside the tracks and villages where the blue smoke rolls sleepily from the chimneys, and everywhere the snow is falling.
    We pass a river, an electrical plant with steaming stacks, an ochrecoloured station with a dirty banner and an old man pushing a pram full of oranges. The conductor has started looking like a wise, old professor.
    After Prague the snowflakes begin to whip and drift, the wind howls, the locomotive hoots in the distance. We stop and wait at a nameless station. There is light coming from a kitchen window. A woman is standing at the counter. She is bathing a child, who is standing naked in the sink. Then both of them slip away. A little while later we are in Vienna.
    ‘The merry apocalypse’ was what they once called this city, this odd mixture of creativity, middle-class normality, human suffering, power, complicity and schizophrenia. Around 1914 it was the power base for a huge empire that suffered from one major flaw: it no longer had a function, other than to amplify its own hum.
    In the centuries that went before,