Shoving his awe in

Philip Hensher

CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH by Werner Hofmann Thames & Hudson, £39.95, pp. 304

In some ways, German romanticism is very different from what we like best about works of art, and its most characteristic and individual products are apt to seem extremely strange to us. Goethe is still there, of course, a massive, central figure, but quite a lot of the writers who the age really rated appear completely baffling now. Jean Paul, for instance, seems the most peculiar writer imaginable, with his rapid shifts of tone, his paragraphs which combine the most impenetrable sublimities with the most vulgar scatological jokes, and it is almost impossible to understand how very difficult and disconcerting a writer became the most famous and popular novelist of his age. We have a huge appreciation of the music of the time, but anyone who concentrates on Beethoven soon comes to worry about his incredible wildness and instability, his willingness to throw absolutely every certainty out of the window and begin again from his raw materials.

The painting of the period is as odd as anything. A painter like Philipp Otto Runge is almost impossible to come to terms with now, with his embarrassingly direct sentiment and almost overpowering whimsy. If Caspar David Friedrich is not the oddest painter of his age, there is still a huge barrier which lies between his conception of what painting ought to be doing and ours. He is absolutely fascinating, and his paintings offer so immediately attractive and tactful an appearance that it is easy to fall for them in rather a superficial way. But the more you look at him, the more absolute seems the difference between his mind and ours.

The paintings pursue a single aim, that of the paysage moralise with an inescapable awareness of their own philosophical seriousness. They are illustrations to Kant's observation that two things only filled him with admiration and awe: 'the starry sky above me and the moral law within me'. Landscape, until that point, was often tinged with picturesque paganism, and naiads and dryads still h'aunt the landscapes of Turner. Friedrich's, by contrast, are entirely Christian, and can only he read in a Christian context. Some people at the time thought Christianity a much more appropriate sort of philosophy through which to pursue the idea of the sublime landscape. Runge went as far as to say that the idea of reviving the art of antiquity through mythologies was a 'disastrous' one, admittedly after his 1801 entry for Goethe's annual painting competition, 'Achilles' Battle with the Rivers', was savagely rejected. Chateaubriand was in tune with the direction of art when he said that

when it peopled the universe with elegant phantoms, mytholog3r robbed creation of its gravity, its grandeur and its solitude. It took Christianity to chase away this population of fauns, satyrs and nymphs, to give caves their silence and woods their reveries again.

From the beginning, Friedrich undertook to depict landscape without the faintest hint of paganism, and his Christian sublimity immediately struck a chord with the age. In 1805, as an unknown artist, he entered Goethe's competition, which that year was set on the theme of 'the labours of Hercules'. He had, however, the brass neck to submit two sepia drawings with no conceivable connection to antiquity; one of them is of a procession of pilgrims approaching one of his favourite subjects, a cross in an empty landscape. Goethe took the point, surprisingly, and awarded Friedrich joint first prize.

After that, Friedrich pursued a single concept, that of the Christian landscape. A huge number of his paintings find it neces

sary to stick a great cross in the middle of a landscape, and he returns over and over again to the subject of a huge pilgrimage church in the mountains, looming reassuringly out of the fog. The meaning is all too often absolutely on the surface, just as Friedrich wanted it to be; it was as if beauty (which is everywhere in these marvellous, calm, moonlit pictures) was never quite enough for Friedrich. He wanted to be a philosopher. And even where there is no blatant hit of Christian symbolism, he often found some way to smuggle in his single meaning. If a girl is gazing out of a window, lost in thought, the cruciform shape of the window frame acquires exactly the same significance. A monk wandering by the seashore, lost in religious contemplation, can hardly be distinguished from a figure in more secular dress, on top of a mountain and gazing down into a sublime, mist-filled valley. We are never allowed the slightest doubt that what his figures are experiencing — what we are intended to experience vicariously — is not just awe, but religious awe, Werner Hoffmann says that his paintings 'are not tracts', but they are not far from it.

Of course, there are other meanings to be extracted from Friedrich's work. There is a strong vein of romantic German nationalism there, and his paintings are almost all of identifiably German subjects; a harmless assertion in the early 19th century, but one which has rather tainted his reputation in the last 50 years. He was a great hero of the Third Reich, and though that should not affect the way we look at him, there is a certain temptation to see these stupendous sublimities as containing the seeds of the empty assertions of might which were being made in Berlin a century and a half later. More seductive and amusing is Friedrich's utter helplessness before a really ruthless Freudian interpreter; has there ever been a painter so keen on mossy clefts, next to which the usual crucifix stands like a nervous talisman? Werner Hofmann doesn't raise this question, but, frankly, he barely needs to; the reading is almost unavoidable. But the principal meaning of the paintings is exactly the single one which Friedrich intended, and in an age which tends to prefer its art to come without a violently expressed moral, this can be rather off-putting.

What saves Friedrich is the wonderful beauty of his paintings, and the simplicity and grace of his design. They are unforgettably translucent, washed with the clear blue, Baltic light. A painting can be nothing more than sea and sky (and a monk, of course); and even at their most dramatic, they are never exaggerated, and the swirling mists in the mountains and at sea are rendered with a true, respectful eye. They are always lovely, always simple, and if their meaning is too near the surface, there is enough unaffected grace there to deserve anyone's attention.

Friedrich has never quite been an English taste — if you want to see him in bulk, you still need to go to Germany — and this is a very useful addition to rather a small library of books about him in English. Hofmann for my taste is slightly austere; the book has a great deal to say about the abstract geometries of Friedrich's design, often setting the contemporary reading of Friedrich down next to an analysis of horizontals and verticals which, though always right, can be somewhat dry. I would have liked to have heard more about the contrejour effect, which is everywhere in Friedrich; that particular, irresistible trick of setting the viewer in a dark space, and a Karl Maier has been writing about Africa with authority and insight for the past two decades, and here he turns his eye on the ever-recurring collapse and changing shape of post-independence Nigeria, where his grasp of the political and historical overview and of the telling details within it is greater than ever, and seems at times to be near miraculous.

This House Has Fallen is subtitled 'Nigeria in Crisis', but crisis is a devalued and discredited word, and never more so than here. Maier has written an even-handed and disturbing account that combines his sharp eye and rigour as a reporter with his personal commitment and integrity. There is not a single page of this book upon which Maier's passion for the place and its people is not immediately evident.

Here, he shows us, is a country endlessly pulled apart (and occasionally even more disastrously pieced together again) by military and civilian power-brokering and greed, and by a kaleidoscopic array of ethnic and religious conflicts that have often led many to accept and tolerate this brutal and uncertain way of life as normal. The cast of characters and the causes and outcomes of their disputes are at times overwhelmingly complex and scarcely credible, brilliantly lit patch in the middle distance, has a sort of metaphysical significance in this painter. Conire-jour, in Friedrich, surely has the intended significance of the soul's journey from darkness into light, just as the eye travels forward from its confined, dark space into the broad, brilliant day. The painterly revelation and the divine one as a window opens become indistinguishable. A more lavish writer, too, would have made more of the poignancy of Friedrich's last years, when he was abandoned by public taste; his late paintings are nowhere near as good as the works of his high period, but it remains rather a sad story, and one doesn't want always to be told about axes and diagonals in the composition. Still. Friedrich's intellectual background is interestingly explored, and the quotations from his contemporaries are always very much to the point. A decent, unexciting exploration of someone we are always going to have reservations about. Nigeria, Maier convincingly argues, remains the key to the development of Central Africa as a whole, sitting as it does on such massive and valuable oil reserves. And it is this oil, he frequently attests, that fills the troughs at which the long line of self-serving officials (and commonly whole governments) squabble. And if this particular brand of domestic greed were not enough, then sufficient internal division and external manipulation exist — the demands of over 300 ethnic groups and every imaginable religion; the ignorance and blind-eye-turning of foreign governments — to ensure that stability of any sort and at any level remains in short supply.

Maier knows many of the great and small players personally, and he achieves a fine and vital balance between outlining the destruction and instability caused by their policies or misguided aims and the lives and desires of the men themselves. In a country where syphoning millions of dollars into foreign bank accounts is not regarded as theft but as a gift from God, it is to Maier's credit that he can remain so impartial in his assessment of these men, and that, even knowing the outcome of their policies — Biafra, the millions killed since, the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa, the abject poverty in which so many live — he can still present them to us in all their vainglorious details without judgment.

A few simple and undeniable facts, in a land where everything else seems open to blatant misinterpretation and colourful translation: 280 billion dollars have been earned in export revenues from oil yet the GNP per person is lower now than before the oil was discovered. Fewer than half of all Nigerians have access to clean water, and foreign debt stands at 32 billion dollars. There are six times as many admirals as there are ships in the Nigerian navy, and though Nigeria trains and supports an air force of 10,000 men, it possesses fewer than 20 serviceable aircraft. And where weapons are totally unavailable, juju is employed to turn back the bullets of others (even the bullets of the Mobil Police, nicknamed Kill and Go, notorious for their own acts of extortion and execution).

Karl Maier has written an account that is complex without being complicated, which strives for fairness amid the endless corruption and horrors it chronicles, and which combines disturbing and evocative reporting with personal insight and commitment. He has shone his brightest light yet into the Africa he so clearly loves and of which he steadfastly refuses to despair. This is an important book, and in an oil-thirsty world struggling towards its own embarrassingly unattainable notions of democracy at any cost we ignore the story it tells and the messages it sends at our own peril. Sadly, it will occur all too often to the reader that any true hope amid this endless chronicle of conflict, instability and despair, seems at times to be Maier's alone.