GREECE MAKES A CHOICE

Greece has been rather out of the European public eye in recent weeks. After many a weary conference, the second bailout of €130bn was signed up on 21 February and the luckless private bond-holders later took a 70% haircut.  The uneasy coalition government of technocrat (i.e. bank stooge) Lucas Papadimos has fulfilled its mandate. The Athens street turmoil has calmed, anxiety has switched to the much more significant economies of Spain and Italy and the balm of billions of euros pumped into the eurozone by the ECB has given the crisis a temporary respite.

Stop-gap Papadimos was obliged to call elections and they are scheduled for 6 May. All the signs are that the old guard, those who have misruled Greece for a generation, will poll badly but no coherent alternative government is discernable. The existing PASOK/ New Democracy coalition had about 220 seats in the 300-seat parliament. Opinion polls suggest that those likely to vote (20% are undecided) will choose as follows:

Supporters of Bailout and Eurozone

Party                           Politics            Leader                   % vote        Seats
PASOK                           Left              Venizelos                     17.8        48
New Democracy             Right             Samaras                       22.3        110*
Democratic Coalition    Centre             Bakoyannis                    3.0           8
                                                                                             43.1        166
Opponents of Bailout but pro-Europe

Independent Greeks          Right           Kammenos                     9.9      26
Syriza                               Far Left      Chipras                           9.8      26
LAOS                               Far Right     Karatzoferis                   3.9        10
Democratic Left                 Left             Kouvelis                        8.6        23
Greens                               Left              A Committee               3.1        8
Various Independents            -                                                   6.2        0
                                                                                               41.5      93
Anti-European

KKE                               Communist    Papariga                       9.7        26
Golden Dawn                   Neo-Nazi       Michaloliakos                5.7        15
                                                                                              15.4       41

*Under the Greek system the highest polling party gets a bonus of 50 seats.

On the face of it, the existing PASOK/ New Democracy coalition should have a comfortable majority but Samaras has vowed not to renew his alliance with PASOK.  The support for both parties is inexorably melting away. As parties need to poll at least 3% to be represented, the pro-bailout Democratic Coalition may not make it, nor may the Greens or even LAOS. Some kind of coalition will eventually emerge but its complexion is uncertain and may well be influenced Left-wards by the French elections, especially if Sarkozy falls. The established parties are reaping the whirlwind of unpopularity as they implement austerity under EU/IMF instructions but there are local issues too, especially the immigration flood and crime-wave, with LAOS and Golden Dawn advocating wholesale forced repatriation.

Samaras (New Democracy) and Venizelos (PASOK)

In a sense all this election fever is the trivia of Lilliput as Greece is not master of its own house. After two huge bail-outs it is wholly dependent financially on subsidies from the Eurozone. Its fate will be decided in Brussels and Berlin. If Greece leaves the Eurozone (which surely it must), it can only do so under the auspices and direction of the European powers, unless revolution breaks out, which seems unlikely. There is a distant echo in Greece of the 19th century Capitulations which so oppressed the Ottoman Empire. The Capitulations granted Europeans legal and fiscal privileges in that country and although they were not very intrusive they naturally offended Ottoman ideas of national sovereignty. EU, normally German, officials dictating policy and staffing ministries in Greece are much resented and recent remarks by Poul Thomsen, IMF’s man in Athens, advocating speedier bank repossessions caused a particular furore. It took Kemal Ataturk’s revolution to rid Turkey of the Capitulations but Greece is currently an embryonic Capitulatory State.

There is certainly a respectable intellectual case for Greece to be taken under European tutelage. Greece’s own politicians have totally failed to manage the economy, after 5 years of steep recession, or implement the reductions in public spending and organise the privatisations required in the EU memoranda. The Greeks are charmingly eloquent and will formally pass the necessary legislation but action seldom follows as they lack political will and the civil service is incompetent, often staffed by useless placemen after years of clientism.

Three notable scandals, illustrating the dire state of public probity, have moved forward recently. The German entity Siemens, heavily involved in telecommunications equipment, traffic lights, the Athens Metro and the Greek Railways among others was discovered by the German courts to be running a slush fund paying large bribes (allegedly €100m) to Greek officials and politicians including the then Minister of Transport. To end civil action, Siemens has just agreed to pay €270m in compensation to the Greek state but criminal actions are still possible, if unlikely.

The good reputation of the Orthodox Church in Greece has been damaged by the long-running Vatopedi scandal. The abbot of Vatopedi, Brother Ephraim, heads the largest and richest monastery on Mount Athos (known as The Holy Mountain in Greek). Brother Ephraim was incarcerated at Christmas on charges of fraud and embezzlement but was released on bail at Easter, in part thanks to pressure from Vladimir Putin, suddenly wanting to ingratiate himself with Russian Orthodoxy.

Brother Ephraim of Vatopedi

 The scandal revolves around land-swaps between the New Democracy government of Costas Karamanlis and Vatopedi from 2008 said to have disadvantaged the Greek state to the tune of €100m. As usual this is a very murky “Byzantine” affair.

Much worse have been the revelations regarding the activities of a former senior PASOK politician, Akis Tsohadzopoulos. A former bus driver, Akis rose through the ranks of PASOK from 1981 to 2007, holding important portfolios including Transport, Defence and Development. He retired in 2007, was expelled from PASOK in 2011 and arrested and charged with money laundering in April 2012. A 104-page report on his activities from the prosecutor’s office has been leaked. Allegedly he took bribes from various sources, notably the German supplier of submarines to the Greek navy and the Russian supplier of missile systems, and bought about €35m worth of property  mostly now in the names of his wife and daughter, via a network of offshore companies. Tsohadzopoulos currently languishes in prison.

It is not surprising in the light of the above that the contempt the Greek people have felt for their political class has deepened. A totally new broom is called for to reform a system wholly rotten from corruption, though it is not clear whether it will be a European or Greek broom. In this context the question of who wins the coming election is somewhat superfluous. Dr Johnson, speaking of another contest between midgets, declared “There is no settling the point of precedency between a Louse and a Flea”.

Akis Tsohadzopoulos

SMD
20.04.12

Text copyright Sidney Donald 2012

TASTES CHANGE

We know already that Women are fickle (La Donna e mobile), but the truth is that all Mankind is fickle and the treasures of yesterday are soon discarded while new favourites flourish. I recall my eye being greatly offended by my first sight of Keble College, Oxford, the St Pancras Station Hotel and the old Prudential building in High Holborn, London. I thought all three were hideous red-brick excrescences, but Betjeman has since educated us to think differently and these buildings are now much cherished Victoriana. Our tastes have been changed.

The Great Hall, Keble College, Oxford

      
The female form, a rather basic element in our lives, has also gone through many a metamorphosis. Did our ancestors really find seductive Rubens’ enormous and sturdy nudes (those thighs!) or presentable the somewhat louche ladies of Boucher?  I guess so, as even in recent times we admired the over-upholstered figures of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. The inevitable reaction was extreme as it brought on the almost anorexic figures of Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Twiggy though now the pendulum has swung back to the fleshier pleasures of Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Lopez and Cate Blanchett.

At a more intellectual level, opinions and thought-processes change. The oracles of yester-year, like Matthew Arnold or John Ruskin were derided, whatever their considerable merits, and new arbiters of taste emerged, for example Walter Pater, Bernard Shaw or Lytton Strachey, to be deposed in their turn. Forming or leading opinion is a thankless task, as people move on like bees supping on the next flower’s nectar. I wonder if anyone still reads that fine writer and historian, “the Sage of Ecclefechan” Thomas Carlyle, with his declamatory style, hero-worshipping and profusion of capital letters! The baton of popular cultural leadership has been passed on to the likes of Kenneth Clark, Gore Vidal and Alan Bennett until, inevitably, they too are pronounced old hat.

Thomas Carlyle, the Sage of Ecclefechan

Simply growing older is part of the explanation. As usual Dr Johnson expresses this phenomenon most pithily: “Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore”. I was bowled over as a teenager by Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye but I was left cold when I re-read it more recently. It had caught wonderfully well a young man’s attitude to life in the 1950s but the moment and the magic have long passed. Many seminal books will share this fate; not least Sir Walter Scott’s, once the wonder of Europe, but whose over-descriptive style and slow plots are not to modern tastes.

Political oratory is an area where tastes change radically. Churchill’s matchless prose reads magnificently but audiences no longer want grandiloquent speechifying. Churchill was also very partisan and had much difficulty winning elections; his rival Stanley Baldwin was polished too but spoke simply of national unity and the end of class conflict. This rang a popular chord and his style was mirrored by the famous radio “fireside chats” that so enhanced FDR’s place in American hearts. Politicians strive now to be “just folks” – something which Margaret Thatcher could not easily master but John Major and George W. Bush got right.

Changing tastes are most evident in the arts. Comedy often does not wear well. Our great-grandparents fell about laughing at Charlie Chaplin. I doubt if many people find him funny now. Even Shakespeare lets us down occasionally – the Porter’s Scene in Macbeth is desperately unamusing. The brittle comedies of Noel Coward have lost their vogue but that much neglected but workmanlike playwright Terence Rattigan has enjoyed a series of well-deserved revivals in London. Pre-Raphaelite painters have fluctuated too in the public’s affection and are now a bull market while the manic saleroom stars like Pablo Picasso (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust went for $106m) or Gustav Klimt (his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer fetched $136m) ignore the laws of gravity. Now must be the time to sell your Klimts and Picassos and buy up neglected High Victorians like Lord Leighton, G.F.Watts and William Dyce!

Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt

Yes, our tastes greatly alter. As a Scotsman I love my country and I hugely enjoyed visiting Fingal’s Cave on Staffa. The 18th century explorer Joseph Banks described it as superior to the Louvre Palace, St Peter’s in Rome, Palmyra and anywhere in Classical Greece. Others call it the 8th Wonder of the World. All this is totally disproportionate hyperbole in my view – or must I change my tastes?


SMD
17.04.12

Text copyright Sidney Donald 2012

A FAT LOT OF GOOD

One of the many scandals of this modern world is the disenfranchisement of the Fat. In the US about 60% of the population is overweight, many indeed are quite evidently obese, and yet there is no chance that this majority will be able to elect one of its own to be President. All the current serious candidates for President are from the lean and hungry minority with ne’er a fatty to be seen. It is all very odd and I scent a skinny conspiracy.

Grover Cleveland

Howard Taft

  It was not ever thus. Resolute Grover Cleveland, 22nd and 24th President, in H L Mencken’s phrase “sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite”. Grover tipped the scales at a solid but hardly excessive 250lb (17stone 12lb to us Brits) and the Americans embraced judicious 27th President Howard Taft, a colossal 332lb (23stone 10lb). 31st President Herbert Hoover was no stripling either but his texture was (Mencken again) “not that of the Alps, but that of chocolate éclairs” as the Depression struck. If politically the Americans have slimmed down, here in Greece we have two notable fatties: Evangelos Venizelos, erstwhile finance minister and new leader of leftist PASOK, must be 22 stone and has the mien of an ill-tempered toad. Yet he is tiny beside the gargantuan veteran Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos, who has no discernable duties but who terrorises his colleagues because he knows where the bodies are buried. Pangalos always reminds me of the huge diner Mr Creosote, played by Python Terry Jones, who stuffed himself  gluttonously before messily exploding; whereupon maitre d’ John Cleese presented the bill. If you hear a loud bang outside the Greek cabinet room, you will know what has happened.

Evangelos Venizelos

Theodoros Pangalos

              

               

In Britain we have our fatties too. Winston Churchill himself was pinkly rotund and liked the good things in life. Accosted by, some say Bessie Braddock, but more likely Nancy Astor, with “Winston, you are very drunk!” he replied “Possibly I am. But you Bessie/Nancy are very ugly. Tomorrow morning, I will be quite sober, but you will still be very ugly!” Bessie Braddock was a Liverpudlian socialist firebrand and was one of those sizeable and formidable political battleaxes once common in Britain like Dame Irene White and Gwyneth Dunwoody. Of the current generation, my best fatty hopes used to reside in well-upholstered Nicholas Soames, grandson of Churchill and hate-figure of lady Labour MPs for his sexist banter, but an amusing fellow nonetheless. Sadly his first wife has damagingly revealed that making love with Nicholas was “like having a large wardrobe falling on you with a small key still in it!”

Bessie Braddock

Nicholas Soames

    

There have of course been some less-than-admirable fatties. The Emperor Vitellius insisted on at least 4 large meals a day, podgy and begloved Cardinal Wolsey was lucky to escape the axe; pot-bellied Napoleon Bonaparte threw Europe into chaos, even if the French unaccountably revere him. The less said the better about boasting Benito Mussolini (“the bullfrog of the Pontine Marshes”) or sinister Herman Goering - he who had two but they were very small, as the rude wartime song went.

Billy Bunter

I much prefer the genial fatty of fact and fiction. Billy Bunter, the Fat Owl of the Remove, always raises a laugh and most Scots will recognise Fat Bob, bosom pal of Oor Wullie, cartoon mainstay of Dundee’s Sunday Post. Fatty Arbuckle became a byword for plump good nature on the silent screen and monocled Charles Coburn was a splendidly florid feature of 1940’s comedies. Best of all, the world laughed with gentle Ollie Hardy in his madcap adventures with Stan Laurel.

Oliver Hardy

                   Back to the real world, there is a wise adage that you should never borrow from a thin banker and I have always been, er, um…a well-fed customer. My ideal bank manager would resemble Germany’s former Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, a flop at the top job, but a brilliant Economics Minister for the first 14 years of Germany’s renaissance, with just the right mixture of generosity and prudence, in short an admirable fat man. I believe the Fat are the life-enhancing Salt of the Earth. 

Ludwig Erhard

                   

SMD
23.03.12


Text copyright Sidney Donald 2012

DEMON BANKERS

In my City investment banking days long ago, I recall attending the usual Monday morning meeting for all the directors in about 1987. We were given an exposition by a bright spark from the quantitative (“quant”) analysis team about his latest product – some kind of hedging or swap instrument with various bells and whistles attached. My field was blissfully uncomplicated Private Equity, but I listened politely and I hope my face did not betray my almost total incomprehension, shared, I would guess, by plenty of others in the large room. I thought then that banks should not dive deeply into matters most of their senior people did not understand but I could hardly admit this to such a hard-bitten gathering. So I was really left at the starting gate on the invention of new instruments and derivatives followed by the securitisation of debt, perhaps one of the reasons my finance career never rose beyond the commonplace. Yet the Financial Crisis from 2007 onwards shows that my unease was well justified. Bankers often complain that they have been unfairly demonised: this complaint is not well founded and bankers are prominent (if not the only) villains of this story.

At about the same time, unforgettably described in Michael Lewis’ Liars Poker, the mortgage team at Salomon Brothers in New York run by the florid Italian-American Louie Ranieri, discovered a way to trade boring old mortgages in bulk making a fortune for the team and the firm. This was done in a dealing room with a Babylonian atmosphere – new recruits being verbally abused, women being belittled and insulted, constant foul language, customers being gleefully fleeced and the team relaxing with gluttony competitions featuring huge takeaways of Mexican food and litre tubs of guacamole. Ranieri sold his mortgages mainly to naïve members of the US Savings and Loan industry (RIP). The tone, the intellectual climate was simply deplorable.

His methods were soon enough copied and surpassed by other Wall Street institutions. The invention of the Collateralised Debt Obligation (CDO) is “credited” to Drexel, Burnham, Lambert in 1987 but it took some years to win wide acceptance. The mortgage CDO takes a pool of mortgages and divides it into tranches – the first tranche being rated AAA down to riskier tranches, rated BBB. Investors can invest in whatever tranches they want, the lower the rating, the higher the interest return, as the tranches are sliced. With the variety of borrowers and credit ratings, with some mortgages being on fixed and others on adjustable rates, with redemptions being unpredictable, the CDO became a very complex product and “quant jocks” were employed to analyse and structure them. Some banks were chary of CDOs as they found them difficult to value.

An apparent breakthrough occurred in 2000 when a Chinese mathematician working in Wall Street, David X. Li, presented a paper on his Gaussian Copula, a formula based on probability theory, which purported to produce a correlation number. Calculating this number and applying it to a model allowed banks to value their CDOs more easily, which now pooled all types of loan, not just mortgages. Li’s method was widely adopted, although there were doubters like Warren Buffett, who described CDOs in 2003 as “financial weapons of mass destruction”. Yet the CDO market grew from $275bn in 2000 to $4.7 trillion in 2006. Most crucially the rating agencies were converted to Li’s methodology and somehow rated most CDOs AAA, making them acceptable to the banks.

Sadly, Li’s formula was flawed and relied on houses rising in value; the end of the US housing bubble led to the collapse of the mortgage CDO market, as nobody could say where the liabilities lay, and inter-bank funding sources dried up for many banks globally. Post-crisis, J P Morgan estimated the recovery rate for CDOs would be a catastrophic 32c in the $ and 5c for mezzanine. The casualty list was long as huge write-down were necessary; all the following collapsed, had to be rescued or were sold off cheaply – Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, Citigroup, AIG and Wachovia. Alan Greenspan’s belief that the market was best left untrammelled proved false, the rating agencies and the academic economist establishment should have foreseen the crash; the auditors should have raised the alarm; the Fed should have supervised the banks much more closely, but the culture of Greed dominated the powerful banks, driving them to ever greater imprudence and contempt for their fellow-citizens and to well-deserved ultimate disgrace and execration.

In the UK, the crisis took a different shape and drew blood 12 months earlier than in the US. The US sub-prime mortgage panic undid Northern Rock and caused an ugly run on that bank in September 2007. The Bank of England provided the required facilities, but NR did not recover and it was nationalised a few months later. Its management had foolishly relied far too much on short term inter-bank funding to run the business. Several members of the board were quite rightly heavily fined and banned from the banking sector.

Much worse was to come. In an excess of folly, already overleveraged Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) mounted a complex 3-way bid in September 2007 for ABN-Amro for an eye-watering £71bn. The target, feeble due diligence and timing were disastrous; soon enough the poor quality of ABN-Amro’s loan book emerged; emergency rights issues failed; a record loss of £24bn was reported for 2008 and to avoid panic RBS came into 84% public ownership. A proud Scottish bank, the product of generations of hard graft and prudence, was wiped out in a few months. The only executive to be heavily criticised at first was senior lender Johnny Cameron but clearly the greatest source of grievous error was the CEO, over-assertive Sir (now plain Mr) Fred Goodwin, aided and abetted by an ineffective group of (be)knighted non-execs Sir Tom McKillop, Sir George Matthewson, Sir Steve Robson and Sir Peter Sutherland. Their duty of oversight and challenge was very imperfectly exercised.

A similar sad story surrounded Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) and Lloyds Bank. HBOS had made wildly inappropriate property loans and had funding difficulties. The Chairman of hitherto stable Lloyds Bank, Sir Victor Blank, received a nod and a wink from Prime Minister Gordon Brown to take it over. A deal was carelessly rushed through only for Lloyds to discover what a can of worms had been bought. Lloyds too became 41% publicly owned. A recent report has criticised HBOS’ corporate lender Peter Cummings, but the buck really stops at CEO Andy Hornby and Chairman Lord Stevenson and a set of silent non-executive directors.

The crisis spread to Europe, but that is another convoluted story. The bankers should now be wearing sackcloth and ashes but they are certainly not. A few days ago Greg Smith resigned from Wall Street king-pin Goldman Sachs and in his resignation letter highlighted the “toxic and destructive” culture, the shameless crowing over rip-offs of customers, known as “Muppets”, the continuing peddling of opaque derivatives and the lust for profit at any price.  It sounds much like Salomon’s 1980s dealing room.

In the UK, where vast public funds have been injected into the bankers’ money markets to assist their liquidity, the remuneration package this year for Bob Diamond of Barclays Bank is a stratospheric £17.7m. They just don’t get it, do they? Self-restraint is not a word in the bankers’ vocabulary. So let Vince Cable do his worst to clip the wings of the irresponsible banks who are the authors of much of our current misery. Otherwise, do not be surprised if the tumbrils soon roll and the suffering working people scream for bloody and exemplary revenge!


SMD
18.03.12


Copyright Sidney Donald 2012

FIVE ROCOCO CHURCHES IN SOUTH GERMANY

This is the third article I have written on Rococo buildings in South Germany. The first concentrated on the famous pilgrimage churches of Ottobueren, Die Wies and Vierzehnheiligen. The second looked only at secular buildings, the Residenz at Wurzburg, the Amalienburg at Nymphenburg, the Cuvillies Theatre at Munich and Linderhof Palace. I now want to share my pleasure in five more modest but still sumptuous Rococo churches at Regensburg, Weltenburg, Munich, Steingaden and Oberammergau. I have visited them all and apologise for the omission of those others I have either simply overlooked or not managed to inspect in person.

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I have come to realise that splendid as many of the secular Rococo buildings are, there is an extra dimension in the religious ones. This is a hard admission for me to make as I am a self-proclaimed sceptic, proud of my rationalist and humanist credentials. The sinuous, uninhibited delights of Rococo architecture, the dizzying vistas, the extravagant ornamentation, the sheer physical beauty of the paintings, stucco figures and asymmetrical decorations intoxicate, inspire and delight the viewer, raising him to new levels of joy and, yes, I say the word, of spirituality.

Our first stop is St Emmeram, Regensburg. The former Imperial Free City of Regensburg has had two millennia of distinguished history starting as an ancient Roman bishopric and thriving as a great trading city on the Danube. It escaped serious war bombing damage and has an enviable heritage of fine buildings and churches. It is flatteringly twinned with my home town of Aberdeen.

St Emmeran, Regensburg

The church is by the gatehouse to the Schloss Thurn und Taxis, the T&T family being immensely rich benefactors of the city (they held the postal monopoly in Germany at one time). The church was a medieval foundation but was remodelled in the Rococo manner in the 1720s by the famous Asam brothers, painter Cosmas Damian Asam and sculptor Egid Quirin Asam. A glorious painted ceiling, white and gold walls, rapt saintly figures and a galleried balcony grace this lovely church.

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A short rural trip from Regensburg takes us to our second highlight, Weltenburg Abbey Church, near Kelheim, attractively situated in the Danube Gorge. It is a popular excursion destination as visitors allow their children to paddle and their dogs to swim in the river from the pebbly banks; the Abbey has a famous brewery with a delightful beer garden where one can eat and drink lazily in the summer sun.

Weltenburg Abbey

The large Benedictine Abbey, which still functions, is in the Baroque style while the Abbey Church was decorated, again by the Asam brothers, the great Rococo masters. The Abbey Church is quite small but the Asam brothers and other artists have covered every surface with their lavish decoration. There are various scenes appropriately from the life of St Benedict and other saints, stunning allegorical painted ceilings, augmented by a profusion of angels. The most striking feature, framed by splendid barley-sugar shaped columns, is the theatrically-lit high altar where a golden mounted St George slays the Dragon with exemplary aplomb.

Weltenburg Altar

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Our third church is in central Munich, St John Nepomuk, known as the Asamkirche, after the famous brothers who designed and built it. It was intended to be their private church but local pressure forced them to open it to the public. It was built between 1733 and 1745 and is an illustration of the devout Catholic feeling in Europe at that time – in 1736, for example, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was commissioned by a pious Neapolitan confraternity of laymen to write his wonderfully moving Stabat Mater.

Asamkirche, Munich

St John Nepomuk was a Bohemian martyr, then recently canonised in 1729, and his life is venerated above the portal of the church. Great artistic genius and substantial wealth has been spent on this lovely place. The church is small and narrow with only 12 rows of pews but it is most opulently decorated. The walls are covered with frescos, beautifully carved animated wood and stucco figures abound and the church is suffused with a dark red and golden glow. A window behind the altar provides a bright, symbolically striking, sacred light.

Asamkirche interior

As a footnote, a good friend of mine, a highly intelligent Scottish Episcopalian, was inspecting the holy water stoup here and was painfully stung by a Catholic wasp, settling perhaps an abstruse theological score!

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Our next church is on the Alpine foothills in Upper Bavaria. In the little town of Steingaden stands a now dissolved monastery and its abbey church is now the town parish church of St John the Baptist, Steingaden. This church is often overlooked as it cannot rival nearby Die Wies, a world heritage site, but it has its own lively charm.

Steingaden ceiling

Originally a Romanesque building, after burning and looting in 16^th and 17^th century wars, it was decorated in the Rococo style in the 1740s, under the supervision of the fresco painter Johann Georg Bergmuller. South German craftsmen, along with Austrians and Bohemians, had developed over the years great expertise in wood-carving and wood painting. This expertise was easily enough transferred in the Rococo period to carving and painting plaster stucco and also to a huge talent for ceiling paintings, those rapt and flowing apotheoses which enliven so many Rococo churches. Many of the builders and artisans are not known by name but how much pleasure they gave and they too could echo Wren’s epitaph; “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”

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Our final stop is St Peter and St Paul, Oberammergau, the little Bavarian town famous for its Passion Play, held every 10 years as a 1635 promise by those villagers spared from a devastating plague. It is now performed in years ending in a zero. The Rococo parish church, with its distinctive onion dome, much seen in Central Europe, nestles in a town where many houses are adorned by attractive devotional murals.

Oberammergau

The sumptuous Rococo interior (1736-42) was the work of Josef Schmuzer and the ceiling paintings were created by Matthaus Günter. The ecstatic saintly figures crowd in on all sides and the delightful decoration of this beautiful pink church make it a most memorable sight. When my wife and I visited, a young woman was rehearsing a baroque aria from a balcony vantage point. The lovely music and the singer’s clear soprano voice complemented this splendid church in a unique way, raising our morale and enthusing us, which is one of the great merits of the Rococo style.

Oberammergau church interior

SMD

10.03.12

Text copyright Sidney Donald 2012

HATS IN THE AIR

           

One of the many real if undramatic losses to civilisation in recent times is the virtual disappearance of hats. A generation or two ago, and for centuries before, nobody would dream of venturing out of doors bare-headed, which was the mark of a person of the lower orders. In past times hats often denoted class – wide brims for the bourgeois, flat hats for the plebs – and the decline of hats is partly explained by the blurring of class distinctions. I hereby proclaim the joy of wearing hats and propose a Great Headgear Revival and call upon you all to cover your thatch and re-assert your individuality not just with your warm heart but also with the top of your head.

Undeniably hats define the man. Where would de Gaulle be without his kepi, Schweitzer without his solar topee or LBJ without his Stetson?  Not quite forgotten but fading in the memory, yet restore the hat and the vivid colours and personalities surge back. The examples are legion: Zapata in a huge sombrero: Greek liberator Theodoros Kolokotronis in his flamboyant casquette: Bonnie Prince Charlie sporting his bonnet and white cockade: Anthony Eden in his eponymous black Homburg: Maurice Chevalier in his jaunty boater: Frank Sinatra in his snap-brimmed fedora: above all, Charlie Chaplin and Stan and Ollie in their often battered Bowlers.

  

Maurice Chevalier

Charles de Gaulle

Kolokotronis

Charlie Chaplin

Bonnie Prince Charlie

Lyndon Johnson

The Bowler has indeed gone through many phases. Designed by London hatters T&W Bowler in 1849 for the gamekeepers of Lord Leicester, as the branches of trees knocked off their top hats, the Bowler was adopted by the working classes here and in the US. In the American West, Bowlers were the preferred headgear of goodies like Bat Masterson and baddies like Billy the Kid. As the cap rose in popularity in the UK, the black Bowler gradually moved up a class and became the uniform of respectable bank managers and the mufti headgear of off-duty officers of the Brigade of Guards.

Politicians liked to get into the act.  Adolf even donned a Tyrolean effort; Harold MacMillan wore a rather unconvincing Cossack hat to ingratiate himself to the Russians on a détente expedition, while Chairman Mao wore a proletarian cap, although he was privately rather a dandy.

Talking of proletarian garb, I like the story of the laconic Yorkshireman inspecting the shelves at his local branch of tweedy Dunn & Co. “And what’s your fancy, Sir?” asks the attentive shop assistant, to be answered “Well as a matter of fact, it’s fishing and fooking, but Ah came ‘ere for a flat ‘at!”

At least in the eyes of the High Tory Duke of Wellington, headgear, especially when combined with radical opinions, could condemn a whole assembly: “I never saw so many shocking bad-hats in all my life” exploded the Duke on encountering the new House of Commons after the 1832 Reform Act.

But what, I hear you ask, of the ladies? It is less true to say that that the hat defines the woman. Ladies’ hats are frivolous and decorative confections, not badges of office. Ladies try to avoid other sisters wearing the same chapeau and hats enliven formal gatherings of all kinds, but these days they are seldom de rigueur except for the Enclosure at Ascot and royal weddings. The Royals maintain the tradition, with mixed success. Her Majesty can look radiant but too often looks grumpy: Camilla’s hats are sometimes a feathered or flowered disaster-zone: Fergie’s daughters’ recent fascinators did not much fascinate me: but Princess Diana carried her hats very well and Princess Kate looks promising.

H M The Queen

 

                                                            Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall

Fergie's Daughters

Princess Kate

Princess Diana

Anyhow, I say Hurrah for Hats and I hope readers male and female echo my cry. My dear Father always bought his brown felt Trilby from Lock’s, the famous hatters in St James’s Street, but my native Scotland also has its own distinctive headwear, Glengarry, Balmoral or Tam o’Shanter. So I will don my tartan Tammie and proudly stride around the streets of Athens, to the wonder and admiration of my Greek friends and neighbours.

SMD

22.02.2012

Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2012

GREECE IN AGONY

For longer than I care to remember, Greece has been struggling economically, largely a crisis of its own making, but tragic nonetheless. A divorce from the Eurozone seems inevitable but both parties are in denial and are not taking sensible steps to make the divorce as painless and orderly as possible, although much pain and some turmoil is probably unavoidable.

Briefly to recap, Greece is in its 5^th year of recession, industrial production slumped 7% in the last 12 months, recorded unemployment is 19%; a first rescue package of €110bn was extended in May 2010 with many conditions but has failed to arrest Greece’s decline; a second Eurozone/ ECB/IMF bailout package of €130bn, linked to a private bondholders’ 50% haircut, has been exhaustingly negotiated but its availability is not confirmed. The fact is that the Greek economy is collapsing, projections for recovery by 2020 are fanciful and it has no prospect of repaying its huge debts.

Discussions between Greece and the so-called “Troika” are currently abrasive. Greece reckons it has done all that was asked and is frustrated by new demands from Brussels and the leading paymaster, Berlin. The Troika, hugely exasperated by dealing with Greek politicians, who have prevarication and dishonesty form, want close control of the disbursement of the second package and the detailed implementation of its conditions. It is not satisfied by Greek assurances. The troika has a team in Athens headed by IMF’s energetic Poul Thomsen, a Dane, and the Eurozone has nominated its commissioner to oversee Greek compliance, a mild-appearing German, Horst Reichenbach. Tempers have been raised by caustic comments about Greek good faith made by the German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble, probably a sensible enough person, but looking like an economic Dr Strangelove with his rather snarling manner in his wheel-chair.  His comments have provoked a rare rebuke from Greece’s venerable President 82-year old Karolos Papoulias.

As usual the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Surprisingly to many, Greece has over-delivered on austerity. Its primary deficit has been reduced from 10% to 2% so before debt servicing Greece is almost self-sustaining. This has been achieved at great social cost with very high new taxes, especially on immobile property, a poll tax euphemistically called a solidarity tax, rises in VAT, and savage cuts in all government expenditure like education, hospitals and defence. Greece has however failed to push through structural reforms to liberalise business, reform labour laws and remove bureaucratic obstacles to many aspects of life. By their nature some of these will always take longer to implement, but Greece’s public administration is systemically dysfunctional, and there are powerful vested interests in the trades unions and professions opposed to change. Thirdly Greece is lagging behind in its privatisation programme, but frankly the expectations were over-stated and anyhow who would invest in Greece given its current political and currency uncertainty?     

The Troika has handled matters in a very cack-handed way. The Eurozone, let alone the EU, is a clumsy institution, divisions are easy to identify and consensus hard to establish. The Mediterranean countries are somewhat sympathetic, if impotent, but the wealthy Northern Europeans are indignant about Greek sins and an AAA bloc of Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Finland has been formed, determined, it seems, to punish Greece with a Calvinist and Lutheran self-righteousness. The troika’s prescription of ever more austerity is economically illiterate; deflation can only strangle an already feeble economy. If Greece stays in the Eurozone, it needs some kind of new Marshall Plan, but nothing so imaginative has emerged or is likely to emerge from Brussels.

The mood in Athens is darkening. Youth unemployment exceeds 40% and a good riot is an attractive diversion; the government, headed by colourless unelected technocrat Loukas Papademos, has little popular support with its main constituent PASOK only showing 10% approval; the hard Left has about 45% support, much stimulated by the police last week gassing in Syntagma Square iconic leftists composer Mikis Theodorakis and aged Resistance hero Manolis Glezos; the Right is gaining strength but a military coup is unlikely. Greeks are glued to their TVs and radios, avidly following the Lilliputian manoeuvres of their deplorable political elite.

This corrupt, incompetent and overpaid elite has made no sacrifice itself (save the President who yesterday offered to forego his salary) but has instead characteristically swooped like wolves on the poorest and most defenceless. Pensions have been cut by more than 20% and support withdrawn from council house tenants and the disabled while children shiver in unheated schools. I have myself seen able-bodied Greeks scouring dustbins; well-dressed unemployed people queue for food at soup kitchens and sleep rough. Weeping fellow-Hellene Cypriots send blankets and coats for the poor in Athens. As if deliberately to light a fuse, the troika now want EU administrators in all departments (naked colonialism), all political parties, including the opposition, to sign up to their bail-out terms (some hope!) and insist that Greece indefinitely postpones its very necessary elections (so much for democracy). Its demands are probably unconstitutional and illegal.

Unsurprisingly populism abounds with raw hatred of the Eurozone vocally expressed, Nazi memories rekindled (“at least we did not make soap from the flesh of Jews” a TV commentator said last night in response to a German insult) and wartime reparations demanded. The Dutch (“notorious drug traffickers”) and the Finns ("who are they?”) are routinely abused. The Eurozone is seen as only wanting to protect its pet euro-project and its bloated banks. None of this is very helpful, even if there are grains of truth embedded.

Greece needs to reject the second bail-out; announce a debt default; re-introduce a devalued drachma; hold elections and find totally new leaders. The country would have a chance to become competitive, whether inside or outside the EU, and run itself in its own way. The political elite will resist, fearing for their jobs and their necks, but they have lost the people and the current nightmare must end. I do not believe the consequences for the eurozone would be as drastic as some fear. In any event, let the Devil take the hindmost.

SMD

18.02.12

Copyright Sidney Donald 2012