Scotland
in the
heat
The Scottish Review is on holiday for a week over Easter. The magazine will resume normal publication on Tuesday 17 April. SR’s average weekly readership in the first quarter of this year was 17,446 compared with 13,326 in the corresponding quarter of last year.
The art form
of the
Scottish heart
George Gunn
on the purpose
of poetry
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Eriskay
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
I worry about Scotland,
not about possible
independence
Christopher Harvie
The author recently received the Order of Merit of the German Federal Republic for services to education and cultural co-operation in Germany, Scotland and the British Isles. This was his acceptance speech:
III
About one’s future at 67? Get things in order. Give books and archives to people who can use them. I look after my parents and try to act for friends now gone: John Brown, Angus Calder, Julie Brotherstone, Friedel Glaeser, Carola Ehrlich, Phil Williams, Neil MacCormick, Jane Morgan, Horst Trossbach, my wife Virginia.
Fighting a plutocracy that says it’s here to help, but spies and manipulates, lets finance loot ordinary people. My wife used to say, brandishing a copy of the Financial Times’s shameful ‘How To Spend It’: ‘Aren’t you glad you’re married to me and I don’t want one of those?’ – meaning a giant Aga, a four-wheel-drive, a Riviera villa.
But we see here that good can come from wealth rightly used: Bob McDowall’s ‘Summerhall’ and Ricky Demarco – the spirit of the place – have all the anarchic energy of east Berlin when the wall fell. Perhaps this can even cradle the geotechnologies that can reverse our self-destruction. Alison and I read on a plaque beside the Landwehrkanal: ‘On 13 March 1848 the Berlin workers tried to storm the Stadtschloss, singing as they fell the words of the Scots poet Robert Burns’. It was in my old Holyrood constituency that the achtundvierziger Fontane looked from Kinross kirkyard out over Loch Leven and decided to write about his Brandenburg as Scott had written about Scotland.
I worry about Scotland: not about possible independence – for I wrote ‘Fool’s Gold’, about North Sea oil, and Norway did far better out of it than Britain. In fact England would have thriven on an independent Scotland’s investment. Ironically, Germany became the real beneficiary of Mrs Thatcher: where the oil cash went.
But the oil is running out. $10 a barrel in 1999; it’s gone up twelvefold since. By 2020 it will be above $200. The age of Daimler and Ford is ending. Germany and China and even Arabia know this. Does Scotland? Our last shipyards are building aircraft carriers for which we have no planes. We want to put a second road-bridge over the Forth. Will we have cars to run on it?
We stand, though, on the edge of a new railway age. In 1988 I wrote in Germany’s official Design Report that its module wouldn’t be the Bismarck-to-Hitler one of a man with a pack and a gun, but a girl with a child in a buggy, a family with their wheelies, a pensioner – me in 10 years? – with two sticks.
Before then, get the web to work as an educator, not an informational quagmire. I’m having a shot at this in ‘Clan Scotland’: little guides for schoolkids modelled on Argyll’s ‘Scotland the Brief’ – before I fall over. Get the flysheet.
IV
Finally – an die musik! My father taught at Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart College, where Wilfred Owen wrote the poems that interpellated Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem’: recently and hauntingly broadcast from Tuebingen’s ‘Stiftskirche’. Dietrich Bonhoeffer worshipped there: the man George Mackay Brown made the modern parallel to Saint Magnus Martyr.
Yet my own mind is moved more by miniatures, by Johannes Brahms and his piano works, which he taught to the young Frederic Lamond from Glasgow. His opus 10 derived from the bleakest Border ballad: ‘Edward, Edward’. His last piano pieces seem equally stark. But at the end, his ‘Four Serious Songs’ – settings of St Paul’s first Corinthian epistle, from the Lutherbibel, or from the King James’ Bible, determined on in our Burntisland Kirk in 1601 – wrestle with this, to surge out with trust in endurance and love:
Nun aber bleibet Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, diese drei,
Aber die Liebe ist die grosseste unter ihnen;
Die Liebe ist die grosseste unter ihnen.
The Scottish Review is on holiday for a week over Easter. The magazine will resume normal publication on Tuesday 17 April.
