This chamber in the Town Hall was the meeting-place of the permanent Diet of the Holy Roman Empire; on this empty chair sat the Emperor, rendered increasingly ineffective by the princes and the guilds, or else himself neglectful of the Reich, often more administrator than dominus. Around it are the halls set aside for the Electors, the princes, the College of the imperial cities. When Regensburg became the seat of the permanent Diet, in 1663, the Empire was already ossified and divested of power. In this room, supposed to rule the world, the world itself is missing; the void of it reminds one of that “nothing defined only by its own confines”, to quote from The Hole, a play by Achim von Arnim, the nineteenth-century Romantic poet fascinated by the German past. That feeble conjuction, the und in the formula “Kaiser und Reich”, also seems a nothing, a disjunction, a mere nullity that does nothing but separate. The Empire is an ellipse, wrote Werner Näf, the foci of which are the princes and the guilds, while the centre – the Emperor – appears as a pure abstraction. Irregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile, said a seventeenth-century jurist on the subject of the Empire.
This lack of centre, this shortage of cohesive strength and political unity, does not call to mind the clear, penetrating gaze of Frederick II of Swabia, who saw things as they appear to the naked eye, without a trace of recondite significance; what it calls to mind rather is the oblique glance of the Spanish Hapsburgs, focused upon the hidden, twisted side of things, upon darkness and obscurity: the glance which tradition attributes to Don John of Austria, victor of the Battle of Lepanto, born in a house in the Tändlergasse, illegitimate son of Charles V and a beautiful daughter of middle-class Regensburg, Barbara Blomberg. Barbara Blomberg was eighteen years old, while the Emperor, seven years a widower, was forty-six and marked by a precocious, melancholy weariness, by that sense of the vanity of vanities which caused him to decline – according to a line of Planten’s – like the old Empire itself, even if that waning of the medieval heritage entailed the rise of a modern world power under his crown.
Mindful of this passion, and of this woman whom he never saw again, Charles V remembered her on the eve of his death, indeed a matter of hours before he died, and secretly left her the considerable bequest of six hundred golden ducats. Heedlessly do we make love, says a line of Brecht’s. Don John of Austria grew up for the triumph of Lepanto, but not for happiness; he was destined for the murky obliquities of life, not for life’s clarity.
The two-headed eagle on the wall of this imperial chamber sets the seal on a shadowy, melancholy scene. This pathos of decline does not seem to have affected the secretary, or the scrivener, to whom we owe the end of the tradition of the Konfekttischlein. On this little table for the display of confectionery the city was wont to offer the delegates to the Diet refreshments, wines and sweetmeats, on which chiefly the secretaries and scriveners made a practice of gorging themselves. During a Diet one of their number had partaken rather too generously of the wine, so that in the course of a session, in which he was supposed to draw up the minutes, he fell asleep and started to snore sonorously, disturbing the discussions on which depended the Holy Roman Empire, and therefore the world at large. The city senate thereupon abolished the traditional refreshments.