The Grindelwalds: an introduction
In the Year of Our Lord 1883, Victoria was Queen and Empress. Richard Wagner died, the Brooklyn Bridge opened, and Benito Mussolini was born. Gladstone was PM; that prize ass, Spavin, was Minister for Magic; and Albus Dumbledore was rising two years old.
In the Dual Monarchy, Count Taaffe was the Minister-President of Austria and bearing up, with typically Irish insouciance, under the incarnate annoyance that was his Hungarian counterpart, Kálmán Tisza de Borosjenő. Franz Josef’s subjects were mildly diverted by the imminent birth of a new Imperial granddaughter: the archduchess Elisabeth, the first, and, as it fell out, the last, of the Crown Prince Rudolf’s children. That glittering and unsuitable heir, her father, had five years remaining to him before he should have his disastrous encounter with the Vetsera chit, and six years before his mysterious - to Muggles - death at Mayerling.
It would have occurred to no one that anything of historic import could occur in that year that would link Mould, in Glos; Godric’s Hollow; Csejte - nowadays Slovak Čachtice - in Hungary; Bezau, in the Austrian Bregenzerwald; and Olmütz, today’s Olomouc, in what is now the Czech Republic and was then Habsburg Moravia. In Cjeste, Slovak nationalism simmered. In Bezau, a village of dairymen and cheesemakers was being transformed into an Alpine resort. And in Olmütz, where, in 1767, the eleven year old Mozart had composed his Sixth Symphony, in F, all eyes were on the new conductor in residence, one Gustav Mahler.
Yet in Godric’s Hollow, a scholarly Witch, Bathilda Bagshot, was awaiting eagerly the owl that would bring her news of her niece’s accouchement in Bezau; and in this delicious anticipation of a new birth to a Wizarding family, she was joined by prospective grandparents in Cjeste and in Olmütz. There was joy in the West Country and in the Dual Monarchy alike when Professor Bagshot’s niece, Frau Grindelwald, was delivered of a healthy son. The boy was christened ‘Gellert’: a combination of Hungarian Christian name and Swiss-Austrian surname (as Swiss-Austrian as the dynastic name of the House of Habsburg itself) that augured, everyone agreed, greatness, and symbolised the Ausgleich itself.
___________________________________________
The first Grindelwald known to history was a sturdy peasant lad, known variously over the course of his curious career as Konrad of Grindelwald, Werner Grindelwalt, Hubertus Grindelwald, and Albrecht Grindl. He first appears in the chronicles of the Austin friars of Interlaken, from whom he was on the run. It is uncertain whether he was sent to Interlaken by his doubtless desperate parents as an oblate or - as is rather more likely - as a lay brother and general labourer. What is certain is that he quite swiftly decided that he wanted no part of monastic life and discipline. Being possessed of low cunning, a gift for brutality, peasant stubbornness and peasant sturdiness, an earthy, rough-trade sex appeal that he exerted powerfully on both sexes, and no scruples whatever, his flight from the abbey in his teenaged years was, rather surprisingly, successful. The area then newly falling under the sway of predatory Bern was naturally hostile to the monks of Interlaken - Bern was already looking greedily towards the Oberland of Interlaken, Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnun, and Brienz - but equally hostile to a sturdy beggar on the run from Authority. Moreover, the dialect of the Oberland was more archaic even than that of the Bernese Mittelland, marking the runaway as an outsider whenever he opened his mouth to speak.
Somehow, this lad of the many names and the sixteen summers managed to booze, burgle, brawl, and bugger his way through the Bernese lands and reach the safety of Habsburg Aargau. There, through skill at arms - mostly of an ungentlemanly sort - and a swift and concentrated programme of seductions of men and women alike, he managed to achieve a position as a halberdier in the ranks of Frederick 4th.
Evidently, the Augustinians had failed to teach him foresight, or indeed divination. A year later, in 1415, the Emperor Sigismund - busy with burning Hus at the stake, intervening in the Council of Constance, making the world-historic error of raising the Hohenzollerns to power, and wisely - if with indecent haste - switching his support from France to England in the wake of Agincourt - took time to undercut Frederick Empty-Pockets and encourage the Eidgenossen in conquering the eponymous Aargau heimat of the House of Habsburg.
Perhaps the Austin friars had taught him something, after all. For the many-named lad from Grindelwald was next heard of, advanced to the state of a man-at-arms, in the armies of Frederick 3d, Holy Roman Emperor in succession to Sigismund and Duke of Austria from the rival line to that of the failed Frederick 4th. And it was under the emperor Frederick 3d that the Habsburgs - by his son Maximilian’s gaining the hand of the heiress of the duchy of Burgundy - began to rise in a rocket-like fashion.
If Muggle records are confusing for the period, Wizarding annals are not, and there was and is no question that the cloister runaway Konrad of Grindelwald, who like his first master was booted out of the Aargau, was the same Werner Grindelwalt who prospered under his master’s rival and successor. It is equally certain that the fraudster posing as an alchemist under the name of Albrecht Grindl, who gulled both Stiborius and Vadianus out of shocking sums in the reign of Maximilian, was that selfsame Grindelwald; and quite as certain that all these Grindelwalds were the same man as the Hubertus Grindelwald who first was paid to see to it that Martin Luther did not return safely from Worms and was then paid still more to Apparate the man to Wartburg Castle.
The longevity of the first Grindelwald is of course the obvious clue. His descendants would also be Wizards. And like the first Grindelwald, they would be noted for their cunning, amorality, seductiveness, and ability to betray and re-betray again and again.
___________________________________________
By 1883, the Grindelwalds had prospered according to their degree. One branch of the family had managed to attain to rather a dubious ‘von’, although how, precisely, they came to achieve that nobiliary particle is a trifle obscure. They had married well for generations: they were now a fine-boned and powerfully seductive race, not without an admixture of Veela blood if rumour were true, as it may well have been: Veela are not precisely moral in the human sense, and, as may be seen in the history of Gabrielle Delacour, whose first pash was on Harry Potter and who after the late Rebellion married Dennis Creevey, Veela admire above all things fearlessness.
The means by which they had prospered, and the manner of their profitable marriages, were less creditable. A Grindelwald had played an equivocal role in the Siege of Szigetvár; another, after if not during the victory at St Gotthard - Szentgotthárd - and the rout of the Turks, had conspired to prevent any further liberation of Hungary, and connived at the seditious efforts of Leopold’s ostensible French allies in urging the Hungarians to throw off the Austrian as well as the Ottoman yoke. Similar Grindelwaldisch incidents of running both with the hare and with the hounds obtained at the Second Battle of Mohács, at Austerlitz, at the First Battle of the River Piave in 1809, and at Sadowa, as they would later at Caporetto and on many another field. If a Grindelwald assisted in muddying the waters after the disaster at Mayerling, it is equally true that a Grindelwald assisted in bloodying the fatal incident beforehand. It was a Grindelwald who first seduced - in both senses - Alfred Redl and delivered him, and Austria with him, to Batyushin to do with as he would; it was to be a Grindelwald who protected Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky in their Austrian exile.
Grindelwalds had by then long been a part - a deliberately unobtrusive part - of the magical component of the Great Camarilla that helped destroy the Empire. The Muggle members of the camarilla - culminating in such fatal nonentities as Hoyos and Berchtold, and their military gull Conrad von Hötzendorf - were merely blind - or blinded; they intended, however feebly and foolishly, fumblingly, to serve the Emperor, and the Imperial interest, and one might have found k.u.k. engraved upon their hearts. This was not always so of the Wizarding members; it was assuredly not so for the Grindelwalds, who had by this time been, for many generations, middle-ranking members of the Zauberamt.
The Grindelwalds had, by 1883, made several marriages that were - in a curious sense - advantageous, although they ought by rights to have been tocsins of warning to the attentive. They had gained ton by managing to attach British connexions; more troublingly, they had over the centuries bagged a decayed Báthory, roped in an impoverished Muggle-born Rákóczy (the soi-disant Count of St Germain), and bought or bartered a Basarab-Drăculeşti bride. It was hardly a secret that they had attained with these alliances to a pride that had been overbearing even for a scion of the House of Black. Yet they remained, it seemed deliberately, obscure and determined to maintain a middle station.
Why?
The answer was to be made clear in that bloodiest of centuries, the Twentieth.
___________________________________________
Bathilda Bagshot was by far the youngest of a celebrated family, daughter of a father who had been Wizarding plenipotentiary in Prague and a member of Wellington’s diplomatic staff at the Congress of Vienna, and of that father’s foreign bride whom he swept off dazzlingly from the glitter and glamour of Vienna. As the youngest of her sisters, she was far closer in age to her great-nephew than is the common or garden great-aunt: quite young enough to have been his mother, in fact. An unworldly bluestocking, better suited to her don’s life than to intrigue and high politics, she was putty in the hands of her grasping, dangerously charming, wild great-nephew when he appeared in England with his tale of woe and his exculpatory, his speciously self-exonerating, account of how he’d come to be sent down from Durmstrang.
Gellert Grindelwald was always able to charm, cozen, baffle, and gull the great academic minds and the Very Clever Indeed, as Albus Dumbledore was soon to find, to his cost. It was a family trait: his cousin Ferenc, by way of example, was responsible for the many uses to which Egon Erwin Kisch was put by masters he knew not that he had.
And through it all, the Grindelwalds were devoted to one cause and one end. It was the end for which they sacrificed the notoriety their natures craved. It was not the k.u.k. cause, the interests of the Dual Monarchy. It was not the nationalism that tore the Dual Monarchy apart. It was not pan-Slavism or pan-Germanism, it was not Futurism, nor socialism, nor communism; nor was it anti-Semitism, nor yet the cause of the blood-purists. It was not even, in the end, the supremacy of Wizard over Muggle, whether for the greater good or no.
It was chaos. Sheer anarchic chaos, destruction for destruction’s sake, apocalypse. For the Grindelwalds had always known, and their last and most notorious heir incarnated, the conviction that power and the erection of tyranny could come only out of chaos and old night. It was to that end alone they strived, that goal they sought. And it is the great indictment of Wizardry in all nations that they so nearly succeeded, and that their legacy, although it must pass now under other names, yet persists.