The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  THE PRIMACY OF PHYSICS AND PSYCHOLOGY

  At the same time, there was in Vienna a strain of thought that was wholly scientific and frankly reductionist. The most ardent, and by far the most influential reductionist in Vienna was Ernst Mach (1838–1916). Born near Brünn, where Mendel had outlined his theories, Mach, a precocious and difficult child who questioned everything, studied mathematics and physics in Vienna. He made two major discoveries. Simultaneously with Breuer, but entirely independently, he discovered the importance of the semicircular canals in the inner ear for bodily equilibrium.25 Second, using a special technique, he made photographs of bullets traveling at more than the speed of sound. In the process, he discovered that they create not one but two shockwaves, one at the front and another at the rear, as a result of the vacuum their high speed creates. This became particularly significant after World War II with the arrival of jet aircraft that approached the speed of sound, and is why supersonic speeds (on the Concorde, for example) were given in terms of a “Mach number.”26

  After these achievements, however, Mach became more and more interested in the philosophy and history of science. Implacably opposed to metaphysics of any kind, he dismissed as worthless concepts such as God, nature, soul, and “ego.” All knowledge, Mach insisted, could be reduced to sensation, and the task of science was to describe sense data in the simplest and most neutral manner. This meant that for him the primary sciences were physics, “which provide the raw material for sensations,” and psychology, by means of which we are aware of our sensations. For Mach, philosophy had no existence apart from science. An examination of the history of scientific ideas showed, he argued, how these ideas evolved. He firmly believed that there is evolution in ideas, with the survival of the fittest, and that we develop ideas in order to survive. For Mach, therefore, it made less sense to talk about the truth or falsity of theories than to talk of their usefulness. Truth, as an eternal, unchanging thing that just is, for him made no sense. The Vienna Circle was founded in response as much to his ideas as to Wittgenstein’s.

  THE “ARYAN DEFICIT” IN CULTURE

  All this was the Vienna that the young Adolf Hitler arrived in from Linz, where he had grown up, in 1907. It was bewildering. Brigitte Hamann tells us that in 1907 Vienna had 1,458 automobiles, which caused 350 accidents a year (overshadowed by the 980 accidents caused by horse-drawn carriages).27 The Westbahnhof, the station where Hitler arrived, was lit by electric light, as were the city’s ten inner districts. There were great battles in the newspapers of the time about the merits of modernism. For the opponents of modernism, the term “degenerate” (entartet) was a favorite form of abuse. Modernism in Vienna, at the time Hitler was there, was often referred to as “Jewish modernism,” though this was clearly not true—Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Alban Berg, Otto Wagner, and Adolf Loos were not Jewish but the label suited the opponents of innovation. According to August Kubizek, it was in Vienna that Hitler began to reflect on how the “Aryans’” obvious educational deficit and lack of interest in culture could be reduced.”28

  The two best-known anti-Semites in Vienna (though there was no shortage) were George Schönerer, the leader of the Pan-Germans (see Chapter 22), who lost his seat in the Austrian Parliament the year Hitler arrived, and Karl Lueger. The Pan-Germans pledged allegiance to their “Führer,” sang “Schönerer songs,” and wrote poetry in his praise. Full-page advertisements were taken out in the newspapers, with “HEIL TO THE FüHRER” in the headlines.29 Schönerer’s early fight was against Russian Jews, fleeing the pogroms of the tsars, and he made a point of appropriating Wagner to the anti-Semitic cause.

  Dr. Karl Lueger was Schönerer’s archenemy, and their followers often feuded. Hitler, however, was impressed by Lueger even while he was a follower of Schönerer.30 Lueger had been mayor of Vienna for ten years by the time Hitler arrived there. A handsome man, fond of the mayoral chain, he had, to his credit, masterminded the modernization of his city with efficiency and charisma, often attacking the local merchants for profiteering from their customers. “He knew how to turn disputes over such personal matters as milk prices and refuse disposal to his advantage.”31 And he raised anti-Semitism to an art form, becoming a superb, demagogic mass orator: the Jews, he insisted time and again, were to blame for most of the misfortunes of the Viennese (the Jewish population of the city had risen from 2,000 in 1860 to 175,300 in 1910).32

  We must be careful, however, not to ascribe all of Hitler’s characteristics to his time in Vienna. The Austrian capital was a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, multifaceted city which could be—and was—enjoyed in many different ways. The tumult of war and the divided and divisive landscape of the Weimar Republic still lay ahead. Still, there is no escaping the fact that Vienna in the first decade of the twentieth century provided the young Hitler with a whole raft of experiences that, almost certainly, he would never have had elsewhere.

  27.

  Munich/Schwabing: Germany’s “Montmartre”

  Munich was radiant…Young artists with little round hats on their heads…carefree bachelors who paid for their lodgings with colour-sketches…Little shops that sold picture-frames, sculptures, and antiques there were in endless number…the owners of the smallest and meanest of these shops spoke of Mino da Fiesole and Donatello as though he had received the rights of reproduction from them personally…You might see a carriage rolling up the Ludwigstrasse, with such a great painter and his mistress inside. People would be pointing out the sight…Some of them would curtsy.”

  This is Thomas Mann, in “Gladius Dei,” a story published in 1902 that in part compares contemporary Munich with quattrocento Florence.1 Mann was himself just one of the artists drawn to Munich, where the beer was famous, the architecture and landscaping incomparable, the opera, theater, and university likewise renowned and where, the breweries apart, there was no real industry and the poverty associated with it.

  Elsewhere in his work Mann was not always so positive about Munich’s position but there is no question that, at the turn of the century, the arts community was integral to the city. A municipal committee set up in 1892 to inquire into the Sezessionist Controversy (which we shall come to) confirmed that “Munich owes its outstanding importance among German cities to art and artists, however highly one may rate other factors in its development.”2 The poet Erich Mühsam described Schwabing, the cultural quarter of Munich, as Germany’s “Montmartre.” The Café Stephanie, known as Café Megalomania, was where the poets and artists met, played chess, borrowed money, and tried not to lust after Lotte Pritzel, “the most endearing amoralist ever known.”3

  The other jewel in some ways was the Neue Pinakothek, which Ludwig I (1786–1868) built for his collection of contemporary art (even today it houses only art produced since 1800). At his death in 1868 nearly half of his pictures were by non-German artists. Munich also boasted the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, “by mid-century the pre-eminent teaching institution in Central Europe.” This drew students from all over the world. “An entire generation of American realists studied in Munich in the 1870s, as did many Scandinavian, Russian and Polish students.”4

  A final aspect of the Munich art world that was unique was its exhibition space. Unlike other cities in Germany, by mid-century Munich had two buildings large enough to host shows of significant size. The first was the Kunst-und Industrieausstellungsgebäude, used for exhibitions of local art, and second the Glaspalast, designed by August Voigt to house the Allgemeine Deutsche Industrie-Ausstellung (German industrial exhibition) of 1854 and subsequently used for major shows of both historical and contemporary art, including foreign artists.

  These exhibitions were mounted by the Munich Artists Association (MAA), established in 1868, which held shows of both German and foreign artists every three years. To begin with they were insignificant affairs, but after it was granted a royal charter, the association began to use some very imaginative techniques to interest the general public in art. One device was a torchlight parade in which 800 a
rtists walked through the streets of Munich behind a horse-drawn float showing four allegorical figures of genius. In 1892, just before the Munich Sezession occurred (see Chapter 27), the association consisted of 1,020 artists and was an eclectic mix of established—even famous—artists, together with their much less successful colleagues, and students. The association’s regulations were strict, limiting the number of paintings any one artist could exhibit in their shows to three, but the exhibitions were marked by the same imaginative devices as the torchlight parade. Beer gardens were installed in the exhibitions, and lotteries were arranged with paintings and drawings as prizes.5

  Following 1871, says Maria Makela, Munich entered a golden age for the arts. Besides its lower cost of living, Munich was seen as a more relaxed city than most, with looser morals, benefiting from its proximity to the Alps and Italy, and as a rail crossroads on the way to the Orient. By 1895 some 1,180 painters and sculptors were registered there, 13 percent of the total in Germany, and more than were registered in Berlin (1,159), which had a population four times that of Munich (Dresden had 314 registered artists, Hamburg 280, and Frankfurt 142). The English painter John Lavery, who visited Munich in the 1880s, remarked that painters there “had the status of generals.”6

  Despite these positive factors, by the early 1890s disagreements over the “equal rights for all” exhibition policy at the association were reaching critical dimensions and in February 1892 eleven artists announced they had established an informal club that would pursue its own goals outside the association. None of the eleven at that stage intended to resign from the MAA but their “Sezession” was soon supported by nine other artists, and this made them more optimistic that a rival organization could succeed. They announced their decision to mount their own exhibition and that it would counter the aims of the association, which, they said, had grown too unwieldy in size and was too dominated by mediocre artists. For the city fathers, the Sezession threatened the artistic unity of Munich so it was not universally popular and there was briefly a plan by the Sezessionists to hold exhibitions in Berlin. But a member of the city’s board of works agreed to give the new group a plot of his own land for a five-year term. This kick-started the project, and the Sezessionists obtained funding to build their own gallery, an impressive achievement, making the Sezession a powerful presence in Munich even before its first exhibition opened in 1893.7

  THE “APOSTLE OF UGLINESS”

  The best-known, and for many people the best of the Sezessionists in Munich, was Max Liebermann. Though his family of wealthy cotton manufacturers was Jewish, they might almost have been one of Max Weber’s Protestants in their devotion to hard work and thrifty simplicity (Liebermann’s grandmother even did the laundry herself). Max’s father naturally wanted his son to go into the family business, so the son received little encouragement when it became clear he wanted to be a painter.

  Although he was eventually allowed to attend the Weimar Academy, Liebermann never rebelled against his bourgeois background. Indeed, his lifestyle was so like that of his businessman-father that Gerhart Hauptmann was once moved to remark: “How is it possible for such a philistine to paint such [beautiful] pictures!”8

  In fact, Liebermann was someone who kept his distance, both in his life and in his art. He announced his approach while he was still a student at Weimar, with The Goosepluckers, a large canvas showing women plucking the feathers from geese. At one level this could be seen—and was seen—as social comment, working women being exploited to pluck down in order to “warm the affluent.” On closer inspection, however, the women are shown enjoying their work, and they have a quiet dignity as they get on with it. The picture provoked widespread criticism, much of which missed the point, critics taking affront at what they took to be references to exploitation, rather than that there is dignity in honest toil.9

  Between Weimar and the Munich Sezession, Liebermann made trips to the Netherlands and to France. In the former he was very impressed by the humane policies of the Dutch toward orphans and the elderly, and he made a number of pictures showing this side of Dutch life. Here too he focused on the quiet dignity among even the most unfortunate souls, observing that everyone is capable of reflection, thoughtfulness, even peace of mind. Only later did his style become lighter, using broader brushwork and a palette knife to create scumbled passages that gave his work an even lusher appeal. This too was new and, for many, unappealing. Liebermann became known as “the apostle of ugliness.”

  After his travels in the Netherlands and France, he returned to Germany and settled in Munich. He exhibited at the association but as the 1890s passed, Liebermann’s style changed again. He started to collect paintings of the French Impressionists, and their lightness rubbed off on him. He used his distinctive grays more sparingly now, his pictures became more colorful, airy, and light—and he began to concern himself less with the world of the poor and unfortunate and more with the elegant world of the bourgeoisie.10

  Liebermann eventually settled in Berlin, where he was one of those who helped found the Sezession there and became its president. His “Impressionist” works—of Beer Gardens and parks—lack the bite of his earlier work, but his brilliant technique was just as well suited to the more fashionable world that he now portrayed. Even here he succeeded in keeping his distance. His paintings still contain some sharp observation.11

  THE OTHER DACHAU

  Unlike Max Liebermann, Fritz von Uhde’s interest in art was supported by his father. President of the Lutheran Church Council in Wolkenburg, Saxony, Uhde’s father was himself a part-time painter and was married to the daughter of the general director of the Royal Museums in Dresden. Born in 1848, Udhe was thus encouraged to enter the Dresden Academy. Like Liebermann, he went to the Netherlands to paint en plein air to gain first-hand experience of the unusual light the Dutch landscape had to offer. This produced a looser, lighter style, which he used to depict mainly lower-class life in the 1880s. As part of this, Uhde and his fellow artists used the unusual landscape and light of the moorlands northwest of Munich, at Dachau. This served more or less as the German Barbizon, and was widely known as such before it became indelibly linked with the atrocities of Nazi Germany. The marshy topography and watery landscape of Dachau fascinated several other painters besides Uhde, in particular Adolf Hölzel and Ludwig Dill who, though not widely known in the twenty-first century, were both—in their landscapes—using the peculiar climate to grope their way toward semiabstract forms that anticipated what Kandinsky would realize a decade later.12

  Franz von Stuck was a brooding sensualist from Tettenweis, a village in Bavaria; he was the son of a miller who had little feeling for art and assumed his son would take over the family business. Fortunately for the boy, his mother helped ensure that Franz was sent to a Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich where he learned the principles of design and architecture. In his early work he produced prints based on the work of some well-known Austrian and German artists—Max Klinger and Gustav Klimt among them.13

  Stuck’s own style began to emerge, well described as an amalgam of the erotic and the sinister, the naked female torso featuring in such works as The Hunt (1883), and Sin, which dominated the first Sezession show (in fact, according to Heinrich Voss, fully three-quarters of Stuck’s paintings involve the erotic). While this sounds like a lot—while it is a lot—it was not so unusual in Europe at that time, when many artists—Fernand Khnopff, Paul Gauguin, Ferdinand Hodler—began to express visually their pent-up frustration with the repressions of “civilized” society.14

  Stuck has also been seen as one of those leading the way to abstraction, in that the psychological component of his works is achieved by the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical lines and forms, by strongly contrasting color schemes that, in effect, render the actual figures secondary to the overall effect. Kandinsky, who arrived in Munich in 1896, chose Stuck as one of his teachers, working hard for a year to be accepted into his class.15

  JUGENDSTIL: REDUCING THE UGLINESS OF
MODERNITY

  Richard Riemerschmid was born in Munich, studied painting at the Munich Academy, where his early works presented nature—as those of Caspar David Friedrich had done—as a form of religious substitute (trees with halos, for example), landscapes as profane altarpieces. He was condemned as blasphemous.

  The crucial episode in his life turned out to be his marriage to the actress Ida Hofmann. After searching for furniture for the marital apartment and failing to find anything suitable, Riemerschmid designed some for himself. He hit upon a style in which the decoration used motifs taken from nature, with flowing lines that recalled leaves and fronds.16 Others liked what they saw and he received a number of commissions, the motifs of which soon caught on. Other Germans—Bernhard Pankok, Hermann Obrist, and August Endell—all began to design a wide variety of objects (light fixtures, cooking utensils, even clothing), replacing an exclusive concern with the “fine” arts. Like other artists they felt that Germany’s rapid industrialization and urbanization was robbing the world of something precious, where even Munich, much less industrial than other Grossstädte, had nearly tripled its population, from 154,000 to 415,500 between 1868 and 1896. Their idea was that the disagreeable aspects of modernity could be erased by the arts, that, in the words of Hermann Obrist, the ugliness and misery of modern life might be alleviated, “that life in the future will be less toilsome than now.”17

  The fact that the undulating organic lines of nature might recover, regenerate, rejuvenate what was in the process of dying gave rise first to the title of George Hirth’s art nouveau journal, Jugend, and then to “Jugendstil” for the whole art form. The Munich Sezession played an important role in the dissemination of Jugendstil ideas: in 1899 it mounted its most important show, combining the fine and decorative arts, featuring entire living rooms, dining rooms and bedrooms, with entries from Scotland (Charles Rennie Mackintosh), France (René Lalique) and Russia (Peter Carl Fabergé)—everything from embroidered tablecloths to jewelry to framed mirrors.18