The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  One final founding member of the Munich Sezession who soon went his own way, and made a name for himself in doing so, was Peter Behrens. Born in Hamburg in 1868, Behrens studied at that city’s school for the applied arts before going on to the Karlsruhe School of Art and the Düsseldorf Art Academy. He was in Munich from 1890, working as a painter and graphic artist, an early advocate of Jugendstil, producing woodcuts, designs for bookbindings and other artifacts. In 1897, together with Hermann Obrist, Richard Riemerschmid, and Bernhard Pankok, he was one of those who founded the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst und Handwerk, which produced handmade utilitarian objects as part of the general approach to reducing the ugliness of everyday life.

  Behrens received his big break in 1906 when he secured his first commission from AEG.19 He shared many friends with Walter Rathenau, and this may account for the commission. He was asked to design advertising material, after which Emil Rathenau chose Behrens as an artistic consultant on a wide range of projects, including the Turbinenhalle in Berlin, one of the first concrete and glass factories, housing for the factory’s workers, and a number of electrical appliances, standardizing their components so as to make them interchangeable. He designed salesrooms, sale catalogs, even price lists, famously creating for the first time a “corporate image” for the company, which gave it an immediately recognizable identity.

  A year later, together with Peter Bruckmann, Fritz Schumacher, and Richard Riemerschmid, he founded yet another organization, the Deutscher Werkbund.20 This took its color from the British Arts and Crafts movement, and the aim was to produce everyday objects with standardized interchangeable parts that would be within reach of everyone’s pocket, but of high quality like handmade goods, the underlying rationale being to remove the alienation from life. At much the same time, Behrens founded his own architectural and design practice in Berlin where, over the next few years, in the run-up to war, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier also worked. Among the firm’s architectural commissions were the German Embassy in St. Petersburg and the IG Farben Höchst headquarters in Frankfurt.21

  BROTHERS MORDANT AND MELANCHOLIC

  But there was more to Munich than its painters. The two Mann brothers (Heinrich was born in 1871 and Thomas four years later) were sons of a prominent grain merchant in the Baltic port of Lübeck. Heinrich developed faster than Thomas, qualifying for university at the age of eighteen, the same year that two of his stories were published in the local Lübeck press. He left school and worked in a Dresden bookshop, later transferring, in April 1890, to Berlin to work for the publisher Samuel Fischer.

  After their father died in October 1891, and the family firm was liquidated, both brothers received a settlement that enabled them to embark on their literary careers without too much hardship. Two years later, Frau Mann moved to Munich with the three younger children. Having already published anonymously in his school magazine, Der Frühlingssturm, Thomas then published a novella and some poems under his own name in the avant-garde monthly Die Gesellschaft and, joining his family in Munich, started working in an insurance company.22 At his mother’s suggestion (she wanted him to be a journalist) he started attending lectures at the Technische Hochschule and, on the strength of that, and because he had received an encouraging note from Richard Dehmel, submitted a story, “Der kleine Professor,” to the new quarterly Dehmel edited, called Pan.

  Heinrich had by now accepted the editorship of a new magazine, Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert (The Twentieth Century). The magazine was conservative and anti-Semitic, not qualities that would be long associated with Heinrich, but it was also polemical and anti-monarchist because the editors felt that Wilhelm II had “sold out” to capitalist and moneyed groups in Germany at the expense of the hard-working bourgeoisie.23 Heinrich wrote a great deal for the magazine, from militarism (a bête noir of his) to anti-Semitism to Nietzsche, whom he found the most interesting modern philosopher.

  For a time the brothers’ careers ran more or less in parallel, for by now Thomas’s new novella, “Der Wille zum Gluck” (The Will to Happiness), was appearing in yet another new Munich magazine, the satirical weekly Simplicissimus. This publication was the brainchild of Albert Langen, the son of a rich industrialist who had originally started a publishing house and only turned to the magazine later. Just 15,000 copies of the first edition were sold but even so the magazine soon became the sharpest-tongued publication in all Germany. Very liberal, Simplicissimus constantly attacked the government of the Reich and supported the workers against the employers. The emperor accused the magazine of undermining Germany’s international prestige, and in 1898 a lawsuit was brought against Langen, as publisher, Frank Wedekind, as writer, and Thomas Heine, a cartoonist. Langen fled to Switzerland, remaining in exile for five years, while Heine and Wedekind were imprisoned for six and seven months respectively.

  This publicity only helped the magazine, sales soared to 85,000, which helped it attract other writers like Ludwig Thoma (himself imprisoned later) and Rainer Maria Rilke. Soon after Thomas Mann began writing for it, he was asked to join the staff. He was, as we would say today, a copy-taster, vetting the stories sent in for publication. In this way he met many writers, satirists, and cartoonists of the day.

  It was about this time that differences between Heinrich and Thomas began to appear. Their only collaboration, a Bilderbuch für artige Kinder (Picture Book for Good Children), was produced in 1896–97, but with Im Schlaraffenland (In the Land of Cockaigne; 1900), and Buddenbrooks(1901), the divergence of the brothers became obvious. Thomas’s Buddenbrooks was a long, beautifully written account of a declining bourgeois family, which owed as much to Thomas’s reading—and appreciation of—Tolstoy, as to anything else. But the book was bleak. Thomas Budden-brook and his son Hanno die at a relatively early age—Thomas in his forties, Hanno in his teens—“for no other very good reason than they have lost the will to live.” Behind their fate lies the specter of Darwin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, nihilism, and degeneracy. Although it sold only slowly to begin with, it was critically well received, and eventually earned for Thomas enduring fame and the Nobel Prize.24

  Heinrich’s Im Schlaraffenland, on the other hand, has been described as “the first completely ‘new’ novel of the twentieth century in Germany,” showing a debt to Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola. “Half my being consisted at this time,” he said later, “of French sentences.” The story concerned the temptations of an innocent young writer anxious to make his mark in fin-de-siècle Berlin. Into this apparently simple story line, Heinrich brought to bear his acid powers of observation, a mordant eye for the corrosive aspects of social climbing, lust for money, commercial deceit, and sham in all its guises. It was an angry book, “impudent,” as his publisher described it, and cast in a style that hadn’t existed before, at least not in Germany. Heinrich was close to a breakdown after producing it, but the book was unique in the history of the German novel, “the first major foundation of German expressionism.”25

  Whereas Heinrich became ever more acerbic, an ever louder critic of Wilhelmine Germany (as he was one of the first, much later, to predict the annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis), Thomas was more melancholic, more interested in the arts.26 This affected his choice of follow-up to Buddenbrooks, a work in which, as Thomas later said, “I learned to use music to mould my style and form.” This was Tonio Kröger, which he later described as the “dearest” of all his books and the most personal.27 Tonio Kröger is about a young writer’s struggle to find his true self as an artist, his disillusion and his comparison of the life of the bourgeoisie—to which he is also drawn—and that of an artist. This theme, the place of art in life, and its relation to “engagement” and politics, was to dog Thomas all through his career.

  Between their first successes and the outbreak of World War I, both brothers wrote a great deal and both had one more major triumph before hostilities sent them their separate ways. In Heinrich’s case it was Professor Unrat, published in 1905. This was about
a small-town secondary-school teacher, Professor Rat, who is so loathed by his students that they nickname him “Unrat,” altering the meaning of his name from “counsel” to “excrement.”28 Unbalanced by this, Unrat one evening follows a group of students to a shady nightclub near the town’s port, a club called the Blue Angel, where he intends to expose them and ruin their careers. Instead, he falls for the nightclub singer Künsterlin Fröhlich. His obsession is now threatened with exposure by the very students he had intended to disgrace, and it is he who begins to sink ever lower in society. Dismissed by his school, he marries the singer and, with the aid of the gambling that takes place in the club, exercises a corrupting influence on the whole town.

  Professor Unrat showed Heinrich at his bitter best but such was the nationalism in Germany at the time that his message was scarcely welcome. However, when the book was re-issued in the middle of the war it did much better, selling over 50,000 copies. It did even better in 1930 when Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) became one of the first sound films released in Germany, directed by Josef von Sternberg, with a script by Carl Zuckmayer and starring Marlene Dietrich as the nightclub singer.

  Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), published by Thomas in 1913, was much better received. Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer newly arrived in Venice to complete his masterpiece. He has the appearance, as well as the first name, of Mahler, whom Mann fiercely admired and who died on the eve of Mann’s own arrival in Venice in 1911. No sooner has Aschenbach arrived than he chances upon a Polish family staying in the same hotel and he is struck by the dazzling beauty of the young son, Tadzio, dressed in an English sailor suit. The story follows the aging Aschenbach’s growing love for Tadzio; meanwhile he neglects his work, and his body succumbs to the cholera epidemic encroaching on Venice. Aschenbach fails to complete his work and also, deliberately, fails to alert Tadzio’s family to the epidemic so they might escape. The writer dies, never having spoken to his beloved.

  Aschenbach, with his ridiculously quaffed hair, his rouge make-up, his elaborate and dated clothes, is intended by Mann to embody a once-great culture now “deracinated and degenerate.” He is also the artist himself. In Mann’s private diaries, published posthumously, he admitted to being erotically stirred by young, handsome men, though his 1905 marriage to Katja Pringsheim (daughter of a well-known professor at the University of Munich and herself the first female student at that institution) seemed happy enough. The horrors lurking beneath the surface of the story also call to mind the general climate of opinion in “civilized” Europe in the run-up to war.

  BEER AND SATIRE

  Simplicissimus was not only the name of a satirical magazine. It was also adopted as the name for one of the new “cabarets” in Munich. The city had a long tradition of popular entertainment—there were, according to one account, nearly 400 folksingers performing in Munich in 1900.29 Their entertainment was tied to the popular beer-drinking culture of the city.

  But one man stood out: Frank Wedekind (1864–1918). His father was a doctor and his mother a singer and actress, and the family lived in Hanover. The doctor was a fierce democrat, had taken part in the 1848 revolution, and afterward escaped to America (his son’s name was actually Benjamin Franklin Wedekind).30 In America the doctor made a quick fortune in land speculation and it was there, in San Francisco, that he met his wife, twenty-three years younger than he. He returned to Germany but, dismayed by Bismarck’s policies, immigrated to Switzerland and bought a castle in Lenzburg, where Frank grew up. He attended first the University of Lausanne and then the University of Munich but abandoned his legal and literature studies, taking a job as a publicity agent for the Swiss soup company Maggi. He visited London, Paris, and Zurich, where he met the Swedish playwright August Strindberg and had an affair—and a child—with his wife.

  Back in Munich Wedekind led a bohemian life, producing work that often flirted with the censor, and sometimes went well beyond what even the liberal Munich authorities would allow. His first full-length drama of importance was Frühlingserwachen (Spring Awakening; 1891), which appeared in book form and wasn’t realized on stage until Max Reinhardt produced it fifteen years later. Its theme was adolescent sexuality, and most people found it far too obscene to be actually performed (a fourteen-yearold girl dies as the result of a botched abortion).

  Wedekind, as we have seen, was one of the cofounders of Simplicissimus, with Langen. For his satire on the Kaiser he was forced into exile, then jailed, but in 1901 he paraded with a group of artists, writers, and students, denouncing censorship, after which eleven of the demonstrators established a cabaret called Die 11 Scharfrichter (The Eleven Executioners).31 They rented a smallish room at the back of an inn (it seated only eighty people) and decorated it with paintings by their friends from Jugend and Simplicissimus as well as some instruments of torture—which appealed to Wedekind’s love of the grotesque. In the cabaret, Wedekind sang his own songs and accompanied himself on the guitar.32

  Among the many women in Wedekind’s life, there was only one, Tilly Newes, the actress he married in 1906. Tilly starred in Wedekind’s magnum opus, Lulu, which appeared in two parts, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) in 1895, and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) in 1904.33 She played Lulu to Wedekind’s Jack the Ripper. Lulu is a wild, untameable, beautiful beast, the very embodiment of female sexuality—or what men would like female sexuality to be. “She was created to stir up great disaster,” is how Wedekind himself described his greatest creation. She became even better known when Karl Kraus staged Pandora’s Box privately in Vienna in 1905. Sitting in the sixth row was the composer Alban Berg (1885–1935). His postwar opera would introduce a whole new public to Lulu.

  THE ROAD TO ABSTRACTION

  In 1896 the Russian Wassily Kandinsky inherited enough money from an uncle for him to become financially independent. His interest in art was kindled by seeing one of Monet’s haystack paintings at an exhibition in Moscow and also by a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Bolshoi which he later said he experienced mainly as “a series of wild lines and colours.” He moved to Munich where he entered the private art school run by Anton Azbe.

  There he met Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, fellow students at the school and, the following year, he visited the Sezession exhibition, encountering the works of Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Hermann Obrist. Kandinsky’s own works were rejected by the Munich Art Academy but in 1900 he was accepted into Franz von Stuck’s class, where Paul Klee was a fellow student. Stuck encouraged Kandinsky to work with strong light and dark contrasts, and he began a series of color works on black paper and some early woodcuts. In May 1901 he was instrumental in the founding of the Phalanx group with Waldemar Hecker and Ernst Stern. The Phalanx artists were—like the Sezessionists—opposed to old-fashioned and conservative art.

  Kandinsky was by now integrated into the German art scene: he was friendly with Behrens and Obrist, his work showed the influence of Jugendstil, and he exhibited at the Berlin Sezession. On a visit to the Netherlands in 1904 with Gabriele Münter, a fellow Phalanx artist eleven years his junior, Kandinsky began to apply paint mainly with a palette knife and at the same time started to make notes about his new theories on color and form.34 His first solo show took place in Munich in 1905, at the Galerie Krause. That year, too, he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, after which he and Gabriele moved to Sèvres, west of Paris, where he could observe the work of Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Rouault, Henri Rousseau, and Edvard Munch and where he formed a friendship with Gertrude Stein, who had a comprehensive collection of paintings by these masters. That year too his pictures were shown again in the Berlin Sezession, next to the painters of Die Brücke.

  In 1908, on a cycling tour, Kandinsky and Gabriele discovered (or in his case rediscovered, because he had been there in 1904), the village of Murnau. Kandinsky explained its attractions in a postcard: “It is very, very beautiful…The l
ow-lying and slow-moving clouds, the dusky, dark-violet woods, the gleaming white buildings, velvety deep roofs of the churches, the saturated green of the foliage, remain with me; I even dreamt of these things.” The landscape around Murnau gradually became a decisive motif in Kandinsky’s output, the colors growing more lively, ever more vivid as the forms began to dissolve.35

  In 1909 Kandinsky and Gabriele, together with Alexei Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and the art historians Oskar Wittenstein and Heinrich Schnabel, founded the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich New Artists’ Association), the NKVM, with Kandinsky as chairman. The aim of the association read: “Our assumption is that artists, apart from impressions observed in the outside world, progressively collect experiences of the inner world,” adding that the artist’s task was to “free the line for the inner sound.” That same year Kandinsky produced Painting with Skiff, a work he later described, for the first time, as an “improvisation,” subsequently defined as “mainly sub-conscious…impressions of an ‘inner nature.’”36 In that year too Gabriele Münter bought a house in Murnau, which they called The Russian House and where she and Kandinsky spent several months a year from then on. The following year he began to refer to his works as “C,” for composition, followed by a number.

  Beginning in 1910 Kandinsky embarked on a series of ten compositions, seven completed before 1914, which are now regarded as his most important paintings. His most significant relationship at this crucial time, after Gabriele, was with Franz Marc, who Kandinsky felt understood him instinctively, though he also came under the influence of Nietzsche.37 In the exhibition organized that year by the NKVM his Composition II and Improvisation 10 created a storm of protest, but Marc wrote a review about the “spiritualisation of the material world” and “an immaterial inner sensation which expresses itself through pictures.” Kandinsky confirmed that this was his aim.