The German Genius
Page 61
Not too dissimilar was Anton von Werner, whose vast, precise canvases were reproduced in German schoolbooks and became familiar as few art works are. His Kaiser Proclamation in Versailles, which depicted the emperor and his generals toasting the foundation of the German Empire in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors, was a gift to Bismarck. Appointed president of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1875, Werner subsequently became Wilhelm II’s tutor, reinforcing the young Kaiser’s instinctive loathing for modern art.
But though Wilhelm and Werner were a powerful minority, they were a minority nonetheless. As early as 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists invited Edvard Munch to exhibit his work there. Fifty-five paintings were planned and the conservatives duly incensed. Werner led the chorus, and the show was canceled. The old guard were not so successful with Max Liebermann. Liebermann’s very Germanic humanity was self-evident in his pictures, but Wilhelm did not think that painting should make “misery even more hideous than it already is.”33 Accordingly, he did his best to keep Liebermann barred from official exhibitions. This did not stop the popular painter from exhibiting in private shows, and eventually he grew so popular that he was admitted to the official salon. In 1897 he won the Gold Medal, was elected to the Prussian Academy of Art, and appointed professor at the Royal Academy.
If the Kaiser lost (for the time being) to Liebermann, he won with Käthe Kollwitz. A jury recommended in 1898 that Kollwitz, a powerful, emotional artist, who lived in a Berlin slum, be awarded a gold medal for her cycle of etchings, The Revolt of the Weavers, based on Hauptmann’s play. (The revolt of the Silesian weavers in the 1840s had great significance for the making of the German working class.) The Kaiser had to be consulted before the medal could be announced, and it was too much. “Please, gentlemen,” he complained, “a medal for a woman, that’s really going too far…Orders and honours belong on the chests of deserving men.” Coming on top of the Munch affair, this was too much for the artists.34 In that same year Liebermann and others announced the Berlin Sezession, modeled on the earlier reactions in Vienna and Munich. Their aim was to show art they thought worth showing and without interference. They obtained backing from wealthy collectors, not a few of whom were Jewish. The Cassirer cousins, Bruno and Paul, were the chief supporters—their gallery in Kantstrasse was a leading venue for modern art. For the Sezession, they built a new gallery.35
The Kaiser did not disappoint. All military officers were forbidden to attend the Sezession when in uniform, and Sezession members were banned from serving on juries of the salon. Sezession artists were likewise banned from showing at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Subsequently, officials of the Cultural Ministry held out an olive branch, conceiving a plan for a Liebermann retrospective at the Royal Academy. But the Kaiser was having none of it. The painter, he said, “was poisoning the soul of the German nation.” In fairness to the Kaiser, only three artists of the Berlin Sezession have stood the test of time, Liebermann, Walter Leistikow, and Lovis Corinth. It was Corinth who coined the term “Expressionist” for a predominantly German art form he was himself at odds with.36
The battles between the Kaiser and the artists went on. Die Brücke, a group of Expressionist painters, was founded in Dresden in 1905, and moved to Berlin five years later. Its spokesman, Herwarth Walden, launched a magazine and art gallery called Der Sturm which, on the brink of the war, was the heart and brains of the German avant-garde.37 The art of Die Brücke was—much more than the Sezession—an urban art. The two most important figures were Ludwig Meidner and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Both were concerned with the side of Berlin that the Kaiser thought had no place in art—Meidner focused on suspension bridges, gas tanks, express locomotives, while Kirchner’s contorted figures represented, as he put it, the raw energy in the city’s streets and taverns, the new psychology Simmel had identified, the “so-called distortions” in his paintings “generated instinctively by the ecstasy of what is seen.”38 Static representation was impossible, he insisted, when the inhabitants of the city were in perpetual motion, “a blur of light and action. The city required of its artists a new way of seeing.” The Kaiser, it goes without saying, was affronted.
While Berlin’s reputation as a city of modern art was new, and far from settled, it had been a museum town since 1830, when Schinkel had designed the Altes Museum on the small spit of land in the middle of the Spree that soon became known as the Museuminsel (Museum Island). The Neues Museum was added in 1855, and the Nationalgalerie in 1876.39 In this area, Wilhelm was lucky in having one of Europe’s cleverest collectors and connoisseurs, Wilhelm von Bode, who took over as director of the new Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum when it opened on Museum Island in 1904.40 Bode obtained for Berlin a raft of impressive old masters that included Rembrandt’s Man in a Golden Helmet and Dürer’s Hieronymus Holzschuher.* His success was underlined by the fact that his activities were spared the Kaiser’s interferences. In fact, Wilhelm positively helped von Bode by awarding titles to those who offered works to the royal collections.
In contemporary art the familiar problems resurfaced. The director of the National Gallery, Hugo von Tschudi, was as accomplished a man as Bode, and an expert on French painting and contemporary art and sculpture.41 The Kaiser, however, refused to give him the free hand he gave von Bode and, on one visit, noticed that some German works had been removed, their place taken “by pictures of modern taste, some of them of foreign origin.” He insisted the originals be put back.
The Kaiser couldn’t be everywhere at once, however, and Tschudi did find ways to acquire some contemporary masterpieces, including a Cézanne, making him the first museum director in the world to do so (at that stage, not even the French state had any Cézannes in its official collections).42 Later, however, when Tschudi bought works by Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, and Honoré Daumier, the Kaiser exploded, complaining that Tschudi might “show such stuff to a monarch who understood nothing of art, but not to him.” In 1908 Tschudi decamped to Munich to become head of the royal museums there.
Despite his conservative and retrograde taste in the arts, the Kaiser was nonetheless proud of the scientists and engineers who were building Germany’s prosperity and, since he thought of himself as a man of the future, and believed that the application of new knowledge was the key to progress, he prevailed upon the University of Berlin at the turn of the century to recognize the graduates of the recently created Realgymnasien, which emphasized science at the expense of the humanities. For all his striking contradictions, the elevation in the status of Realgymnasien was conceivably the best thing the Kaiser ever did in cultural and intellectual affairs; it was built on in 1910 when, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, he announced a new institution for the natural sciences. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Germany’s answer to France’s Pasteur Institute and America’s Rockefeller Institutes, was funded by private industry and the government, and would pay dividends in spades.43
29.
The Great War between Heroes and Traders
In the early months of the Great War, the Viennese developed a set of symbolic acts that fortified them and helped them identify with the troops at the front. For instance, in the Schwarzenbergplatz, off the Ringstrasse, was a wooden statue, called the Wehrmann im Eisen, the “soldier in iron.” Anyone who wanted to could buy a handful of nails—the profits from which went to benefit war widows and orphans—and hammer the nails into the statue, “covering him in iron, enveloping him in the collective strength of the Austrian Volkskraft.”1
Support for the war was not, as Matthew Stibbe has recently revealed, quite as enthusiastic in Germany in 1914 as previously reported. Outside the main cities, and among the working class in particular, the mood, he says, was one of “resignation, indifference or passive acceptance” rather than aggressive nationalism. It was intellectuals who believed they were “called upon” to underpin the belligerence with a coherent philosophy, “which idealised the power conflict in terms of an alleged spi
ritual antithesis between German Kultur and political forms and those of its enemies.” (Though Norbert Elias felt that Nietzsche, “almost certainly without being aware of it,” in his book Der Wille zur Macht [The Will to Power], gave philosophical form to the belligerence of the Wilhelmine middle class.)2
For many, Kultur was the central factor in the war.3 What these individuals meant by “Kultur” was the set of achievements represented by Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven—“high culture,” art, music, literature, and scholarship together with “a set of collective virtues” (diligence, order, and discipline) regarded as characteristically German. Writers, historians, and philosophers on both sides of the political divide shared these views—Thomas Mann, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, Werner Sombart, Max Scheler, and Alfred Weber, to name only a few.
THE IDEAS OF 1914
From the outbreak of war, there was in Germany a very public meditation on what was distinctive about German culture, with dichotomies being sharpened on a “polar opposition” between Kultur and Zivilisation. These polar opposites quickly came to a head, sparked by what the rest of the world saw as Germany’s barbaric behavior during its conquests in Belgium and northeastern France, when the ancient library in the Belgian town of Louvain was burned and the cathedral in Rheims was badly damaged, and Belgian civilians in Dinant and elsewhere were massacred, in “retaliation” for alleged acts of sabotage. British and French academics led the cry that the best-known figures of culture and science in Germany must publicly distance themselves from Prussian militarism, but the effect was not what they anticipated. Whole swaths of German cultural and academic figures rallied behind the German war effort and, on October 4, 1914, a group of ninety-three of the most distinguished German scholars and artists issued the “Manifesto of the 93”—an “Appeal to the Cultural World” (Der Aufruf der 93, “An die Kulturwelt”) in which they flatly refuted all charges of barbarianism in Belgium and insisted instead: “It is not true that the struggle against our so-called militarism is not also a struggle against our civilisation, as our enemies hypocritically pretend it is. Were it not for German militarism, German civilisation would have long since been extirpated from the earth. The former arose from the need to protect the latter in a country which for centuries has been afflicted by predatory invasions.”4
The signatories to this appeal included the writers Richard Dehmel and Gerhart Hauptmann; the painters Max Klinger, Max Libermann, and Hans Thoma; the musicians Engelbert Humperdinck, Siegfried Wagner, and Felix von Weingartner; the theater director Max Reinhardt; prominent academics such as Ernst Haeckel, Fritz Klein, the Nobel Laureate physicists Philipp Lenard, Richard Willstätter, and Max Planck; the future Nobel Laureate chemist, Fritz Haber; the theologian Adolf von Harnack; the economists Lujo Brentano and Gustav Schmoller; the philologists Karl Vossler and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff; the philosopher Alois Riehl; and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, together with the historians Karl Lamprecht, Max Lenz, Eduard Meyer, and Friedrich Meinecke. Even before this, a group of academics had renounced their honorary degrees awarded by British universities.5
All this may sound unreal now, and irrelevant, after the widespread horrors that happened later in World War I, and then in the 1930s and World War II, but the “Appeal” did reflect the views of educated people in the Germany of the time, that the war would bring about the country’s rise to world power status and would therefore “go down in history as the German war.” Following the “Appeal” there was a raft of speeches, books, and other events in the same vein. The Bund Deutscher Gelehrter und Künstler, which had its head office in Berlin, recruited 200 leading figures from the literary and artistic world, including Thomas Mann, to argue the intellectual case for war.6 One of the main themes was the superiority of Germany’s authoritarian constitution over the parliamentary regimes of the west.
These ideas remained important. Max Lenz, Otto von Gierke, Max Scheler, and Karl Lamprecht all advanced arguments for German “world leadership” and Lamprecht, one of the advisers to wartime chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, was, like others, not averse to playing the race card: “It is subjectively recognised and objectively proven that we are capable of the highest achievements in the world and must therefore be at least considered entitled to share in world rule…”7 Lamprecht argued that the British were guilty of a sense of “innate superiority” that was too much: “For the other nations this [English] feeling [of superiority] is completely intolerable, and I dare say that the world cannot return to peace until this feeling has been replaced…by a more modest appraisal.”
More impressive were the arguments of the generation of historians who comprised Max Lenz, Erich Marcks, Otto Hintze, and Hans Delbrück among others.8 Their view—commonplace since the 1890s—was that the system of old European states, which existed in Ranke’s day, would soon be replaced by a small number of world states (empires) in which the Germans would take their place as an equal. For them, the point of the war was to force Britain, the oldest of the established world powers, to surrender its pre-eminence and grant Germany equality.
The effect was twofold. It meant that Britain had to be seen as the instigator of the war, and it provided yet more justification for militarism. Even a moderate like Hans Delbrück, who later came to oppose government war policy, could write as follows in the early months of hostilities: “This nation is invincible…against that island nation [Britain]…[these] men of commerce, who merely hand out money, who send out mercenaries and mobilise the barbaric masses and think they are able to defeat us—it is these [men] who we need to be fighting against…with the certainty of our eternal inner superiority…”
Not everyone fell into this category. In 1915, for instance, Otto Hintze, Friedrich Meinecke, Hermann Oncken, and Hermann Schumacher got together to produce Deutschland und der Weltkrieg, aimed at counteracting the effects of English propaganda on neutral countries, in particular the United States.9 They sought specifically to counter the British propagandists who had resurrected the French argument that there were two Germanies, the Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven, on the one side, and the Germany of Treitschke, Nietzsche, and General Friedrich von Bernhardi on the other. Hintze, Delbrück, and Meinecke stopped short of advocating the utter destruction of Britain, arguing instead for a “balance-of-power” and they thus seemed reasonable, certainly in comparison with everyone else.10 In general, however, they were drowned out by more openly annexationist writers and speech makers.
Oswald Spengler, later well known as the author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West; see Chapter 30), believed that Germany’s decision “to challenge England for world domination” was a turning point in history. The fight with Britain was for him a crude Darwinian struggle between “English” liberalism, “with its emphasis on individual freedom and self-determination,” and “Prussian” socialism, “with its emphasis on order and authority.”11 Elsewhere he confessed, “In the Germany which made its world position secure through technical skill, money and an eye for facts, a completely soulless Americanism will rule, and will dissolve art, the nobility, the Church…in a materialism such as only once has been seen before—in Rome at the time of the First Empire.”12
As the war continued, and the stalemate grew staler, still the arguments kept coming. Even Max Weber, so sane in so many ways, said this in a speech in Nuremberg in August 1916: “It would be shameful if we lacked the courage to ensure that neither Russian barbarism, English monotony, nor French grandiloquence ruled the world. That is why this war is being fought.” The historian Friedrich Meinecke went much further, claiming that the German nation as a whole “has a mission from God to organise the divine essence of man in a separate, unique [and] irreplaceable form. It is like a great artist, who, by means of his personal genius, creates something above his own personality…Only the Germans had managed to find the combination of Innerlichkeit, individual freedom and willingness to sacrifice selfish interests to the good of the whole tha
t characterised their unique spiritual heritage.” The philosopher Eduard Spranger wrote about the need to keep alive the German tradition of Bildung.13
Even as the war started to go against Germany, the cultural arguments remained strong. The philosopher Adolf Lasson insisted: “The whole of European culture, which is surely the only universal form of human culture, has gathered itself together like a focal point on German soil and in the hearts of the German people. It would be quite wrong to express ourselves on this point with modesty and reservation. We Germans represent the…highest of all that European culture has ever brought forth; upon this rests the strength and the fullness of our self-esteem.”14
In his own wartime essay “Gedanken im Kriege” (Thoughts in War), Thomas Mann spoke of Germany’s “indispensable role as missionary” in defending the unique status of German Kultur against the superficial, liberal Zivilisation of the West. And he went on, “It is not so easy to be a German…[It is] not so comfortable as it is to be English, and not at all such a distinct and cheerful thing as it is to live as the French do. This people has difficulty with itself, it finds itself questionable, it suffers from itself to the point of outright disgust; but…it is those that suffer the most that are of the most worth, and whoever would wish that German manners should disappear from the world in favour of humanité and raison is committing a sacrilege.” Perhaps inevitably, at that stage anyway, he argued that Western-style democracy was not the German way. “[T]his most introspective of people, this people of metaphysics, of pedagogy and of music, is not a politically oriented, but a morally oriented people. And thus it has shown itself to be more hesitant and less interested in political progress towards democracy, towards parliamentary forms of government, and especially towards republicanism, than other [peoples].”15