by Peter Watson
When war broke out, Thomas Mann—as we have seen—was as nationalistic as many others. He was not yet one of the giants of European literature, but he did have a growing reputation. He volunteered for the Landsturm, or reserve army, but the doctor who examined him was familiar with his work and, reasoning that he would make a greater contribution to the war effort as a writer rather than as a soldier, failed him physically for active service.
Like other intellectuals, Mann also saw the fighting as a clash of cultures, a battle of ideas. His first essay, “Thoughts in Wartime,” written in August 1914, claimed he had seen the war coming, that Germany had been coerced into war by its “envious” adversaries and that, altogether, war was “a tremendous creative event,” helping to stimulate “national unity and moral elevation.”29
After “Thoughts in Wartime,” Mann intended to spend the following months and years completing his next major work, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), which would contain much implied criticism of the corrupt prewar world that had led Europe to the abyss. But that was to reckon without his brother Heinrich. In his own lifetime, Heinrich would pass through the entire political spectrum, from (as we saw earlier) the editor of a racialist publication to become a supporter of Stalin. But in 1916, he published an essay on Émile Zola in a new dissident journal and in the essay there were a number of disparaging references to Thomas. Heinrich insisted that politics were important and he accused his brother of ignoring this dimension.30
So upset was Thomas by Heinrich’s attack that he broke into work on The Magic Mountain, and devoted several months to a long essay, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man), which reached the bookshops just before the armistice in 1918. In this work, he discovered that he was more nationalistic than he had anticipated but, more important, he found he was a “profoundly apolitical being.” This was not due to any failings in his education, he said, but as a matter of principle. Politics, he thought, “was not a fit occupation for aristocrats of the spirit.” He therefore wrote about the war, in Walter Lacquer’s words, with great confidence and “almost total abstraction.”31 “Mann thought of the war mainly as great drama, a conflict of ideas…He had attached certain attributes to the German spirit and also to the French, the Russian and the British; America had no civilisation and did not count.”32 His view, directly contradictory to Heinrich’s, was that the “ultimate questions of mankind” could not be solved by politics.
A rambling but powerful (and in parts shrewd) critique of democracy, Mann pointed out its weakness and predicted it would not suit the Germans who, he thought, wanted and needed authority. He was dismissive, too, arguing that a democratic Germany would be “boring.” Walter Lacquer again: “He lived to realise that the boredom of the 1910s was greatly preferable to the excitement of the 1930s.”33
THE DADA VIRUS
During the war many artists and writers retreated to Zurich in neutral (but German-speaking) Switzerland. James Joyce wrote much of Ulysses there; Hans Arp, Frank Wedekind, and Romain Rolland were also there. They met in the cafés of Zurich which for a time paralleled in importance the coffeehouses of Vienna at the turn of the century—the Café Odeon was the most well known. For many of those in exile in Zurich, the war seemed to mark the end of the civilization that had spawned them. It came after a period in which art had become a proliferation of “isms,” when science had discredited both the notion of an immutable reality and the concept of a wholly rational and self-conscious man. In such a world, the Dadaists felt they had to transform radically the whole concept of art and the artist.
Among the other regulars at the Café Odeon were Franz Werfel, Alexei Jawlensky, and Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher. There was also an unknown German writer, a “Catholic anarchist” named Hugo Ball (1886–1927), and his girlfriend, Emmy Hennings (1885–1948).34 Hennings was a journalist but also performed as a cabaret actress, accompanied by Ball on the piano. In February 1916 they opened a review or cabaret with a literary bent. It was ironically called the Café Voltaire (ironic because Dada eschewed the very reason for which Voltaire was celebrated) and occupied premises on the Spiegelgasse, a steep and narrow alley where Lenin lived.35 Among the first to appear at Voltaire were two Romanians, the painter Marcel Janco and a young poet, Sami Rosenstock, who adopted the pen name of Tristan Tzara.36 The only Swiss among the early group was Sophie Taeuber, Hans Arp’s wife (he was from Alsace). Others included Richard Hülsenbeck and Hans Richter from Germany.
For a review in June 1916, Ball produced a program and it was in his introduction to the performance that the word “Dada” was first used. Ball’s journal records the kind of entertainment at Café Voltaire: “Rowdy provocateurs, primitivist dance, cacophony and Cubist theatricals.” Tzara always claimed to have found the word Dada in the Larousse dictionary, but whether the term ever had any intrinsic meaning, it soon acquired one, best summed up by Hans Richter. He said it had some connection “with the joyous Slavonic affirmative ‘Da, da’…‘yes, yes’ to life.” In a time of war it lauded play as the most cherished human activity. Dada was designed to rescue the sick mind that had brought mankind to catastrophe and restore its health. Dada questioned whether, in the light of scientific and political developments, art—in the broadest sense—was possible. Rather than follow any of the “isms” they derided, Dada turned instead to childhood and chance in an attempt to recapture innocence, cleanliness, clarity—all as a way to probe the unconscious.
No one succeeded in this more than Hans Arp (1886–1966) and Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948). Arp produced two types of image. There were his simple woodcuts, toylike jigsaws; as children do, he loved to paint clouds and leaves in straightforward, bright, immediate colors.37 At the same time he was open to chance, tearing off strips of paper that he dropped and fixed wherever they fell, creating random collages. Kurt Schwitters made collages too, but he found poetry in rubbish.38 A cubist at heart, he scavenged his native Hanover for anything dirty, peeling, stained, half-burnt, or torn. Although his collages may appear to have been thrown together at random, the colors match, the edges of one piece of material align perfectly with another, the stain in a newspaper echoes a form elsewhere in the composition. The detritus and flotsam in Schwitters’s collages were for him a comment, both on the culture that leads to war, creating carnage, waste, and filth, and uncomfortable elegies to the end of an era, a new form of art that was simultaneously a relic, a condemnation of that world, and a memorial.
Toward the end of the war, Hugo Ball left Zurich for the Ticino and the center of gravity shifted to Germany. It was in Berlin that Dada changed, becoming far more political. Berlin, amid defeat, was a brutal place. In November 1918, the month of the armistice, there was a general uprising, which failed, its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered. The uprising was a defining moment for, among others, Adolf Hitler, but also for the Dadaists.
It was Richard Hülsenbeck who transported “the Dada virus” to Berlin.39 He published his Dada manifesto in April 1918, and a Dada club was established. Early members included Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hanna Höch.40 George Grosz and Otto Dix were the fiercest critics among the painters, their most striking image being the wretched half-human forms of the war cripple.41 Their depiction of the prostheses with which these people were fitted made them seem half-human, half-machine, with an element of the puppet, the old order still in command behind the scenes.
THE STOLEN VICTORY
In explaining what came next, it is necessary to explore briefly the nature of Germany’s defeat in World War I. Although by common consent all the European combatants had fought themselves to a standstill and Germany was, to all intents and purposes, the loser, it was possible for Germans to derive some—albeit grim—comfort from what had actually come to pass. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch puts it, in his book on Die Kultur der Niederlage (The Culture of Defeat), “Only America’s sudden intervention, at the Allies’s behest, had saved England and France fro
m the coup de grâce of the spring invasion of 1918. Put simply, the Americans had stolen Germany’s victory.” To the Germans, the very fact that the Allies had “ridden America’s coattails to victory” instantly converted the other European nations into “second-rate powers…Germany had not been subdued in and by Europe.” This meant that Germany was a loser only in relation to America, that she, from now on, would be “the only serious participant in a future Europe-America duel.”42 Unlike the Triple Entente, Germany had fought the war, not with American aid, but using only its own resources. France was the real weakling and loser. Her old ideas of revanchism since 1870–71 had implied subduing Germany in a one-onone contest, but France had suffered much damage and, by herself, would have been quickly overcome. After the war, General Ludendorff gave as his explanation for Germany’s loss that she had not been defeated by the enemy but “stabbed in the back” by forces at home (Dolchstosslegende). The desire for a unanimity of national feeling, the Burgfrieden (literally “fortress-peace”) remained strong.
There are two ways of looking at these remarks. One, that the German views about her 1919 predicament were real enough, sharpened by her defeat. Or that they were fantasies, ignoring the Realpolitik of the situation (why had America supported the Allies?). Either way, they played a part in what came next. As Norbert Elias has said, the defeat of 1918 had interfered with the whole process of Germany’s “catching up.”43
31.
Weimar: “Unprecedented Mental Alertness”
The old Vienna officially came to an end on April 3, 1919, when the republic of Austria abolished titles of nobility, forbidding the use even of “von” in legal documents. The peace left Austria a nation of only 7 million people with a capital that was home to 2 million of them. The years that followed brought famine, inflation, a chronic lack of fuel, and a catastrophic epidemic of influenza. Housewives were forced to cut trees in the woods, and the university closed because its roof had not been repaired since 1914. Coffee, historian William Johnston tells us, was made of barley, and bread caused dysentery. Freud’s daughter Sophie was killed by the influenza epidemic, as was the painter Egon Schiele.
Freud, Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, and Otto Neurath all stayed on in Vienna and the Vienna-Budapest (and Prague) German-speaking axis did not disappear completely, still producing individuals such as Michael Polanyi, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Karl Popper, and Ernst Gombrich. But it wasn’t the same, and these people came to prominence only after the Nazis forced them to flee to the West. Vienna was no longer the buzzing intellectual center it had been, its cafés no longer the warm, informal meeting place of a worldly elite. What Vienna offered now, as we shall see, was the occasional literary or scientific or philosophical firework, which had to shine the more brilliantly against a brighter firmament to the north. The city’s thunder had been stolen, and her lightning too.
THE FIRST “ART FILM”
Berlin was a different matter. Following World War I, Germany was turned almost overnight into a republic. The fact that this could happen at all shows what is often overlooked—that, as mentioned earlier, some parliamentary/democratic traditions had been established. Berlin remained the capital, but Weimar was chosen as the seat of the assembly after a constitutional conference had been held there to decide the form the new republic would take. The choice of Weimar was based partly on its reputation dating from the time of Goethe and Schiller, and partly on worries that the violence in Berlin and Munich would escalate if either of those cities was selected. (Hitler always hated the wit and cynicism of Berlin.) The Weimar Republic lasted for fourteen years, until Hitler came to power in 1933, “a tumultuous interregnum between disasters” which nevertheless managed to produce a distinctive culture both brilliant and singular, and despite the steady decay of the state’s monopoly on violence during those years and which, as Norbert Elias has highlighted, was as much a part of Weimar culture as anything else. 1
The period is conventionally divided into three clear phases. From the end of 1918 to 1924, “with its revolution, civil war, foreign occupation, and fantastic inflation, [there] was a time of experimentation in the arts.” Expressionism dominated politics as much as it dominated painting or the stage. This was followed, from 1924 to 1929, by a period of economic stability, a relief from political violence, and increasing prosperity reflected in the arts by the Neue Sachlichkeit, the “new objectivity,” a movement whose aims were “matter-of-factness,” sobriety.2 Finally, the period 1929–1933 saw a return to political violence, rising unemployment, and authoritarian government by decree; the arts were cowed into silence and replaced by propagandistic Kitsch.
After painting, the art form most influenced by Expressionism was film. In February 1920 a horror film was released in Berlin that was, in the words of one critic, “uncanny, demonic, cruel, ‘Gothic,’ a Frankenstein-type story filled with bizarre lighting and dark, distorted sets. Considered by many to be the first “art-film,” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a huge success, so popular in Paris that it played in the same theater every day between 1920 and 1927. But the film was more than a record breaker.
Caligari was a collaboration between two men, Hans Janowitz, a Czech, and Carl Meyer, an Austrian, who had met in Berlin in 1919. The film features the mad Dr. Caligari, a fairground vaudeville actor who entertains with his somnambulist, Cesare. Outside the fair, however, there is a second string to the story that is far darker. Wherever Caligari goes, death is never far behind—anyone who crosses him ends up dead. The darkest part of the story starts after Caligari kills two students—or thinks he has. In fact, one survives, and it is the survivor, Francis, who discovers that the sleepwalking Cesare is unconsciously obeying Caligari’s instructions, killing on his behalf without understanding what he has done. Realizing he has been discovered, Caligari flees into an insane asylum, where Francis finds out that Caligari is also the director of the institute. Still, there is no escape for Caligari when his double life is exposed, he loses all self-control and ends up in a straitjacket.
This was the original plotline of Caligari, but before the film appeared it went through a drastic metamorphosis. Erich Pommer, one of the most successful producers of the day, and the director, Robert Wiene, actually turned the story inside out, rearranging it so that it is Francis and his girlfriend who are mad.3 The ideas of abduction and murder are now no more than their delusions, and the director of the asylum is in reality a benign doctor who cures Francis of his evil thoughts.
Janowitz and Meyer were furious. In Pommer’s version, the criticism of blind obedience had disappeared and, even worse, authority was shown as kindly, even safe. The irony was that Pommer’s version was a great success, commercially and artistically, and film historians have often wondered whether the original version would have done as well. Perhaps there is a fundamental point here. Though the plot was changed, the style of telling the story was not—it was still expressionistic, a new genre.4 Expressionism was a force, an impulse to revolution and change. But, like the psychoanalytic theory on which it was based, it was not fully worked out. The Expressionist Novembergruppe, founded in December 1918, was a revolutionary alliance of all artists who wanted to see change—Emil Nolde, Walter Gropius, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Alban Berg, and Paul Hindemith, among others. But revolution needed more than an engine; it needed direction. Expressionism never provided that. And perhaps in the end its lack of direction was one of those factors that enabled Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
It would be wrong, however, to see Weimar only as a temporary way station on the path to Hitler—it boasted many solid achievements. Not the least of these was the establishment of some very prestigious academic institutions, some of which are still centers of excellence even today. These included the Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut—home to Franz Alexander, Karen Horney, Otto Fenichel, Melanie Klein, and Wilhelm Reich—and the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (the German Institute for Politics), which had more than 2,000 students by the last year
of the republic—its teachers included Sigmund Neumann, Franz Neumann, and Hajo Holborn. There was also the Warburg Institute of Art History, in Hamburg, with its impressive library. This library was the fantastic fruit of a lifetime’s collecting by Aby Warburg, a rich, scholarly, and “intermittently psychotic individual” who shared Winckelmann’s obsession with classical antiquity and the extent to which its ideas and values could be perpetuated in the modern world. The charm and value of the library was not just that Warburg had been able to afford thousands of rare volumes on many recondite topics, but the careful way he had put them together to illuminate one another: art, religion, and philosophy were mixed in with history, mathematics, and anthropology. The Warburg Institute would become the home of many important art historical studies throughout the twentieth century. In particular, Erwin Panofsky’s way of reading paintings, his “iconological method,” as it was called, would prove hugely influential after World War II.
Europeans had been fascinated by the rise of the skyscraper in America, but it was difficult to adapt on the eastern side of the Atlantic: the old cities of France, Italy, and Germany were all in place and were too beautiful to allow the distortion that very tall buildings threatened. But the new materials of the twentieth century, which helped the birth of the skyscraper, were very seductive and proved very popular in Europe, especially steel, reinforced concrete, and sheet glass. In the end, glass and steel had a bigger effect on European architects than concrete did, and especially on three architects who worked together with the leading industrial designer in Germany, Peter Behrens (see Chapter 27). These men were Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the Frenchman Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. Each would make his mark but the first was Gropius. It was Gropius who founded the Bauhaus.
