The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Three things stand out about German television culture. One, it is very popular: ZDF, or Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, the Second German Television Channel, is the largest TV station in Europe. Two, internationally it has had much less impact than German music, painting, dance, or film. And three—perhaps most interesting of all—there has been much more controversy about the impact of television culture in Germany than elsewhere. Helmut Schmidt, when he was chancellor of Germany, stigmatized cable television as “more dangerous than nuclear power.” Several professional critics such as Günther Anders, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Jürgen Habermas all agree in seeing television as a cultural “black hole.”

  THE DOMINANCE OF DARMSTADT IN MUSIC

  Music, we must never forget, had not suffered in the Third Reich as had other activities such as painting and scholarship. Despite what had happened, postwar Germany beyond the rubble still boasted—incredibly—some 150 opera houses and orchestras, unparalleled conservatories for musical education, an undiluted musicological tradition producing musical scholarship of unequaled quality and originality, and a larger number of specialized periodicals devoted to music than in any other country.56

  In West Germany composition and musical production quickly regained their former position once the “economic miracle” had begun to exert itself. In 1948 Richard Strauss remarked “I have outlived myself,” but it wasn’t true—the next year he produced what would turn out to be his ever-popular Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs).57 The Berlin Philharmonic, under Wilhelm Furtwängler from 1947 to 1954, and then under Herbert von Karajan, a child prodigy on the piano, quickly recovered its pre-Goebbels pre-eminence and the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft was likewise reinvigorated.58 Karajan’s Nazi past dogged him (he had been a party member since 1935), his favored status emphasized by the fact that when he had married his second wife, in 1942, and she turned out to be one-quarter Jewish, the NSDAP had made her one of Germany’s five “honorary Aryans.” Several musicians, such as Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman, refused to play with Karajan because of his Nazi past, and in 1946 he was banned from conducting by the Soviet occupation authorities.

  Did the pressure begin to get to him? He sought psychoanalytic help from Carl Jung but in 1948 Karajan helped build the newly formed Philharmonia Orchestra in London and in 1955 he was appointed musical director for life of the Berlin Philharmonic, in succession to Furtwängler, two years later becoming artistic director of the Vienna State Opera.59 He was also intimately involved with the Salzburg Festival, and over the next three decades, as “the genius of the economic miracle,” discovered several artists (Anne-Sophie Mutter, Seiji Ozawa) and became the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, with some 200 million records sold.

  Given that the Nazis had been so opposed to the work—as well as the person—of Schoenberg and his pupil Anton von Webern, it was all but inevitable that their technique should become almost a new orthodoxy in the 1950s, boosted by the annual summer course in composition that was begun at Darmstadt. Three brilliant young composers, Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–70), Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926), and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), each of whom had studied at Darmstadt, emerged in the 1950s. The critic Erik Levi, best known for his book on music in the Third Reich, has described Zimmermann’s opera Die Soldaten as “the most significant German opera since Berg’s Lulu.”60

  Henze was a fervent Schoenberg enthusiast who nonetheless removed himself to Italy to keep himself open to other musical innovations. Two of his operas, Elegie für junge Liebende (Elegy for Young Lovers; 1961), and Die Bassariden (The Bassarids; 1966), with a libretto by the English/American poet W. H. Auden (and premiered by Karajan), were immediately recognized as successful marriages of music and drama. Later, Henze became involved with the student revolutionary movement of the late 1960s, and his compositions acquired a more strident edge, looking across the world to the music of Castro’s Cuba and back to Kurt Weill.61

  Stockhausen, the third of the postwar young Turks, was the most radical. He famously pioneered electronic music, experimented with indeterminacy (or chance), as devised by the American composer John Cage, becoming a cult figure in the 1970s, not least among certain rock musicians.62 Stockhausen’s influence declined in the 1980s, his prominence not helped by the fact that, after 1977, he concentrated on a Wagnerian-like cycle of seven sacred operas, each one representing a day in the week. Known collectively as Licht (Light), and lasting for twenty-nine hours, it had not been staged in its entirety at the time of Stockhausen’s death in 2007. One of the logistical difficulties is that, at one point, a chamber orchestra is directed to play from above the opera house in helicopters.

  Music students still flock to Germany today to study and play.

  OVERCOMING THE PAST IN PAINTING

  The art form that has adjusted best to Germany’s Nazi past is painting and sculpture. The first figure to consider is Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913–51), better known as Wols. Born in Berlin, he studied the violin but preferred instead the Bauhaus under Moholy-Nagy; he moved to Barcelona in 1933 (where he refused to be called up) and then to Paris where he made a living as a photographer until he was interned in 1939 and began to paint. He suffered in great poverty during the war but was befriended and supported by Jean-Paul Sartre, though this couldn’t prevent him from drinking himself to an early grave at the age of thirty-eight. Wols’s pictures, formally called Tachiste, show openly the scars of his own life and his nation around him—they are, as one critic said, “eruptions of blood-red and black,” reminiscent in form of carcasses, suppurating wounds, and the insect life that feeds on those wounds. There is no redemption in Wols’s work.63

  The main general phenomenon immediately after the war was the revival of abstraction. This was marked by the rehabilitation of artists like Klee and Kandinsky but it had one unfortunate side effect, forcing neglect on some German artists, which eventually provoked a group of painters in Düsseldorf in 1957 to mount a series of exhibitions in the studio of Otto Piene. Düsseldorf had emerged as the leading school, with artists from East Germany such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke moving there in the late 1950s and early 1960s to create their blend of kitsch and Pop Art, known satirically as Capitalist Realism. (Richter’s father-in-law had been responsible for overseeing the mass sterilization of women, including the painter’s own aunt, under the Nazis.)

  The group around Piene, much influenced by Yves Klein and his doctrine that art is about ideas rather than any one view of reality, took the name Zero.64 Their objective was to “strike out reality,” notably by denying form, producing images (often in monochrome, or as explorations of whiteness) that had no physical presence other than sheer energy. Piene’s 1963 Venus of Willendorf is the defining work here, along with Günther Uecker’s Hunsrückenstrasse, a whole street painted entirely white. The developments of the Zero group were accompanied by an important private initiative that turned into one of the more successful elements of the late twentieth-century art world. This was the establishment of Documenta in Kassel, which has evolved into one of the great forums for contemporary art.

  JOSEF BEUYS’S DIALOGUE WITH TIME

  All this was overshadowed by the advent of Joseph Beuys, who stands apart (and, for many people, above) all else in German postwar art. Beuys, born in Krefeld in 1921, never deviated from his conviction that his artistic aim was to find a new visual language that would come to terms with the war and at the same time find a way forward that did not ignore all that had happened.

  The work of art, Beuys believed, exists in “eternal time, historical time, and personal time.”65 Having himself been shot down over Russia as a Luftwaffe pilot in the Second World War, he was treated for frostbite by his Russian captors, who used felt and fat, which became the materials Beuys used in (some of) his art, fused with other, less personal substances.66 He felt the spectator should be aware of what these materials meant to the artist, adding a level of consciousness to the aesthetic experience
: the artist is a person with a past, part of the national past. His famous piece Strassenbahnhaltestelle (Tram Stop) fuses his own experience (as a boy he used a tram stop near an important monument), with the national past, featuring railway lines to remind the viewer what railways were used for in Nazi Germany. But, his lines were slightly curved, to hint at progress, a way forward, and up. In experiencing the present-day beauty of his sculptures, Beuys is saying, we must relive past events—this is his dialogue with time.67

  Beuys exerted an influence through his pupils, notably Jörg Immendorf and Anselm Kiefer, though a younger generation—Markus Lüpertz, Georg Baselitz, and A. R. Penck—has reacted against the high-culture associations that even Beuys’s work displayed. Kiefer’s materials include sand, straw, and burnt wood, and they often superimpose one simple image floating above the landscape below—denser, more damaged, more chaotic. This, for Kiefer, is the level of shame.68 Baselitz, influenced by Munch, is a painter of monumental images that are, in his own words, an attempt to create an “aggressive disharmony” of color, though he too incorporates his own experiences—of the Wall and of the rebellions of 1968—into his work. Penck’s stick figures mix cave painting and graffiti, the lurid, the sensual, the abuse and pathology of intimacy, which was, for him, the Nazis’ greatest crime.69

  In the works of the latest generation, Rainer Fetting, Helmut Mid-dendorf, and Jiri Georg Dokupil, all high-culture trappings have been abandoned in favor of rock culture “at its most frenzied,” so that there is an (all too postmodern) ironic distance between the artists and the issues depicted.70 Here the iconic work is Immendorf’s great series of Café Deutschland paintings, produced in the 1970s, in which the main elements of German political history take place in discotheques and druggy, cross-dressing cabarets, even on the flight decks of airplanes. Painting, in the words of Irit Rogoff, has become (and this too is a Germany we haven’t seen before) “raucously informal.”71

  Culturally and intellectually, the biggest development since the Wall came down has been the collapse of East Germany. East German individuals still shine in painting, in film, and in literature, and there are opera houses and artists’ colonies in such cities as Dresden and at the Baumwollspinnerei in Leipzig, with strong choirs in Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin. But during the years of a divided Germany few outside the GDR understood how rotten the infrastructure was, that the trade currents within Comecon would simply disappear, that there was nothing to build on. In the Meissen factories the skill of the people remained, but after the Wende all the machines had to be thrown out. Even the vineyards in East Germany needed new plants. The Dresden camera maker, Pentacon, had a 10 percent share of the world market in the Communist era, with 5,000 employees in 1990; within a year just 200 were left.72 The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Natural Sciences and Humanities, which had 24,000 members in the old East Germany (many of them “parked” there, as a form of hidden unemployment), now has 200 members and 175 research fellows.73

  Among former East German scholarly projects, the definitive edition of the works of Marx and Engels has been taken over by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, as has the Goethe Lexicon, a dictionary and analysis of the language of Goethe. The scholarly strengths of the GDR were mainly in the realms of mathematics and computer science, molecular biology, pharmacology and energy, and, in the humanities, in Oriental and antique languages (where Manfred Bierwisch was well known); but most of these areas have now collapsed and almost all academic journals have been discontinued (whereas publishing in Germany overall has been growing at 1.9 percent annually).

  In science, since 1945 German-born physicists, chemists, and medical doctors have won twenty-five Nobel Prizes, in addition to the Nobel Prizes for Literature won by Böll, Grass, and Herta Müller (in 2009) and Willy Brandt’s Peace Prize in 1971. This success in science is due largely to the Max Planck Society: there are seventy-six Max Planck Institutes scattered over Germany, one in the Netherlands, two in Italy, one in Florida, and a sub-institute in Manaus, Brazil. Current research strengths lie in turbulence studies, superconductivity, quantum optics, quantum Einstein gravity, and evolutionary biology. The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, in Berlin-Dahlem, is returning to traditional German concerns about the nature of knowledge, conducting research projects on The History of Laboratory Sciences, The Rise and Decline of the Mechanical World View, and an investigation of the links between knowledge and belief.

  Between 1999 and 2004, the Max Planck Society investigated the role of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in the National Socialist era, focusing on the continuity or discontinuity of scientific activity, the extent to which science was used as a “legitimation” for the regime’s policies, which experts knew what and when, racial hygiene, military research, Ostforschung (research on the east), and Lebensraumforschung (research on living space). No detailed results have yet been published.74 Several universities now teach science courses in English because that is the language of science.

  Elsewhere in Berlin, the city has become Europe’s biggest concentration of contemporary architecture. The first buildings to rise from the rubble of 1945 were considered at the beginning of the previous chapter. Hans Scharoun, also mentioned in the previous chapter, continued to shine in the 1960s.75 His twin apartment blocks at Stuttgart Zuffenhaussen, known locally as Romeo and Juliet (1954–59), lean this way and that in a configuration that would be made popular worldwide by Frank Gehry.76 Much influenced by Scharoun was Günter Behnisch who, with Fritz Auer and Frei Otto, designed the celebrated Olympic Games Complex in Munich (1965–72). Their soaring “tent roof” over and above the Stadium, Olympic Hall, and Olympic Pool would find an echo across the world as far afield as the Barbados airport. In the 1980s, a raft of museums was erected throughout West Germany, notably in Frankfurt and notably its Museum of Modern Art, designed by the Austrian Hans Hollein (1985, 1987–91).77

  Reunification created architectural opportunities on an unprecedented scale. Initially the main aim was to rebuild central Berlin, which had been in the East. Among the early completed or renovated buildings are the Reichstag, with Norman Foster’s glass cupola, the Federal Archive, the DG Bank (Frank Gehry), the library of the Freie Universität (Norman Foster), the Holocaust Memorial (Peter Eisenmann), and the Potsdamer Platz, an entire area that has been rebuilt since 1995.

  In some ways the most effective—and most beautiful—architectural project (or is it sculpture?), which also presents the face of a Germany we haven’t seen before, are the Stolpersteine, the “stumbling stones” of Gunter Demnig. These stones, set into the pavement, in Cologne to begin with, are slightly raised cobblestones located outside houses where murdered Jews once lived. A brass plate is nailed to each stone containing basic details: “Here lived Moritz Rosenthal. b. 1883. Deported 1941. Lodz. Died 28.2.1942.” The first stones Demnig installed were illegal, but the idea caught on and in 1999 he was officially approved. More than a thousand stones are now in place in Cologne and in several other cities.78

  In 1999, Dietrich Schwanitz, a historian and philosopher, who had studied in London and Philadelphia as well as Freiburg, and was then a professor of English literature at the University of Hamburg, published Bildung, “a handbook” that was essentially a device to address what he saw as a crisis in German education, by reintroducing a “canon” of works that would teach students to be at home in culture, to understand why they should know “Shakespeare, Goethe, and van Gogh,” to have a conversation with history, to grasp the “great European narratives” that have brought us to this point. He thought that, in Germany at least, there had developed a disruption between school life and university life and that Bildung was the best way to bridge it. He somewhat spoiled his argument by asserting that Bildung was also a game, with snobbish elements, but perhaps he felt that such glosses were necessary in the contemporary world so as to “sell” the idea. But he discussed Humboldt, Hardenberg, Herder, and Hegel in a spirited attempt to turn the clock back that, to an extent, succeeded
in the sense that as this book went to press his Bildung was in its twenty-second printing.79

  When we look at the way German culture has “come back” since the years of National Socialism, at the very great depth and variety of German postwar poetry, at the country’s serious theater, at the high ambition of its dancers, at its continued dominance in musical composition, performance, and scholarship, at its second film renaissance, at its preference for art over entertainment, at the bitter debate about the deleterious effects of popular culture in general and television in particular, we realize that High Culture is the culture of the educated middle class and that that whole constellation of ideas and concepts is more deeply rooted in Germany than elsewhere, even now, and after all that has happened.

  CONCLUSION

  German Genius: The Dazzle, Deification, and Dangers of Inwardness

  “The finest characteristic of the typical German, the best-known and also the most flattering to his self-esteem, is his inwardness.”

  —THOMAS MANN

  In January 1939, W. H. Auden, the English poet, arrived in America. He had emigrated, he said, because it was easier there to “live on one’s wits.” One of the most famous homosexuals of the twentieth century, Auden was married at the time: in 1936 he had wed Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, in order to provide her with a British passport and escape from Nazi persecution (“What are buggers for?” he asked). In the United States he saw a lot of the Manns—he was an editorial adviser to Klaus Mann’s magazine, Decision, he visited Thomas and Katja in California, and at the house they rented on Rhode Island from Caroline Newton, a rich East Coaster who had been psychoanalyzed by both Sigmund Freud and Karen Horney. He met Wolfgang Köhler, one of the originators of Gestalt psychology, who he described as “a great man with quite a lot of neuroses.” He moved in a German/German-friendly world. But then Auden, so unusual in so many ways, was unusual in the sense that, unlike many other educated English people and Americans, of his and other times, he had long been fascinated by German culture. He had spent several months in Germany in 1929, some of them with his friend Christopher Isherwood; they had collaborated on a play, Auden had written a handful of verse in (poor) German, started work on his long poem The Orators and, as he put it in his Berlin journal, spent “my substance on strumpets, and taking part in the White Slave traffic.” This sexual underworld notwithstanding, he recognized that Germans had in many ways defined the age in which he lived. He dedicated a poem, “Friday’s Child,” to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and another, written after the death of Sigmund Freud, in 1939, emphasized the nature and extent of his influence: