In 1873, Friedrich Nietzsche, then twenty-nine and teaching philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, began writing a series of Untimely Meditations on the current state of German culture. The first essay took as its target the theologian David Strauss, whose book, The Old Faith and the New: A Confession (1871), struck Nietzsche as the expression of all that was wrong with the so-called cultivated classes in German society. Published in the all-engulfing wake of German unification, The Old Faith and the New championed science as the new faith, rationally demonstrable in the evidence of historical progress. Nietzsche, long parted from the ‘old faith’ of his Lutheran forbearers, still regarded this glorification of the status quo as the embodiment of ‘philistine culture’ with its motto, ‘all seeking is at an end’.1
What provoked Nietzsche most in Strauss’s long and dull book was his impenetrable smugness. ‘During recent years’, declared Strauss, we ‘have participated in the liveliest way in the great national war and the construction of the German state, and we feel ourselves profoundly uplifted by this turn, as glorious as it was unexpected, in the history of our much-tried nation.’ He delighted in ‘our knowledge of nature’, the ‘writings of our great poets’, and ‘the performances of the works of our great composers’, and in all of this found ‘a stimulus for the spirit and the heart, for the imagination and the sense of humour, that leaves nothing to be desired’. ‘Thus we live’, he concluded, and ‘go our way rejoicing.’2 Repelled by such complacency, Nietzsche saw instead ‘the defeat, if not the extirpation, of the German spirit for the benefit of the “German Reich”’. Responding to Strauss’s implication that German culture had been victorious on the battlefields of the war with France, Nietzsche doubted whether ‘German culture’ even existed. ‘Culture’, he declared, ‘is above all the unity of artistic style, in every expression of the life of a people.’ But the German could claim only ‘a chaotic jumble of all styles’,
and one seriously wonders how, with all his erudition, he can possibly fail to notice it, but, on the contrary, rejoices from the very heart at the ‘culture’ he at present possesses. For everything ought to instruct him: every glance he casts at his clothes, his room, his home, every walk he takes through the streets of his town, every visit he pays to a fashionable shop; in his social life he ought to be aware of the origin of his manners and deportment, in the world of our artistic institutions, of our concerts, theatres and museums, he ought to notice the grotesque juxtaposition and confusion of different styles.… But with this kind of ‘culture’, which is in fact only a phlegmatic lack of all feeling for culture, one cannot overcome enemies, least of all those who, like the French, actually possess a real and productive culture, regardless of what its value may be, and from whom we have hitherto copied everything, though usually with little skill.
‘Up to now’, Nietzsche concluded, ‘there has been no original German culture.’3
Taken together, Strauss’s paean and Nietzsche’s tirade raise the issues that shaped the German pursuit of culture in Imperial Germany. Informing all considerations of culture and the arts was the issue of German identity, which intruded itself into every discussion about a building, a concert, or an exhibition, every production of a new opera or play. The compulsion to define what the composer Richard Wagner called the ‘true meaning and peculiarity of that German essence’ also bumped up against, as in Nietzsche’s meditation, the rest of the world.4 The purveyors and creators of art in the imperial period tried, at times awkwardly, to reconcile their desire for international cultural exchange, on the one hand, and for an authentically German art, on the other. Germany’s difficult relationship with France was often the focus of this tension. One can speak equally of Francophobia and Francophilia as defining features of imperial German culture.
The search for ‘Germanness’ in a world of nations exposed further tensions that found expression in the arts and cultural institutions of these years. First among these were religious tensions. Nineteenth-century Germans were profoundly divided on the question of religion’s place in their rapidly changing society. These divisions came out explicitly in the Kulturkampf (‘cultural struggle’) against Catholicism waged by German liberals and the Bismarckian state. But they also came out implicitly in many efforts to represent the sacred in visual, dramatic, and musical forms. Second, the question of religion reflected an even more general questioning of the hold the past had on the present. Nietzsche’s second ‘untimely meditation’ on ‘The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ extended his lament about Germany’s lack of cultural vitality by suggesting that an excess of historical consciousness had inhibited Germans’ ability to live and create. Critics other than Nietzsche worried that too many artistic works relied on historical precedents to the point of lifeless conventionality. Moreover, many artists and consumers of art found, on the contrary, that the past was the only sure guide in society’s march forward. Nevertheless, between the categories we still use in studying art—the establishment and the avant-garde, the traditional and the modern—the differences were not always dramatic. Ambivalence about both tradition and modernity formed a subtext of much cultural activity and artistic creation.
Third and finally, the relationship of culture and the arts to political and social life raised a series of questions for Germans. Who were the cultural leaders in society—artists or scholars or critics or even a new category of commercial producers and sponsors? Who could or should participate in cultural life? Did culture and the arts have a role to play in the collective life of the nation? And if they did, was it celebratory and affirming or critical and interrogative? As artistic movements alternated and collided in the increasingly rapid pace of cultural activity after 1870, these questions elicited no clear answers. Nor could even the most optimistic of cultural observers have found in these decades a ‘unity of artistic style, in every expression of the life’ of the German people. But amidst the ‘chaotic jumble of styles’ that Nietzsche derided as the pedants’ modernity, Imperial Germany sustained a cultural life that created as many glimpses of the future as homages to the past.
The founding of the German Empire in 1871 had no immediate effect on the ways that cultural and artistic institutions operated or that Germans participated in cultural life. Cultural policy remained decentralized and in the hands of individual states and municipalities and constituted a vigorous survival of particularism in German Europe. Particularism and decentralization did not necessarily produce backwardness and provincialism in cultural affairs, although critics were always quick to find both. One English observer of Germany in the 1870s wrote that ‘Kleinstädterei [sic], or the niggling government of petty princes’, with its ‘consequent narrow views and interests, place-hunting, and stagnation of culture’, was ‘the bane of Germany’.5 But its consequences after 1871 were less dire than that. For one thing, the persistence of a pattern of dispersed cultural organization generated local pride in the offerings of a state’s or a city’s cultural institutions. This in turn led to perpetual competition for the best conductors and the best orchestras, the best international art exhibitions and the best permanent art collections. A network of nearly 100 art unions and guilds in the many cities of Germany organized artists and their exhibitions: by 1914 it had developed extensive international links, particularly between the larger art centres like Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, or Düsseldorf and France and Great Britain. The rare national cultural associations that came into existence in these years, like the loosely organized General German Art Association, had to avoid connection with any one city or region if they were to be effective. Cultural activists, especially in the area of music, often had only limited interest in political borders, because the German culture that they sought to nurture had much to lose, as both historical tradition and continuing project, from too much attention to political borders. The General German Music Association, founded in 1861 in Weimar as the first national music society in Germany, sponsored annual music festivals which alternated among different German and German-speaking cities. It also established scholarship funds for which many more Germans than the residents of Bismarck’s empire were eligible to compete. For instance, Arnold Schoenberg of Vienna was a recipient of an award from the association’s Beethoven Foundation, established in 1872.
The stimulating effects of so many different localisms in competition with each other, along with a general expansion of commerce, wealth, and tax revenues, meant that more and more money was spent on artistic undertakings. Funds for projects ranging from grand new buildings to band music in the town park also came from a wider variety of sources, with an inexorable shift away from courts and aristocratic patrons to public coffers, at the state and civic level. Just as significant was the presence of private, non-state sources of funding even for public projects. Voluntary associations played a crucial role in music and the visual arts, helping local orchestras, conservatories, and art museums in their work, raising subscription funds for national monuments, and organizing amateur performance groups for public performances. Little of this was new. Art associations and choral societies had been around for decades. The opening up of court concerts and princely museums to a paying public had its beginnings in the eighteenth century. And the transformation of civic cultural institutions into joint ventures between taxpayers and wealthy local citizens had long characterized the cultural life of commercial cities like Hamburg and Frankfurt. Furthermore, churches now provided very little patronage of new art, which reflected changes in church independence going back to the decline of the Holy Roman Empire. In sum, the imperial period after 1871 saw the final consolidation of a complicated system of densely interrelated but dispersed cultural institutions.
The biggest changes came with the ever more complete integration of cultural activities into the commercial market, with mixed consequences for artistic autonomy. Works of art became products for sale in a marketplace of art galleries and auction houses, music publishers and concert series. Artists could potentially make enough money to remain independent of governments and wealthy patrons. Or they could, as many feared, become as co-opted by the market as they had been controlled by the courts. The expansion of the art trade was particularly notable by the end of the century, with more dealers offering artists more commercial opportunities than did established institutions, as well as better promotional services beyond the purview of the old-fashioned art academy and its salon exhibition. The range of commercial opportunities for artists was considerable. Johannes Brahms, one of the first composers to earn a comfortable living from his compositions’ royalties alone, composed a lucrative line of Hungarian dance music for amateur pianists. In his early, impoverished years, Wagner wrote short articles and prepared piano reductions of opera scores for the Parisian publisher Schlesinger. Hermine Preuschen, the ‘Advertising Artist’, parlayed the notoriety of rejection by the Berlin Academy Exhibition in 1887 into an exhibition she arranged and publicized herself with great success.6 The Russian-born avant-garde artist Wassily Kandinsky, who likewise had a painting rejected for a juried exhibition in 1911, formed a touring exhibition with several other avant-garde artists under the intriguing and commercially effective name of The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter). Between ticket sales and exhibition receipts, the market became an equal player in the operations of cultural life, and by 1914 it was perhaps even the dominant one, for traditional and avant-garde artists alike.
For their part, the directors of cultural institutions showed increasing ingenuity in their search for commercial revenue and private donations. The greatest innovator of all may have been Richard Wagner, whose long march through the nineteenth century’s moneyed institutions, in search of funding for his Festival Theatre (Festspielhaus) at Bayreuth, took him from traditional royal patronage (King Ludwig II of Bavaria) to the more impersonal patronage of the new German national government (an appeal to Bismarck, who declined the honour) to an even more novel scheme involving the founding of ‘Wagner clubs’ across Germany and around the world to raise funds for Bayreuth.7 Germany’s complex arrangements for the maintenance of culture and the arts did make artistic innovation on a grand Wagnerian scale difficult. But the very difficulties Wagner encountered in his epic quest for money reveal the norms—and the limitations—of his time. In the jaundiced view of George Bernard Shaw, the ‘energetic subscription-hunting ladies’ of the Wagner clubs soon triumphed over Wagner’s own ‘fabulous and visionary’ experiment to ‘keep the seats out of the hands of the frivolous public and in the hands of earnest disciples’. As ‘an attempt to evade the ordinary social and commercial conditions of theatrical enterprise’, Shaw concluded that Bayreuth ‘was a failure’.8
Shaw’s juxtaposition of ordinary conditions and visionary projects hints at a fundamental division of European culture into two categories of unstable definition—the high and the low, the serious and the thoughtless, the avant-garde and everybody else. Shaw was not alone in viewing the cultural scene dichotomously. Many commentators defended the fortress of art from incursions of triviality and trash. More recently, musicologist Carl Dahlhaus suggested that the great dividing line in nineteenth-century culture lay between a strong and a weak concept of art, corresponding to two kinds of artists and audiences. The strong concept of art regarded it as a serious undertaking, demanding of the listener or viewer high levels of training and attention, along with a philosophical commitment to self-cultivation (Bildung) and artistic autonomy. Adhering to the strong concept of art, an advance guard of creative artists constituted an elite few who were able to move beyond the conventions of the time and conquer ever more demanding artistic heights. Adhering to the weak concept of art, by contrast, were those who regarded art as entertainment, diversion, and pleasure, who valued transparency of meaning and ease of consumption, and who expected little staying power from the objects of their artistic attention, given that repetition of such work would inevitably produce boredom.
But to illuminate the many ways that people actually participated in cultural life, we need to make a more extensive set of distinctions. Imperial Germany was marked by at least four different, overlapping circles of artistic activity. First, all the arts attracted amateur practitioners and developed new ways to involve art-lovers in them. Urbanization, technology, and belief in the importance of self-cultivation combined to make more art available to more people. The legal end to timeless copyright in 1867 brought about a boom in the publication of ‘classics’ by both writers and composers. Book and music stores were soon awash with the works of Goethe and Beethoven, Schiller and Mozart. Promoting and consuming these classics provided a satisfying way to express one’s national identity. With the shift in piano manufacture from craft shop to factory by mid-century and the consequent development of standardized types, the production of pianos increased eightfold in Germany between 1870 and 1910, their cost was cut in half, and the piano came into its own as the centrepiece of middleclass cultivation. The genre of Hausmusik, or simple compositions for amateur players, became the profitable foundation of many music publishing houses. Such publishers oversaw an explosive increase in the sheer amount of available printed music up to a high point around 1910. Anthologies with titles like German Music for the Home from Four Centuries included easy instrumental and vocal pieces and piano reductions from both currently popular operas and symphonies of the great German masters. One can scarcely exaggerate the importance of the piano in the parlour for middle-class sociability, for the persistence of an idealist view of art’s edifying effects, and for the growing certainty among ordinary Germans about Germany’s special musical gifts.
The people who participated in the amateur artistic activities of Imperial Germany were also among the most avid students of the past—early and persistent consumers of the historical scholarship that assembled a genealogy of German artistry across the centuries. The repertoire of serious musical amateurism was historical in orientation, and associations of amateur musicians had been among the pioneers in the recovery of the German musical Baroque. But hand in hand with a nationally tinged reverence for the past went an openness to contemporary artists and composers, especially those who saw themselves as contributing to this tradition. Of these, Hamburg-born Brahms was uniquely able to combine profound musical language with accessibility to performance and understanding. Obsessed with his late entry into a musical tradition of near-unapproachable greatness (he famously spoke of hearing the footsteps of the giants who came before him), Brahms paid homage to that tradition with works that sought to extend the models from the musical past. A direct consequence of his historical interests was his continuing attention to such genres as the string quartet and the piano sonata. In an era that saw chamber music moving increasingly out of the salon and private drawing room and into the concert hall, Brahms composed a number of chamber works dedicated to the serious musical amateurs who were his friends and supporters. The piano—the instrument par excellence of the amateur musician—also stood, in Leon Botstein’s words, ‘at the very heart of his compositional genius’.9
Brahms composed hundreds of Lieder, or art songs—another musical genre central to serious music-making in the home and small gatherings. The genre of the Lied that Brahms carried forward was closely linked to German identity through its integration of the texts of Germany’s poets with the music of its composers. Brahms and his younger Austrian contemporary Hugo Wolf helped to shape the culture of feeling and subjectivity that marked middle-class participation in the arts. Its characteristic milieu was not solitude but intimacy—intimacy between the keyboard and the vocal lines of music, between pianist and singer, between performers and their audience. The Lied expressed a German community constituted through close communication. Its ubiquity in the middle-class household created a commonality of experience as crucial to national consciousness as visits to large public monuments or participation in the popular historical parades.
The performance of a Lied formed the central subject of the most often-reproduced painting at the turn of the century. Titled the Billet Outside Paris and completed in 1894, its painter, Anton von Werner, was the director of the Royal Academic Institute for the Fine Arts in Berlin and celebrated for his depictions of the proclamation of the new German Empire at Versailles (also frequently reproduced in postcards and prints for the drawing room). ‘Billet Outside Paris’ illustrated a scene from the Franco-Prussian War, now some two decades past. Like all Werner’s work, this painting had a cinematic realism to it, with Werner’s characteristic attention to every detail of decor and uniform. Set in a rococo drawing room of an occupied French chateau, its focal figure was a Prussian officer, standing by a piano and singing a Schubert Lied to the accompaniment of another officer. The spontaneous house concert evoked the intimate culture of the German home. The soldiers’ valour now combined cultivated domesticity with military tradition, elevating both to a national monument of German greatness and contrasting its ineffable substance to the material superficiality of French society in which it now resounded.
Amateurism also took more public forms. Hamburg’s Alfred Lichtwark was exemplary in this regard. In 1886, Lichtwark became director of the Hamburg Art Museum and transformed it from a second-rate provincial art collection to the vehicle for a wide-ranging project of cultural renewal through aesthetic education. Lichtwark’s plans, which he cannily laid out first in high-profile speeches, aimed to create a broader public for art through active involvement in its appreciation. A museum library with extensive hours, engravings framed so that they could be picked up and scrutinized, instruction in drawing and painting for schoolteachers and the interested public, lectures for working-class audiences, exhibitions of amateur art, and of course that staple of modern museum culture, the guided tour for squirming schoolchildren—Lichtwark used all these innovations to narrow the distance between the activity of art and the passivity of its reception.10
For music lovers, increasing numbers of choral societies, orchestras, and brass bands filled the schedules of performance halls and city bandstands to the bursting point. Dresden, the fourth largest city in Germany, boasted fifty male choirs, and even the new industrial city of Ludwigshafen had more than twenty amateur choral groups. Typical of all such groups was the Ludwigshafen Choral Society, whose director, the grammar-school teacher Jakob Gutwein, kept his singers on a steady diet of ‘folk songs and the easier art songs’, rehearsed ‘to stand up to the most exacting criticism’.11 In industrial areas, a distinctive culture of mine and factory bands and choruses developed. The Saarland’s coal and steel industries generated nearly fifty such organizations, with links both to factory music associations elsewhere in Germany and to middle-class musicians in the Saarland’s cities.12 Max Bruch, a composer now largely forgotten, enjoyed tremendous success in Imperial Germany because of the many works he wrote for amateur choruses. His first great success, Frithjof, an un-Wagnerian oratorio based on a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga, was rapturously received by the public.13 The oratorio, old and new, became an important form of religious expression in Imperial Germany. Not part of religious services, its performance represented a modernized piety, all the more pervasive for being freed from traditional sacred spaces. Bruch himself wrote fourteen sacred oratorios. Brahms’s German Requiem, the texts for which he drew not from the Latin requiem mass but from Luther’s translation of the Bible, offered contemplation of this world’s sorrows and consolation to those who grieve. Its debut in Bremen in 1868 and its progress through the choral societies of not only Germany but Switzerland, England, and the Netherlands—all places with choral traditions that paralleled Germany’s own—established Brahms’s reputation as a major composer.
Amateurs, as Goethe had long ago described them, merely followed the ‘tendencies of the times’, whereas the true artist ‘commanded’ them.14 Amateur involvement in culture and the arts remained dependent—for repertoire, for instruction, for directors and conductors, for the prestige that amateurs hoped to absorb secondhand—on three other circles of artistic activity, all of which were shaped by professional artists and their creations. These circles might be characterized as the serious, the light, and the avant-garde. Of these three, the most commanding arena of artistic activity was the first, that of the serious artistic establishment. It consisted of art academies and city art unions; master classes, juried exhibitions, and museums; opera houses, orchestras, and music conservatories; royal or ducal or municipal theatres; and prestigious journals for literature, the visual arts, and music.
Disparaged by its critics for being little more than a system of rule enforcement, the artistic establishment of Imperial Germany was not as old and secure in its institutional power as it sometimes seemed. This was particularly true in the case of musical life, the institutions of which had hardly reached adolescence when they came under attack for being hidebound and conservative. The concert had early modern precedents, but its defining characteristics—the hall, the formal clothing, the silent audience, the performance of entire works—all reflected a new seriousness, not an old one. They also reflected a new process of canon formation and professionalization, led by a new breed of conductors who commanded their increasingly large forces like generals in a war on fashion and superficiality. The historical editions of Bach’s and Handel’s works only reached completion in the 1880s; the first full-fledged music conservatory in Germany, Felix Mendelssohn’s Leipzig Conservatory, dated back just to 1843; the Berlin Philharmonic, soon the epitome of the serious music ensemble, was founded only in 1882.
Although the concert repertoire became overwhelmingly historical in the course of the nineteenth century, with the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven at its heart, serious orchestras did not close their lists to new compositions. The death of Beethoven in 1827 had led to a crisis in the composition of large-scale instrumental works, as composers faced the impossibility of either ignoring or imitating him. But after relatively little symphonic composition in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Brahms’s First Symphony, premiered in 1876, took the symphonic tradition (four movements, an old-fashioned array of instrumental forces) and made it once again the centrepiece of the established concert. Brahms’s ability to fuse tradition with profound innovation suggests that the musical establishment of Imperial Germany was not an inert and backward-looking set of institutions incapable of encouraging new creative energies.
The institutional situation of the visual arts was somewhat different. The most prominent art academies could trace their origins to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But as with music, the impression of age and conventionality that they exuded in the late decades of the nineteenth century derived in part from their determination to uphold a relatively new artistic ideal, that of the autonomy and moral purpose of art. For many an establishment figure, art was a serious matter and the pathway to true freedom. In Imperial Germany, it seemed threatened not by frivolous aristocrats but by the short attention span of the paying public; that is, by commerce and its works. This attitude towards the arts found its most fervent defender in Kaiser Wilhelm II. ‘Art should contribute to the education of the people’, Wilhelm informed his subjects; ‘even the lower classes, after their toil and hard work, should be lifted up and inspired by ideal forces.’15
Anton von Werner, the quintessential establishment painter, was only thirty-two when he became director of the Berlin art academy in 1875. But this power base allowed him to exert and extend his influence well into the twentieth century. Although he could be tyrannical and intolerant, his artistic ethos was upto-date and even liberal: in his ‘meticulously executed paintings’, in the ‘reforms established at the art institute’, and in his ‘antielitist policies supporting the large number of average artists within the societies and associations’, one saw the bourgeois age at its most confident.16 The artists most celebrated within the artistic establishment—Werner himself, Franz Lenbach, Hans Makart, Adolph Menzel, Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Karl von Piloty—were also not so easily pigeonholed. Most did favour pictorial representations of historical and contemporary scenes, with recognizable figures in fully realized settings; but in their theatricality, allegory, monumentalism, and historically accurate detail, they differed substantially from one another. From Piloty’s Thusnelda at the Triumphal Entry of Germanicus into Rome (1875) to Menzel’s Iron-Rolling Mill (1875), the search for a national style in the artistic mainstream encouraged variety as well as conformity, whatever one might ultimately say about the quality of its results.
Most of the new buildings of the imperial period likewise reflected many historical styles, from the Gothic to Renaissance to Classical and Baroque, each dominant within a sphere deemed appropriate (German Renaissance for city halls, very often). Here, too, the search for a distinctively German architecture resurrected many imagined pasts in which religious and secular traditions became entangled. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, built in 1891–94 to honour Wilhelm I by his grandson Wilhelm II, took a neo-Romanesque style, rich in reference to Germanic medieval empires. Wilhelm I, the ‘white beard on the red beard’s throne’, became the reincarnation of Friedrich Barbarossa, and his memorial served as church, museum, and monument, incorporating a pre-Reformation Catholic past within the frame of a Protestant church/dynasty. But the placement of the memorial church in the Augusta-Victoria square in central Berlin, also rebuilt in neo-Romanesque style under Wilhelm II’s direction, pointed forward as well as back—an urban space, with apartment buildings and restaurants, and even, soon, a thriving artists’ community centred on the neo-Romanesque Romanisches Café.17
The idealism inherent in both the concert repertory and the art academy annual exhibition, however hidebound they came to seem, contrasted with what was perhaps the largest arena of artistic production and consumption in Imperial Germany, that of art for popular entertainment, marked by its commodity status and unaccompanied by claims to moral edification. ‘Light music of quality’, as one music historian has dubbed it, had its spiritual home in the Vienna of the waltz kings, Johann Strauss the father and Johann Strauss the son, and in the Paris of Jacques Offenbach’s operettas.18 It was performed by professional musicians in venues consistent with its easy-going premise: in restaurants and parks, at spas, in ballrooms and theatres, in popular concert series that provided an alternative to the Beethoven-based repertoire of the symphony concert. The ubiquitous military bands of the nineteenth century were not commercial, but they also performed essentially ‘light music of quality’ and were a much-loved feature of Sunday afternoons in the public gardens. Much of the opera repertoire fell into this category as well. Even Wagner’s music dramas—the whole point of which was to elevate dramatic music beyond an evening’s diversion and into the higher realm of the symphonic—became a paradoxical kind of high-brow entertainment for the paying public, especially in regional opera houses with their countless performances of Lohengrin and Tannhäuser. The bridal chorus from Lohengrin began to redefine the bourgeois wedding ceremony, and it was a rare brass band, whether made up of miners or middle-class civil servants, that did not perform some simplified version of Siegfried’s Rhine Journey.
Despite their patina of seriousness, most of the monuments that sprang up all over Germany, in epidemic numbers after 1871, could also be included in this category, not just because of the banality and sheer bad taste of their design but because of their place in a physical ensemble with strongly recreational overtones. People took hikes to the Bismarck towers scattered across the hilltops of Germany, and they dined practically in the shadow of Germania on the Rhine. Then there were the panoramas, the high-tech rotundas that ‘popped up like mushrooms’ across Europe in the last three decades of the century. These circular landscape paintings, usually depicting battle scenes, were designed and executed by professional artists and interior decorators and were celebrated as a ‘new art form for the common people’. In Germany, about 10 million visitors viewed them in cities from Stettin to Karlsruhe. The panoramas were big business, organized by joint-stock companies (many of them Belgian) and attracting attention in serious art journals as well as the penny press.19 The ‘staple of the bourgeois market’, however, and the bulk of what lay behind the rapid growth of the art market in the last decades before the war, was not so much large battle scenes as small landscapes and genre paintings. This art was ‘cabinet-sized’, studio-finished, and ‘calculated to evoke a mood of wistful nature romanticism in an increasingly urban public’.20
A comparable realization of the commercial potential for straightforward yet artful renderings of history, travel, nature, and modern life came in the field of what we might call ‘light literature of quality’. The expansion of literacy, the institution of the commercial lending library, and the growing number of publishing houses, journals, and newspapers all underlay an outpouring of fiction for the German middle classes. From former opera singer Eugenie Marlitt (a pseudonym), whose serialized novels were said to have been responsible for the quadrupling of the circulation of the family journal Die Gartenlaube, to Karl May and his adventure stories about Old Shatterhand, Winnetou, and Hadschi Alef Omar ibn Hadschi Abu Abbas ibn Hadschi Dawud al Gosarah, the decently educated German reader had plenty of reading matter that demanded little of him or her except the expenditure of time.
The fourth circle of artistic activity in the German Empire was that of the avant-garde. It was the most self-conscious and self-defining group of cultural producers: too elitist for the everyday artists of amateurism, at once too iconoclastic, too market-oriented, and too separatist for the establishment, and too philosophically and artistically demanding for the consumer of art as entertainment. Its self-consciousness explains its ability to generate names for its activities (Naturalism, Expressionism, neo-Realism, Jugendstil), which in turn created movements out of small numbers of people and disparate, even incoherent, stylistic innovations. That Imperial Germany could even claim to have had an avant-garde has been disputed. Its secessionist artists have sometimes seemed unoriginal, its composers conflicted (or Viennese, and hence not to be counted), its architects provincial, its writers uninspired. But however their work is ultimately regarded, there can be no doubting the sheer variety of ways that artists found to escape the confines of established institutions and to combat the idiocies of commercialized modern life.
The avant-garde in Imperial Germany also took shape as a form of opposition to—but also under the constraint of—government censorship. Such censorship usually involved ex post facto prosecutions of art or literature for breaking laws concerning blasphemy, obscenity, and other forms of disrespect for authority and heads of state. Censorship, as it evolved over the course of the imperial era, became itself a moving target for those trying—sometimes in equal measures—to evade it and to provoke it. Initially a matter to be decided by hereditary rulers and their civil servants alone, questions of censorship soon involved elected representatives and the public itself. Both were just as likely to call for more public support for artistic innovation as they were to clamour for a crackdown on artists who offended ‘feelings of modesty and morality’.21 The set-piece of censorship in this period became the debate over the ‘Lex Heinze’, a bill introduced in the Reichstag in 1892 that sought to expand existing laws against obscenity by explicit reference to theatre and art. The parliamentary debate split the political parties into opposing camps, which was hardly surprising. But the public controversy mobilized in opposition a powerful cross-section of cultural leaders in all fields of artistic endeavour, which was surprising. It suggested that the lines dividing established artists and avant-garde ones, the conventional and the innovative, were to some extent artificial and certainly a matter of context and perception.
Nevertheless, if avant-gardism included many artists with full establishment credentials, it operated in different ways and venues. The most public of the declarations of independence from accepted artistic practices were the various ‘secessions’ from the annual salon exhibitions organized by the artists’ equivalents of trade associations. The salon exhibitions were probably the single most important venue for sales of art works, but the conditions under which art was displayed were crowded and inadequate. This situation itself testified to the growing number of artists in Imperial Germany and the growing market for their works. The first secessionists, in Munich in 1892, were not so much rejected as disgruntled artists, eager to get away from the cluttered exhibition halls and establish freer conditions for the production and appreciation of art. The Munich secessionists received plenty of publicity and favourable reviews, and their example was soon followed in other cities—Berlin most prominently, in 1898. The twenty-five or so years before the outbreak of war in 1914 were marked by waves of secession from whatever group of artists had most recently established itself as the dominant force in the art community; secession itself generated publicity and with it sales. All secessionists retained a sense of rejecting the aesthetic tyranny of the art academies. But at the same time, all retained a close relationship to the art markets, working with gallery owners and museum directors.
Art historians have often regarded the works of the German secessionists and avant-garde artists in general as tame forms of rebellion. Yet they did arouse controversy. Initially their notoriety came from their choice of subject matter, which abandoned great men and ancient gods in favour of the ordinary and sometimes the bizarre. The latter was the specialty of the eccentric Arnold Böcklin and the dream-haunted Max Klinger, both of whom deployed all the symbolic paraphernalia of the sublime (stormy seas, mysterious figures, lyres, and hunting horns) to achieve a kind of avant-garde kitsch. Max Liebermann, the leading representative of Naturalism in Germany, had been attracting criticism since the 1870s for his portrayal of what were considered miserable, depressing subjects: a painting of tired, grim-looking women plucking geese seemed to its establishment critics an image unlikely, paraphrasing Wilhelm II, to lift up the toiling classes. When in 1879 the Jewish Liebermann dared to paint a young, almost stereotypically Jewish-looking Jesus with the elders in the temple in Jerusalem, the storm of criticism became explicitly antisemitic and hysterically defensive of Christian Germany.22 In the decade of the 1880s, the Christian painter Fritz von Uhde aroused both criticism and praise (also tinged with antisemitism) for a series of paintings of Jesus, his apostles, and his early followers, all with the faces and clothes of German peasants and situated in the plain settings of German countryside and village. In this case, the mainstream art critics proved far more ready to embrace this naturalistic image of a German Jesus than were the Protestant or Catholic church establishments. The latter remained suspicious of the socialist sympathies implicit in all forms of Naturalism.
By the time von Uhde joined the Munich Secession in 1892 and Liebermann led the Berlin Secession in 1898, both had, in a sense, left their most controversial days behind them. What came to be called Expressionism claimed the status of the new avant-garde, experimenting with a style that would express the intensity of interior emotion rather than try to reproduce the outward visual impression of things. The two main groups of Expressionist artists, The Bridge (Die Brücke) formed in Dresden in 1905 and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) formed in Munich in 1911, moved toward abstract representation in their use of vivid colour and violent, often primitive imagery. In the heyday of Expressionism, the whole notion of a modernist avant-garde in conflict with the establishment had become almost a cliché of art criticism and consumption—a phenomenon that subtly detracted from their capacity to shock the audience into new consciousness.
Other kinds of secession marked the theatrical, musical, and literary communities. Richard Wagner, for instance, can be seen as Imperial Germany’s first and most important avant-garde artist, breaking all rules, musical, social, and otherwise—a veritable one-man secession movement. After all, he cut himself loose from existing musical and theatrical institutions and built his own centre at Bayreuth, which he organized according to all his own rules of tonality, architectural design of theatres, social conduct at performances, and professional expectations of performers. Yet even while his music dramas continued to enact a radical challenge to existing politics, society, and religion, he became (or at the very least allowed himself to become) the cultural focus of a radically antisemitic and racialist movement, which sought to exclude and to shut down much that was vibrant in Imperial Germany’s cultural and artistic life. The musical avant-garde after Wagner thus found little to inspire or sustain them in the Bayreuth ruled over by Wagner’s widow Cosima. Wagner’s influence, enduringly important in purely musical terms, lost its revolutionizing potential to the suffocating cult of one man’s genius.
In the world of non-operatic theatre, the difficulties of staging Naturalist plays under existing commercial and political conditions led to the creation of new, essentially private theatrical societies, the model for which was Berlin’s Free Stage. Here the premiere of The Weavers, Gerhart Hauptmann’s controversial dramatization of the 1844 revolt of the Silesian weavers, created a sensation. In order to extend the moral uplift of theatre to the working classes, socialist activist Bruno Wille founded the Free People’s Stage in 1890, an organization with radical egalitarian goals but conventional, even conservative, tastes in drama. Secession from popular entertainment led to the growth of cabaret culture after 1900 in the major urban centres. Satirical, humorous, at times blasphemous and grotesque, the German cabaret movement developed a distinctive kind of urban entertainment that was both intimate and challenging, aspiring neither to high cultural seriousness nor to broad acclaim or commercial success.23 Satirical journals, such as the aging Kladderadatsch in Berlin (founded in 1848) and the newer Simplicissimus in Munich (launched in 1896), developed large circulations with their irreverent content and high-quality cartoons and illustrations. Many of these images had strong affinities with modernist art’s drive to simplification, exaggeration, and abstraction. Shortly before war broke out in 1914, Simplicissimus published the first chapters of novelist Heinrich Mann’s biting critique of German arrogance and servility, The Loyal Subject.24 While far from serving as political gathering points, cabarets, open theatres, and satirical journals did provide venues for artists to dissent from the Straussian ‘rejoicing’ in German achievements that Nietzsche had warned at the outset of the empire would be the death of German culture.
Finally, secession was also the watchword for a colourful array of life reform movements that proliferated in the 1890s and beyond. Many of these appropriated Nietzsche as their spiritual mentor, glorifying the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the first complete edition of which appeared in 1892, three years after Nietzsche’s final mental breakdown), with its endless calls for self-overcoming, life-affirming, and faithfulness to the earth. Whether carrying Nietzsche in their back pockets or not, life reformers sought to make clothing more comfortable, bodies more beautiful, houses more restful, foods more digestible, and diets more vegetable. Striving for any, let alone all, of these things in the modern cities of Imperial Germany usually involved abandoning them. Thus the turn of the century, in Germany as elsewhere, saw a new enthusiasm for the countryside, seaside, and mountainside, all of which provided vistas of a new kind of cultural progress for a new kind of human being. The artists’ colony at Worpswede was the most famous of these retreats from the city. Founded in 1889, when the painters Fritz Mackensen and Otto Modersohn left their art academies for a peat-bog in Lower Saxony, Worpswede soon gathered a group of like-minded artists and poets and, in the way of such things, founded an official association in 1894 (called, unimaginatively, the Worpswede Artists’ Association). Worpswede was only geographically isolated; its artists participated in, and provided a distinctive German contribution to, a number of broader international movements. National romanticism, a Scandinavian movement to recover vernacular styles and building materials like brick and wood for the regeneration of architecture and interior design, had important German participants, in Worpswede and elsewhere. So too did the closely linked arts and crafts movement, the main exponents of which were the Jugendstil artists and designers in Munich and in Darmstadt, the latter at the Mathildenhöhe colony established in 1899 by Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig.
Yet each of these movements had tendencies not only to secession and retreat but also to urbanism and commerce. This is well illustrated in the career of Peter Behrens, a founding member of Munich’s United Workshops for Art in Handicraft. Behrens was inspired by the idea of small communities of artists and craftsmen, integrating style and practicality to achieve social and cultural reform. In 1899, he left Munich to join the ducal community at Mathildenhöhe, there designing a house that was part curving Jugendstil, part vernacular brickwork in the spirit of national romanticism, with interior designs inspired by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. In 1907, with designer Hermann Muthesius, he helped to found the German Crafts League (Deutscher Werkbund), still recognizably part of the arts and crafts movement but increasingly focused on industrial design and the possibilities of mass consumption. In the same year, Behrens became the artistic consultant to the electrical mega-corporation AEG (General Electric Company), for whom he created the first corporate identity, in the form of a logo, publicity materials, and the basis of the modern steel-and-glass aesthetic that came to full maturity in the Bauhaus movement closely associated with Behrens’s younger colleague Walter Gropius.
By the post-war Weimar years, the culture of Imperial Germany had come to seem, in Thomas Mann’s retrospective description, ‘equivocal’ and ‘laughable’ in its attachment to ‘liberal ideas of reason and progress’, ‘crass’ in its materialism, and absurd in its ‘wilful love of mere largeness’ and its ‘taste for the monumental and standard, the copious and grandiose’.25 This was a weighty critique, especially coming from a writer whose first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), represented a finely honed portrait of nineteenth-century culture in one German family. Yet with all due respect to Mann and to the critical spirit he sought to uphold and encourage, a great deal of art that did endure and that did prove influential over the long term came out of the workshops, studios, rehearsal halls, and drafting rooms of Imperial Germany. This was culture that did not merely seduce the Germans who appreciated it into believing themselves the most cultured nation on the earth.26 It also provided an illumination of its world and revealed the sorrows as well as the joys of a German modernity.