Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 - Review

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 400 pp.; 35 b/w illus. $39.50

For most of the past two centuries, much of Germany's culture - its literature, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture - has been profoundly influenced by a continued confrontation with the classical past. To be sure, the arts of all European nations have been inflected by neo-classicism to varying degrees, at one time or another. Germany, however, has always believed that it has had a special relationship to the ancient world, a relationship that was memorably (if somewhat drastically) summarized in the title of E. M. Butler's famous work, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (1935). Whereas Butler focused on the works of great writers, Suzanne Marchand examines the professional purveyors of classical studies, the philologists and archaeologists who turned enthusiasm for the ancient world into an academic science. According to Marchand, their efforts were, in the long run, self-defeating, inasmuch as the humanist enthusiasm that gave rise to classical studies was destroyed by the professionalization of the field: "the triumph of historicist classical scholarship over poetry and antiquarian reverie gradually eroded the very norms and ideals that underwrote philhellenism's cultural significance" (p. xviii).

Marchand begins her tale with the dual legacies of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Wilhelm von Humboldt. In the mid-eighteenth century, Winckelmann put forth a novel image of Greek art as being marked by "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur," an aesthetics of restraint that stood in marked contrast to the Baroque and Rococo styles of the day. Half a century later, Humboldt persuaded the Prussian state to adopt Greek and Latin as the curricular fundamentals of the Gymnasium, the secondary school that was a prerequisite for entrance to the university and, consequently, the professional civil service. Humboldt saw classical languages and literature as a key element of personal Bildung, a concept of self-formation marked by rationality, self-control, and civic engagement. Politically, it was supposed to avoid the excesses of both absolutism and populist democracy: classically educated citizens would neither kowtow to tyrants nor be fooled by demagogues. The traditions of Winckelmann and Humboldt, which dominated German thought in the early 19th century, thus had pronounced aesthetic, ethical, and political implications.

Alas, says Marchand, these traditions soon were sapped of their vital energies as professional and institutional "self-interest" - by her own account, the primary motive force of her narrative (p. xix) - took over. Study of classical texts became not a means to a civic end, but an increasingly erudite and self-centered academic end in itself, resulting in the "dominance of elite, expert, and philosophically unadventurous university philologists over the study of the ancient past" (p. 24). In particular, philologists looked down upon archaeologists and all manifestations of material culture. Archaeology was also spurned by many German museums for much of the 19th century: rather than seeking to procure original works, they collected plaster casts of the "best" sculptures of the classical tradition, to impart a proper sense of beauty to art students and the public at large.

Ultimately, however, "grand-scale" archaeology was able to challenge the philologists and aesthetes, because it received support at the highest levels of Germany's Imperial - and imperialist - regime. In the third and sixth chapters of her book ("The Vicissitudes of Grand-Scale Archaeology" and "The Peculiarities of German Orientalism"), Marchand contends that the unification of Germany in 1871, and its subsequent Great Power aspirations, set the stage for major challenges to the "philhellenic" tradition. One of those challenges came from a new generation of museum directors like Richard von Schone, an official in the ministry of education who became head of Berlin's royal museums in 1880. Schone saw no reason why the collections of the German capital should lag behind those of, say, Paris or London, in terms of original works. But where could they be obtained? Italian digs were increasingly supervised by Italians themselves; as for the Greeks, they were happy to have foreigners conduct excavations - Germans, for example, were busy at Olympia - but they imposed strict export requirements after having lost choice objects like the Parthenon frieze. Fortunately, there was still the Ottoman Empire, which was being courted diplomatically by the German Foreign Office. The plunder of Ottoman possessions was facilitated by the fact that Wilhelm II, who was keen on stocking Berlin's museums, had a cordial personal relationship with Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who was anything but an archaeology buff. Indeed, he was reputed to have said, "Look at these stupid foreigners! I pacify them with broken stones" (p. 204).

From the philhellenic perspective, the pickings on Ottoman soil were potentially rich, but not unproblematic. The good news was that the coast of Asia Minor offered numerous ancient Greek sites ripe for excavation; the bad news was that the Ottoman Empire encompassed even more non-Hellenic antiquities that posed a serious challenge to classical tastes. Even the Greek stuff wasn't quite right: the glorious Pergamon altar, uncovered already in the 1870s, was sculpted in a flamboyant late Hellenistic style that was far removed from the restrained classicism preferred by Winckelmann. Nevertheless, the "Baroque" nature of the Pergamon relief was very much to the liking of the German public, and it opened a major breech in the citadel of classical aesthetics. Even more troubling was the acquisition of the remains of preclassical civilizations: the "Ishtar Gate" of Babylon, for example, was big and colorful and a spectacular addition to Berlin's museum landscape, but Greek it was not. Such finds boosted the prestige of "Orientalist" scholars, who had long chafed under the dominance of the classical mafia that sneered at non-Hellenic civilizations.