Imagining Modern German Culture: 1889-1910 - Review

Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996. 312 pp.; 8 color ills., 149 b/w. $55.00

The fall of the Berlin .Wall in November 1989 was undoubtedly one of the most important events of the last half-century. Its political effects were in some ways predictable; its intellectual ones much less so. And yet here, too, important changes have taken place. Broadly speaking, until now German art of the post-Renaissance era has been practically ignored by art historians in North America and Britain. Exceptions have mainly been made for early modernist manifestations such as the Blaue Reiter, a few individual artists of the pre- and postwar periods, and the Bauhaus. Naturally, there had also always been those who recognized the potential interest of 19th-century Germany - among them several of the contributors to Francoise Forster-Hahn's compilation, and above all the editor herself - but theirs were voices crying in the wilderness of French-oriented Anglo-American art history.

This has begun to change in recent years, perhaps - as Forster-Hahn suggests (p. 301) - as a reflection of the new political order. Certainly, reunification has made research easier and has facilitated access to the great collections of 19th-century art in the former GDR. But there may be a psychological component as well. Germany has finally become "normal"; apparently cured of the ills of both National Socialism and communism, it can now be treated like any other country; dealing with it is no longer taboo. The result has been a spate of English-language publications,(1) several important exhibitions in the United Kingdom and the United States - including a major retrospective of the works of Adolph Menzel at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. - and even a few interesting museum purchases.(2)

The Romantic Spirit in German Art, 1790-1990 and Imagining Modern German Culture, 1889-1910 represent two very different approaches to German art of the 19th and 20th centuries. The former, a weighty tome masquerading as an exhibition catalogue, was published to accompany an exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and the Hayward Gallery in London in 1994; the latter is an anthology of conference papers, given originally at a symposium at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C., also in 1994.

The methods used to analyze the material could not be more at variance. While The Romantic Spirit is essentialist in outlook, the CASVA essays are thoroughly contextualized and grounded in history. The former attempts to create an overarching paradigm for understanding the German art of more than two centuries; the latter, in examining only a brief moment, shows the complexity and variety of ideological forces that shaped modern art in Germany. The Hayward catalogue, with one or two exceptions, is the work of art historians only and focuses almost exclusively on painting, while Forster-Hahn's compendium is interdisciplinary and "multimedial." It is perhaps also important to note that The Romantic Spirit was written primarily by German authors (here translated with varying degrees of success) but designed for a broad, non-German audience, while Imagining Modern German Culture is by American and British scholars and is directed at others in their fields.

The circumstances surrounding the organization of the exhibition The Romantic Spirit had a profound influence on both the form and content of the catalogue, making some commentary necessary. The exhibition was first conceived in 1992 to focus on German Romanticism; it was soon discovered, however, that because of prior commitments a number of important loans were unavailable. Rather than postpone their project, the organizers chose to broaden the original concept to include later Romantic and "Romantic-inspired" images up to our own time.(3)

Probably the most controversial decision was to exhibit pictures of the Nazi era as a "decadent flowering" (p. 391) of the Romantic spirit. This was certainly the aspect that attracted the most media attention.(4) Although arguably a legitimate idea, the issue was dealt with in an extremely perfunctory manner, making the works' inclusion seem merely provocative. The essay covering this period in the catalogue, "Aspects of Art in the Third Reich" (pp. 390-92), written in a rather bombastic style by Lutz Becker, is far too short to do anything but evoke a vague feeling of consternation. The same could be said of the incorporation of two East Germans, Gerhard Altenbourg and Hermann Glockner, who receive a similarly cursory treatment (pp. 453-54).

These circumstances have resulted in an extremely uneven catalogue. The emphasis is clearly on early German Romanticism, with the other sections simply tacked on as an afterthought. Although the organizers expressly intended to appeal to "audiences who lack close familiarity" (p. 9) with the subject, the confusing organization of the book, which contains more than forty-five essays, but no index or bibliography, makes it almost impossible to tackle, even for the most intrepid reader. For those already well acquainted with artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, and the Nazarenes, or modern movements such as the Blaue Reiter and Die Brucke, there is little here that is original. The book is thus simultaneously too broad and too detailed. Moreover, the essays are extremely repetitive, citing the same sources and quotations (often in different translations) and frequently even coming to the same conclusions. Judicious editing and a combining of similar themes in one essay would have prevented many of these difficulties and would certainly have made the work more readable and informative.