Wilhelmine Berlin

Art in America, April, 2000 by Franz Schulze

An exhibition currently on view at the Jewish Museum in New York examines Berlin's rich artistic milieu--embracing art, literature, theater and film--and the extensive cultural contribution made by Jews as the 19th century became the 20th.

A quick glance at the title arouses interest, since it suggests a curious pairing of parts. "Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918," an exhibition currently at the Jewish Museum (through Apr. 23), has sought to make a unity of two subjects normally regarded as anything but unified. It is customary to regard the relations between Jews and Germany as one of the grimmest, least inspiriting chapters of modern history.

Yet the exhibition, which reviews the cultural role played by the Jews and non-Jews who lived in Berlin during the Wilhelmine era, succeeds in conveying a story as complicated and multilayered as it is enlightening. The show does not shrink from references to German anti-Semitism, and it leaves no doubt about its organizers' awareness of the horrors of the Hitler years that followed. But it offers heaps of information, much of it little known to the American public, to demonstrate the richness of Berlin's artistic atmosphere at the turn of the 20th century and the contributions made to it by Jews, and also by Gentiles connected with them in one significant way or another.

To its further credit, the show is not confined to painting, drawing and sculpture. Books, letters, posters, theatrical memorabilia and film clips are also included, and the reach of the display and its attendant literature extends into social and intellectual history as well.

The 250 objects on view play out the breadth of this coverage. Jewish artists as well known as Max Liebermann and Ludwig Meidner, as unfamiliar as Jakob Steinhardt and Lesser Ury, share space with non-Jewish artists, e.g., Germans Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc and Kathe Kollwitz and foreigners Robert Delaunay, Edvard Munch and Umberto Boccioni (and others), all of these having been brought to the attention of Berliners by such Jewish gallerists as Herwarth Walden and publishers like Bruno and Paul Cassirer. Attention is also drawn to the seminal work done in experimental theater by Max Reinhardt, in film by Ernst Lubitsch, in an uncommonly lively cabaret scene by composer and producer Rudolf Nelson and satirist Julius Freund. A section devoted to the society of the cafe marks it as a locale vital to Berlin's literary and artistic vanguard and described by one of its most influential figures, the poet Else Lasker-Schuler, as "our stock exchange ... where you have to go, where the deals are closed. There are all the playwrights, painters, poets." There could also be found the editors, critics and patrons, people of greater wealth and power than the artists, all adding up to a subculture whose members saw a lot of each other and in the process thrived, independent of class distinction.

While cafe life was, and remains, a pan-European phenomenon, the closeness it fostered among certain Berliners around 1900 was essential to the formation of the commonality of the city's Jews and non-Jews, whose creative efforts not only matched in energy and invention the extraordinarily swift growth of the city in the later 19th century but correspondingly helped to turn a provincial capital into a cosmopolis.

The importance of collaboration has been emphasized by guest curator Emily Bilski, who conceived the idea of the show. The viewer cannot help but be impressed, if not surprised, by the degree to which Jews and Gentiles worked together in a harmony that extended to their family relationships. A charcoal study by Liebermann shows a daughter of Paul Cassirer and a daughter of the landscape painter Walter Leistikow drawing side by side at the same table, and Max Slevogt's affectionate oil portrait of Suzanne, the Cassirer girl, is one of the most memorable works in the exhibition. Lovis Corinth, moreover, was Steinhardt's teacher, as well as the designer of costumes for Reinhardt's spectacular 1903 production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Indeed, as Bilski points out in her catalogue introduction, cooperation sometimes verged on paradox: the Jewish draftsman E.M. Lilien "established his reputation as the Zionist artist par excellence by illustrating the ballads of a right-wing writer [Borries Freiherr von Munchhausen] with anti-Semitic leanings."

Yet the exhibition provides ample evidence, despite all the collaborative gestures that worked to the overall advantage of Berlin culture, of the persistence of anti-Semitism in Berlin society and of the status of the Jew as an eternal stranger there, "not," in the words of the Jewish sociologist Georg Simmel, "as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow." Jews as a collective shared a reverence for the time-honored German concept of Bildung--education steeped in culture and grounded in the classics--and their pursuit of that ideal contributed to the flowering of their own artistic and intellectual creativity. But there was little room for them on the faculties of German universities, and their embrace of modernism was seen in some quarters as the "alien element" in German life.