Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a very beautiful painting, Grunewaldsee, which owed a clear debt to the French Impressionists. The work showed the placid lake in evening light, the surrounding trees silhouetted against a darkening sky, and a small path snaking along the shore. He had high hopes for the painting but it was refused by the Academy. Richard Israel thought it of such high quality that he purchased it and donated it to the National Gallery, where it came to the attention of the Kaiser. Shortly after the Academy refusal the gallery director Hugo von Tschudi tried to persuade the Kaiser to invest in some French Impressionist paintings, and he hoped that by showing him a great work in the same style by the ‘Painter of the Mark Brandenburg’ he would approve the expenditure. The opposite happened. Instead of admiring Leistikow’s work William announced that the picture was terrible, and did not look like nature at all. He was certain of this not only because he personally ‘knew the Grunewald’ but because ‘apart from anything else he was a hunts-man’.⁹³ Tschudi was forced to resign, and it became clear that the Academy would remain closed to Leistikow. In 1898 he and eleven other artists, including Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, broke away in protest and founded the Berlin Sezession. Max Liebermann became its first president.

      The first Berliner Sezession exhibition was held in a small building in the garden of the Theater des Westens in the Kantstrasse; the freshly prepared walls were so damp that the paintings had to be taken down every evening and rehung the next day to prevent damage. Most officially approved artists refused to have anything to do with the gallery; Menzel ‘spat with contempt’ when asked if he would exhibit there.⁹⁴ Nevertheless, the gallery became an underground success and moved to larger premises. A 1905 guidebook informed tourists that the Sezession had moved to Kurfürstendamm 208: ‘Regular summer exhibitions from May to September. Small but powerful … Officers go in civilian clothes!’ (the Kaiser had threatened to punish officers seen entering the gallery).⁹⁵ Despite official condemnation the gallery exposed Berliners to some of the greatest works of the late nineteenth century. The young art dealer Paul Cassirer was instrumental in bringing paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Lautrec, Rodin, Whistler, Israëls, Beardsley and Maillol to Berlin, and it was he who introduced the as yet unknown Cézanne to Germany. During a trip to Copenhagen Leistikow had seen works by Van Gogh and brought them to the gallery. According to Corinth the paintings ‘baffled Berliners … there was much ironic laughter and shrugging of shoulders’ but the Sezession continued to exhibit Van Gogh’s works long before they were generally appreciated as masterpieces.⁹⁶ The gallery also showed an increasing number of German artists and soon works by Beckmann, Grossmann, Purrmann and Walser were shown along with those by Hans Baluschek, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Heinrich Zille and Frank Skarbina.

      Industrial Berlin itself was becoming an acceptable ‘subject’ for the first time, and paintings began to show the desolation and misery of life in the working-class city. Lesser Ury exhibited his first ‘street paintings’ in 1889. Skarbina’s Railway in the North of Berlin depicts a proletarian couple trudging through the dirty snow on a Ringbahn bridge high above a railyard, framed by dreary smokestacks and rusty ironwork and bathed in icy artificial light. Poor tattered women huddle under a cold yellow sky waiting for their husbands in Hans Baluschek’s Midday at Borsig, while in his Berlin Landscape a lonely female figure hurries furtively past a Berlin municipal railway and row of tenements, concealing a small red wreath meant for a socialist demonstration. Baluschek captured the new Berlin which ‘like a lucky speculator, lacked the breeding and culture to play the new role with decorum, without meanness’.

      Heinrich Zille’s lithographs were inspired in part by the revelations of a Dr Ebelin who, after talking to Berlin slum children, discovered that ‘70 per cent have no idea of what a sunrise looks like, 76 per cent don’t know what dew is, 82 per cent have never seen a lark, half have never heard a frog’. Zille showed people crammed together in their high rental barracks accessed by tiny staircases or living in wretched wet cellars and over stinking stalls without air and sun. ‘There, one could kill a man’, he commented wryly, ‘just as easily as if one used an axe.’⁹⁷ His drawings for popular magazines were tragic, witty and ironic at the same time; one showed a boy yelling to his mother to throw down the flower pot because his dying consumptive sister wanted to sit ‘in the garden’. But of all the works shown the most passionate and moving were by Käthe Kollwitz. Her shocking portrayals of starvation, disease and filth, of death in the slums, of human tragedy behind the brick walls of the rental barracks were wrenching and terrible. The Kaiser refused to allow the Association of Berlin Artists to grant her their gold medal: ‘Please, gentlemen, a medal for a woman,’ he exclaimed, ‘that would really be going too far.’ It hadn’t helped that she had incited ‘revolutionary tendencies’ by producing engravings for Gerhart Hauptmann’s banned play, The Weavers.⁹⁸

      Although these artists would reach dizzying heights of fame during the Weimar Republic they were lonely pioneers in imperial Berlin. The official critic Broder Christiansen once sneered that the Naturalists were interested only in ‘the crass, the shrill, the caustic, the repulsive and the common … the miserable people of Berlin in Heinrich Zille’s paintings do not want to move,’ he said, ‘they are not there as a social indictment, but rather as a means of producing intense nervous stimulation. Their putrescence gives a stimulant to art, and in Zille’s paintings the latrine is seldom missing.’ Herwath Walden published a marvellous article simply listing the words used by Berlin critics against the new artists, expressions which might well have appeared in Hitler’s Degenerative Art catalogue, including ‘sensation seekers’, ‘motley coloured louts’, ‘Niggers in frock coats’, ‘Hottentots in dress shirts’, ‘rabid simpletons’, ‘shitty and laughable clods’, ‘bluffers’, and ‘a horde of colour spraying howling apes’.⁹⁹

      In those days of pettiness, repression, misunderstanding and hatred it was difficult for the industrial poor to see that the glittering Wilhelmine system was drifting towards collapse, and that it would be struck a mortal blow in the mindless butchery of the First World War. But between 1871 and 1914 the squalid life in the factories and the rental barracks carried on as before, and the artists who tried to address these issues were kept well away from the official culture, and the ever increasing wealth and prosperity of the swaggering imperial city.

       VI Imperial Berlin

      Fame surrounds her, blazing, glorious,

      shines to dazzle all men’s eyes:

      and her chosen name, Victorious,

      Goddess of Man’s enterprise.

      (Faust, Part II, Act 1)

      IMPERIAL BENIN, THE BRASH, parvenu capital of the German Reich, exploded on to the world stage in 1871. In its brief forty-seven years the imperial city would change from a small provincial town into a garish giant, and for most Berliners its sheer size and wealth was enough to prove that their city had finally arrived. Berlin was no longer a mere Residenz; it was the Reich capital, complete with parliament and bureaucrats, banks and enterprises and burgeoning industries. The opportunities seemed limitless and the optimism was intoxicating as the city became the showcase of the new energetic German state. The capital might have been chauvinistic, militaristic and undemocratic but few well-to-do Berliners noticed, and for many the late nineteenth century would be remembered as Berlin’s golden age. As one of Gerhart Hauptmann’s characters put it: ‘Berlin is splendid! … Berlin is the most wonderful city in the world … Berlin is life.’¹

      On 16 June 1871 Berliners woke to find their city in festive mood. Acres of bunting and flags smothered the grey buildings up and down Unter den Linden, and the Brandenburg Gate was heavy with greenery. Academy artists from Gustav Richter to Carl Becker, Otto Heyden, Georg Bleibtreu and Adolph von Menzel had worked since May to decorate the route between the Halle Gate and the Lustgarten to СКАЧАТЬ