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

Royal Opera House had to be approved by him, it remained backward and stale. His aversion to modern pieces and his wife’s hatred of the late nineteenth-century themes of sensuality, decadence and corruption ensured that the most innovative works of the period were not performed in Berlin. The great Richard Strauss gave over 1,000 performances at the Royal Opera in nearly twenty years of direction but was forced to première his own operas in Dresden because they were considered too risqué for Berlin; the most insulting incident occurred when his great work Salome was banned because the empress could not tolerate its eerie music, sexual overtones and wild erotic dancing. She was not alone; the Count von Hülsen-Häseler thought Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier was ‘too lusty and vulgar’, an amusing observation from the man who was later to die of a heart attack while dancing in a ballet tutu in front of the Kaiser. Hypocrisy was never a problem for William’s courtiers.⁹⁵

      The Kaiser’s negative influence was even greater in the theatre. He had an intense dislike for the avant-garde and venues such as the Freie Bühne, which were dedicated entirely to the great works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and Wedekind, were officially ignored. Instead, Berliners were given an insipid diet of nationalistic drama. Ernst von Wildenbruch’s historic plays such as Die Quitzows, which distorted the exploits of the pre-Hohenzollern Berlin robber barons, were common fare. The Theater des Westens in Charlottenburg was notoriously dull; Bernhard Sehring’s pseudo-Renaissance building ‘For the Care of Art’ was later described as one of the great sins of the imperial period. But the most dreary of all was the Kaiser’s own Royal Theatre, where the director Hüälsen-Häseler commissioned nothing of which the ‘All Highest Master’ might not approve. A critic who saw a 1905 production of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg said that all was ‘inadequate and superficial’ and that the actors were ‘beneath contempt’. It was said that even productions in the New Theatre, the Lessing Theatre and the Little Theatre were better despite the fact that money, pensions, orders, decorations and official praise were showered down on the Kaiser’s favourites. Artists like Max Reinhardt struggled on, producing works by Wedekind and Shaw and Chekhov at the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele and even opening his famous Grosse Schauspielhaus before the collapse of the empire. But despite their increasing appeal the works would only become ‘acceptable’ after the First World War.⁹⁶

      William was as disgusted by contemporary art as he was by the new theatre. Like many of his contemporaries he had been influenced by the eighteenth-century interpretation of Greek culture which assumed that there was such a thing as an absolute artistic ideal.⁹⁷ All forms of modern art were rejected and he continued to ban the French Impressionists and to attack the local Berlin Secessionists who were, in his words, ‘vulgar’, ‘crass’ and ‘revolutionary’.⁹⁸ Despite the fact that they were attracting the attention of artists and critics throughout the world Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Slevogt, Ernst Barlach and Max Beckmann were treated with such contempt that Franz Servaes was moved to call Berlin ‘the scullery maid of Europe’.⁹⁹ In return for conformity the Kaiser gave his appointees a free hand to control the Berlin art world. Anton von Werner, the conservative President of the Academy of Fine Arts, had soon become to painting what Hülsen-Häseler was to opera.

      Werner echoed the tastes of his master. For him, historical painting was the rightful subject of the modern artist and themes of national history were the most important of all. Art and nationalism coincided as paintings were meant to portray the greatness of the German past as well at to instruct the viewer about decisive world historical moments. On the other hand Werner commonly referred to any form of modern art as ‘dreadful’ or ‘worthless trash’, and even insulted Berlin’s liberal press by complaining that ‘art was better when the critics were better’. For a man who claimed to have ‘no sympathy, no understanding and no apology for historical lack of genius’ his inability to see the great gifts of contemporaries from Manet to Munch was astounding. Artists of whom he approved included the now forgotten Franz Krüger, Eduard Gaertner, Michael Aschenbach, and Ernst Hildebrandt, and the top floor of the National Gallery in Berlin still bears witness to his limited taste; after a visit in 1913 the American critic James Huneker wrote, ‘The sight of so much misspent labour, of the acres of canvas deluged with dirty, bad paint raises my bile.’¹⁰⁰ Hans Rosenhagen complained that he ranked Bonnat with Rembrandt, Anton Graff with Holbein and Gustav Richter with Reynolds, and concluded that ‘When one knows that Herr von Werner is one of the artists who advises the Kaiser … one cannot be surprised that so much meaningless art finds its way to the throne, while none of the painters who are creating the art of our time are found anywhere near the palace.’¹⁰¹

      The artist who captures the era was the Kaiser’s friend Adolph Menzel. Menzel was one of the few outstanding Berlin painters of the period to be accepted at court. He had started on the road to fame with lithographs illustrating the works of Frederick the Great which were recognized for their brilliance. His early paintings, particularly landscapes like Houses in the Snow, were similar to those of Corot or Constable (whose work he knew), and he was open to new ideas – as can be seen in his paintings of construction and industry such as the Iron Rolling Mill of 1875. This momentous work depicts the interior of a huge rail factory with its cavernous interior lit by the glow of molten iron in which around forty workers hurry to lift a bar on to a set of rollers while in the foreground a young girl brings them a basket of bread. The work is reminiscent of Courbet’s The Stone Breakers. Menzel broke new ground with works like Travelling through the Countryside (1892), one of the first pictures to depict rail travel. Such works bring to mind Theodor Fontane’s comment that Menzel was possible only in Berlin – ‘indeed Berlin was for him a necessity’.¹⁰²

      Sadly the more famous Menzel became the more he was seen as the chronicler of the showy Wilhelmine court. This began with his paintings of Frederick the Great, including The Flute Concert in which he created an image of life at Sanssoucci which has impressed leaders ever since – from William II to Hitler – and continued with depictions of Hofbälle and galas and processions for which he was increasingly criticized by his fellow artists. Even his friend and admirer Fontane once referred to him as a ‘grandiose little bauble’, and when he was awarded Prussia’s highest decoration Gerhart Hauptmann called him a traitor to art: ‘Imagine him receiving the Order of the Black Eagle: what horrible blasphemy!’¹⁰³ Although they were friends Liebermann said of him that for all his pretensions he was backward and provincial ‘like all Brandenburgers’.¹⁰⁴ Liebermann admired Menzel but saw him as an artist of the past who dismissed Impressionism with its ‘fuzzy lines’ as the ‘art of laziness’. The art critic Julius Meier-Graefe saw two distinct ‘Menzels’, both the ‘Impressionist’ and the ‘painter of Frederick the Great’.¹⁰⁵

      Despite the opprobrium since heaped upon him it must be said that Menzel’s attempts to create realistic portraits of the great men and events of the past were executed with a skill unmatched by any Berlin painter of his generation. As a result of William’s admiration for his historical works he became a fixture at court and when he died in 1905 the city staged a grand procession with so many flags and officers in uniform that Oskar Loerke remarked that ‘it looked more like a carnival than a funeral’. The Kaiser himself walked behind the coffin; the only other European artist to have been so honoured by his monarch was the incomparable Velázquez, who had died in 1660. But it was clear which aspect of Menzel William admired, saying he was ‘the most distinguished of German artists … not of course the Menzel who anticipated in his street scenes, landscapes and interiors what the younger generation strove for, no, the posthumous Chronicler of old Fritz’.¹⁰⁶

      Historically Berlin art collections had never compared with those in the old German court cities like Munich or Dresden, and it certainly had nothing to match the Louvre or the Hermitage. Thankfully William had nothing against the Old Masters and was determined to bring Berlin galleries up to the standard of his rivals. Thanks to men like Carl Osthaus, Hugo von Tschudi, Ernst Wichert and, above all, Wilhelm von Bode he came closer to his goal than might have been expected.

      Berlin owes a great debt to Bode.¹⁰⁷ An extraordinary art historian in his own right, he had a marvellous eye for lost masterpieces or forgeries; legend has it that he spotted a Frans