Weimar's Others: Art History, Alterity and Regionalism in Inter‐War Germany
2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8365.12454
ISSN1467-8365
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoCrushed underneath the broken marble of former empires / lies an entire narrative / of the bloody conquest / the colonial scroll palimpsest / the interest in the unrest / the beginning and the end.1 (Philipp Khabo Koepsell, 2014). In 2014 the British Museum in London staged an ambitious sweep through six hundred years of German history as told through a carefully selected range of diverse material objects. Curated by the museum's then director Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation explored how the country had fashioned and refashioned its fragmentary identity from the Holy Roman Empire through to unification in the 1870s, post-war division and eventual reunification in 1989. The curatorial narrative moved boldly and fluidly across different regions and times: visitors encountered artworks by Albrecht Dürer, Käthe Kollwitz and Gerhard Richter; they could marvel at the technological achievements of the Gutenberg printing press and the development of Meissen porcelain, as well as explore modernist examples of Bauhaus design and the VW Beetle (plate 1). Together, such objects revealed the complex jigsaw that constitutes Germany's ruptured past. Indeed, the historical malleability of German borders, so succinctly mapped through material artefacts, reminded viewers of just how many of the country's former major polities, including the Holy Roman Empire and the Prussian state, have long since disappeared. As the popularity of the exhibition, its accompanying BBC radio series and substantial monograph attested, curiosity about a country that now represents an economic powerhouse, and which has sat at the helm of Europe since 1993, remains unabated. Yet amidst the plethora of seminal moments in Germany's long and fractured history, it is the Weimar Republic above all that has received more attention in popular culture and academic discourse since the fall of the Berlin Wall than almost any other phase of German history.2 Germany's fragile republic was a period of intense creation, regular crisis and oft-cited ‘inevitable’ collapse into a dictatorship of unprecedented extremes within modern Europe.3 As the peace-time interlude between the First World War and the ascendancy of Hitler, it continues to yield significant historical, economic and cultural lessons about Germany's place in the matrix of contemporary global politics.4 On the centenary of its foundation, then, it is the aim of this special issue of Art History to ask: how has the wealth of scholarship on Weimar culture from the last two and a half decades, since re-unification, contributed specifically to the discipline of art history (as opposed to German studies, film studies, political history or performance studies, for example) and vice versa? And where might art-historical research on the Weimar Republic be heading? What, if any, are the continued resonances of art made during the era, well beyond the immediacy of its origins in 1920s and 1930s Germany? How might a focus on art-historical margins – what we are referring to in this special issue as Weimar's ‘others’ – either change our thinking about what the Republic was, or perhaps confirm the dominant narratives of decadent excess, moral decay and imminent political danger that have so long defined this period of study? What role, if any, do the Republic's intellectuals, artists and cultural producers continue to play in the present? This special issue explores the cultural practices, production and reception of art from both the Republic's cities and its rural provinces. As a de-centrist project, it seeks what Gustav Frank has suggested ought to be an openness to diversity in its varied explorations of Weimar visual culture.5 It does so by foregrounding in-depth analyses of art made by historiographically under-represented Berlin-based women such as Lotte Laserstein and Jeanne Mammen, as well as lesser-known work by regionally-based artists including Elsa Haensgen-Dingkuhn, Gela Forster and Heinrich Hoerle. In addition, it includes essays on the overlooked material and iconographic contexts for the Merz collages of the more celebrated Kurt Schwitters, as well as in-depth research on the production and appearance of Notgeld – the vast sums of emergency money that were produced during Germany's period of hyper-inflation, between 1914 and 1923. It is this shift of focus, then, from the usual suspects of Weimar cultural historiography (Otto Dix, George Grosz, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang and countless others – justly celebrated but perhaps over-determined figures from the era) that opens up further possibilities for a varied and nuanced account of the period under investigation. It does this through a variety of methodological lenses, from material cultural analysis to gender, queer and disability studies. ‘Weimar's Others’ heralds a shift from centre to periphery and attends closely to the regional inflections and intersectional biases of art made in Germany between the First and Second World Wars.6 The hasty political compromise that became the Weimar Republic was spawned in November 1918 after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the ensuing popular revolution that swept the country. Both had been engendered by Germany's crushing defeat in the First World War. Yet the political struggles that followed between the newly emergent communists and the right-wing upholders of an outmoded, pre-war imperial order began not in the nation's capital Berlin but in the port town of Kiel. The republic's regional genesis was further underscored through the choice of Weimar as the city in which the new constitution was eventually declared on 11 August 1919. Choosing Weimar, not the capital Berlin, for such a historically momentous political occasion was a deliberate strategy; it shifted the values and ideals of the emergent republic away from the extreme partisan politics of the immediately preceding bloody civil war that had been bitterly fought on Berlin's streets. Weimar enabled an alternative cultural vision for Germany's future, away from metropolis. As a city of poets, it was traditionally associated with the golden age of Goethe and Schiller, but it soon became the site of the first incarnation of that quintessentially modernist institution, the Bauhaus (plate 2). One hundred years ago, in 1919, Walter Gropius literally stood at the nexus between Germany's past, present and future. The founder and first director of the state-sponsored school of applied arts and design, he was also commissioned to produce a commemorative bronze plaque marking the inauguration of the Weimar government. The inscription was placed in the German National Theatre in which Goethe and Schiller were most often performed and in which the new constitution had been vigorously debated by politicians of all parties.7 Thus, from the outset both Germany's cultural producers and its regions were pivotal to the political visions of a Republican future. Yet when we originally conceived this collection of essays, our thinking was motivated by a general sense that scholarship on Weimar Germany often conflated it with its metropolitan capital, Berlin, standing in for the entire country.8 As the regional origins of the Republic remind us, Berlin was not the only or even the whole story. Whilst a variety of cultural practices in outlying areas of the country may have been inflected by aspects of Berlin's metropolitan chic, they also retained their own peculiar strengths and variations, some of which are explored by our contributors. It also seemed apposite that a special issue of Art History should be devoted to the varieties of Weimar visual culture produced during the same period that engendered some of the key disciplinary accomplishments of the modern discipline's founders: Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, Gertrud Bing and the so-called ‘Hamburg School’.9 That the birth of Hamburg's university coincided with that of a new age might have been enough to land Cassirer a position there. That he promoted an interpretation which placed German thought into the context of European intellectual history, however, signalled the potential for a strong partnership with Hamburg's reimagined urban identity.12 The surviving form does not triumphantly outlive the death of its competitors. On the contrary, it symptomatically and phantomatically survives its own death: disappearing from a point in history, reappearing much later at a moment when it is perhaps no longer expected and consequently having survived in the still poorly defined reaches of a ‘collective memory’.15 Scholars like Margaret Iversen and Didi-Huberman have expertly unravelled some of the indeterminate impulses of Warburg's thought and both point to the idea that fully conscious explanations of the concept of Pathosformeln remain purposefully elusive.16 Giorgio Agamben has suggested that it refers to ‘an indissoluble intertwining of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula in which it is impossible to distinguish between form and content’.17 Iversen observes that ‘Warburg thought of antiquity as best symbolized by a Janus-faced herm […] of Apollo and Dionysus’ in dialectical tension, one dependent upon the other and that “the pathos formulae” […] were exemplary expressions of primitive emotion and “tragic unrest”.’ For Agamben ‘what is unique and significant about Warburg's method as a scholar is not so much that he adopts a new way of writing art history as that he always directs his research toward the overcoming of the borders of art history.’18 In recent scholarship it is the unfinished Bilderatlas (picture book) or Mnemosyne that has redirected the discipline's attention to this specific moment in its own historical formation.19 Begun in 1924 and left unfinished at Warburg's death in 1929, black-and-white reproductions of classical and Renaissance sculptures, frescoes, Eastern and Western medieval manuscript pages, popular prints, calendars, tapestries, astrological charts, playing cards, newspaper clippings, stamps and advertisements were pinned in various arrangements over a sequence of more than sixty cloth-covered boards. Neither definitively montage, nor quite mosaic, these were images in motion – never permanently fixed and subject to regular re-iteration. Their heterogeneity was inherently suggestive – a far cry from the methodological system of interpretation promulgated posthumously in the exilic aftermath of the Hamburg School. As Iversen has outlined, for several decades after Warburg's death Panofsky (and Gombrich after him) became responsible for reifying some of the key tenets of Warburg's dialectical thinking into a more easily manageable register of different levels of iconographic interpretation.20 Panofsky and Gombrich's identification of a logical set of coordinates with which to understand, identify and taxonomize what Warburgian thought might entail was counter-intuitive. Warburg's ideas remain evasive – and deliberately so; value lies precisely in their resistance to narratives of progress. Rather, it is on the taut thread between Dionysian and Apollonian impulses where symptoms of collective pain in human culture may be identified and critiqued; the dark and violent underside of Renaissance culture (and latterly ‘the colonial scroll palimpsest’ of Philipp Khabo Koepsell's epigraph) is where redemptive possibilities might be sought. As Emily Levine has commented, ‘unfortunately for Warburg, the struggle between reason and irrationality was also deeply personal, thwarting his productivity’, and led to a significant mental breakdown for which he was hospitalized in Kreuzlingen between 1921 and 1924.21 It was largely visits by, and continued belief in the scholarly enterprise of, Cassirer that enabled Warburg to return to the library in 1925 to resume his work (before his untimely death from a heart attack a few years later). Levine's richly detailed account persuasively argues for the auspicious conditions in which Weimar cultural life could thrive in regional cities like Hamburg. In this special issue, Hamburg signifies as a location for both the origins of art history and its limits. By 1933 Saxl, Bing, Wind, Cassirer and the library had fled to London to escape Nazism and Panofsky was already teaching in the USA. With Warburg dead, the revolutionary but difficult aspects of his thinking were inevitably by-passed in favour of Panofsky's more systemized approach to methods of iconographic interpretation. Returning though for a moment to Hamburg in 1919, whilst Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, Saxl and their circle were mostly preoccupied in the reading room of the KBW on Heilwigstraße, across town a young Elsa Haensgen-Dingkuhn (the subject of Elinor Beaven's essay in this volume) was enrolling in the newly re-opened Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule (State Arts and Crafts School) at Lerchenfeld in Hamburg-Nord (now the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg or HFBK Hamburg). A new building for the school had been inaugurated in 1913 to accommodate its growing enrolment figures, but during the war educational activities were suspended and the building had served as a military hospital. When it resumed its function as an art school in 1918, the ceremonial speech dedicated to the completion of a wall painting in the auditorium was delivered by Aby Warburg.22 Whilst it is unlikely that Haensgen-Dingkuhn and Warburg knew each other personally, their parallel ties to the Hanseatic city through art and its histories – as retrieved here – is a coincidence that is testament to the role of regionalism within Weimar's art histories and one of the strands of this special issue.23 Indeed, the major role that towns like Hamburg, Frankfurt, Weimar, Dresden, Munich, Mannheim and others played in the fostering of interwar Germany's unparalleled intellectual and artistic climate – many of which feature in the range of essays assembled here – are central to our re-thinking the urban dynamics of the era under investigation. Cultural histories of Weimar Germany remain dominated by the inevitable lure of Berlin.24 Undoubtedly an exemplary modern city during this period, it was a vigorous barometer of the ways in which modernity was made manifest in post-First World War Germany. Yet can the dominant narratives of the capital's avant-garde adequately represent the experiences of democracy for the German nation at large? With a population explosion from just under two million in 1919 to well over four million by 1933, it was the second largest city in Europe and attracted numerous visitors of all hues from across the continent and beyond. With its trade exhibitions, film studios, light installations, living window displays and cross-dressing nightclubs, visitors were ‘struck dumb with amazement’.25 However, the city's critics were quick to condemn the overcrowding, crime and poverty that had been generated by rapid urbanization and industrialization. In much of the masculinist culture of the era, the figure of the prostitute who haunted the ‘Berliner Strich’ (Berlin's red-light district) became synonymous with the city. In gendered satirical visions of modernity, so fierce was the competition amongst the ‘modish’ women lining the streets, that they often outnumbered the potential clientele. For art critic and editor of the journal Kunst und Künstler, Karl Scheffler (1869–1951), its quick construction and modern infrastructure signified the negative eradication of past histories. Berlin became the city of ‘modern ugliness’.26 For Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Germany's first cultural sociologist of modernity, it was also the site of modern alienated individualism, brought on by the commodification of relationships as transactional exchanges within the mature money economy.27 In many respects, the rapid urbanization and modernization that developed in Germany overall during this period was not unlike the landscape found elsewhere in France or Britain. Yet Germany's defeat in war, the loss of its colonies, the abdication of its monarchy and its failed 1918–19 revolution meant that it was marked by political strife from the very beginning of the post-war period. Despite or perhaps because of its bloody beginnings, the Weimar Republic also developed into a radical testing ground for social reformism, parliamentary democracy, mass consumerism and nationalist mobilization. A particularly revealing episode can be found in the activities of the African Aid Association: the occupation of the Rhineland by French colonial troops after 1918 had caused a vehement propaganda campaign against what came to be known as the ‘schwarze Schmach’ (Black Shame) in Germany.28 Anti-black sentiment was at its height in the immediate aftermath of the war. Yet as Christian Rogowski has demonstrated, Black Germans mobilized and in 1918 the first self-help group for people of African descent living in Germany was founded in Hamburg, the Afrikanischer Hilfsverein (African Aid Association). Prompted by an attack on a fellow Black German, on 24 May 1921 the film actor Louis Brody penned an open letter, published on behalf of the association in the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag. He called on Germany to respect its colonial migrants ‘and not constantly to stir up hatred against them by reporting on Black Shame’.29 He exhorted the German populace to remember their obligations as a result of their own colonial misadventures, particularly as their former colonial subjects now found themselves in legal and political limbo. Brody's letter is both extraordinary and significant in giving voice to the concerns of Weimar Germany's burgeoning black population at a time when black voices were at best mute and more often than not invisible. This was a political era in which revolutionary artists, Bauhaus architects, social democrats, radical nationalists, Zionists, communist intellectuals, sexual reformers, ‘new women’ and avant-garde artists frequently intersected and often collided. It was a time when Germany developed the greatest number of social housing projects in Europe and cooking a meal efficiently was likened to the time-motion systems of Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor.30 Sexual reform movements saw the world's first Institute for Sexual Science established by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin; Bertolt Brecht believed that technology in the future might permit people to be taken apart and put back together like machines. Mass sport and expressionist dance possessed the potential to rebuild a nation, while after the Dawes Plan, American imports including jazz, the Charleston, chewing gum, cotton, machinery and tobacco were marketed to provide succour to a defeated nation intent on forgetting the immediate past.31 For white women over the age of twenty-one, article 109 of the new constitution afforded them the freedoms and, in principle at least, the rights of suffrage and equality with white men that preceding generations had fought for without success. Yet for most ethnic minorities living, born or married within Weimar Germany, the promised freedoms and ideals of the new Republic often brushed up against the entrenched Imperial legislation and conservative regulations, particularly around fraught questions of German citizenship. Questions about who belonged and who did not were vigorously debated with reference to the 1913 citizenship laws which promoted the principle of jus sanguinis (the law of blood) over jus soli (law of the soil or residency). As Annemarie Sammartino has indicated, ‘German ancestry became an important test of an applicant's suitability for German citizenship’.32 Yet the criteria for determining who was and who was not eligible were increasingly ambiguous. In 1920 the Reich Interior Ministry stipulated that the most important measure was a foreigner's ‘way of life’.33 With such loose guidelines, it was far easier for individual states to find grounds for dismissal of applications than it was to grant them. Those who could become citizens and those who were excluded were determined by privileges of ethnicity and race. So what positions were left open to those who were unable to obtain citizenship? at once a demand to question what constitutes Germanness and a desire to express a relationship to blackness […] Black German identity provokes not only a different conception of German cultural identity but, at the same time, contests essential, phenotypical and nationalist definitions of race.38 There is no immediate access to a subaltern consciousness; forms of subaltern articulation are neither transparent nor easily readable as expressions of a logically presumed, self-identical subject of enunciation. Rather they flicker between different poles of subjugation and subjectivation, split, highly positioned, bearing traces of what W. E. B. Du Bois has described as the ‘peculiar sensation’ of a ‘double consciousness’.41 The archival fragments that reveal glimpses into the histories and subjectivities of Weimar's Black Germans offer scholars challenges but also opportunities to engage in alternative methodological approaches. Although none of the essays collected in this issue address Weimar culture from the perspective of post-colonialism, the broken fragments of history inherent in the concept of Geschichtssplitter (resonant with Warburg's Bilderatlas) serve to remind us of the limits of our discipline. All but one of the essays in this volume (that by Erin Sullivan Maynes) focuses on named individuals. The narratives that unfold through the selected case studies on artists as disparate as Kurt Schwitters, Heinrich Hoerle, Gela Forster, Jeanne Mammen, Elsa Haensgen-Dingkuhn and Lotte Laserstein are the fragmentary narratives of only a tiny sample of Weimar subjects caught up in the political maelstrom of the era. So, if one takes MacGregor's impressive curatorial project as an exemplary model of one version of German history, as has been done here, and recalibrates aspects of it through the lens of Black German scholarship, for example, what might Germany's ‘memories of a nation’ look like? In the same year as the British Museum's sweeping chronicle of the hegemonic history of (white) Germany, Black German poet and activist Philipp Khabo Koepsell and American-born, Berlin-based Asoka Esuruoso published a collection of poetry and creative writing by black writers living in Germany. In their anthology Arriving in the Future, Esuruoso, Khabo Koepsell and their collaborators put forward a series of alternative experiences of home and exile that reclaim a presence for themselves and their peers within national narratives of German identity. Esuruoso's introductory essay offers an incisive historical overview of the presence of people of African descent in Germany, from black soldiers in the Imperial Roman armies to Audre Lorde's account of her seminal 1992 visit to Berlin, immediately after the fall of the wall.42 Esuruoso's opening gambit focuses on the narrative of St Maurice, a third-century Nubian legionnaire who became central to the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto I, from 962 to 973.43 The legend of the saint was first chronicled between 443 and 450 by Eucherius, Bishop of Lyon.44 According to Eucherius's account, Mauritius (known today as Maurice) was a native of Thebes in Egypt. He became a high-ranking officer in the Imperial Roman army, commanding a unit of over six thousand soldiers composed entirely of Christians. Normally deployed in the east, Maurice and his men were sent from Egypt to Europe to quell the Gauls on the west bank of the Rhine. When Emperor Maximian (250–310) ordered them to persecute Christians, they refused, and the entire unit was executed.45 In tenth-century Germany, Emperor Otto decided to establish a cult around the saint, transferring his remains in 961 to the royal territories in Magdeburg, Saxony. There, he established a monastery, a church and an archiepiscopal residence around the relics.46 Maurice became the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire. From the mid-twelfth century until the sixteenth, ‘the emperor was anointed at the altar of St Maurice in St Peter's Basilica in Rome’.47 As Ainsworth, Hindriks and Terjanian have commented in their analysis of Cranach's 1520 painting of the saint (plate 3), ‘hailing from a remote corner of the Roman Empire that was populated by blacks and also representing the virtues of the perfect Christian warrior, Maurice was ideally suited to epitomize the contemporary ambitions to expand Christian rule’.48 He became ‘one of the most prominent saints in the Holy Roman Empire’, and his sword and spurs ‘would become part of the regalia used at coronations of Austro-Hungarian Emperors right up until 1916’, the crowning of Charles I, the last Emperor of Austria.49 Whilst early German depictions of Maurice, such as an anonymous sculptural rendition (c. 1240) on the exterior of Madgeburg cathedral, the detailed painting of St Maurice by Lucas Cranach and Matthias Grünewald's Meeting of St Erasmus and St Maurice (1520–24) in the Alte Pinakothek Munich unequivocally represent him as black African, by the sixteenth century across most of Europe, in works such as Jacopo Pontormo's Martyrdom of St Maurice and the Theban Legion of 1528 (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) and El Greco's The Martyrdom of St Maurice of 1580–82 (Monasterio de El Escorial, Madrid), the saint had been bleached. Esuruoso comments: As the ancient sword and spurs of Saint Maurice proclaim, Black German history did not spring from the wreckage of the First and Second World Wars, or even German colonization, as it was once believed. Black history has been here far longer and yet, like the body and face of Maurice, has been actively whitened and negligently forgotten over time […].50 Indeed, Maurice was not the only medieval black saint in Germany; as Paul Kaplan reminds us, ‘there were several lesser-known [ones], including St Gregor Maurus of Cologne’ and the short-lived sister saint to Maurice, St Fidis.51 A buried lineage of black saints in Germany notwithstanding, Maurice is significant to narratives of German nationhood because of his centrality to the ceremonies of the Holy Roman Empire (the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1806) for almost seven centuries until its dissolution in 1918 (and the inauguration of the Weimar Republic a year later). Apart from saints, there were of course other historical exceptions, perhaps the most notable of whom was the Ghanian Enlightenment philosopher, Nzima Antonius Wilhelm Amo Afer (c. 1703 to c. 1753) who wrote a major thesis, On the Rights of Moors in Europe (De Jure Maurorum in Europa), likely ‘the first defence of Black people written on German soil’.52 Both Amo and Maurice are unusual examples of Black Germans whose fabled life stories stand out within orthodox narratives of German history precisely because of their exceptionalism. Nevertheless, they serve as important milestones in the German national story. They prompt us to beware of the occlusions within historicist narratives of nationhood. Indeed, the opening epigraph to this introduction is a timely contemporary reminder by Philip Khabo Koepsell of the bloody histories of Germany's multi-faceted past that have nevertheless propelled him and his contemporary Afro-Germans to ‘arrive in the future’.53 Yet, despite the archival evidence of many centuries of individual black people arriving in the courts, universities and armies of Germany, the birth of modern Black Germany can undoubtedly be traced back to the 1884 Berlin West-Africa congress and its aftermath. This was the event that precipitated the so-called ‘scramble for Africa’ by the major European colonial powers. As Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft have demonstrated, young men ‘who hailed from Germany's new African colonies became the founding generation for a substantial black presence in Germany’.54 The nation's defeat in 1918 and the concomitant loss of its colonial territories left many of this generation in limbo. As Marcia Klotz observes, the Weimar Republic occupied a peculiar place within Europe of the 1920s and 1930s as ‘a post-colonial state in a still colonial world’.55 Whilst a number of male colonial migrants had chosen to partner with white German women, have children and raise families, they were not permitted to gain German citizenship since once the colonies were lost they became stateless and in limbo. Denied passports and facing bureaucratic hindrances to securing identity papers, they were also unable to leave Germany. From the outset, the myth of the country's Golden Twenties remained an elusive one for many of Weimar's post-colonial Black Germans who were forced into the entertainment industry as exotic ‘extras’ for the amusement of the indigenous population if they were to subsist in the devastated post-war economy.56 Considerations of regionalism on one hand or Black Germans during the Weimar era on the other are of course only partial ways of thinking through who or what ‘others’ might encompass in a methodological framework for the analysis of Weimar's modernity. The burgeoning scholarship in the areas of Jewish, LGBTQ, gender, ethnicity, disability and critical race studies (amongst others) pertaining to modern Germany is testament to the ever-expanding field of research that this rich period of history continues to yield for researchers, but what is its specific value for art history? In visual terms, the representation of difference in Weimar culture is also inevitably contextually contingent. Ethnic identities as diverse as Jewish, Roma, African, Indian, Arab, Mongolian and Chinese were frequently conflated within visual representation of the era to signal a trope of exoticized ‘other’ or tolerated ‘foreigner’. As Katherine Tubb has observed, ‘in the Weimar period, to depict a person of colour was to take a socio-political position on modernity, on German-ness, and o
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