“On Germany”

Carl Gustav Carus, Haute Montagne (c. 1824)

I’m fortunate to have received some funding for a research trip to Paris this summer and decided to spend my first weekend in town at a special exhibition at the Louvre, “On Germany,” which promised ” une réflexion autour des grands thèmes structurant la pensée allemande de 1800 à 1939.”  The exposition proceeds chronologically and is divided into three parts: ““Apollo and Dionysius”, “Nature” and “Ecce Homo.”  We move from the neoclassicism of the late Enlightenment into Romanticism and onward to the First World War (there’s a rather large gap in there, yes) and then conclude with artists I’m more familiar with, those such as Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, and George Grosz, who wrestled with the implications of a post-total war modernity and the rise of the National Socialism.  To my eye, the exposition constructed a narrative that progressed from an emergent German nationalism during the Napoleonic era to a counter discourse questioning the foundations of that ideology.  If the exposition begins, in other words, with a survey of what would gradually become a dominant nationalist discourse, it ends with a counter-discourse that not only emphasized the failure of nationalism to create a coherent community, but also questioned whether German cultural nationalism could ever do so.

image: Otto Dix 'Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) [Wounded soldier - Autumn 1916, Bapaume]' etching, aquatint, Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, The Poynton Bequest 2003
Otto Dix, Verwundeter (Herbst 1916, Bapaume) (1924)

A look online, however, revealed a different interpretation raging within the German press, who have accused the Louvre of reinscribing a teleological view of German history where the origins of the Nazis lay in the foundations of German nationalism.  The Sonderweg, or special path of German history, moved from the cultural nationalism of Herder and Fichte to that of Hitler.  As Adam Soboczynski put it in Die Zeit (translation into French is from Le Monde): “Que l’exposition s’achève avec la césure de 1939 ne doit rien au hasard. L’horreur est inscrite dans l’art allemand depuis Goethe. Les paysages nostalgiques d’Italie et de Grèce, la méditation sur le gothique, l’enthousiasme allemand pour le Moyen Age, l’accent mis sur la vie quotidienne, la dépréciation de la “profondeur” allemande ne sont, dans l’interprétation ainsi proposée, que des étapes qui mènent à la catastrophe allemande” (That the exhibition finishes with the turning point of 1939 was not by chance. Horror is inscribed on German art from Goethe on. The nostalgic landscapes of Italy and Greece, the meditation on the Gothic, the German enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, the emphasis put on everyday life, the depreciation of German “depth” are only, in the interpretation thus proposed, steps which lead to the German catastrophe). According to Soboczynski, simply arranging the chronology of the exhibition in a way that begins with the emergence of German nationalism and ends with World War II constitutes a reaffirmation of the Sonderweg.  After all, the various themes of German art history that he points to would have been present under any circumstances; its thus the accent placed on them through the construction of chronology that enforces a narrative of inevitability onto German history.

I find it fascinating, however, that this particular critique points to the endpoint of 1939 as prima facie evidence that the organizers of the exhibition sought to enforce the Sonderweg.  However, did the catastrophe not begin with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933?  Does the choice to continue to the onset of World War II, while ignoring — with the exception of a short clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) — the dominant art of the period, that of the Nazis, not in fact deemphasize that aspect of German History? Why was there no mention of the Degenerate Art Exhibit, where one had to go in order to see the work of Dix and Grosz in the 1930s?

Artur Kampf, 30 Januar 1933

To speak of German art in the 1930s, one must speak of Nazi art because, like it or not, Nazi art was German Art.  It seems to me, in other words, that the Louvre went out of its way to avoid the obvious narrative of German history. The exhibit instead contributed to an historical excision, indicating that the Nazis were simply an aberration and not wholly part of the German story.  The exhibit presented a narrative that was essentially angular, not linear, by beginning with a dominant expression of German culture and ending with those expressions that were most thoroughly repressed at the very moment of their enunciation. That story would have been more convincing had they decided to end in 1933, when political power could be effectively exercised in a way that would mold German cultural expression into forms that corresponded with the virulent nationalism of the Nazis.  The presence of Olympia, almost hidden within a middle room that stands within the very last part of the exhibition, indeed reveals the exhibitors own awareness of the problematic history they decided to present.

Such a narrative, however, too fails to truly avoid teleology.  The more nuanced solution would have been to ask which Germany we’re referring to when we speak of “On Germany.”  After all, Germany was only barely an idea at the beginning of the exhibition and only came into political existence in 1870.  As Donald Lee says in The Art Newspaper, “The main problem with presenting art made in Germany (not including the Austrian Empire) between 1800 and 1939 (1933 would have made an historically more meaningful closure) is that it is very hard to create a coherent story that is made of so many disparate, divergent, contradictory, local, regional and confessional segments. It is a struggle to make the sum of the parts add up to a whole.” An attempt to acknowledge that complexity, a refusal to reduce the variety of German cultural expression into one “Germany” would have also highlighted the contingency of Germany itself.  And in so doing, have revealed the contingency of the Nazis as well.