The chief obstacle was Kaiser Wilhelm, who disapproved of Strauss’s music except for the bombastic marches that the composer dedicated to His Majesty. Wilhelm finally consented to Strauss’s appointment in Berlin only because the musician promised to cooperate with him in guiding the Royal Opera to even greater heights. But once ensconced on the Spree, Strauss continued to write the sort of modernist music the kaiser hated. “I raised a snake in the grass to bite me,” fumed Wilhelm. He told Strauss to his face that he considered his music “worthless.” After the empress stalked out of Strauss’s Feuersnot because it contained erotic themes, Wilhelm ordered the piece banned forever from the Royal Opera. Strauss’s much more “decadent” opera, Salome, based on a play by Oscar Wilde, could not premier in Berlin due to the court’s resistance, and when it finally reached the capital it had to be given an uplifting ending. Similarly, Der Rosenkavalier was approved for production in 1912 only after Strauss agreed to cut out sections showing an official of the royal court behaving like a lecher. “An imperial chamberlain should not act like a vulgar fellow,” admonished the kaiser.
Although Strauss often deferred to the kaiser’s judgment in the interest of promoting his career, he was determined to keep Berlin on the cutting edge of modern music. Because Wilhelm could not be dissuaded from interfering with his work at the Royal Opera, the composer founded a private orchestra, the Tonkünstler, which put on unbowdlerized versions of his own operas as well as works by experimentalists like Bruckner, Elgar, Wolf, and Schonberg. Thus in music as well as in drama, official Berlin was unable to suppress the growing influence of the avant-garde.
Berlin was not Germany’s capital of plastic arts at the time of national unification. That distinction was claimed by Munich, which boasted the largest community of painters and sculptors in the nation. But this began to change in the 1880s and 1890s, when artists started scrambling to the new imperial capital in search of money and prestige. The growing concentration of talent also brought bitter internecine battles over commissions and contracts. The divisiveness was exacerbated by the kaiser, who could not resist taking sides, especially in a domain where he considered himself an expert.
Prior to the 1880s, Berlin’s best known and certainly most beloved artist was Adolf Menzel, who had moved from his native Breslau to the Prussian capital in 1830 at age 15. In his youth Menzel had been a protomodernist, turning out impressionistic treatments of Berlin’s seamier side, its dark streets and primitive factories. Degas was one of his admirers. But by the 1870s he had changed tack both in technique and subject matter, focusing on official Berlin and its historical antecedents. His The Flute Concert and The Round Table mythologized the court of Frederick the Great. He rendered Kaiser Wilhelm I riding down Unter den Linden on his way to the Franco-Prussian war. Skillful in execution, these paintings conveyed an uncritical admiration for Prussian might and glory. Unquestionably, Menzel was anxious to become a part of the court set himself.
The Iron Rolling Milclass="underline" Modern Cyclops by Adolf von Menzel. An example of the painter’s realistic depiction of Berlin’s factory scene
And part of it he duly became. Soon the dwarfish and exceptionally ugly painter—he ruefully admitted that on Judgment Day no woman would be able to point to him and say, “You have me on your conscience, old Menzel”—became a fixture in the high society scene, a voyeuristic presence at every party and ball. Ever the attentive observer, he chronicled these occasions in close detail, providing a rich visual history of upper-class Berlin life at the turn of the century. Like his portraits of the Prussian masters, these works tended to be reverential, containing little hint of the grossness under the glitter. As a reward for his piety, Menzel was heaped with titles and medals: he became Professor of Art at the Royal Academy and, on Kaiser Wilhelm II’s orders, won the Order of the Black Eagle, Prussia’s highest honor. When he died in 1905, Wilhelm personally marched in the funeral procession; he also ordered the Prussian government to purchase the paintings in Menzel’s estate and to display them in the National Gallery.
Another paladin of official art in the new German capital was Anton von Werner, a history painter who glorified the Prussian crown in huge, almost photographically precise, canvases. His Battle and Victory, for example, depicted Kaiser Wilhelm I riding in the victory parade of June 16, 1871, with the Brandenburg Gate and a host of fawning subjects in the background. His most famous work, reproduced in thousands of German schoolbooks, was his Kaiser Proclamation in Versailles, which recorded the emperor and his generals toasting the foundation of the German Empire in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors. Commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm I as a gift to Bismarck, the painting was put on public display in 1877 and quickly became a national icon. Through his closeness to the imperial court, Werner won accolades similar to Menzel’s. He was appointed president of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1875, and chairman of the Association of Berlin Artists and head of the Berlin chapter of the National Union of Artists in the mid-1880s. Upon Wilhelm IIs accession, Werner emerged as even more influential, for he had tutored the future emperor in drawing and won his trust as a reliable mentor in all things artistic. After 1888 he served as the new kaiser’s unofficial adviser on Royal Academy appointments, museum acquisitions, and official exhibitions. In this capacity he validated Wilhelm’s instinctive hatred for modern art. With Werner at his side, Wilhelm vowed to maintain the German capital as a bastion of wholesome and uplifting art.
For all their influence, however, neither the kaiser nor Werner could keep Berlin free of the modernist influences in painting that were sweeping Europe at the turn of the century. In 1892 a progressive faction within the Association of Berlin Artists invited Edvard Munch to mount a one-man show in the German capital. The Norwegian put up fifty-five paintings in the Association’s exhibition hall. None of the old guard around Werner knew anything about Munch, and when they saw his works they were horrified. According to the mocking account of a Munch partisan, they gasped in unison: “This is supposed to be art! Oh misery, misery! Why, it’s entirely different from the way we paint. It is new, foreign, disgusting, common! Get rid of the paintings, throw them out!” And out they went, via a vote orchestrated by Werner to suspend the show.
Yet while Werner and company were able to expel the foreigner Munch, they could not get rid of Max Liebermann, a native Berliner who became the city’s chief crusader for modernist art. Liebermann had made a prominent name for himself in Paris and Munich before returning to his native city in 1884. As the assimilated son of a wealthy Jewish cotton manufacturer, he identified deeply with German culture, without for a moment overlooking the persistent racial and social prejudices around him. When a patronizing acquaintance told him that there would be no anti-Semitism if all Jews were like him, he replied: “No, if all gentiles were like me there would be no anti-Semitism. For the rest, I am glad that my face makes it obvious that I am a Jew. I don’t need to spell it out to anyone.” Nor did Liebermann need to spell out his artistic principles, which were evident in paintings like The Flax Spinners, Views of Workers Eating, and Asylum for Old Men, which exposed contemporary ills in a bold impressionist style.
Käthe Kollwitz, circa 1905
Liebermann was anathema to Kaiser Wilhelm II. The kaiser had no use for painters who, as he said, “made misery even more hideous than it already is.” For a time, Wilhelm and his cultural bureaucrats managed to keep Liebermann from displaying his works in official exhibitions. They could not, however, prevent him from appearing in private shows, such as those organized by “The Eleven,” a shortlived offshoot of the Association of Berlin Painters. With time, moreover, Liebermann became so popular that he had to be admitted to the official salon, where he won the Gold Medal in 1897. In that same year he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Art and made a professor at the Royal Academy—both accolades he considered long overdue.