This great dislocation had two effects that concern us. One, the middle class, excluded politically and yet eager to achieve some measure of equality, fell back on education and Kultur as key areas where success could be achieved – equality with the aristocracy, and superiority in comparison with foreigners in a competitive, nationalistic world. ‘High culture’ was thus always more important in imperial Germany than elsewhere and this is one reason why it flourished so well in the 1871–1933 period. But this gave culture a certain tone – freedom, equality or personal distinctiveness tended to be located in the ‘inner sanctum’ of the individual, whereas society was portrayed as an ‘arbitrary, external and frequently hostile world’. The second effect, which overlapped with the first, was a retreat into nationalism, but a class-based nationalism which turned against the newly created industrial working class (and the stirrings of socialism), Jews and non-German minorities. ‘Nationalism was seen as moral progress, with utopian possibilities.’42 One effect of this second factor was the idealisation of earlier ages, before the industrial working class existed, in particular the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stood for an integrated daily life – a ‘golden age’ – in pre-industrial times. Against the background of a developing mass society, the educated middle class looked to culture as a stable set of values that uplifted their lives, set them apart from the ‘rabble’ (Freud’s word) and, in particular, enhanced their nationalist orientation. The Volk, a semi-mystical, nostalgic ideal of how ordinary Germans had once been – a contented, talented, a-political, ‘pure’ people – took hold.
These various factors combined to produce in German culture a concept that is almost untranslatable into English but is probably the defining factor in understanding so much of German thought as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and which helps explain both the (predominantly German) discovery of the unconscious and why Germany became so dominant in this area. The word in German is Innerlichkeit.43 Insofar as it can be translated, it means a tendency to withdraw from, or be indifferent to, politics, and to look inwards, inside the individual. Innerlichkeit meant that artists deliberately avoided power and politics, guided by a belief that to participate, or even to write about it, was a derogation of their calling and that, for the artist, the inner rather than the external world was the real one. For example, and as Gordon Craig tells us, before 1914 it was only on rare occasions that German artists were interested, let alone stirred, by political and social events and issues. Not even the events of 1870–1871 succeeded in shaking this indifference. ‘The victory over France and the unification of Germany inspired no great work of literature or music or painting.’44 Authors and painters did not really find their own day ‘poetic enough’ to challenge their talents. ‘As the infrastructure of the new Reich was being laid, German artists were writing about times infinitely remote or filling their canvases with nereids and centaurs and Greek columns.’ Even the great Wagner was composing musical drama that had only the remotest connection with the world in which he lived (Siegfried, 1876; Parsifal, 1882).45
There were of course exceptions. In the 1880s, for example, there was a movement in the arts known as Naturalism, inspired in part by the novels of Émile Zola in France, the aim being to describe the social ills and injustices caused by industrialism. But in comparison with the literature of other European countries, the German Naturalist movement was half-hearted in its attempt to make radical criticism and the Naturalists never turned their attention to the political dangers that were inherent in the imperial system. ‘Indeed,’ writes Gordon Craig, in his history of imperial Germany, ‘as those dangers became more palpable, with the beginnings under Wilhelm II of a frenetic imperialism, accompanied by an aggressive armaments programme, the great majority of the country’s novelists and poets averted their eyes and retreated into that Innerlichkeit which was always their haven when the real world became too perplexing for them.’46 There were no German equivalents of Zola, Shaw, Conrad, Gide, Gorky or even Henry James. Among the major (German) names of the day – Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal – hard, harsh reality was subordinated to feeling and the attempt to fix on paper fleeting impressions, momentary moods, vague perceptions. Hofmannsthal’s concept of Das Gleitende, the ‘slip-sliding’ nature of the times, where nothing could be pinned down, nothing stayed the same, where ambiguity and paradox ruled, is discussed in Chapter 36. Gustav Klimt did exactly the same thing in paint, and his example is instructive.
Born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in 1862, Klimt was the son of a goldsmith. He made his name decorating the new buildings of the Ringstrasse with vast murals. These were produced with his brother Ernst but on the latter’s death in 1892 Gustav withdrew for five years, during which time he appears to have studied the works of James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley and Edvard Munch. He did not reappear until 1897, when he emerged with a completely new style. This new style, bold and intricate at the same time, had three defining characteristics: the elaborate use of gold leaf (using a technique he had learned from his father), the application of small flecks of iridescent colour, hard like idl, and a languid eroticism applied in particular to women. Klimt’s paintings were not quite Freudian: his women were not neurotic, far from it. The women’s emancipation movement in Germany had been far more concerned than elsewhere with inner emancipation, and Klimt’s figures reflected this.47 They were calm, placid, above all lubricious, but they were still ‘the instinctual life frozen into art’, as Hofmannsthal said. In drawing attention to women’s sensuality, Klimt was subverting the familiar way of thinking every bit as much as Freud was. Here were women capable of the very perversions reported in Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis, which made them tantalising and shocking at the same time. Klimt’s new style immediately divided Vienna but it also brought about his commission from the university.
Three large panels were asked for: ‘Philosophy’, ‘Medicine’ and ‘Jurisprudence’. All three provoked a furore but the rows over ‘Medicine’ and ‘Jurisprudence’ merely repeated the fuss over ‘Philosophy’. For this first picture the commission stipulated as a theme ‘The triumph of light over darkness’. What Klimt actually produced was an opaque, ‘deliquescent tangle’ of bodies that appear to drift past the onlooker, a kaleidoscopic jumble of forms that run into each other, and all surrounded by a void. The professors of philosophy were outraged. Klimt was vilified as presenting ‘unclear ideas through unclear forms’. Philosophy was supposed to be a rational affair; it ‘sought the truth via the exact sciences’. Klimt’s vision was anything but that, and as a result it wasn’t wanted: eighty professors collaborated in a petition that demanded Klimt’s picture never be shown at the university. The painter responded by returning his fee and never presenting the remaining commissions.48 The significance of the fight is that in these paintings Klimt was attempting a major statement. How can rationalism succeed, he is asking, when the irrational, the instinctive, the unconscious, is such a dominant part of life? Is reason really the way forward? Instinct is an older, more powerful force. It may be more atavistic, more primitive, and a dark force at times, but where is the profit in denying it?49