German Landscape Painting 1871-1914
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Identities in Transition: German landscape painting 1871- 1914 History of Art, PhD thesis, University of Birmingham Charlotte Gore Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………….6 German identity reconsidered as regional with landscape in the limelight……………………………………………………………………………7 German Romantic Painting c.1800…………………………………..9 Regional Identity in Colonies and Landscape Painting……………...10 Towards a methodology..................................................................................11 Structure of this thesis.....................................................................................13 I Landscape as metaphor: identity, myth making and longing in the Eifel………16 National style, regional content………………………………………………...26 Die Toten Maar, myth and reality.................................................................32 Fritz von Wille’s Romanticism received on a national level………..43 (i) The Rhineland’s cultural expression of national identity……………47 (ii) Marketing the Eifel as the rural sublime, a counterpoint to the conquered Rhine……………………………………………………………………...54 II Establishing the identity of Dachau as traditional using a modern style: the artists’ colony Neu Dachau……………………………………………………………………….67 Deconstructing the identity depicted by Neu Dachau in Dachau and Bavaria as a whole………………………………………………………………………73 Dachau’s Tracht myth enforcing images of the Dachau inhabitants in regional costume………………………………………………………………………79 Catholic culture in Dachau as an expression of regional loyalty to Bavaria………………………………………………………………………………………90 Neu Dachau’s depiction of the town’s surrounding landscape……….95 Heimat artist Hermann Stockmann and his preservation and celebration of Dachau………………………………………………………………..103 III Worpswede and the construction of a traditional farming Lower Saxon identity……………………………………………………………………………………………………...116 (i) Literature aimed at tourists to Worpswede……………………………116 (ii) Biographical literature....................................................................................117 (iii) Retracing political history approach………………………………………124 (iv) A social approach…………………………………………………………………126 Rembrandt als Erzieher ………………………………………………………………………131-166 The Worpwede monographs………………………………………………………………167-185 Behind and beyond Rembrandt als Erzieher………………………………..………194-207 Marketing Worpswde…………………………………………………………………………..208-245 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………245-257 Illustrations List…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….260 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………265 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Charlotte Klonk for her supervision at the inception of this thesis and the department of art history at Warwick University. I would also like acknowledge Dr. Dr. Jutta Vinzent for her enduring support at Birmingham University whose guidance was fundamental to this thesis. I acknowledge the Leverhulme Trust’s financial assistance in making the primary research for this thesis possible. Finally, I owe my deepest gratitude to my parents who have been a constant source of support. 3 Introduction I have come to like the federal system as practiced in our country very much. The feeling of having a homeland as well as a sense of regionalism has finally found a channel for political expression in Germany. No more anonymous GDR administrative divisions, but a real sense of identity: the Brandenburger, the Mecklenburger, the Western Pomeranians, the people of Saxony-Anhalt, the Saxons and the Thuringians. 1 In an address commemorating the day of German re-unification in 2006, Angela Merkel recognized Germany‟s regional identities in the above quote. She advocates that regional identities were so strong that they were able to endure the GDR, which, according to her, did not really support them politically. She therefore actually suggests that the country‟s federal identity has, even during periods of political repression, always manifested itself culturally. It is Germany‟s specific ability to embrace different identities; how this has been manifested in landscape painting around 1900 that is the focus of this thesis. The period covered here is c.1871 to 1914 as they mark the years when Germany officially became a nation state and the outbreak of the First World War. Recent 1 Chancellor Angela Merkel from a speech celebrating German unification, 2006, 03.10.2006. (Ich habe mich begeistert für die föderale Ordnung unseres Landes. Heimat und regionales Lebensgefühl fanden endlich auch bei uns wieder politisch einen Ausdruck. Nicht mehr anonyme DDR-Bezirke, sondern Identität: Die Brandenburger, die Mecklenburger, die Vorpommern, die Sachsen-Anhaltiner, die Sachsen und die Thüringer.) 4 academic surveys maintain that Germany was in the process of an intense awakening of regional identities at this time. The present work is based on three places in Germany where artists settled and expressed a sense of regional identity, Dachau (Bavaria), Worpswede (Lower Saxony) and the Eifel (the Rhineland). These three geographic locations of Germany have been chosen in an attempt to explore the visual representations of the country‟s varied landscapes and distinct federal identities at a time during which the construction of a national identity was on the political agenda. This thesis is rooted in a debate that has been established in political history but as yet has not been tackled in relation to German landscape painting The work that follows endorses and deepens the established field of political history in an art historical context. It is based on primary research carried out in regional archives of the three German provinces. German identity reconsidered as regional with landscape in the limelight The subject of German federal identity is a field that has opened up since the end of the Cold War. It has subsequently gained considerable impetus, beginning with Celia Applegate’s A Nation of Provincials.2 Pioneering German regional identity (by concentrating on the Palatine region), Applegate’s book readdressed the concept of Heimat from the 1850s to the 1950s. She convincingly argued that the model reconciled individual local identities with a sense of overarching national identity. She paved the way for authors such as Alon Confino who contributed to Applegate’s work using sources based in Württemberg but takes 2 C. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, Oxford, 1990. 5 her work further with his tenet that states that the concepts of nation and region in Imperial Germany were interchangeable. For Confino local was national.3 Glenn Penny, who also attributes his theory to Applegate, argued that museums were another form of cultural expression: a demonstration of local pride with a national significance.4 Penny demonstrates in his case study however, that national identity was the unconscious bi-product of regional competition between museum collectors. Abigail Green’s work, which again pays tribute to Applegate and Confino, uses a different approach with a focus on the economics of Germany’s industry, in her book titled Fatherlands.5 Her work also benefits from a comparison between three Länder rather than a single case study. She shows how, with the economic strength of industry, Hanover, Saxony and Württemberg built monuments and used symbols to reflect their distinct identities. Applegate and Confino attributed to Germany one of the earliest nature conservation movements in Europe, both suggested that this was one way of expressing local pride. Thomas Lekan’s Imagining the Nation in Nature took this discussion much further by using Germany’s natural environment as his case study. Lekan uses the province of the Rhineland in which to base his report. He contends the territory was highly romanticised in the early nineteenth century and subsequently industrialised and polluted in the later part of the century thus becoming a fiercely contested site by around 1900. Building upon Applegate and 3 T. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature, London, 2004. 4 G. Penny, Fashioning Local Identities in an Age of Nation-Building: Museums, Cosmopolitan Visions and Intra-German Competition, in „German History‟, Vol. 17, No. 4, Arnold, 1999, London. 5 A. Green, Fatherlands,Cambridge, 2001. 6 Confino’s work, Lekan describes local nature conservation as a down to top expression of national identity. Since the end of the Cold War probing questions have been raised about Germany’s federal identity, in the period between 1871 and 1914. This study of regional identity in landscape painting, therefore, methodologically benefits from the debate about the distinctiveness of Germany’s various selves. The present study continues in the footsteps of those who have paved the way for a federal approach to German history but, it uses an art historical methodology, where artists repeatedly depict cultural or geographic symbols, in order to define their federal status. Applegate, Green, Lekan and Penny have all used different cultural expressions of how German’s articulated regional loyalty, arguing for a dialectical relationship with national identity. This thesis focuses on the subject of landscape painting. However, where my work differs in methodology to those cited is that I argue that the artists were not just reflecting an established regional identity: they were shaping, forming and inventing identities. These constructed identities were subsequently accepted both by little known local journalists and well-known authors and thus contributed to changing as well confirming regional identities, keeping them in a