AN EXHIBITION WITHIN THE EXHIBITION - IMAGES OF THE BISMARCK PERIOD

Writing of Otto von Bismarck in 1919, the cultural sociologist Karl Scheffler judged that "there is no German statesman of more brilliant mind and more intense energy, and there is mounting evidence to prove both." Yet the Germans whom Bismarck had united with his pragmatic politics felt ambivalent at best about the nation he had founded. As an uncommon politician, as a loyal diplomat, he pursued his concept with the greatest possible circumspection, never forgetting to figure his enemies into his plans as well.

His principles were oriented to the dictates of expedience. During table talk in Friedrichsruh on 20 December 1890, Bismarck is reputed to have said that going through life with principles was like walking a narrow forest path while carrying a "long stick" in one's mouth. Because he did not carry a long stick in his mouth, his principles changed frequently, something that complicated the assessment of his personality - and not only for his contemporaries.

Does an exhibition do justice to such a multifaceted and contradictory figure? At least this kind of medium can bring out the drama of his epoch and present the "dramatis personae" of the play in which he often enough had the leading role. The age of Bismarck was also the age of the tricolors, the banners serving as sources of identity for the national movements in central and southern Europe and movers like Giuseppe Garibaldi and Camillo Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini and Leon Gambetta, Lajos Kossuth and Lajos Batthyany, Frantisek Palacký and Robert Blum.

The letters Bismarck wrote testify to the range of his intellect and education. In an essay written in 1949 and entitled Goethe, das deustsche Wunder - a comparative reflection upon three German intellectual giants, Martin Luther, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Otto von Bismarck - Thomas Mann described Bismarck as

a phenomenon of a political genius of German stock who, in three bloody wars, created the Prusso-German dominion and secured its hegemony in Europe for decades;. . . a hysterical colossus with a high-pitched voice; brutal, sentimental, and prone to nervous fits of weeping, all at the same time; a giant of unfathomable cunning and of such cynical candor of speech that it was not advisable to report on it officially (according to Lord Russell); a misanthrope and subduer of men through charm or force; a go-getter, realist, utter anti-ideologue; a personality of inordinate, almost superhuman dimensions who, the absolute ego, subjugated everything around him to enthusiasm and set it quaking.

In relation to Luther and Goethe, the "so iron and pathologically irritable autocrat" is described by this great author with weighty, ponderous words that capture the qualities of the man.

In Thoughts out of Season (1873-76), Friedrich Nietzsche, at hrst an admirer of Bismarck, marked the line of demarcation between political style and cultural style, between the nation defined by culture and that defined in political terms. Terminologically, his concept of the "will to power" did away with the contradiction between culture and state. Nietzsche correctly recognized that Bismarckian politics was characterized by a compromise between conservative Prussian traditions and middle-class liberal persuasions, which collapsed at the end of the 1870s. In the 324th aphorism of Mixed Opinions and Maxims (Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche, 1879), a collection that appeared as a sequel to Thoughts on Moral Prejudices (Gedanken iiber die moralischen Vorurtheile, 1878) and later under the title Dawn of Day (Morgenröthe, 1881), he has a foreigner sum up the Germans:

He found the future of the Germans threatened and threatening: for they had forgotten how to be happy (which the Italians understood so well) but had become accustomed to emotion through the great hazardous game of wars and dynastic revolutions; as a consequence they will one day have emeute. For this was the strongest emotion that a people could acquire. . . . "Bismarck," he finally cried, "has cured you of the Faustian devil that had so plagued educated Germans: but now the devil has entered the swine, and worse than ever before."

Unlike Nietzsche, Richard Wagner made his peace with the Bismarckian empire and explained its founder in terms of the corrents of the intellectual Philistinism of which he accused the Germans:

What complicated the governing of Germany's leading statesman throughout an entire century as much as the acquired concepts buzzing in German heads, lifted as it were from foreign party politics and having no native equivalent, those needs born of words and schemata, not of actual hardship? What is the real cause of that disgraceful conflict mocked abroad and in which we Germans with the creative artistic genius of our time live, but with whose name this very period will be known and celebrated in the memory of posterity?

Set in the context of "The German Search for Identity," the pictures in the inner courtyard and inner gallery trace the "artistic genius" of which Wagner spoke. It was the "myth of German unity" in nineteenth-century history painting, a genre that rose to become the painted record of events only after the empire had been founded. It exposed many motifs that, as well-known pictorial traditions of the nineteenth century, fell victim to the goals of a totalitarian art policy after the Bismarckian period.

In view of the great span of time recounted in this exhibition, one must ask the basic question about the value of pictures as historically accurate source material and inquire into the conditions under which paintings and graphic illustrations were created as reflections of historical reality in the first place. With which standards can the reliability of their historical statement be measured? This consideration is especially relevant for pictures of events. The artist's difficult problem of choosing between reality and reconstruction is exemplified by the Prussian court painter, Anton von Werner, in his turn to topics of current interest in his day, to a "strict realism that seeks its main purpose in the scrupulously faithful reproduction of real events," as his biographer, Adolf Rosenberg, stated in 1895. His love of truth thus became fundamental to his monumental chronicles. His sketches for the picture reconstructing the Congress of Berlin, published in his memoirs, bear witness to the realistic history painter's meticulous concern for detail (see the inner courtyard and rooms 8a, 8b, and 9). But the ostensible fidelity to the truth is not what it is made out to be. His pictures, which were reproduced by the thousands, mirror instead how the nation saw itself at that time. This is especially the case with his most popular work, the Proclamation of the Emperor in Versailles (room 8c), which did much to shape the way the founding of the empire was viewed. The circumstances in which this painting was created make it positively impossible to take it as a faithful representation of the facts.

Accuracy of detail also characterized Adolph Menzel's studies for the Royal Coronation in Königsberg. In 1861 he was commissioned by the Berlin court to preserve the spectacle of the Prussian ceremony for posterity. He depicted the moment at which the monarch turned from the altar to the solemn gathering and raised the imperial sword. In various versions Menzel changed Bismarck's position after Bismarck had been appointed as prime minister (room 6). However, the curators of the royal treasure did not provide Menzel with the ceremonial sword symbolizing the authority traditionally vested in the sovereign ("von der Preußischen Souvreränität, so noch von Alberto, Hertzog von Preußen, herrühret"). It had been used in the coronation but had just been sent to be displayed at an exhibition. Instead, they made the Brandenburg electoral sword available. This fact has not compromised the value of the picture as source material, but it does remind the historian to check the accuracy of everything carefully if possible.

Even today pictures still do not figure prominently in history as a science. As Peter G. Thielen pointed out in his 1964 discourse entitled "Historienmalerei der Bismarckzeit" (Spiegel der Geschichte, Festgabe für Max Braubach), Johann Gustav Droysen classified inscriptions, medallions, and art of every kind art as monuments, bu t he did not mention pictures as sources unless they were of a monumental sort- and this at a time when publishers were opening entire galleries dedicated to the history of the fatherland. Not until the years of World War I did the demand for topical pictorial information grow. At that point, official army painters were appointed in the British army to document the events of the war (inner courtyard). With the improvement of photographic and reproduction technology and the establishment of picture archives in newspaper companies, the increasingly politicized public role of the press changed. An international iconographic committee did not form until the Congress of Historians met in Oslo in 1928. In the committee's declaration of principles, it was noted that the property of museums had hitherto been examined almost exclusively from the standpoint of art and aesthetics. As Steinberg stated in the Historische Zeitung in 1931, the idea was to open up these holdings to historical research and to develop a method intended to provide historical iconography with "standards for the critical analysis of what is historically usable from the stock of artistically fashioned vestiges of the past." A corresponding national commission was founded at the 1930 conference of German historians in Halle. This body subsequently tended to a number of systematic projects such as registering public and private collections of pictorial historical sources in Germany, but the work did not progress very far. The first edition of the History of the World (Weltgeschichte), which the Propyläen publishing company brought out, was illustrated from 1931 to 1933 according to the guiding principles of this commission.

The new art of montage, which photomontage was to make an instrument of political satire and enlightenment even before World War I, created an additional dubious type of source material on current events. One example was the widely circulated "photograph" of Empress Eugenie leaving the Tuileries on her way into exile in Britain after the abdication of Napoleon III on 4 September 1870. This "true-to-life photographic forgery" was contained in the first volume of Propyläen's History of the World. The scene never took place as purported by the artist, however. Even William I, prompted by his reader, had been having the main events in his turbulent life chronicled in an illustrated album since 1860. It is not certain whether it included the composite pictures of the court photographer, Heinrich Schnaebeli, who had a penchant for showing the Prussian potentates on horseback with the Nickolsburg or Paris theaters of war in the background (room 6). The Prussian king and German emperor commissioned the artists, prescribed the pictorial themes, and altered the sketches until the details matched his recollection.

Further tributes to the wealth of pictures in the late nineteenth century and its enthusiasm for portraits were the more than eighty portraits of Bismarck by the painter Franz von Lenbach, who worked from photographs after a brief sitting with the man. In fact, a letter from Lenbach to his wife mentions that he had sketched as many as 137 portraits of Bismarck. Numerous Bismarck monuments and apotheoses appeared on the chancellor's seventieth birthday and especially after the death of the "founder of the empire" (inner courtyard and room 13). The first local monuments dedicated solely to the chancellor were erected after the 1870s, as Volker Plagemann in Munich pointed out in his 1972 study. By 1915, the one hundredth anniversary of Bismarck's birth, monuments to the chancellor had been erected in small towns and on mountain tops within the empire as well as in the African and Asian colonies. There were some even in Austria. According to the biographer Bruno Garlepp, whose Bismark-Denkmal für das Deutsche Volk (Bismarck Monument to the German People) was an example of titanic grandiloquence in honor of the hero, such commemoration stemmed from "a powerful elementary force, the burning desire, and the ardent longing for the hero to be present in our minds, as it were, in any manner whatsoever even after his death."

In some instances, historical pictures were commissioned and produced much later in order to exploit the political import of events long past in an effort to intensify militant national feeling or as a program for restoring an ancient form of the state. This was true for the purchase of John-Lewis Brown's 1869 painting of the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, 17 June 1815, after the artist had exhibited it in Paris (inner courtyard). It was also true of Engelbert Seibertz's plans for furnishing Munich's Maximilianeum, the edifice built by Gottfried Semper and Friedrich Bürcklein to terminate the avenue named after the Bavarian king, Maximilian II (inner courtyard). One decade after the Revolution of 1848, the statesmen of the Restoration were gathered together in his fresco.

This delight in visualization, symbolization, immortalization, and ancestor worship produced an abundance of pictures, an enormous range of which has survived despite the ravages of two world wars. Their sheer numbers do not make selection any easier. Thanks to European collaboration, the great tensions and movements of the nineteenth century can be seen in this exhibition through the statesman's biography that runs through it. The female allegories of national feeling that are included, ranging from the pictures of "Mother Denmark" (room 3c), Italia (room 5), and the French Marianne (room 8b) to the shift in the ideological meaning of Germania (inner courtyard, inner gallery, room 3b), exemplify the vividness of these identity figures and the almost religious symbolism in them. The junctures and climaxes of social conflicts, armed clashes, humanitarian improvements, and economic expansion (inner courtyard) were captured in paintings, many of them colossal in size, and a vast number of these works have come down to us. The exhibition lives from these two- and three-dimensional objects, which are such an eloquent testimony of their time that a stagy presentation would detract from their message. Where conservative misgivings or local circumstances have prevented the loan of originals, life-size replicas have been made. Thus, monumental paintings and statues take their place alongside the conventional sources of written matter as equally warranted historical evidence in this exhibition. The immediate comprehensibility of the accounts, documentation, and statistics of events is enhanced not only by the press, whose organs came to have increasing influence in shaping political opinion, but also by posters, leaflets, and proclamations pertaining to the Revolution of 1848 (room 3b), by the bureaucratic revision of handwritten tallies of losses in the Battle of Königgrätz (room 6), and by the information from the theaters of war in the campaigns of 1866 and from the French front in the Franco-Prussian War (rooms 6 and 8a).

Two years of intensive research, study of objects in Germany and abroad, and minute analysis of the collection have yielded a stunning number and range of finds. The variety of objects, selected for their quality as relevant source material and for their narrative content, is taken into consideration by the system of screens that arrange the subtitles of the theme rooms into sections. This principle of organization condenses the message and increases intelligibility without deliberately theatricalizing the objects. At the same time it takes their merits as independent artifacts seriously. These highly valuable loans attest to the focus that the visual arts throughout Europe had on events of topical interest in the century of states and nations (rooms 3a, 3b, 6, and 10).

The presentation was thus not intended to upgrade the objects on display; they do not need it. The European dimension of the concept motivated many donors to provide important works of art and other pieces of the historical record. Without taking away from the illustrative character of what is depicted, we examine the profusion of history paintings for what they can tell us by comparing and contrasting them with what we know about the circumstances under which they were created and the new pictorial media of the epoch. Photography and wood engraving, the new pictorial and printing media of the day, also changed and influenced the perceptions of the artists. Such dynamics are clearly apparent in the painting by the Parisian salon artist Isidore Pils, whose Trenches before Sevastopol drew on wood engravings made on the basis of photographs of the Crimean theater of war and later used by the Illustrated London News. His artistic vision of the front is contrasted with the first examples of European military photography, produced by the English photographers James Robertson and Roger Fenton (room 5). In some cases it has been possible to juxtapose the views that a German and a French history painter had of the same action one instance being the Battle of Gravelotte in the Franco-Prussian War as conceived by both Carl Röchling and Alphonse de Neuville (room 8a).

This principle of comparison and contrast is followed systematically with the films being run in the central courtyard and movie theater of the Martin-Gropius-Bau. They treat the insights that European contemporaries had of Bismarck as they were expressed through the cartoons that so vividly exposed the objectives of his political designs and efforts. Where it has not been possible for objects to represent thematically important passages, we have intentionally visualized them by using contemporary graphics and press excerpts (Rooms 3b, 4, and 6). One such media source that deserves special attention consists of the telegrams on the war of 1866 (room 6), which are housed in government archives in Coburg. The files begin on 9 May with dispatches about Julius Cohen-Blind's assassination attempt on Bismarck, the mobilization of Prussian army units, and Austrian and Prussian troop movements and end with the Prussian invasion of Hanover, Saxony, and Hesse on 15 June 1866. The link between the originals on display and the telegraphic bulletins covered in the exhibition's films conveys an idea of the technological possibilities for rapid communication, something akin to news agency reports today. A particularly awkward and sensitive circumstance was that messages concerning the status of war preparations and movements on the front were wired by the two enemy belligerents over facilities that were operated jointly the German-Austrian Telegraph Association.

With few exceptions, the exhibition purposely dispenses with kitsch, commemorative objects, knickknacks, and keepsakes, of which there are untold numbers where Bismarck was concerned. The catalogues of complimentary gifts he received on his eightieth birthday brim with evidence of the extravagance and ingenuity of the many associations, clubs, private persons, and committees that made a virtual cult of venerating the former chancellor of the Reich. The presents listed range from a pillow embroidered with his portrait to a solid-silver postcard bearing his monogram.

The cultivation of "Bismarck apples" and "Prince Bismarck cucumbers" was recommended in gardening magazines and horticultural journals. "Bismarck sunflowers," too, were planted by German nationalist home gardeners on their plots as a demonstration of loyalty to the empire.

An entire nation seemed to have descended into a frenzy over Bismarck. It has not been the intention of the exhibition to draw attention to this aspect but rather to highlight the structures and circumstances of his day and his achievements in their interaction with the issues that shaped his political role.

Bismarck soars above all; he is six foot four I should think, proportionately stout; with a sweet and gentle voice and with a peculiarly refined enunciation which singularly and strongly contrasts with the awful things he says, appalling from their frankness and their audacity. He is a complete despot here, and from the highest to the lowest, the Prussians and all the permanent foreign diplomacy tremble at his frown and court most sedulously his smile.

As indicated in these observations by British Prime Minister Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli) in 1878, the effect of Bismarck's physical attributes was stressed by many of his contemporaries. This fact and others are dealt with in the vestibule ("Bismarck the Man"), which is located between theme rooms 6 and 7, the halfway point along the gallery encircling the inner courtyard. Focusing on the private side of Bismarck, this room also gives a glimpse of his love for nature, the lyrical vein to which he gave expression in letters to his wife, his culinary preferences and passions, and his remarkably frequent stays at spas and sanitariums, which kept him physically fit for pursuing world politics.

The exhibition does not consider the nineteenth century solely from the perspective of Prusso-German nationalism. Rooms 1 through 3c and room 5, provides a panorama showing the reorganization of Europe from the Congress of Vienna to the convulsions caused by the Revolution of 1848 and the shifts in its priorities until the decisive year of 1866. In a series of valuable documents the exhibition also displays a part of the European cultural history of diplomacy. Until 1848, when Bismarck entered the political scene in Prussia's United Diet as a substitute for a member who had fallen ill (room 3b), he is presented as a contemporary and an onlooker. In 1851 he was made legation counselor and served his apprenticeship as Prussia's delegate to the Diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt (room 4), being appointed later as Prussian minister in St. Petersburg, then Paris.

Our aim has been to create a three-dimensional figure of the man and put his career as a European statesman and politician into relief against the background of the day's great arenas of conflict. If we have achieved that aim, then one can join Heinrich Mann in saying that an age has been opened to view - an age whose problems and the successful and unsuccessful attempts to solve them have again become relevant.

Marie-Louise von Plessen