150 years ago: German Empire proclaimed

[Syt]

Something I noticed rather by chance, and there's hardly any coverage of it, but today, 150 years ago, the German Empire was founded. Regardless of what you think of the date, it has significant ramifications up till today, so it seems weird how absent it appears to be from the news.

https://www.ft.com/content/b257bb76-aa06-49d6-b98a-521fd8819e2e

Blood and Iron by Katja Hoyer — conflicted Germany

The ceremony 150 years ago at which Germany was unified for the first time in its modern history was unusual for two reasons. Firstly, the German empire's proclamation on January 18 1871 took place abroad — at the Palace of Versailles outside Paris. This was not just a way of rubbing France's nose in the dirt after the war of 1870. Holding the event on domestic soil might have raised suspicions that one German region was being favoured over the others, jeopardising the empire's untested unity.

Secondly, as depicted in the famous 1885 painting of Anton von Werner, everyone at the Versailles ceremony wore military uniform. There was not a civilian in sight. Recalling the idealism of the German revolutionaries of 1848, Katja Hoyer says in Blood and Iron: "This was a far cry from the democratic unification of which the liberals had dreamed."

The themes of political fragility, social cleavages and pervasive militarism give an impressive depth and coherence to Hoyer's tightly written narrative. She is rightly sceptical of the once fashionable notion of a Sonderweg in German history — a "special path" to modernity that supposedly distinguished Germany's development from that of the US, Britain or France. Yet under Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany was a country "whose patriotic fervour needed a constant diet of conflict to fill the holes torn in the social fabric by inequality, geographical separation and cultural differences".

Hoyer, a German-born author who teaches history in the UK, praises Bismarck as "one of the greatest statesmen of all time". However, by her own account, Bismarck sharpened domestic tensions by marking out Catholics, socialists, Poles and other national minorities as Reichsfeinde — "enemies of the empire". Still, Germany under Bismarck led Europe in the 1880s with an early version of the welfare state that to a degree balanced the country's explosive industrial growth.

Bismarck also exercised restraint in foreign policy up to his resignation in 1890. It was a different story under Wilhelm, whose "peculiar mix of swaggering overconfidence and obvious insecurity" combined with "a childlike outlook on the world that would become a dangerous vehicle for the expansionists and warmongers in his inner circle at court".

As Hoyer writes, the heart of the problem lay in the way that the political system — authoritarian with democratic features — exacerbated conflicts inherent in the structure of German society. Governments were not answerable to the Reichstag, which was elected by universal male suffrage, but they needed the legislature's approval to pass laws, including military budgets.

It became increasingly difficult for Bismarck's successors to manage the Reichstag, where the Social Democrats became the largest party by 1912. The SPD, liberals, Catholics and conservative agrarians — all with strong roots in different strata of German society — squared off against each other. Outside parliament, governments were under pressure from powerful court factions of army officers and aristocrats, not to mention militant nationalist leagues.

To what extent did Germany's domestic deadlock lie behind the reckless decision to offer unconditional support for Austria-Hungary in the July 1914 crisis and risk a general European war? Hoyer does not devote much space to this question. But she makes the telling point that, as the war unfolded, "the ease with which the German people had allowed their semi-democratic system to descend into a military dictatorship stood testimony to the fact that parliamentary culture was still in its infancy". It is a judicious conclusion to a book that has the merit of treating imperial Germany as an era on its own terms rather than as an inevitable prelude to the horrors of 1933-1945.

[The Brain]

Would things have been that much different if Prussian dominance of Germany hadn't been given the form of Empire?

[Sheilbh]

Something I noticed rather by chance, and there's hardly any coverage of it, but today, 150 years ago, the German Empire was founded. Regardless of what you think of the date, it has significant ramifications up till today, so it seems weird how absent it appears to be from the news.

I wonder if the pandemi has an impact. It's difficult to do events to commemorate or reference this - whether sort of formal events, or galleries doing exhibitions etc - so anniversaries are going less marked that I'd expect otherwise.

[Syt]

Something I noticed rather by chance, and there's hardly any coverage of it, but today, 150 years ago, the German Empire was founded. Regardless of what you think of the date, it has significant ramifications up till today, so it seems weird how absent it appears to be from the news.

I wonder if the pandemi has an impact. It's difficult to do events to commemorate or reference this - whether sort of formal events, or galleries doing exhibitions etc - so anniversaries are going less marked that I'd expect otherwise.

Of course. But I would expect at least some coverage on news sites, though, i.e. some op ed articles that feature somewhat prominently at first but are buried within 12 hours.

[Syt]

Another factor, of course, is that the Third Reich was such a huge cut, and 1945 a big reset of German statehood and self-image, that everything before those years looks incredibly distant; Kaiser Wilhelm, Martin Luther, or Frederick the Great all look, in many ways, equally distant from a modern point of view.

[Sheilbh]

Another factor, of course, is that the Third Reich was such a huge cut, and 1945 a big reset of German statehood and self-image, that everything before those years looks incredibly distant; Kaiser Wilhelm, Martin Luther, or Frederick the Great all look, in many ways, equally distant from a modern point of view.

Yes. And not only that but the Third Reich instrumentalised parts of Germany history that in itself approaching them is complicated - I imagine this is especially the case with creation of the German Empire or Frederick the Great. So it's not just that it's such a huge cut but they kind of erected a lense through which the past is approached.

But it does feel like something that should be marked and considered. It'd be interesting to see whether it is in other countries - for example there's that op-ed in the FT, I wonder if there are any pieces in the French press for example.

Edit: One though from an Anglo perspective is that I think our point of modern history v ancient past is basically WW1. So I saw lots of things about the Easter Rising, the Russian Revolutions, interwar and WW2 events getting commented on. But things before WW1 need some form of explanation of why they're relevant - and the only exceptions I can think of are the French and American revolutions.

[Sheilbh]

A Guardian take - one I find a lot to agree with:

Raw, brave, wild and honest: why Germany is Europe's greatest artistic nation

Germany became a unified state 150 years ago this week – and no other country has produced such original, provocative and powerful art since, from Richter to Klee, from Dix to Höch
Jonathan Jones
Tue 19 Jan 2021 16.38 GMT

Last modified on Tue 19 Jan 2021 16.40 GMT

Situated on the edge of the Alps, Neuschwanstein Castle may not look like the birthplace of modern art. Best seen from a perilously crowded footbridge across a vertiginous gorge, it floats in misty rains, a cloudy dream of white spires and battlements. Yet this 19th-century colossus is an architectural homage to one man: a composer who inspired the avant garde to make the leap to modernism.

Richard Wagner's music so enflamed King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he built this magnificent medieval vision in honour of the composer. But, in artists across Europe, Wagner's musical might released much more futuristic impulses. The abstract leitmotifs and unearthly symbolism of his operas fascinated artists from Aubrey Beardsley to Paul Cézanne. The impressionists, too, were entranced: Renoir travelled to Palermo, Sicily, to portray Wagner when he was composing Parsifal.

For all these artists, Wagner, in spite of his disfiguring antisemitism, was a new kind of creator from a new kind of country, and not just one that built castles for its cultural heroes. Germany became a unified nation 150 years ago this week, on 18 January 1871. It's an anniversary that will doubtless be seen by some as one of shame and blood: the Prussian chancellor and architect of German nationhood Bismarck secured unification through a series of wars in the 1860s, including attacks on Denmark and Austria, and it was sealed at the Palace of Versailles after the military humiliation of France. In the next seven decades, Germany would be at the centre of two world wars and perpetrate the Holocaust, only to re-emerge today as a successful democracy after the defeat of Nazism in 1945 and the fall of communist East Germany in 1989.

But Britons who close their minds to Germany are missing so much. For one thing, this is the greatest modern artistic nation in Europe. Art history tends to get it all wrong, exaggerating the glamour of French art, just as it does with American art. And in Britain, laughably, we even try to kid ourselves that Henry Moore and John Piper are modernist greats. The reality is that nowhere else has produced as much original, provocative and powerful art as Germany over the last 150 years. This has been the German era.

And all modern art begins with Wagner. His mystic tones can be discerned in the smoky light of Monet's Impression: Sunrise, and they shaped the late-19th-century symbolist movement, which turned away from exterior reality into poetic distillations of feeling. The arch-symbolist Edvard Munch spent key years of his career in bohemian 1890s Berlin and originally gave his most famous painting a German title, Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature). With its blood-red sky, it is a very Wagnerian shriek.

By the 1900s, the international appeal of Berlin as an artistic centre was matched by Munich. It was here that Marcel Duchamp journeyed from Paris in 1912 to study perspective and plan his meisterwerk, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. He was part of a cosmopolitan golden age. Munich's Blue Rider group took the symbolist intensity of Munch into a fierce realm of raw colour. They were anything but narrowly nationalist, led as they were by Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky who preached the spiritual depth of the colour blue. The wildest genius was Bavaria's own Franz Marc, who painted unforgettably charged visions of red and blue horses in exploding landscapes before being killed, aged 36, at the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

Here the angel of history appears. There is no denying the nightmare of Germany between 1914 and 1945. The greatness of German modern art lies in the ways it has recorded, opposed and remembered that age of destruction. In Georg Grosz's 1926 painting The Pillars of Society, the rise of the far right is laid bare. While a building blazes in the background, an unholy alliance of stormtroopers and capitalists rant and rave. One has shit for brains, literally, another wears a potty as a helmet, and another wears a swastika tiepin, a prophetic image – as few thought, in 1926, there would be a Chancellor Hitler.

etc

I disagree with his dismissal of American art (and I have my issues with this critic for other reasons ) but the rest of his piece is great even if you probably weren't think of an appraisal of German impact on art

[The Brain]

"his meistertwerk"?

[celedhring]

I had this Cuban film teacher who would say "Western art was completed by Wagner, what we're doing now is just a corollary". And I believe it's the kind of boutade that hides a nugget of wisdom. A lot of what we do is a permutation or a rejection of the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (which is a tension that can be found throughout art history, but he was probably the most influential and successful proponent of the 'total work of art')

[Duque de Bragança]

"his meistertwerk"?

Chef d'œuvre, obviously. 

[celedhring]

I disagree with his dismissal of American art (and I have my issues with this critic for other reasons ) but the rest of his piece is great even if you probably weren't think of an appraisal of German impact on art

The fact he never deemed it necessary to petulantly dismiss Spanish art HURT. 

[Sheilbh]

I disagree with his dismissal of American art (and I have my issues with this critic for other reasons ) but the rest of his piece is great even if you probably weren't think of an appraisal of German impact on art

The fact he never deemed it necessary to petulantly dismiss Spanish art HURT. 

He once called HP sauce which is a favourite of mine the "UKIP of condiments" and I've never quite forgiven him

[crazy canuck]

I disagree with his dismissal of American art (and I have my issues with this critic for other reasons ) but the rest of his piece is great even if you probably weren't think of an appraisal of German impact on art

The fact he never deemed it necessary to petulantly dismiss Spanish art HURT. 

He once called HP sauce which is a favourite of mine the "UKIP of condiments" and I've never quite forgiven him

Why destroy the taste of good meat?

[Sheilbh]

Why destroy the taste of good meat?

I wouldn't have condiments with meat (on its own)

They're for baked goods

[celedhring]

I tend to use condiments with veggies, so they don't taste like veggies 

I looked up HP sauce and it's rather ironic to see it's now produced in the Netherlands.