HIST 2509
A History of Germany
Lecture 13-2
Germany at the Fin-de-Siècle
The Augsburg Zoo Affair 2005
Today’s Main Themes
 Understanding “modernity.”
 An antidote to authoritarianism?
 The multiple Germanys.
 Antecedents to Weimar and Nazi Germany.
I. Modernity and Its Discontents
Wilhelmine Germany
-paradoxes, contrasts, and contradictions
-politically, socially fractured
-competing agendas and ways of life: traditionalism,
authoritarianism, and modernity
Traditionalism
Die Hüldegung Wilhelm I, by Paul Bürde 1871
German Historical Museum, Berlin
Authoritarianism
The Siegesallee in Berlin’s Tiergarten
Max Missmann, 1905 German Historical Museum, Berlin
The depths of poverty
Life in Poverty in Berlin, 1910
German Historical Museum, Berlin
The height of modernity
Swimsuit Fashions, 1913
German Historical Museum, Berlin
II. Mass Politics and Culture
Pan-German League
Navy League
support for
naval race
Berlin Germania Football Squad, 1898
German Historical Museum, Berlin
High and low
culture:
mass spectacle
The Panopticon -- 1913 -- “in their re-created villages”
Acting the Part
Die Völkerschau der Samoaner 1910, Dresden Zoo.
III. Literature, Art, and Society
1) establishment culture
2) anti-bourgeois expression
3) literary opposition, theater, cabaret
4) painting and sculpture
5) music
1) establishment culture
elitist, status, station
hero-worship
sentimentality
Berlin Cathedral, 1898
German Historical Museum
2) anti-bourgeois expression
SPD-driven cultural movements
-Volkshochschule “people’s schools”
-Käthe Kollwitz, Gerhard Hauptmann
-Heinrich Mann and education
Clara Zetkin (1871-1933)
Socialist-feminist, teacher, and MP
2) anti-bourgeois expression
Middle-class movements
-the Wandervogel
(wandering birds)
-Karl Fischer and
Hans Breuer
Der Zupfgeigenhansl
(Guitarist’s Companion)
More wandering birds….
-anti-materialism
-anti-bourgeois
-sometimes anti-semitic
-anti-war
-Hohen Meissen 1913
re-enactment of Battle of
Nations 1813
Nudism and FKK
Freiekörperkultur
-health, sport,
beauty, freedom
nakididity
Back to the land artist colony in Worpswede, 1898 -Heinrich Vogeler
Desire, 1908, also by Vogeler
3) literary opposition, theater, cabaret
-the press
Simplizissimus (The Simpleton) 1892
Der Wahre Jacob (The Real McCoy)
Zukunft (Future)
-Maximilian Harden, “the table,” and the Eulenberg
Affair
3) literary opposition, theater, cabaret
-Trivialliteratur, Schundliteratur (the yellow press)
-romance novels
-from highbrow to lowbrow
-science fiction, mystical, erotica
-prostitutes, city life, decline of middle class
Theater
Max Reinhardt’s
Deutsches Theater
-naturalism (socially critical
Theater -- The Weavers 1893)
-socialist Freie Volksbühne
(people’s stage)
cabaret
4) Painting, sculpture
“this was the taste of an age that had no taste”
-a turn away from naturalism and sentimentalism
-1894 Munich seccessionism
-paved way for impressionism (1860-1900) and
expressionism (1900-1910)
-and Jugendstil or art nouveau
Impressionism
-Monet
Expressionism
-Emil Nolde’s
The Dancers 1910
-Klimt’s Jugendstil
5) music
-from the sentimentalism of Wagner’s operas
to avant guard and experimental
-Arnold Schoenberg’s atonality
IV. Sexual Science
and the Unconscious
a. Freud and psychoanalysis
b. sexology
-Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, and the third sex
-companionate marriage and repeal of antisodomy legislation
Advice manuals,
magazines, self help guides
anything but Victorian
values
V. The Balance Sheet
 Literature, art, society between traditionalism and
modernity
 Not turn inward, but intensely political
 Weimar, Nazi cultural and political antecedents
 Alongside authoritarianism stood powerful critique
of society
**how will 1914 affect these voices of opposition?