Berlin: The Struggle of Art and War

Since the eighteenth century, Berlin has been a city that inspires progression and expression, and conversely, has worked against those very same ideals.  As the capital of Prussia, Berlin experienced a military growth under King Friedrich Wilhelm I, but when his son, later known as Friedrich the Great, came to power, focuses for Berlin began to shift to the performing arts and French Enlightenment.  This brief artistic and philosophical expansion was due to Friedrich the Great’s infatuation with philosophers such as Voltaire, with whom he corresponded with for several years.  While Friedrich II did not fully break away from his father’s warring aspirations, he lit a fire in Berlin’s heart that would not soon be extinguished.

George Grosz, The Funeral. (1918)

At the turn of the twentieth century, social and artistic movements were rising in the streets of Germany.  Born in Dresden, the German Expressionist movement took hold in Berlin and spread across Europe.  The artists credited with starting this form of modernism collectively called themselves Die Brücke, and was comprised of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleyl, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.  While not a movement easy to define, Expressionism just before and during the years of the Weimar Republic became an outlet for artists, musicians, and writers to criticize injustices, explore passions and sexuality, and make political statements.  Berlin at this time became a center for the expressionists, whose interest in human subjectivity and emotion and rejection of realism led them against the status quo of industrialized Germany.  Such rejection is evident in the works of Berlin’s own, George Grosz, a Dadaist caricaturist during the Weimar Republic years.  Critical of the rampant industrialism, Grosz’ iconic images depicted Berlin as home to the corrupt and scandalous.   This is especially clear in pieces such as Fit for Active Service and Made in Germany, openly criticizing the Weimar Republic’s approach to World War I, which he was subsequently fined for blasphemy and defaming the military. 

Adolf Hitler and prominent Nazi artist Adolf Ziegler
at the Degenerate Art Show, a collection with works
 from artists such as Kirchner and Beckmann.

During the years of the Weimar Republic, intellectual pursuits flourished in Berlin.  German Expressionism continued to be greatly influential in cinema and the fine arts, which also experienced elements of cubism, and as the decade went on, artists denouncing expressionism and futurism.  As the Weimar Republic experienced economic disparities and Adolf Hitler rose to power, many artists and intellectuals fled Berlin.  In the Third Reich, strict rules regarding the arts were implemented in accordance to Hitler’s position on equating classicism with his idea of Aryan purity.  This led to the creation of Reichskulturkammer, the Reich Culture Chamber, a membership group which regulated the arts shown in museums and gave approval to artists upholding their ideals.  They were notoriously anti-modernist and actively purged artworks they deemed as “Degenerate art.”  Instead, they encouraged works romanticizing war, depicting landscapes with natural colors, and classically-inspired figure and portrait paintings of ideal Germans.  Berlin, which had once been a birthplace of and home to progressive forms of art, had now become a showplace for the Nazi’s anti-Semitic propaganda, as seen in the 1940 film, The Eternal Jew.

           

Friedrich der Große statue on Unter den Linden.

As communism swept the nation, Berlin was divided into the Soviet East Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic, and West Berlin, the sector associated with America, England, and France but surrounded by the GDR.  In Matt Frei’s BBC documentary on Berlin, a woman who grew up in East Germany recalls the Soviet official version of Friedrich the Great.  The Soviets of the GDR, in an attempt to distance themselves as wholly as possible from Hitler and the Third Reich, perpetrated a vision of an exploitive and tyrannical Friedrich unworthy of the title “Great.”  This is mainly due to Hitler’s own infatuation with Friedrich the Great, and so to disassociate with Hitler, Berlin’s iconic statue of the Prussian king was removed in 1950.  However, the spirit of Friedrich II would transcend the Nazi association; as the Soviets were desperate to regain a symbol of German legitimacy, enlightenment, and militarism, they returned the statue in 1980.  While it may be easy to say there was a cultural and progressive stagnation in the divided Berlin, the movements of protests that eventually ended in the breaching and dismantling of the Berlin Wall could be attributed to the progressively-minded citizens who challenged their circumstances. In this regard, Friedrich the Great struggle between philosophical and military endeavors were merely the dawn of the same conflict Berlin would face time and again.