Cesar Klein, expressionist

German Expressionism, what does it mean to you? Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, are some of the names that come to your mind, probably.

If I say Cesar Klein, does it ring a bell for you? If it doesn't, don't worry; Klein (1876-1954) is one of the "forgotten" expressionists. It is true that he dispersed his talents in many directions: he was a painter, but also a theatrical designer. He decorated the interior of the Marmorhaus cinema in Berlin, and designed the sets for "Genuine", a film by Robert Wiene, yes, the same Wiene that some months earlier had made "The cabinet of doctor Caligari". 

He had the nerve to say no to Gropius's offer of a teaching position at the Bauhaus, and that alone should grant him a place in history. Of course, he couldn't foretell that Bauhaus would become such a myth, otherwise I doubt he would have turned down Gropius...

Klein was politically very active, being one of the founder of the Novembergruppe. And he was, in time, like other avantgarde artists, classed as a degenerate artist by the Nazis, which amounts to a Hall of Fame of sorts, in today's view. 

"Genuine", by Robert Wiene

    

An anti-conformist ?

Lederer at work. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2005-0827-501

We have a tendency to imagine Weimar Berlin as populated by revolutionaries from the left and from the right, and by artists who painted either workers in struggle against arrogant and bloodthirsty officers, or scenes of debauchery with prostitutes and fat bourgeois. This is indeed the case for painters like George Grosz and Otto Dix though they did paint other subjects too. But it is especially their most risqué or crude paintings that one finds on the Internet.

But Berlin was a metropolis of several million inhabitants. Although political extremists were many, they were far from a majority. And even if artists were constantly looking for new ways to represent a reality they saw as decadent and chaotic, there have always be
We have a tendency to imagine Weimar Berlin as populated by revolutionaries from the left and from the right, and by artists who painted either workers in struggle against arrogant and bloodthirsty officers, or scenes of debauchery with prostitutes and fat bourgeois. This is indeed the case for painters like George Grosz and Otto Dix though they did paint other subjects too. But it is especially their most risqué or crude paintings that one finds on the Internet.

But Berlin was a metropolis of several million inhabitants. Although political extremists were many, they were far from a majority. And even if artists were constantly looking for new ways to represent a reality they saw as decadent and chaotic, there have always been more traditional artists in Berlin.

I am not thinking now of "völkisch" artists, who painted folkloric scenes and loathed the avant-gardes, which they labeled as Bolsheviks and jewish. No, I'm thinking of an artist like the sculptor Hugo Lederer. His style was classic, clearly influenced by Greek art. He was the author of beautiful statues and received prestigious awards. He was director of the Berlin Academy of Arts during the Weimar years.

Practicing a classical art which didn’t excite much interest in those years, not revolting against traditional styles or struggling to invent new expression forms, Lederer didn’t have many admirers among modern art lovers. And, not being politically active and having declined to sign a manifesto for Nazi art, he wasn’t appreciated by the new masters either, after 1933. He didn't get any more commissions from the state.

Among his disciples, many were considered « degenerate » artist by the Nazis. But ironically, one of them, Josef Thorak, became one of the official sculptors of the Third Reich.

Lederer was born in the Austrohungarian empire in 1871. He died in Berlin in 1940.

Bust of Gustav Stresemann.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-08657

    

Menschen am Sonntag

In episode three of season one of the TV series Babylon Berlin, while Trotskyites are being hunted by Soviet agents, young would-be detective Charlotte Ritter goes to the cinema. To see which film ?

Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a silent movie directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer from a screenplay by Billy Wilder, who would later make a great career in Hollywood. The film follows a group of young Berliners on a summer's day at the end of the 1920s. It is « a film without actors », as the credits put it. There are indeed actors, five of them, but their names are unknown to us. « They have never been in front of a camera before, and today they have gone back to their professions ». 

The roles they play are : Brigitte Borchert, who works in a music-shop and has sold 150 records of « In einer kleinen Konditorei » in just a month, Wolfgang von Waltershausen, a wine seller, Christl Ehlers, a girl with acting ambitions, Annie Schreyer, a model and Erwin Splettstösser, a taxi-driver.

If one is fussy, Charlotte could never have seen that film in May 1929, as it didn’t have its premiere until February 1930. I guess the makers of the series wanted to show a well known film. They could have chosen Pabst’s Threepenny Opera, from 1928, or Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, from 1927, a documentary by Walther Ruttmann (by the way, the animations playing behind the credits of each episode are taken from Lichtspiel: Opus II, a series of abstract films made by Ruttmann in 1921). But Charlotte Ritter being a working-class girl, maybe those films would seem too highbrow for her.

They could also have chosen some other of the films with premiere in 1929 : Morgenröte, starring Paul Henckels, Werner Fuetterer and Carl de Vogt. Or § 173 St.G.B. Blutschande, a film about incest, with Walter Rilla, Erna Morena and Olga Tschechowa. But those films are almost forgotten today, whereas the scene from Menschen, with the young girls Christl and Brigitte having a picnic by the Wannsee Lake, may still be recognized in our days by film fans. Besides, that scene could also be seen as a reference to episode 6, where Charlotte, Greta and two boys are seen hanging out by the same lake in Berlin outskirts. 

Seeing this film, one thinks of "City love", written in 1933 by the young Berlin poet Mascha Kaléko: 

You kiss each other on park benches,

Erotics, yes, but only on Sunday,

On other days, who thinks of it?

Sylvia von Harden and Otto Dix

Who hasn’t seen this picture from 1926 by Otto Dix ? An emancipated intellectual, a image of the New Woman, it shows her with bobbed hair and monocle, sitting at a cafe table with a cigarette in her hand and a cocktail in front of her. With her grayish skin, her spidery fingers, her bony body and masculine look, this woman has become one of the faces that best sums up the art movement from the 1920s called "the New Objectivity."

That the woman's name was Sylvia von Harden is no secret; indeed, it can be read in the painting's title. But, who was she ?

The real Sylvia von Harden

She was born in Hamburg in 1894 but lived during the 1920s in Berlin, writing for magazines like Das junge Deutschland and Die Rote Erde and for newspapers as Berliner Tageblatt and Frankfurter Zeitung. A book of poetry, "Verworrene Städte" (Confused Towns) appeared in 1920 and a second one The Italian Gondola, in 1927.

The painting, an important example of the New Objectivity movement, may be admired in Paris, at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

As Sylvia von Harden recalls, what Dix aimed to accomplish was a portrait which would represent a whole epoch.

Von Harden left Germany for England when Hitler came to power. She died there in 1963.

    

Mascha Kaléko

I often try to reconstruct in my mind the atmosphere of famous literary cafés, like the Romanisches in Berlin. I know the names of some people who frequented it, like Erich Kästner, the novelist, and Kurt Tucholsky, the journalist. I doubt that Thomas Mann did, he was too serious a person to spend hours in cafés, and who would go to a place like that just to have a quick cup of coffee? Besides, he lived mostly in Munich. But maybe his children, Klaus and Erika did. And of course Joachim Ringelnatz and Else Lasker-Schüler.

I was glad whan I discovered another patron of the Romanisches. Her name : Mascha Kaléko. She was born 1907, not in Berlin, and not even in Germany, at that. Like many adoptive Berliners, she came from the eastern regions of the Austrohungarian empire. 

Her family moved to Germany escaping pogroms, and her first adress in Berlin was Grenadierstrasse 17, in Scheunenviertel, the eastern neighbourhood where many poor Jews lived. In Berlin, she studied philosophy and psychology, but what really interested her was poetry.

She published regularly poems in newspapers, like the Vossische Zeitung, the Berliner Tagblatt, and the Welt am Montag. In 1929 she publish her first poems in the renowned magazine Der Querschnitt. Playful verses, about the lives of poor people in the big city, with a peculiar mixture of melancholy and wit.

Her first book of verse, Das Lyrische Stenogrammheft. Verse für den Alltag (1933), though seemingly influenced by Erich Kästner's "Gebrauchslyrik" (lyrics for everyday use) with its cynical yet neo-romantic tone, nevertheless reveals a very personal style with a specific Berlinesque flavor.

One would think that being a Jew, Mascha would have left Germany 1933, as many others did. But the fact is, many German Jews managed to survive during that time, even though conditions got worse all the time. At last, she did emigrate to the U.S., in 1938.

After the war, her poetic work found a new German public. She visited Berlin a last time in 1974. She lived in Israel but dreamed of having a small apartment in Berlin, where she would spend some months every year. But she didn’t live long enough to realize those dreams. She died in 1975. 

One of her poems, from Das Lyrische Stenogrammheft.

City love

You meet hastily somewhere

and agree on a date sometime,

Something, hard to say what,

makes you feel you can’t live without it.

By the second raspberry ice-cream, you call each other « thou ».

You like each other and in the greyish mornings

you perceive already the glow of happy evenings,

You share the worries of everyday life

you share the joy of an extra salary.

The rest is taken care by the telephone.

You kiss each other on park benches,

Erotics, yes, but only on Sunday,

On other days, who would think of it ?

One speaks concretely, and rarely blushes.

No roses or daffodils are offered

And when you are tired of weekend adventures and kisses

you notify each other, through the State Mail

in stenographic writing, just a short word : « Off ! »

(My own translation) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above: the house where Mascha Kaléko lived in Berlin in 1936-1938, with a plaque on the entrance.

 

 

https://www.maschakaleko.com/

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kal-x00e9-ko-mascha

 

 

 

Vienna, the German capital?

Palace of Vienna

Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Francfort, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Dresden, some of the most important cities in our days' Germany, besides Berlin, the capital. If we go back one century, we would have to add centers like Breslau, Posen or Königsberg, which today belong to Poland or Russia.

But there is another city which for a long time rivalled Berlin in importance, a city no one calls German today, as it is the capital of another state I'm speaking of Vienna. 

Before the creation of the German empire in 1871, Austria was considered a part of that vast territory comprising an impressive number of duchies, counties and margraviates, but lacking a central authority, which went under the name "Germany". 

Austria was indeed one of the two biggest states of that aggregate, besides Prussia. Other large German states were Bavaria, Saxony and Hannover.

But there was no place in a unified Germany for two leading stars. If Prussia would command it, Austria would have to stay outside. Besides, Austria never wanted a unified Germany, which would challenge its privileged position as a giant among a myriad of dwarfs. 

So, in 1871 Berlin, since centuries the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia - a state which started as a humble North german duchy and step by step became the largest one in the German sphere -  became the capital of the German empire and subsequently of the Weimar Republic. In fact, Berlin has been the German capital ever since, except for the period 1949-1990, when it was replaced by the Rhenish town of Bonn. Still, Berlin was not completely "decapitalized" during those years : its eastern part could still boast a "capital" title; that of the GDR, the East German communist state. 

See also: 

http://www.weimarberlin.com/2018/05/the-two-german-capitals.html

    

Gerd Arntz

Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) was a German Modernist artist renowned for his black and white woodcuts. He is considered as the inventor of pictograms, a kind of schematic, simplified pictures, for example the icons used in computers.

He was a member of different left-wing movements and participated in an exhibition of « Revolutionary Art from the West » in Moscow in 1926. In 1932-1933 he lived in the USSR and had contacts with soviet artists like El Lissitsky and Tatlin.

In 1934 he had to leave Germany and he settled in the Netherlands.

 

 

    

Otto Braun, the red czar of Berlin

Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-10131

Otto Braun. have you ever heard of him ? An extremely ordinary name, like Hans Müller, or Karl Schmidt. Still, he hold a key position in Germany’s history in the first half of the 20th century.

If his name nevertheless doesn’t ring a bell with you, there is a good reason for that. The important position he hold was not in the German republic’s government but in the Prussian region’s. And while many have heard of Weimar Republic’s politicians like Gustav Stressemann, Walter Rathenau, Friedrich Ebert or Paul von Hindenburg, few are aware that there was another important state in the Republic, quite independent of the Reich, a kind of republic inside the republic. It was the Free State of Prussia.

Otto Braun (1872-1955) was one of history's most important social democrats worldwide, even if his name is less known than that of Friedrich Ebert, Willy Brandt, Olof Palme or Felipe González. He never ruled Germany, but from his headquarters in Berlin he did govern the Prussian State, which comprised about two thirds of the German republic, including cities like Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Breslau, Königsberg and, of course, Berlin. It had its own parliament, its own ministers and its own mighty police force. Otto Braun was known as « Prussia’s red czar ».

The son of a railway clerk in Königsberg, he joined the social democratic party SPD at the age of sixteen and soon became well known as a leader among rural labourers in East Prussia.

After the German Empire collapse in 1918, he became prime minister of Prussia, a post he retained for more than ten years, thanks to his ability to build stable coalitions with catholics and liberals. He was also aided by the fact that Prussia was a full parliamentary democracy, unlike the German republic, where the prime minister had to co-habite with a president with formidable powers. The Weimar Republic was, from 1925, undermined by its president, marshal Hindenburg, who was not a republican but a monarchist. In his Prussia, Braun could rule without that kind of interference. Having a parliamentary majority sufficed.

One could compare the Weimar Republic’s constitution to the French Fifth Republic of today, whereas Prussia’s constitution was more like the German one of our days.

Braun’s pragmatism and moderation helped to create a framework for harmonious government in Germany’s largest federal territory under the Weimar Republic. Prussia became the bastion of democracy and political stability within the Weimar Republic. Whereas Weimar politics at the national level were marked by extremism, conflict and the rapid alternation of governments, the Prussian grand coalition held firm and steered a steady course of moderate reform. Whereas the German national parliaments of the Weimar era were periodically cut short by political crises and dissolutions, every one of their Prussian counterparts (except the last) was allowed to live out its full natural lifespan.

In 1932, Braun could look back with a certain satisfaction on what had been achieved since the end of the First World War. ‘In twelve years,’ he declared, ‘Prussia, once the state of the crassest class domination and political deprivation of the working classes, the state of the old feudal Junker caste hegemony, has been transformed into a republican people’s state.’

But later that year, his proud Prussia lost its autonomy through a coup d’état, and in 1933, Braun, like other democrats, was forced into exile. 

Some information from Iron kingdom, by Christopher Clark.

    

 

The Schlesischer Bahnhof

This is the fourth posting about train stations. What’s with train stations ? Who cares about them today ?

Well, I have always been very interested in the Berlin of the 1920s. I have read Isherwood, I have browsed history books, I have watched films from those years, I have seen Grosz’ and Dix’ paintings, listened to Kurt Weill’s melodies. I have the general idea of what Berlin was like during the 1920s. But, not having experienced that personally, I want to know more about people’s daily life at that time. What music they listened to, but also how they moved around town, which were the tram and bus lines, exactly how their homes looked. I suppose it’s a compensation for not having actually seen that with my own eyes at the time it went on.

Having explained that, over to train stations.
If you lived in Berlin in the 1920s and wanted to travel to the Baltic Coast, you bought a train ticket at the Stettiner Bahnhof. If you instead felt like going to the French Riviera, or to Italy, then the Anhalter Bahnhof should have been your choice. Danmark, Norway ? Go to the Lehrter Bahnhof in that case.

But what if you for some reason needed to get to Poland or even to Leningrad ? Then your first alternative would be the Schlesischer Bahnhof (the Silesian Station), known as The Gate to the East. Silesia belongs today to Poland, but back in those days it was still a part of Germany, its most important town being Breslau.

The Silesian Station was also known as "the catholic station", as people from Silesia, mostly Catholics, came to Berlin through that gateway. It took 4 hours to Breslau (Wroclaw), 6 to Danzig (Gdánsk) and 8 to Königsberg (Kaliningrad).

From Silesia Station you could even go to Japan, via Siberia, in twelve days.

Many of the Russian Jews who emigrated to America arrived here to travel on to the emigration harbors in Hamburg or Bremen. This station was also the scene of the Spartakist revolt in 1919.

Its name today is Ostbahnhof (Eastern Station), and it is indeed located in the eastern part of the German capital, in the Friedrichshain district.

From Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J00861 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de,

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5364144

    

The Stettiner Bahnhof

Above, a scene from Babylon Berlin S02 E07

 

 

The real Stettiner Bahnhof

The Stettiner Bahnhof opened in 1842 as a terminus of the railway line to the Pommeranian city of Stettin (today we know it as Szczecin, a part of Poland since 1945).

The station connected the capital with the holiday resorts on the Baltic Sea, also known as the Pomerania Riviera. One of them was the island of Rügen. As the number of passengers increased rapidly, the station soon became one of Berlin's busiest railway stations and had to be enlarged several times.

When the Wall was built, the underground station under the Stettiner became one of East Berlin’s « ghost stations », where trains from the West were not allowed to stop.

There is a train station there in our days too, but it is called Nordbahnhof.

If Stettiner Bahnhof’s destinations, fashionable beaches on the Baltic, were elegant, the neighbourhood of the station was not. Streets like Elsasser Strasse and Ackersstrasse were known for their prostitutes, who received their customers in rooms conveniently located there.

From Goldstein, a Gereon Rath mystery, by Volker Kutscher :

"That part of town was the Poetenviertel, near Stettiner Bahnhof, but the only thing poetic about it were the street names, named after Germanys great Romantics. Otherwise, the area was devoid of both poetry and romance. It was a railway district: dilapidated house fronts, dim rear courtyards, dive hotels, prostitution, drugs, the whole shebang."


From Berlin Expo, a novel by Jorge Sexer :

"Hundegustav was a hangout near the Stettiner Bahnhof, where all sorts of asocial characters mingled. But also fine people seeking thrill; some obtained it by inhaling cocaine, others went slumming to Hundegustav’s. There, they could enjoy a beer while watching the girls with their pimps, the burglars talking business with the pickpockets, or the Africans joking in Berlin slang with an accent from Cameroon or Togoland, while at the same time admiring the tango dancers sporting newsboy caps and a scarf around the neck, a kind of Parisian apaches, East Berlin-style." 

 

Other railway stations in old Berlin.

                               Aschinger, the restaurant chain, had one of its branches there. 

 

 

1931

    

          

1930

1931

1938

1903