The German Genius

realism into a form of “magic and excitement.” 26 He still kept the theater serious—everything from Sophocles to Büchner—but he introduced new lighting effects, new staging techniques, making the theater more spectacular than it had ever been in Berlin. (Marsden Hartley says Reinhardt probably handled the largest theatrical quantities outside wars, volcanic eruptions, or train crashes.) 27 There was nothing specific in Reinhardt’s techniques that the Kaiser could object to—it was their very modernity that he didn’t like. Therefore, unable to invoke any law, the Kaiser simply ordered his productions off-limits to the military. Childish to the end, when war broke out in 1914, Wilhelm rejected the playwright’s offer to tour the Front with his company. 28
    Another of the great figures in the Berlin cultural world whose admirers did not include the Kaiser was the conductor Hans von Bülow. By the turn of the century, as we have seen, Berlin had long been a center of international respect so far as music was concerned. Ever since 1842, the royal orchestra, once led by Felix Mendelssohn, had had an excellent name. In the 1880s, a second, privately funded symphony orchestra had been established by a certain Benjamin Bilse. The former leader of a military band, he turned his new orchestra into a rival of the royal orchestra but was something of a martinet in style. In 1882, a group of his musicians who had grown weary of being treated in such a domineering way broke off to form a rival outfit, calling themselves the Berlin Philharmonic. Their early years proved difficult and they were forced to perform in a converted roller-skating rink. But in 1887 they came under the direction of Hans von Bülow. Not only was he a brilliant and charismatic conductor himself, who liked the classics and contemporary music equally, but he also had interesting friends. In 1889 he brought one of these, Johannes Brahms, to Berlin to conduct his D Minor Concerto. The occasion was a sensation.
    The Kaiser, it will be no surprise to learn, hated modern music as much as he loathed modern art and modern theater. 29 He and Bülow clashed in particular over Wagner. Bülow was an experienced interpreter of Wagner, even though the composer had stolen his wife, Cosima, and the Berlin Philharmonic’s offerings of Wagner had become a shining jewel of the Berlin opera scene, which had had little to show for itself since Giacomo Meyerbeer in the 1840s. Even so, many long memories in Berlin could not forget the composer’s support for the revolution of 1848, and the Kaiser used this to put Wagner down. Soon after ascending the throne, he announced portentously that “Gluck is the man for me; Wagner is too noisy.” He had much the same view of Richard Strauss, allowing Strauss to take over at the Royal Opera only because the composer promised he would make Berlin an even greater international center of music than it already was. 30 In fact Strauss continued to compose in the discordant way that the Kaiser hated. “I raised a snake in the grass to bite me,” he growled, and told Strauss to his face that he considered his music “worthless.”
    In 1871, at the time of national unification, Berlin was a good way behind Munich in the world of fine art. Munich, as we have seen, had by far the largest community of painters and sculptors. In the 1880s and 1890s, however, as it became clear that Berlin was to be enriched by new monuments and museums, artists began migrating to the new capital. Here too, the Kaiser could never resist taking sides.
    Until the influx, Berlin’s best known artist was Adolf von Menzel, a native of Breslau who had lived in the Prussian capital since 1830. At first Menzel painted impressionistic depictions of Berlin’s rougher edges, its dingy streets and archaic factories (Degas admired Menzel). In the 1870s, however, Menzel changed radically, turning instead to the history of the state and the monarchy. 31 For example, The Flute Concert and The Round Table treated the court of Friedrich the Great and did so reverentially; other compositions showed a straightforward adulation for Prussian Macht . The change achieved its aim, and Menzel duly became admitted to the court himself, this “unfortunately ugly painter” soon gracing the playgrounds of high society, which he now chronicled in loving detail. In 1905 the Kaiser marched in his funeral cortege. 32
    Not too dissimilar was Anton von Werner, whose vast, precise