The German Genius

saying, was affronted.
    While Berlin’s reputation as a city of modern art was new, and far from settled, it had been a museum town since 1830, when Schinkel had designed the Altes Museum on the small spit of land in the middle of the Spree that soon became known as the Museuminsel (Museum Island). The Neues Museum was added in 1855, and the Nationalgalerie in 1876. 39 In this area, Wilhelm was lucky in having one of Europe’s cleverest collectors and connoisseurs, Wilhelm von Bode, who took over as director of the new Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum when it opened on Museum Island in 1904. 40 Bode obtained for Berlin a raft of impressive old masters that included Rembrandt’s Man in a Golden Helmet and Dürer’s Hieronymus Holzschuher . * His success was underlined by the fact that his activities were spared the Kaiser’s interferences. In fact, Wilhelm positively helped von Bode by awarding titles to those who offered works to the royal collections.
    In contemporary art the familiar problems resurfaced. The director of the National Gallery, Hugo von Tschudi, was as accomplished a man as Bode, and an expert on French painting and contemporary art and sculpture. 41 The Kaiser, however, refused to give him the free hand he gave von Bode and, on one visit, noticed that some German works had been removed, their place taken “by pictures of modern taste, some of them of foreign origin.” He insisted the originals be put back.
    The Kaiser couldn’t be everywhere at once, however, and Tschudi did find ways to acquire some contemporary masterpieces, including a Cézanne, making him the first museum director in the world to do so (at that stage, not even the French state had any Cézannes in its official collections). 42 Later, however, when Tschudi bought works by Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, and Honoré Daumier, the Kaiser exploded, complaining that Tschudi might “show such stuff to a monarch who understood nothing of art, but not to him .” In 1908 Tschudi decamped to Munich to become head of the royal museums there.
    Despite his conservative and retrograde taste in the arts, the Kaiser was nonetheless proud of the scientists and engineers who were building Germany’s prosperity and, since he thought of himself as a man of the future, and believed that the application of new knowledge was the key to progress, he prevailed upon the University of Berlin at the turn of the century to recognize the graduates of the recently created Realgymnasien , which emphasized science at the expense of the humanities. For all his striking contradictions, the elevation in the status of Realgymnasien was conceivably the best thing the Kaiser ever did in cultural and intellectual affairs; it was built on in 1910 when, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, he announced a new institution for the natural sciences. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Germany’s answer to France’s Pasteur Institute and America’s Rockefeller Institutes, was funded by private industry and the government, and would pay dividends in spades. 43

The Great War between Heroes and Traders
     
    I n the early months of the Great War, the Viennese developed a set of symbolic acts that fortified them and helped them identify with the troops at the front. For instance, in the Schwarzenbergplatz, off the Ringstrasse, was a wooden statue, called the Wehrmann im Eisen , the “soldier in iron.” Anyone who wanted to could buy a handful of nails—the profits from which went to benefit war widows and orphans—and hammer the nails into the statue, “covering him in iron, enveloping him in the collective strength of the Austrian Volkskraft .” 1
    Support for the war was not, as Matthew Stibbe has recently revealed, quite as enthusiastic in Germany in 1914 as previously reported. Outside the main cities, and among the working class in particular, the mood, he says, was one of “resignation, indifference or passive acceptance” rather than aggressive nationalism. It was intellectuals who believed they were “called upon” to underpin the belligerence with a coherent philosophy, “which idealised the power conflict in terms of an alleged spiritual antithesis between German Kultur and political forms and those of its enemies.” (Though Norbert Elias felt that Nietzsche, “almost certainly without being aware of it,” in his book Der Wille zur Macht [ The Will to Power ], gave philosophical form to the