Weimar: golden art in times of uncertainty

Madrid,

From the abyss of horror in which today, half blind, we grope our way with a troubled and broken soul, I still look up in search of the old constellations that shone over my childhood, and I console myself, with the inherited confidence, thinking that one day this relapse will appear as a mere interval in the eternal rhythm of ceaseless progress. Today, when the great storm annihilated it a long time ago, we know for sure that that world of security was a house of cards.

It is no surprise that Stefan Zweig put especially clear words to the feelings of orphanhood experienced by those who see their countries plunge into wars of uncertain ending and their daily lives collapsed; Perhaps, as is the case with the sale of lipstick, the sale of The world of yesterday: Memoirs of a European It also grows in step with the majority’s concerns regarding political polarization or from conflicts that multiply and become increasingly closer.

A quote from that same essay begins, starting today at CaixaForum Madrid, the exhibition “Uncertain Times. Germany between wars”, which with a clearly didactic purpose examines, taking into account very diverse perspectives (political, social, economic, artistic, philosophical and even musical), the future of the Weimar Republic, from the end of World War I and of the Reich until the emergence of Nazism that would lead to the Second War, that is, in some twenties that have been described as happy, in comparison with their prolegomena and its outcome, but which clearly constituted a difficult period.

Audiovisual works, a careful scenography to emphasize the vertigo of the changes known to German society at that time and several participatory devices star in this montage, as we say, very suitable for educational purposes, which in several of its sections is enriched with key works of art from the moment linked, broadly speaking, to expressionism, the New Objectivity and the Bauhaus School; Carefully chosen for their representativeness, they come from Spanish and German museums. This proposal, curated among others by the architect and philosopher Pau Pedragosa, underlines that, in that stage emerging from terror in which Germany and Europe were heading towards another even greater terror, a cultural wealth developed in the center of the continent that reached all disciplines and that we can link precisely, or not, to the general absence of certainties and the mine-strewn life of the entire population (because of Italy, Switzerland and the cuckoo clock).

Europeans born in the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century had the opportunity to see the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires collapse under their feet, in addition to facing those two bloody wars so closely connected; In this context, the Weimar Republic was an attempt to establish a German democracy guided by reason and equality (women’s suffrage was approved), which did not last more than fourteen years but, due to its virtues and contradictions, its potential and its fragility, and due to its parallels with our time – some obvious and others not so obvious, pointed out at the end of the exhibition – it perhaps deserves a careful review a century later.

The tour begins with the recreation of the bourgeois hall of The Buddenbrooksthe Lübeck merchant family that stars in Thomas Mann’s first novel, a stay immersed in the notes of The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss; the projected romantic landscapes on its walls will soon be cracked by images of Nijinsky’s choreography on The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, a key work of the musical avant-garde of the beginning of the last century that here represents the break with the old peaceful harmonies.

After advancing through a dark trench, a symbol of the Great War, we will reach a second area that recalls some fundamental data of the political dimension of the Weimar Republic: Goethe and Schiller resided in this city, which is what this new regime indicated from its name. its desire to establish itself on the enlightened foundations of Germany, and its Constitution established social welfare and recognized some rights of workers, although it also included, in its article 48, which appears in CaixaForumopen, the germ of its fall. That heading stated that the president could dissolve the cabinet and veto the laws of the legislative branch to maintain order and security, and suspend public liberties for the same reason; Hitler would later take advantage of it. Matthew Arnold accurately described the moment, and any crisis: Wanderer between two worlds. One dead, another unable to be born.

From now on, the exhibition delves into creative terrain: at this time, wounded and mutilated in World War I were a regular part of the urban landscape, as a continuous reminder of the physical vulnerability of everyone, at the same time as the cult of the body grew. strong and beautiful and the importance of sport and exercise was emphasized. The sculpture of a maternity hospital by Käthe Kollwitz, who lost a child in that conflict, refers to inevitable fragility and the need for care; an Icarus as a fallen soldier by Georg Kolbe, to that same weakness, and a work by Marg Moll, greatly influenced by Matisse, to the dissolving forms of the avant-garde, also the corporal ones.

the film Metropolisby Fritz Lang, pointed to the future robotic body; and Doctor Caligari’s officeby Robert Wiene, to the first capture of psychological tendencies in cinema, how their psychology is revealed by the people of the 20th century that August Sander portrayed, almost always addressing the viewer. This individualization, which can be equated with autonomous freedom, was opposed by a growing tendency towards the mass, first politicized and then united in consumption: the exhibition brings together fragments of the November Revolution of 1918; of Berlin, symphony of a city (Walter Ruttmann) and The triumph of the will by Riefenstahl. In a time of enormous social division, art becomes politicized: on the magazine covers AIZHeartfield used the montage to criticize Nazism and Grosz asked for the communist vote in his works; Bertolt Brecht already stated that creation was not to be a mirror of reality, but rather a hammer that gave it shape.

Johannes Itten, Group of houses in spring, 1916. © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid

In the economic chapter, except for a brief period of stability, the Weimar Republic was marked by hyperinflation and shortages derived from the war and, later, by the effects of the Crash of ’29 in the United States: inequality was rampant and brought looting, riots and an increase in suicides, while nightlife was the escape route for many. As we already pointed out, the upheavals also reached gender roles: women began to escape from traditional ones to become independent in the social and sexual spheres, transforming their clothing in the process; The photographer Marianne Breslauer and the painters Jeanne Mammen and Karl Hubbuch reported on the changes; Of the latter we will see a double portrait of his wife, Hilde, which indicates the complexity of his personality.

Gertrud Arndt. Self-portrait in the studio, Bauhaus Dessau, 1926.© Gertrud Arndt

In reference to the artistic movements current in Germany at the time, from Dadaism to New Objectivity through Expressionism and Constructivism, we will see very representative pieces by authors such as Johannes Itten, Lovis Corinth, Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Dix (the acid portrait by Hugo Erfurth with dog), Christian Schad (and his Portrait of Dr. Haustein with her lover in the shadows), Schwitters, Hausmann and El Lissitzky, all of them contemporaries of the Bauhaus, a school that, to a large extent, embodied the spirit of Weimar due to its desire to democratize art and merge it with crafts. Its curriculum, its courses and workshops (first in Weimar, then in Dessau and Berlin) were aimed at generating a total work of art in which all its areas participated.

Otto Dix. Hugo Erfurth with dog, 1926. © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid
Christian Schad. Portrait of Dr. Haustein, 1928. © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid

Another section of the tour reviews the many musical genres that coexisted in the interwar phase, from the bombast of Wagner to the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schönberg, passing through jazz, the rhythms of cabaret or The violet song from 1920, considered the first gay anthem. Science and philosophy put an end to it: in a very graphic way, through spherical devices, we will appreciate the doubts opened in the transition from the classical physics of Newton to the relative physics of Einstein and quantum mechanics, in which reality is converted into a probabilistic question; The famous debate that Cassirer and Heidegger had in Davos regarding the consideration of the individual as a rational animal or as a being that avoids definitions that dedicates its existence to finding meaning also sowed many doubts; about freedom, ultimately. For the author of Being and timebelieving in our rationality is repeating a prejudice; He participated in the crisis of reason as a child of his time (it is known that the fortunes of both after the establishment of Nazism were very uneven).

A video that records the terrifying book burning of March 1933, a second trench where we will hear the voice of Paul Celan reciting death escapethe poem dedicated to the pain of Auschwitz, and Goya’s whim The dream of reason produces monsterswhich alludes here to the fact that the Weimar dream of reason ended with the monsters of Nazism, concludes an exhibition from which we will emerge defining ourselves: separate doors have been arranged for those who confess that they prefer to live in times of certainty or uncertainty, and once the exhibition we will know the statistics. At least at the press day, the cast was very balanced.

The Lissitzky. Proun 5 A, 1920. © Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum. Madrid

“Uncertain times. Germany between the wars

CAIXAFORUM MADRID

Paseo del Prado, 36

Madrid

From October 17, 2024 to February 16, 2025

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