by Susan Ronald
Then suddenly, he bursts out with, “The ever precarious future calls us the ‘Prey of the Moment,’ a cannibalistic term, so ravenous, isn’t that so?” In ever-increasing tiny circles, he reasons through the “dreariness” and “laziness,” trying to “think of a way of how we can live [in peace] with mankind, how we must yet live, not in discord. It is reflecting on this that one has the greatest fear—about how one should then live.”
The repetition and half sentences show clearly a young man in distress. He meanders through his mind, contradicting himself, repeating thoughts in different ways, before finally bursting forth with, “Here I am reading Nietzsche narrowly. It is your fault that I am reading him with a strange mistrust.… It is on yours and Eitl’s conscience that I never experience this [joy of discovery], as I know your opinion on everything, which basically is foreign to me.… I don’t give a damn.… You’d say, ‘How have you fallen so low?’ Curse them, I say to all the older siblings!!”28
This is hardly a letter from a young man at ease with life or his situation. Nietzsche naturally troubles him most, because he finds a kinship with the philosopher whom both his brother and sister had rejected. It was once said that “only a conscious National Socialist [Nazi] can completely understand Nietzsche.” To compound Hildebrand’s confusion, his other great writer of the moment, Tolstoy, had thought that Nietzsche was absurd.
* * *
Nietzsche, however, was highly relevant to the times. He had arrived at the idea of “crisis through art history” as taught by his colleague and great friend Jakob Burckhardt. While attending Burckhardt’s lectures “On the Study of History” at the University of Basel, describing the historical powers of state, culture, and religion, Nietzsche latched on to what Burckhardt described as “the theory of storms.” This characterization of history as a theatrical work of competing and conflicting powers, alternately suppressed then released, claimed that “the suppressed power can either lose or enhance its resilience in the process.… Either it is suppressed, whereupon the ruling power, if it is a wise one, will find some remedy … A crisis in the whole state of things is produced.… The historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms.”29
Both Burckhardt and Nietzsche were dabbling in the dark metaphysics of a heroic Schopenhauerian philosophy. Both believed that “the crisis itself is an expedient of nature, like a fever, and the fanaticisms are signs that there still exist for men things they prize more than life and property.”30 This is what troubled Hildebrand: Would the drive to make all of Europe bow to Germany’s will overshadow his entire life?
In the fervor of France’s defeat in 1871, Nietzsche wrote, “For an unconscionably long time powerful forces from the outside have compelled the German spirit, which had vegetated in barbaric formlessness.… But at long last the German spirit may stand before the other nations, free of the leading strings of Romanized culture.”31
Early Nietzsche writings were influenced by an earlier philosopher and political activist, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The first to expand on the need for Germany to act and react as one nation in his Addresses to the German Nation in 1807—a critical year in the battle against Napoleon—Fichte became the model for many art historians serving over a century later in the Great War. Indeed, the Fichte Society of 1914 was founded amid patriotic fervor. It saw itself as a “comprehensive, folkish, educational community which in all its institutions aims at educating the German into being German.”32
* * *
Hildebrand soon suffered another breakdown. In October 1917 he wrote that he was in Mannheim at a sanatorium “due to my nerves and some personal matters, which are too boring to write about, and shall remain in Königsbrück for a while or go to Eitl, where I have been offered a job with the press.”33
How had Hildebrand been rescued again and given the opportunity of sitting out the rest of the war in one of the best jobs in the East behind the front line? Had his father prevailed on Clemen to keep Hildebrand away from snipers in Sedan? Hardly. Cornelia was still stationed as a nurse in Vilna on the eastern front. It was she who arranged for Hildebrand to receive the personal stamp of approval from the press office art critic and boss, Paul Fechter.
Earlier that year, Cornelia wrote that she was unable to “go to Mannheim,” presumably to see Hildebrand, as their mother was ill. Hildebrand was at the sanatorium for some eight months before he wrote his own letter.34 She saw it as her duty to somehow rescue her little brother, and through a combination of desperation and delight, Cornelia ultimately secured Hildebrand a position as a writer of dispatches from the eastern front. The family had no suspicion that she was Fechter’s mistress.
By the time that the first American boots hit European soil in April 1917, prompted by the final piece of news that Germany had been coercing Mexico into declaring war on the United States,* Wilibald received a letter from his sister that made her love for Fechter clear. “I love my life here—it’s such a beautiful life compared to earlier,” Cornelia enthused. “At the heart of it all is a journalist … who has also studied philosophy, and is also very learned and with a different understanding, which I believe was also my own whenever I spoke of art. Perhaps this lovely man will later convey his knowledge to me which I so easily and in such a childlike way worship.”35
* * *
With the weight of battle lifted from his shoulders, Hildebrand seemed cheerier. Though there is no mention of the United States’s entry into the war, it is clear that he is accepting his—and Germany’s—fate more phlegmatically. “Do you actually know what my new plans for the future are?” he asked Wilibald. Replying to his own question, he wrote of settling “in some city with modern life and major industry, in Bremen or Essen etc.; and there try to influence work via a small museum.” There, he believed, art could be used as an “enticement” for everything spiritual.
Why did he want to go to a city with major industry? “I hope to encounter the fewest obstacles and find the greatest demand due to well-respected art institutions. Of course, these are all castles in the air.” Reverting to his nervy state, he continued, “Above all I want to continue my PhD in art history and then see what might happen. Of course I have no idea where I will study, but I just wanted to talk to you about it.”36
That October, Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized power in the Second Russian Revolution,* sealing the end of hostilities with Russia. The cease-fire came into effect only on December 15, 1917. Hildebrand’s Christmas letter to Wilibald, dated December 2, showed that he, however, did not believe in the peace. His mental state remained fragile. Gone were his notions of Pan-Germanism and the greatness of the German arts. He comes across as mentally exhausted, fragile, and as though he hardly knows where to turn. The Christmas letter is forlorn: “It is snowing outside and it is the Advent season and [I] could almost try to have hope again. But what for? For peace? I do not think that any message of peace will reach mankind in the near future; sure it is possible that they get fed up with shooting for a while, but so long as people do not learn to understand that [it is] not enemies or states etc … [or] the war, but that everyone is guilty, and because everyone has led the wrong life, there will be no peace.”
He likens the war to “an earthquake, which is a necessity of nature,” fearing that the fighting “will never end.” He attempts to find reason in the madness of war with a bizarre logic: “It seems to me that the cause for this war is that religion, science and art had reached a certain height and heyday beforehand, but had become increasingly abstract and detached from daily life. Mankind came into being and lost, and science, religion, etc. became the focal point.”
He blames art, science, and religion for the “terrible aberrations … (because the murder of hundreds of thousands must be an aberration) if so many ideas believed in by mankind had not rendered all real life insane?” Then he rambles on about how they “should try [to lead] as far as possible a correct,
(if you want) good life … Live in the way you want others to live. Only it is important and only through this we can do something against the war.”
Hildebrand thought that when people lived the wrong sort of life, it caused wars. “I do believe, that only by proving that until now we have led the wrong kind of life (because the war came) and that [in believing] there is a real life with more love we will get closer to peace.” His final thoughts turn to the Christmas season, and he brutally admits, “All this is tormenting me dreadfully, because again and again I see the whole hopelessness with ideas in facing the war and the world as a whole. They have failed miserably in this war. What else is Christendom if not a mockery, what is philosophy if nothing other than gibberish, all the world talks about it [Christendom] while killing each other.”37
Hildebrand was reading Tolstoy at the time, which may account for some of his wrestling with notions of peace and solemnity. Yet at the end of January he admitted that his plans for the future were unsettled. He was preoccupied with life in Vilna—and chasing after women. The life of a civil servant without much to do was boring, but he claimed he saw things better through Cornelia’s eyes. Still, he remained deeply troubled and “lived only for the moment”—a common complaint of all those who survived the war.
January came and went with his enclosing an excerpt from Tolstoy’s On Life to Wilibald. It is a dark passage on the misinterpretation of love, given to his brother “so you can see what is really occupying me. Everything else is incidental and I do not force myself toward these ideas, because I am afraid of them.”
Wilibald was shortly due to marry Gertrud Darmstäedter. Was this some sort of coded message? Or is Hildebrand afraid of love or of Tolstoy’s view of love? The salient passage reads, “the biggest evil in the world develops from the much praised love for a woman, children, friend, not to mention love for science, art, the Fatherland, which is nothing but a temporary preference of certain conditions of the animal life to others.”38
Laziness and mental instability, however, remained his main preoccupations: “You can say that I am lazy, at least lately. But I am almost glad about that, because in Königsbrück and especially in Berggiesshübel … I suffered from terrible anxieties due to my fear of time. Every minute seemed precious and lost to me, if it was not used to achieve something—yet I did not know what this something was.”
Still, his tone remains dark. “I no longer have the energy to want to reach my goal against all the obstacles of the current life.… My museum plans have thus become small and ugly. Please don’t call me feeble, remember that every few months I have started again in a different place with completely different prospects.… Perhaps it is good that I am now staying here for a longer time.”39
His frame of mind hadn’t improved three months later: “I myself am facing this incredible muddle, these cruel, incomprehensible conditions helplessly and am working with some ideas that seem … perfectly clear to me. The only thing I want to do (apart from some fantastically impossible plans) … is to avoid that my life will become dull and common.… Laziness and envy and hatred are infectious, they spread.”40
* * *
Hildebrand’s April 1918 letter foresees an end to the war, where Germany has lost. With the Russian and Romanian peace, the defeat of Bulgaria and the imminent defeat of Turkey, he understood that Germany would be entering a new era—one in which Pan-Germanism was dead and which would require some significant adjustment in his own, his family’s, and his country’s view of themselves.
As spring turned into summer, Hildebrand’s predictions became a reality. The complexion of the war was changing rapidly. Naturally he was at a loss to explain the meaning of it all; how to end it quickly; how to minimize its impact on their futures; and most of all, how to prepare for this “new era.” In August, a calmer Hildebrand wrote about canoeing, taking long walks in the rolling countryside, his bourgeois life in lodgings built on the ruins of a fourteenth-century Lithuanian castle, and the piano in his living room.41
August, however, also brought a flurry of military activity. Hildebrand’s press unit was to be disbanded and reorganized. “You have no idea what that means and how we have to be careful not to be landed in a dreadful job,” he wrote Wilibald. “All this is causing us disquiet and takes away the pleasure of writing.”
Then another lucky break came. In September, he was transferred to the Art Unit of the Military Government of Lithuania, giving courses to the local population on German art, and reminding soldiers of the beauty of Germany. He apologized to Wilibald for his long silences, but still feared, he claimed, his brother’s disapproval. “In the fall of ’17 when I was at Berggiesshübel for the first time,” Hildebrand recalled, “I had time to think, see it all together, and that my personal experiences in a very strange way reinforced my helplessness. Then came Tolstoy … that uncompromising thinker who consistently reminds one of Christ, What you want, also affects others. So I isolated myself as far away as possible from everyone except the loud confessions of my thoughts.”42
Then … nothing. Not one letter from September until after the end of the war in November. What had he to confess? Had he suffered a mental collapse yet again? His military record remains as silent on these final months as does his family correspondence.
For Hildebrand Gurlitt, as for many Germans who believed in the great Pan-German ideal, defeat seemed unconscionable. Still, he set himself apart from millions of Germans by peering through the fog of war to see that Germany had truly lost.
* * *
Despite his uncanny foresight, his moral compass was distorted by the conflagration, twisting Hildebrand’s mind and preventing him from searching for, much less finding, “true north” again. The notion of confession haunted him, though he was a Lutheran. What had he done that affected others? This was a question that he would twist to answer his own ends in the next war. There is a strong sense that he hadn’t read his Shakespeare. He was ignorant of Polonius’s instruction to his son, Laertes, in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” Perhaps this, as with Hamlet, had caused Hildebrand’s Great War madness.
Hildebrand Gurlitt would never live the “good sort of life” again. The war had taught him to adapt morality to his own ends if he wished to survive … and survive he would.
7
PEACE
During the night my hatred increased, hatred for the originators of this dastardly crime.
—ADOLF HITLER, Mein Kampf
Verdun. Passchendaele. Cambrai. Beersheba. All significant battles of 1917. Yet none could claim an absolute triumph to end the war. The cease-fires in December on the eastern front were lauded as German victories over Russia and Romania. In fact, they were victories of Bolshevism. More significantly, the December defeat of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine by British troops liberating Jerusalem ended 673 years of Turkish rule.
An unprecedented opportunity to resolve “the Jewish question” already troubling Germany and other parts of Europe was suddenly presented. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour* seized the day and with America’s blessing (so long as it was kept secret) made public the Balfour Declaration in the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild on November 2, 1917. The letter stated that the British government favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” on the clear understanding that there was no disadvantage to “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”1
Then, in January 1918, riots rocked Vienna and Budapest. The people were starving and cried out for an end to the butchery and long years of privation. Soon Paris, too, exploded in social unrest. Unions pressed for better living conditions and greater security. Though most foodstuffs still reached the city despite the lack of horses in the fields and Paris had full employment, the majority were anxious to right the wrongs of 1871. The political cartoon “Let’s hope they hold out!” “Who?” “The civilians!” best charact
erized their impatience.2 Still, the war continued.
Despite the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the Treaty of Bucharest taking Russia* and Romania out of the war in March 1918, the Great War thundered on regardless. The war seemed remorseless, relentless, endless. Yet the long-awaited US Army sailed over the horizon at last, much like some mythical Fifth Cavalry, with its tanks, well-rested soldiers, and battle-hardened General Pershing.† Engaging in the Second Battle of the Marne, the revitalized Allies ended the German spring offensive, with irretrievable losses for the Germans. Only five days after the significant German victory on the western front on September 22, the Allies stormed the German Hindenburg Line.
The next day, General Erich Ludendorff, who was the real leader of the German High Command, insisted with Field Marshal Hindenburg that Germany must seek an immediate cease-fire.‡ Hindenburg did not mince his words—an armistice “at once” was required “to stop the fighting,” as the army could not wait even “forty-eight hours.”3 When the announcement of the reversal of Germany’s fortunes came, it stunned the nation. “Now the spark leaped across to the people at home. There was panic in Berlin,” wrote Germany’s chancellor.4
By September 30 all Palestine had fallen to the British, and the Ottoman Empire was in final meltdown. That same day, Bulgaria signed an armistice with the Allies. Germany and the remaining Central Powers were near exhaustion, losing ground daily. Ludendorff and Hindenburg had acted in a cowardly fashion, not telling the civilian government just how bad things were until it was too late. General Freiherr von Schoenaich wrote in the Frankfurter Zeitung that he’d “come to the irresistible conclusion that we owe our ruin to the supremacy of our military authorities over civilian authorities.… In fact, German militarism simply committed suicide.”5