by Susan Ronald
* * *
Two weeks later, the exchange rate was 1,134 marks to the dollar. The government’s ill-fated economic policy meant that Germany could no longer afford to import food. Meanwhile, its population became millionaires in marks, paupers in other currencies. German agriculture had not recovered. Anything that needed to be imported was too extortionate to buy. Nitrates used in agriculture prior to the war had been diverted into armaments manufacture, leaving the land depleted of nutrients.
Poincaré, however, had a plan. By Christmas 1922, Germany was officially declared in default of its reparations payments. It took 7,589 marks to make one US dollar.24 Industrialists had long before bought commodities of greater worth than a pound of sugar or several pounds of vegetables: antiques, gold, silver, platinum, jewelry—in particular diamonds, the most concentrated form of wealth—and fine art. These all had international markets and would continue to accrue in value, even in bad times. The Krupp and Thyssen families already possessed superb fine art collections, but would buy only from those who needed to sell. Germany’s cigarette king Reemtsma, too, began adding to his collection.
Industrialist Kurt Kirchbach began collecting, too, his immediate hobby being signature photographs, which would become a valuable chronicle of their times.
Hildebrand Gurlitt became his personal art advisor.
PART II
ART AND POLITICS
All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.
—ADOLF HITLER, Mein Kampf
10
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
Men of letters are not the creators of new epochs; it is the fighters, those who truly shape and lead peoples, who make history.
—ADOLF HITLER, MUNICH, July 1937
The foundation stones for the Second World War were laid long before France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr on January 11, 1923. The pretext for the occupation was that Germany failed to deliver 140,000 telegraph poles on schedule—a “production guarantee” in lieu of money for its reparations payments. Seeckt, that Sphinx with the Monocle, declared that the “road from Dortmund to Berlin is not very long, but it passes through streams of blood.”1
Belgium? the Germans questioned one another, jaws dropping. Then another blow to national pride was wielded on its eastern flank: Lithuania reconquered the border city of Memel. The feeble Weimar government turned to its outlawed Freikorps—redubbed the Black Reichswehr, or Arbeitskommandos—to protect Germany, while urging the people of the occupied territories to engage in passive resistance.
The actions of the French, Belgians, and Lithuanians against Germany were keenly felt by the Gurlitts. A month later, Cornelius wrote that he suffered “badly but hoped for the awakening of the German ‘Michaels’ … as it was in 1914.”2 The German Michaels, according to Lutheran tradition in the Book of Daniel, was the great prince who stood up for the children of his people. It was Michael who led God’s armies against Satan’s forces in the Book of Revelation.
In the same letter, Cornelius also revealed that he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Halle University, which disappointed him. Leipzig’s magnetic professor of art history and archaeology, Wilhelm Pinder, had blocked the honor, in Cornelius’s opinion, from his alma mater at Leipzig owing to his alleged lack of scholarship.
Unusually, when Hildebrand wrote his annual birthday letter to Wilibald that February, he made no reference to the cost of living or any hardship (the mark stood at 27,000 to the dollar) other than mentioning that he’d been freelancing for unspecified newspapers. Instead, his letter is full of a wonderful visit to the same culpable art historian Professor Pinder, made at Wilibald’s behest, concerning Pinder’s important work on the rhythmic structures in Romanesque interiors in Normandy. Hildebrand, naturally, did not discuss his father’s accusations with Pinder. He seemed happy in the superficial world of female students—“very, very pretty girls”—who worshiped the professor. Even better, Pinder treated him with the courtesy he felt was his due. In fact, Hildebrand wrote that the visit was a “tonic,” probably as much for the very pretty girls who “liked his eyes” as for Pinder’s flattery. He, of course, does not mention Pinder’s dogged anti-Semitism.3
Had Hildebrand met Pinder’s most distinguished doctoral student at the same time? Nikolaus Pevsner—later known as Sir Nikolaus, the architectural historian who founded Pelican’s History of Art and the Buildings of England series—would unwittingly stand in Hildebrand’s way before the year was out. Or did he meet another, more lackluster student at Pinder’s home, Erhard Goepel, with whom Hildebrand would later pillage France, the Netherlands, and Belgium? He does not say.
* * *
Two months later, Hildebrand was living in Dresden again, probably thanks to a lack of ready cash. As far back as August 1922, he had begged Wilibald for money, and needed to find an external source of funding for the printing of his doctorate on the cathedral at Oppenheim.4
Everywhere, there was only one subject everyone else discussed: the increasingly worthless mark. The biggest losers were those who agreed on contracts for work—like artists—and delivered their commissions for a fraction of their original value a few weeks later. George Grosz, a prominent caricaturist and artist of the Dada and New Objectivity art movements, depicted Berlin life in the 1920s. He recalled those days when he ate nothing but “turnip coffee and mussel pudding” until he was befriended by a Berlin chef who’d hoarded food and become a black market Raffke. Fortunately for Grosz, he was also an admirer.5
By the spring of 1923, checks and credit accounts were no longer accepted. People demanded to be paid in movable valuables—food or cigarettes, usually, for everyday exchanges, and jewelry, rare books, or fine art for more expensive purchases—like automobiles—or for trades outside Germany to acquire foreign currency. For men and women who hadn’t anything else, their bodies simply would have to do. Weimar became synonymous with a struggle for survival amid despair and humiliation.
“We were handed champagne, that is: Lemonade with a little alcohol in it,” the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of a visit to a respectable bourgeois apartment with his friends in Berlin. “Then the two daughters of the house entered, in an unclothed state, and began to dance. The mother looked hopefully at the foreign guests: Perhaps her daughters would please them and [they] would pay well, in dollars, of course. ‘This is what we call life,’ the mother shrugged and sighed.”6
The unparalleled rise in prostitution, nudity, and free expression was curtailed by a government clampdown on all cabarets and shows—as much to stop the outward expression of the decline of German morality as to avoid accusations of a clandestine world steeped in depraved luxury that hid Germany’s ability to pay its war reparations.
Yet, despite any financial woes, Hildebrand fell in love. He’d met Helene Hanke, a Mary Wigman modern dancer,* and occasionally played music to watch her dance. It gave him “huge joyous amazement” that was “strangely alien” as it emphasized her controlled physicality.7 Intriguingly, the Mary Wigman dancers were at the heart of this spirited group of expressionists seeking new horizons; but with the suppression of cabarets and shows, Helene Hanke’s dreams of dancing professionally perhaps needed sudden rethinking.
* * *
Cornelia and Hildebrand Gurlitt had been part of the German Expressionist movement since its inception before the war. Visual artists, musicians, and film and literary figures were united by the expression of their art, despite wildly divergent political views. The members of Novembergruppe, founded in November 1918, are a prime example. The painter Emil Nolde was a racist mystic, who would later be shocked by his exclusion from Hitler’s unbridled power in the arts. Walter Gropius, founder of Bauhaus a year later, was entirely apolitical. Others, like the Marxist poet, playwright, and theater director Bertolt Brecht and his favorite composer, Kurt Weill, a Jew, soon joined the Novembergruppe. “The future of art,” they pro
claimed, “and the seriousness of the hour forces us revolutionaries of the spirit [Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists] toward unity and close cooperation.”8 The Cubists, by and large referring to Picasso and Braque, were the French Expressionists, where the Futurists denoted the Italian movement. Others, like symbolist Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, were heavily influenced by German expressionism and adopted as Teutonic artists. The visual-art market became modern and truly international since the Impressionists. The Expressionists sought to take it a stage further.
With the abolition of censorship from the earliest days of Weimar, expressionism took on an entirely new dimension. In January 1919, the Bauhaus art institute opened its doors in the city of Weimar. Its style, noted for its clean lines and lack of ornamentation, became an international sensation that united design with functionality and beauty. Bauhaus became the most enduring of Weimar’s cultural symbols and probably the most universally acclaimed.
The mélange of arts and crafts and design flourished in the visual art of painters like Gustav Klimt, in Picasso’s innovation in stage design with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in the work of Bauhaus painters like the Swiss-born Paul Klee, the American Lyonel Feininger, and the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. Each invented his own idiomatic form of expression. Despite stylistic differences, they shared an unrelenting passion for groundbreaking work.
This passion gave all their endeavors an individualistic worldview, a distinctive Weltanschauung, which carried a forceful message. Be it Otto Dix’s social and cultural commentary on pimps and prostitutes, George Grosz’s emboldened take on industrialists and war profiteers, or Käthe Kollwitz’s mourning mothers, starving children, or farewell to Karl Liebknecht, each of their works gave the world their cultural and social view of Germany in these tumultuous times.
In other media, that Weltanschauung was equally potent. The newest of the visual arts and fledgling ubiquitous propaganda tool—film—used allegory as a safety valve. One of the first of myriad arguments between creator/writer and director occurred with the filming and release of another celebrated Expressionist work, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Producer Erich Pommer had assigned Robert Wiene to direct this allegory of the insanity and cruelty that seemed to pervade postwar Germany, distorting the writers’ intent to show the madness of war. To the writers’ eternal consternation, Wiene’s Caligari was an unparalleled success.9
Other groundbreaking films followed. Fritz Lang—once dubbed the Master of Darkness—released Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, an elaborate and stylized tale of crime and insanity that ran for over four hours. In 1923, Bertolt Brecht wrote his first screenplay, too, for the short slapstick film entitled The Mysteries of the Barbershop.
From Cornelia and Hildebrand Gurlitt to Brecht and beyond, they all belonged to this expressionist, rebellious, artistic group whose creativity was born from the times in which they lived. Expressionists were a powerful antidote to the powerlessness of Weimar. As the founders of a modern German culture that tried to make sense of life as it had become, they were antithesis of Hitler’s Nazi vision of the arts.
While the cultural and political revolutions continued, Hildebrand made a life for himself at long last. At half past one on Saturday, August 23, 1923, he married Helene in a sad little ceremony at the Church of Zion in Dresden. There was a small organ prelude, then the ceremony conducted by Pastor Schulze. “Strength is needed at this terrible time, every bill, every errand comes as a terrible shock, and it is so exhausting that you actually wish for nothing and make do,” Marie wrote to Wilibald. “It won’t be like your wedding—[just] two sets of parents eating with them here and then they’re off. No bridal carriage or decorated altar space or sumptuous feast.”10
Describing them as good, simple people, Marie seemed to like Helene’s parents. She also reflected that Cornelius found it difficult, as if Cornelia’s ghost haunted the shadows. Hildebrand, too, had felt her absence, like a dull, aching pain. That Wilibald and his wife were kept away by the cost of the “heavy times in which we live” made it nearly unbearable for Marie.11
* * *
August was punctuated by more unrest in the Ruhr: food riots in French-occupied Wiesbaden closed grocers’ and butchers’ shops. Unbelievably, the French turned back all food shipments from the Reich to the Occupied Zone. The mark continued its slide and was now worth 353,412 to the dollar. Chancellor Gustav Stresemann was reshuffled to the post of finance minister in Ebert’s cabinet, and immediately announced his battle plan to address hyperinflation: an emergency decree making it illegal to trade the mark outside Germany. By August 20, a loaf of bread cost 200,000 marks and one gold mark was equal to a million paper marks.12 The Allies, like jackals sensing a kill, moved in.
The agreed loss of Upper Silesia as part of Germany’s new border with Poland coupled with the French/Belgian occupation meant that Germany lost over 80 percent of its coal, steel, and pig-iron production. In being deprived of these critical resources, the country was starved of any way to resume its reparations payments.
Hyperinflation reignited the flame of German pride—and the supposed anger of the country’s wealthy industrialists. Germany’s businessmen and manufacturers turned to profiteering in increasing numbers, taking advantage of their foreign-exchange capabilities and employing their entrepreneurial acumen. They argued, with some plausibility, that they stepped in for the greater good of Germany, trying to keep their businesses afloat and their workers employed. Yet that didn’t make their actions moral or right. What they needed was someone who could voice their Weltanschauung successfully. Hyperinflation touched every single person living in Germany in a common catastrophe. It destroyed all faith in property and money.13
Bewildered, fiscally and mentally damaged by hyperinflation, Germans were unsure if they could breathe more easily during 1924. During that same year, elections were held. Despite its having been made illegal, the Nazi Party and its allies won thirty-two seats in the Reichstag.14 Still, their election did nothing to relieve the issue of the French occupation in the Rhineland, which remained a festering sore.*
Amid the political and economic chaos, Hildebrand and his bride Helene settled down to married life in a tiny rented flat. Battered by Germany’s economic hardships, they were forced to base themselves in Dresden, taking midday meals with his parents to economize. Yet Hildebrand’s mental state changed miraculously. A grim determination to succeed supplanted his endless doubts and fears.
Was it Helene’s strong influence or the realization that he must make his own way in the world? Or perhaps it was the responsibility of marriage? Whatever the cause, from 1924 making money became his singular priority. Helene took in dance students to make ends meet while Hildebrand wrote freelance articles related to art and architecture for several newspapers. Yet no permanent jobs were forthcoming as a museum director, as he hoped—or as his father expected. During this period, Hildebrand helped Cornelius edit his next book, Art Since 1800, while Marie wrote proudly to family that Hildebrand was “invaluable in writing about modern art.”15
Despite turning seventy-four and having a second eye operation, Cornelius remained mentally alert and active. He had no choice. Although they lived in a huge home, it had neither central heating nor electricity. The plaster was crumbling, and essential restoration needed to be undertaken. Cornelius continued as a guest lecturer at the Dresden Technical University and was reelected chairman of the German Association of Architects. His seminal work on the baroque architecture and times of August the Strong of Saxony was published in 1924 by Sibyllen-Verlag, sealing Cornelius’s international reputation in the field of the German baroque.16
* * *
There were other rebel and terrible voices which began to make themselves heard in that decisive year of 1923. Hermann Göring had joined the NSDAP in 1922, and was by now an avid follower of Hitler. A Great War flying ace who had won the coveted Blue Max medal, Göring was a natural in Hitler’s eyes to take on the supreme leadership of the party’s thugs, the SA. In
July, Göring made it clear to the SA district leaders that “there is not yet sufficient clarity in respect to the various patriotic groups.… Competition between these groups is to be avoided at all costs.”17
Essentially, the NSDAP did not control many of the Freikorps troops. The Vereinigte Vaterländischen Verbände (VVM) and Hermannsbund were loosely connected with the party and it was assumed that they would soon join the NSDAP fold. However, Ehrhardt’s Viking Bund wanted nothing more than to take out the NSDAP and declared war on the party.18 It was mere detail to Adolf Hitler—a detail his heavy Göring could handle.
Hitler was pleased by Germany’s plight. An avid believer in astrological signs, he thumbed his horoscope eagerly in the papers and learned that now was the time to act. He decided to organize a mass rally of a new Deutscher Kampfbund (the Association for the German Struggle) at Nuremberg at the beginning of September and have himself elected its president. It would become the first of his long series of “German Days” to commemorate the party’s victories. “The unification of all battle associations into one great patriotic German Battle League absolutely guarantees the victory of our movement,” Hitler ranted during his acceptance speech.19
However, Bavaria’s virtual dictator, Gustav von Kahr, became seriously concerned that the loudmouth upstart Hitler would ruin his own plans to declare Bavaria a separate country from the rest of Germany and restore the Wittelsbach monarchy. “Propaganda must be adjusted to the broad masses in content and form,” Hitler declared, “and its soundness is to be measured exclusively by its effective result.”20 Kahr was right to worry.
Hitler decided to concentrate all his activity in Munich. There, “training of a community of unconditionally reliable supporters and development of a school for the subsequent dissemination of the idea” would be formed. Once the Munich leadership was irrevocably accepted, they could branch out across Bavaria and on to Berlin.21 Thereafter, nothing would stop the juggernaut.