Anthropology and the Place of Knowledge in Imperial Berlin Andrew Zimmerman
The annual symposium of the Friends of the German Historical Institute has become an event eagerly anticipated by the Friends in both the academic and Washington communities, and by colleagues at the Institute itself. The eighth such symposium was held on November 19, 1999, at the GHI. This year's presenters were the joint Friends' Dissertation Prize winners, who were chosen in a nationwide competition to find the best doctoral dissertations in German history or German-American studies, and one of the research fellows at the Institute.
Professor Geoffrey J. Giles, as president of the Friends, began by thanking the dissertation prize committee for the hard work they put into their difficult task of selecting two joint winners from a short list of quite excellent doctoral dissertations from around the country. The 1999 committee was chaired by Professor William Hagen from the University of California at Davis, who was himself the supervisor of one of the previous year's winners, and was thus known to have a good eye for superlative work. He was joined by Professor Herbert Andrews from Towson State University and Professor Ron Smelser from the University of Utaha team that truly spanned the country. The dissertations submitted to them ranged in focus all the way from the seventeenth century to the 1990s, but they had no difficulty in reaching unanimity over the two winners.
The first young scholar to present his work was Ian F. McNeely, who had conducted much of the research for his University of Michigan Ph.D. in Stuttgart. During the current academic year he is a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. McNeely gave a lucid and fascinating account of the role of scribes (Schreiber) in Germany, especially in Württemberg in the decades around 1800. He gave his talk the title, "Writing, Citizenship, and the Making of Civil Society in Germany, 17801840."
The joint Friends' Dissertation Prize winner, and the second speaker, was Andrew Zimmerman, who completed his doctorate at the University of California at San Diego. He is spending this academic year in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. His illuminating talk explored the position of anthropology in the Kaiserreich, focusing on both the practitioners and the museums in which they exhibited their often curious finds. His talk was titled, "Anthropology and the Place of Knowledge in Imperial Berlin."
After lunch, the audience settled back in to enjoy a presentation of some of the interesting research being carried out in the Institute itself. GHI Research Fellow Cordula A. Grewe illustrated with thought-provoking slides her work-in-progress on corporeal imagery in the service of nationalism. Grewe is working toward her Habilitation at the University of Freiburg. Her paper was headed, "The Nationalized Body: Conceptions of the Body and the Nationalist Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Germany."
As in previous years, a lively discussion followed each of the papers, and the day finished all too quickly. The Friends are already looking forward to their next symposium, scheduled for Friday, November 10, 2000.
Geoffrey J. Giles
What follows are synopses of the presentations given by the Friends' Dissertation Prize winners, McNeely and Zimmerman, and Grewe of the GHI.
The project explores how written texts mediated the encounters between state officials and local citizens in Germany. Set in the duchy (later kingdom) of Württemberg, it spans the fascinating but severely neglected decades from the French Revolution through the aftermath of Napoleon's invasions. It also takes place in local communities, a setting often overlooked by scholars focusing on events in high politics, such as wars, statemaking, and "reforms from above." At the same time, the book attempts to integrate these communities into the broader narratives of German history. Ultimately, it synthesizes micro- and macrohistory, melding political - and cultural - historical methods to argue that Germany's famously bureaucratic culture was also a profoundly civic culture.
The book begins with the observation that the telling of German history has long been dominated by the state. Often reified as a site of oppression or compulsion, sometimes viewed as an "organic" entity with a life and purpose of its own, the state has long been seen as the motor of German historical development. It has functioned as an instrument of totalitarianism, an agent of national unification, and an architect of warfare, religious reform, and social discipline. Starting in the early modern period, writing emerged among the principal means by which the state made its power felt. Writing - the handmaiden of bureaucracy - stands behind the modern state's most potent apparatus of influence. Germany is both famed and despised as perhaps the world's most notoriously administrative society: Every official encounter there is marked by a stamp, a seal, a certificate, or a form. The German state's prowess with writing has, moreover, sustained a belief that its citizens were passive creatures of a bureaucratic monolith.
Official Encounters questions this view. It attempts to situate the production and power of official texts amidst the strategies and assumptions governing the use of writing in German society at large. I want people who read it to think differently about the exercise of power, through official writing, at the interface between state and society. Not only must "bureaucracy" be disaggregated into the individual texts and practices of writing bringing influence to specific officials. Writing must itself be viewed as a vehicle for citizen empowerment. Its very plasticity as a medium, even in its official, bureaucratic form, ensured that the powers the state conferred on writing eluded its grasp at the moment of encounter with local society. To follow the trails of paper circulating between officials and citizens is to re-imagine the German state as a community of political participation, not a site of domination, and thereby restore the German citizenry to the making of its own history during this time period. Citizenship is often viewed in terms of identity, as a passively acquired legal or cultural status defined by those other than citizens themselves. By contrast, I want to recuperate a sense of how citizens themselves actively practiced and participated in the exercise of power. This entails a new conception of citizenship, one whose attention to the uses in texts in local settings shows how power was negotiated within the state, and not between it and an externally constituted civil society.
"Civil society," the realm where citizens interact independently of the state, is the outcome, not the origin, of the historical transformation described in the book. In Germany, civil society was the product of countless decisions, deliberate and accidental, by officials and citizens alike, to demarcate a sphere of free association where ideas and information could be exchanged and society's interests formed without the state's interference. Changes in official writing promoted and at the same time reflected civil society's disengagement from the state. A long-existing set of textual practices and cultural beliefs about writing, once predicated on the interpenetration of state and society, gave way to one in which these realms were viewed as separate. These subterranean, tectonic shifts, rather the classic philosophical distinctions and political reforms which later recognized and institutionalized them, constitute the "making" of civil society that is the main subject of Official Encounters.
II
At the center of this story stands an ambitious group of manipulative local scribes or Schreiber active in Württemberg. These scribes, a species of powerful half-private, half-official notaries public, stood in a hazy realm between government and the local community and experienced the disentanglement of state and civil society especially acutely. They straddled a fault line that widened into an open chasm after Napoleon's invasions in the early 1800s. Not only does their sudden decline provide a vivid illustration of civil society's coalescence, but their previous role as mediators and teachers for their clients in local communities compellingly illustrates the learning process leading up to it.
The study uses the scribes as a lens through which to view the uses of writing in flesh-and-blood settings. It is divided into four parts, encompassing the role of writing in four interrelated spheres: daily life, political mobilizations, the state proper (bureaucracy and parliament), and civil society itself. Before the 1800s, the scribes presided over a civic culture that bound citizens to the state, and to each other, through elaborate textual formalities. Part I details how they managed property transactions; drew up mandatory estates inventories; drafted "alimentary contracts" between parents and children, exchanging heirlooms and property in exchange for care in old age; and influenced the conduct of "protocoled investigations," textual inquisitions into local corruption or malfeasance which brought the state into the world of the scribes and local citizens. Collectively, these texts colonized citizens' lives with bureaucratic formalities but in crucial ways allowed them to pursue and express their social interests through the written record, all with the mediation of the scribes.
As certain of these scribes became enamored of the French Revolution in the late 1790s, they parlayed this underlying civic involvement into a truly political activism, manipulating the machinery of administrative communication and stretching the interpretation of constitutional documents to their absolute limits. Part II begins with a chapter on the so-called Black Forest Cahier, telling how provincial scribes, through their role in drafting binding written mandates and instructions issued by local citizens to their parliamentary representatives, practiced "political ventriloquism" to project their own voices into the faraway debating chambers of the Stuttgart parliament or Landtag. It then shows how, despite the manipulative and paternalistic nature of such ventriloquism, scribes nonetheless educated their putative puppets in the arts of citizenship. In particular, the culture of petition and supplication allowed citizens to participate in dialog with the state and, when state investigators forced citizens to account for words put in their mouths by the scribes, called forth powerful expressions of civic courage and political conscience on their part.
The scribes fell from power when the Napoleonic invasions led to the creation of a larger and more cosmopolitan state in Württemberg, unleashing a parliamentary and governmental campaign to strip them of their provincial hegemony. The tremendous growth in bureaucracy during this period of statemaking generated massive complaints against what Friedrich List called Vielschreiberei, excessive red tape from which the scribes personally profited, with G.W.F. Hegel accusing them of keeping citizens in "textual serfdom," Schreibleibeigenschaft. Part III narrates the parliamentary and public sphere movement to strip the scribes from power and tells how, in a powerful expression of civil society's maturity, this campaign eventually compelled the state to enact emancipatory reforms. During this time, state reform commissioners pioneered new practices of writing, collecting personnel dossiers and income reports on the scribes and analyzing them statistically to get a picture of their lives in civil society. This not only allowed the state to co-opt the scribes and demarcate bureaucracy from civil society for the first time, but also signaled a new role for written texts as vehicles for legibility: official texts now promoted knowledge of the broader social world in a looser, more pragmatic fashion than had been the case under the culture of formality the scribes had themselves dominated.
Robbed of their mediating role between state and citizenry, the scribes saw their tutelage replaced by a more informational, entrepreneurial culture of writing designed to enlighten rather than patronize a citizenry newly emancipated from their clutches. Part IV concentrates on two forms of print culture that put knowledge and information in the hands of citizens and enabled them to construct new networks and affiliations among themselves. The first of these, a series of local statistical-topographical almanacs, brought state officials into collaboration with hometown notables in the production of printed reference books, showing how a progressive, scientistic, Enlightenment-inspired encyclopedias had come to Biedermeier hometowns long regarded by historians as provincial and backward. The second print medium, so-called intelligence gazettes, demonstrates this even more clearly. These classified ad newspapers embodied the Enlightenment's ambition to bring practical knowledge to the people, and their massive and spontaneous diffusion throughout the Württemberg kingdom in the 1820s testifies to a large and sophisticated market for information, goods, and services in local communities, one which evolved in an explicitly political direction in the 1848 revolution. With these changes came a recognizably modern traffic in texts, one forming an integral part of German civil society from the nineteenth century to the present.
III
Official Encounters fundamentally sheds new light on the landscape of civic interactions between the state and local communities in the decades surrounding Napoleon's invasions of Germany, from the 1790s to the 1820s. These interactions have been neglected by a historical literature that misses the vitality of the local amidst the continental sweep of wars and revolutions, that focuses its account of civil society's origin on a rarefied sphere of intellectuals and policymakers, and that fails, above all, to appreciate citizens' participation in a state that purportedly dominated them.
Civil society was the outcome of a long learning process between the 1790s and the 1820s. It took hold not in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers, in their writings and salons and reading societies, but in a much more everyday world where local citizens encountered state officials. What Official Encounters attempts to show is that at each moment during this entire process, what we normally call "the state" had to contend with the active participation of its citizens. In Germany, the state and its written instruments were indeed ubiquitous. But precisely because they were diffused throughout social life and only marked off from civil society over a long process of negotiation, such power remained as much the patrimony of its subjects as the monopoly of a bureaucratic elite. Even in a period of continental warfare and violence and reform and disruption, citizenship and civic participation mattered.
Ian F. McNeely
Anthropology was practiced in locations significantly different from those of the conventional academic humanities in the Kaiserreich. Rather than the university and the library or archive, anthropology took place in voluntary associations, popular ethnographic spectacles, museums, and in the world outside Europe. In my dissertation I followed anthropological knowledge through these various locations, as it traveled from popular shows to scientific museums or from colony to metropole. Anthropology was in many ways defined by the enormous amount of distance it covered, and it was by means of a set of material cultures that anthropology could travel such enormous distances. Anthropologists depended on the material culture of the societies they studied, the artifacts that filled their museums. Furthermore, anthropological knowledge about these non-European material cultures itself depended upon a set of European material cultures. These included the technical apparatus of European imperialism as well as the technologies of display that anthropologists used in their museums. These two material cultures both sustained and contradicted the intellectual and ideological aspirations of anthropologists. These contradictions were not simply an impediment to anthropology but also a precondition for the discipline. By focusing in this essay on the collection, circulation, and display of anthropological objects, I hope to show how the development of anthropology as an ahistorical human science was part of a larger, global colonial encounter.1
Anthropologists studied societies that had been rejected by German historians from Leopold von Ranke to Eduard Meyer as lacking history and therefore as unworthy of scholarly attention.2 Anthropologists shared the view that the people they studied were not historical. Following historians, they regarded these societies as "natural peoples" (Naturvölker), rather than "cultural peoples" (Kulturvölker). Natural peoples were "natural" because they possessed neither writing, history, nor culture. Nature, in this scheme was radically ahistorical. Adolf Bastian, the leading German anthropological theorist and head of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, asked about natural peoples: "What would be old here? What young? In the eternally old or eternally young of nature?"3 Anthropologists conceived of their methods as a natural scientific alternative to the interpretive, narrative methods of academic history. They pointed out that when historians studied the past they relied on historical documents, accounts that societies wrote about themselves, which, one suggested, contained self-congratulatory exaggerations and even lies.4 Instead of interpreting written sources, anthropologists looked at objects, at the possessions and body parts of the people they studied. They claimed that when they studied these objects they did not interpret them as historical traces but rather used natural scientific methods. Bastian proclaimed that the goal of anthropology was to attain a "total impression" (Total-Eindruck) of humanity in all its variations.5 A complete collection of anthropological objects displayed in a museum, it was hoped, would allow an individual to achieve the anthropological total impression. By rendering objects not as historical documents, to be interpreted as part of a narrative, but rather as specimens evidencing a timeless nature, anthropologists thought it would be possible to understand humanity independent of historicism.
The Royal Museum of Ethnology, which opened in Berlin in 1886, was thus supposed to catapult the human sciences outside the horizon of time. The basis of this achievement were the glass and iron display cases designed in part by one of the museum's curators, Albert Voss. Voss chose to replace conventional wooden case frames with iron because iron frames could support much larger pieces of glass.6 The combination of glass and iron, which had made it possible to bring the brilliance of sunlight into enclosed areas such as the crystal palace or the numerous commercial arcades in European cities, also allowed the brilliance of sunlight to fall on anthropological objects. The arrangement of the cases in parallel rows in large halls further induced the eye to compare and generalize from the artifacts of different natural peoples and thus encourage anthropological induction.7 The museum was to demonstrate that humans, or at least natural humans, could be subject to the same kind of classification as the rest of nature. Understanding humans was therefore, the museum offered, not the province of the humanist historian, who placed individuals into narratives, but rather the province of the natural scientist, who placed specimens into classifications.
The presentation of the objects of the colonized as artifacts of an ahistorical humanity was not, however, an accomplishment solely authored by anthropologists. Rather, the objects in the museum were the product of exchanges between Europeans and colonial subjects. Anthropologists rarely traveled abroad to collect objects, and even when they did they were most successful when they acquired collections already brought together by local Europeans.8 More commonly, German soldiers, government officials, and merchants in the colonies would acquire objects, often in the ordinary course of colonial rule, and mail them to the Berlin museum. This denial of history was as much a part of the practical course of colonial rule as it was a part of anthropological discourse. Colonists themselves had an interest in making the people they ruled radically different and fundamentally inferior to Europeans. Putting the objects of the colonized in an anthropology museum was thus part of a larger attempt to deny historical agency and even full humanity to the subjects of colonial rule. Anthropologist and colonist were partners in a larger process of determining the relations between Europe and the rest of the world.
A good example of colonial collecting occurred in German New Guinea in May, 1898, when Lower Pay-Master Braun of the H.M.S. Seagull purchased objects for the Berlin Museum of Ethnology. Braun gave an indigenous leader a hatchet, a carpenter's plane, and four packets of tobacco in exchange for a wooden figure used to protect coconut trees from thieves.9 Even this exchange, which went quite smoothly, illustrates the work required to fix such encounters as culture collecting nature. One might at first be tempted either to applaud or to denounce this exchange as a form of modernization. The Papuan, one might claim, abandoned traditional economic practices based on the magical manipulation of the world, represented by the wooden figure, in favor of modern economic practices based on technological intervention in the world, represented by the hatchet and the carpenter's plane. One might also point to the integration of the Papuan into a system of commodity exchange and away from a gift economy. However, the moment of exchange, rather than "modernizing," actually destabilized the distinction between the "primitive" and the "modern." For collectors like Lower Pay-Master Braun, this sort of exchange was a step toward initiation into the Prussian Orders of the Eagle or the Crown, groups centered around totems that transferred royal aura to their members. One of the most important motivations for colonists to collect anthropological objects was the hope of being named to one of these orders, since donations of artifacts to a royal museum could be interpreted as service to the Prussian monarch. Royal orders conferred prestige upon their members and gave them the privilege of wearing ribbons and medals with formal attire. The objects of exchange thus had a number of ambiguous meanings in precisely the "subjective," historical sense that anthropologists hoped to eliminate from their study. Only when the objects were placed in the Berlin museum was the exchange stabilized as a contribution to science rather, for example, than an exchange of one kind of magic for another.
The Berlin museum was extraordinarily successful in amassing the objects that would allow for a total impression of the natural peoples. The concept of the total impression proved, however, to be self-contradictory, and Bastian privately complained that every advance the museum made toward its goal of completeness was a retreat from its goal of allowing for a totalizing, summarizing gaze.10 By the turn of the century the collections had become such a jumble that "the cases are overfilled, so that every instructive arrangement of the collection remains impossible," Bastian lamented.11 Bastian, who had conceived of the plan of offering a total impression in the museum, left the practical work of cataloging and setting up such massive displays to the junior curators. These curators seem to have resented Bastian for his unwillingness to participate in the cataloging he required of his subordinates.12 One complained "that they were supposed, like handy-men, to take inventory of objects as they came in from every possible part of the earth."13 Even Luschan, a very senior curator, griped that his own work in the museum had become "mechanical," involving mostly registering objects.14 Anthropologists had become victims of their own challenge to history.
Junior curators eventually rebelled against the model of anthropology offered by the museum. Instead of striving to achieve an inductive "total impression" of all the artifacts of "natural peoples," these curators reconceptualized anthropology as type of cultural history. The junior curators Fritz Graebner and Bernhard Ankermann encouraged anthropologists to interpret selected artifacts that were particularly significant of cultural contacts and development.15 This so-called culture-historical method offered a solution to the practical problems of a museum conceived as a non-narrative, inductive overview of a complete collection of uninterpreted objects. This new direction in anthropology did not immediately revolutionize museum displays or subsume the discipline into history (something most historians would, in any case, have resisted). Nonetheless, culture-historical methods did undermine the original project of German anthropology and began a dialog about anthropology and museum techniques that would continue throughout the Weimar Republic and afterward.16 Culture-historical anthropologists at least tacitly acknowledged that the possessions of the colonized were embedded within a history of conflicting interpretations and that every anthropological object was the outcome of a colonial struggle. German anthropology, its challenges to historicism, and its reshaping of the German human sciences were constructed and contested in a global system of material cultures that Europeans could never fully master.
Andrew Zimmerman
Since the Renaissance, the body, especially the nude, has become not only central to the expression of artistic concepts but also a significant site to inscribe representations of gender, class, or the nation. In the context of the latter, depictions of the body played an important role in the construction of national identity. The creation of a "national body" in the nineteenth century - that is, of a visual metaphor for the modern nations that were constituted and shaped during the course of that epoch - build decisively on cultural discourses about race and ethnicity, gender and politics, and an allegedly cultural and national heritage. As George L. Mosse pointed out in his discussion of modern masculinity, beginning with the French Revolution symbolically loaded images of the body hardened into stereotypes that became normative, stripped from their original multitudes of personal or ideal definitions. "Stereotypes came into their own with the modern age as part of a general quest for symbols in order to make the abstract concrete within the bewildering changes of modernity. . . . At a time when political imagery like the national flag or the Jacobin's cocarde became potent symbols, the human body itself took on symbolic meaning."1
Here, I discuss different conceptions of the body in their relation to national imagery and the nationalistic imaginary in nineteenth-century Germany. Beginning with images of Germania, the main part of my discussion focuses on two opposing notions of the body in the period of the Wars of Liberation: I contrast what Mosse called the "modern masculine stereotype" with an androgynous model developed in Nazarene art. This interpretation aims at an attempt to shed new light on the phenomenon of androgyny in art that has been overlooked for a long time in the German context and seldom discussed in a broader historical framework. I also examine the relationship between the artistic program of the Nazarenes and their political world views, especially their relation to nationalism and national aspirations in the first decades of the nineteenth century. This approach coincides with the self-understanding of the Nazarenes who perceived their project of a renewal of German art and politics as a Gesamtkunstwerk and regarded the arts as the spiritual foundation of political developments.
Talking about Germany, or to be more precise, about the multitude of independent states that would become Germany in 1871, one connects the image of the national body immediately and inevitably with depictions of colossal Teutonic warriors and Wagnerian women, exemplarily represented by Karl von Piloty's famous Thusnelda in the Triumphal March of Germanicus, begun 1865 and finished 1875, and by Lorenz Clasen's famous Germania on Guard at the Rhine from 1860. The formation of Germania as an aggressive Valkyrie, fit-to-fight the enemy west of the Rhine, was fostered by the so-called Rhine crisis of 1840. In that year, the French government had suffered a humiliating diplomatic defeat in the Ottoman Empire. In an attempt to divert the attention of its citizens from this foreign-policy debacle and to restore national pride, France declared its intention to recapture the left bank of the Rhine from the Germans and thus to reestablish the river as the country's "natural" eastern border. The threat of war charged nationalist sentiment throughout the German territories, a reaction that soon recalled the intense patriotic, anti-French fervor present during the Wars of Liberation. German nationalism radicalized as the fear of a French attack grew. The sense of a common fate, of belonging to a single German nation, spread. The intense reaction to the Rhine crisis was particularly evident in the press.
Yet the political discussion was not limited to journalistic articles. Starting in the fall of 1840, a flood of Rheinliederwritten, published, and sung - attested to the strong anti-French and nationalist patriotism among the German population both during and after the Rhine conflict. One poem in particular is credited with launching the Rheinlieder craze in 1840: Nikolaus Becker's "Der deutsche Rhein." Becker appealed to his readers' sense of a national character with traditional, romantic images of the river: His poem claims that the Rhine should, and could, remain German as long as an oar strikes its waves or as long as bold lads court slender lasses, to mention just two of his images. Lorenz Clasen's Valkyrian Germania fitted well into Becker's nationalist imaginary, and it rose to the rank of one of the most successful visual manifestations of anti-French sentiment in Germany. As shown in the following, belligerent images such as Clasen's composition successfully entered the visual memory of what is German, and in so doing, erased the memory of and identification with other models of representing the nation and of other concepts of the body.
Already in the last few decades of the eighteenth century, a small circle of enlightened doctors, educators, and cameralist theorists known as the Philanthropists had begun a campaign to bring back what they referred to as the ancient art of physical training or Gymnastik.2 By the early nineteenth century the idea of gymnastic training for male youth gained broader popularity. Against the background of the Napoleonic wars, educators and patriots across the German territories set up a series of gymnastic fields and societies as part of a larger effort to bring about "national liberation" and "renewal." Leaders of the gymnastics movement envisioned the training field as a cradle of nationalist sentiment and promoted gymnastics as part of the education of future citizen-soldiers. In contrast to their nineteenth-century followers, the gender concepts of the eighteenth-century Philanthropists were less strict in their binary division of female and male role models. Nevertheless, their notions of masculinity tied into the evolution of Mosse's idea of the modern masculine stereotype, which came to embody predominantly bourgeois "normative patterns of morality and behavior, that is to say, typical and acceptable ways of behaving and acting within the social setting of the past centuries."3 During the French occupation, the association of physical training, moral virtues, and national desires gained enormous significance and wide-spread acceptance.
In the years between the defeat of the Prussian army in 1806 and the uprising against Napoleon in 1813 figures such as Ernst Moritz Arndt aimed to direct individual aspirations toward the ideal of the Volk, while propagating a concept of beauty that represented a new national stereotype. The idea to foster citizenship and cultural programs together with health and physical-education activities, particularly gymnastics, was rigorously cultivated and then successfully implemented in Prussian culture through Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778 - 1852), the German "father of gymnastics." Jahn was a fervent patriot who believed that physical education was the cornerstone of national health and strength and important in strengthening character and national identity. In 1811, he founded the first Turnverein or gymnastics club in Berlin. Becoming soon popular as centers for the cultivation of health and vigor through gymnastic exercise, early Turnvereine also were intended to prepare German youth to defend their country against Napoleonic France, and gymnasts were encouraged to develop a spirit of patriotism and Deutschheit (Germanness). This national stereotype based on the Greek revival á la Winckelmann nurtured a cult of masculinity, "the male body hard and lithe, poised for battle"4 that revived the Philanthropists' idea of physical training as the foundation of a new German man, the citizen-warrior. The unity of body and spirit was vital for this conception, "as indeed it was for the Gymnasts whose bodily contours were made visible by the uniform Jahn designed for them."5
Despite the vivid discourse about masculinity and war and about masculinity and the creation of a united Germany, the modern masculine stereotype as the foundation of the "new man" did not remain unchallenged. In their attempt to overcome the decadence of the eighteenth century and to renew German culture, the German Nazarenes developed an alternative body concept of the nude male that was grounded in androgyny and found its expression primarily in drawing.
As a reaction to rationalism, the Enlightenment, and the intellectualization of faith, and in artistic terms, against eighteenth-century Neoclassicism, the Nazarene movement found its first institutional expression in the German Brotherhood of St. Luke, the first effective anti-academic movement in European painting. The brotherhood was formed in 1809 and searched to revive and renew artistic practice through a return to the medieval spirit in art. The brotherhood's original members were six Vienna Academy students with Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr as its leading figures. The circle moved in 1810 to Rome, where it occupied the abandoned monastery of Saint Isidoro and where it soon constituted a central group within the community of German expatriate artists. In Rome, the young artists soon acquired the originally derisive nickname "Nazarenes" because of their affectation of biblical style of hair and dress.
Based on a holistic world view, the Nazarenes regarded all facets of human life - whether art, culture, economics, politics, and even war - as an unified whole, whose critical condition of decadence and atheism they set out to heal. The fundamental element of the Nazarene national project represented thereby their belief that only the rise of a new religiosity could lead to an artistic as well as political renewal of the German people after a century of decadence and moral decline. This yearning for a re-Christianization was not rare among the generation who was born in the decade of the French Revolution and grew up in a dramatically changing world. Confronting the collapse of traditions and traditional values, political instability and war, industrialization and the origin of the working class, and a new experience of time dominated by speed and rapid transformations, many of them searched for a new foundational ethical and moral system. For that reason the Nazarene movement turned to religion. In so doing, they were part of the religious revival movements that originated around 1800 and were to become a major sociopolitical force throughout the nineteenth century.
Instead of depictions of forceful, well-build men, the nude drawings of the Nazarenes represent pubescent boys whose bodies are only on the verge of becoming manly physiques. In opposition to the late-Baroque style taught at most academies throughout the German-speaking language area the Nazarenes predominantly rejected the masculine body of professional models and instead hired young boys that they had encountered in daily life. Searching for true expression, they treasured the uncorrupted innocent attitude of their nubile models who had not been involved in any academic or art business prior to their involvement with the Nazarene artists. Beside artistic reasons, this attitude also reflected the anticapitalist stance of the Nazarene movement. As a result of their rejection of traditional models, the first Nazarene generation, that circle that had gathered around Overbeck and Pforr in Rome developed an androgynous ideal of the male body. Thus, Nazarene depictions of the male body contradicted both the stereotype of modern masculinity and the call for the masculine citizen-warrior as advanced by the war party in Prussia.
As mentioned earlier, the heart of the Nazarene enterprise was formed around the belief that only the rise of a new religiosity could lead to an artistic as well as political renewal of the German people after a century of decadence and moral decline. Turning toward Christianity, the majority of Nazarenes rejected antiquity as a symbol of heathenism and denounced French Neoclassicism as an expression of secularization and revolution, which they both despised. In contrast to the persistence of Winkelmannian enthusiasm for Greek art as the model of perfect beauty, exemplarily embodied in Goethe's Weimarer Preisaufgaben, the Nazarenes searched for a truly Christian style, exploring medieval and Renaissance art as sources for their artistic endeavor. The formulation of a new body ideal, however, proved to be difficult: On the one hand, the restricted, abstracted depictions of the nude in medieval art - that is, of Christ on the cross or scenes of saints' martyrdom - did not provide a model that the Nazarenes perceived as aesthetically satisfying. Renaissance art, on the other hand, represented a revival of a body image based on the reception of antiquity. Thus, to follow the conception of the nude in Renaissance art would have meant to assimilate in one way or the other the despised Greek revival of the eighteenth century, and had therefore to be avoided. The lack of Teutonic figurative art or monumental sculpture reinforced the problem of devising an alternative to Greek beauty.
Like Neoclassicism, the notion of androgyny, alas only in its male form, as the germ of social, political, and artistic renewal had a strong theoretical basis in German thought, again beginning with Winckelmann. His rediscovery of the classical world was critical for the development of the mystique of the androgyne. In this context, Aristophanes' narrative of the origin of human being in Plato's Symposium that promoted the idea of a primal being as a cosmic androgyne whose original unity disintegrates into a world of conflicting parts transformed into the notion of a middle voice embodying the utopian call for an aesthetic state that could restore such wholeness. The androgynous concept thus became the major utopian counter model to the fixation on binary models of logic and scientific discourse that characterized the eighteenth century. The Nazarene interest in this model was reinforced by the revival of the notion of God as an androgynous unity - an idea that was revived in the eighteenth century by mystics such as Jakob Böhme and Pietists such as Graf von Zinzendorf.
The questions remains, however, how the androgynous ideal of the Nazarenes related to German nationalism in the first and second decade of the nineteenth century. The most important link between the two was religion: The Nazarene reform program with its emphasis on personal faith and a renewed religiosity as the driving force of all aspects of human life corresponded with the religious overtones of anti-French resistance and the war rhetoric. The religious orientation of these movements clearly shows that the nineteenth century, despite an unfolding secularization, also witnessed a strong re-Christianization. Religion seemed for the Nazarenes as well as for many nationalist to be the true basis for a united Germany. It is thus not surprising that a Nazarene, Philipp Veit, fabricated the monumental image of Germania that embellished the first German parliament, the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. Thereby, the Nazarenes looked back to the perished Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, embraced the idea of the Reich, and opted for a pan-German solution. An example of this attitude is Philipp Veit's fresco of the Introduction of the Visual Arts in Germany through Christianity, executed in 1835 for the newly founded Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main. In this fresco, we see Germania on the right dressed in the ornate of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. She holds a shield that is embellished with the double eagle. At her feet we see the crown of Charlemagne and the imperial insignia, and the pedestal, on which Germania's throne rests, is decorated with the coats of arms of the seven Kurfürsten, the seven imperial electors, that like the insignia refer to the vanished German empire.
In contrast to the aggressive Valkyrian Germania of the second half of the nineteenth century, the Nazarenes did not give priority to martial strength and the will to fight. Instead, they focused on virtues such as purity, self-restraint, and sexual abstinence which they regarded central to the new, regenerated German people. They saw these values manifested in the not-yet-fully developed bodies of the young pubescent boys they hired. They thereby favored values that gymnasts and fraternities also tried to integrate into their ideal of the new man, in their case a correlative, if not control mechanism to their emphasis on those manly virtues that were immediately related to combat. As Mosse put it: "Indeed, the Gymnasts while training for battle were supposed to avoid the so-called sins of youth, such as laziness, lustfulness, and uncontrolled sexual passion." This moral side of the modern masculine stereotype allowed its supporters such as the fraternities to embrace Nazarene art despite its rejection of pronounced masculinity. The Nazarenes' turn to the androgynous model expressed a deep desire to find an alternative to the Greek model, quite a unique undertaking in Western art at that time.
Beside the choice of young boys as models, the striving of the Nazarenes for purity found furthermore expression in their draftsmanship. In the attempt to reduce the sensual aura of the nude human body, they reduced the depiction of the body to outlining the model's contour. Two drawings by Franz Pforr showing the young Italian model Xaverio, who enjoyed immense popularity among the Nazarenes, demonstrate exemplarily this approach.6 Although the first drawing displays the boy from the front, leaning against a pedestal, in a rather realistic manner, the second depiction of Xaverio on the same sheet, a much smaller view from the back, is much more abstract in character. This abstract quality also distinguishes Pforr's second drawing, again a view of Xaverio from the back. In this drawing, Pforr reduced the model's body to a purified ornamentalized outline without articulation of the corporeal structure itself. In contrast to the reductionist depiction of the boy's body, Pforr represented the face - seen in lost profile - in delicate detail. It is noteworthy that Pforr's drawing represents a technique common among the Nazarenes. The dualism between the abstract representation of the body and a detailed characterization of the face thereby grew again out of the Nazarenes' denial of Greek beauty associating it with perfect bodies, but impersonal, non-individualistic faces. In contrast to Greek art, the Nazarenes believed that Christianity had found its highest artistic expression in the representation of the face. This divide - antiquity/body versus Christianity/face - reflected the Romantic theory of the spiritual origins of Christianity. For the Nazarenes, the emphasis on the face symbolized the spiritual character of Christian faith, because they believed that the face mirrored human spirit as well as emotions.
Another connection between the Nazarene concept of the male body and the ideal of modern masculinity as favored by German nationalists formed a decisively anti-French sentiment. The Nazarenes created their pure androgynous nude drawings in opposition to the sensuality of French art. This attitude reflected popular stereotypes and was part of a discourse among German-speaking thinkers on the character of the races. Of course, one could reasonably question the Nazarene definition of their own art as being non-sexual. In contrast to their rhetoric about purity and purified spirituality, their nude drawings possess often a very sensual, almost homoerotic quality that is not at all diminished by the abstract elements. In addition, a closer look at French art reveals another self-deception: The construction of a strict dichotomy between French and German spirit proves untenable as soon as one takes the Romantic classicists into account such as Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, whose art also featured androgyny. In addition, French and German academic art shared a similar approach to the technique of painting, and both Prud'hon and the Nazarenes preferred enamel-like surfaces, a porcelain coloring of the flesh, and a suspension of narrative and action that resulted in a certain frozen quality of the depicted scenes. If anything, the superior technique of the French artists remained a clear dividing line between German and French academic artists, and it did so way into the second half of the nineteenth century.
Interestingly enough, the Nazarenes did not aspire to rival the technical superiority of their French competitors. Instead, they defined this difference again as a sign of the moral supremacy of German art and character. In their opinion, the strong emphasis on skills and the technical execution of an art work represented just another aspect of French decadence, like the over-heated sensuality that German critics thought to detect in French art. In the eyes of the Nazarenes, a dominating orientation toward technique prevented the immediate and unpolluted expression of feeling, sentiment, and emotions that they strove for. Instead of mourning their lack of technical skills, the Nazarenes valued the allegedly direct expression of an artist's idea more important as technical perfection. Their slightly defective drawing technique thus became a signifier of honesty and truth, moral values that the German artists claimed to be at the inner core of the German national character.
As this essay has shown, androgyny in Nazarene nude drawings represented an artistic as well as political reform program that aimed at a renewal of German society on the basis of a religious reawakening. The Nazarene ideal of the androgynous male thus provided an alternative to the modern masculine stereotype with its grounding in ancient art, while it participated at the same time in the German discourse about nation, liberation, and the creation of a united fatherland. Of course, this reading of androgyny in Nazarene art in the context of re-Christianization and nationalism is not an exhaustive interpretation of the material. Androgyny also bears other sets of meaning concerning gender, class, and homosocial bonding. That is, however, another story and will be told at another place.
Cordula A. Grewe