Royally Entertained: Visual Culture And The Experience Of Monarchy In Wilhelmine Prussia

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Notes

¹ Kleindeutsch, or ‘little German’, was the nationalist model that imagined Germany unified under Prussian leadership, and with the explicit exclusion of Austria from the new Empire. It was opposed to the alternate, Grossdeutsch, or ‘large German’ model, which imagined Austria at the head of a unified Germany.

² The Hall of Fame was located in the Zeughaus, Berlin’s military museum, and exalted the Hohenzollern princes as military leaders. For court ceremonial, see: I. V. Hull, ‘Prussian Dynastic Ritual and the End of Monarchy’, in German Nationalism and the European Response 1890–1945, edited by C. Fink, I. V. Hull and M. Knox (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985); J. C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

³ W. von Scholz, Berlin und Bodensee: Erinnerungen einer Jugend (Leipzig: P. List, 1934), 50–1.

⁴ Rudy Koshar makes a similar point in R. Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 53–4.

⁵ For an overview of the field of visual culture, see V. R. Schwartz and J. M. Przyblyski (eds.), The Nineteenth‐Century Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).

⁶ E. Donato, ‘The Museum’s Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet’, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post‐Structuralist Criticism, edited by J. V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 223.

⁷ M. B. Norton, In and Around Berlin (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1889), 108–9.

⁸ C. Duncan and A.Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, Art History, 3:4 (1980), 448–69. For a critique of Duncan and Wallach, emphasizing the multiplicity of ideological interests involved in museum displays, see D. J. Sherman, ‘The Bourgeoisie, Cultural Appropriation, and the Art Museum in Nineteenth‐Century France’, Radical History Review, 38 (1987), 38–58.

⁹ T. Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, New Formations, 4 (1988), 73–102. The original text on Panopticism is, of course M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1977).

¹⁰ Walter Benjamin treated the subject in a number of texts, including W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), Chapter: ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, 14–26; and W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1969). See also Benjamin’s approach to Paris and Berlin as sites of flânerie in W. Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), Chapter: ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, 3–60; and his description of the Kaiser Panorama in W. Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1950).

¹¹ For a description of the browser’s experience of Berlin as modern metropolis, see: P. Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

¹² S. Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. D. L. Schneider (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1997), 229–32.

¹³ J. Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 138.

¹⁴ H. G. Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 213.

¹⁵ V. R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin‐de‐Siecle Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 28.

¹⁶ W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), especially 36–7, 55, 61. The two long quotes are by Victor Hugo, writing in 1837, and Benjamin Gastineau, writing in 1861.

¹⁷ G. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), in G. Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, edited by D. N. Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324–39.

¹⁸ D. Sternberger, Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, trans. J. Neugroschel (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977).

¹⁹ A.Weidauer, Berliner Panoramen der Kaiserzeit (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1996), 11, 16.

²⁰ For a list of panorama subjects, see Oettermann, Panorama; M. Osborn, Eugen Bracht (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1909); Weidauer, Panoramen.

²¹ Sternberger, Panorama, 8.

²² Sternberger, Panorama, 53–5, 62.

²³ Benjamin, Arcades, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, 11.

²⁴ Italics in the original. Crary, Suspensions, quote from 29–31.

²⁵ Schwartz, Spectacular, 131.

²⁶ Catalog des Passage Panopticum (Berlin, 1897), 8.

²⁷ Another typical example of the heady, arrested moment: ‘Oppressive Billeting’ in which a ‘dashing officer’, with his arms around a ‘barely resisting waitress’, attempted to kiss her ‘pouting lips’ while her jealous village lover climbed, threateningly, over the tavern fence. Castan’s Panopticum: Catalog (Berlin, 1910).

²⁸ Cit. Benjamin, Arcades, 409–10.

²⁹ By 1900, 60,000 people visited the zoo on any given summer day. D. Hancocks, Animals and Architecture (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1971), 110.

³⁰ Scholz, Berlin, 50.

³¹ Benjamin, ‘Berlin Chronicle’, 24–5.

³² H. Strehlow, ‘Zoos and Aquariums of Berlin’, in New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century, edited by R. J. Hoage and W. A. Deiss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 65–70.

³³ Benjamin, Kindheit, 56.

³⁴ This was the stated intention of the organizers of Alt‐Berlin. ‘Alt‐Berlin’, Mittheilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins, 12 (1895), 73.

³⁵ O. Bie, ‘Berliner Bericht: Die Gewerbe‐Ausstellung. II’, Der Kunstwart, 9:17 (1896), 265–7.

³⁶ To date, the two main published works on the Hohenzollern Museum are T. Kemper, Schloss Monbijou: von der königlichen Residenz zum Hohenzollern Museum (Berlin: Nicolai, 2005); and F. Windt, J. Luh and C. Dilba (eds.), Die Kaiser und die Macht der Medien (Berlin: Jaron, 2005). The former is an excellent, in‐depth art historical account, including an abbreviated history of the museum’s founding, although much more on Paul Seidel than Robert Dohme. The latter is an exhibition catalogue, also more art historical in focus.

³⁷ In 1877 the museum took up seventeen of Monbijou’s rooms; by 1883, that number had risen to twenty‐two rooms.

³⁸ For a history of the Kunstgewerbemuseum, see B. Mundt, Die deutschen Kunstgewerbemuseen im 19. Jahrhundert (München: Prestel, 1974). For the Crown Prince’s historical interests, see M. von Poschinger, Kaiser Friedrich: In neuer quellenmäßiger Darstellung, 3 vols. (Berlin: Richard Schröder, 1899), vol. 1, 183; H. Delbrück, Erinnerungen, Aufsätze und Reden (Berlin: Georg Stilke, 1902), 77–8; William II, My Early Life (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 17–8.

³⁹ O. Lauffer, ‘Das historische Museum: Sein Wesen und Wirken und sein Unterschied von den Kunst‐ und Kunstgewerbe‐Museen’, Museumskunde, 3 (1907), 1–14, 78–99, 179–85, 222–47 (5–6, 89–91); G. Calov, Museen und Sammler des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969), 142–5; B. Mundt, ‘Über einige Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede von kunstgewerblichen und kulturgeschichtlichen Museen’, in Das kunst‐ und kulturgeschichtliche Museum im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by B. Deneke and R. Kahsnitz (Münich: Prestel, 1977), 143.

⁴⁰ See the description of the museum’s contents in P. Brock, Die Chronologische Sammlung der Dänischen Könige im Schlosse Rosenburg: Eine kurzgefasste Übersicht (Copenhagen: Verlagsbureau, 1888).

⁴¹ For the disagreements between Wilhelm I and Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm over the latter’s historicist interests and desire to see a reawakened medieval German Empire, while the former clung to the idea of Prussia as the ideal state, see E. Fehrenbach, Wandlungen des deutschen Kaisergedankens 1871–1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1969), 64–77.

⁴² Enjoying the confidence of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, Dohme Jr. was also appointed, for a short while, to the position of Oberhofmarschall in 1888.

⁴³ Dohme Sr. continued to hold his position in the Hofmarschallamt along with that of Hohenzollern Museum director until 1888, when he retired from the former, but not the latter.

⁴⁴ Dohme recounted his role in founding the Hohenzollern Museum in his autobiography, R. Dohme, Unter fünf preußischen Königen: Lebenserinnerungen, edited by P. Lindenberg (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler, 1901), 158–62.

⁴⁵ Dohme, Königen.

⁴⁶ R. Dohme, Das Hohenzollern‐Museum im königlichen Schlosse Monbijou (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1878), 1–2.

⁴⁷ Dohme’s speech quoted in Staatsbürger‐Zeitung, 13:82a (23 March 1877), n.p. See also Dohme, Hohenzollern‐Museum, 1–2. The ways in which the image of the Prussian monarchy was increasingly ‘humanized’ from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries has been examined by a number of scholars, including M. Wienfort, Monarchie in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1993); R. Schoch, Das Herrscherbild in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts (Münich: Prestel, 1975); J. H. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); H. Kohle, Adolph Menzels Friedrich‐Bilder: Theorie und Praxis der Geschichtsmalerei im Berlin der 1850er Jahre, Münchener Universitätsschriften des Instituts für Kunstgeschichte, 1 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2001).

⁴⁸ It was no coincidence that Dohme’s reach extended back to Friedrich Wilhelm I; in 1863 he had been involved in the restoration of Friedrich Wilhelm I’s famous tobacco round, in a historically faithful simulation, in Schloss Königswusterhausen.

⁴⁹ For an evocative example of the cult of childhood in nineteenth‐century genre pictures, see W. Brückner, Elfenreigen – Hochzeitstraum: Die Öldruckfabrikation 1880–1940 (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1974), 60, 65–77. For the beautiful death, see: P. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. H. Weaver (New York: Oxford UP, 1991 [1981]), Chapter 10: ‘The Age of the Beautiful Death;’ for the beautiful corpse, see Sternberger, Panorama, 160–3.

⁵⁰ Königliche priviligirte Berlinische Zeitung (Vossische Zeitung), Nr. 69 (23 March 23, 1877), n.p.

⁵¹ Staatsbürger‐Zeitung, 13: 82a (23 March, 1877), n.p.

⁵² Norton, Berlin, 118–20.

⁵³ Dohme, Hohenzollern‐Museum, 1–2.

⁵⁴ See the descriptions in Führer durch das Hohenzollern‐Museum im Schlosse Monbijou (Berlin: Hermann Veit, 1883); Führer durch die Sammlung des Hohenzollern‐Museums im Schlosse Monbijou, (Berlin: n.p., 1895).

⁵⁵ See the descriptions in Führer durch das Hohenzollern‐Museum (1883) and Führer durch die Sammlung (1895).

⁵⁶ Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes in the rest of this section are from the following texts: W. Schwarz, ‘Das Luisenzimmer im Schlosse Monbijou zu Berlin’, Die Gartenlaube, 10 (1877), 164–6; G. Hiltl, ‘Das Hohenzollern Museum im Schloße Monbijou zu Berlin’, Daheim, 13:41 (1877), 660–4; Norton, Berlin; Königliche priviligirte Berlinische Zeitung (Vossische Zeitung), 69 (23 March 1877); Berliner Tageblatt, 69, Erstes Beiblatt (23 March 1877); P. Lindenberg, Das Hohenzollern‐Museum in Berlin (Berlin: Hermann Patel, 1888); G. Horn, ‘Eine Wanderung durch das Hohenzollern‐Museum’, Der Bär: Berlinische Blätter für vaterländische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 9–10 (1882–1884), vol. 9: 389–92, 411–5, 472–3, 542–4, 578–82; vol. 10: pp. 38–40, 66–8, 139–41.

⁵⁷ K. Baedeker, Berlin, Potsdam und Umgebungen (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1878), 64; K. Baedeker, Berlin nebst Potsdam und Umgebungen (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1880), 62–3. Baedeker’s kept this basic description until 1905. Baedeker’s interest in the museum’s cultural–historial potential was part of its broader, bildungsbürgerliche goal of teaching its readers about Germany’s cultural heritage. See Koshar, Travel, 46–7.

⁵⁸ In doing so, the Hohenzollern Museum was imitating, and trying to appropriate, an intimate royal iconography that had been produced by independent entrepreneurs since the late eighteenth century, and which had depicted Queen Luise in her domestic circle and Frederick the Great as a ‘man of the people.’ These images had as often as not been used for purposes of protest against the Hohenzollern monarchy, as when depictions of Frederick as an accessible ‘person’ were used to criticize Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s pretensions to rule by the divine right of kings. Among several excellent studies on the topic, see the overview in Kohle, Menzels.

⁵⁹ Führer durch die Sammlung (1895).

⁶⁰ P. Seidel, ‘Veränderungen und neue Erwerbungen im Hohenzollern‐Museum’, Hohenzollern Jahrbuch, 3 (1899), 260. For a description of the objects, see Kemper, Monbijou, 106–7, 234–46.

⁶¹ G. Voss, ‘Hohenzollernmuseum’, Mittheilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins, 20 (1903), 125.

⁶² ‘Museen und Sammlungen’, Der Sammler, 12 (1890), 103.

⁶³ R. G., ‘Spielsachen der Königin Luise und Kaiser Wilhelms I im Hohenzollern‐Museum’, Der Bär, 19 (1892–1893), 252, images on 249.

⁶⁴ H. Brendicke, ‘Bericht über die Sitzungen des Vereins’, Mittheilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins, 19 (1902), 70–5.

⁶⁵ J. B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), esp.: 4, 208–10.

⁶⁶ A. Rosenberg, ‘Die akademische Kunstausstellung in Berlin’, Die Grenzboten 37:4 (1878), 24.

⁶⁷ ‘Am Familientisch’, Daheim 33:25 (1897), 403–4.

⁶⁸ E. Müller, ‘Kaiser Wilhlem I und die Zahl 3’, Mittheilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins, 14 (1897), 57.

⁶⁹ ‘Das Nationaldenkmal Kaiser Wilhelms I. in Berlin’, Die Grenzboten, 56:2 (1897), 86–8.

⁷⁰ M. Kohlrausch, Der Monarch im Skandal: Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005).