Notes
To Introduction
- See, in particular, Joseph Imorde, Michelangelo Deutsch! (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009).
To Main Article
- See Paul Ziche, “‘Ästhetik von unten' von oben. Experimentelle Ästhetik von Gustav Theodor Fechner bis Oswald Külpe,” in Ästhetik von unten. Empirie und ästhetisches Wissen, ed. Marie Guthmüller and Wolfgang Klein (Tübingen: Francke, 2006), 325–50.
- Oskar Bie, “Ästhetische Kultur,” in Reise um die Kunst (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1910), 1–25, 5: “Art education has become a watchword. The art-less classes have been virtually reared on art and workers have been copiously inoculated with this remedy through popular theater and suburban exhibitions and lectures for the layman. Not even the children have been left in peace: their beloved picture books of old have been replaced by works of art and their own initial daubs have been acclaimed as revelations; attempts have been made to eradicate the non-graphic from their lessons and even children's concerts have been instituted.” In his Schauen und Glauben (Heidelberg: Carl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1903), 8, Henry Thode adopts a critical, questioning stance: “Decent men acting on idealistic inclinations conceive of Volkskunst as art made for the people: aesthetic education is thought to endow the poorer, working classes with a higher level of culture and thus a greater enjoyment of life. Without doubt a philanthropic and in itself commendable aim, provided really good, genuine art is conferred on the farmstead, the workers' hostel, the schoolroom. Does this happen in practice? Do we know, I wish to ask in passing, what is desirable and necessary for these classes? Is there not a danger here of us foisting our own love of artistic luxury on the simple domesticity of these people?”
- Richard Muther, “Ästhetische Cultur,” in Studien und Kritiken. Band II: 1901 (Vienna: Wiener Verlag, 1901), 1–23, 15.
- For example in Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie [1908], ed. Helga Grebing (Munich: Fink, 2007), 73 and 75.
- Theodor Lipps, “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß,” Die Zukunft 54 (1906): 100–14, 100. Republished in Theodor Lipps, “Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß,” in Aesthetik, ed. Emil Utiz (Berlin: Pan, 1924), 152–67, 152. See also Theodor Lipps, “Ästhetik,” in Systematische Philosophie von W. Dilthey, A. Riehl, W. Wundt, W. Ostwald, H. Ebbinghaus, R. Eucken, Fr. Paulsen, W. Münch, Th. Lipps, ed. Paul Hinneberg (Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1907), 349–88, 369. Criticism in August Döring, “Über Einfühlung,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 7, no 4 (1912): 568–77, 575–7.
- Richard Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst (Cologne: Dumont-Schauberg, 1907), 141: “For empathy theory, however, the explanation of works of art lies in speaking of every line, every luminosity, every space and every object as if an entire person were contained therein. The lines begin to gambol and leap and the shadows and lights to shun or caress one another; the surfaces have their life, and cozy interiors start to lose their reality. Thus empathy theory becomes the justification for art interpretation of the kind that wants not to explain, but rather to translate art into vibrant effects, with the result that the entire work dissolves into strong but sporadic impressions. It is the aesthetic of lyricism.”
- Edgar Zilsel, Die Geniereligion. Ein kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideal, mit einer historischen Begründung, ed. Johann Dvořak (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 95.
- Moritz Geiger, “Über das Wesen und die Bedeutung der Einfühlung,” in Bericht über den IV Kongreß für experimentelle Psychologie in Innsbruck vom 19.–22. April 1910, ed. F. Schumann (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), 29–73, 61.
- A national comparison of traveling habits is provided by an author known by the initials M. O., “Vom Reisen,” in Neue Deutsche Rundschau 13, no 8 (1902): 889–91, 891: “Traveling does not mean the same thing to the Frenchman and the Englishman that it means to us. For the Frenchman, his own world in all its splendor, diversity, and greatness suffices. His needs are satisfied by a period of recuperation in the countryside or by the sea. The Englishman travels through countries and across oceans in a matter-of-fact way. He collects sights mentally, registers them as additions to his capital and remains just as he was before. We Germans immerse ourselves in the impressions made on us by this rich universe. We grow and develop in the torrent of its magnificence. We dream our way into the souls of foreign lands and people, and even of unfamiliar animals and plants. We seek to submerge ourselves in the waters of creation and decay that everywhere roar and once we have grasped the art of traveling, even a journey from Berlin to Potsdam can be an experience, perhaps an even greater one than a dilettante's expedition to India and Japan.”
- Georg Dehio, “Deutsche Kunstgeschichte und deutsche Geschichte,” in Historische Zeitschrift 100 (1908): 473–85, 475.
- Rudolf Borchardt drew attention to the importance to German art history of the “mediatization” of Italy as early as 1927: “The first history of art lecturer at a German university was not a contemporary of the Brothers Grimm but Wilhelm Grimm's son Herman; before an overview of the subject could gradually be gained, travel needed to become generalized and a new technique of reproduction—photography—invented and developed.” (Rudolf Borchardt, “Mittelalterliche Kunstwissenschaft. Arnault Daniel und Giovanni Pisano als Schöpfer der modernen Seelenform Europas. Rede gehalten in der Aula der Universität Zürich am 2. März 1927,” Neue Schweizer Rundschau 21, no 8 [1928]: 564–80, 567.)
- Hermann Hesse, Italien. Schilderungen, Tagebücher, Gedichte, Aufsätze, Buchbesprechungen und Erzählungen, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 60–156 (”Reisetagebuch 1901“), 98 (Saturday April 13, 1901).
- The sum was 200 marks. See Karl Jaspers, Italienbriefe 1902, ed. Suzanne Kirkbright (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006), 51–3 (Karl Wilhelm Jaspers to Karl Jaspers, Oldenburg, February 25, 1902), 52.
- Ibid., 85–7 (Karl Jaspers to his parents, Rome, March 25, 1902), 86: “I have already visited photographic shops a number of times and have purchased approximately 180 pictures, covering antique statues and busts, medieval mosaics and churches, and pictures from the early Renaissance to the end of the Renaissance, in particular, as I have already reported, those of Michelangelo.”
- Ibid., 81–841 (Karl Jaspers to his parents, Rome, March 25, 1902), 82: “The landscape of the Campagna has made a powerful impression on me. It is perhaps as unique as Rome with all its treasures. The mood it evokes strikes me again as being of that sublime resignation one meets in Schopenhauer. It is remarkable that I believe myself to feel this time and again in Rome generally, in the Sistine Chapel and in the Campagna, and it could be regarded as highly subjective; nevertheless I believe I am not mistaken. […] I have already purchased numerous photographs. To select the most suitable is no easy task, given the enormous choice on offer. I have bought many of the Sistine Chapel in particular.” See, from twenty years later, Joseph Maria Baernreither, Römisches Tagebuch (Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1929), 64–8 (Rome, March 10, 1925), 64f.: “I made use of the good light to visit the Sistine Chapel. Baron Pastor has written a small but highly enlightening book on this chapel, the stanze and the loggias, which most importantly sheds light on how these artworks originated and on their religious associations. He is a great and quite uninhibited admirer of Michelangelo. Our understanding of the frescoes, which time has admittedly treated very badly, is assisted by photographic reproductions both large and small, colored or in the natural color of photographs, and also available in the form of numerous detailed views.” See also the thoughts of Hans Weigert (Die heutigen Aufgaben der Kunstwissenschaft [Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1935], 11), who believed that the photographic reproduction of masterpieces carried the disenchanting of the world a step further, namely into the disenchanting of art.
- Max Dvořak, “Die Denkmäler der deutschen Kunst. Vortrag gehalten an dem zu Ehren des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft veranstalteten Festabend der Gesellschaft der Kunstfreunde in Wien,” in Vom deutschen Verein für Kunstwissenschaft (Berlin: Reimer, 1913), 1–7, 6. Naturally, in this instance, with negative connotations.
- See, for example, Ferdinand Avenarius, “Volks- und Gipfelkunst,” Der Kunstwart 12, no 1 (October 1898), 2–4, 3: “The artist of the highest order is a conqueror: from some foothill in the immense empire of humanity, in the land of the word or of sound, of color or plastic form, he sets out for the infinite, and where the eyes of the many are occluded by swirling fog, he peers, he recognizes, and he reveals to those following closest behind what he has discovered, thereby acquiring it for their minds too. The poet who teaches others to feel or see an aspect of human or natural life anew, the composer who, with his music, touches us in new depths of the soul, the painter who opens our eyes and our spirits, teaching us to see as we have never seen before, all these are artists of the highest order, pioneers of our emotions, mentors of our souls, geniuses. The highest art conquers; art for the people colonizes.”
- Kurt Breysig, Persönlichkeit und Entwicklung (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1925), 228f.: “Art has seen sufficient examples of the debasing of a master legacy for the day-to-day use of a school, not to mention the humblest possible form to which photography and halftone engraving demean the creations of the greatest artists to suit the taste of the masses.”
- Samuel Lublinski, “Das Publikum,” in idem., Der Ausgang der Moderne. Ein Buch der Opposition (Dresden: Carl Reissner, 1909), 185–216, 211f.: “Originally, of course, more of the virtue of art guardianship was in evidence, for at the outset the journal contented itself with simply educating young people in art. The editor, Ferdinand Avenarius, displayed an outstanding gift for teaching. He knew how to open people's eyes in such a way that they learned to see and feel the colors and tones, the plastic lines of sculptures, but he also went further, directing viewers to the works' spiritual content.”
- See Karl Ulrich Syndram, Kulturpublizistik und nationales Selbstverständnis. Untersuchungen zur Kunst- und Kulturpolitik in den Rundschauzeitschriften des Deutschen Kaiserreichs (1871–1914) (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1989), 87f.
- A list of recommended inexpensive reproductions in Ferdinand Avenarius, “Kunstblätter und Bildwerke,” in Der Kunstwart 16, no 4 (November 1902): 218–28, 221–8. See also Leopold Julius Klotz, “Über Wandschmuck,” in Die Stadwohnung. Wie man sie sich praktisch, schön und preiswert einrichtet und gut erhält. Ein praktischer Ratgeber für alle, die sich in der Großstadt behaglich einrichten wollen, ed. Joseph August Lux and Max Warnatsch (Charlottenburg: Schillerbuchhandlung Max Teschner, 1910), 197–9, 197f.
- “Zu den Michelangelo-Mappen des Kunstwarts,” in Michelangelos Hauptbilder der Sixtinadecke, from the Michelangelo portfolios published by Der Kunstwart (Munich: Georg D.W. Callwey, date not known), accompanying text on the last page of the supplement.
- See Meier Spanier, “Einleitung,” in idem., Zur Kunst. Ausgewählte Stücke moderner Prosa zur Kunstbetrachtung und zum Kunstgenuß. Mit Einleitung. Anmerkungen und Bilderanhang (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1905), v–x, vii.
- Wilhelm Wyl (Wilhelm Ritter von Wymetal), Franz von Lenbach, Gespräche und Erinnerungen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1904), 135.
- Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Du und die Kunst. Eine Einführung in Kunstbetrachtung und Kunstgeschichte [1938] (Berlin: Druckhaus Tempelhof, 1948), 19f.
- Ferdinand Avenarius, “Unsere Sache,” Der Kunstwart 9, no 1 (October 1895), 1–3, 1f. See Edgar Herrenbrück, Literaturverständnis im wilhelminischen Bürgertum. Eine Untersuchung konservativer Zeitschriften zwischen 1900 und 1914 (Göttingen: publisher not known, 1970), 12.
- Johannes Richter, Die Entwicklung des kunsterzieherischen Gedankens als Kulturproblem der Gegenwart nach Hauptgesichtspunkten dargestellt, dissertation, University of Leipzig, 1909 (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1909), 120f.
- “Zu den Michelangelo-Mappen des Kunstwarts,” as detailed above: “For him whose eyes have been opened to the visual arts, the phenomenon that is Michelangelo represents the greatest experience these arts can bestow. Whereas the influence of this great spirit on his contemporaries was as immediate as an earthquake, we of today need to acquire this experience. I speak of experiencing, not of 'understanding,' for it is possible to know every fact and circumstance relating to Michelangelo's artistic creation, to understand all this in an art-historical sense, without feeling the creativity of this soul reverberating even quietly within oneself. Only he who feels it, and only to the extent that he feels it, is able to share in the forces that have created such works. But until today no nation in the world has produced even a single collection of Michelangelo reproductions capable of enabling the educated man to immerse himself, for a reasonable price, in his art. Striving for completeness is not the way to achieve this. This might serve the needs of the art scholar, ambitious to reproduce and catalog the entire output of an artist even if this means mechanically reproducing, among the thousand tiny images, the important and the unimportant alike. Similarly, a small selection serves little purpose in the case of the Richest of the Rich, the sheer abundance of whose outpourings allows one to truly feel the nature of the forces at work here. Small series of pictures after Michelangelo are, as a makeshift, better than nothing. But our culture needs something more, a comprehensive work covering at least Michelangelo the sculptor and Michelangelo the painter, a work that deliberately sets aside all academic intentions in order to concentrate on serving the artistic enjoyment of Michelangelo's work, in other words reliving the experience of his creative self.”
- Johannes Volkelt, Das ästhetische Bewusstsein. Prinzipienfragen der Ästhetik (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1920), 12. By contrast (for example) Konrad Fiedler, Vom Wesen der Kunst. Auswahl aus seinen Schriften, ed. Hans Eckstein (Munich: Piper, 1942), 67: “[…] he who finds a work of art good simply because it flatters his own aesthetic sensibility does not understand the artwork and knows nothing of the nature of art.”
- Johannes Volkelt, Ästhetische Zeitfragen. Vorträge (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1895), 195–222 (”Sechster Vortrag: Die gegenwärtigen Aufgaben der Ästhetik”), 203.
- Ibid., 77–109 (”Dritter Vortrag: Die Kunst als Schöpferin einer zweiten Welt”), 108: “Imagination is a redeeming force. To want to sink one's teeth into the drabness of real existence at any price and time and to shun the magical arts of the imagination along with the black arts of the lie is but an unhealthy, fanatical, and moreover Philistine quest for the truth.”
- Ibid., 108, see also 97: “The arousal of our emotional life simultaneously brings relief from our burden. When contemplating works of art we feel ourselves to be highly vibrant, emotional individuals but at the same time these movements of the emotions are of an easy, free, and quiet character. The individual ‘I’ with its lead weight, fetters, and barbs is eradicated, allowing us to live, to revel in the less inhibited, clearer, more impersonal sphere of the General-Human […] Accordingly—we say today—both things are present during our aesthetic contemplation. We are present there as intensely and deeply moved human beings, but without the unsettling and oppressive aspects entailed by the emotions and passions of real life. Our feeling and thinking is inspirited, it moves in a freer orbit; the Sunday of the soul has dawned.”
- Ibid., 107f.: “And how salutary it is that mankind should be blessed with this gift! It bestows a sense of freedom from things, from our possessions, a sense of hovering above them. We believe ourselves capable of escaping our bondage to them. And how profitable is this feeling, especially in view of the prodigious multitude of pain, squalor, and triviality! The cultivation of the imagination is conducive to our health. It allows us to breathe more freely and more happily, and to carry the burden of our existence more lightly.”
- Ibid., 105: “To see how the world is reflected in eminent intellects, how singularly they have pondered and cogitated on mankind and the way of the world is one of the most gratifying experiences in life. I count those hours spent communing with great and original individuals, by immersing ourselves in their works and making ourselves at home in their worlds of feeling, belief, and thought as some of the most solemn and rewarding of all times. In doing so we become more aware than by any other means of the multifarious magnificence and richness of revelation of the world of the mind.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fürs Leben,” [1874] in Nietzsches Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, part 3, vol. 1, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972), 239–330, 255.
- Richard Muther, “Arnold Böcklin, zum 70. Geburtstag,” in idem., Studien und Kritiken, vol. I: 1900 (Vienna: Wiener Verlag, 1901), 140–57, 140f.: “Thus art of all times came to be given its due and the great works of art apprehended as expressions of great personalities, from whose minds they gushed with elemental, natural force. The cult of personality replaced aesthetic abstraction. Rembrandt and disorderliness ousted Raphael. The brusquer and more idiosyncratic an artist revealed his personality to be, the dearer he was to us. Devoted communities gathered around Botticelli, Carlo Crivelli, and Grünewald.”
- Zilsel, Die Geniereligion, 151.
- Theodor A. Meyer, “Die Persönlichkeit des Künstlers im Kunstwerk und ihre ästhetische Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 9, no 1 (1914): 47–65, 54. The idols of youth are, according to Max Weber, “personality” and “experience,” see Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf” [1919] in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922), 524–55, 533.
- Adolf Lasson, “Stilvoll. Eine Studie,” Preußische Jahrbücher 66 (1890): 315–44, 323f. See, for example, Karl von Hase, Erinnerungen an Italien in Briefen an die künftige Geliebte (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1891), 186: “I therefore know only one way of discussing works of art which is worth the effort, namely such a one whereby, when confronted with the work or an exact copy of it, the same thing develops in the soul of the observer that occurred in the artist himself when he designed and executed his work, or in the relationship of the individual to the whole, in other words in an art-historical respect, which explains the position of the artist and his work with respect to the artistic worlds that preceded and succeeded him.” Also Max Sauerlandt, Werkformen deutscher Kunst (Königstein im Taunus: Karl Robert Langewiesche, 1926), 10: “Precisely because the whole world so stubbornly resists this realization, it cannot be said often or clearly enough that reflecting on the artistic thinking of the artist, even where this is fully accomplished within the subconscious of resonating feeling, is a precondition for artistic enjoyment.” By contrast, see Max Scheler, “Vorbilder und Führer,” in Schriften aus dem Nachlass, vol. 1: Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre, ed. Maria Scheler (Berlin: Francke, 1957), 255–344 (”Der Künstler—ein Schöpfer”), 330: “The work of art does not express a feeling or opinion of the artist. It is a visible, palpable creation and the less it recalls the life of the artist and the more it has freed itself from the umbilical cord of its making and appears as a work of God, the higher it stands.”
- Volkelt, Ästhetische Zeitfragen, 77–109 (”Dritter Vortrag. Die Kunst als Schöpferin einer zweiten Welt”), 88f.
- Karl Paul Hasse, Die Italienische Renaissance. Ein Grundriß der Geschichte ihrer Kultur (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1915), 182: “All attempts by those who come later to empathize with, and describe the contest between, the forces that preside over the inner life of this unique individual [Michelangelo] will fall short of their aim. Only those who experience inner struggles of their own and undergo conflicts of life akin to those of a Michelangelo might justifiably, provided they are endowed with sufficient mental ability, hope to come close to the task.”
- Margarethe Hausenberg, Matthias Grünewald im Wandel der deutschen Kunstanschauung (Leipzig: J.J. Weber, 1927), 4.
- Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst, 140f.
- Zilsel, Die Geniereligion, 95.
- Otto Pächt, “Das Ende der Abbildtheorie,” Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur, nos 3–4 (1930/32): 1–9, 9, containing a reference to Benedetto Croce, Zur Theorie und Kritik der Geschichte der bildenden Kunst, translated by Julius Schlosser (Augsburg: Filser, 1926), 38. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Italien und das deutsche Formgefühl” [1920/21] in idem., Gedanken zur Kunstgeschichte. Gedrucktes und Ungedrucktes (Basel: Benno Schabe & Co., 1941), 119–26, 125: “There seems to be no way around it: in revering Italian values, the German renounces his god and commits idolatry. But what if we were not seeing Italy as an ‘Italian’ sees it? If we were taking something out of Italian art that we ourselves had put into it in the first place? It is clear that on the basis of the background of the Nordic sense of form, this southern beauty would have a completely new impact.”
- Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben und Kunst, 140f. See Döring, “Über Einfühlung” (note 5), 570: “What the expression ‘empathy’ is supposed, in its ‘harmless’ sense, to denote is a long-familiar group of psychological processes. These are the procedures which, in the form of 'aesthetic contemplation,' perform the aesthetic task that was used in all earnest by primitive man to explain every natural phenomenon: imbuing with life, anthropomorphization, personalization. In all innocence, primitive man, with his animistic way of thinking, explained every occurrence by analogy with the exercising of the human will.”
- Richard Hamann, Ästhetik (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1919), 51.
- Statement reported in Michael Stettler, Über Heinrich Wölfflin (Bern: Hans Huber, 1970), 14: “When one has experienced how difficult it is to be correctly understood, even to a limited extent, by contemporaries and initiates, there is something ludicrous about the idea that the Dutchman Rembrandt, from the seventeenth century, could be interpreted by Heinrich Wölfflin of Winterthur, resident in Waldhof. Furthermore, I also see it as unpleasant ingratiation and misplaced collegiality when one of us tries to get close to such a great. I will never write about people, only about objective issues. This is why I find the natural sciences so appealing.”
- Julius von Schlosser, “Zur Einführung,” in Croce, Zur Theorie und Kritik der Geschichte der bildenden Kunst, 1f., 2.
- To quote a word used by Nietzsche. Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fürs Leben,” 239–330, 313.
- Julius von Schlosser, Künstlerprobleme der Frührenaissance, no III, part V: Lorenzo Ghiberti (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1934), 8.
- Julius von Schlosser, “Stilgeschichte” und “Sprachgeschichte” der bildenden Kunst. Ein Rückblick (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie für Wissenschaften, 1935), 30f.
- Ibid., 16 (the “words of the Abbé from Goethe's Wanderjahre”): ”How difficult it is, though apparently so natural, to look at nature or a splendid painting simply for itself, to listen to a song for the sake of the singing, to admire the actor in the actor, or to take pleasure in a building for the sake of its own harmony and durability. Now, by contrast, people can be seen treating unquestionable works of art as if they were lumps of soft clay. The shaped marble is expected to refashion itself, the solidly constructed building to expand or contract, a painting to instruct, and a play to improve, in accordance with their inclinations, opinions, and fancies, and everything is to become everything else. The reason being, in fact, that most people are themselves formless, that they are incapable of modeling themselves from their being, so that all may become free and loose stuff of which they too are a part. They reduce everything in the end to so-called effect. Everything is to be relative and thus indeed becomes relative, other than nonsense, or vulgarity, which then shall reign supreme.”
- Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 72f.
- Schlosser, “Stilgeschichte” und “Sprachgeschichte” der bildenden Kunst, 5.
- Friedrich Gundolf, “Vorbilder,” Jahrbuch für die geistige Bewegung 3 (1912), 1–20, 5 and 8f.
- Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, vol. 2: Von Passavant bis Justi (Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1921), 213.
- Henry Thode, Kunst, Religion und Kultur. Ansprache an die Heidelberger Studentenschaft gehalten bei der anlässlich seiner Ablehnung des Rufes an die Berliner Universität veranstalteten Feier (Heidelberg: Carl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1901), 5: “What, then, is this Germanness, which has at last assumed the outward form of political unity, making us a large, indeed a mighty people? And wherein lies the power of its essence? It is nothing other than that aptitude, that need to internalize, which no other nation possesses to the same degree. It is that compulsion and ability to disregard all outward appearance in favor of what is recognized as the true nature found within; it is that sincere striving for profundity. Thus can it not be otherwise than that our mission stands clear and bright before us: to immerse ourselves, far removed from mere appearances, in the depths!”
- Heinrich Wölfflin, Italien und das deutsche Formgefühl (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1931), 206: “In point of fact, reverent of nature though the German may be, it is also in his blood to go beyond the tangibly natural. He develops notions of beauty which no longer coincide with any reality.” And earlier in Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1915), 113: “Italy has always possessed a stronger feel for the superficial than the Germanic north, in whose blood it is to delve around in the depths.”
- Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1931), II, 513f. See Klaus von See, “Das ‘Nordische’ in der deutschen Wissenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 15, no 2 (1983), 8–38, 25. See also Hans Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische. Ein Kapitel deutscher Ideologie (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1962), 148–90.
- Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, “Die Überschätzung französischer Kunst in Deutschland,” Der Kunstwart 18, no 22 (August 1905), 501–8, 501: “To be German is to be universal. No people has, since time immemorial, gone further in escaping itself, breaking through the bounds of self and inner being, venturing into the outside, alien world and incorporating into its own ambit all the patterns of living and intellectual and artistic milieux it has come into contact with there than ours. It is the Faustian in us that does not content itself with humanity but desires the world as well. And it is no doubt to the Faustian, that eternal urge to raise the individual to the universal, that we owe our richness and beauty as a people. Our entire history, heroic to the point of adventurousness, regardless of whether we consider it from its political or its intellectual side, derives from this.”
- Rudolf Kautzsch, Der Begriff der Entwicklung in der Kunstgeschichte. Rede zur Kaisergeburtstagfeier am 27. Januar 1917 (Frankfurt am Main: Werner und Winter, 1917), 22. Max Nordau, “Die gesellschaftliche Aufgabe der Kunst,” in idem., Von Kunst und Künstlern. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte (Leipzig: B. Elischer Nachfolger, date not known), 1–26, 25: “Like the art patrons of yesteryear, the people, turned art sponsor, are only interested in art for their own sake. The source of the emotions they experience in art are the emotions they experience in their own lives. What they look for in a work of art is to find themselves reflected there, only, like a priest or king in days of yore, magnified and ennobled.”
- Henry Thode, Das Wesen der deutschen bildenden Kunst (Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1918), 16.
- Joseph August Lux, Deutschland als Welterzieher. Ein Buch über deutsche Charakterkultur (Stuttgart/Berlin/Leipzig: Union Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1915), 93.
- Thode, Das Wesen der deutschen bildenden Kunst, 17.
- Ibid.
- Eduard Wechßler, Esprit und Geist. Versuch einer Wesenskunde des Deutschen und des Franzosen (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1927), 51.
- Ibid., 52. See also 54: “It is not by chance that this painting [German Expressionism, J.I.], appreciated by few today, emerged at the same time as the first critical essays by the science of phenomenology. Only here does a meticulous description of the intrinsic replace the mere concept, which never quite does justice to the intellectual essences. Edmund Husserl and his students undertook to explain the meaning of this method of thinking and representation in all its novelty: since 1913 the Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie has provided a summary of their endeavors. But the whole movement is too deeply grounded within the development of German thinking for it not also to have asserted itself outside this philosophical school. Rudolf Otto's book on the concept of the holy and Richard Hamann's phenomenological explanation of aesthetics, along with other works both old and new, reveal a striving to fathom the depth of mental phenomena in a manner in keeping with the German way of thinking.”
- Jens Petersen, “Das deutsche politische Italienbild in der Zeit der nationalen Einigung,” in Imagini a confronto. Italia e Germania. Deutsche Italienbilder und Italienische Deutschlandbilder, ed. Angelo Ara (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), 169–204, 202. Relating here to Friedrich Theodor Vischer's achievements in the field of projection. See Weigert, Die heutigen Aufgaben der Kunstwissenschaft, 61: “The Germanic race, however, wants to 'reach out into the world.' As a combative race, it needs an enemy, and if that enemy does not enter its territory, it seeks it out. This is as true of intellectual combat as it is of armed combat.”