Free Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark

still legitimate in an era of ‘artistic freedom’. Even within the ministry itself, there were doubts about the wisdom of the interior minister’s heavy-handed approach. 17
    A gap opened up between the official culture of the court and the experimentation and anti-traditionalism of an increasingly fragmented cultural sphere. It can be seen, for example, in the divergence of courtly and popular dance cultures. Around the turn of the century, new North American and Argentinian steps flooded into the dance locales of the larger cities. The fashionable shelf life of individual styles grew shorter and shorter as the
jeunesse dorée
welcomed the Cakewalk, the Two-Step, the Bunny Hug, the Judy Walk, the Turkey and the Grizzly Bear. But while an increasingly broad public consumed these transatlantic imports, the court of William II saw a revival of pomp and old-world ceremony. All court balls were organized so as not to upstage members of the royal family: ‘if a princess is participating in the dance,’ the journal
Der Bazar
noted in 1900, ‘only two other pairs apart from the one in which the princess finds herself may dance at the same time.’ William II explicitly forbade members of the armed forces to perform the new steps in public: ‘The Gentlemen of the Army and the Navy are hereby requested to dance neither Tango nor One-Step or Two-Step in uniform, and to avoid families in which these dances are performed.’ 18
    The same widening cultural gap could be seen in architecture and the visual arts. Consider, for example, the contrast between the heavy, neo-baroque megalomania of the new Berlin Cathedral, completed in 1905 after ten years of construction works, and the graceful, austere proto-modernism of the new architects – such as Alfred Messel, Hans Poelzig and Peter Behrens, among others – whose works between 1896 and 1912 were emphatic rejections of the eclectic ‘historical style’ favoured by official Prussia. 19 The arbiters of public taste – from Emperor William II to the rectors and professors of the state-funded academies – held that art should edify by drawing its subject matter from medievallegend, mythology or stirring historical episodes, while remaining true to the eternal canons of the ancients. But in 1892 there was bitter controversy in Berlin over an exhibition staged by eleven artists who wanted to free themselves from the strictures of the official salon. The ‘bleak and wild naturalism’ (thus the words of one outraged critic) of Max Liebermann, Walter Leistikow and their associates ran directly against the grain of officially sanctioned art practice. By 1898, the rebellion had broadened and diversified into the ‘Berlin Secession’, whose first exhibition, held in 1898, showcased the wide range of styles and perspectives taking shape within the non-official art world and was a huge public success.
    What was interesting about the Secessionists was not simply their oppositional relationship to the prevailing cultural authorities, but the specifically Prussian and local content of much of their work. Walter Leistikow, who hailed from Bromberg in West Prussia, was well known for his haunting images of the Mark Brandenburg: trees brooding in shadow beside lakes, flat landscapes pocked with still, luminous water. His painting
Der Grunewaldsee
, a dark, atmospheric view of a lake on the leafy south-western outskirts of Berlin, was rejected for exhibition by the official Berlin Salon in 1898 – indeed, it was the controversy over this decision that prompted the Secessionists to create their own forum in the following year. Leistikow’s paintings and etchings disturbed contemporary sensibilities in part because they took possession of the Brandenburg landscape in the name of a new and potentially subversive sensibility. William II, who loathed Leistikow’s work, registered this sense of displacement when he complained that the artist had ‘ruined the entire Grunewald’ for him (‘
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