ARCHITECTURE IN THE MUSEUM:

DISPLACEMENT, RECONSTRUCTION AND REPRODUCTION

OF THE MONUMENTS OF ANTIQUITY IN BERLIN’S PERGAMON MUSEUM

Volume I

S. M. Can Bilsel

A DISSERTATION

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY

OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE

OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE

BY THE SCHOOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

NOVEMBER 15, 2003

UMI Number: 3107866

2003 by

Bilsel, S. M. Can

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3107866

2004 ProQuest Information and Learning Company.

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iii

Abstract

This dissertation is a study in the formation of modern knowledge about the architecture

of antiquity. Its main concern is to address an epistemic problem by exploring the

relationship between archaeology—the scholarly practice of excavating the past—and

the reconstruction and display of “monuments” of antiquity in the museum—the process

through which the history of art and culture becomes intelligible to modern viewers.

Exploring the framing of archaeological fragments by modern visions, I examine the

Pergamon Museum, a highly contested and, yet, immensely popular “museum of ancient

architecture” in Berlin, and three of its chief exhibits, the Great Altar of Pergamon, the

Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.

The first part of the dissertation, “Architecture in the Museum,” investigates the

architectural exhibits of the Pergamon Museum through the 20

century theories of

museology and historic preservation. Part 2, “The Architecture of an Imperial Museum

in Berlin,” studies how German imperialist discourse on art and “Kultur” was translated

into the actual ordering of works of art and cultural contexts in Alfred Messel’s project

of the Royal Prussian Museum of 1907 (today’s Pergamon Museum). In Part 3, “The

Altar and its Frames,” I study the history of the museum displays and reconstructions of

the Great Altar of Pergamon, from Carl Humann’s excavations of the castle of Bergama

in 1878 to 1930 when the Pergamon Museum was opened to the public. The final part of

the dissertation focuses on Walter Andrae’s curious reproduction of “Babylonian

architecture” in the museum’s South Wing, reframing the products of an archaic industry

as unique works of art.

Focusing on the history of the construction of the Pergamon Museum, I expose the

ideological underpinnings of the process that transformed fragmentary archaeological

finds into complete museum-objects. I argue that, even though initially hypothetical, the

reconstituted “monuments” gained autonomy from the discursive field in which they had

found their form and, through the assumption of aesthetic distance and modern

spectatorship, have come to replace the lost antique originals instead of merely

representing them.

Table of Contents

Volume I

Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………... iii

List of Illustrations ……………………………………………………………….… vii

Acknowledgements ..……………………………………………………………….. xvi

Part 1. Architecture in the Museum: Definitions and Problems

1. 1. Architectonic Restitution: Historical Monument versus Historical Décor ……. 2

1. 2. Architecture in the Museum: Viewing the Fragment and the Whole ……… 17

1. 3. Monuments in “Exile”: On the Location and Dislocation of Architecture …24

1. 4. On the Historical Method ...…………………………………………………31

Part 2. The Architecture of an Imperial Museum in Berlin: Art and Kultur

2. 1. Alfred Messel’s Project for the Royal Prussian Museum, c. 1907 ……...… 39

2. 2. On the Vocation of the Museum: Bildung versus Kultur …………….….… 60

2.3. Art versus Ethnology: Imperial Archaeology and Taxonomies of Culture ... 85

2. 4. The “Style-Room”: Between the Original Setting and the Bourgeois Intérieur 97

Part 3. The Altar and Its Frames: Reconstructing Pergamon

3. 1. Space and Relief in the Pergamon Room ……………………..……….… 106

3. 2. Antique Fragments and Modern Visions ………………………………… 118

3. 3. The Problem of Museum Reconstruction ………………………………… 135

3. 4. On the Museum’s Object: a Model, a Décor and a Restored Monument … 141

3. 5. The Museum of Ancient Architecture: Monuments for Mass-Spectacle … 151

Part 4. Architectural Reproduction: Reconstructing Babylon

4. 1. The Lion of Babylon in the Age of the Work of Art ………………………169

4. 2. Transgressing Bilderverbot: the Babel-Bible Controversy ………….…… 180

4. 3. Romantic Reconstruction: in Search of “Organic” Essence …….……….. 188

4. 4. Symbol, Ornament, Art: Figures of the Counter-Enlightenment ………… 199

Conclusion. On the Modern Cult of Authenticity ………………………….……… 209

Selected Bibliography …………………………………………………………….. 220

Volume II

Illustrations

Illustrations for Part 1 …………………………………………………………. 259

Illustrations for Part 2 …………………………………………………………. 266

Illustrations for Part 3 …………………………………………………………. 295

Illustrations for Part 4 …………………………………………………………. 357

vii

List of Illustrations

Illustrations for Part 1

Fig. 1.1

The reconstruction of the West Façade of Great Altar of Pergamon,

completed in 1929, the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 1.2

Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (6

to 5

century B.C.), completed in 1930, Vorderasiatisches (Near Eastern)

Museum (in the Pergamon Museum), Berlin.

Fig. 1.3

Theodor Wiegand, the reconstruction of the Market Gate of Miletus (c.

160 A.D.), c. 1926-1929, the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 1.4

Reconstruction of the Market Gate of Miletus (c. 160 A.D.), c. 1926-

1929, Berlin.

Fig. 1.5

Detail From the Photograph of the Reconstruction of the Market Gate of

Miletus, c. 1926.

Fig. 1.6

“Zeus in Exile” from the cover of Sefa Tas-kIn’s book Sürgündeki Zeus:

Bergamadan Berlin’e, Berlin’den Bergama’ya).

viii

Illustrations for Part 2

Fig. 2.1

Perspective drawing, showing Berlin’s Museum from the Southeast.

Fig. 2.2

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museums, completed in 1830, Berlin,

showing the main façade from the Lustgarten.

Fig. 2.3

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Site Plan of the (Altes) Museum showing the

Royal Palace (below) and the Custom Houses (Packhof) along the

Kupfergraben (above), 1823.

Fig. 2.4

August Stüler, “Forum” with the Neues Museum, site plan, 1853.

Fig. 2.5

August Stüler, “Forum” with the Neues Museum, elevations and

perspective.

Fig. 2.6

August Orth, master plan of the Museum Island, 1875.

Fig. 2.7

August Orth, plan of the Museum Island, second design, 1875.

Fig. 2.8

August Orth, master plan of the Museum Island. View from the

Kupfergraben canal.

Fig. 2.9.

Alfred Messel, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Island, 1884, site plan.

Fig. 2.10

Alfred Messel, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Island, 1884, elevation from the Kupfergraben.

Fig. 2.11

Alfred Messel, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Island, 1884, section.

Fig. 2.12

Alfred Messel, Project for the Extension of the Royal Prussian Museum

and Development of the Museum Island, 22 August 1907.

Fig. 2.13

Alfred Messel, Project for the Extension of the Royal Prussian Museum.

Fig. 2.14

Alfred Messel, Project for the Extension of the Royal Prussian Museum

in Berlin, 30 October 1907. The first exhibition (ground) floor.

Fig. 2.15

Alfred Messel, Extension of the Royal Prussian Museum in Berlin, 30

October 1907. Section through the court and the Pergamon Altar-Room.

Fig. 2.16

Alfred Messel, “Gothic Room.”

Fig. 2.17

Alfred Messel, “Baroque Room.”

Fig. 2.18

The view of August Stüler’s Neues Museum from the Kupfergraben, c.

1930.

Fig. 2.19

August Stüler, Neues Museum, plan of the 1

and 2

floors.

Fig. 2.20

August Stüler, cross-section of the Egyptian Court with a view to the

Northwest.

Fig. 2.21

August Stüler, cross-section of the main stairwell with a view to the

South.

Fig. 2.22

August Stüler, cross-section in the Greek Court with a view to the North.

Fig. 2.23

August Stüler, Egyptian Court in the Neues Museum.

Fig. 2.24

View of the Egyptian Department in the Neues Museum.

Fig. 2.25

Entrance of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

Fig. 2.26

Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Schematized floor plans after Ernst von Inhe.

Fig. 2.27

Wilhelm von Bode’s arrangement of the Simon Room (dedicated to

James Simon) in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

Fig. 2.28

Wilhelm von Bode, arrangement of the Rembrandt Room in the Kaiser

Friedrich Museum.

Illustrations for Part 3

Fig. 3.1

The reconstruction of the West Façade of the Great Altar of Pergamon,

completed in 1929, the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 3.2

The Pergamonsaal in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 3.3

Okeanos and other figures from the Gigantomachy (Western Frieze), as

displayed on the reconstruction of the West Façade of the altar, Pergamon

Museum.

Fig. 3.4

The reconstruction of the West Façade of the Great Altar of Pergamon in

relief against the background of the museum wall.

Fig. 3.5

The Telephos Room at the time of the reopening of the Pergamon

Museum in 1959.

xii

Fig. 3.6

Detail from Pergamonsaal showing a point where the reconstruction of

the altar meets the wall of the gallery.

Fig. 3.7

Slabs of the Gigantomachy Frieze (North Frieze) against the wall of the

museum.

Fig. 3.8

Detail from the Topographical Plan of Roman Pergamon by A. Attila and

U. Wulf.

Fig. 3.9

Volker Kästner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of Pergamon,

ground plan.

Fig. 3.10

Wolffram Hoepfner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of

Pergamon, ground plan.

Fig. 3.11

Wolffram Hoepfner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of

Pergamon, section.

Fig. 3.12

Wolffram Hoepfner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of

Pergamon, East Façade.

Fig. 3.13

Comparison of the reconstructed plan of the Great Altar with a schematic

plan of the Pergamonsaaal.

xiii

Fig. 3.14

Bergama, Western Turkey, view from the citadel (the former Acropolis of

the Hellenistic Pergamon).

Fig. 3.15

Christian Wilberg, Excavations at the Byzantine Wall Where the First

Reliefs Were Found, 1879.

Fig. 3.16

Wilberg, Excavation Site of the Pergamon Altar, 1879.

Fig. 3.17

Zeus Group of the Gigantomachy (East Frieze) as displayed in the

Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 3.18

The “Temple of Pergamon” in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy of

Arts, 1886, Berlin.

Fig. 3.19

Reconstructed view of the upper town (acropolis) of Pergamon during the

early Roman period as seen from the West.

Fig. 3.20

Emmanuel Pontremoli, plan of the actual condition of the ruins of the

Acropolis of Pergamon (c. 1890’s).

Fig. 3.21

Emmanuel Pontremoli, monuments of the Agora and Acropolis of

Pergamon, restored plan.

xiv

Fig. 3.22

Two details from Emmanuel Pontremoli’s reconstruction of the Acropolis

of Pergamon, elevation.

Fig. 3.23

Emmanuel Pontremoli, reconstruction of the Great Altar, elevation.

Fig. 3.24

Ludwig Hoffmann, prize-winning project in the Schinkel-Competition,

1882, “Dispositions-plan.”

Fig. 3.25

Ludwig Hoffmann, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Island, 1884, site plan.

Fig. 3.26

Ludwig Hoffmann, competition entry, 1884, section of the Pergamon

Museum.

Fig. 3.27

Alfred Hauschild, prize-winning competition entry for the Museum

Island, site plan.

Fig. 3.28

Alfred Hauschild, prize-winning competition entry for the Museum

Island, 1884, section through the sculpture museum.

Fig. 3.29

Fritz Wolff, prize-winning competition entry for the Museum Island,

1884, site plan.

Fig. 3.30

Fritz Wolff, prize-winning competition entry for the Museum Island,

1884, section through the Pergamon Museum.

Fig. 3.31

Fritz Wolff, prize-winning competition entry for the Museum Island,

1884.

Fig. 3.32

Fritz Wolff, plans of the first Pergamon Museum (built in 1898,

demolished in 1908).

Fig. 3.33

Fritz Wolff, the Pergamon Museum (1898-1908), vestibule and entrance.

Fig. 3.34

Fritz Wolff, the reconstruction of the West Façade of the Great Altar of

Pergamon in the (first) Pergamon Museum (1898-1908).

Fig. 3.35

Fritz Wolff, the interior of the Pergamon Museum showing the South

Frieze of the Gigantomachy.

Fig. 3.36

Detail from the North Frieze of the Gigantomachy in Fritz Wolff’s

Pergamon Museum.

Fig. 3.37

Fritz Wolff, Architecture Room in the Pergamon Museum (1902-1908).

Fig. 3.38

Fritz Wolff, Architecture Room in the Pergamon Museum (1902-1908).

xvi

Fig. 3.39

Parts of column, capital and entablature from the Temple of Artemis in

Magnesia (Western Anatolia), as displayed in Fritz Wolff’s Architecture

Room in the Pergamon Museum (1902-1908).

Fig. 3.40

Ludwig Hoffmann, master plan for the Museum Island and University,

1912.

Fig. 3.41

Ludwig Hoffmann, revision of the project for the Royal Prussian Museum

(originally designed by Alfred Messel in 1907), September 1913.

Fig. 3.42

Ludwig Hoffmann, revision of the project for the Royal Prussian

Museum, June 1914.

Fig. 3.43

Ludwig Hoffmann, revision of the project for the Berlin State Museum

(today’s Pergamon Museum), January 1920.

Fig. 3.44

A partial wooden model of the façade of the Pergamon Museum showing

Alfred Messel’s original design of 1907.

Fig. 3.45

A partial wooden model of the façade of the Pergamon Museum in 1:1

scale, showing Ludwig Hoffmann’s revision.

xvii

Fig. 3.46

A partial wooden model of the façade of the Pergamon Museum in 1914.

Fig. 3.47

Wilhelm Wille, revision and alternative project for the Berlin State

Museum (today’s Pergamon Museum), 5 January 1921, upper exhibition

floor.

Fig. 3.48

Wilhelm Wille, revision and alternative project for the Berlin State

Museum, 5 January 1921, lower exhibition floor.

Fig. 3.49

Wilhelm Wille, revision and alternative project for the Berlin State

Museum, 5 January 1921, sections of the Pergamonsaal.

Fig. 3.50

Wilhelm Wille, revision and alternative project for the Berlin State

Museum, 5 January 1921, interior perspective of the Pergamonsaal.

Fig. 3.51

Theodor Wiegand, the Market Gate of Miletus during its reconstruction,

12 August 1925.

Fig. 3.52

Theodor Wiegand, the Market Gate of Miletus during its reconstruction.

Fig. 3.53

Theodor Wiegand, the Market Gate of Miletus in the final stages of its

reconstruction.

xviii

Fig. 3.54

Theodor Wiegand, arrangement of Roman architecture from Western

Anatolia and Syria photographed against a black background.

Fig. 3.55

Theodor Wiegand, reconstruction of two columns and entablature of the

Temple of Artemis in Magnesia and other architectural elements from the

Hellenistic era (Western Anatolia).

Fig. 3.56

Theodor Wiegand, arrangement of Roman architecture from Western

Anatolia.

Fig. 3.57

The presentation of the Pergamonsaal to the participants of the congress

on the centennial of the German Archeology Institute (DAI), 21-25 April

1929.

Fig. 3.58

Celebration of Olympia in the Pergamonsaal during the Berlin Olympics,

1936.

Fig. 3.59

Wilhelm Kreiss, design for Soldier’s Hall in the Supreme Command of

Armed Forces.

Fig. 3.60

Albert Speer, Zeppelinfeld Stadium designed for the National Socialist

Party day (Reichsparteitag-Gelande), Nuremberg, 1937.

xix

Fig. 3.61

Albert Speer, Zeppelinfeld Stadium, elevations, sections and plan.

Illustrations for Part 4

Fig. 4.1

Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (6

to 5

century BC), completed in 1930, Vorderasiatisches Museum (in the

Pergamon Museum), Berlin.

Fig. 4.2

Detail of the museum partition between the reconstruction of the Market

Gate of Miletus and that of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.

Fig. 4.3

Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, detail.

Fig. 4.4

Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Processional Street of Babylon

to 5

century BC) completed in 1930, Vorderasiatisches Museum (in

the Pergamon Museum), Berlin.

Fig. 4.5

View of the model of the Processional Street and the Ishtar Gate, detail

with the gate, the forecourt and the bastions.

Fig. 4.6

Walter Andrae, reconstruction of the Lion of Babylon from the

Processional Street.

Fig. 4.7

Wilhelm Wille, revision of the Berlin State Museum (today’s Pergamon

Museum), 5 January 1921, two sections through the South Wing.

Fig. 4.8

Wilhelm Wille, revision of the Berlin State Museum, 5 January 1921,

interior perspective of the reconstruction of the Processional Street of

Babylon.

Fig. 4.9

Walter Andrae, working drawing for the reconstruction of the

Processional Street of Babylon in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, 1927,

Berlin.

Fig. 4.10

Walter Andrae, working drawing for the reconstruction of the

Processional Street of Babylon in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, 1927,

Berlin. View toward the Ishtar Gate.

Fig. 4.11

Walter Andrae, working drawing for the reconstruction of the Throne-

room of Babylon in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, 1927, Berlin.

Fig. 4.12

Walter Andrae, working drawing for the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate

of Babylon in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, 1927, Berlin.

Fig. 4.13

Assembly of the Babylonian brick fragments into figures and ornaments

of Babylon in Berlin, 1928.

xxi

Fig. 4.14

Walter Andrae, First reconstruction on paper of the Lion of the

Processional Street at Babylon, 1899, Babylon (Iraq).

Fig. 4.15

Félix Thomas, plan of the general layout and the fortifications of the

Assyrian city of Dur Sharrukin (Khorsabad), which the 19

century

French archaeologists erroneously identified as Nineveh.

Fig. 4.16

Félix Thomas, “Ornamented Gate” (a gate to the ancient Assyrian city of

Dur Sharrukin), elevation and plan of the actual ruins, 1852-54.

Fig. 4.17

Félix Thomas, the “Ornamented Gate,” restored section.

Fig. 4.18

Félix Thomas, plan of the ruins of the Palace of Sargon II, 1852-54.

Fig. 4.19

Félix Thomas, two elevations of the palace of Sargon II in Dur Sharrukin

(Khorsabad), represented as an “ensemble,” 1852-54.

Fig. 4.20

Félix Thomas, a gate to the Palace of Sargon II, restored elevation, detail,

1852-54.

Fig. 4.21

Félix Thomas, “Harem” in Nineveh (in reality: Assyrian temple in Dur

Sharrukin), 1852-54.

xxii

Fig. 4.22

Félix Thomas, “Gate Z of the Harem,” restored elevation.

Fig. 4.23

Félix Thomas, Assyrian murals in a chamber of the “Harem,” actual

condition, 1852-54.

Fig. 4.24

Félix Thomas, Lion figure from the Assyrian murals in a chamber of the

“Harem,” restored on paper, 1852-54.

Fig. 4.25

A plan of the inner city of Babylon after the excavations of the German-

Orient Society 1899-1917.

Fig. 4.26

Dragon (Sirrush) Relief from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (6

to 5

century

BC).

Fig. 4.27

Walter Andrae, reconstruction of the Dragon (Sirrush) Relief.

Fig. 4.28

Illustration from Robert Koldewey, Das wieder Erstehende Babylon,

1913, comparing the claw of the Babylonian dragon with that of a bird

from Mesopotamia.

Fig. 4.29

Excavations at the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, 1902.

xxiii

Fig. 4.30

Foundations of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon with colorless bull and dragon

reliefs after the excavations of the DOG.

Fig. 4.31

Reconstructed section drawing of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon showing

different ground levels of the Processional Street throughout the

centuries.

Fig. 4.32

Reconstructed section drawing of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.

Fig. 4.33

Walter Andrae, drawing showing the marking-system for placement of

the bricks of the Throne-room façade.

Fig. 4.34

Walter Andrae, a second drawing showing the marking-system for

placement of the bricks of the Throne-room façade.

Fig. 4.35

Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Throne-room Façade, completed

in 1930, Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 4.36

Walter Andrae, sketch for stage-set I of the historical opera

“Sardanapalus,” 1907.

Fig. 4.37

Walter Andrae, sketch for stage-set II of the historical opera

“Sardanapalus,” 1907.

xxiv

Fig. 4.38

Walter Andrae, a reconstruction of the Processional Street of Babylon by

night.

Fig. 4.39

Walter Andrae, conceptual sketch about the “origin” of ornament.

Fig. 4.40

Walter Andrae, “Die Symbole von Babylon” (sketch, ink on paper).

xxv

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Alan Colquhoun for countless hours of intellectual discussion.

The precision and clarity of his criticism and the intellectual challenge he brought to my

work at every stage of its preparation turned this dissertation into a fascinating learning

experience. I am indebted to Professor M. Christine Boyer not only for her criticism of

my dissertation and intellectual inspiration but also for her generosity of spirit. By

offering her support in every form and occasion, Professor Boyer helped me survive the

odds of nearly five years of independent research. My sincerest thanks are also to

Professors Esther da Costa Meyer, Mark Jarzombek and Michael Jennings for agreeing

to be the examiners of this dissertation. I was fortunate to have inspiring teachers at the

Middle East Technical University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton

University who influenced the argument and methodology of this dissertation. My

engagement in the history of modern archaeology goes back to a paper I wrote for

Professor Emel Aközer in Ankara. My Masters thesis under Stanford Anderson provided

me with theoretical and methodological foundations upon which I build my later work.

Most of this dissertation was written during two years of residency as a pre-doctoral

fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. I am grateful to the GRI’s director,

Thomas Crow, and to the staff of the Research and Education Department. The

xxvi

comments and feedback of the Getty scholars, fellows and staff played a part in the

working out of the ideas presented here. I wish to thank especially Malcolm Baker,

Sarah Morris, John Papadopoulos, Kajri Jain, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Partha Mitter,

Deanna Petherbridge, Henry Millon, Marian Hobson, Mieke Bal, Sherrie Levine,

Benjamin Buchloh, Mario Carpo and Alexa Sekyra.

The staff of the Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen, the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, the

Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, the Bauhaus Archiv offered me their kind assistance

during my research in the archives and manuscript collections in Berlin. I owe a special

debt of gratitude to Linda Nolan at the Getty Research Institute and Mary Burdett at the

University of San Diego for their help in compiling the bibliography, scanning the

illustrations and copy editing at various stages of my research.

I have received generous grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the

Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Scientific and Technical Research Association of

Turkey (TUBITAK), and the University of San Diego, in addition to support from

Princeton University including scholarships from the Graduate School, the School of

Architecture, Council for Regional Studies, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and

International Affairs—Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.

The presentation of the chapters of this dissertation as work in progress in seminars,

conferences and public lectures, including presentations at the Getty Center, Yale

University, the annual international meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of

xxvii

Architecture in Istanbul, the Cotsen Institute at UCLA, Sanart Conference in Ankara and

in a conference organized by the doctoral students at MIT and Harvard University

helped me to reformulate my arguments. An earlier and significantly different version of

Part 3 was published in the Sanart conference proceedings edited by Ipek Türeli (“Space

and Relief in the Pergamon-Room,” in Retrospective: Aesthetics and Art in the 20

Century, Ankara: Sanart, 2002). I am grateful to Malcolm Baker, Maria Georgepoulou,

Jale Erzen and John Papadopoulos for their invitations and encouragement.

This project would not have been completed without the support of my colleagues,

friends and family. I wish to thank especially Ufuk Ersoy, Heiko Henkel and Tina

Lupton for our long and inspiring conversations at the first stages of my research. My

colleagues in the Department of Art at the University of San Diego Sally Yard and

David B. Smith offered their support during the completion of this dissertation. I would

like the express my deepest gratitude to Professor Yard for reading the entire dissertation

and for her perceptive comments.

I am grateful to my sister Cânâ Bilsel for reading the dissertation, for offering her

criticism and above all for being a role model as an architect, scholar and teacher. My

parents, architects, city planners and educators, have prepared the conditions that

induced critical inquiry at home, and gave us a passion for the mythologies and ruins of

ancient Anatolia, the traces of which I found many years later in the archives of Berlin’s

Pergamon Museum.

xxviii

My most profound thanks go to Juliana Maxim who read and most perceptively

commented on every stage of my manuscript. Her research in history and theory of

architecture inspired me in ways that I could not have imagined. Finally, I would like to

thank my son, Alin Emre, who was not born when this project started and yet whose

presence motivated me to end my containment in German archaeology, complete the

dissertation and, finally, let it go.

Part 1

_______________________________________________________________________

Architecture in the Museum: Definitions and Problems

1.1. Architectonic Restitution: Historical Monument versus Historical Decor

We have now had a glimpse of all the rooms of the new museum. In all of them it
has proved possible to reconstruct the architectural masterpieces of ancient times
in their full original height, thus showing the real proportions and conveying to
the visitor an adequate sense of space. In this museum, the greatest museum of
architecture the world over, it is intended that visitors should rivet their attention
first and foremost on the immense ensemble and then be enabled to follow the
evolution of style from the sixth century B.C. down to the threshold of the
Christian era…

Theodor Wiegand, The Pergamon Museum, c. 1930

The State Museum of Berlin, popularly known as the Pergamon Museum, is among the

most complex buildings of the German capital. Conceived as the extension of the Royal

Prussian Museum by Alfred Messel in 1907, the building was completed twenty-four

years later during the artistically productive and politically uncertain days of the Weimar

Republic. As the regimes that patronized the museum changed, so did the original

program and architecture of Messel within the space of three decades: the museum that

opened to the public in 1930 took its final shape in the hands of Berlin’s cultural

bureaucracy, whose factions had waged a “museum war” to gain more influence in its

plans. The museum met with immediate success in the 1930’s when it was presented to

the public as the largest “museum of architecture” in the world. World War II spared the

Pergamon Museum but left it in a desolate condition. Its treasures were shipped to

Theodor Wiegand, The Pergamon Museum (Berlin: Reichsbahnzentrale für den

Deutschen Reiseverkehr, n.d.), 20. Distributed in several languages by the German
Railways and tourism bureaus in the 1930’s.

Moscow as part of what the Red Army called war reparations, only to return to a divided

Berlin in mid 1950’s as a gift of the Soviet Union to the people of the Democratic

Republic. To this day, the museum is renowned for its gigantic interiors, which offer an

awe-inspiring vision of antique architecture. Walking through the galleries, the visitors

encounter the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Street of Babylon, the Market Gate of

Milet, the Great Altar of Pergamon among others. The presentation of Babylonian,

Hellenistic and Roman “monuments” in a historic sequence has made the Pergamon

Museum one of the most visited sites of Berlin, just as the photographic and filmic

reproduction made the “masterpieces” of antique architecture available to a large public.

At first sight there is nothing unusual about the idea of a museum that contains antique

monuments from the ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, given that the national

galleries of Europe have long assumed the task of exhibiting the arts of all humanity: a

privilege that has become a contentious issue over the last decades. Just as the Parthenon

frieze—the so-called Elgin marbles—is not in Athens but in the British Museum, so it

appears that the Great Altar of Pergamon and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon are currently

located in Berlin. Yet the more we reflect on the architectural exhibits of the Pergamon

Museum, the more problematic they become.

On the one hand, the exhibits of the Pergamon Museum are perceived as architectural

“monuments,” each of which testifies to a distant past. Most visitors would agree that

there in the museum we stand in the presence of the opera nobile of antiquity:

“monuments” that were “brought” to Berlin after nearly four decades of German

excavations in the Middle East prior to World War I. Thousands of miles away from

their original locations, the “monuments” are presented in the gallery as art objects, as

well as historical documents. On the other hand, the interiors of the museum could as

well be read as modern installations, which reconstruct an image of antiquity somehow

analogous to a theater décor. Each “monument” is installed as a stage set that reenacts

the experience of a “work” that would not typically be contained within the interior of

the museum: an architectural ensemble, an antique city, or the totality of an ancient

civilization.

This semantic difficulty, the collapse of the boundary between a historical monument

and a historical décor, has not troubled those who have described the museum before as

in, for instance, the museum guides, those unproblematized presentations of the

museum’s objects as “archaeological reconstructions.”

There is nevertheless, an

unbridgeable gap between the two types of object: a historical monument endures from

the moment of its construction and subsequent restorations until the present; a historical

décor, in contrast, reenacts a lived moment of history in every “now” of experience

within the controlled space of the stage. If the first survives the passage of time only by

In a concise history of the museum Olaff Matthes writes: “The Pergamon Museum is

one of the most impressive museums of architecture in the world. It owes its existence
mainly to extremely successful excavations conducted by the museums of Berlin in Asia
Minor, above all in Pergamum (Pergamon), Magnesia, Priene, and Milet. In further
archaeological expeditions, the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Orient-Geselschaft
DOG) co-operated with the museums of Babylon, Assur, Uruk, and various other
Mesopotamian cities. However, it is the combination of reconstruction of architectural
monuments from Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Islamic antiquity that even today
confirms the Museum’s worldwide uniqueness.” The Pergamon Museum, translated by
Nina Hausmann (Berlin: Berliner Ansichten, 1998), 9.

gradually falling into ruins, the later is ephemeral: it is bound to the time of the

spectacle.

The question then comes to mind: how can we characterize the architectural exhibits of

the Pergamon Museum—originals, restorations or reconstructions? If, on the other

hand, the exhibits of the museum are a theatrical décor, how do they relate to the historic

originals: do they represent, reproduce or replace the monuments of antiquity?

The “monuments” that are exhibited in the museum today have preserved neither their

material integrity nor their complete form throughout their histories. They were

destroyed, buried or transformed into other buildings prior to their archaeological

recovery. In the case of the Altar of Pergamon, the Hellenistic masterpiece of the

museum, the archaeologists extracted most of the sculptural fragments of the Great

Frieze from a Byzantine wall where they had been reused. While the archaeologists

shipped sculptural and architectural fragments from their excavations in Turkey, Syria

and Iraq, the arrangements of these fragments into “monuments” in the Pergamon

Museum is the result of modern imagination. Unlike the archaeological fragments from

which they are reassembled, the duration of these “monuments” is not a continuous

testimony to the history they have endured. Their display in the museum poses an

uneasy tension between two distinct temporal moments: the imaginary moment of their

original construction, and the moment in which they were reassembled in the museum as

a jigsaw puzzle. The architectural exhibits of the Pergamon Museum, in other words, are

not “originals,” if we understand “original” to mean a historical monument, which

carries the traces of its material duration from the moment of its initial construction to

the present, and which is a unique presence in the site where it was built.

Nor can we describe the exhibits of the museum as “restoration,” in the 19

century

meaning of the word. The French architect and theorist, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-

Duc (1814-1879) defines “restoration” in his Dictionnaire raisonné (1866-1869, 10

volumes) as follows:

RESTORATION, s.f. Both the word and the thing are modern. To restore an
edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it means to
reestablish it in a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at
any given time. The idea that constructions of another age can actually be
restored is an idea that dates only from the second quarter of our own [19

]

century, and it is not clear that this kind of architectonic restoration has ever been
clearly defined.

Highly idiosyncratic in nature, Viollet-le-Duc’s philosophy of “restoration” contradicts

the idea of reconstruction as it was conceived by the 19

century historical

school—particularly Leopold von Ranke’s (1795-1896) concept of “wirkliche

Geschichte” (actual/real history). It suffices to reflect on the techniques of historical

Cf. Walter Benjamin who writes, “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that

is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its material duration to its historical
testimony to the duration which it experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on
authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when material duration
ceases to exist.” Revised from Harry Zohn’s translation, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” [the translation of the German title may also be revised as
“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility”] in Hannah Arrendt, ed.,
Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). I am grateful to Michael Jennings
and Thomas Levine for a graduate seminar that focused on the article at Princeton
University.

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from

the Dictionnaire raisonné, introduction by Barry Bergdoll, translated by Kenneth D.
Whitehead (New York : G. Braziller, 1990).

representation as evidenced in the historical paintings or panoramas in the 19

century to

pinpoint this difference. The 19

century panorama offered the spectators the scenery of

a world-historical event depicted on the vast periphery of a circular interior. In the Sedan

panorama in Berlin, for instance, once admitted in the interior, the spectators could

“relive,” as it were, the moment when the outcome of the Franco-Prussian war of 1871

was decided. The concept of history as a linear trajectory is made manifest in the 19

century panorama—the heterotopia of a time machine, which transposes the spectators

to the heart of a moment of historical destiny. The panorama turned history into a

spectacle for the masses.

Viollet-le-Duc in contrast, coined “restoration” as a practice that upholds the stylistic

and structural integrity of architecture above and beyond the historicity of a given

building. Having studied the system that underlies the constructional logic of a

monument, the 19th century restorer often redesigned the building in an ideal form,

which it had never had in history. “Correcting” the stylistic or structural “mistakes” of

the original builders was an important task of restoration. The restorer also erased

systematically the traces of later historic additions—for instance, depriving the medieval

cathedrals of their Baroque additions, hence, forcing the building into a structural and

stylistic purity. It is therefore not so much the value of a monument as a historical

document as much as the architectonic principles it embodies that were of interest to the

century restorer.

The architectural exhibits of the Pergamon Museum differ from what Viollet-le-Duc

called “restoration” on two counts. First, the museum seeks to establish its credibility for

its viewers as a historical make-believe. The museum installation mimics the form of a

monument in a given historical period. In doing so it seems to transport the viewers into

a historical moment—even though this moment is vaguely defined by comparison with a

theater décor or the 19

century panorama. The museum cultivates a sense of history

that is more akin to Ranke’s truism, “to reconstruct as it actually was,” than to Viollet-le-

Duc’s restoration.

Secondly, the museum exhibit of the Pergamene Altar is limited to a three-dimensional

facade put in an illusionary perspective that is suggestive of the whole monument. By

reducing the original building to a mainly visual presentation, the Pergamon Museum

hinders the structural integrity and constructional logic of architecture, which were dear

to Viollet-le-Duc. It is not as if the Hellenistic building is rebuilt in the museum as a

freestanding structure, but the museum reconstructs an image of the monument as a

tableau vivant, which not only can be seen but also partially occupied by the visitors.

We have to be equally cautious about concluding that the exhibits of the museum are a

historical décor that reconstructs the originals as “they actually were” in antiquity. For,

the installations of the museum, unlike a theater décor, display the effects of age on their

material: conveying a carefully calculated sense of authenticity to the visitors, as if the

“monuments” have endured weather throughout millennia.

It is precisely the effect of a monument’s ‘oldness’ that marked a major split in the

modern approach to historical monuments. The 19

century idea of “architectural

restoration”—in contradistinction to historical reconstruction—presented a fatal

contradiction, one that seemed all the more problematic at the turn of the 20

century.

For “restoration” sought to both honor and effectively annul the idea of historical time

when it “recovered” historical architecture in a perfect state in the present: as Alan

Colquhoun puts it, “the old takes on a surreal contemporaneity” in the restorations of

Viollet-le-Duc.

Yet, for the 20

century audience that expected to see the traces of

natural decay on an historical “original,” the appearance of a flawless historic monument

in a “finished state” appeared incredulous. It is precisely this problem that the Viennese

art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1905) puts into question in his Moderne Denkmalkultus

sein Wesen, seine Entstehung [The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and

Genesis] of 1903.

He writes:

Alan Colquhoun, “Thoughts on Riegl,” Oppositions 25 (1982); reprinted as “Newness

and Age Value in Alois Riegl,” in Modernity and Classical Tradition: Essays in
Architectural Criticism 1980-1987 (Cambridge Ma.: The MIT Press, 1989).

Alois Riegl, “Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung” (1903), in

Gesammelte Aufsätze (Vienna: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag, 1929). The text was translated
into English by Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo as “The Modern Cult of
Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982). An editorial by
Kurt W. Forster and separate commentaries by Ignasi de Solà-Morales and Alan
Colquhoun appeared in the same issue. A second and—unfortunately—severely
abbreviated version by Karin Bruckner and Karen Williams translated the title as “The
Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Development.” Nicholas Stanley Price et
al. eds., Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage
(Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1995). Here I suggest translating the
sub-title of Riegl’s essay as “Its Essence and Genesis.” There is little question that the
German “Wesen” should be translated as “essence,” and not as “character.” As for
Riegl’s use of the word “Entstehung”: I take as a model the distinction Walter Benjamin
makes between “Ursprung” and “Entstehung” in his “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, translated by John Osborne as “origin” and

The fundamental aesthetic principle of our time concerning the age-value may be
formulated as follows: we expect from the hand of man the production of
complete works as symbols [Sinnbilder] of necessary and lawful becoming
[Werden]; from nature that works over time, on the other hand, we expect the
dissolution of completeness as symbol of equally necessary and lawful decay
[Vergehen]. Just as the appearance of decay (premature dilapidation) in recent
works disturbs us, so do the signs of new intervention (conspicuous restoration)
in old works. It is rather the clear perception of the cycle of natural becoming and
decay—pure and lawful—that modern man at the beginning of the 20

century

enjoys most.

Thus, every work of man is conceived like a natural organism in

whose development one should not intervene; the organism should live
[ausleben] freely and man, at most, may protect it against premature destruction.
Hence the modern man sees part of his own life in a monument, and any
intervention on it disturbs him as if it is an intervention upon his own organism.

Appointed director of the Commission for Preservation of Monuments, Riegl wrote

Moderne Denkmalkultus as an addendum to new legislation of historic preservation in

the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His conclusions were meant to have immediate effects in

practice. In fact, it effectively brought to an end the ongoing “cleansing” of Gothic

cathedrals of their later baroque additions, a practice inspired by Viollet-le-Duc’s

principle of “restoration.”

Although pragmatic in scope, Riegl’s Denkmalkultus outlines

“genesis” respectively, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (New York, Verso
1985), 45.

The excess of adjectives Riegl uses to underline the unobstructed clarity, purity and

necessity of the natural law of becoming and decay makes it almost impossible to
translate this sentence. The original reads: “Es ist vielmehr der reine, gesetzliche,
Kreislauf des naturgesetzlichen Werdens und Vergehens, dessen ungetrübte
Wahrnehmung den modernen Menschen vom Amfange des 20. Jahrhunderts erfreut.
“Denkmalkultus,” 162.

Ibid.,162, translation mine.

In The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural

Entertainments (Cambridge Ma.: The MIT Press, 1994) M. Christine Boyer writes:
“Riegl thought the controversy surrounding the restoration work on the giant western

a vitalist phiolosophy, which is influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s “philosophy of

life.”

Riegl shared Nietzsche’s distaste for 19

century historicism, and his fascination

with cyclical, “natural” time. Riegl’s concept of the monument rejects the idea of a

golden age—and all reconstruction that aims at returning the monument to its “original”

state. Instead Riegl seeks to minimize the modern intervention in the natural process of a

monument’s “aging.” Far from freezing historical monuments in time, Riegl’s idea of

portal of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna—a controversy that brought an end to the
work in the 1880’s and again in 1902—reflected the different ways a monument might
be valued in modern times. He believed there would be less trouble enveloping every
restoration attempt when the history and significance of these values were carefully
told”; see also Margaret Rose Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of
Art (University Park Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 1992). On the influence of
Riegl’s thought on the practices of historic preservation see Wim Denslagen,
Architectural Restoration in Western Europe: Controversy and Continuity, translated
from Dutch by Jane Zuyl-Moores (Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura Press, 1994).

Recent research has shown that Riegl’s art history was engaged in a complex dialogue

with 19

century German philosophy and most specifically with the writings of Arthur

Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. In fact, Riegl not only read Nietzsche’s key
works The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations, but also discussed them with a
group of friends at the University of Vienna. Between 1875 and 1878, Riegl was an
active member of “The Reading Society of German Students in Vienna” (Der Leseverein
der deutschen Studenten Wiens). Admirers of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will, the
members of the society—including Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud—became
receptive to the work of Nietzsche and the music of Richard Wagner as early as the mid
1870’s (see William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). See also Diana Graham Reynolds, “Alois Riegl
and the Politics of Art History: Intellectual Traditions and Austrian Identity in Fin-de-
siècle Vienna,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego
(1997), 26-28. Hence it is plausible to argue that, although Riegl was trained in the
Institute for Austrian Historical Research—a school that resisted German idealism—and
exposed to the methods of empiricism and positivism, Riegl was well informed about the
alternative positions that emerged from Germany. In fact, Nietzsche’s critique of 19

century historicism, and his celebration of the inner force of life processes is clearly
present in Riegl’s “mature work” after Stilfragen [The Problems of Style] of 1893.
Refusing the Hegelian philosophy of history, Riegl maintained that art, more than being
determined by the Spirit external to it, has been driven by an internal urge throughout
history.

His famous dictum “Kunstwollen,” could perhaps better be translated as art’s

will, or will-to-art, than the common English version, “artistic volition.”

preservation consists of leaving monuments to fall gracefully into ruins and, thus,

complete their natural cycle of “life.” Repairs are allowed only when the structure has

been adopted for modern use, or when it was destroyed due to an unexpected human

catastrophe.

It is clear that reconstruction of archaeological monuments in the Pergamon Museum

contradicts Riegl’s principle of “preservation” to the extent that it intervenes in the

natural circle of the monument’s “becoming” and “decay.” Yet, it is rather Riegl’s

utterly psychological theory that the “modern subject” and the modern “masses” engage

monuments through a vaguely defined feeling of “age value” that makes his text central

to an understanding of archaeological reconstructions—in situ, as well as museal.

Writing in a prophetic tone in 1903, Riegl argues that the value of a monument as a

historic document will soon be secondary to the immediacy of the “atmospheric effect”

[“Stimmungswirkung”] it exercises on the masses. The monument will be transformed in

the 20

century into an object that evokes emphatic reactions in the “organism” of the

beholders: an effect through which “modern man” could relate to the natural law of

“becoming” and “decay” to which his own body is subjected.

Riegl writes: “… das Denkmal bleibt nur mehr ein unvermeidliches sinnfäliges

Substrat, um in seinem Beschauer jene Stimmungswirkung hervorzubringen, die in
modernen Menschen die Vorstellung des gesetzlichen Kreislaufes vom Werden und
Vergehen, des Auftauchens des Einzelnen aus dem Allgemeinem und seines
naturnotwendigen allmählichen Wiederaufgehens im Allgemeinen erzeugt.”
“Denkmalkultus,” 150.

Meeting the public’s growing expectation of “age value,” 20

century archaeology

refrained from the problematic task of “faking” the effects of age in their historical

reconstructions. “Anastylosis,” a technique of archaeological reconstruction that became

widely accepted around the 1920’s, seems to accommodate both the archaeologists’

quest for historicity and the popular feeling for material authenticity. Nicolas Balanos,

who is credited as one of the founders of the technique during the reconstruction of the

Athenian Acropolis, reassembled the monuments from the original fragments that are

either available on the site or that are found during the excavations. Modern materials

were used only when necessary, and mostly to reinforce the antique structures. In fact,

anastylosis is a practice that perfectly suits the modern concept of historic monuments.

Showing the difference between “original” historic fragments and modern materials used

in recent interventions has come to be seen as the ethical principle of historic

reconstruction.

At first sight, the distinction between authentic fragments and modern interventions

seem to be respected in the architectural exhibits of the Pergamon Museum. Yet, the

truth is certainly more complex. For instance, the “reconstruction” of the Market Gate of

Miletus by Theodor Wiegand (1864-1936), the renowned archaeologist and the director

of the Antiquity Collection in Berlin c. 1930, has little in common with the 20

century

practice of “anasytlosis.” A number of photographs taken during the construction of the

Market Gate in the Pergamon Museum, and other objects of the “comparative

architecture rooms” reveal that only a small percentage of the exhibits is made of antique

fragments.

Wiegand achieved the “Roman” gate by using modern materials available

in Berlin at the time of the construction: iron, brick, cement and stucco. More troubling,

however, is the fact that Wiegand gave the gate the finish of aged marble, imitating, as it

were, the appearance of a Roman original, had it survived the effects of time up until our

own day. In fact—as Wiegand’s critics did not fail to take notice in the 1920’s—such

historical monuments did not survive in our day, and whether such a “monument”

existed at all in the Roman province of Asia, in Miletus, is a hypothesis that needs to be

proven.

Noting the radical departure of the Pergamon Museum from traditional museology, an

article published by Office International des Musées [The International Museum Office]

in 1935—the only text that calls into question the philosophical underpinnings of such a

presentation—defines the museum’s exhibits as “architectonic restitutions” (“les

reconstitution architectoniques dans les musées”). The author notes that, instead of

displaying the constitutive elements or parts of architecture, such as one expects to find

in the galleries of a Beaux Arts academy, the Pergamon Museum conveys to its visitors a

vision of the architectural “ensemble.” The idea of the ensemble, in other words, has

replaced the architectural specimen. Praising the Pergamon Museum for such a bold

vision, the article fails to identify the contradiction intrinsic in “architectonic restitution.”

Eight photographs of the Market Gate of Miletus and of other architectural exhibits

illustrate the process of reconstruction. Berlin-Dahlem, Deutsches Archäologisches
Institut (DAI) Wiegand-Archiv, Kasten 21 “Pergamonmuseum, Milettor,_Gall Prozess.”
See my discussion of the reconstruction of the Miletus Gate in Part 3.

Karl Scheffler, “Das Berliner Museumschaos,” Kunst and Künster XXIV (April

1926): 261-272.

The author concludes that such restitution is justifiable only if the primary goal of the

museum is the “preservation of historical originals.”

However, the practice of molding

isolated fragments into a seamless architectural whole, as Wiegand did in his recreation

of Hellenistic and late Roman architecture, is one that does not preserve but effectively

destroys the historical fragments. The “architectonic restitution” of the Pergamon

Museum sacrifices the specificity of the fragment for the generality of the whole.

In achieving an imaginative and imaginary “ensemble,” Wiegand seems consistent with

his own theory of theatrical and emphatic presentation of ancient history. In a museum

guide he wrote on the occasion of the opening of the museum in 1930, he appears to

make a subtle and ambiguous distinction by describing the exhibits as reconstructions

that convey the visitors an idea about the originals. He writes that the museum

“reconstructs the architectural masterpieces of ancient times in their full original height,

thus showing the real proportions and conveying to the visitor an adequate sense of

space.”

Can we then interpret the architectural exhibits of the museum as full-size,

partial models that convey a faithful impression of architectural space, rather than

architectural originals themselves? The experience of the museum simulates an effect

similar to the perception of the original monuments, had they existed in antiquity, and

had they remained intact in our modernity.

“Les reconstitution architectoniques dans les musées,” Mouseion 29-30 (1935): 59-71.

Wiegand, “The Pergamon Museum,” 20.

Although Wiegand never openly acknowledges that the architectural “restitutions” of the

museum are not historical originals, his description raises an array of questions. Does the

museum recover an historical experience by mimicking the typical perception of the

ancient man who created these “masterpieces”: a visual experience about which we

know nearly nothing? Does the museum give modern Germans access to the “original”

experience of the Babylonians and the Hellenistic Greeks? Or does it merely promote a

picturesque—and therefore unmistakably modern—idea of antiquity by imitating the

appearance of ruins in their “natural” landscapes?

Yet isn’t the enterprise of

reproducing the monuments of antiquity as ruins problematic—in fact more problematic

than Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration, which fabricated flawless monuments in a complete

form—given that none of these “ruins” were freestanding in their original locations

when the German archaeologists began their work?

The French architectural historian Auguste Choisy argued in 1899 that the principles

of the Greek site planning depend on a picturesque idea, and that the experience of the
Parthenon in the Athenian Acropolis was originally intended as a “succession of
pictures” each seen from a privileged and definable viewpoint. See Histoire de
l'Architecture, I & II (1899) (Genève and Paris: Slatkine Reprints, 1987). This theory
has exercised influence on modern architects, most notably on Le Corbusier, who visited
Athens during his Voyage d’Orient. More recently the American art historian Vincent
Scully revisited Choisy’s idea of the picturesque. He argued that the meaning of the
sacred Greek landscape can be grasped by looking at the ruins of ancient Greece in the
present as they stand in their original landscape. See The Earth, the Temple and the
Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (revised edition, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979). Scully’s poetic—and ahistorical—description of the original Greek experience as
it is embedded in the present-day ruins does not take into consideration that most of the
ruins available in situ are the products of modern archaeological reconstruction. It is
therefore impossible to have an “original” vision of the Greeks unmediated by modern
science.

1. 2. Architecture in the Museum: Viewing the Fragment and the Whole

Let us then address an ontological difficulty which is at the heart of Berlin’s self-

acclaimed “museum of ancient architecture.” The idea of the museum of architecture

seems to rest on the assumption that architecture’s relation to its object is similar to the

relation of art to the work of art. Architecture, in other words, is an activity that creates

“works,” which need to be classified, preserved and displayed based on their historic and

artistic value. Yet, displaying a work of architecture—such as a monument—literally in

the museum poses an insurmountable problem: where does the frame of a museum end

and where does its exhibit, the work of architecture, begin?

From the conception of the first public museums of architecture in 18

century France to

the recent Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt by Oswald Mathias Ungers, one

thing has been clear: a museum of architecture, unlike a museum of art, does not contain

its object within the physical space of the gallery. Hence we expect to find in the

“museum of architecture” drawings, models, plaster casts, as well as building parts and

architectural fragments, but not an actual work of architecture. How can a

building—assuming that a building is a “work” of architecture—be displayed inside of

another and maintain its objecthood as distinct from that of its container?

One aspect of this problematic has been previously addressed. Eve Blau and Edward

Kaufman write in their introduction to an exhibition catalogue of the works from the
Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA): “The Museum of Architecture occupies a
special place in the museum world. While Museums of painting, sculpture or decorative
arts collect, display and make available for study the objects themselves, architectural

Given the impossibility of containing architecture in the gallery, there have been two

significantly different ideas of a museum of architecture in current scholarship:

according to the first, the museum consists of either a representation or reproduction of

architecture (a museum of models, architectural drawings, photogrametric surveys or

photographs); according to the second, the museum contains not the work itself but the

fragments of the work: an ionic column-capital and a segment of architrave, for instance,

may stand for the whole Greek temple, as well as being an exemplar of the architectural

order.

In his essay, “Architecture au musée?” [Architecture in the Museum?] Hubert Damisch,

argues that museums of architecture emerged historically at the very moment when new

techniques of reproduction (in contradistinction to representation) became widely

available in the 18

century: the cork model and the plaster cast.

Scale models had

been commonly used in the West at least since the Renaissance in order to conceive a

building before it was constructed. Yet the very idea of producing replicas of famous

museums collect and display not their subject-matter, but works that are representations
of it—drawings, prints, photographs, models, and books.” Blau and Kaufmann eds.
Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation (Montreal:
Centre Canadien d’Architecture, 1989), 13; in Deutsches Architekturmuseum (the
German Architecture Museum) by Oswald Mathias Ungers we can clearly see the
metaphor of “a house inside the house”: the architect designed the service shaft of the
museum in the form of a roofed “baldachin” that reads like a separate “house” placed
inside the shell of the museum. See “Deutsches Architekturmuseum,” in Vittorio
Magnano Lampugnani ed., Museum Architecture in Frankfurt 1980-1990, 139-151.

Hubert Damisch “L’Architecture au musée?” Cahiers du Musée national d’art

moderne 42 (Winter 1992), 63-78.

monuments and disseminating them in greater numbers seems to belong to a fairly recent

modernity. An Italian craftsman Antonio Chichi (1743-1816), for instance, is known to

have standardized thirty-six cork models of the antique monuments of Rome and sold

them to a large clientele in France and Germany.

As these scale models attained a

place in the European salons as exhibition pieces, architecture gained a new audience:

that which was the secretive craft of the masters became a collectible item for the

amateurs. Yet, it is important to note that even though the process of replication granted

architecture aesthetic autonomy, the status of these models has always been different

from that of “works of art”: sculpture or painting. As Werner Szambien shows in his

Musée d’Architecture [Museum of Architecture], these objects were meant to remedy a

perceived shortcoming of picturesque or fantastic paintings of ancient monuments in the

century: their imprecision in representing architecture. Faithfulness to the surveyed

“original” was the primary quality of a scale model. Hence, the quest for precision made

the models strictly referential objects. Not surprisingly these three-dimensional

reproductions, rather than paintings, were to become the first objects exhibited in the

century “museum of architecture.” Interpreting the origins of the institution in

France, Damisch goes on to argue that the task of this type of museum has little to do

with the preservation of a work of art. The museum of architecture relates to the “work”

indirectly through the mediation of an “imaginary component.”

The museum of

architecture is precisely where the “work” is imagined, yet, where it is absent.

Werner Szambien, Le Musée d’Architecture (Paris: Picard, 1988), 16.

Damisch has provided the most exhaustive analysis of this problematic: “Ma thèse…

sera que le musée d’architecture ne devrait accueillir que des objets qui aient valeur
d’example, ou de modèle, mais dans l’acception strictement théorique, épitémologique,

Damisch—like Szambien before him—interprets the museum of architecture primarily

as a museum of architectural models. Arguing that the museum of architecture is

structurally linked to the techniques and idea of reproduction, he underplays the

importance of another institution that emerged only a few decades later: Alexandre

Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français [Museum of French Monuments]. Originally a

temporary shelter that saved the fragments of royal and religious monuments from

destruction in the hands of the vandals during the Revolution, Lenoir’s “depot” was to

become an ambitious museum of Gothic architecture—the first of its kind—which

intended a historical and didactic presentation of the architecture of the nation. There is

little doubt that Lenoir’s museum has stirred more controversy, both during and after the

years of Terror, than the 18

century museums of architectural models. It suffices to

recall Quatremere de Quincy’s relentless campaign against the Museum of French

Monuments, which ultimately succeeded in establishing that a museum of fragments,

which displaced “originals” from their context, was an unacceptable transgression of the

Neoclassical canon.

* * *

projective, et mieux encore projectile du terme (“projectile” s’entendant, si l’on croit
Littré, de ce qui lance, qui produit en quelque sorte la projection). Ce que le public, le
grand public aussi bien que le public specialisé, cherchera au musée, en matière
d’architecture, ce seront desormais moins des modèles qui devrait prêter à l’imitation, ou
des images plaisantes, des representations faites pour le séduir, que des informations
portant sur ce qu’il en est, ou peut en être, du travail du projet: ce qui ne saurait aller
sans rétombées critiques au regard de la pratique actuelle de l’architecture, et de sa
gestion institutionelle, idéologique, voire même politique.” “L’Architecture au musée?”
72-73.

A contemporaneous and well-documented schism emerged in Germany from the dispute

between Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Alois Hirt in the 1820’s during the construction of

the Royal Prussian museum in Berlin (today’s Altes Museum). While Hirt insisted that

the new institution be a place for “study,” a depository of specimens within the academy,

Schinkel famously defended the idea of the museum as an independent “Gestalt”—a

form and design. Frustrated by his exclusion from the commission of the Royal

Museum, Hirt objected to Schinkel that “the art objects are not there for the museum;

rather the museum is there for the objects.”

Thinking through this dichotomy we may conclude that it underscores a divergence of

opinion within the Romantic (and therefore organicist) idea of history. Hirts seems to

advocate history as an independent organism, whose documents should enjoy certain

autonomy from the designs of the present, while Schinkel collapses the difference

between past and the present, making the fragments of history subordinate to a present

décor. Throughout the 20

century this split of opinion seems to have recurred several

times: a distinctly modernist “cult of the fragment” which sought to maintain a

disjunction between the fragments of the past and the frame of the present has been

Cited in Douglas Crimp, “The End of Art and the Origin of the Museum,” Art Journal

46 (Winter 1987), 263; cf. “Hirt’s Bericht an den König vom 15. Mai 1824,” in Alfred
von Wolzogen ed., Aus Schinkels Nachlass: Reisetagebücher, Briefe und Aphorismen
(Berlin, 1863), III: 244-49; see also Hans Kauffmann, “Zweckbau und Monument: Zu
Friedrich Schinkels Museum am Berliner Lustgarten,” in Gerhard Hess, ed., Eine
Freundesgabe der Wissenschaft für Ernst Hellmut Vits (Frankfurt / Main, 1963), 135-66.
For a recent history of the planning and conception for the Altes Museum see C. M.
Vogtherr, “Berlin Königliche Museum,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 39 (1997): 7-
302.

contradicted by new contextualist approaches seeking to integrate the old and the new

into a seamless whole. We see the contradictory ideas of the historical object as a

distinct fragment or as part of a décor, in a variety of fields including museology,

historical preservation and urban design. The modernist city plans of the 20

century,

which preserved historical monuments while destroying systematically the urban fabric

around them, are parallel in that sense to modernist museology, which refused all

restoration and which sought to exhibit historical fragments as distinct sculptural

objects.

It is indeed remarkable that the Pergamon Museum, which was completed exactly one

hundred years after Schinkel’s Altes Museum, seems to be caught between these two

positions that are handed down to us from German Romanticism: history as an

autonomous organism versus history as a present “Gestalt.” The important difference,

however, is that in the Pergamon Museum the décor does not necessarily recover “lived

history.”

Instead a constellation of antique fragments and modern decor creates the

In his reading of Riegl’s “Denkmalkultus,” Alan Colquhoun argues that Riegl

established a “complementarity” between the notions of “newness” and “age-value.” He
writes, “… although the two ideas are antithetical and must be kept rigidly separate, they
are also complementary, and dependent on each other. This idea corresponds closely to
the ideas of the Modern Movement, in which the preservation of historic monuments
sometimes went hand in hand with the destruction and rebuilding of the city (See Le
Corbusier’s 1936 Plan Voisin for the Center of Paris). Historical works have here lost
their meaning as part of the fabric of time and space, and are preserved as emblems of a
generalized and superseded past.” “Thoughts on Riegl,” Oppositions 25 (1982), 79;
reprinted as “Newness and Age Value in Alois Riegl,” in Modernity and Classical
Tradition, 214.

Cf. Stephen Bann’s analysis of two museums in early 19

century Paris, the Museum

of French Monuments, founded by Lenoir, and Musée de Cluny by Alexandre du
Sommerard in The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in

illusion of the presence of the architectural “monument” in the museum. In the

Pergamon Museum, the architectural object is self-referential, as if it is seen in a hall of

mirrors: it is more an end in itself than a means to represent history.

Therefore, I need to nuance the questions I have raised at the beginning: what were the

specific conditions in early 20

century Berlin that eventually naturalized an oxymoron

that emerged in the 18

century: architecture in the museum?

Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1984),
especially 87-89.

1. 3. Monuments in ‘Exile’: On the Location and Dislocation of Architecture

Even though these questions may sound purely theoretical, they gained new political and

architectural implications after the reunification of Germany. Extending its control over

the museums of former East Berlin, the Prussian Heritage Foundation (Stiftung

Preußischer Kulturbesitz) has taken firm action to unify the antiquity collections in the

historic Museum Island, collections that were divided between the East and the West in

1945.

Following this new political initiative, Berlin’s Museum Island has become the

focus of a series of restricted architectural competitions.

The prize-winning Masterplan

of the Museum Island by the British architect David Chipperfield proposes to connect

Wolf-Dieter Dube, “Große Pläne für Berlins schönste Schätze,” in Berliner

Illustrierte, (13-14 March 1993).

The first competition for the restoration of August Stüler’s Neues Museum

(constructed between 1843-1855 and severely damaged during World War II) was
initially won in 1994 by the Italian architect Giorgio Grassi, whose project maintained
the solitary nature of the historic museums—particularly Schinkel’s Altes Museum—and
linked the Pergamon and the Neues Museums with a subtle and open colonnade. A
subsequent decision in 1998, however, reversed the results of the previous competition
and gave the commission for the renovation of the Neues Museum to the British
architect David Chipperfield whose prize-winning competition entry of 1994, in contrast
to that of Grassi, makes direct “connection links” between the museums. Both Grassi
and Chipperfield’s competition entries for the renovation of the Neues Museum were
published in Bundesbaudirektion ed., Museumsinsel Berlin: Wettbewerb zum Neuen
Museum (Stuttgart, Avedition, 1994); see also “Museumsinsel,” l’Architecture
d’aujourd’hui 297 (February 1995): 80-83; about the later decision to give the
commision for the renovation of the Neues Museum to Chipperfield see Bernhard
Schulz, “Museumsinsel Berlin: Entscheidung für Chipperfield,” Baumeister 95, no.1
(January 1995): 13.

the individual museums into a single destination for “bus tourism,” as well as “more

sophisticated” individual visitors, with the motto “archaeological promenade.”

The most significant part of this “archaeological promenade” consists of the Pergamon

Museum, which will be reorganized and expanded according to a design by the German

architect Oswald Mathias Ungers. Arguably returning to the “original intentions” of

Alfred Messel, Ungers proposes to add a Western Wing to the museum in order to

display the Egyptian monuments brought to West Berlin after World War II. When

completed, the Pergamon Museum will present its visitors with an experience of two

thousand years of world history from Ancient Egypt to the Islamic Middle Ages.

new central entrance and visitors’ center by Chipperfield that connects the Neues and

Pergamon Museums will make Berlin’s Museum Island no less glorious a center of

mass-tourism than I.M. Pei’s “pyramid of the Louvre” in Paris.

On the other hand, by granting a central role to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin’s new

“archaeological promenade,” the Berlin State Museums and the Prussian Heritage

Foundation have brushed aside the recurrent demands for “repatriation” that have sought

The consortium for the Master Plan of the Museum Island consists of David

Chipperfield Architects, Heinz Tesar, Hilmer & Sattler and Oswald Mathias Ungers. See
Heinz Tesar, Wege zum Masterplan: Museumsinsel Berlin 1998-2000 (Berlin: G & H,
2000).

Bernhard Schulz “Plötzlich ist das Glasdach nicht mehr nötig: die

Architektenwettbewerb für den Umbau des Pergamonmuseums ist entschieden,” Der
Tagespiegel, 26 May 2000; “Umbau und Erweiterung des Pergamonmuseums, Berlin,”
Bauwelt 91, no. 22 (9 June 2000): 10; Nikolaus Bernau, “Zurück zur Grundfrage!: Das
Pergamonmuseum wird von O. M. Ungers saniert und umgebaut,” Deutsche Bauzeitung
134, no.7 (July 2000): 22.

to restitute these “monuments” to the countries of “origin.” In one case the campaign

initiated in the early 1990’s by the city of Bergama in Western Turkey for the restitution

of the Pergamene Altar has caused a remarkable controversy.

In a short book Sefa Tas-kIn, the Social Democrat mayor of Bergama in the 1990’s

voices the claims of the town’s inhabitants against the museum of a distant European

city.

As the title of the book, Zeus in Exile, suggests, the people of Bergama feel that

they were robbed of their cultural heritage, or more specifically, the major cultural

monument of their town is in “exile” in Berlin. Having argued that “their culture is the

accumulation of all previous cultures, which flourished in Bergama in the past,” the

modern inhabitants of the town demand the return of the “Zeus Altar,”

which had been

displaced from Bergama during the German archaeological excavations of 1878-79.

On the cover of Tas-kIn’s book a Zeus figure dressed in ancient Greek attire is depicted

as he breaks his chains and as he steps towards his long lost “home.” This image, which

represents the ancient Greek God as the “prisoner” of a German museum, is perhaps the

Sefa Taskın, Sürgündeki Zeus: Bergama’dan Berlin’e, Berlin’den Bergama’ya [Zeus

in Exile: From Bergama to Berlin, from Berlin to Bergama] Bergama Belediyesi Kültür
Yayınları no. 4 (Izmir: Altindag Matbaacılık, 1991). I have written elsewhere on the
significance of the “repatriation” campaign, “Zeus in Exile: Archaeological
Reconstitution as Politics of Memory,” Working Paper Series no.14 (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, 2000).

The 19

century interpreters maintained that the Great Altar was dedicated to Zeus.

Though Zeus was probably among the honorees of the Hellenistic monument, we cannot
establish this claim today with certainty. The Turkish public knows the monument with
the name given to it by the 19

century German archaeologists, although the monument

is exhibited as the “Great Altar of Pergamon” in the Berlin State Museum.

most powerful allegory of a repatriation case. A century after the German archaeologists

started excavations in their town, the people of Bergama selectively identified a

historical heritage for themselves. Curiously the heritage of the city of Bergama does

not depend on the presence, but on the conspicuous absence of an ancient monument,

which had once been in Bergama, yet which is exhibited in Berlin today.

The 1991 campaign for the repatriation of the “Zeus Altar” quickly gained popular
support on a national scale: according to one account sixteen million signatures were
collected to ask for the return of the monument from Germany. In 1991 alone, more
than one hundred articles appeared in the Turkish daily press—ranging in tone from
mourning for the stolen altar to accusations that Mayor Tas-kIn was “crazy” in thinking
that “the Germans” might give the altar back at all.

Tas-kIn, however, seems less

pragmatic than many of his critics in Turkey. In Zeus in Exile, he is interested in raising
the ethical dimensions of the case. He underlines—correctly—that those who displaced
Bergama’s heritage for the sake of “preserving” it were indeed in search of cultural roots
for their emerging 19th century empire. He adds, “Today, they try to conceal the
inhuman dimensions of the [19th century project of] sharing the world.”

Another claim of repatriation had come from the Directorate of the Antiquities of Iraq,

shortly before the National Museum in Baghdad was pillaged in 2003—as the

international community and the invading forces stood by. Having argued that the Ishtar

Gate of Babylon and the accompanying tower had been improperly “displaced” from the

The Turkish daily Milliyet reported that the petition for the “repatriation” of the altar

was endorsed by three million people, “Zeus Için Üç Millyon Imza,” 13 May 1992; see
“Zeus Imza Rekoru Kırıyor,” Tercüman, 13 May 1992. A local newspaper from Izmir
reported ten months later that the number of petitioners reached sixteen million, “Zeus
Sunaginin Geri Alınması Için Onaltı Milyon Imza Toplandı,” Yeni Asır, 25 March 1993;
see also Hacer Özmakas and Yavuz Özmakas, Bergama Kaynakçası (Bergama
Bibliography) (Bergama Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları No.12, Izmir: Özgen Ofset, 1993).

Tas-k

n, Sürgündeki Zeus, 51.

extinct city by the German archaeologists, the Iraqi directorate demanded the

monument’s restitution.

The citizens of Bergama, just like the directorate of Iraqi antiquities before the

occupation, grasp that a major violence was done to their heritage by the Berlin State

Museum, without however being able to identify in what way this violence was done,

making a somehow vague claim that architecture had been stolen just like a piece of

sculpture or painting.

Faced with the demands of repatriation, the Berlin Museum, on the other hand, has

assumed a defensive attitude, which invests in maintaining the myth of the

“monument’s” absolute authenticity. A number of books published by the Museum in

the 1990’s celebrate the archaeologists of the Wilhelmine age as the pioneers of modern

science. “Looking behind the historical scenes” these publications often assert in

between the lines that all the original elements of the altar which are on display today

have a secure legal status.

Immersed in the political and legal aspects of these disputes,

Ewen MacAskill, “Iraq appeals to Berlin for Return of Babylon Gate,” The Guardian,

May 4 2002. As I will show in Part 3 on the German reconstruction of Babylon,
MacAskill’s interpretation that “an Entire tower, the Ishtar Gate, was lifted and taken to
a museum in Berlin, where it remains today” is not accurate.

The guide to the Pergamon Museum by Olaf Matthes illustrates this kind of uncritical

literature. Explaining to the visitors why all the monuments of the Pergamon Museum
were taken from the territories of the Ottoman Empire, but not from Greece, another
country rich in antiquities, Matthes writes that “neither the Turkish authorities nor its
people had a historical consciousness of their Greek and Roman past” in the 1870’s:
“...Turkish authorities and the tourists above all may regret that only the grid foundations
are left at Pergamon itself. What, however, would have been the fate of the great altar
and the friezes if the excavators had not rescued them from the hands of the lime

the critics and defendants of the Pergamon Museum do not seem to have reflected on a

basic question: what are these “monuments” that the local administrations seek to

“repatriate”; what are these objects that the museum refuses to “give back”?

Tas-kIn, in his repatriation campaign, seeks to remedy the symbolic violence the Berlin

Museum inflicted on Bergama by returning the original work of architecture to its

authentic “place.” I intend to show, on the other hand, that both the aura of the “original”

and the authenticity of the lost “place”—a variant of the museum notion of context—are

the fabrications of the museum in the first place. True, there were a number of fragments

of a Hellenistic relief built into a Byzantine wall in Bergama’s citadel in 1878. The

fascinating success of the Berlin Museum is not in restoring an original architectural

monument “as it really was,” but in creating an audience that is disposed to appreciate

the original, while yearning for the lost context. The archaeologist who laments the

displacement of the “monuments” into the museum, which “spared” the masterpiece

from a “certain destruction” and imprisoned it in the gallery—no match to “the

Mediterranean skies”—is not only disingenuous, but also, knowingly or unknowingly,

justifies the German cultural hegemony as a painful and yet necessary exercise. The

politician of Bergama who feels victimized by German cultural imperialism,

nevertheless remains faithful to the German cult of authenticity. A history of the

Pergamene reconstruction in Berlin shows, however, that the “monument” has no

burners? It may indeed be doubted that the Gigantomachia would still exist as it does
today if Humann, in his time, had not so energetically opposed the current practice of
destroying antique marbles in Turkey.” The Pergamon Museum (Berlin: Berlin Edition,
1998),15-16.

“home” to go back to, and not because, as the museum argues, it was legally “acquired.”

Even though the condition of architecture-in-the-museum is one of permanent ‘exile’,

there is no ‘home’ to which the “monument” could return.

1.4. On the Historical Method

A number of histories have departed from the characteristically obsequious chronicles of

German archaeology to put into question the political and ideological aspects of

archaeology and museum displays during the Kaiserreich. To cite only a few examples:

Silke Wenk’s short biography of Theodor Wiegand presents the archaeologist less as an

infallible pioneer of the new discipline than an impresario of reactionary official culture

and a master of political intrigue, focusing on the ease with which Wiegand served the

authoritarian regimes.

Published immediately before the German reunification,

Thomas Gaehtgen’s history of Berlin’s Museum Island underscores the connections

between the history of the collections and the Kunst- and Kulturpolitik of the Wilhelmine

Empire.

An article by Nikolaus and Nadine Riedl explores the relation between the

Pergamon Museum and the official architecture of Germany, and

concludes—interestingly, though perhaps hastily—that the presentation of ancient

architecture in the museum helped re-classicize the German official architecture: the

authors find the echoes of Messel’s museum in the work of two generations of

“conservative-modern” architects from Peter Behrens to Albert Speer.

Silke Wenk, Auf den spuren der Antike: Theodor Wiegand, ein deutscher Archäologe

(Bendorf: Stadtverwaltung Bendorf / Rhein, 1985).

Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel im Deutschen Kaiserreich: Zur

Kulturpolitk der Museen in der wilhelminischen Epoche (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag,
1987). See also Gaehtgens, "The Museum Island in Berlin," in Gwendolyn Wright ed.,
The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology (Washington, D.C.:
National Gallery of Art, 1996), 53-77.

Nikolaus Bernau and Nadine Riedl, "Für Kaiser und Reich: Die Antikenabteilung im

Pergamonmuseum," in Alexis Joahimides et al. eds., Museumsinszenierungen: Zur

Suzanne L. Marchand’s monumental history, Down From Olympus, offers not only a

survey of German philhellenism and archaeology from the 18

to the 20

centuries—a

history of ideas, institutions and discourses—but also sheds light on relatively little

known aspects of the German engagement in the Near East prior to World War I.

Though Marchand does not intend a history of the Berlin Museums, much less an

architectural analysis, she offers a foundation upon which such analyses could be based:

first by showing how the gradual decline of the German philhellenic humanism was

paralleled, on the one hand, by the rise of cultural relativism—the German particularism

stemmed from a form of cultural relativism—and, on the other hand, by the undeclared

colonial ambitions of the Wilhelmine Empire.

She convincingly argues that the

Prussian pioneers of the grand-scale excavations were not merely in the service of a

“disinterested” science, but provided the infrastructure for a subsequently aborted effort

to colonize the Levant.

In the light of Marchand’s history, I study on the following pages the celebrated

“monuments” of the Pergamon Museum—all of which originated from the territories of

an ailing Ottoman Empire—as the glorious symbols of a future colonial empire that

never fully materialized. I hope my contribution to this debate will consist in

Geschichte der Institution des Kunstmuseums. Die Berliner Museumslandschaft 1830-
1990 (Dresden and Basel: Verlag der Kunst, 1995), 171-189.

Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in

Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1996) (hereafter cited
as Down From Olympus).

establishing the Pergamon Museum not only as a cultural product of the colonial

daydreams of the Wilhelmine Reich, but also as the most significant manifestation of a

recurrent problem in history, as Western empires sought to represent their own

hegemony by appropriating the “monuments” of others—either in a historic or

geographic sense.

By focusing on the philosophical and technical aspects of Pergamon’s museum

displays—i.e. by asking questions such as where does the original monument start,

where does its modern frame end; that is by posing the problem of architecture in

architecture—I do not mean to overlook the political and ideological dimensions that

have been explored by Marchand, Wenk, Gaehtgens and others. Nor do I intend to

underplay the serious political ramifications of my challenging of the myth of the

monument’s absolute authenticity. Quite on the contrary, I intend to show that the

museum restitution of an architectural object—whether it seeks to recover the original

experience of the ancients who had built it, or the ideal conditions of viewing a work of

art by re-contextualizing it in the museum—is an intrinsically ideological exercise.

In Part 2, “The Architecture of an Imperial Museum in Berlin: Art and Kultur,” I begin

by exploring the vocation of the art museum in Berlin from Schinkel’s day in the 1820’s,

when the institution served the bourgeois ideal of humanistic Bildung, to an increasingly

étatist representation of world-history in the 1850’s, and finally to its servitude to the

Kulturpolitik of an expansionist Kaiserreich. Focusing on Alfred Messel and Wilhelm

von Bode’s project of the Royal Museum of 1907—today’s Pergamon Museum—I

investigate how the fin de siècle narratives of art and culture were translated into an

actual architecture: the ordering of the collections of artistic and cultural objects on the

museum’s plans. Hence the Royal Museum became a microcosm where the world’s

cultures were mapped. I argue that what are commonly seen as antique “monuments”

today were initially conceived as the interior furnishings of “style-rooms”: Bode’s aim

was to remedy the displacement of art in the museum by constructing in the gallery a

semblance of the architectural context for which the works of art—sculpture and

painting—had been originally intended. Had this plan been carried out, the museum

would have consisted of a series of Hellenistic, Gothic, and Baroque rooms, each

presenting a dichotomy of works of art and architectural contexts.

In Part 3, “The Altar and Its Frames: Reconstructing Pergamon,” I study the historical

process between 1907 and 1930 through which Messel and Bode’s “style rooms” were

transformed into the “monuments” of antiquity, just as the museum was redefined as a

“museum of ancient architecture.” I am particularly interested in underlining the paradox

of this process, which both reproduced and authenticated the “monuments”: architecture-

inside-architecture became both an autonomous work of art, an object of pure

contemplation, and a sublime interior, which is designed to awe and entertain the

masses.

In pursuing the history of archaeological reconstructions in the museum, I have not

found it always necessary to assume a single authorial voice: the reader will find inter-

textual “readings” of historical documents, as well as descriptions of the museum’s

objects in the present. This duality is perhaps most apparent in my discussion of the

Pergamon Room (Pergamonsaal), which starts with a lengthy description of the

“experience” of the interior from the position of an impersonal third person singular. In

doing so my aim is not to go back to Kant’s “judgment” by an “impersonal mind,” nor to

take for granted Wilhelm Dilthey’s psychological / intuitive “experience” (Erlebnis).

Having revealed the “reality effects” of the Pergamon Room from the position of an

imaginary observer (who replaces me as the author), the chapter goes on to provide an

analysis of the art historical and aesthetic discourse concerning the modern presentation

of antique sculpture in the museum.

An overarching concept in this dissertation is a critique of organicism in 20

century

German architecture and intellectual culture. This critique comes to the foreground in

Part 4, “Architectural Reproduction: Reconstructing Babylon,” which is dedicated to the

curious reproduction / fabrication of Babylonian antiquities in the South Wing of the

Pergamon Museum. Starting from Walter Andrae’s “production” of the Lion of

Babylon—as the Babylonians would have produced it—I investigate the theories of the

symbol in Andrae’s writing of the “origins” of art and architecture. I attempt to show

how the late 19

century idea of “Gesamtkunstwerk”—the community of the arts—was

transformed, by 1930, into a full-fledged esoteric tradition that sought to recover the

“organic” architecture that transcends human reason, influencing the writings and

For Wilhelm Dilthey’s neologism “experience” (Erlebnis) defined in contradistinction

to experience as knowledge (Erfahrung) see Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing,
Goethe, Novelis, Hölderlin (Leipzig: Verlag B. G. Teubner, 1916).

museum practices by the protagonists who sought to reverse man’s “alienation” from the

“original language.”

* * *

From a methodological point of view, I undertake in this dissertation two distinct

projects. On the one hand, I intend to write history as a means of demystification by

exposing the ideological underpinnings of the process through which the museum’s

object has become a self-enclosed and aesthetically autonomous “work of art.” I argue

that, even though initially hypothetical, the reconstituted “monuments” gained autonomy

from the discursive field in which they had found their form, and through the assumption

of aesthetic distance and modern spectatorship, have come to replace the lost antique

originals instead of representing them: full-scale models of the Altar of Pergamon, the

Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the Market Gate of Miletus came to be seen as antique originals

themselves.

On the other hand, informed by hermeneutic theory, I argue that, although not antique

originals, the architectural objects in the museum are elevated into the category of the

“work of art.” And this is not so much because they embody an “essence,” an “origin,” a

timeless interior, but since throughout its afterlife in the museum the object gained

autonomy from both the intentions of the builders and the ideology of the restorers and

became a work that reflects as much modern “taste” as the antique one.

In focusing on an object, the Pergamon Museum, that has been excluded from

developmental histories of modern art and architecture, I am nevertheless interested in

establishing the museum’s radical modernity: its embeddedness in the modern German

intellectual, socio-cultural history and the phenomenon of mass culture. I am

particularly interested in knowing, in other words, why these “monuments” of

Hellenistic Greece and Babylon could not have found their specific form anywhere other

than Germany and at the turn of the last century: why the specific intersections between

the objects and discourses could not have happened anywhere else.

To underline the contingency of the objects and occurrences, however, does not

necessarily mean to adhere to a neo-historicist position: it is not to ask whether these

occurrences are paradigmatic or symptomatic of a historic trajectory. Instead, following

the example of Eric Michaud, I seek to call into question metaphors in the architectural

and aesthetic discourse many of which have been recurrent in different forms since the

century.

By the same token, many of these problems have maintained their

actuality. To sum up, while I interrogate in this dissertation a particular museum in

Berlin, I raise issues that find particular resonance today: the problems of authenticity,

reproducibility and autonomy of architecture as an object of art.

I am grateful to Benjamin Buchloh for recommending Eric Michaud’s compelling

study of art under National Socialism, Un Art de l’Eternité: l’image et le temps du
national-socialisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

Part 2

_______________________________________________________________________

The Architecture of an Imperial Museum in Berlin: Art and Kultur

2. 1. Alfred Messel’s Project for the Royal Prussian Museum, c. 1907

The liberal reforms after the Napoleonic wars created, in the European capitals,

symbolic centers where the values of the emerging bourgeoisie and a new civic order,

were celebrated. Nowhere did the idea of representing in architecture a new civic order

seem initially more promising, and yet suffer a more tragic defeat than in Berlin’s

Museum Island.

Formerly known as the Spree Island, this narrow peninsula between the

banks of the Spree and the Kupfergraben rivers witnessed for nearly a century the

reformers’ aspiration to build an ideal community of artists and philosophers in the midst

of the Prussian garrison town, whose historical archetype they found in the Greek polis.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) conceived Berlin’s first museum on the southern

end of the Spree Island in 1822: a Neo-Greek temple, its row of Ionic columns facing the

Royal Palace across the Lustgarten.

The museum promised to transform Berlin into an

“Athens-on-the-Spree,” which symbolized not so much the might of the Prussian state,

as its commitment to educate the public in the paradigms of civic virtue and high

morality.

One could perhaps compare the “Gesamtkunstwerk” of Berlin’s Museum Island—its

symbolic and civic program—to Vienna’s Ringstrasse, although the latter was
constructed only after the 1840’s. For an analysis of the the Viennese museum district
see Carl Schorske, “Museum in Contested Space: the Sword, the Scepter, and the Ring,”
in Thinking with History (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 105-124.

Approved by the Prussian monarch Frederich Wilhelm III, Schinkel’s museum (today’s

Altes or “Old” Museum) was opened to the public in 1830.

The political reaction that prevailed in the following decades transformed the Museum

Island instead into a mirror of the pedantic taxonomies and cultural politics of the

Prussian state. As the holdings of the Royal Museum expanded to encompass the works

of a variety of civilizations, ancient and modern, a number of museums were built on the

Spree Island, each of which housed different collections of art. The way the collections

were classified, ordered and displayed in the museum revealed two competing

paradigms throughout the 19

century: while a broad coalition of classical philologists,

art historians and advocates of public education continued to privilege Greek sculpture

and Renaissance painting as paradigmatic of timeless virtue and morality, and therefore

essential for German education, 19

century historicism conceived of the history of

civilization as a linear trajectory driven by continuous progress. The very idea that

collections of art should be organized historically, and not based on a timeless aesthetic

hierarchy, posed a challenge to the Neoclassical, humanist tradition.

After the political unification of Germany in 1871, the architectural program of the

Royal Museum in Berlin was no longer seen as analogous to the history of the mind. Nor

did the architecture of the museum—that is, both the style of the building and the

program through which the collections of art were organized inside—remain a potent

symbol of a civic or historical order. Instead, the fin de siècle museum in Berlin was

housed in an eclectic, Neo-baroque palace (i.e. the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, today’s

Bode Museum). The arbitrary citations of architectural styles on the museum’s facades,

coupled with a chronological presentation of the period-styles in its interiors, reinforced

the disjunction between the container and the contents of the museum. Hence the late

century museum presented a contradiction: while historicism led to the conviction

that the art of each epoch presents a historical style that is retrospectively discernible in

the installation of the collection in the interior—the “style rooms”—the eclecticism of

the facades made clear there was no longer a ruling style in the present.

It is in response to the precarious terrain of the Prussian museums, caught between the

crises of German classical humanism and of 19

century historicism, that the last project

for the extension of the Prussian Royal Museum took shape. Conceived by two

prominent figures of Wilhelmine Germany, the architect Alfred Messel (1853-1909)

and the art historian Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929),

the project of the new Royal

I find it useful to differentiate between historicism and eclecticism, which are often

used interchangeably in architectural discourse to refer to the citation of historical styles
in contemporary architecture. Here, I use historicism to refer to the 19

century doctrine

that all phenomena, including art and architecture are determined by the trajectory of
history: an interpretive model that translates the Hegelian historical determinism into art
and architecture. Eclecticism, on the other hand, as Alan Colquhoun notes, originally
refers to the belief that the historical styles are “emblems of the ideas associated with the
cultures that produced them.” I seek to show on the following pages how the association
between style and culture had become arbitrary by the end of the 19

century. Hence my

use of eclectic, in reference to the fin-de-siècle museum simply means the use of styles
as arbitrary signs. See Colquhoun “Three Kinds of Historicism,” in Modernity and the
Classical Tradition, 3-19.

Alfred Messel, architect, best known for his design of the Wertheim Department Store

of 1904 in Berlin. Though Messel was presented in histories of modern architecture as a
pioneer of the Modern Movement avant la lettre —i.e. Barbara Miller, Architecture and
Politics in Germany 1918-1945 (Cambridge Ma.: Harvard University Press,
1968)—Walter Curt Behrendt’s 1911 biography remains the most comprehensive source
up until today. See also Alfred Messel 2 vols. (Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1905-11). For an
analysis of Messel’s concept of interior space see Julius Posener. Berlin auf dem Wege
zu einer Neuen Architektur (Munich: Prestel, 1979), esp. 454-58.

Wilhelm von Bode, art historian and museum curator, became Assistant Director of

Altes Museum in 1872, director of Department of Christian Sculpture in 1883, and
director of Berlin’s Painting Gallery in 1890. Bode was appointed the General Director

Museum attempted to combine the distinct buildings and collections of the Spree Island

into a single museum complex, while at the same time projecting a unified architectural

image to the new German capital.

Seeking to interpret Messel’s project of 1907—today’s Pergamon Museum—I shall

explore in the following pages the connections, if any, between the representations of the

emerging German Empire and the architectural language and program of the museum.

That the Kaiserreich commissioned a monumental museum in its capital to display

works it had acquired from its interests overseas—thanks to state sponsored

archaeological excavations, ethnological expeditions and museum purchases—presents a

particularly difficult problem for the historians of modern Germany. It has been

suggested that the Museum Island is “the particular result of Prussian and German

Kunst- and Kulturpolitik,” just as the recent research has shown that the Pergamon

Museum was fueled by Wilhelmine Germany’s Weltpolitik, more specifically by its

colonial ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, the territories of

the Ottoman Empire.

And yet it is also established that the colonial ambitions of the

German Reich in the late 19

century, unlike that of other European empires, was

of the Prussian Royal (later State) Museums in 1906 and held this position until 1920.
Bode, whose ideas influenced museum displays in Germany, the United Kingdom and
the United States, remains to this day one of the most studied museum curators. For
Bode’s role in shaping the Kultur- and Kunstpolitik of the Kaiserreich see Gaethgens
Die Berliner Museumsinsel, 11-65; for recent interpretations of Bode’s museum displays
in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum see the special issue of Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen,
38 (1996). For a detailed biography see Manfred Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, Zwischen
Kaisermacht und Kunsttempel, Biographie (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1995) hereafter
cited as Wilhelm von Bode.

See Gaethgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel; Marchand, Down From Olympus.

not—could not be legitimized with a discourse of normative, universal civilization.

There was neither an equivalent of a self-righteous “mission civilisatrice,” nor a self-

congratulatory “white man’s burden” in the German Reich prior to the Great War. Hence

Bode and Messel’s project seems to present an impasse: even though an imperial

museum typically entails a representation of the history of the universal civilization—in

contrast to the more modest bürgerlich values of the 19

century German museum—its

patrons tended to see the Kaiserreich more as an embodiment of a peculiar Kultur than

the effectuator of the universal Zivilisation.

Hence the questions emerge of what was the vocation of an imperial museum in Berlin;

how did the architecture of the museum represent the totality of human experience in art,

history and culture? How did Messel and Bode translate the narratives of history and

anthropology into the actual organization of things in architectural space, and for which

political ends? Exploring the decline of the German humanistic Bildung (education of

the urban middle classes), on the one hand, and the crisis of historicism around the

1890’s on the other, I shall attempt to understand how the colonial ambitions of the

Wilhelmine Empire were reconciled in the museum with the peculiarism of the German

Kultur.

* * *

About “Kultur” and Germany’s manifest destiny see Stern, The Politics of Cultural

Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1963), esp. 150-52 (hereafter cited as Cultural Despair). See also Louis
Dumont, German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (Chicago: University of
Chicago Presss, 1994).

Appointed the General Director of the Prussian Royal Museum in 1906, Bode designed

the museum’s program, rallied political support and secured funding. According to the

guidelines Bode presented to the Prussian Parliament in February 1907, the new

complex consisted of three distinct museums: an extension for the Antiquity Museum,

the “Near Eastern (Vorderasiatisches) Art Museum” and, finally, the “Ancient German

Art Museum.”

To draw the distinction between “Antique” and “Near Eastern” departments inevitably

required a number of assumptions on the part of a new generation of museum

administrators, in the absence of clear geographic or historical boundaries. For instance,

the Near East would come to include the Hittites, a civilization newly discovered by the

German archaeologists operating in central Turkey. The Hellenistic and Roman works

from Turkey and Syria were, however, “Antique.” The boundary between Antique and

Near Eastern “art” was, perhaps, self evident in the sense that it stemmed from a

division, which goes back to the 18

century in the classical and Oriental philology in

German academia,. While classical philologists studied Greece and Rome, the German

Orientalistik explored the origins of the Indo-European languages and religions.

For Bode’s vision about the extension of the Royal Museum see Bode, “Denkschrift

Erweiterungs- und Neubauten bei den königlichen Museen in Berlin” February 1907,
reprinted in Bode Mein Leben, Bd. 2 (Berlin: Verlag Hermann Reckendorf, 1930), 239-
248; see also Bode, “Alfred Messels Pläne für die Neubauten der Königlichen Museen,”
in Jahrbuch der Königlich Preußischen Kunstsammlungen 31, Berlin (1910): 59-63,
reprinted in Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte München ed., Berlins Museen:
Geschichte und Zukunft (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994), 244-46. See also Bode,
Mein Leben, Bd. 2, 182 –92.

“Semitic” languages, Assyriology and Biblical archaeology were also considered in the

domain of the Orientalistik. After 1898, the newly founded German Orient Society

(Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft—DOG) explored the ancient civilizations of

Mesopotamia, while the German Archaeology Institute (Deutsches Archäologisches

Institut—DAI) focused on the Hellenistic and Roman periods in the Eastern

Mediterranean.

Although the Near Eastern Museum responded to a practical necessity

of displaying the Mesopotamian finds—several decades after the Assyrian exhibits in

London and Paris—it was, nevertheless, significant within the German context: by

allocating the Mesopotamian finds to a “Museum of Near Eastern Art” Bode departed

decisively from the philological roots of the German Orientalistik: Mesopotamia offers

not solely a repository of archaic texts of interest to the students of the Old Testament,

but also “works of art.”

The “Museum of Ancient German Art,” on the other hand, was a radical departure from

the 19

century conception that allocated the material culture of the Germanic peoples

either to ethnology (Völkerkunde) or the local heritage museums. Initially, Bode

conceived this museum as an extension of German and Dutch art collections from the

medieval, renaissance and the baroque ages in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum—today’s

For a history of the German discipline of Orientalistik and its distinction from German

philhellenic humanism see Marchand, Down From Olympus, esp. ch. 5 and 6; see also
Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case
of Josef Strzygowski,” in Anthony Grafton and Suzanne L. Marchand eds., “Proof and
Persuasion in History,” History and Theory 33 (1994): 107-130. For a history of the
excavations of the German-Orient Society (DOG) see Gernot Wilhelm ed., Zwischen
Tigris und Nil: 100 Jahre Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft in
Vorderasien und Ägypten (Mainz am Rhein, Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998).

Bode museum—which opened to the public two years earlier on the north end of the

Museum Island. Yet, in addition to the art of the German speaking peoples of the

Christian era, Bode also included in the museum “the art of the Germans from the stone

age to the migration of peoples.”

The annexation of what Bode called “the primitive art

of the Germanic tribes” had portentous implications in its emphasis on the mythic

common roots of the “Germans” (including all the Nordic races) before they figured in

the Roman histories. One potential result of such a museum—as I shall touch upon

later—was a polemical appropriation of the Dutch and Flemish masters. Furthermore,

seeking to combine works of art with pre-historic or vernacular artifacts, Bode

deliberately fused the contents of the traditional art museum with those of the more

recent prehistory, ethnology (Völkerkunde) and applied arts (Kunstgewerbe) museums.

Ranging from the “art” of the hunter and gatherer ancestors to the paintings of

Rembrandt, the Museum of Ancient German Art conveniently captured the nationalist

fervor of Germany under Wilhelm II. It seems, though, more as a result of Bode’s

personal interests and convictions that the museum would focus on the art of the

Renaissance and the Baroque periods in Germany and the Netherlands. Bode apparently

did not think of modern art as much of an achievement for the “Germans” at the turn of

the century: apart from a few 18

century works that glorified the ruling dynasty in the

Kaiser Friedrich Museum no modern art was included in the new complex.

* * *

Bode, “Alfred Messels Pläne,” 246.

Just as Bode’s inclusion of cultures outside the canon of Western art history involved

some political risks, so did his choice of architect to carry out this program. Messel had

limited experience in official commissions: with the exception of a recent design for the

museum in his native Darmstadt, he was known primarily for his private and commercial

projects commissioned by an emerging class of nouveau-riche, German entrepreneurs

and businessmen. Furthermore, his innovative design for the Wertheim Department store

in Berlin, for which he is renowned today, had earned him the suspicion of Kaiser

Wilhelm II. The Kaiser, a self-assured conservative who fancied himself as the patron of

the arts and an amateur archaeologist, suspected Messel to be “hyper-modern,” and

therefore unfit for the royal commission.

Bode’s insistence in appointing Messel as the

architect of the Royal Museum may suggest that as early as 1906 the museum curator

favored a stylistic departure within the “official architecture” of imperial Germany: a

type of eclecticism with a mix of Nordic vernacular, Renaissance and Baroque elements

executed in monumental scale.

It is more likely, however, that Bode was more

impressed with Messel’s skills as an interior decorator than his potential as a

revolutionary architect. He admired the house Messel had designed for Eduard Simon in

Berlin, particularly Messel’s ability to connect the architectural style of a high-bourgeois

interior with the objects of a private art collection. Bode must also have been well aware

of the Grossherzogliches Museum in Darmstadt, where the architect successfully

Bode, Mein Leben, 2: 182–92; see also Volker Viergutz, “Berliner Museumskrieg: ein

unveröfentlichtes Kapitel der Lebenserinnerungen Ludwig Hoffmanns” in Jürgen Wetzel
ed. Berlin Geschichte und Gegenwart: Jahrbuch des Landesarchivs Berlin (Berlin:
Landesarchiv, 1993), 85 (hereafter cited as “Berliner Museumskrieg”).

Cf. Bernau and Riedl, "Für Kaiser und Reich,” 171-89.

accommodated a difficult program (to exhibit objects as varied as paintings, sculpture,

historical weapons and natural history collections). Messel designed a “clustered

building” [“gruppirtes Gebäude”] in Darmstadt, which was shaped by the specific needs

of each collection in lieu of imposing a rigid architectural form from outside.

In addition to a difficult architectural program, Messel faced in Berlin a complex urban

setting. The existing museums of the Spree Island—Schinkel’s Altes Museum, Stüler’s

Neues Museum (compl. 1855), Johann Heinrich Strack’s National Gallery (1876), and

the recently completed Kaiser Friedrich Museum (1904) by Ernst von Ihne—had been

built, though not haphazardly, with conflicting urban plans.

It suffices to contrast

Stüler’s plans for the Spree Island with the project by August Orth, the chief architect of

In his analysis of Messel’s Darmstadt museum James J. Sheehan writes: “The key to

the building’s interior design, therefore, is in its relationship to the various sorts of
objects it was meant to contain: painting, sculpture, antiquities, weapons and other
historical objects, and a natural history collection as well. To meet the different
requirements of these exhibits Messel designed a ‘clustered building,’ with spaces
appropriate for various sorts of displays.” Museums in the German Art World: From the
End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 174 (hereafter cited as Museums in the German Art World); see also Das
Darmstädter Landesmuseum von Alfred Messel: Skizzen, Entwürfe, Fotografien, 1891-
1906, exhibition catalog (Darnstadt: Hessisches Landesmuseum, 1986).

For the history of the buildings of the Museum Island see Wilhelm von Waetzoldt,

“Die Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin 1830-1930,” Jahrbuch der Preuszischen
Kunstsammlungen 51 (1930): 25-204. Stephan Waetzoldt, “Bauten der Museumsinsel”
in Wilmuth Arenhövel ed., Berlin und die Antike, exhibition catalog (Berlin: Deutsches
Archäologisches Institut, 1979), 361-74; Renate Petras, Die Bauten der Berliner
Museumsinsel (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1987); Stephan Waetzoldt, “Pläne und
Wettbewerbe für Bauten auf der Berliner Museumsinsel 1873 bis 1896,” Jahrbuch der
Berliner Museen 35, Beiheft (1993): 7-184; Berlins Museen: Geschichte und Zukunft
(Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994).

the City of Berlin in 1875, to understand how radically the late 19

century planning

departed from the idea of the Greek acropolis.

Located on a narrow peninsula tightly surrounded by Berlin’s historic Mitte and

Neuköln, the Museum Island was not easily accessible from the main arteries of the

city.

Schinkel dedicated the Spree Island behind the museum to the customhouses and

storage facilities alongside the Kupfergraben in his masterplan. Yet, the perspective

opening onto the Spree to the North, and the wide urban plaza in front of the Royal

Palace including Schinkel’s Lustgarten to the South made the Spree Island a highly

visible urban site. Stüler took advantage of this relative isolation and visibility to

transform the Spree Island into a “sanctuary of arts and sciences.” The overall image

Stüler intended to display along the Spree was less a Greek acropolis than a Roman

“forum.” Yet, unlike the Roman precedent this urban plaza was not woven into Berlin’s

dense urban fabric and, instead, revealed carefully calculated vistas through the gardens,

stairways, sculpture, and the neo-Roman temple fronts.

The 1875 project by Orth, in contrast, redesigned the Museum Island as the center of a

bursting metropolis. From 1871 to 1875, Orth designed Berlin’s municipal railway

system (S-Bahn). Although the circumstances in which a major train line came to cross

the Museum Island through the middle are not exactly clear—it was not included in the

Bode mentions the inaccessibility of the Museum Island as one of the major problems

of Berlin’s Museum district, “Alfred Messel’s Pläne.”

See S. Waetzoldt’s entries in the exhibition catalog, “Bauten der Museumsinsel,” 364-

66; see also S, Waetzoldt, “Pläne und Wettbewerbe” 7-184.

initial commission, but Orth later took full responsibility for it—Orth seems to have seen

the S-Bahn as an opportunity to connect the Museum Island with the rest of Berlin. In a

sharp departure from the idea of the “sanctuary of the arts,” a retreat from the city, Orth

conceived of the Spree Island as a sort of node for public transportation.

His plan of

1875 also reflected this vision: the entire Museum Island was developed into a gigantic

urban block. Orth integrated the detached museums by Schinkel and Stüler, as well as

the National Gallery by Stark into a single complex, to such an extent that the space

between the museums would be read not so much as a ground but as light-wells. The

visitors’ circulation and the mass transit were solved on different levels: the S-Bahn

trains, for instance, crossed the Spree and the Kupfergraben with two bridges and

entered into a long tunnel inside the Museum Island’s unified urban block. The two

facades of the gigantic urban block against the Spree and the Kupfergarben were dressed

conveniently in “baroque” attire, which Orth must have borrowed from 17

century

Rome.

Orth’s legacy in the Museum Island is not only the—much criticized—S-Bahn that

crosses the island from West to East on a long, elevated viaduct, but also a new urban

vision: a bustling metropolis in the making. In fact the subsequent projects for the

Museum Island prior to 1907 combined in essence Stüler’s idyllic “sanctuary” and

Orth’s urban block. For instance, in 1882 the Order of Architects and Engineers of

Berlin (Berliner Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein) organized the “Schinkel

S. Waetzoldt “Bauten der Museumsinsel,” 364; Petras, Bauten der Berliner

Museumsinsel, 96-98.

Competition” for the extension of the Museum Island: the winning project by Ludwig

Hoffmann, a close friend of Messel from Darmstadt and the future chief architect of

Berlin, is, to my mind, a return to Stüler’s idea, only re-clothed in “late antique” style.

Messel was to participate in a second architectural competition for the extension of the

Museum Island, which was organized by the Ministry of Culture in 1883—though

without success. The ministry invited German architects to design two new

museums—the antiquity and the Renaissance museum—while it left to the participants

the decision of designing either a single building or a complex of several. The

participants were required to reintegrate the North and South of the Museum Island,

which had been divided by the S-Bahn, as well as providing “a dignified monumental

character, with a simple [design] that refrains from unnecessary ornamentation.”

April 1884, fifty-two projects were submitted, including projects by Messel, Fritz Wolff

and Ludwig Hoffmann. Although none of the projects was implemented—Bode later

wrote in his memoirs that the competition brought no satisfactory solution—the ideas

that emerged from this competition would later lead to Ihne’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum

(the Renaissance Museum) and Wolff’s so-called interim Pergamon Museum.

Messel’s entry in this competition, which he presented with the motto “Hellas and

Rome,” sought a synthesis between Stüler’s forum and Orth’s unified urban block. He

S. Waetzoldt, “Bauten der Museumsinsel,” 362; Petras, Bauten der Berliner

Museumsinsel, 99.

Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, 120.

designed the Antiquity Museum across a large processional court facing the

Kupfergraben, while the Renaissance Museum found its place under a Roman Baroque

dome, similar to Orth’s project of 1875. The Antiquity Museum, a large vaulted

building, would house a reconstruction of the Great Altar of Pergamon. Differentiating

this building from the rest of the complex, Messel created a hermetic interior, which is

almost completely closed to the outside. Unlike Orth, Messel did not build the entire

museum island into a unified urban block: the detached museums are instead connected

to one another through bridges. However, his architecture is unmistakably baroque—I

use this term here not so much to refer to Messel’s stylistic preference, as his peculiar

treatment of spaces. In Messel’s project we find neither the picturesque transparency

(Anschaulichkeit) of Schinkel’s Neo-Greek temple in front of the Lustgarten, nor the

idyllic vistas of Stüler’s forum.

Messel sculpts the void between the solid masses as if

the space is a tectonic matter: both the urban court opening to the Kupfergraben and the

interior of the Antiquity (Pergamon) Museum seem to be created by carving or emptying

out solid shapes.

For an analysis of Schinkel’s “Anschaulichkeit” see Steven Moyano, “Quality vs.

History: Schinkel’s Altes Museum and Prussian Arts Policy,” The Art Bulletin volume
LXXII number 4 (December 1990): 601. Moyano shows how Schinkel associated
“structural clarity with Classical Greek architecture, and, indirectly, with the prestige of
Classical education [Bildung].”

Julius Posener contrasts Messel’s interior (Lichthof) of the Wertheim (1904) in Berlin

with the interiors of 19

century Parisian department stores such as Henri Blondel’s La

Belle Jardinière (1863) and Boileau and Gustave Eiffel’s Le Printemps (1876). He
concludes that the Parisian department stores are “system-spaces” (Systemräume), where
the light well serves the floors around it. Messel’s space on the other hand, is “an
independent work of art.” Unlike the French precedent Messel conceived of the “Raum”
as an object of “Gestaltung.” If the space of the French department store is
“transparent,” that of Wertheim is opaque. Posener, 453-58.

Revisiting the problem of the Museum Island nearly three decades later, Messel worked

from February to October 1907 on a number of sketches, which entertained the idea of

housing the new Antiquity, Near Eastern and German Museums in detached buildings,

each of which expresses the distinct “theme” of the collection it houses. It seemed at

first impossible, as Messel admitted to Bode, to provide enough room in the Museum

Island for the new collections, while connecting the existing buildings into a consistent

whole.

Departing from the idea of detached museums for each collection, Messel

designed in July 1907 a gigantic structure that combined all three museums.

organized three curatorial departments into a U-shaped complex around a large court,

which, as in his competition project of 1884, opened to the Kupfergraben. The Near

Eastern, the Antiquity and the German Museums were placed on the South, East and

North wings of the complex respectively. A less pronounced, one-storey wing for the

Egyptian antiquities extended from the Near Eastern Department to the south, filling the

narrow strip of land between the Neues Museum and the Kupfergraben. While Messel

placed his complex carefully between the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the Neues

Museum, he proposed to demolish and replace Fritz Wolff’s Pergamon Museum, which

was built between 1897 and 1899, and which contained a full reconstruction of the Great

Altar.

Messel’s complex was perhaps the most monumental, if not the most expensive

Bode, “Alfred Messels Pläne.” 244.

Viergutz, “Berliner Museumskrieg…,” 85.

The first Pergamon Museum by Wolff—now called the “interim building” in

literature—was demolished only a few years after its completion, in order to open room
for Messel’s new museum. See the discussion of Wolff’s museum in Part 3.

building in Berlin to that date, not least because it was placed partly on unstable ground

that was unfit for any permanent construction: shortly after the foundations were laid in

1909, they started to sink into the river basin, making the construction of the museum a

true engineering challenge.

An analysis of Messel’s drawings—now available in lithographs—shows the new Royal

Museum as a series of style-rooms, each of them furnished with archaeological

fragments, plaster casts and decorative elements.

Works of art from a given historical

period would be displayed together with architectural and decorative elements of that

period in order to approximate the effect of the works in their original context. Had the

project been carried out according to Messel’s design, a visitor to Berlin’s Museum

Island would have experienced art in its distant origins in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the

Southern part of the complex. Approaching from the Egyptian galleries, a visitor would

have entered the Near Eastern Museum on the South wing where the antiquities of

“South Arabia,” “Asia Minor” and “Syria” were exhibited on two floors respectively.

Messel completed two stages of the project prior to his untimely death in 1909. The

first stage of August 22, 1907 included a site plan, plans of the two main exhibition
floors and major sections and elevations, which were published by Bode in 1910,
alongside the perspective renderings of the museum both from inside and outside. The
second stage of the project of October 30, 1907 illustrates that Messel designed the
interiors of the Antiquity and the German Museums in detail, while he left the Near
Eastern and Egyptian museums for a later stage. See Alfred Messel, “Projekt für den
Ausbau der Museumsinsel,” Berlin August 22, 1907: Plans of the first and second main
exhibition floors, reduced in Bogdan Gisevius’s lithographs into 1/1500 scale. A more
detailed project of October 30, 1907 consists of a site plan, two main elevations from the
Kufergraben and from the Spree in 1/3000 and floor plans in 1/1200 scale. Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz Zentralarchiv, Bauverwaltung der
Königlichen Museen, “Baudokumentation,” I/BV 494 (hereafter cited as SMzB PK
Zentralarchiv).

Even though the Antiquity and the Near Eastern Museums were distinct from curatorial

and administrative points of view, Messel seamlessly combined them in the South wing,

perhaps to underline the cultural and historical connections between the Ancient Orient

and classical Greece. Approaching from the Near Eastern Museum, the visitor would

first encounter a reconstruction of the temple of Olympia in a two-storey gallery linked

by a staircase inside. Due to a well-enforced antiquities law in 19

century Greece, the

Prussian Museum acquired no originals from Olympia, the first excavation site of the

German Archaeology Institute. The Olympia room featured instead copies—plaster

casts—of architectural and sculptural elements, particularly of the sculptural relief from

the pediment. A bridge connected the second floor of the Olympia room directly to the

plaster cast collection on the second floor of the Neues Museum.

The overwhelming majority of the works in the Antiquity Collection originated from the

excavations in Western Turkey. In contrast to the Greek regulations, a more permissive

antiquities law in the Ottoman Empire in the 1870’s allowed the Prussian Royal

Museums to acquire originals from the German excavations of Pergamon: the

Gigantomachy frieze from the 2

century BC became the most celebrated holding of the

museum. Even though the Ottoman law was modified in the 1880’s to ban all exports of

antiquities, it fell short of restricting the ambitions of the Prussian archaeologists. The

German Reich exercised direct political pressure on the Sublime Porte, sidelining the

Ibid.

Ottoman cultural bureaucracy and the Imperial Museum in Istanbul.

Hence originals

from Priene, Milet and Didyma on Turkey’s Ionian coast continued to reach Berlin.

Messel organized not only the Antiquity Museum but also the entire complex around a

gigantic interior, the “Altar-Raum,” where he partially reconstructed the Great Altar of

Pergamon from the 2

century B.C. The Gigantomachy frieze would be displayed partly

on the West façade of the altar. Two exhibition rooms containing the architectural

fragments from Pergamon, to the North, and from Milet, Priene and Didyma to the

South, opened to the main Altar-Raum.

Having experienced Greek, Hellenistic and Roman monuments in the Antiquity

Museum, the visitor would be able to proceed towards the German Museum in the North

Wing. The connection between the German and Hellenistic art seems less evident than

the link between the Near Eastern and Greek art. Looking at Messel’s plans, we may as

well assume that the art of the Roman Empire and of the late Roman antiquity were the

missing links between the Hellenistic Asia Minor and Medieval Europe.

For a history of the Ottoman/Turkish Law of Antiquities in the 19

century see I.

Günay Paksoy, “BazI Belgeler IsIgInda OsmanlI Devleti’nin Kültür MirasI PolitikasI
Üzerine Düsünceler” and Nur Akin, “Osman Hamdi Bey, Âsâr-I Atika Nizamnamesi ve
Dönemin Koruma AnlayIsI Üzerine Düsunceler,” in Zeynep Rona ed., Osman Hamdi
Bey ve Dönemi Sempozyumu (Istanbul: Tarih VakfI Yurt YayInlarI, 1993).

See Messel’s perspectives of the interiors of the museum: “Pergamon Room,” “Gothic

Room” and “Baroque Room,” lithographs, SMzB PK Zentralarchiv, I/BV 494.

Though Bode included a Byzantine room in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and founded

the Islamic Department of the Royal Museum in 1904, those civilizations were not
included on Messel’s plans. Bode commissioned a separate museum for “Asian Art” by
the renowned architect Paul Bruno outside the Museum Island, which would encompass

On the ground floor, the German Museum featured two church-like interiors, one in

Romanesque and the other in Gothic style. Both rooms were to exhibit a variety of

objects from medieval altarpieces to drapery and weapons. Messel placed a baroque

room with rococo elements on the upper floor of the North Wing, near the bridge where

the new museum was linked to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum’s Renaissance and Baroque

collections. The “art” of the honorary ancestors of pre-historic times, on the other hand,

was assigned to a crypt-like room in the German Museum’s basement.

Judging from the tripartite organization of the complex, Babylonia, Greece and

Germany, one could conclude that Messel, like Stüler before him, fulfilled in the

architecture of the museum G.W.F. Hegel’s (1770-1831) philosophy of history. It is true

that “German art” from the medieval to the baroque ages is added oddly to a narrative

of—apparently—universal history, suggesting the migration of the Spirit from one

world-historical epoch to another.

A closer look suggests, however, that Bode’s program does not offer a linear history of

civilization. The path from the ancient Orient to Greece and from Greece to Germany

was only one of the ways the museum could be experienced and it was by no means the

major one. Far from following a continuous line, the presentation of the history of art

was frequently ruptured, then woven back through unexpected correspondences and

Islamic art in addition to ancient Chinese and Japanese art. It was only after Bruno’s
Asian Art Museum was abandoned by the Weimar Republic that the Islamic Department
was added to the South Wing of Messel’s project in 1926.

contingencies between the exhibited cultures. Even though all the departments were

connected with one another, each of the collections could also be experienced as an

independent museum, which could be accessed from the city through a separate

entrance. The most ceremonial of these entrances was a monumental gateway, which,

across the main open court facing the Kupfergraben, led visitors directly to the

Pergamene Altar-Raum.

Nor was Messel’s Royal Museum a return to the “Neoclassical ideal,” which abandoned

the historicist organization of the collections for a return to a hierarchical ordering of

classical masterpieces.

The prominence Messel gave to the post-classical, “baroque”

art of 2

century BC Asia Minor, in lieu of the classical art of Hellas, is indeed

remarkable. The discovery of the Gigantomachy (the Battle of the Olympian gods with

Titans) in the 1880’s created a shock in art historical circles. Highly expressive

representation of bodies in motion on the Pergamene Frieze—its “pathos”—challenged

the Neoclassical interpretations of the art of the antiquity, which had been firmly in place

since Winckelmann’s dictum, “noble simplicity and calm grandeur.” Pergamon’s

interpreters put into question the superiority of the classical art of Hellas over the

Hellenistic art of later antiquity, which had been overlooked or outright dismissed as

“decadent” prior to the 1880’s. In contrast to the central location of Pergamon, the

classical Greek art of Olympia—the first major excavation site of the German

Archeology Institute—occupied a marginal position in the museum plans on the South

Cf. Bernau and Riedl who argue that the “Neoclassical forms of the facades” of the

Pergamon Museum and the exhibition of antique architecture inside parallel the
simultaneous shift within the Wilhelmine official architecture around 1906-1907, 172.

wing of the complex: it was positioned not as the culmination of Greek art, but as a stage

leading to the later antiquity of Pergamon. Hellas was represented not so much as the

culmination of art and civilization, but as one point on a circle of culture, one of the

many steps leading to the great synthesis of the East and the West in the Hellenistic

Pergamon.

2.2. On the Vocation of the Museum: Bildung versus Kultur

The creation of the museum as a temple of knowledge in Revolutionary France

convinced the Prussian reformers that the central state had a compelling interest in

educating a scattered nation. Unlike the French precedent, however, the Prussian Royal

Museum never unambiguously endorsed the universal project of the Enlightenment. This

reluctance has as much to do with the rise of nationalist sentiment in Germany before

and during the Napoleonic wars as it has with the peculiarity of German Romantic

thought. The ideal of Enlightenment, just like the idea of universal civilization, was

associated, first, with the genteel manners of the French-speaking elite, and, then, with

the foreign invaders. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was the first to idealize the

spontaneous and primitive ways of the German peasant. It should therefore not come as

a surprise that the German “culture,” defined in contradistinction to French civilization,

was a neologism introduced at the end of the 18

century.

A surge in interest in local

traditions and “Germanic Altertüm” and the opening of semi-private “heritage

Even though Herder prefigured comparative and ethnological analyses, his notion of

“Cultur” refers merely to the achievements or products of the civilization in a given
present. The German word “Cultur” curiously languished in the early 19

century. A

concept that Herder and Kant used is conspicuously absent from Hegel’s Philosophy of
History. For a history of the concept see A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A
Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Milwood, N.Y.: Krauss Reprint Co., 1978).
For the German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation see Norbert Elias, The
Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1939), English translation by Edmund
Jephcott (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1978).

museums” were to follow.

The Prussian reformers knew well that, though it helped in

defeating the French, the German cultural peculiarism could as well pose a challenge to

the central authority of the Prussian state. In tailoring the civic function of the Royal

Museum, they sought to reconcile the “disinterested,” humanistic principles—identified

with the state—with the peculiar character of the German Volk.

The foundation of the Royal Museum in Berlin underscores two assumptions about the

nature of art and society, whose origins we may trace to German idealism. First is the

conviction that art is “disinterested” and autonomous: it is detached from all the contexts

of practical life; secondly, art has a social purpose: exposure to art cultivates among the

ordinary citizens (that is middle class men) feelings of aesthetic pleasure and moral

restraint. Although this might appear a paradox, it is indeed perfectly consistent with the

work of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) who sees the social function of art only in its

aesthetic autonomy. Noting the shocking destruction brought by the mob during the

French Revolution, and the moral decadence and depravity of the “educated” upper

classes, Schiller concluded in “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” that the

development of civilization destroyed the wholeness of man—the unity of feeling and

reason: “We see not merely individual persons but whole classes of human beings

See Suzanne L. Marchand, “The quarrel of the ancients and moderns in the German

museums” in Susan A. Crane ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2000).

developing only part of their capacities, while the rest of them, like a stunted plant, shew

only a feeble vestige of their nature.”

“Eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself
grew to be only a fragment… he never develops the harmony of his being and
instead of imprinting humanity upon his nature he becomes merely the imprint of
his science.”

As Peter Bürger noted, Schiller introduced art precisely at this point as a means to

develop the totality of human potential. Only art, in its detachment from everyday

activities, may restore the wholeness of man, which had been shattered by centuries of

overspecialization. Schiller admired the Greeks, not so much because they achieved a

timeless civilization, but since he saw them as a historical people who explored the

totality of human potential, unlike modern society, which is shattered by the division of

labor. It suffices to recall a famous painting of the construction of the Parthenon in

Athens by Friedrich Schinkel, to see that German humanistic Philhellenism depended

less on the idea of a normative Classical civilization than the idealization of the Greeks

as an organic ur-community of philosophers and artists. The museum, from its outset,

was less a temple of civilization—in the French Enlightenment meaning of the

word—than a cathedral of the ideal community.

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, translated by Reginald Snell

(New York: Friedrich Ungar Publishing Co., 1965), 38; also cited in Peter Bürger,
Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984), 44-45.

Schiller, 40.

Reconsidering the conflict between Alois Hirt and Friedrich Schinkel, which I have

discussed in Part 1, and the events that led to Hirt’s resignation in this light, we can see

why Hirt’s concept of the museum as an extension of the academy of fine arts was not

popular among the ranks of the Prussian reformers: the museum was tailored for an ideal

community of non-specialists, in the search for inner harmony and human “wholeness.”

Indeed, when Humboldt was appointed in 1829 to supervise the installation of the works

of art in the Old Museum, he, just like Schinkel, favored a hierarchical and non-

historical organization of the works of art. The works, in other words, were not

illustrations of historical development but embodied an aesthetic feeling that could be

accessible to all. In his report of June 14, 1833, Humboldt saw a link between the

aesthetic quality of the masterpieces and the task of national cultivation (Bildung), and

argued that only antique sculpture and the masterpieces of European painting had to be

included in the museum. For “Classical sculpture and Renaissance painting would affect

the entire nation because they were accessible to natural feeling.”

Classical art was not

only to elevate the taste of the ordinary citizen, but also to speak to “natural feeling” and

intuition.

Idealistic as it was, this spontaneous link between high art and the inner feeling of the

Volk presented two fatal contradictions: First, the cultivation of the ordinary man by art,

though it seemingly transcended the feudal class structure of Prussia, involved no

political emancipation as such. Bildung promised first and foremost a key to the

bourgeois society: individuals were to join the respectable ranks of Bildungsbürgertum,

Steven Moyano, “Quality vs. History: Schinkel’s Altes Museum…” 601.

thanks to merit, not privilege. Yet by the time the (Altes) museum opened to the public

political reform had suffered crucial setbacks in Prussia. In fact, as Prussia’s failure to

establish the constitution that had been promised in 1815 suggests, neither the monarch

nor the feudal establishment intended to share power with Germany’s enlightened, art-

loving Volk. In an excellent analysis of Schinkel’s museum and its relationship with the

Prussian state, Steven Moyano points out the apparent contradiction in the attitude of the

German reformers when faced with the suppression of the constitution and censure.

Seeing the impossibility of representative government in the foreseeable future,

Humboldt, for one, argued in 1822 that the “members of the middle class” had to be

truly cultivated before participating in the assemblies.

The autonomy of art in the

museum, just like “disinterested” aesthetic education, which transcends the social class

of the viewer, assumed a double function: to cultivate the middle class

(Bildungsbürgertum) and to provide a sanctuary from political conflict.

A second contradiction of the equation of art with Bildung, and the state with the patron

of the arts, is the fact that it led precisely to what Schiller had hoped to remedy: the

overspecialization of society. A new type of professional curator and museum

administrator eventually replaced amateurs of art. Moyano writes,

In this light, the goal of disseminating cultivation through art was an attempt to
recast society in the image of the museum’s advocates… General administration
also claimed Bildung in the belief that the bureaucracy included the most

Ibid., 604.

educated and capable members of the society. Cultivation was theirs to allocate
in order to direct society from above.

Despite Schinkel’s refusal to conceive the museum as an extension of the academy, the

new institution created within the context of Prussia was one of the most bewildering

cultural bureaucracies ever created, its job initially to oversee the acculturation of the

nation by means of exposure to an increasingly pedantic knowledge about art and its

history.

* * *

Less than two decades after Schinkel’s museum, August Stüler built the Neues (New)

Museum on the Museum Island as a metaphor for the history of the mind

[Geistesgeschichte]. The museum, which was constructed between 1843 and 1859,

consisted of three floors, each of which corresponded to one stage of Hegel’s Aesthetics:

the symbolic, the classical and the romantic eras, which correspond to the unconscious,

conscious and rational minds respectively. The ease with which the architectural

program of the Neues Museum corresponded to the history of the mind could as well be

due to Hegel’s original metaphor, which presents history as a tripartite building: each

stage is built upon the foundations of the previous floor.

The triumph of historicism in the organization of the Neues Museum is politically

significant.

It meant, above all, that the civic and social function of the museum, the

Ibid.

Bildungsideal, was replaced by academism: a narrowly didactic project of representing

Hegel’s history. The ground floor of the museum, which was dedicated to what Hegel

called “symbolic art,” was a metaphor for the roots of history. In addition to the objects

of prehistoric and non-historical (ethnological) peoples from overseas, it displayed the

infancy of history in ancient Egypt. It suffices to reflect on the organization of the

Egyptian collections by the German philologist and founder of Egyptology Karl Richard

Lepsius (1810-1884) to underscore the importance of historicism. Lepsius led the

Prussian scientific expedition to Egypt and Sudan from 1843 to 1845. He shipped to

Berlin a large number of architectural reliefs and inscriptions taken from the ancient

temples, in addition to drawings and actual artifacts, which he published in the twelve-

volume Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien.

Lepsius’ major contribution to

archaeology is the Egyptian chronology he established in 1849: he observed correctly

that the extinct civilization underwent significant evolution from the first dynasties of

the Old Kingdom to its later days.

Organizing the collections in the Neues Museum,

Lepsius did not consider the aesthetic value, originality or uniqueness of the works, but

treated all the objects as historical specimens. He included only the works that could be

placed precisely in the chronology of Egypt’s dynastic history, and which could

For a discussion of historicism in the organization of the collections of the Neues

Museum see Guido Messing “Historismus als Rekonstruktion. Die Ägyptische
Abteilung im Neuen Museum” and Gunvor Lindström “Historismus als
Ordnungsprinzip. Die Abgußsammlung im Neuen Museum” in Alexis Joahimides et al.
eds., Museumsinszenierungen, 51-66 and 67-80.

Richard Lepsius, Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien (Berlin: Nicolaische

Buchhandlung, 1849-1856).

Richard Lepsius, Die Chronologie der Ägypter (Berlin: Nicolaische

Buchhandlung, 1849).

therefore illustrate Egypt’s historic development.

The Egyptian department in the

Neues Museum, in other words, treated Egyptian art merely as the hieroglyphics of

Egyptian history.

Equally significant was the organization of the second floor of the Neues Museum to

represent art’s “classical” age. Unlike Schinkel’s Museum, the Neues Museum did not

comprise originals, but plaster-cast copies of the most representative Greek and Roman

sculpture. The visitors were offered a linear history of the development of antique art

from its archaic origins to its classical perfection. That Humboldt had rejected the plaster

cast as an exhibition object, and had allowed only originals in the Altes Museum only a

few decades earlier,

illustrates how radically the historicist museum—its perception of

art as illustration of the history of the mind—departed from Bildung, the civic task of the

museum.

By abandoning the autonomy and the vocation of art, the Neues Museum not only lived

up to Hegel’s étatism—he maintained that the modern State rather than the harmonious

community of the Volk was the final embodiment of world-historical process—but also

ceased to be a museum of art as such. For, the originals and the copies that adorn the

museum’s floors are not so much the content of the museum as vehicles—symbols and

allegories—through which the history of the Idea is presented, though imperfectly. The

more art succeeds in depicting the idea of beauty with “sensuous form” the more it falls

Messling, 59.

Lindström, 67.

from the grace of history. In fact, Hegel maintained that the fundamental problem of

classical art is precisely the fact that it achieved beauty all too well: “The deficiency of

the classical is art itself—a complete unification between spiritual and sensual

existence.”

The “romantic art” is superior to the classical only to the extent it achieved

“self-transcendence” though still in the form of art. The history of art would come to an

end, according to Hegel, only when the idea of Beauty is achieved, not in the outer form,

but in the spiritually inner world, when aesthetics is dissolved into ethics.

* * *

How Hegel’s iconoclastic conviction that art’s development was driven to its final

transcendence by an idea external to it came to dominate the Prussian museums and

academic art history in the mid 19

century deserves a separate study. For my purposes,

however, it is important to note that Wilhelm Bode, and his generation of art historians,

curators and critics who came to shape the discourse about the museum in the 1890’s

hardly believed in Hegel’s philosophy of history, and even less in the Hegelian faith in

historical progress.

The critique of the museum in the last decade of the 19

century is imbued with

pessimism—if not cynicism—about the civic and didactic function of the institution,

which is a symptom, in retrospect, of a larger crisis in Prussian public education. The

See Donald Preziosi, Art in Art History: a Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford

University Press), 104.

German intellectuals’ disenchantment with the museum at the end of the century has to

do as much with the institution’s failure to achieve its original goals—to speak to the

inner feeling of the Volk—as with its servitude to academism. Historicism, the view that

collections of art should be organized and understood in relation to the trajectory of the

universal history of the mind, added to the perception that the museums became the

“mausoleums of art,” where works are kept as relics of past epochs with no relevance to

the ordinary German’s “feeling for life.” What is more, it was not only the

disenfranchised art critic who voiced this opinion, but a new generation of museum

administrators and curators, among them Wilhelm Bode.

As early as 1860, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt challenged the Hegelian

philosophy of history by introducing a new scholarly method, cultural history, which

was to exercise decisive influence on Bode’s museology. In his Die Cultur

der

Renaissance in Italien—erroneously translated into English as The Civilization of

Renaissance in Italy—Burckhardt argues that the great art of the Renaissance was born

not merely from the revival of classical antiquity, but from antiquity’s “union” with the

genius of the Italian people, as made manifest in the Florentine community.

“Culture,”

unlike the pedantic Bildung, is the unconscious “survival” of genius in the “blood of

For the German discourse of the art museum at the turn of the 20

century see

Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, esp. ch. 4, “Museums and Modernism
1880-1914.”

Burckhardt spelled the word with “c” unlike the modern German “Kultur.”

Jacob Burckhardt (1860), The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York:

Phaidon, 1950), 104.

humanity.”

The rebirth of genius in an organic community, either in the polis of

Athens or in the city-state of Florence, is manifest in every aspect of its life, from the

ingenuity of its handicrafts and the masterpieces of its art to its civic order.

It is true, as one historian has noted, that Burckhardt’s depiction of Florence bears some

political resemblance with his native Basel, one of the last bastions of Neohumanism in

the German speaking world: years after Humboldt’s education reform was stalled in

Prussia, the patrician-merchant families of Basel zealously protected the independence,

and the civic vocation of their university.

Burckhardt’s cultural history of the

Renaissance stemmed as much from his dedication to his own community in Basel as his

disillusionment with 19

century Europe at large, its submission to the authoritarian

empires and its inability to create an organic culture. And yet Die Cultur der

Renaissance in Italien had a legacy above and beyond the historical circumstances in

which it was written. Although Burckhardt’s cultural history is often incorrectly

identified as historicist, it introduced an entirely different method: Burckhardt presents

the Renaissance communities as a series of synchronic cross-sections, which explored all

aspects of life in a given present. In lieu of the succession of events, causes and effects,

we find in Burckhardt’s book an analysis of works and contexts.

Jacob [also Jakob] Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, lectures published

posthumously by Jakob Oeri (Berlin, Stuttgart: Verlag von Spemann, 1905), 52.

Carl E. Schorske, “History as Vocation in Burckhardt’s Basel,” in Thinking with

History, 56-70.

Ibid.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is rightly cited as an intellectual source of the fin-de-

siècle critique of the museum.

Even though he did not target the art museum as such,

his writing effectively demolished two basic assumptions upon which the 19

century

museum had been built: art’s autonomy from the practices of everyday life—which goes

back to Kant prior to Schiller—and the very possibility of the history of the mind. In The

Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche mocked Kant’s definition of “disinterested” art, and the

unearthly pleasures of aesthetic contemplation as “the country parson’s naiveté.”

favored instead—a key argument in The Birth of Tragedy—the Dionysian rites in

ancient Greece, where there was yet no distinction between the producers and receivers

of art as such.

Art was not defined by aesthetic detachment of a “disinterested” subject

from the object of perception, but by mutual participation and performance. If the

autonomy of art from the praxis of life was artificial, so was the entire category of

Geistesgeschichte, which Nietzsche found irrelevant in the face of the eternity of the

circular processes of life.

It was, however, not Nietzsche, the disaffected philologist-turned-philosopher, but an

embittered ‘outsider’ to the academy, Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), who leveled the

Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, 140-143.

Cited in Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, 140.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Douglas Smith (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Sheehan Museums in the German Art World,
141.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” (1874) in

Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).

most damaging critique, targeting the museum, along with the Gymnasium and the

academy as the major symptoms of Germany’s “cultural decline.” Opinionated and half-

educated, Langbehn was no match to Nietzsche intellectually. Nietzsche however seems

to have influenced Langbehn by providing him, perhaps, not so much intellectual

venues, as with a personal obsession: it is possible that Langbehn, who apparently

suffered from severe megalomania, identified himself with the Übermensch whose

advent Nietzsche prophesized. Having heard of Nietzsche’s mental breakdown in late

1889, Langbehn was taken by the obsession that he should “save Nietzsche,” whom he

had not met yet in person. He visited the philosopher in the Jena asylum every day for

two weeks, sought his legal guardianship and tried to bar Nietzsche’s loyal friends and

family from seeing him: only placing Nietzsche under his custody in Dresden, Langbehn

insisted, would save the “child-like” philosopher.

If Langbehn was the savior, so was

the noble philosopher in mental distress a metaphor for the German Volk in despair.

Had Langbehn not succeed in inciting a widely popular anti-education movement in the

1890’s—one that influenced the proto-fascist Youth Movement—he would have stayed

an odd footnote to German intellectual history, as one of the readers Nietzsche

anticipated and feared most.

As Fritz Stern put it: “In 1890, Langbehn, a failure and

Stern, Cultural Despair, 107-08.

Stern in his The Politics of Cultural Despair seeks to defend Nietzsche against the

charges that he “fathered” the “Germanic ideology” epitomized by Langbehn. He argues
that the latter misread the great philosopher, turning Nietzsche’s complex thought into
tags and clichés that can be consumed by the masses. According to Stern the reception of
Nietzsche’s critique of 19

century philistinism and pedantry at best paved the way for

the success’ of Langbehn’s simpler and more ambiguous defense of irrationality.

psychopath, wrote a sensational bestseller, a rhapsody of irrationality, denouncing the

whole intellectualistic and scientific bent of the German culture, the extinction of art and

individuality, the drift toward conformity.”

Langbehn’s book Rembrandt als Erzieher

[“Rembrandt as Educator”—most probably an adaptation of Nietzsche’s title

“Schopenhauer as Educator”] met with a rare success when it was published in 1890,

reaching a thirty-seventh edition in less than two years.

Though its reception amounts to a mass euphoria in fin-de-siècle Germany, Rembrandt

als Erzieher offers neither a clear argument nor an exhaustive analysis. We may start by

noting that the book is not really about Rembrandt, the Dutch painter. It is an

unsystematic compilation of reflections about everything that seems to have occurred to

the author’s mind: the noble roots of the Germans, the decline of the humanistic Bildung,

the doom of modern civilization as well as prophecies of salvation. Langbehn has

something to say about everything: the chapters of the book read “German Art, German

Science, German Bildung, German Mankind [Menscheit].”

Though it imitates

Nietzsche’s later prose, the book defies all disciplines and genres. Characteristically,

Langbehn quotes a few words of wisdom by great men as tags for mass consumption

(“Fichte says, to have a character and to be German are synonymous”). His own

sentences either border tautology (“One can become an expert, a scholar, but one must

Ibid., xii.

Julius Langbehn [signed: a German], Rembrandt als Erzieher (Weimar: Alexander

Duncker Verlag, 1922).

be born an artist”) or feature simple deductions (“therefore artistic culture [Bildung] is

superior to scholarly learning [Bildung]”).

A consistent theme throughout the book is an ardent primitivism, which glorifies the

pure German peasant: the native German is by birth predisposed to be an artist. The

gymnasium and the academy are targeted throughout the book as two institutions of

pedantic learning that waste the natural talents of the Volk. Langbehn, who had a taste

for simple comparisons, likens the work of art to a single word and the museum to a

dictionary: just as the meaning of the word was embedded in the context of a living

language, so was the meaning of the work of art in the local traditions and the “tribal

character” of the artist.

Rembrandt, and a lesser hero Shakespeare, appear occasionally in the book to illustrate

the tribal and local character of great art and literature: the first is presented as the “most

German of all German artists” and the latter as the Germanic “ur-poet.” Their artistic

genius is the embodiment of the character of their tribe—Langbehn presented them as

Niederdeutsche, the “purest” of the Germanic tribes—and of the peculiarity of the soil.

Hence as role models, they could inspire the Germans to discover their own intuitive,

artistic soul, their own predisposition to “individuality” and genius.

Shakespeare’s native Germanic identity was evidenced, as Lanbehn did not fail to take

notice, by his name, which mean “spear-shaker” [Speerschüttler], Langbehn, Rembrandt
als Erzieher, 211; see also Stern, Cultural Despair, 135 n.

One suspects that Langbehn’s motive in choosing the Dutch painter and the English

poet as two role models was little more than simple self-identification. Both, Langbehn
insists, were Niederdeutsch, that is, from the purest of the Germanic tribes. Langbehn,

Theoretically, Rembrandt als Erziehler draws from contradictory, and at times

antithetical positions in German idealism, without sublimating them into a synthetic

position. Langbehn conflates Herder’s “Volksseele” [soul of the people], which inspired

the study of anonymous vernacular traditions of the folk throughout the 19

century,

with the concept of the genius-artist, which he borrows from Romanticism. The

“individuality” of a genius-artist such as Rembrandt is, strictly speaking, the expression

of, not freedom, but his native tribal character. Hence it is artistic intuition but not

scholarly education that can save the Germans from cultural decline. All the ills of

modern society, including cosmopolitanism, alienation, fragmentation, could be

remedied by learning from Rembrandt what is already inherent in the character of the

purest Germans.

Not surprisingly, Langbehn’s book resonated particularly well with the right-wing critics

of modernity

: by 1890 a number of conservative intellectuals had been engaged in an

anti-positivistic and organicist critique of Germany’s modernization. The “German

who was born in Schleswig-Holstein, then ruled by the Danish throne, considered
himself a Niederdeutsch. He appears to have attributed his own “genius” and
“individuality” to his own high birth, and complained that he was
misunderstood—particularly by the Prussians who were too mixed with Jewish, Slavic
and French blood. As Stern shows in his biography, Langbehn published Rembrandt
with the pseudonym, “a German,” and spent an absurd amount of time to conceal his
true identity; though few knew him, or were interested in finding out at that time.
According to Stern, the concealment of the author’s identity worked unexpectedly as a
marketing strategy; many mistook Langbehn initially for Nietzsche or Paul de Lagarde,
the famous biblical scholar who had sought to coin a Germanic religion in the 1850’s,
Cultural Despair, 109.

Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, 142.

ideology,” as epitomized in Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, also

published in 1887 [Community and Society, 1957], elaborated a reactionary attitude. It

persistently faulted the universal project of the Enlightenment for the devastating effects

of industrialization in the metropolis, and the alienation of the individual in capitalist

society, and dismissed the Enlightenment—which was seen as too French and therefore

un-German—altogether in favor of a return to the volkish ideal of the organic

community: one whose structure is embedded in the tradition of the soil and the pre-

industrial, handicraft production. New anthropological, and increasingly biologistic

definitions of Kultur were coupled with a revived interest in the ethnic ancestors of

modern day-Germans.

Among Langbehn’s admirers were also reformers and pioneers of aesthetic modernism:

the architect and founder of the German Werkbund, Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927);

a leading patron of modern art, Karl Enst Osthaus (1874-1921); the pioneers of modern

museology Alfred Lichtwark (1852-1914) and Wilhelm Bode.

In fact, Langbehn’s

carefully constructed image as an “outsider” who ruthlessly attacks the cultural

establishment while having no stake in it, is complicated by the fact that renowned

museum administrators, curators and art historians supported and financially patronized

a high-handed yet penniless Langbehn before and during the “German-Rembrandt”

controversy. Richard Schöne, then the general director of the Prussian Royal Museum,

For Langbehn’s influence on Muthesius see Stanford Anderson, “Introduction,” in

Muthesius, Style-architecture and Building-art: Transformations of Architecture in the
Nineteenth Century and Its Present Condition, translated by Stanford Anderson (Santa
Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 6.

opened his house and private library to Langbehn. Without the encouragement of the art

historians Alfred Lichtwark and Woldeman von Seidlitz (1850-1920), who helped

Langbehn to study Rembrandt, the book would perhaps not have been completed.

Bode, who met Langbehn upon Seidlitz’s recommendation, agreed to cover the

publication expenses of Rembrandt als Elzieher from his own private funds in 1899,

when Langbehn failed to find a publisher for his manuscript. After L.H. Hirschfeld, a

publishing house in Dresden agreed to publish the book, Bode and Seidlitz sent copies of

Rembandt als Erziehler to their most affluent contacts in Germany and abroad.

Langbehn, who made a point of limiting the sale price to two Marks in order to make the

book available to ordinary Germans, did not object to reaching out to this most

distinguished audience.

Nor is it a coincidence that Bode wrote the first professional review of the book in the

respected Preussische Jahrbücher in March 1890, which he titled “Rembrandt as

Educator by a German.” He praises the book as “a polemic, derived from the innermost

life of the German spirit, which intends to find through a diagnosis of today’s frequently

corrupt conditions the basis for the necessary rebirth of German art and culture.”

Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, 146.

Langbehns gave consent to the distribution of his book to affluent readers, with the

sole condition that the book not be sent to university professors and the Jews. Ohlsen,
Wilhelm von Bode, 149.

Bode, “Rembrandt als Erzieher von einem Deutschen,” Preussische Jahrbücher,

LXV:3 (March, 1890), 301-314. Also quoted in English translation in Stern, Cultural
Despair, 159.

It is indeed puzzling why Bode, who first curated Rembrandt paintings in the Royal

Museum, endorsed Langbehn’s gross misrepresentation of the Dutch master and ruthless

attacks on the institution. One cannot completely rule out the possibility that Bode, just

like Langbehn’s other admirers among Germany’s cultural elite, was so taken by the

forcefulness of the author’s argument and so attuned to the German ideology, that he

turned a blind eye to the inconsistencies or outright errors in Langbehn’s account.

It is

more likely, however, that Bode’s endorsement of the book reveals more than an

occasional sympathy for Langbehn’s ideology when he writes:

Although Rembrandt is only the thread by which the author unfolds his tapestry,
his appraisal of the great master is based on the knowledge of his work and a fine
understanding of his nature. What he says about him is often new and surprising,
always brilliant and presented with the warmth of glowing admiration for the
artist… [The book] is certain of a distinguished place in the Rembrandt
literature.

Langbehn’s book, to say the least, was hardly a “distinguished” contribution to the

Rembrandt literature. At least one leading Rembrandt scholar in the Netherlands to

whom Bode had sent a copy of Rembrandt als Erziehler, had brought to Bode’s attention

some of Langbehn’s errors.

Bode’s personal correspondence with Langbehn also

suggests that Bode’s review was carefully planned and coordinated with the author to

lend the book the very scholarly legitimacy that Langbehn denounces as decadent.

Stern, Cultural Despair, 159.

Bode, “Rembrandt als Erzieher,” 303; Stern, Cultural Despair, 120 n.

See the Dutch art historian Abraham Bredius’s letter to Bode, 26 November 1889,

Berlin, SMzB PK Zentralarchiv.

See Langbehn’s letter to Bode, 10 January 1890, SMzB PK Zentralarchiv.

Even if Bode agreed that Germany was “corrupt” and needed “cultural and artistic

regeneration,” one could hardly believe that he failed to see the feebleness of

Langbehn’s “Kunstpolitik.” Langbehn advocates reintegrating the urban proletariat with

the pastoral Volk and establishing a “social aristocracy,” a harmonious community in

which the peasants happily defer to the racial purity and artistic intuition of their lords: a

naïve—though not innocent—“education reform.” He argues that only by exploiting the

artistic talent of the few—the noblest, purest peasants— could Germany transcend its

current state of mediocrity. Yet, it did not occur to the author that his populist

primitivism might contradict his political elitism. While Langbehn benefits from the

popular disillusionment with Bildung, particularly with secondary school education, he

offers no viable alternative. Instead, he substitutes Humboldt’s educated middle class

(Bildungsbürgertum) with a vague “Bidungsaristokratismus,” an absurd oxymoron.

Bode, on the other hand, knew all too well that he could achieve reform in the museum

only by enlisting the financial and political support of the emerging class of Berlin’s

cosmopolitan (partly Jewish) bourgeoisie, which Langbehn—an anti-Semite—loathed.

The question remains, then, of why Bode choose to underwrite Langbehn’s quixotic

opportunism?

Bode belonged to a new type of connoisseur-curator who came to dominate the German

museums at the turn of the last century. We may list at least three factors that contributed

to the rise of a new curatorial connoisseurship: the emergence of international art

Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 40.

markets, the rise of German nationalism in the aftermath of political unification, and the

critique of academic art history by hands-on museum curators who preferred instead a

practical “Kunstwissenschaft.”

Bode’s patronage of Langbehn is, in this light, the most

significant evidence that points to the relation between the movement for museum

reform and the rise of the German ideology at the turn of the century.

An ardent nationalist, Bode was profoundly concerned about how to display in the

museum the “German character in art,” which, he maintained, had been ignored by the

Royal Museum since its foundation.

And yet, as a political realist who mastered the

mechanisms of power in Prussia’s cultural establishment, he conceived not of

Langbehn’s noble peasant, but the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of Berlin as the museum’s

preferred audience. A new class of entrepreneurs yearned for social legitimacy and had

the means to acquire prestigious collections of art. Bode, who gained his art historical

credentials not in the academy but through on-the-job experience and who mastered the

international art markets, offered Berlin’s rich collectors two invaluable assets: the

service of a renowned connoisseur who could distinguish, through half scientific and

half intuitive methods, an original masterpiece from an imitation (hence the difference

between a good and bad investment); secondly the service of a collector who can

“tastefully” display the originals in Berlin’s bourgeois intérieurs by taking into account

Alexis Joachimides, “The Museum’s Discourse on Art: the Formation of Curatorial

Art History in Turn of the Century Berlin,” in Susan A. Crane ed., Museums and
Memory (Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 200-19.

Bode, “Denkschrift Erweiterungs- und Neubauten bei den königlichen Museen in

Berlin.”

both the social convenance of the patron’s apartment and the original—usually

aristocratic—setting from which the work was displaced. Thanks to Bode’s invaluable

advice, Berlin’s new class of entrepreneurs, who acquired a substantial quantity of

original works from France—due to the war reparations imposed after the Franco-

Prussian war, France was suffering an economic crisis—and from the declining

aristocratic families in Italy and Britain, would appear less the unrefined “Huns,” as they

were commonly seen in the rest of Europe.

Bode, a public servant who accepted no payment from the rich collectors, arranged for

substantial donations to the Royal Museum both in original works of art and in funds. He

also financed some of the major public projects such as the construction of the

Renaissance museum (Kaiser Friedrich Museum or today’s Bode Museum) by enlisting

rich benefactors in Berlin in private associations; he founded the Verein für

Kunstwissentschaft to finance Messel’s project.

Bode, in this sense, is a founder of the

modern capitalist art museum for he turned upside down the Humboldtian relationship

between the public institution and its audience, the urban bourgeoisie. It was no longer

the state museum that contributed to the construction of an urban middle class by

educating the “taste” of the individual. It was instead the wealthy bourgeoisie that

sustained the Royal Museum and in doing so acquired social legitimacy.

Gaehtgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel, 12-13.

Each member of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum-Verein contributed a yearly

membership fee of 500 Mark. Considering that the association had about one hundred
members, Bode amassed considerable funds for the construction of the museum. See
Petras, 102-03.

Though contingent on the socio-political conditions of Germany at the turn of the

century, the new relation between the museum and its patrons had two lasting results:

firstly, the disciplinary autonomy of the connoisseur curatorship, which severed the

museum’s connection with the academy, and secondly, the construction of the cult of

authenticity in which the original work of art is thought to embody a unique essence,

which cannot be reproduced in its imitations or plaster casts: the task of the art museum

was no longer to educate the public but to highlight that authentic essence by creating

the best possible conditions for the exhibition. Bode ridiculed academic art historians

like his chief opponent, Hermann Grimm, who occupied the first regular art history chair

in the University of Berlin, and his successor Heinrich Wölfflin. Grimm was an old-

fashioned Hegelian who did not comprehend why Bode would spend public funds to

acquire relatively insignificant originals instead of displaying copies of the most

significant masterpieces. He complained—correctly—that the Royal Museum no longer

provided visual aid for the education of art history in the university.

Wölfflin, on the

other hand, constructed grandiose theories about the changes of epochal visions

throughout history, but could not always correctly establish the authorship and the

authenticity of a masterpiece, which Bode saw both as a test of competence and the goal

of art history.

Joachimides, “The Museum’s Discourse on Art,” 204-10.

Ibid., 211-15.

Paradoxically, then, Langbehn’s primitivism had a particular appeal for the emerging

curatorial connoisseurship and the new art museum, and not simply because he

condemns humanistic Bildung and academic historicism alike. In his yearnings for

redemption, both cultural and spiritual, Langbehn enthrones art as a surrogate for

religion: art leads to the Volk’s salvation in and by itself.

Though Langbehn’s art may imply a type of autonomy, it surely departs from Schiller’s

autonomous art, which, as we have seen, fulfills its vocation through its detachment

from the context of everyday life. Nor is Langbehn’s “art” analogous to that of

Nietzsche, who challenges the rarefied experience of aesthetics, and emphasizes its

performative, ritual roots. Langbehn, in contrast, both intends to relocate “art” in its

authentic context, the character of the local tribe and the soil, and keep the aesthetic

distance that distinguishes an original “masterpiece” from the praxis of life: he

“liberates” the work of art from the museum and, yet, maintains the “aura” that had

resulted in the aesthetic differentiation of an object as a “work of art” in the museum in

the first place.

For our purposes here, it is important to note that Bode’s aesthetic presentation made

Langbehn’s notion of redeemer-art (in contrast to didactic art) the very content of a new

museum: a museum that was put together by the technical expertise of the connoisseur-

curator, and one that was intended for the innocent eye. Had it been carried out

according to Bode’s original plans, the German Museum would have revealed further the

connection between the aestheticism of the connoisseur-curatorship and the populist

primitivism of Langbehn’s German ideology.

2.3. Art versus Ethnology: Imperial Archaeology and Taxonomies of Culture

A history of the Royal Museum and its later transformation needs to take into

consideration the prominent role archaeology came to play in the self-representations of

an increasingly aggressive, expansionist German Reich at the turn of the 20

century.

As shown in a recent history of German archaeology and Philhellenism by Suzanne

Marchand, German archaeology underwent a massive reorganization in the aftermath of

the unification, bringing under a central cultural bureaucracy not only the 19

century-

humanistic disciplines of ancient philology and antiquarianism, but also the museums of

art and ethnology. The centralization under the state apparatus brought the German

sciences of things ancient into a unique position, allowing large-scale undertakings, such

as long-term excavations in Olympia and Pergamon.

During the reign of Wilhelm II the imperial patronage of archaeology in the Eastern

Mediterranean and the Near East reached its most ostentatious dimensions, compelling

scholars to serve under increasingly nationalistic and, at times, comically pompous

representations of the German throne. Fuelled by the enthusiasm of the Kaiser for

ancient dynastic histories, the Reich mobilized unequalled resources—financial, political

and diplomatic—for the exploration of ancient sites in a geography expanding from the

Aegean Sea to ancient Mesopotamia: the vast territories controlled by the Kaiser’s ailing

“friend,” the Ottoman Empire. The vast region claimed for German science perfectly

coincided with Germany’s systematic—and officially undeclared—designs on the

Ottoman Empire: the connection between the science of the past and Germany’s political

interests in the future of the region became all the more clear during the construction of

the Istanbul-Baghdad Railway. The foundation of the German Orient Society (DOG) in

1898 by a board of trustees—including Georg von Simmens, the director of Deutsche

Bank—marked the beginning of a new era in the Western exploration of the ancient

Near East. Starting with the excavations of Babylon and Assur, the German Orient

Society unearthed the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, completing the sporadic

explorations by the British, French and American travelers in the 19

century.

Notwithstanding the political designs of the German archaeological institutions—to

provide an infrastructure for a future German occupation

—the effects of German

archaeology in the Near East were phenomenal. Within four decades, from the

Pergamon excavations of 1883 to 1918 when Germany and its Turkish ally were

defeated in World War I, systematic excavations of a dozen archaeological sites

transformed the modern knowledge of the ancient civilizations of the Eastern

Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.

The new German archaeology was less dependent on the 19

century dilettantes,

adventurers and treasure hunters like the Englishmen Henry Layard (Nineveh) or the

German Heinrich Schliemann (Troy) who had pursued the European public’s attention

Marchand, Down From Olympus, esp. ch. 6, “The Peculiarities of German Orientalism

(188-227).

Ibid.

more than a systematic documentation of the sites. As a new generation of German

archaeologists commenced excavations in some of the most important sites of the

ancient world from today’s Iraq to Turkey’s Ionian coast, the age of sensational

“discoveries” in the Orient gave way to the era of “grand-scale archaeology”: long-term

explorations in ancient sites, which reached their objective as a cumulative effort of

generations of archaeologists working under Western colonial and national institutions.

In other words, the German excavations prior to World War I radically modernized

archaeology, transforming it into a professional practice, which claimed a degree of

scientific objectivity. And yet, the professionalization of the discipline tended also to

compromise the spirit of humanism as professed by the mandarins of classical Greece

and Rome.

The famed amateurs, the engineer Carl Humann (1839-1896) and the architect Robert

Koldewey (1855-1925), were succeeded by their assistants, Theodor Wiegand and

Walter Andrae (1875-1956), a new generation of archaeologists trained in the field.

These archaeologists professed first-hand knowledge about the civilizations they

“discovered.” Sponsored directly by the Kaiser, they also proved able bureaucrats who

survived countless controversies within Prussia’s cultural establishment. Wiegand, the

son-in-law of the powerful Siemens family, for instance, was equally at ease in

orchestrating byzantine intrigue in Istanbul and Berlin at the height of the Wilhelmine

Empire. Despite the fall, in 1918, of the regime that favored them, both figures came into

prominent administrative positions in the Berlin State Museum. It was under the

See Marchand, Down From Olympus.

supervision of these archaeologists-turned-museum directors that today’s Pergamon

Museum would take shape.

* * *

The extraordinary expansion of the holdings of the Prussian Royal Museum during the

Kaiserreich was undoubtedly a practical outcome of imperial archaeology. As early as

the 1850’s, shortly after Lepsius shipped the Egyptian finds to Berlin, the Prussian

museum was reshaped to represent the experience of humanity—artistic, cultural and

historical—in the spatial organization of a museum: the historical and ethnological

narratives are translated into actual architectural spaces.

By the end of the 19

century, however, the realization that the history of humanity is

not a continuous and linear evolution from one world-historical stage to the following,

but consists of several cultural circles that have come into contact with one another at

several points in their developments, made the totality of the experience of humanity

unrepresentable. No single chart of the genealogy of art and culture could be agreed

upon. Nor could the taxonomies of artistic and cultural objects in historical or

ethnological narratives be easily translated into an architectural diagram.

The theories of cultural diffusion, which emerged particularly from fin-de-siècle Austria,

explored manifold connections between the Western and Oriental cultures, seeking the

common origins of Celtic, Greek, Mesopotamian and Islamic art. Whether that origin

was to be found in Egypt, before it was perfected in Greece and transmitted to Europe

and the Islamic Near East, as Alois Riegl and others maintained,

or whether there

existed an ur-Aryan culture in Persia, which lent its forms both to the German and

Islamic cultures, as Riegl’s chief opponent Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) argued,

matters less compared to the revolution such inquiry entails in the historian’s method. In

the absence of written record, formal analysis of the decorative ornament came to be

accepted as a viable historical method, just as the similarities and differences in “style”

were seen as evidence of cultural continuities or ruptures.

* * *

One crucial result of the new historiographic positions in Germany and Austria was the

blurring of the boundaries between works of art and ethnological objects. As early as

1880, the acquisition of artifacts from cultures historically and geographically distant to

Germany initiated an intense debate among the ranks of the Royal Museum. Initially all

objects of non-Western civilizations, including Chinese and Islamic artifacts, were

included within Berlin’s ethnologic collections: the museum made no distinction

between the objects of popular crafts and those of more sophisticated courtly traditions.

Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations For a History of Ornament (1893),

translated by Evelyn Kain (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Josef Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Spätantiken und

Frühchristlichen Kunst (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1901).

See Marchand, “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism:

The Case of Josef Strzygowski.”

Though the necessity of studying the peoples oversees was not in dispute, all the more

necessary because of Germany’s new-found colonial ambitions, how to integrate the

ethnological collections into the rubric of the 19

century museum raised a number of

questions: should the objects of ancient Oriental civilizations from the Sumer to the

Islamic middle ages be displayed alongside the masterpieces of Western art? Could non-

Western art, if such categorization could be justified at all, be presented for the aesthetic

enjoyment of the German public?

As general director, Richard Schöne (1840-1922) is responsible for expanding the scope

of the Royal Prussian Museums in Berlin, adding several new departments including the

Völkerkunde Museum. Yet, Schöne did not fully understand the implications of the vast

expansion of the museum to encompass objects that had not previously been considered

“art.” He wrote in 1880 that the ethnological collection could no longer be embraced

within the art museum derived from the principles of Wilhelm von Humboldt. One could

not enjoy these objects artistically: ethnological objects constituted a category outside

art.

The ethnological collections of the Royal Museum, which go back to the expeditions of

the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) in South America, were

initially exhibited, as we have seen, on the ground floor of the Neues Museum, and

represented the symbolic age of the civilization. Yet the construction of a distinct

Festschrift zur Feier ihres 50 jährigen Bestehens am 2.8. 1880: Zur Geschichte der

Königlichen Museen in Berlin (Berlin, 1880), 56; cited in Gaehtgens, “The Museum
Island,” 63.

Museum of Ethnology (Völkerkunde) on the Königgrätzer street between 1880 and 1886

institutionalized the distinction between the categories of work of art and ethnologic

object: if works of art were “historical,” the ethnological objects were “non-historical.”

From the ethnologist’s—rather self-serving—perspective, art was a sub-category of

“culture.” Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), head of the new Völkerkunde Museum,

significantly narrowed the domain of art museum to encompass only the “artistic

products of a historical people.”

Hence Bastian not only requires all art to be historical,

but also uses “culture” in a non-elitist sense that has little in common with, for instance,

the meaning Burckhardt assigned to the word three decades earlier: the sum of the

achievements of a golden age, such as those of classical Hellas or Florence of the

Renaissance.

One outcome of limiting “art” to the domain of the historical was the transformation of

the museum of art into the museum of art history—as, for instance, the Art History

Museum in Vienna. Yet, the “historical peoples” of Europe also produced crafts, objects

of good “taste” for practical use (including architecture), which necessitated a category

outside of the “disinterested” domain of fine arts. Faced with the decline in the “taste” of

the European public after the industrial revolution and the perceived superiority of the

traditional crafts and ornamental designs of India and North Africa, the South Kensigton

Museum in London (est. 1851, now the Victoria and Albert) provided a new model. The

museum was intended not so much for the general public—its aim was not to cultivate

Cited in Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch, “Hundert Jahre Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin:

Zur Geschichte des Museums,” Baessler-Archiv, Beiträge zur Völkerkunde, Neue Folge
21 (1973): 4; see also Gaethgens, “The Museum Island in Berlin,” 63.

the moral and civic character of the middle classes—as for professionals, designers and

industrialists. That the Kunstgewerbe Museum (Museum of Applied Arts) was financed

initially by the Prussian Ministry of Trade—not by the Ministry of Culture—suggests

that the institution was seen as instrumental for economic development, alongside the

arts and crafts school.

Even when the new museum on Prinz Albert Street was

incorporated into the Royal Museum in 1885, the civic and moral benefits one could

gain from such collections were far from established.

The disagreement about the future expansion of the Royal Museum—the first of nearly

half a century of “museum wars” among the competing factions of Prussia’s cultural

bureaucracy—erupted in 1880 between Schöne, the general director, and Bode, then the

director of the Department of Christian Sculpture. Faced with a lack of space on the

Museum Island and Berlin’s expanding collections, Schöne intended to separate the

ethnology and applied arts collections from the more traditional collections of fine arts.

According to Schöne, while the Museum Island would continue to house the collections

of fine arts, emphasizing art’s origins and its highest achievements in the ancient

Mediterranean, the ethnology and applied arts collections would be housed in new

museum buildings, miles from the Museum Island, on what later became Prinz Albert

Street. Bode, in contrast, proposed to integrate Berlin’s Painting Gallery

(Gemäldegalerie) with the Department of Christian Sculpture into a new Renaissance

Gaehtgens, “The Museum Island in Berlin,” 64.

Museum on Prinz Albert Street: a museum that would display the art of Italy and

Germany from the Middle Ages to the end of the baroque era.

The debate has been presented in histories as an encounter between a conservative

Schöne who subscribed to the old-fashioned idea of fine arts, and a reformist Bode who

introduced the more recent ideas of the Kulturgeschichte.

In fact, there is little doubt

that Bode’s Renaissance Museum was informed by his reading of Burckhardt’s Die

Cultur [Kultur] der Renaissance in Italien: instead of comparing and contrasting the

aesthetic values of a single art form in the gallery, Bode sought to reintegrate painting

with other achievements of a given “culture.” That Bode was in tune with more recent

historiographic approaches, however, does not necessarily mean that his museum was

more socially progressive than Schöne’s.

Schöne maintained that the distinct methodologies of art history and ethnology made

these two types of museum irreconcilable: the ethnologists collected specimens whereas

art historians sought masterpieces. Art and ethnology museums also had different tasks.

The scientific curiosity about the primitive man or the instrumental interest of

professionals in the ornamental designs of pre-industrial cultures should be kept separate

from the vocation of the museum of fine arts. Hence the Museum Island would remain a

sanctuary of moral and civic Bildung, unadulterated by scientific and practical interests.

Petras, 100.

Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, 110-11; Gaehtgens, “The Museum Island in Berlin,” 65;

Petras, 100.

Even though Schöne seems to have prevailed initially—most museum directors sided

with Schöne—he had to accept over the years compromises due to Bode’s increasing

influence with the royal family and Berlin’s powerful class of entrepreneurs. Two

museums, the interim Pergamon Museum by Fritz Wolff and the Renaissance

Museum—named after the late Kaiser Friedrich—were constructed on the Museum

Island. Bode, who became the director of the Gemäldegalerie in 1890 and oversaw the

construction of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, eventually transformed the very structure

of the Royal collections. He founded early Christian and Byzantine, Near Eastern

(1899), Islamic (1904) and East Asian Art (1907) departments, and planned for the

Ancient German Art Museum. Most of these new collections were housed initially in

Bode’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum and, in many instances, in spite of Schöne’s fierce

opposition.

Bode, unlike Schöne, seems to have taken notice that the superiority of the

Mediterranean civilization and its privileged place in the humanistic Bildung could no

longer be defended in the face of the rise of cultural relativism. In fact, in its defense of

the German culture against the advances of universal civilization, the German ideology

put into crisis the humanistic vocation of art. Compared with the newfound necessity to

honor the heritage of the ancestral Germanic tribes, or to display the cultural objects of

the other “primitives” overseas, the privilege of the “art” of the “historical

peoples”—Greeks in particular—came under constant scrutiny.

In a memorandum concerning the extension and the new buildings of the Royal

Museum, published in February 1907 shortly after he succeeded Schöne as the general

director, Bode clarifies his vision of a new museum. Noting that “ancient German art”

has been neglected by the Royal Museum—in fact, such a collection was nowhere to be

found in Germany—he underlines the difference between a museum of German art and a

museum of applied arts or cultural history. Bode’s Museum of Ancient German Art,

alongside the museums of East Asian and Islamic art, would not necessarily present

cultural history as a general picture of the “fundamental character of the German art and

its various developments.”

That the German Art Museum was one among a series of

new art museums dedicated to Near Eastern, Islamic and East Asian art suggests that

Bode’s vision was more than an opportune response to the rising Germanophilia.

Overall, Bode’s new museum was an attempt to rescue “art” from the crisis brought

about by the fin-de-siècle cultural relativism: he redefined art as a fundamental

experience, which is not simply a specimen of culture—ethnologic object—as such, but

which, in its sublimity and essence, embodies the fundamental character of a people.

Bode transformed Langbehn’s exclusively Germanic cult of art into a cross-cultural,

rather than universal, category, analogous to the sacred. For Bode, unlike Langbehn,

authentic context and original “art” could be embodied as much in a Chinese bronze or

Islamic ornament, as in the unacknowledged “masterpieces” of the pre-historic Germans.

Bode makes a distinction between the Museum of Ancient German Art and “cultural

history” or applied arts museums such as the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg or the
Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz. See “Denkschrift Betreffend
Erweiterungs- Und Neubauten bei den Königlichen Museen in Berlin” (1907), in Bode,
Mein Leben, II: 242-44.

It is in this context that we may understand the innovation Bode brought to the Berlin

Museums: the simultaneous introduction of Germanic and Asian “art” museums. By

abandoning the dependence of art on Bildung and redefining it as a non-elitist, and yet

profound experience shared by every culture, Bode prefigured the postwar discourse of

art and of the “family of man,” one that we find in the writing of another connoisseur of

Oriental art, André Malraux.

2.4. The Style Room: Between the Original Setting and the Bourgeois Intérieur

Bode’s Stilraum (style-room) must be seen as a technique of museum display through

which the curator negotiated between the monumental character of the imperial museum

and the taste of the private, bourgeois viewer. As early as 1880, Bode opposed Schöne’s

plans to centralize the Royal collections on the Museum Island, which would lead

inevitably to an officially sanctioned taste in the representation of the history of art, and

favored instead the dispersion of the collections within the city into pseudo-aristocratic

private residences. Though it was constructed on the Museum Island and not on the site

favored by Bode, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum reflected Bode’s idea of the museum.

Though most exhibition rooms in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum were identified with a

master or a historical school, such as the Rembrandt room, a few were dedicated to

private collections and were named after the donor. Hence more than a comprehensive

survey of historical styles, the museum celebrated a new political order: the cultural and

artistic choices of the Kaiserreich—a Kulturstaat—could be sustained only thanks to the

taste of the museum’s affluent benefactors.

It mattered little, at least in the

representation of the museum, that such private taste was mediated by Prussia’s

powerful connoisseur-bureaucrat, Bode, who was responsible for selecting and

organizing the collections.

Gaehtgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel, 116-18.

By reshaping the public museum along with the “taste” of the private collector, Bode

was responding to a fin-de-siècle critique: the public museum, Bode maintained, stacked

the works of art in a “warehouse,” which, due to the overabundance of masterpieces and

the lack of appropriate conditions of display, distracted the attention of the viewers.

Explaining his alternative technique of display to an English audience in 1891, Bode

writes that “the chief aim” of the museum should be

“the greatest possible isolation of each work and its exhibition in a room which,
in all material aspects, such as lighting and architecture, should resemble, as near
as may be, the apartment for which it was originally intended.”

Hence Bode set forth two objectives: first, to recontextualise the masterpiece in a

semblance of the historical setting for which it was intended in the first place; secondly,

to “isolate” the work from other masterpieces. Bode opposed the comparative displays of

the 19

century museum, which often grouped the very best examples of painting

together. The painting could better be served, he argued, by combining it with works of

lesser artistic value, usually sculpture and architectural decoration.

The characteristic features of Bode’s style-rooms in which he pursued these two

objectives are well known.

Unlike the earlier displays of the Royal Museums, which

classified the arts according to their medium, Bode integrated paintings, sculpture, and

Bode, “The Berlin Renaissance Museum,” Fortnightly Review, 50 (1891): 506-15;

cited in Malcolm Baker, “Bode and Museum Display: The Arrangement of the Kaiser-
Friedrich-Museum and the South Kensigton Response,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen
(1996): 144 (hereafter cited as “Bode and Museum Display”).

Malcolm Baker provides an excellent critique of Bode’s museum displays in “Bode

and Museum Display,” 144-52; see also Gaehtgens, Berliner Museumsinsel, 12-23; See
Petras for photographs of Bode’s museum displays.

applied arts into historical ensembles within the museum interiors to evoke the period-

style. As early as 1888, nearly two decades before the opening of the Kaiser Friedrich

Museum, Bode petitioned the Prussian Ministry of Culture to acquire, in addition to

original paintings and sculpture, original architectural elements such as

portals, fireplaces and ceilings of the Italian renaissance… in order to exhibit
painting and sculpture in a series of rooms each of which is furnished in a way
that corresponds to the exhibits with genuine, contemporary decoration.

Though it integrated works of art with applied arts, Bode’s “style-room” had little in

common with the American “period rooms,” which displayed all the contents of a

historical interior from Europe and reinstalled it within the museum.

When we take for

example Bode’s organization of the Rembrandt Room, it becomes clear that Bode did

not intend to replicate an existing, or an archetypal historical Dutch interior.

Nor did Bode recontextualize the works within modern life by imitating, as it were, the

living room of a private collector. The visitor could certainly not sit and make himself at

“eine Reihe von Räumen in einer den darin auszustellenden Kunstwerk ganz

entsprehenden Weise mit echten gleichzeitigen Dekoration auszustatten.” Geheimes
Staatsarchiv Preußicher Kulturbesitz (GStAPK), I.HA Rep.76 Ve Sekt,
Kulturministerium, 15 Aby. VIII, Nr.2., Bd.10: 10-12; cited in Ohlsen, Wilhelm von
Bode, 134.

In a recent book on the history of the Art Museums in Berlin the editors offer three

definitions based on the way the interior of the museum relates to its historical contents
in the German museology: (1) an “Epochenraum” combines originals that belong to a
historical or stylistic epoch in the modern museum without imitating the architectural
context of the time. (2) A “Stilraum,” in contrast to “Epochenraum,” imitates a historical
interior by using architectural elements that match the style of the exhibited objects. (3)
A Period Room (used in English in German texts) displaces the original architectural
elements of a historic interior and restores them as an actual room in the museum. Alexis
Joachimides et al. eds., Museumsinszenierungen, 235.

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home on a period-chair in front of a Rembrandt, for the furniture, just like the painting,

was a museum display. And yet, unlike an applied arts collection, the utilitarian and

decorative objects are not presented for inspection. They are merely in a subsidiary role

as “accompaniments” to the paintings. The symmetrical organization of decorative

objects and sculpture in the interior was designed to draw attention to the masterpieces.

In combining these objects into an aesthetic ensemble, Bode claimed to approximate in a

modern interior the original experience of the paintings, had they not been displaced

from the rooms for which they were intended. Such a claim of course poses an

insuperable problem.

The dependence of a work of art on a historical or cultural context is already implied in

the very notion of “style”: the 19

century historical consciousness maintained that all

works embody some binding characteristics of the periods during which they were

executed, which are often not discernible by the artists themselves, but visible to the

retrospective gaze of the connoisseur. The conformity of the period style with the

dominant taste of an epoch is justified by the fact that the work does not only entail a

peculiar expression but it is put to use within a context: the Rembrandt painting

Baker, “Bode and Museum Display,” 150.

Some of those problems have been thoroughly addressed. Gaehtgens, for instance,

finds a “paradox” in Bode’s intention to recontextualise the masterpieces in the
museums at a time when more Renaissance and Baroque interiors across Europe were
deprived of their original works of arts due to the Berlin Museum’s unstoppable appetite
for originals. Berliner Museumsinsel, 16. Malcolm Baker, on the other hand, points out
that, “The harmonious qualities of Bode’s [style-] rooms mask the underlying
disjunction between original setting and the place of the de-contextualised figure in the
museum,” “Bode and Museum Display,” 150.

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originally decorated a 17

century Dutch interior. This said, we have also to mention

that style for Bode was not so much a historical, interpretive tool, as it was for the fin de

siècle historians, but an operative, aesthetic category. By creating a semblance of the

historical and cultural setting in a museum-interior, Bode turned upside down the

relation between art and context: works can only be experienced in their authentic

architectural context, and yet the architectural context is only subsidiary to the

experience of the original work.

However, that which makes a work a “masterpiece,” worthy of unwavering attention, is

its aesthetic differentiation from the context of its original use: hence the difference

between art and applied arts, between painting and architectural ornament. The

decontextualisation of art is not a shortcoming of the exhibition techniques of the 19

century museum, as Bode maintained, but a structural transformation in the status of the

object, which made the institution of the museum necessary in the first place. For, as

Theodor Adorno once wrote, even if the masterpieces of art are ‘liberated’ from the

museums and hung in their original places in aristocrats’ palaces across Europe, they

would still remain “museum objects without museums,” to the extent that they remain

object of pure aesthetic contemplation.

* * *

Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum” in Prisms, translated by Samuel and

Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Ma.: The MIT Press), 184

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Despite the risk of oversimplifying the complex intersections between the taxonomies of

art and culture and the history of Prussian Museums, we may summarize the history of

Berlin’s Museum Island prior to the Pergamon Museum as the succession of three

distinct mentalities. At its origin the Prussian Royal Museum presented a direct

correspondence between the museum and the project of social reform. The museum—its

architectural style, as well as its contents—was seen as a potent emblem for civic virtue

and morality. The architecture of the museum, in other words, did not raise a distinct

problem, but was an organic part of the vocation of art as Bildung.

The discrepancy between the architectural language and program of the museum

emerges arguably for the first time in the Neues Museum, thanks to the decline of

Humboldtian Bildung and the triumph of Hegelian historicism. While Stüler intended an

idyllic Roman forum—“a sanctuary of arts and sciences”—in the midst of the city, his

collaboration with the leading Prussian academicians and philologists such as Lepsius

resulted in building the Neues Museum as a metaphor for the philosophy of history. Had

Stüler instead chosen an eclectic language, a combination of architectural styles that

correspond to the symbolic, classical and romantic collections on the façade of each

floor respectively, he would have contradicted Hegel’s historical determinism (the forms

belonging to distinct historical ages cannot co-exist in a given present). For the Neues

Museum did not present so much what art had been in the past, but what it was leading

to, its final transcendence. I have argued that subjugating art into the idea of historical

progress, a telos external to art, served a conservative project that consolidated the

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authority of the Prussian state (a bewildering cultural bureaucracy), over the initial

project of instituting a civic community.

Bode’s notion of the Renaisssance Museum, which found its expression in Ihne’s Kaiser

Friedrich Museum, abandoned the mid-century idea of the museum as a metaphor for

history. Yet, Bode did not go back either to the earlier idea of the museum as Bildung.

The architecture of Ihne’s Neo-Baroque palace-museum has no moral or historical

message to convey. In its interiors Bode intended to create the “authentic experience”

(Erlebnis) of “art,” by reconstructing a semblance of cultural and historical contexts.

And yet, Bode’s architectural context in the museum is strictly speaking fictional and

modern and it does not replicate the historical interior from which the work was

displaced. I have attempted to trace some of the intellectual origins of Bode’s dichotomy

of art and context, from the work of Burckhardt and Nietzsche to that of Langbehn.

Several other sources could also be suggested, among these Wilhelm Dilthey’s theory of

“experience” (Erlebnis) in literary criticism and Konrad Fiedler’s formalism in art.

Bode’s curatorial connoisseurship was formalist in the sense that it rejected all earlier

notions that art mirrors something other than itself, either a moral idea, or the idea of

historical development. Instead, Bode subscribed to a vague definition of art as national

character, which he owes to Langbehn’s vaguely allusive and confused theory of art as

the redeemer of the Volk.

Basing his museology on a dichotomy of art and context, Bode created a new schism

between the architectural style of the museum and the styles of its interiors. Only the

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neutrality of the white cube, which would be introduced nearly two decades later, could

resolve the disjunction between the interior and the exterior of the museum. The

transformation of the Royal Museum of 1907 into the Pergamon Museum presents a

fascinating case in that sense—even though the Pergamon Museum never became a

modernist gallery.

When Messel wrote to Bode in 1907, having tried without success to match the theme of

each collection with the architectural style of the museum in which it is housed, he was,

perhaps, warning Bode that such correspondence is no longer possible.

He provided

instead simple facades in Berlin’s characteristic vernacular classicisim (Zopfstil), which

hide hermetic interiors, each of which reconstructs a context for a different art and

culture. If Stüler’s museum embodied the history of civilization, turning art into a

hieroglyphics of history, Messel’s museum mapped in architectural space the human

geography of arts and cultures.

Messel’s letters to Bode, 2 July 1907 and 7 August 1907, Berlin, SMzB PK,

Zentralarchiv.

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Part 3

_______________________________________________________________________

The Altar and Its Frames: Reconstructing Pergamon

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3. 1. Space and Relief in the Pergamon Room

Let me begin by noting the difficulty of describing the object. The truth is that we do not

know exactly what the object is or what it stands for. Some earlier accounts call it the

“Zeus Altar of Pergamon,” others simply the “Great Altar,” referring to a modern

presentation of a lost monument. Most visitors would agree that in the museum we stand

in the presence of one of the opera nobile of the history of art. Yet, what sort of object is

exhibited in the museum? Can it be displaced and replaced? And what about the modern

space of the gallery, the architecture of display, the optical reality-effects, the discursive

and aesthetic parameters that sustain the authenticity of experience?

From a strictly architectural point of view the object of experience is a modern interior.

The observer enters the room from a gate off the center, facing the main exhibit with a

sharp perspective angle. The Pergamon Room, or the “Pergamonsaal” as it is called in

German, is a rectangular prism approximately twenty meters high, fifty-one meters wide

and thirty-two meters deep. On all sides, the room is surrounded with light-colored walls

with no window to the outside with the exception of its translucent ceiling. Filtered

through the double layers of the glass roof, daylight gives the room its peculiarly austere

character. The exhibited objects are arranged alongside the inner walls of the room. The

space that the giant prism defines is mostly left empty in the form of a large void.

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The moment of entrance was no doubt conceived as one of the most important aspects of

the Pergamonsaal, leaving a permanent impression on the viewer. The visitor’s attention

is immediately directed to the façade of an ancient monument from the Hellenistic city

of Pergamon, reconstructed on the opposite side of the room. Two wings of this façade

extend from the rear wall of the Pergamonsaal towards the observer. As sculptural

objects in space, these two wings give the impression that the reconstructed altar is a

freestanding monument. They also frame the overall composition as seen from the

entrance.

The other three walls, which remain on two sides and at the back of the observer at the

moment of entry, are mostly left unoccupied. They rise 20m from the ground and meet

the glass ceiling with a simple ornamental moulding, a classicizing cornice. The flat and

mostly unarticulated surfaces of these walls give the impression that the altar is exhibited

inside a giant Platonic prism.

Near their lower edge, these three walls exhibit a long frieze in sculptural relief. The eye

of the observer scans the frieze horizontally, although the frieze is placed significantly

higher than eye level. Approximately one hundred thirty meters in length, the

“Gigantomachy frieze” once decorated the four sides of a freestanding altar in

Pergamon. It represents a scene from the mythic battle of the Olympian gods with the

giants. The frieze, which depicts the extremely expressive forms of bodies in motion, has

inspired modern artists and writers alike since Carl Humann shipped its fragments to

Berlin during the excavations of Pergamon in 1878-1886. Given its cultural and art

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historical importance we may assume that the display of the Gigantomachy is the

primary concern that shaped the Pergamonsaal of the Berlin Museum. Here in the hall

we may observe two different strategies of display. Most of the marble panels of the

frieze are exhibited on the walls of the room, independently from the reconstructed altar.

They are not exactly hung on the wall in the way a picture canvas is displayed in a

gallery, rather they are incorporated into the plaster finishing of the modern walls. Only

a small portion of the frieze, which actually corresponds to two wings of the altar beside

the great stairway, is exhibited with its architectural context as incorporated into the

reconstructed façade.

As the observer proceeds towards the façade and reaches the broad flight of the great

stairway, the experience changes drastically. The viewer no longer contemplates the altar

as a tableau from a distance, but rather walks through the scenery. The large steps

somewhere in the middle of the Pergamonsaal define the boundary that demarcates the

space of the museum in front of the altar, from the space of the altar proper. Judging

from its white marble finish, we may conclude that the stairway is a part of the original

altar, more than a modern architectural element. Yet the visitors are not only allowed to

step on it, they are encouraged to ascend the stairs. This is in sharp contrast, for example,

to the columns, base and entablature of the altar, which are vigilantly protected against

tactile perception. As in any other museum, security officers watch the crowd that might

feel compelled to actually touch the “monument.”

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The stairs take the viewer through the altar, presenting the sculptural frieze on both

sides. The sculptural figures that are kneeling on these very steps powerfully integrate

the exhibit with its frame. At the end of the stairs the viewer reaches a higher platform,

which leads first across a row of Ionic columns to a vestibule overlooking the

Pergamonsaal, and then, through a gate, to a separate exhibition room of the museum.

This room is named after Telephos, referring to a separate frieze that narrates the legend

of the founding of the city of Pergamon. Here a series of complementary impressions are

exposed. The gallery, which runs parallel to the reconstructed façade, provides the

visitor with a view of the Pergamonsaal from above and through the columns of the

peristyle. The impression is certainly that of looking at the Pergamonsaal from inside

the monument: a view from inside out. The Telephos Room constitutes an architectural

interior, which is curiously experienced as distinct from the overall interior of the

Pergamonsaal. This architectural boundary between the Pergamonsaal and the Telephos

Room is perceived as the threshold between the outside and the inside. Even though the

observer physically leaves one exhibition hall and enters another, a masterful treatment

of enclosures gives the visitor the impression of entering a freestanding Hellenistic

building. Hence the modern Pergamonsaal is translated into an impression of the antique

Pergamon Altar, as seen both from outside and inside.

A closer look suggests that the Pergamonsaal consists of critical points, which unfold

the optical construction of its reality-effect. Characteristically, these are located at the

very sites where the reconstructed altar meets the museum’s wall. If we ignore for a

moment the two freestanding wings and focus on the central colonnade of the Zeus

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Altar, we will see that this central section is a sculptural articulation of the modern

partition wall between the Pergamonsaal and the Telephos room. From a distant

perspective, however, the central colonnade looks like the peristyle of an ancient

monument, while the section of the wall immediately above the colonnade is

dematerialized. In order to give the Pergamon Altar its discernible “façade,” the eye

erases the modern partition wall in the background, as if it is simply the sky. This effect

that brings the Pergamonaltar to the foreground while effacing the architectural frame is

the result of a simple contrast between the highly articulated façade, attributed to antique

Pergamon, and the “neutral” surface of the modern museum. Yet, the aesthetic aspect of

this contrast is nevertheless remarkable: The Pergamon Altar is read as a work of art

against the background of a non-ground.

So far we have observed that the Pergamonsaal consists of carefully chosen visual

effects which present the semblance of an antique building in a modern interior, and that

this presentation occurs in two distinct yet complementary spheres of perception. The

first sphere is analogous to the contemplation of a picture. At the moment of entrance,

the observer sees the Pergamon Altar as an “ensemble” at a glance. The aesthetic

distance between the observer and the object of perception lends the reconstructed altar

an effect of completeness, which it physically lacks. The large void in front of the altar

magnifies the effect of depth and compels the observer to read the sculptural relief as the

image of a building. It is also important to note that this effect is not necessarily a

trompe l’oeil in the limited definition of the term. It does not construe the third

dimension out of a two-dimensional picture. Yet the reconstruction of a representative

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part—which is technically speaking a combination of freestanding sculptural forms and

sculptural relief, conveys the effect of the whole monument.

Secondly, the architectural promenade through the altar gives the visitor the impression

of occupying the original space of a Hellenistic building. More specifically it gives an

impression of crossing the boundary between inside and outside. It evokes a sense of

enclosure and exposure in the face of an imaginary landscape. The distant perception of

the altar as a picture and the subsequent experience of an enclosure do not conflict with

one another because of what we may call a scenario of experience, or rather, a

mnemonic sequence. In other words, the observer is overwhelmed by the vision of an

ensemble, prior to examining the reconstructed altar with close-ups in profile. The vision

proceeds from the general to the particular and constitutes a visual field that restores an

architectural continuum. Even though the wall of the gallery cuts through the altar as a

picture plane, the impressions of a moving eye restore the third dimension beyond this

plane. The depth of the Pergamon Altar extends in front of the viewer in high relief as a

fictive space.

* * *

Archaeological evidence shows that a major Hellenistic monument with elaborate

sculptural program was built in the castle of Bergama, in Western Anatolia, most

probably during the reign of Eumenes II (2

century BC)—only decades before 133

when Attalus III bequeathed the kingdom to Rome, and Pergamon became the provincial

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capital of Roman Asia. The monument stood on a lower terrace of the Pergamene

acropolis, south of the sacred precinct of Athena, facing the vast valley of the Bakırçay

(antique Caicus river). Following a peculiar Hellenistic type it consisted of a colonnaded

open court on an elevated podium (built upon 36.80 x 34.20 m foundations). The

monumental frieze Gigantomachy surrounded the high podium on all sides. A

monumental stairway, which faced the valley on the West side, gave access to an inner

court. An inner structure, walled with a balustrade on three sides and opening to the

West—perhaps a sacrificial altar—was housed in this court. The inner court was also

embellished by a smaller frieze, which showed the story of Pergamon’s mythic founder,

Telephos.

Conclusive evidence stops there: we have remarkably little knowledge about the

program and function of the antique building. We call it an “altar”—most often, the

Great Altar of Pergamon—for its architecture seems to fit a peculiar type of monument

in Hellenistic Anatolia, and for the only Roman writer who testified to its presence,

Lucius Ampelius called it “ara,” though he failed to identify to whom the “altar” was

A number of publications that followed the first German excavations of 1878 and

1886 attempted to reconstruct the Great Altar of Pergamon: Richard Bohn, the architect
of the excavations, published the first reconstruction of the ground plan of the
Hellenistic altar in the preliminary excavation reports published in 1880 and 1888; Otto
Puchstein reassembled and arranged the Gigantomachy Frieze in 1888-89; Hans
Schrader studied the sacrificial altar and the Telephos Frieze in two publications, “Die
Opferstätte des pergamenischen Altars,” Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 6 (July 1899): 612-25
and “Die Anordnung und Deutung des pergamenischen Telephos-frieses,” Jahrbuch des
Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 15 (1900): 97-135; A volume dedicated to the
architecture of the Great Altar, Der grosze Altar. Der obere Markt by Jakob Schrammen,
appeared in a series of official museum publications, Altertümer von Pergamon (Berlin:
Georg Reimer, 1906).

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dedicated.

For our purposes it is important to underscore the hypothetic nature of all

architectural reconstruction. Particularly the function and the form of the structure,

which was housed in the inner court, cannot be established with certainty: it might have

served as a sacrificial altar for the actual slaughtering of animals, an ash altar for the

burning of the offerings, a palatial court for festive banquets, or as the figurative altar of

a victory monument where the enemies of the Greeks, mythic and real, were depicted in

a set of reclining sculptures.

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It is likely, given the prominent position of the figures of Zeus and of Athena

Nikephoros (victory-bringer) on the East frieze, that the two Olympians were among the
honorees of the altar. This, however, does not rule out the possibility that the altar was a
shrine to a mortal (which may or may not have included a tomb), perhaps dedicated to
the hero Telephos, or to a member of the Royal family, most likely queen mother
Apollonis (died 183 B.C.?). None of these hypotheses, as Andrew Stewart has recently
noted, is exclusive: the altar may have had several honorees. See Stewart, “Pergamo Ara
Marmorea Magna: On the Date, Reconstruction and Functions of the Great Altar of
Pergamon,” in From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture in Context, eds. Nancy T. de
Grummond and Brunilde S. Ridgway (Berkeley Calif.: The University of California
Press, 2000), 37.

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Volker Kästner and Wolffram Hoepfner have recently proposed two reconstructions

of the Great Altar on paper, which differ both from Bohn’s 19

century reconstruction

and from each other in a number of details. Hoepfner also led a team that reconstructed
the altar in a new (1/20) scale model built from corian. While Kästner argues that the
sacrificial altar for burnt offerings may have been roofed by a baldachin, Hoepfner
endorses an older hypothesis that the sacrificial altar was either used for unburnt
offerings or contained a figurative representation of sacrifice. According to Hoepfner the
defeated enemies of the Greeks, Amazons, Persians and Celts were represented on the
“altar.” See Kästner, “Der Pergamonaltar als Bauwerk,” in ‘Wir Haben eine ganze
Kunstepoche gefunden!’ Ein Jahrhundert Forschungen zum Pergamonaltar, exhibition
catalog (Berlin, DDR: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1986); Kästner, “The Architecture
of the Great Altar and the Telephos Frieze,” in Pergamon: the Telephos Frieze from the
Great Altar, Renée Dreyfus and Ellen Schraudolph eds. (San Francisco: Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, 1997), vol. II: 68-82. See also Hoepfner, “Bauliche Details
am Pergamonaltar, Archäologischer Anzeiger (1991): 189-202; Hoepfner, “Siegestempel
und Siegesaltäre: der Pergamonaltar as Siegesmonument,” in Wolffram Hoepfner and
Gerhard Zimmer eds., Die griechische Polis: Architektur und Politik (Tübingen: Ernst
Wasmuth Verlag, 1993); Hoepfner, “Der vollendete Pergamonaltar,” Archäologischer

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Even though it might not be apparent to viewers at first glance, there is a correspondence

between the actual position of the Gigantomachy frieze on the museum walls and its

original location on the historical altar in Hellenistic Pergamon. Given that only the

West façade of the Hellenistic altar is reconstructed in the Pergamonsaal (opened to the

public in 1930) the German restorers needed to develop a peculiar order of presentation

for the East, North and South segments of the Gigantomachy.

A landmark novel in contemporary German literature, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands

[The Aesthetic of Resistance] by Peter Weiss, captures this critical issue in one

paragraph. Weiss’s novel, which narrates the resistance of a group of German insurgents

against the Nazi regime, starts with a description of the Gigantomachy frieze in the

Pergamon Museum. In an extended description that reanimates the sculptural figures in

narrative time, the author transforms the scene of the Gigantomachy into an allegory of

the German struggle against fascism. In the last paragraph of the first section, Heilmann,

the character from whose voice the author speaks, observes the peculiar strategy of the

reconstruction. He notices that inside the Pergamonsaal the “spatial function was turned

inside out” and that “the exterior surface of the temple became the inner walls of the

room.” “When we face the stairs of the West façade, we have behind us the East façade,

that is, the back side of the temple, which was only partially reconstructed.” Likewise on

Anzeiger (1996): 115-134. Hoepfner “Model of the Pergamon Altar (1:20),” in Renée
Dreyfus and Ellen Schraudolph eds., vol. II: 59-67.

115

the right of the observer, the southern frieze extends through the wall of the

Pergamonsaal, while the North frieze is located on the left-hand side.

101

Hence the presentation of the frieze in the museum is remarkable: it offers the viewer an

opportunity to inspect the one hundred and thirty-five-meter long frieze without breaking

the original order of the sculptural figures. And yet, by displaying the Gigantomachy on

the inner walls of a gallery, the museum effectively turned the Hellenistic building

outside-in like a glove. (Admittedly, the analogy of glove is helpful only to a certain

degree: for while the exterior facades of the Hellenistic monument were translated into

the inner façades of the Pergamon Museum, the sculpture on display in Berlin is not a

mirror image of the antique frieze.) In other words, the frieze of the historical altar,

which could be experienced only by a viewer who circled around the monument, became

the panoramic vision of an observer who stands in the middle of the Pergamonsaal.

Only when we reflect on the place of the observer who sees all the four facades of an

antique building, can we underscore the ambiguity of the museum presentation. No need

to say that the space defined by the four façades of a building is intuitively perceived as

its inside. Yet the viewer of the Pergamonsaal is given the impression of seeing the

monument from the exterior: a mental eye sees both the back and the front of the same

building from the same standpoint. It is therefore not so much the Great Altar of

Pergamon, which was uprooted and displaced from its original site, but the subject who

101

Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

taschenbuch edition, 1998), 19.

116

looks at the altar. Conceptually omnipresent, yet physically absent, this observer who

sees the monument from everywhere is, actually, nowhere.

102

To sum up: the object presented in the Pergamonsaal is not so much a restoration of a

freestanding architectural monument as a conceptual model of ancient architecture. The

museum presentation created the atmosphere of experiencing the Hellenistic altar not by

restoring it to its entire form, but by citing a hypothetic reconstruction of its façades in

four picture planes, and pasting them on the interior walls of the museum. To put it

polemically, the modern presentation deprived the Great Altar of Pergamon of its

buildinghood. The status of the altar as a freestanding tectonic corpus is compromised to

achieve the visual effect of an artistic whole. To the contrary of the common impression,

it is not that a historic altar was displaced and relocated in a modern interior; rather, the

prism of the Pergamonsaal functions as a giant apparatus that construes the Great Altar

as a modern spectacle.

The basic characteristic of such presentation, as we shall see, is that it does not

acknowledge its own status as a conceptual model, and, instead, amounts to a make-

belief: a tableau vivant. Such presentation is achieved by constructing in the modern

102

According to Weiss, the strategy of display in the Pergamon Museum is one that

renders the works completely dependent on the subjectivity of the viewer. The museum,
in other words, presupposes its audience. In a remarkable passage, Weiss’s hero,
Heilmann, asserts that the Pergamon Museum compels us to better understand—what he
calls the “theory of relativity.” The sudden encounter with the monuments of Pergamon,
Milet and Babylon in the adjacent rooms of the museum, the sudden transition from the
forms of one century to another, which is immediately accompanied with the experience
of the modern metropolis, is a “dizzying occurrence.” The museum both disorients and
reorients its visitor, and induces the subject to take a new position. Ibid.

117

gallery a fictive boundary between the antique space of the Hellenistic altar and the real

space of the modern museum.

118

3.2. Antique Fragments and Modern Visions

The museum reconstruction of the Great Altar is often presented as a result of the

successful German excavations in Pergamon in the last decades of the 19

century.

103

This statement, though literally correct, underplays an essential aspect of the relation of

German imperial archaeology with the Prussian Royal Museum: the promise of

achieving a spectacular museum reconstruction in Berlin was the main motive that led

the Prussian State to sponsor excavations in Western Turkey in the first place. When the

expatriate German engineer-architect Humann shipped his private finds from the castle

of Bergama, he failed initially to obtain the official support of the Royal Museum. It was

the newly appointed director of Berlin’s Antiquity Collection, Alexander Conze (1831-

1914),

104

who first saw the potential of reconstructing a monumental Hellenistic Frieze,

the Gigantomachy, from the fragments of human and animal figures in high relief.

105

103

See for example Matthes, The Pergamon Museum, especially “Introduction,” 9. Cf.

Kunze, “Der Pergamonaltar und die hellenistische Kunst Griechenlands: Geschichte und
Stand der Erforschung,” in ‘Wir Haben eine ganze Kunstepoche gefunden!’, ed. Kunze,
5-9. A history of the reception of the Pergamon Altar in Germany by Hans-Joachim
Schalles, on the other hand, shows the way Pergamene art came to be identified in the
19th century with the self-representation of the Wilhelmine Reich. See Schalles, Der
Pergamonaltar: zwischen Bewertung und Verwertbarkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986); Schalles, “Rezeptiongeschichtliche Nachlese zum
Pergamonaltar,” in Modus in Rebus Gedenkschrift für Wolfgang Schindler, eds. D.
Rösler and V. Stürmer (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1995), 189-200. Although I am
indebted to Schalles’ excellent study, I depart from his “history of reception” by arguing
that the Pergamene “works of art” did not stand on the shore of modern history but they
were actually shaped by it. Hence the appropriation of antique art is not, in my mind,
“abuse” or “explotation” of it by modernity: I intend here, in other words, a history of
modern construction of Pergamene art.

104

Alexander Conze was appointed as director of the Sculpture Collection of the Royal

119

As often is the case when archaeology is seen as a means for museum reconstruction of

monuments, the first German campaign in Pergamon was guided by a Romantic idea of

a golden age, and a determination to recover it at all cost. Neither Humann who had been

trained as an architect in Berlin, and had pursued most of his career as a road engineer in

Turkey, nor Conze, a curator of Greek sculpture, showed much interest in preserving the

historical strata belonging to the Byzantine and the Turkish Karasi Beylik eras in the

castle. The late antique and medieval structures were systematically destroyed to obtain

the fragments that might help a hypothetic reconstruction of the acropolis to its stage

during the Hellenistic and early Roman eras.

Seeking to recover a monument, which had once stood in the castle of Bergama, and

which had long since been absorbed into other historical structures, the German restorers

tackled two extraordinarily difficult problems: first, how to reassemble the fragments of

sculptural relief, most of which were embodied within an 8

century Byzantine wall,

into their original Hellenistic configuration—recovering the Gigantomachy, a

masterpiece of the 2

century BC; secondly, to recover the architectural monument to

which the frieze belonged. As early as 1878, Conze instructed Humann to seek not

merely “single works of arts, but rather to keep in view the whole structure of the altar,

Prussian Museum (Berlin) in 1877, and the director of the German Archaeology Institute
in 1881.

105

Matthes, The Pergamon Museum, 12.

120

the true object of inquiry.”

106

In fact, Conze’s quest to recover a lost Hellenistic

monument was also fuelled by the remarkable landscape of ruins in Bergama, which so

impressed the visitors and the excavators. Towering some two hundred and fifty meters

above the Bakirçay valley, the terrace where Humann excavated offers a vertiginous

view: the modern Turkish town on the Bakirçay valley covers to this day only partly the

ruins of a much larger Hellenistic and Roman settlement.

* * *

Among thousands of pages of excavation reports, official and private correspondence,

personal memoirs, two documents from Humann’s hand—a letter he wrote to Conze in

1878 and his first excavation report of 1878-79—provide a synoptic view of the process

through which the Gigantomachy was restored.

Since the start of the first official campaign sponsored by the Prussian State on

September 9, 1878, Humann and an army of workers—Turkish and Greek locals who

enlisted for the excavations—had dug a long trench on the lower terrace of the castle

along the Byzantine wall. Over ten months of excavations the trench had disclosed

several figures built into the wall: fragments of human and animal scenes carved on

slabs of white marble. Pursuing the foundations of a lost monument, Humann extended

106

See Conze’s letter to Humann, 16 July 1878, Chronik der Ausgrabung von

Pergamon 1871-1886, ed. Eduard Schulte (n.p., n.d.); also cited in Marchand, Down
From Olympus, 95. Conze predicted—correctly—that the sculptural fragments Humann
recovered belonged to a freestanding altar with an open court and not to a Greek temple.

121

the trench to the East where he encountered four marble panels in April 1879. In his

letter to Conze of July 22, 1879, and in his excavation report, Humann describes the

events of July 21 when the excavators turned over the marble slabs and brought their

sculptural relief into light. In his excavation report Humann writes,

I had visitors in Pergamon; my wife had come over from Smyrna [Izmir] and
also Dr. Boretius from Berlin, on his trip through the Orient. It was July 21 when
I invited the visitors to the [excavation site in the] castle to observe the turning of
the slabs, which were standing outwards with their backsides and against the
debris. While we were ascending, seven mighty eagles circled the castle,
anticipating good luck.

107

According to Humann’s vivid description, first a serpent-legged giant was turned over

and fell into the trench: the figure, whose back was stretched with fervor, and whose left

arm was raised defensively, faced toward an opponent to the left. Larger than life and

chimerical, the figure did not seem familiar to Humann. The second slab to be

uncovered displayed the powerful torso of an Olympian who towered over the

composition. His robe was wind-blown around the torso and between the legs, clearly

suggesting the posture of stepping in attack. His arms extended to the adjoining slabs,

which were still lost. If the figure had a head, it would perhaps have turned toward the

serpent-legged giant to engage him in battle. The identity of the torso escaped Humann

at first. Then the excavators uncovered a third figure: a slightly built, but muscular giant

who had fallen to his knees. His left hand held with pain the right shoulder from which

the arm hung, slack and lifeless. Then, a fourth panel came to light: a giant who wore a

107

“Humanns erster Bericht über Pergamon, 1878/79,” in Der Entdecker von Pergamon

Carl Humann: ein Lebensbild, ed. Theodor Wiegand (Berlin: G. Grote’sche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1930), 42.

122

shield and sword, yet, defeated in the battle, fell on his back. Rays of a thunderbolt had

cut through his body and pierced his thighs. The lightning that struck this last figure left

little doubt in Humann’s mind about the identity of the giant’s opponent. Who in

Olympus would use such a weapon?

I feel your presence, Zeus! [Ich fühle deine Nähe Zeus!] Feverish, I am rushing
around the four marble slabs; here the third [slab] fits onto the first one; the
snakes of the big giant clearly turn toward the slab with the giant on his knee.
The upper part of the slab where a giant has stretched his arm, wrapped in fur, is
missing; but one sees clearly that he is fighting above the fallen one. Could it be
that he is fighting against the greatest god? Surely, yes, his left foot, covered by
the garment, disappears behind the kneeling giant. Three slabs fit together, I
exclaimed, and am already with the fourth one; it fits too—the giant struck by
lightning falls under the god. I am literally shaking, my entire body; there,
another piece comes along—with my nails, I am scraping off the soil—lion skin,
it is the arm of the giant—next to him, a tangle of scales and snakes—the Aegis!
It is Zeus! Such a magnificent work was bestowed upon the world again and
crowned our efforts; the Athena group [a previously discovered group of the
Gigantomachy] found its most beautiful counterpart. Deeply moved, three of us
stood around the delicious find until I sat down on Zeus and cried in tears of
joy…

108

Humann’s description of the discovery in his letter to Conze, is virtually identical,

though it makes more pointed references to the supernatural signs that presaged the

discovery of the Zeus group: “Seven eagles circled the tip of the castle, and I asked Mr.

Boretius whether he knew anything about the birds; he believed it meant good luck.”

After identifying the slabs as the Zeus Group, Humann adds, “that is why the flying of

seven eagles.”

109

108

Ibid., 42-43.

109

Humann’s letter to Conze, 22 July 1879, Der Pergamon Altar: Entdeckt, Beschrieben

und Gezeichnet von Carl Humann, ed. Eduard Schulte (Dortmund: Ardey Verlag, 1959);
reprinted in Friedrich Karl and Eleonore Dörner, Von Pergamon zum Nemrud Dag: Die
archäologischen Entdeckunken Carl Humanns (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von
Zabern, 1989).

123

Humann’s description reveals the quasi-mythic consciousness that “discovered” the

Gigantomachy. For instance, “Ich fühle deine Nähe Zeus!” which he awkwardly inserted

both in the letter and report, breaks with the usual narrative voice of the author (who,

exactly, feels the presence of Zeus?). As a pronouncement in the tradition of the

Hellenistic soothsayers, this exclamation clearly belongs with the eagles that had circled

the castle the morning of July 21, 1879.

If the role of Humann in this drama of “discovery” is to foretell the return of the

“masterpiece,” the role of his immediate audience is equally crucial. Humann presents

his two non-specialist visitors, Dr. Boetius and Mrs. Humann (who resided in Izmir and

occasionally traveled to Bergama) as “skeptics.”

110

They come to embrace the slabs of

Gigantomachy only at the end of Humann’s reconstruction, not when the fragments fall

into the trench, but only when Humann presents compelling evidence about the identity

of the god represented. One could ask whether the Greek and Turkish workers who

turned over the slabs also felt “the presence of Zeus” along with the three Germans.

Humann, who studied and compared the work habits of his Muslim and Christian

Orthodox workers—in order to obtain higher efficiency—is silent about the reaction of

his workers to the discovery. Nor does he mention how they perceived the miraculous

signs that presaged it. That their reaction, unlike that of a Dr. Boretius in his grand tour

in the Orient, is totally irrelevant is not without significance: even though the “work was

110

Cf. Humann’s account with an article published by Boretius in Nationalzeitung about

the discovery of the Zeus Group, n.d., reprinted in Schulte, 59.

124

bestowed upon the world,” the reconstruction was intended, at least initially, for a

specific audience. The “discovery” of Pergamon, that is the destruction of the medieval

structures in order to recover a lost antique image is, above all, a process of cognition: it

could be achieved only by a group that was predisposed to see the cognates of Zeus—the

aegis, the thunderbolts, the eagles etc…--but cared little about the late antique and

medieval castle.

Humann’s biographers quoted indefatigably this moment of original “discovery.”

111

the 1920’s and the 30’s, the narration of the quasi-mythic events that had led to the

discovery of the Zeus Group effectively helped to refashion the image of the expatriate

architect as a “pioneer” of the emerging German nation, “the discoverer of Pergamon”

and—more astonishingly—“the savior of the frieze” (in the light of the recent

repatriation debates, such a title has a political significance).

The historical personality is undoubtedly more complex: Humann entered the service of

the Ottoman Government under the premier minister Fuat Pasha in 1864. He was sent on

Turkish engineering missions in Syria and Palestine. He first arrived in Bergama in order

to construct the Bergama-Dikili road and commanded as many as two thousand

construction workers in the region. Having established his engineering headquarters in

Bergama he started collecting antique marble from the castle in 1869. Though an

admirer of Greek architecture, what made Humann’s service invaluable for the German

Reich after 1871 was certainly not his knowledge of Greek antiquities. Few foreigners

111

See especially Wiegand, ed., Der Entdecker von Pergamon, Carl Humann.

125

knew the infrastructure of Western Anatolia as well as one who had actually helped

build it. Humann’s contacts with the Ottoman Turkish bureaucracy in the province

[vilayet] of Izmir also proved crucial in undertaking grand-scale excavations and

successfully exporting the finds from Pergamon, Magnesia on Büyük Menderes

(Maeander) (1891-93) and Priene (1896).

112

* * *

As early as 1886 the “Zeus Altar of Pergamon” came to be identified with the glory of

the Kaiserreich. The similarities between the Pergamene Kingdom that was patron to the

monument and the Prussia that recovered it, seemed convincing: the Attalids, like the

Prussians, were committed to reviving Hellenism, paid tribute to the high culture,

religion and traditions of classical Athens, and unified Hellenistic Anatolia under their

rule (building a second Greek empire after Alexander). To make matters worse, the

major victory of the Pergamenes was against the much-hated Celts (often cited as the

“Gauls,”

113

) who invaded Anatolia in the 2

century BC. In fact, even though we cannot

establish whether the original altar was intended to celebrate Eumenes II’s victory over

the Celts, there is little doubt that fin-de-siècle Germany embraced the monument as one

that crowned the Prussian victory over France.

112

See Karl and Dörner, Von Pergamon zum Nemrud Dag, 11-24.

113

The bronze Pergamene sculptural group representing the Celts is available today only

in marble Roman copies. See for example Epigonos (?) Dying Gaul, in Museo
Capitolino, Rome and Epigonos (?) Gaul Killing Himself and his Wife, in Museo
Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Altemps, Rome.

126

It is thus little wonder that the first reconstruction of the city of Pergamon in Berlin was

a panorama, a popular entertainment, which flourished in Europe and in the United

States in the 19

century.

114

The occasion was the exhibition celebrating the hundredth

anniversary of the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1886, as well as the 25

anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm I’s ascension to the Prussian throne. In addition to a

number of colonial pavilions,

115

the exhibition also featured a “Temple of Pergamon,” a

temporary structure that celebrated the achievements of the German archaeologists under

the Kaiser’s patronage.

116

The “Temple of Pergamon” was an architectural wonder: its base consisted of a

reconstruction of the elevated podium of the Great Altar of Pergamon, which was

decorated by plaster casts of the Gigantomachy frieze. On top of the Pergamene podium

a reconstruction of the Zeus Temple of Olympia was mounted. This architectural

chimera, which fused two monuments of two distinct cities and of two distinct historical

periods into a single structure, was dedicated to the achievements of German

114

For a history of the panorama, see Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a

Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997).

115

The exhibition also featured a “Kaiser-Diorama”—a misleading name that shouldn’t

be confused with the optical viewing device designed around the same years. The
installation presented the recent achievements of German colonialism in central Africa in
five different panoramas. The architects of the exhibition chose to house the colonial
installations in a replica of the Temple of Denderra in Egypt, which dates not from the
pharonic Egypt, but rather from the Hellenistic period: an exceptional symbolism to
incorporate Africa into the German empire without giving up the high Hellenic ideal.

See

Schalles, “Rezeptionsgeschichte Nachlese zum Pergamonaltar,” 190.

116

Ibid., 188.

127

archaeology: Olympia and Pergamon were the two major sites recently excavated by the

German Archaeology Institute. Although we have nearly no information about the

architects, Kyllmann and Heyden, it is clear that they conceived the “temple” as a

popular entertainment and did not intend a restoration of either historical monument.

117

In a recent article which focuses on the exhibition, Hans-Joachim Schalles points out a

few inconsistencies in the presentation of the “citations” of the Zeus Temple on Olympia

and of the Great Altar in Pergamon. First, echoing the 19

century debate on

polychromy in Greek architecture, the frieze on the pediment of the Olympia Temple

was fully painted, while the casts of the Gigantamochy frieze were left white.

118

Secondly, the German architects altered freely the sequence of the figures of the

Gigantomachy in order to accommodate the decorative program of the new building.

The two most celebrated sculptural elements, the Zeus and the Athena groups, which

originally belong to the East façade of the altar were presented on its front, on the most

prominent site of the modern “temple.”

Walking up the stairs of the Pergamon Altar through the peristyle of the Olympia

Temple, visitors entered a large semi-circular room. The interior wall of the half-rotunda

117

Oettermann, The Panorama, 257.

118

Only three years later in 1889 the Berlin art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin writes:

“Whereas one could imagine the Pantheon frieze with a gold ground, which might form
an effective foil to the beautiful contours of the figures, this would not be possible with a
more painterly relief like the Pergamene Gigantomachia, which relies entirely on the
effects of moving masses, and for which a gold ground would only create a wild and
completely inappropriate confusion of color.” Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque,
translated by Kathrin Simon (London, Collins, 1964), 63.

128

featured the “Pergamon Panorama” painted on a fourteen by sixty meter-long canvas.

The semi-circular Pergamon Panorama was adapted from a perspective by Richard Bohn

(1848-1898) who joined Humann’s excavations in 1879. According to the exhibition

guide, the panorama depicted

“a moment …in the annual feast of Pergamon, one of the capitals of the province
of Asia Minor during the Roman Empire… The theater was splendidly
decorated, the lodge of the governor was covered with red cloth. The
performance has just ended and some of the spectators proceed towards different
exits through narrow stairs. Most of them hurry towards the altar and the market,
and can still be seen on the processional way of sacrifice as they approach the
Zeus Altar.”

119

As Schalles argues, the depiction of people on their way to the altar of sacrifice, this

episode from the life of the “war and art-loving Hellas” can easily be recognized as a

motto in the self-image of the Kaiserreich.

120

In summer 1886 some one thousand and

five hundred actors in period costume dramatized the victorious wars of the Attalids

against the invading “Gauls,” using the Temple of Pergamon as an open-air décor. Both

the Pergamon Panorama and the Temple of Pergamon of 1886 played a crucial role in

the German self-identification with the antique city.

Even though the chimerical mixture of the Gigantomachy with the Zeus Temple of

Olympia had little effect on the later museum reconstructions, the idea of presenting a

panoramic view of the acropolis in an interior as an ensemble remained a powerful

influence. Hence as early as 1886, the Pergamon Panorama presented a phantasmagoric

119

E. Fabricius, cited in Schalles, “Rezeptionsgeschichte,” 195.

120

Ibid.

129

vision of Pergamon as a sublime landscape, curiously contained in a “Pergamon

Temple”—reversing the relation between the Hellenistic altar and the historical

landscape in which it once stood.

* * *

The French response to the Pergamon Panorama of 1886 came more than a decade later

with the monumental publication of Pergame by the historian Maxime Collignon and the

architect Emmanuel Pontremoli. Alarmed by the German appropriation of major

archaeological sites in the Eastern Mediterranean, the French Ministry of Education

sponsored a number of archaeological publications, which brought together a prize-

winning architect of the Beaux Arts academy with a historian of antiquity, usually a

member of the French School in Athens. Although the restoration of antique monuments

in Italy in a conventional set of drawings had long been part of the Beaux Arts

pedagogy—the winners of the prix de Rome after 1880 persistently chose the recently

excavated sites in Greece and Turkey as the topic of their 4

year-restoration

projects

121

—the architect’s collaboration with the historian was aimed at creating a new

type of scholarship in archaeology beyond the purpose of enhancing architectural

education.

122

121

For an overview of the projects by the fellows of the French Beaux Arts academy in

Rome see the exhibition catalog, Paris, Rome, Athènes: le voyage en Grèce des
architectes français aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: L'École nationale, 1982).

122

In one instance the French historian Bernard Haussoullier and the architect

Emmanuel Pontremoli carried out excavations in 1895-96 in the temple of Didyma in
Western Turkey, in a desperate and ultimately failed attempt to compete with the

130

It is bemusing, given the contemporaneous and distinctively anti-French celebration of

Pergamon in Berlin, that Collignon starts the book by arguing one should look nowhere

other than Versailles in order to understand Pergamon.

123

According to Collignon, both

the palace of Louis XIV and the seat of Eumenes II were conceived as an architectural

“ensemble,” a visual expression of the absolute power of the king. Vaguely allusive, this

comparison proved extremely influential on the subsequent interpretations of the site

plan of Pergamon.

124

And yet Collignon’s comparison plays out a deep

misunderstanding: even if the capital of the Attalids were composed intentionally around

an actual viewpoint—it was not; the acropolis was an accumulation of several historical

layers—such a privileged viewpoint would have to correspond to the symbolic place of

the king proper, the embodiment of divine authority. This was certainly not the case in

antique Pergamon: the king’s palace was one among many monuments that could be

seen by a traveler who approached the city from the valley.

German Archaeology Institute (DAI). See Pontremoli, Didymes: fouilles de 1895 et 1896
(Paris: E. Leroux, 1904). In other cases, French historians and architects studied
archaeological evidence already available in situ or in the Berlin museums. We may cite
the restoration of Olympia by Laloux and Monceaux, Epidaurus by Defrasse and Lechat,
among the most remarkable publications. Pergame of 1900 is a significant example of
this genre.

123

M. Colignon and Emmanuel Pontremoli, Pergame: restauration and description des

monuments de l’acropole (L. H. May, 1900), 229.

124

Looking at a small fragment of the antique city of nearly one million inhabitants

historians often interpreted Pergamon as “scenographic” urbanism, a giant stage-set that
pivots around the theater, opening to the vast valley, and hence celebrating the absolute
power of the suzerain.

131

Pontremoli’s impressive drawings, which he had originally submitted to the Beaux Arts

academy as his 4

year project in Rome [envoi de Rome], restored the Pergamene

Acropolis into a harmonious composition, an “ensemble.”

125

Unlike the Pergamon

Panorama, which is based on Bohn’s perspective, and where the modern viewer is

expected to occupy a central viewpoint (from which the ancient city as a theater-stage is

looked at), Pontremoli restored the acropolis in a set of Beaux-Arts drawings (most

remarkably in an elevation, which interpreted the antique city as a single and gigantic

façade). Even though the French architect restored the acropolis into its complete form

during the Roman era, he, unlike Bohn, does not depict a given historical moment in

Pergamon. Pontremoli made clear his disdain for theatrical restorations of antiquity,

which depicted man in historical attire on the architectural drawings alongside the

restored monuments.

126

His elevations of the city of Pergamon, just like the drawings of

Olympia by his teacher, Victor Laloux, are curiously devoid of people but overly

populated by a large number of Greek sculptures: the uncanny vision of an antique city

in a perfect state, suddenly abandoned by its people.

125

A student of Victor Laloux [who is known for his monumental reconstruction

drawings of Olympia in 1883], Pontremoli won the first prize in 1890 in the Beaux Arts
competition and was sent to Rome. As a “pensionnaire” in the French academy in Rome,
he first worked on the architectural restitution of monuments in three Italian cities, as
was expected during his first three years. For his fourth and final project of restitution,
however, he chose Pergamon. In Summer 1894 Pontremoli traveled to Berlin to work on
the fragments of the Pergamon Altar and especially those of the Gigantomachia frieze.
He must have seen them as exhibited in the Altes Museum.

126

See Pontremoli, Didymes.

132

A comparison of the hypothetic restorations of the Great Altar by German and French

architects is fascinating: it shows how the archaeological evidence available at the end of

the 19

century could be interpreted to “restore” two radically different buildings. Based

on a comparison of the archaeological fragments with the grid foundations in Bergama,

Bohn achieved the first hypothetic reconstruction of the altar in 1880

127

, in which he

conceived of the altar as an architectural frame for viewing a “baroque” sculptural

group. Based on the superficial resemblance of the Pergamene sculpture to 17

century

sculpture in Rome, German art historians called the art of the 2

century AD Anatolia

“Hellenistic baroque,” a category defined in opposition to classical art. Fuelled by the

neo-baroque style in German architecture in the 1860’s, and by German art history’s

preoccupation with “baroque” in the 1890’s, the Pergamene altar has been interpreted up

until today as a “post-classical” or “baroque” structure.

128

127

Volker Kästner, “Architecture of the Great Altar,” 68.

128

Representation of movement in painting and sculpture had become a central problem

in German aesthetics and art history by the end of the 19

century. Some of the

discussion was literally formulated in the aftermath of Carl Humann’s discovery, by a
group of scholars who were inspired by the Hellenistic figures of the Gigantomachy
frieze. In striking contrast to restrained, static and canonical representation of the human
body in Classical Greek sculpture, the Pergamon frieze offers an intense and exaggerated
way of expressing movement. The discovery of the Gigantomachy frieze put into
question the Neoclassical scholarship that had ignored Hellenistic art as decadent or
imitative of the classical age, and cast doubt on Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s (1717-
1768) famous dictum on the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of Greek sculpture.
The Gigantomachy frieze presents formal features that are almost entirely missing from
classical Greek art. In Art in the Hellenistic Age, J.J. Politt identifies some of these
characteristics as “undulating surfaces; agonized facial expressions; extreme contrasts of
texture created by deep carving of the sculptural surface with resultant areas of highlight
and dark shadow; and the use of ‘open’ forms which deny boundaries and tectonic
balance.” See Art in the Hellenistic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 111. It was not until the first years of the 20

century that the term “Hellenistic

Baroque” came to describe the Pergamene architecture and sculpture. We owe this
artistic category largely to the influence of the German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin

133

In contrast to the German interpretations, the French architect who studied the fragments

of the Gigantomachy in the Berlin Museum in 1894 and surveyed the foundations of the

monument in Bergama, conceived the altar as a curiously art nouveau ziggurat.

129

Pontremoli’s project the Gigantomachy surrounds a towering structure where the

monumental stairs lead to the high terrace of a sacrificial altar. Pontremoli’s fantastically

Oriental monument reveals the continuing influence of the British art historian James

Fergusson who restored on paper the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in 1862.

130

The subsequent reconstructions on paper by Jakob Schrammen in the official publication

Altertümer von Pergamon of 1906, and by Armin von Gerkan, which guided the

museum display of the late 1920’s, departed from Bohn’s initial plan only in minor

(1864-1945). In his Renaissance and Baroque (1889), a history of architecture of the
period immediately after the Renaissance in Italy, Wölfflin posits “baroque” as the
diametrical opposite of the classical idea in architecture. Baroque, then, besides referring
to a specific historical period in 17

century Italy, is a general tendency that periodically

surfaced in Western art, and usually as a reaction against a classical epoch. Wölflin’s
generalization of “baroque” into a circular, world-historical category is indebted to the
similarity he perceived between the Italian baroque and the Hellenistic art of Pergamon.
See especially Arnold von Salis, Der Altar von Pergamon: ein Beitrag zur erklärung des
Hellenistischen Barockstils in Kleinasien (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1912).

129

A graduate of the Beaux Arts academy, Pontremoli executed most of his buildings in

art nouveau style. See for instance his Villa Kerylos, France for the archaeologist
Théodore Reinach, built 1902-08. Pierre Pinon, “The Architect and the Archaeologist:
the Villa by Emmanuel Pontrémoli for Theodore Reinach,” Lotus International, 60
(1989): 112-27.

130

See Fergusson, The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus Restored (London: J. Murray,

1862). See also Fergusson, The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored: An Essay
on the Ancient Assyrian and Persian Architecture. (Delhi: Goyal Offset Printer. First
reprint 1981).

134

details. Since the subsequent excavations did not reveal substantial new evidence, our

knowledge about the superstructure of the altar essentially does not exceed that of Bohn

in 1888. The axial spans of the colonnade, the shape and function of the “sacrificial

altar,” the height of the building, the placement of the freestanding sculpture can only be

hypothetically reconstructed.

135

3.3. The Problem of Museum Reconstruction

By the end of the first campaign in 1880, Humann had shipped ninety-seven frieze slabs

and approximately two thousand fragments of the Gigantomachy, alongside thirty-five

slabs of the smaller Telephos. In his excavation report he predicted that the original

Gigantomachia covered an area of 135 X 2.30 m., and the sculptural fragments he sent to

the museum corresponded roughly to three-fifths

of the original frieze.

131

Hence, while a

substantial portion of the Great Frieze has survived, the architectural fragments Humann

uncovered are incomplete, making a restoration of the monument from its original pieces

impossible. Similarly, the grid foundations, which Humann uncovered on the altar

terrace in Bergama in 1879, scarcely reveal a specific scheme for the floor plan of the

monument.

132

As for nearly fifty fragments of ceiling slabs that have survived, Humann

left them in Bergama, where they can still be seen around the foundations.

From the moment that the fragments of the Gigantomachy reached Berlin, the question

of how to integrate the frieze with its architectural setting preoccupied the restorers. Two

131

Humann, “Die Ausgrabungen zu Pergamon. Geschichte der Untersuchung.

Vorläufiger Bericht,” Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen I (1880):
129-56; also cited in Ursula Kästner, “Excavation and Assembly of the Telephos
Frieze,” eds. Renée Dreyfus and Ellen Schraudolph, vol. I: 25.

132

These foundations, unlike the marble upper structure, were constructed from the

locally available tufa; their partitions were independent from those of the upper
structure. No more than two marble steps on the East façade have survived: we have no
fragment of the monumental stairs of the West façade. See V. Kästner, “The
Architecture of the Great Altar,” 69.

136

different approaches presented themselves in the architectural competition for the

extension of Berlin’s Museum Island in 1884. While a group of participants proposed to

display the frieze on a partial reconstruction of the Great Altar, an arrangement that

imitated the original setting of the Hellenistic relief (e.g. entries by Fritz Wolff, Ludwig

Hoffmann and Alfred Messel); other architects conceived a more “museal” presentation,

displaying the frieze on the wall of a large museum interior (for instance, the winning

project by Alfred Hauschild).

133

The Gigantomachy was first reassembled inside the “Pergamon Museum,” an interim

building designed by Fritz Wolff on the Museum Island. Even though the building was

constructed between 1897 and 1899, the sorting and assembly of the fragments of

Gigantomachy was completed only in 1901, when the museum was opened to the public.

At first sight, Wolff’s design presents a simple idea: a full-scale reconstruction of the

Pergamene altar placed inside a large square of about fifty meters on each side. The

architect’s treatment of the exterior facades of the museum, particularly the vestibule, in

Neoclassical style gives the impression of a Hellenistic altar placed inside a slightly

larger Greek temple—a building inside a building. And yet, as the photographs of the

museum galleries show, the shell of the museum was not experienced from inside as an

uninterrupted container. Wolff divided the space of the museum into three distinct areas,

each of these roofed in a different way. The area between the principal façade of the

Great Altar with its monumental stairs and the vestibule of the museum was roofed with

133

See S. Waetzoldt, “Bauten der Museumsinsel.”

137

a high vaulted ceiling. The architect surrounded the North, East and South segments of

the Gigantomachy with a narrow corridor, focusing direct light onto the frieze from the

museum’s windows. Inside the interior wall of the museum, which was read as the

exterior façade of the Pergamene Altar, Wolff placed a comparative architecture gallery:

the “interior” of the reconstructed altar, so to speak, is not an elevated inner court, as in

the historical original, but a sunken room lit through its glass ceiling. This large, central

space featured fragments from extinct cities in Western Anatolia, Pergamon, Priene and

Magnesia.

According to Volker Kästner, Wolff’s reconstruction of the altar in an “architecturally

neutral” interior, anticipated 20th century museum aesthetics. The interior of the first

Pergamon Museum was simple and relatively free of architectural ornament, unlike

Bode’s “style-rooms” in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

134

Yet, despite its simplicity Wolff’s museum was not by any means a precursor of the

“white cube” of the typical modernist gallery: it did not make a self-conscious statement

about the “neutrality” of the architectural frame in which “originals” were exhibited.

Quite the contrary, Wolff presented no ontological difference between the reconstructed

altar and its neoclassical container. Instead, Wolff’s Pergamon Museum acknowledged

both the partial reconstruction of the Great Altar (that is, the inner wall of the museum)

134

Volker Kästner, “Das alte Pergamonmuseum Berliner Museumsbaupläne gegen Ende

des 19. Jahrhunderts” in Staatliche Museum zu Berlin Forschungen und Berichte 26,
(Berlin, DDR: Henschelverlag, Kunst un Gesellschaft, 1987).

138

and its modern frame, the Neoclassical museum, as modern-day constructions: they are

the inseparable parts of a late 19

century design.

135

Hence the first Pergamene “reconstruction” in the museum presents a historical irony:

Wolff’s design was the only instance, in more than a century of museum displays, which

integrated all the segments of the Gigantomachy into an architectural reconstruction of

the Hellenistic altar. And yet, unlike his successors, Wolff did not see the reconstruction

of the altar as a museum exhibit in its own right: the reconstructed altar is merely an

imitation of the original architectural context of the frieze. The guide to the Pergamon

Museum of 1904 makes this point clear: “The purpose which governed the plan of the

Museum was the erection of a building in which the frieze of the Great Altar of

Pergamon might find, as nearly as possible, its original setting and light.”

136

The question remains of why Wolff’s museum, whose construction took nearly four

years, was demolished only eight years after its opening. True, structural problems of the

first Pergamon Museum and the unstable ground of the Museum Island were cited as

reasons for replacing it in 1908. One nevertheless wonders about the wisdom of building

135

In contrast to the make-believe of today’s Pergamonsaal, Wolff invited the viewers

to an interesting negotiation of the original plan of the altar and its adapted uses in the
gallery. This is particularly apparent in the entrance of the museum. Wolff bisected the
large monumental stairs of the Great Altar in the middle and introduced modern stairs
that descended to the sunken architecture galley. Inside the two projecting wings
(risalites) of the reconstructed West façade Wolff inserted two staircases leading to the
study collection upstairs for more specialized visitors. See Royal Museums of Berlin,
Guide to the Pergamon Museum (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1904).

136

Ibid.

139

a much heavier structure on the same ground, as Messel and his successors did between

1908 and 1930. Furthermore, the entire South Wing of Messel’s building was intended

for a silted rift, unfit for construction. The ground needed to be stabilized with wooden

palisades, steel trusses and reinforced concrete vaults: an illogically expensive and

lengthy solution to the perceived problem.

137

It is more likely that Wolff’s design did not satisfy the expectations of the fin de siècle

public, which must have kept a vivid memory of the colonial display of the Pergamon

Panorama two decades earlier. Wolff’s building left too narrow a space—seven to nine

meters—between the altar and its modern shelter. The visitors could experience the

Gigantomachy from all four sides. But they did not have the chance to experience the

building as an ensemble from a distance, which reduced the monumental effect of the

museum interior. Such a reconstruction was apparently not deemed appropriate to

representing the glory of the German Reich. At least one visitor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was

particularly disappointed with Wolff’s rigorous and yet modest display of the

Gigantomachy.

138

Wolff’s Museum was demolished in 1908 to give its place to Messel’s

new museum. The Gigantomachy had to wait until 1930 for the completion of its new

“home.”

137

See the engineer O. Leithof’s design of the steel construction for the foundations of

the South Wing. SMzB PK Zentralarchiv, I/BV 365; see also Matthes, 45-47.

138

See Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, 200.

140

A comparison of Wolff’s plans with Messel’s perspective of the “Altar-Raum” of 1907

shows that the latter remedied the perceived “failure” of the first Pergamon Museum.

Unlike Wolff, Messel displayed a reconstruction of the West Façade of the altar from an

awe-inspiring perspective angle and from a considerable distance. While Messel also

displayed the frieze on the interior walls of the gallery, he left the center of the “Altar-

Raum” unoccupied.

It seems that Messel was neither interested in reconstructing the Great Altar according to

its historical plan, nor did he intend to create the ideal architectural setting for the

Gigantomachy—in fact, as critics of the project noticed in the 1920’s, the scale of the

“Altar-Raum” and its fictive reconstruction of the West Façade distract viewers from an

experience of the Gigantomachy. He intended to create a hermetic interior, with an

overwhelming and unique experience. It is the unique experience conveyed by this

“Raum,” and not a reconstruction of the altar, that should be cited among Messel’s major

contributions to the history architecture.

141

3. 4. On the Museum’s Object: a Model, a Décor and a Restored Monument

The museum that opened to the public in October 1930 departed significantly from

Messel and Bode’s project of 1907. This transformation was partly due to the

interventions of the architect, Ludwig Hoffmann (1852-1932), who oversaw the

completion of the museum after Messel’s untimely death in 1909.

Hoffmann, just like his close friend Messel, had several occasions to develop ideas for

the architecture of the Museum Island throughout his career. He first came to

prominence by winning the Schinkel Competition for the Development of the Museum

Island in 1882. Hoffmann also participated in the competition of 1884 with a successful

entry. His design of the Antiquity Museum was in many ways similar to Messel’s in the

same competition: both architects placed a full-scale reconstruction of the Pergamon

Altar in a large museum, and conceived of a processional court in front of the Antiquity

Museum opening to the Kupfergraben. Having become the city planning councilor of the

City of Berlin in 1896, Hoffmann designed and actually built a large number of public

buildings, among which are the Märkisches Museum (1899-1908) and Stadthaus (1902-

1911) in Berlin. Around 1910 Hoffmann abandoned his earlier Neo-Baroque and

eclectic building style and, like other influential architects who reshaped the “official

142

architecture” of Wilhelmine Germany, started to build in simple Neoclassicism often

making reference to Berlin’s local classicism [Zopfstil] of the 18

century.

139

Hoffmann’s projects between 1911 and 1920, which altered Messel’s original plan,

seldom received positive reviews from his contemporaries. The protagonists of the

emerging Modern Movement, Walter Curt Behrendt, Adolf Behne and Karl Scheffler

saw the chief architect of Berlin as a proponent of the ancien régime, and found his

monumental Neoclassicism anachronistic.

140

Behne, who wrote several articles on the

Pergamon Museum in the daily press in the 1920’s dismissing it as an “uncanny child of

the Wilhelmine spirit,” accused Hoffmann of blocking the “transparency” of Berlin’s

urban center.

141

Scheffler wrote in 1924 that Hoffmann “spoiled everything that had

been good in Messel’s project, and everything that had been bad became worse.”

142

139

See Hans J. Reichhardt and Wolffgang Schäche, Ludwig Hoffmann in Berlin: die

Wiederentdeckung eines Architekten (Berlin: Landesarchiv, 1987); Volker Viergutz,
"Der Nachlass Ludwig Hoffmann: Stadtbaurat für Hochbau in Berlin von 1896-1924"
Museums Journal (Berlin) 8, 1 (January 1994): 48-51; Viergutz, “Berliner
Museumskrieg.”

140

In his biography of Messel, Behrendt compared the architect with Hoffmann. While

Hoffmann, according to Behrendt, is a neoclassicist who “achieves beauty through the
laws of proportion” Messel, is an artist who “feels the effect of plastic form” and heard
the “melody… of architectural beauty.” Behrendt, 132.

141

For Behne’s critique of the Pergamon Museum and Hoffmann see his papers and

manuscripts in Berlin, Bauhaus-Archiv. Especially his typescript, “Das auf dem
Pergamon-Altar geopferte Deutsche Museum,” printed in Die Weltbühne 42 (1930):
583-85. See also Behne, “Vernunft oder Repräsentation im Städtebau?” Sozialistische
Monathefte 62 (5. June 1925): 352-54; Behne, “Die Museumsinsel eine Tragödie
Berliner Städtebaues,” Das neue Frankfurt 4 (1930): 211-13.

142

Cited in Bernau and Riedl, “Für Kaiser und Reich,” 172.

143

attributing the Pergamon Museum to Hoffmann, architectural historians have

conveniently cleared Messel—the “progressive” architect—from the responsibility of

designing what has come to be seen a politically and artistically reactionary landmark.

143

It is therefore curious that, as at least one historian of the Museum Island noted,

Hoffmann’s interventions between 1911 and 1928 could as well be read as an attempt to

“modernize” Messel and Bode’s museum interiors.

144

From his first project of January

1911 onward Hoffmann took issue with Bode’s style rooms, opposing the integration of

works of art with architectural or decorative elements. He favored instead a “neutral,

…simple, modern room” [neutral gehaltene einfache moderne Zimmer], which is

suitable for the display of any collection. The minutes of the official meetings of the

Commission for the New Building Construction [Baukomission] underscore Hoffmann’s

struggle with Bode. At least in one instance, on 18 November 1915, Hoffmann burst out

in anger, accusing Bode of effectively blocking his plans to modernize the museum for

the previous five years. Although the General Director, Hoffmann argued, had conceded

to changes on Messel’s exterior facades, he had rejected any compromise in the

Museum’s interiors.

145

143

As late as 1994, for instance, Goerd Peschken calls Hoffmann’s alterations to

Messel’s project “a provincial stupidity”—and he does not mean “provincial” in a kind
way. “Der Messel-Bau,” in Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte München, Berlins
Museen: Geschichte und Zukunft (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994), 239-246.

144

See Gaehtgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel, 114; also cited in Marchand, Down From

Olympus, 289-90.

145

See the official minutes of the meetings (Sitzungs-Protokol) of the Baukomission, 18

November 1915, Bauverwaltung der Königlichen bzw. SmzB PK Zentralarchiv, I/BV
327 (Cf. I/BV 328 for the copy of the minutes with Wille’s manuscript corrections).

144

Though Hoffmann’s understanding of the interior seems more in tune with emerging

museal aesthetics in the first decades of the 20

century, it remains to be seen whether

his project was truly more “modern” than that of Messel. An analysis of Hoffmann’s

plan of September 1913 shows that the architect’s struggle to simplify Bode’s style-

rooms was consistent with his persistent quest to classicize Messel’s museum-

complex.

146

While Messel and Bode conceived of the museum as a series of self-

contained interiors, organized around an open court or extending along the

Kupfergraben, each of which reconstructs a cultural and architectural context for the

period art, Hoffmann’s composition conceived of the complex as a unified monument

organized around a strictly symmetrical axis. Though Hoffmann’s interventions in

Messel’s site plan seem relatively insignificant at first sight, he effectively transformed

the court into a Neoclassical, processional axis. Furthermore, by raising the building as

much as five meters, Hoffmann gave the museum a much more monumental appearance

than Messel had intended. Overall, as Behne correctly noticed, Hoffmann’s museum

looks severely heavier and bulkier than Messel’s project of 1907.

147

Having conceived the Pergamon Museum as an urban landmark, Hoffmann sought to

remedy its relative isolation in Berlin’s historic center. His urban plan of 1912 for the

Museum Island and the University, cut a monumental East-West axis through the

146

See Hoffmann’s project of September 1913, lithograph, SMzB PK Zentralarchiv,

I/BV 494.

147

Behne, “Vernunft oder Repräsentation im Städtebau?”

145

existing urban fabric, connecting the processional court in front of the museum to the

Hegelplatz behind the University of Berlin (today’s Humboldt University). Had

Hoffmann’s urban plan been implemented, the West façade of the Great Altar,

hypothetically reconstructed in the museum, would crown one end of a monumental

urban axis.

148

* * *

Today’s Pergamonsaal was achieved after a lengthy and remarkably experimental

process of design: different alternatives for the interior arrangement of the room were

built in the museum as full-scale wooden models. The records of the Building

Commission show that decisions were often taken after the museum directors,

archaeologists and other members of Prussia’s cultural bureaucracy inspected the

models.

Even though the alternatives the commission considered over the years are varied both in

their strategy of museum display and concept of historical reconstruction, two major

tendencies could be detected. The vaulted, false-ceiling of Messel’s “Altar-Raum” was

simplified and regularized: by 1914 the Pergamonsaal had become a pure rectangular

148

Cf. Hoffmann’s master plan for Athens, Greece in 1910. See Hartwig Schmidt, “Das

‘Wilhelminishe’ Athens. Ludwig Hoffmann Generalbebauungsplan für Athen,”
Architectura 9/9 (1979): 30-44; see also Hans J. Reichhardt and Wolffgang Schäche,
Ludwig Hoffmann in Berlin: die Wiederentdeckung eines Architekten (Berlin:
Landesarchiv, 1987), 36-37.

146

prism.

149

A second, and perhaps a more intriguing development occurred in the room

which is adjacent to the Pergamonsaal, and which extends to the West of the Museum

Island, towards the Spree. In Messel’s project the contents and function of this room are

not linked to the Pergamene reconstruction. Curiously, in the projects of the 1910’s and

20’s this room has first become a sort of annex to the Pergamonsaal and then was

transformed into today’s Telephos Room—even though the plan of the Telephos Room

is not analogous to that of the inner court of the historical structure. By 1920 it had come

to be perceived as the “interior” of the reconstructed altar.

Such perception, however, is complicated, as we have seen, by the display of the East,

South and North sections of the Gigantomachy as detached from the reconstructed West

Facade. In fact, Hoffmann proposed to reconstruct the remaining four façades of the

historical altar and paste them on the remaining interior walls of the Pergamonsaal.

Hence instead of the presentation of a “monument” of the altar from a distance,

Hoffmann sought to integrate the Gigantomachy into a semblance of its original

architectural setting on all four walls of the Pergamonsaal. Wiegand is mostly

responsible for blocking Hoffmann’s plans and giving the gallery its final shape.

150

The

archaeologist must have thought that reducing the altar to a mere architectural context

149

As late as September 1913, Hoffmann maintained the vaulted ceiling Messel had

designed for the Pergamonsaal. The following project of June 1914 transformed the
Pergamonsaal into a simple rectangular prism. I/BV 494

150

In the final analysis Wiegand, the director of the Antiquity Collection, was more

influential than Hoffmann in shaping the Pergamonsaal. See the official correspondence
of the museum directors about the construction and interior arrangement of the
Pergamon Museum, 1914-15 and 1920-31. SMzB PKB, Zentralarchiv, I/BV 329.

147

for the Gigantomachy would confuse viewers and, more importantly, would diminish the

imposing effect of the monument seen as an “ensemble” from a critical distance.

Although the projects for the museum between 1911 and 1930 are single-handedly

attributed to Hoffmann, Wilhelm Wille (1877-1929), a relatively unknown architect,

played a crucial role in the museum’s design, particularly in developing the Near Eastern

Museum in the South Wing of the complex.

151

We may assume that while Hoffmann,

who oversaw a large number of public projects simultaneously, was responsible for more

general decisions, Wille executed most of the projects.

Apparently frustrated with Hoffmann’s complacency, Wille developed two alternative

projects for the museum in 1921 and 1927, which, in both instances, created

controversies. Unlike Hoffmann, Wille believed that Messel’s “Altar-Raum” contained

a “false representation” of the Hellenistic altar and should be abandoned.

152

In his

project of 1921, he proposed instead to restore the altar to its full architectural plan. This

required extending the Pergamonsaal considerably by constructing a large niche where

the floor plan of the antique building could be fitted. In sharp contrast to Messel’s

original idea, Wille’s project can be read as if a historical monument is restored to its

original plan and grafted, as it were, into the space of a modern museum.

151

Wille developed nine alternative designs for the Near Eastern Museum between

1912-1914. See the projects in SMzB PKB Zentralarchiv, I/BV 494.

152

Sitzungs-Protokol, July 1920, SMzB PKB Zentralarchiv, I/BV 327.

148

Even though Wille proposed to restore the entire Great Altar to its original plan, his

presentation of the altar in the museum was still frontally organized: the monument

could be seen from three sides, but not from its back. In what appears to be a

compromise in his “truthful” representation, Wille had to paste the rear (East) façade of

the Great Altar on the museum wall, opposite the West façade of the restored altar.

Hence inside Wille’s Pergamonsaal, the viewer would have found him/herself

effectively occupying a place between the front and back of a Hellenistic building, as

well as inspecting its entire plan.

We also learn from the official records of the Building Commission that Wille developed

six years later a second alternative for the Pergamonsaal. This time, having altogether

dismissed Messel’s reconstruction as a “theater stage,” he proposed to restore the

Pergamon Altar as a freestanding building inside the Pergamonsaal. To the dismay of

the other members of the Commission, Wille provided Berlin’s daily press with a

critique of Messel’s original idea as well as an account of the advantages of his own.

153

Wille’s design eventually found supporters in the Prussian Ministry of Culture under the

Weimar Republic, which further infuriated Berlin’s conservative museum

administration. The Building Comission meeting of July 1, 1927 when Wille’s project

153

Daily Berliner Tageblatt of 9 April 1927 argues that the Altar Raum is “so small”

that only part of the altar can be exhibited. The author adds “To enlarge the room to
contain the full depth of the altar—would have a greater effect.”

149

was considered and rejected is particularly informative, underscoring the divergent

concepts of reconstruction debated by archaeologists and architects.

154

Offering qualified support to Wille’s alternative plan, Carl Heinrich Becker (1876-

1933), the Prussian Minister of Culture (1925-30) and renowned scholar of Islamic Art,

opened the discussion by comparing two different types of museum display: the first is a

“purely museal presentation”—the display of the original frieze inside a modern

museum—while the second entails the reconstruction of the Great Altar as an

“architectural object” [“corpus”]. Demanding that museum directors pay closer attention

to Wille’s alternative plan, Becker underscored the ambiguity of Messel’s “Altar-

Raum”: it was neither a “museal” presentation, nor an architectural restoration. It

reminded Becker of a theater décor, or a “Kulisse”—a theater back stage.

155

Eventually Wiegand prevailed and Wille’s idea of full architectural restoration was

defeated on the grounds that the remaining space in the Pergamonsaal would be limited

and it would not give the observer the chance to experience the façade from a distance

and through a wide perspective angle. According to Wiegand, the contemplation of the

whole monument at a glance—and not a freestanding architectural restoration—was the

aim of the Pergamonsaal. Furthermore, Wiegand’s argument in defense of Messel’s

reconstruction is telling: he countered Becker’s criticism by arguing that the “Kulisse”-

154

Minutes of the meeting of the Museum Building Commission on 1 July 1927, SMzB

PKB Zentralarchiv, I/BV 327.

155

Ibid.

150

like effect of the museum display was precisely what the Hellenistic builders had

intended in the first place.

156

The aim of the museum, according to Wiegand, is neither

to create a “purely museal” presentation of works, nor to restore an architectural

“corpus,” but, rather, to recapture the original, theatrical spectacle of the ancients.

The controversy over the Pergamonsaal continued after Wille’s death in 1929. Perhaps

more than Wille’s alternative plan, his critique of Messel’s—and Hoffmann’s—design

as a “theater-stage” and a “false representation” became the starting point of subsequent

criticism.

157

156

Ibid.

157

Daily Der Tag of 23 April 1929—a few months before the architect’s

death—reported that Wille’s alternative was never made public. Yet the author argues
that the full restoration of the Great Altar, as suggested by Wille, would be logical only
if the altar is restored in its original place in Western Anatolia.

151

3.5. The Museum of Ancient Architecture: Monuments for Mass Spectacle

The construction of the Pergamon Museum in the1920’s had provoked one of the most

bitter controversies on the representation of art and culture in modern Germany. The

main participants in this debate were the constituents of the cultural bureaucracy which

the Weimar state inherited from the Kaiserreich, as well as critics who futilely attempted

to modernize that very apparatus: archaeologists, architects, art critics, politicians and

advocates of education reform.

158

What appeared at first a territorial skirmish among the

competing humanistic disciplines to demand more space on Berlin’s Museum Island for

the object of their study, quickly escalated into an ideological battle. Theoretically,

“Berlin’s Museum War”—as it is known in the literature—evolved amidst the rise of

cultural relativism: while an increasingly biologistic definition of “culture” became

commonplace, the idea of universal civilization was marginalized. From then on, no

normative judgment about the hierarchies of art and culture could be taken for granted

without causing a political controversy.

Writing in 1921, in the wake of Germany’s military defeat, economic collapse and

political turmoil, the art critic Karl Scheffler (1869-1951) offered a harsh account of the

Wilhelmine Kulturpolitik in his Berliner Museumskrieg. He observed, acutely, that the

158

For analysis of “Berlin’s Museum War” and its significance see Marchand, Down

From Olympus, 288-94. See also Silke Wenk “Theodor Wiegand: Chronik,” in Auf den
Spuren der Antike, 24-26; Frank Matthias Kammel, “Neuorganisation unserer Museen
oder vom Prüfstein an dem sich die Geister Scheiden,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen
34 (1992): 121-136.

152

general strategy of display in the Pergamon Museum was determined by a “mania of

completeness” and a “façade mentality.” In lieu of exhibiting archaeological fragments

as distinct objects, the museum chose to integrate them into an architectural décor.

Mocking the imperialist ambitions of the “archaeologists,” Scheffler wrote: “If the era of

the Wilhelmine Reich had lasted fifty years longer, if the war had come later and

excavations continued, we would surely have had to make room in the museum for an

entire Greek city.”

159

Two visions came to clash in “Berlin’s Museum War”: Bode’s idea of the museum of

art and culture, which sought to give priority to the completion of the German Museum

on the historical Museum Island and the Asian Art Museum in Dahlem; and the

archaeologist Wiegand’s position to transform Messel’s building into a grandiose

antiquity museum—the “museum of ancient architecture” as Wiegand called it. Unlike

Bode’s style rooms, Wiegand’s museum would feature completed facades or ensembles

of architectural elements from antiquity. Whereas the influence of Bode waned during

the Weimar years—he resigned as the General Director of the Berlin State Museums

(former Royal Prussian Museums) in 1920, and kept an increasingly symbolic post as

the director of the New Building Commission until 1928—Wiegand became one of the

most influential figures of the Prussian cultural bureaucracy during the Weimar years,

first as head of Berlin’s Antiquity Collection and then as the director of the German

Archaeology Institute (DAI), a position he kept during the first years of the National

159

Karl Scheffler, Berliner Museumskrieg, 76 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921). Cited and

translated into English in Marchand, Down From Olympus, 290 n.107.

153

Socialist era, until his death in 1936.

160

As early as the 1920’s Wiegand successfully

blocked Bode’s plans and diverted the severely limited funds of the Weimar State to his

“museum of ancient architecture.”

In this light, Scheffler’s Berliner Museumskrieg appears as an attempt to support Bode in

a losing battle. The megalomaniac “archaeologist” with “façade mentality” that Sheffler

refers to is, undoubtedly, none other than Wiegand. Enraged by the decision to abandon

the Asian Art Museum in Dahlem, Scheffler echoes in his book the ideas already put

into practice by Bode decades earlier in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. He underlines the

necessity of distingusihing the masterpieces of Asian “art” (those produced by courtly

traditions in East Asia and the Middle East)—from ethnological objects of “primitive”

peoples.

161

* * *

If Bode—and later Scheffler—attempted to rescue “Asian” and “Germanic art” from the

hands of the ethnologists—construing high art as a cross-cultural category, Wiegand’s

position about the hierarchies of ancient arts and cultures is more ambiguous. He fought

a fierce battle to defend the primacy of Mediterranean antiquities over ancient Germanic

or Asian art in the museum’s plans. And yet, his choice of “ancient architecture” as the

160

Watzinger, Carl, Theodor Wiegand: ein deutscher Archäologe 1864-1936 (Munich,

C.H. Beck, 1944), 351-56.

161

Scheffler, Berliner Museumskrieg, 7-42.

154

principal exhibit of the museum and the emphasis he gave to Hellenistic and provincial

Roman monuments in Anatolia instead of the classical art of Hellas show that Wiegand

departed significantly from the vocation of the 19

century museum, Bildung.

Unlike most of his predecessors, Wiegand did not come to prominence in German

archaeology as a scholar of classical philology. He made a career for himself as an

excavator—he directed excavations in Miletus, Didyma and Pergamon after Humann’s

death—and a political liaison in Istanbul, who successfully imported archeological finds

to Berlin from the Ottoman Empire. A man of action, Wiegand founded and commanded

a field artillery unit, the so-called “German-Turkish Commandos for the Protection of

Antiquities” in 1914-1918, during the Turkish-British war in Sinai and Palestine. Using

German reconnaissance planes and his military staff, he surveyed a number of

archaeological sites in Sinai, Palestine and Syria, which appeared in a series of

impressive publications after the war.

162

Wiegand’s success in shipping the archaeological finds to Berlin, in violation of the

Ottoman Law of Antiquities, was often thanks to his friendships with the Turkish

officials in key positions including Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910), the director of the

Imperial Museums and the founder of the Beaux Arts academy in Istanbul, and Cemal

Pas-a, (1872-1922) the commander of the 4

Turkish army and the war-time governor of

162

See Theodor Wiegand, Sinai, Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen des deutsch-

türkischen Denkmalschutz-Kommandos, heft 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1920), 1-35;
see especially a monumental survey of Damascus, Carl Watzinger and Karl Wulzinger:
Damaskus: Die Antike Stadt, heft 4 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1921).

155

Syria and Arabia. When his contacts failed to comply with his demands, Wiegand

proved to be a true brinkman, who did not refrain from using the financial influence of

his father-in-law, Georg von Siemens, the director of the Deutsche Bank, as leverage.

163

Wiegand’s philhellenism, which was crucial in transforming Bode’s “German Museum”

into a “museum of ancient architecture,” was not so much rooted in the classical

philological traditions as in his quest for an imposing and graphic presentation of the

“monuments” of antiquity, which he called “Total Anschauung” (view, intuition,

experience, contemplation).

164

As early as 1908 a controversy erupted over the display of the Market Gate of Miletus,

the fragments of which Wiegand shipped from Turkey. Despite Hoffmann and Bode’s

fierce opposition, Wiegand was determined to open room in Messel’s plans for a

grandiose reconstruction, and ultimately succeeded in securing Kaiser Wilhelm II’s

support. In his diaries Wiegand writes that he impressed Wilhelm by presenting him a

“full-scale” model of the Milesian gate from the right distance—24 m—that allowed the

German monarch to see the monument as a “whole.” Wiegand also argues that

Hoffmann attempted to hinder the effect of the “scenery” by initially arranging Kaiser’s

viewpoint too close to the model—only 10 meters: an effort Wiegand noticed and

prevented the day of the Kaiser’s visit. This anecdote is certainly as telling about

163

See Marchand, Down From Olympus, especially 202-05.

164

Theodor Wiegand, “Pergamon-Museum,: 15 July 1925, SMzB PKB

Vorderasiatisches Museum, 17; cited in Marchand, Down From Olympus, 291.

156

Wilhelm as Wiegand’s idea of museum display—the Kaiser was flattered to learn that

the distance between the Cesar’s seat and the arches of the procenium in the Roman

theater was equal to the distance of his viewpoint to the Milesian model at that very

moment. (“What Augustus thought right…, Your Majesty will find proper”).

165

Impressed by Wiegand’s presentation Wilhelm ordered that “the recently acquired

Market Gate of Miletus be reconstructed into its “real scale” [in wirklicher Größe] like a

theater backdrop [Kulisse].” The Kaiser also approved Wiegand’s proposal to place the

reconstruction inside the museum, in between two exhibition rooms.

166

An analysis of Wiegand’s reconstruction of the Market Gate of Miletus and of his

arrangement of the comparative architecture rooms two decades later shows that “Total

Anschauung” meant for Wiegand little more than a visually pleasing composition of

fictive architectural ensembles in the museum. A number of photographs that have

survived in the archives of the German Archaeology Institute give a glimpse of the

process through which a relatively small quantity of antique fragments were mixed with

brick and cement, reinforced by steel and covered with stucco, producing, as it were,

“antique architecture” in the museum as composite objects.

167

The most remarkable

165

Cited in Matthes, The Pergamon Museum, 59. See also Wiegand, “Wichtige

Ergänzungen zu meinen Tagebüchern etc… Cospel,” DAI Wiegand-Archiv, Kasten 25.

166

“Auszug II.1358.10,” SMzB PK Zentralarchiv, I/BV 327.

167

As early as 16.8.1922 Wiegand lists the benefits of using modern materials—brick,

cement and stucco—in the “completion” [“Ergänzung”] of antique monuments in a letter
he sent to the museum directors. New materials, according to Wiegand, are cheap and
preferable in terms of strength. He notes that limestone—which had been chosen by
Wilhelm II in 1910 for the finish of the museum—conveys the “best effect” of antique
architecture. SMzB PK Zentralarchiv, BV 329.

157

aspect of these photographs is perhaps not so much their evidential nature, showing how

little of the museum’s exhibits are indeed antique, but the fact that they were used as the

very medium through which the exhibits were designed. The photographs show the

architectural objects in different stages of their construction and in different

arrangements. Often set against a black background, the architectural ensembles were

photographed with a human figure or a mannequin to suggest the scale of the visitors.

Some of the black and white prints in the Wiegand archive were sketched upon with red

pencil.

168

Far from being merely a matter of convenience, the use of photography in the

composition of these ensembles underscores a new development in museology. Wiegand

understood well that the photographic reproduction of the “monuments of antiquity” in

the museum reach a wider audience than the museum itself. Once completed, the

“monuments” were meant not only to awe the visitors who walk into the gallery, but also

to be photographed.

* * *

The critics of the Pergamon Museum in the 1920’s and the early 1930’s focused

primarily on the question of material authenticity. It seemed problematic to them that

“imitations” of antique monuments posed in the museum as “originals.” The museum’s

most eloquent critic, Scheffler obtained and published in 1926 some of the photographs

of the “antique” exhibits during their construction. Scheffler’s article, which

168

Eight black and white prints by Max Krajewski, Lichtbildwerkstatt (Charlottenburg,

Berlin) some of them with sketches with red pencil. “Pergamonmuseum, Milettor, Gall-
Prozess,” in DAI, Wiegand-Archiv, Kasten 21.

158

accompanies the photographs, warns the German public against what the author sees as a

deliberate forgery. About the reconstruction of the Great Altar of Pergamon Scheffler

writes, “the only original component is the frieze, all the rest is built artificially out of

plaster and cement.” Just like the other architectural reconstructions in the museum the

Pergamonsaal exemplifies, according to Scheffler, the triumph of “quantity over quality,

plaster over marble, the pedantic over the artistic, and the imitation over the original.”

The material inauthenticity of the architectural elements, Scheffler argues, compromises

the integrity of the original frieze as well.

169

In another critique published in a daily newspaper in Dresden in April 1929, Dr. Paul F.

Schmidt characterizes the Pergamon Museum as “an artistic [act of] barbarism against

archaeology.” The very intention of the museum to create a “picturesque and romantic

ensemble,” Schmidt contends, violates the ethics of professional archaeology. By

erecting antique monuments in real scale and out of cement and plaster, the restorers

ignored one basic principle of the discipline: the dependence of the truth claim on the

materiality of the archaeological finds. Having thus condemned from the outset the very

intention of substituting the “effect” for the material truth, Schmidt goes on to criticize

the restored monuments. He finds the artistic effect of reconstruction in the Pergamon

Museum “disastrous.” According to the author, the freestanding columns, gates and

other elements from the Hellenistic and late Roman periods were carelessly

reconstructed in the comparative architecture rooms without respect to their original

169

Karl Scheffler, “Das Berliner Museumskaos,” Kunst und Künstler (April 1926): 266-

67.

159

proportions. Furthermore, Schmidt dismisses the Pergamonsaal as a “theater-décor.”

Apart from the material inauthenticty of this décor, the author fears that the authenticity

of the frieze has also been compromised, since one could hardly distinguish authentic

from copy.

170

In another article published in the daily Berlin newspapers two days later

on April 22, Schmidt attacks the Pergamon Museum with another eye-catching title:

“Millions Were Wasted for Kitsch.” The author’s argument is analogous to that of the

previous article in its general lines. Yet in this article Schmidt uses the terms “kitsch,”

“ornamental,” “decorative” interchangeably to characterize the restoration, which is

clearly contrasted with “authentic,” “freestanding” and “archaeological.”

Though Scheffler and Schmidt were the most outspoken critics of the Pergamon

Museum, they were certainly not the only ones. A survey of the daily newspapers in

Berlin between 1926 and 1931 reveals a discourse that persistently put into question both

the political ambition and the aesthetic strategy of the reconstruction. A newspaper

published a few days before Schmidt’s articles on April 17, 1929 cynically called the

Pergamon Museum “The Commercial-Mall State Museum,” accusing the restorers for

the commodification of archaeological finds.

171

Another article from April 1929

characterizes the reconstruction of Pergamon under glass ceiling as a modern

“panopticon.” It does not however elaborate on the perceived analogy of the

170

Paul F. Schmidt, “Das Pergamon-Museum: Eine künstleriche Barbarei der

Archäologie,” Dresdner Nachrichten, 20 April 1929.

171

Georg Stein, “Magazin Statt Museum,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, 17 April 1929.

160

Pergamonsaal to the infamous model for the 18

century prison designed by the English

philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

Common to many critics of the Pergamon Museum in the 1920’s is the tendency to point

to the rift between the appearance and the historic essence of the reconstructed

monuments. The characterization of the exhibits as a theater “décor” often sufficed to

dismiss them as “fakes.” Hence the critics seem to subscribe to a rather strict

understanding of authenticity. They contended that an object which was not an antique

original had no place in the museum.

In retrospect, we may certainly defend the exhibits of the Pergamon Museum against

such orthodoxy: a conceptual model or a hypothetic reconstruction should certainly have

a place in a “museum of ancient architecture.” And yet, Wiegand’s intention was by no

means to acknowledge the status of the objects for what they are: he instead chose to

authenticate, if not the objects themselves, then the experience of viewers who encounter

them. The deliberate confusion of fictive reconstructions with “antique monuments”

surfaced particularly clearly in 1929.

The Pergamonsaal was first presented to an international group of archaeologists in

1929 on the occasion of the centennial of the German Archaeology Institute (DAI). The

general director of the State Museums in Berlin, Wilhelm Waetzold, and the director of

the Antiquity Collection, Wiegand, emphasized in their respective speeches that the

primary task of the museum was to achieve a “living” [“lebendig”] presentation of the

161

work of art. In Waetzold’s words, the museum needed to highlight the “elementary

force of the artwork” [“elemantar Gewalt der Kunstwerk”].

172

Wiegand, on the other hand, argued that a museum reconstruction should aim at

conveying the “whole at a glance” [der Blich auf Ganze], unlike archaeological research,

which was all too often lost in the particular aspects of the past and hence could not see

the entire world picture. What followed was a comically dramatized praise of the

“monuments” of antiquity. The Nietzschean, Wagnerian tone of Wiegand’s speech

culminated in its finale, where he invoked an Apollonian - Dionisian duality. Having

invited the guests to observe the “extravagantly rich pictorial decoration” [“Schmuck”]

that surrounded them, he likened the Pergamonsaal to a “powerful symphony” that re-

captures “the triumph of light over unbridled wilderness and barbarism.” “Perhaps the

time has come,” he added, that “all the cultivated peoples of the world unite under a

single will… that the two thousand-year old work that rises here be a warning symbol

for all the acculturated peoples on earth.”

173

In both speeches the critique of 19

century philistine culture and a profound distrust for

knowledge about history are made manifest. As Silke Wenk noted in an excellent

biography of Wiegand, the “non-verbal persuasive power” of the Pergamon Museum

172

See Waetzoldt’s speech, Hunderdtjahrfeier des Archäologischen Institut, (Berlin,

1930): 112; also cited in Wenk, Auf den Spuren der Antike, 50.

173

Wiegand, manuscript of the speech given at the centennial of the German

Archaeology Institute (DAI), 22 April 1929, Pergamon Museum, “Zum Tagebuch
1929,” DAI, Wiegand-Archiv, Kasten 21.

162

differentiated it from its precedents. In other words, the “modern” museum meant to

overcome 19

century historicism so as to reinstate an essentialist trust in the

unmediated power of “art.” The strategy of the museum entailed the sacralization of the

work of art by restoring an “aura”—to use Walter Benjamin’s word—around supposedly

original “monuments” of antiquity. Waetzold’s speech made this aura particularly clear,

by calling the Pergamon Museum what it truly became within three decades: “a sacred

island in the ocean of the modern life of the metropolis.”

The sacralization of the museum’s exhibits as “works of art,” and the new investment in

the immediacy of their artistic message, unfold a new populism, which was shared by

the Weimer politicians and the cultural establishment that the republic inherited from the

Wilhelmine Empire. In fact, the triumphal tone of the opening speeches hardly conceals

the complex circumstances, which led the social democrat governments of the Weimar

Republic to yield to the demands of the conservative cultural bureaucracy and to

appropriate half-heartedly this major symbol of the Wilhelmine imperialism. For, if

Oppeln-Bronikowski, the Prussian Minister for Science, Art and Public Education, a

social democrat, saw in the immediacy of the Pergamonsaal a means of reaching out to

the underprivileged and uneducated classes,

174

Wiegand, an affluent conservative,

viewed the “social mission of the museum” as making the “masterpieces” of Greece and

Rome accessible to the German “Volk.” Hence departing from the 19

century critique

of the museum as “mausoleums” and from the rejection of philistine Bildung, Wiegand

aimed at creating a new museum, one that was in agreement with the early 20

century

174

See Oppeln-Bronikowski’s comments cited in Wenk, Auf den Spuren der Antike, 50.

163

Germany’s characteristically vitalist, right-wing populism: quoting Wiegand, a daily

newspaper of 23 April 1929 declared that the Pergamon Museum is neither “a museum

of dead-architecture,” nor a place for “past cultures,” but “a living folk-museum” [“ein

lebendiges Volksmuseum”].

175

Wiegand, more than any other, understood that a new audience had emerged for the

museum. The “museum of ancient architecture” was not intended for a small group of

artists, intellectuals or students of ancient architecture, many of whom readily dismissed

its exhibits as “fakes.” Nor was the task of the museum necessarily Bildung in the 19

century meaning of the word. A century after the emergence of the Berlin Museum as an

institution for the elevation of the taste of the bourgeois public, the Pergamon Museum

was intended for the most impressionable crowds: conveying an immediate and awe-

inspiring image, the museum of ancient architecture created a peculiar type of mass-

spectacle. Wiegand’s strategy of display met unequalled popular success: only a year

after its opening on October 30, 1930, more than one million people visited the

Pergamon Museum.

176

* * *

175

“Tausend Archäologen im Pergamon-Museum,” Danziger Neueste Nachrichten (23

April 1929).

176

Oppeln-Bronikowski reports that from October to February, in the first five months,

600 000 people visited the Pergamon Museum. “Pro Pergamo,” Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung, Abend-Ausgabe (10 February 1931).

164

In this light—that is, in the light of the process of sacralization of the “monuments” in

the museum, which cultivates a vaguely allusive sense of authenticity and of the

accessibility of a “sublime” message for the masses—we may understand the enthusiasm

of the National Socialist rulers of Germany for the Pergamon Museum. In fact, the

Pergamon Museum not only served as the backdrop for pathetic spectacles that

reenacted an image of ancient Greece during the Berlin Olympics; the reconstruction of

the Great Altar was also to become a recurrent model of the Nazi official architecture.

Soldier’s Hall by Wilhelm Kreiss, which was to be erected on the monumental North-

South axis of Germania, would-be capital of the Nazi Empire, and the Zeppelinfeld

Stadium by Albert Speer in Nuremberg are the most significant examples.

In early 1934 Speer, still a relatively unknown member of the National Socialist Party,

received his first major commission from Adolf Hitler: “a permanent stone installation”

that was to replace the temporary bleachers on the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremberg for the

celebrations of Reich-Partie Day. Going far beyond the scope of the assignment, Speer

designed a major monument: an ambitious project that also marked his political debut.

Speer recalls in his memoirs:

I struggled over those first sketches until, in an inspired moment, the idea came
to me: a mighty flight of stairs topped and enclosed by a long colonnade, flanked
on both ends by stone abutments. Undoubtedly it was influenced by the
Pergamum [Pergamon] altar. The indispensable platform for honored guests
presented problems; I tried to place it as unobtrusively as possible midway in the
flight stairs.

177

Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer (1969), translated by

Richard and Clara Winston (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970), 65.

165

And yet, what Speer ignores is precisely this: he was not influenced by the Hellenistic

altar itself—now lost—but by the Pergamonsaal, the most popular museum display in

Germany. Just as the Pergamonsaal consists of a large void for the awe-struck masses,

so, too, does the “permanent installation”—as Speer called it—of the Zeppelinfeld. The

analogy between the two, however, stops there: admittedly, the museum and the parade-

ground had a different relation with the masses. The crowds visited the Pergamonsaal

with the hope of seeing an antique “original”—although such object was nowhere to be

found. The Zeppelinfeld framed a political rally. The first seemingly transforms

architecture into an object of spectacle, the second highlights a setting in which the

crowd itself is the exhibit.

* * *

Consequently, the reconstruction and display of Pergamene art in Berlin underwent a

metamorphosis through which both the task of the museum and the status of its object

have changed. Initially the reconstruction of the Great Altar was seen as a museal setting

for the Gigantomachy Frieze. Instead of displaying the sculptural relief as detached

fragments, the museum sought to reintegrate it into a hypothetic reconstruction of its

original architectural context. In Wolff’s first Pergamon Museum, for instance, the

function of the “altar” was merely to create the ideal conditions of viewing for the

Hellenistic sculpture. Even though the first Pergamon Museum achieved a partial

restoration of the altar, the altar was not seen as the object of the museum. Hence in

Wolff’s museum the distinction of the “work of art” from its frame was not ambiguous:

166

architecture—either the shell of the museum or the partial reconstruction of the

altar—served as the modern frame of antique sculpture.

Departing significantly from the earlier concept of the museum, Messel intended in his

“Altar-Raum” a self-contained interior, which transfers the viewer into antique

Pergamon: an interior that conveys the feeling of standing in front of a monument in a

distant historical present. By displaying the West Façade of the altar from a distance,

Messel provided an impressive representation of ancient architecture, one that eventually

distracted the viewers from an experience of the Gigantomachy. And yet, the “Altar-

Raum” did not restore an architectural monument: the exhibit of the museum was merely

a sculptural articulation of the modern wall of the museum.

Curiously, between 1910 and 1930, Messel’s “Altar-Raum” underwent a significant

transformation. In fact, it was not so much the hypothetic reconstruction of the West

Façade but its relation with the museal frame in which it was displayed that changed.

The “Great Altar” in Berlin, which was initially conceived as a context for antique

sculpture, was eventually objectified and authenticated inside a gigantic prism: “antique

architecture” became the exhibit of the museum. So much so that, since it opened to the

public in 1930, the museum has conveyed to its visitors the erroneous impression of an

antique building displaced from its original site and relocated inside the modern

museum.

167

Hence Wiegand’s “museum of ancient architecture” has come to pose a paradox: the

exhibits of the museum are endowed with a sense of authenticity thanks to their aesthetic

differentiation from their museal frame, the architecture of the museum. Wiegand’s

photographs showing the architectural exhibits against a black background are quite

telling: the object of the museum is meant to be a work of art against a non-ground.

While antique architecture came to the foreground, the architecture of the museum was

effaced. And yet, in the final analysis, the distinction between the museum’s frame and

its exhibits is merely fictive.

Hence the question remains of what is the “object,” the exhibit of the modern

Pergamonsaal: a fictive architectural context for the Gigantomachy frieze; a hypothetic

conceptual model of an antique building, which conveys an idea about the original

without actually restoring it; a partial architectural façade, an exhibit in its own right?

Admittedly these three definitions of the museum’s object are not mutually exclusive.

The Pergamonsaal may exhibit several things at once: a partial reconstruction, a fictive

context and an architectural model. What is problematic, however, is precisely that

Wiegand’s “museum of ancient architecture” constructed, and has maintained up until

today, an undue cult of authenticity: obscuring the hypothetic, fictive and conceptual

nature of the museum’s exhibits.

168

Part 4

_______________________________________________________________________

Architectural Reproduction: Reconstructing Babylon

169

4.1. The Lion of Babylon in the Age of the Work of Art

An ambiguous site in the Pergamon Museum, and perhaps the most fascinating of all the

exhibits, is a double-sided gate that demarcates the Antiquity Collection

(Antikensammlung) from the Near Eastern Museum (Vorderasiatisches Museum).

Approaching from the Antiquity Collection, the structure is perceived as the Market

Gate of Miletus, Wiegand’s reconstruction of a Roman gate from the 2

century AD. As

the visitor walks through the gate, the austere, limestone finish of Miletus yields its place

to a sudden burst of colors, chiefly vivid dark blue and yellow. Countless fragments of

enamel compose glazed bricks, which for their part are assembled into the appearance of

a gate of the Ancient Near East. Looking from the Near Eastern section of the museum

the doorway represents the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. Dragon and bull figures in bas-relief

decorate the gate. Perhaps a modern monument to Janus, the animistic spirit of doorways

in Ancient Rome, the reconstructed gate offers two faces to the visitor: one in Western,

late antique, and the other in archaic, Oriental attire.

Having entered the Near Eastern Museum, a careful visitor may observe some

discrepancies in the presentation of the Ishtar Gate. The historical gate (as can be seen in

a scale-model, also displayed in the gallery) was much higher (about 12 m) than the

museum-reconstruction. As many as thirteen rows of animal figures decorated the

original gate, compared to only five rows on the museum-reconstruction. Clearly, the

proportions of the reconstructed gate have little in common with those of the Babylonian

original.

170

Furthermore, one can observe a duality in the museum display of the Ishtar Gate: the

bricks on the lower part, particularly those of the bull and dragon figures, are composed

of a large quantity of broken fragments: the face of each brick consists of a mosaic of

several glazed pieces, suggesting that they were assembled of antique originals. Unlike

the fragmentary appearance of the lower section, the bricks on the upper parts are

flawless. They are clearly the products of modern brick manufacturers, which attempted

to imitate the Babylonian technique of glazing.

* * *

A professor of history of architecture and the director of the Near Eastern Section of the

State Museum in Berlin, Walter Andrae undertook an unprecedented project of

archaeological reconstruction in 1928. His design of the interior of the Near Eastern

section of the museum consists of a creative rearrangement of about 300.000 broken

fragments of glazed brick into an image of the ancient city of Babylon. At the center of

Andrae’s plan is a thirty meter-long, eight meter-wide, double-height gallery, which

leads the visitors to the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate. Andrae conceived the gallery

as a shortened replica of the Processional Street of Babylon. Built during the reign of

Nebukadnezzar (6

century BC), the Processional Street was originally about three

hundred by sixteen meters and was surrounded on two sides with glazed brick walls. No

less than one hundred and twenty lions in bas-relief—perhaps as many as two

171

hundred—decorated the walls of the Processional Street on either side.

Since the

figures on one side of the street were the mirror image of those on the other, there must

have been two prototypes of lion figures, one walking to the right and one walking to the

left. All lions on the Processional Street were otherwise identical. The Babylonian

walls were clearly the products of a highly industrialized process, an archaic system of

architectural production in large quantities, which Andrae was determined to reinterpret

in Berlin.

Initially, the reconstructed lion figures were to be displayed on the South wing of

Messel’s complex, in the Near Eastern section designed by the architects Hoffmann and

Wille. As early as the 1910’s Wille developed a number of alternatives for the Near

Eastern Museum, many of which arranged the Mesopotamian collections along a long

and double-height gallery. Though it would have also displayed the reconstructions of

the Babylonian reliefs on both sides, Wille’s gallery recalled more the interior of a

Gothic cathedral than a sacred street in Ancient Mesopotamia.

Trained as an architect, Andrae rejected these museum plans, which, in his own words,

had been imposed on him as a “fancy dress costume that did not fit properly.” He found

the imagination of the architects, Hoffmann and Wille, rather “limited.” Whereas color

had been an essential part of Andrae’s reconstructions of Babylonian and Assyrian

antiquities since 1900, Wille’s interiors were inappropriately somber and dull. Given the

Walter Andrae, “Vorderasiatisches Museum,” October 1930, 4 pages typed manuscript,

Andrae Archive, Berlin, Staat Bibliothek, 17.

172

fierce battles that had been fought over Messel’s plans for nearly a decade—the so-

called “Museum Wars”—it should not come as a surprise that Andrae did everything in

his power to undermine Wille’s plans. He went as far as redesigning the interiors of the

Near Eastern Museum, which he represented in a number of watercolor perspectives, a

medium he mastered during long years of excavations in Babylon and Assur. He called

upon the scenery-décor painters of the Berlin State Opera to enlarge his watercolors into

life-size models, painted on wood and paper, and installed them in the South wing. It

was this full-size wooden installation that convinced both the Prussian Ministry of

Culture and the museum administration to replace Wille’s earlier plans with Andrae’s

design. The positive impression created by Andrae’s installation also convinced the

ministry to reconstruct a large number of lions to decorate the gallery, although it had

instructed earlier that only two exemplars of the Babylonian lion be reconstructed for

they were “all the same.”

The fragments that Andrae used in his reconstruction found their way to Berlin after a

long process. The archaeological excavations of the German Orient-Society (Deutsche

Orient-Gesellschaft, DOG) directed by Robert Koldewey between 1899 and 1917 in the

extinct city of Babylon came to an abrupt end with the Great War when the Ottoman-

Turkish army retreated from Mesopotamia. As the provinces of Baghdad, Mosul and

Basra were given to British mandate, the German finds were seized by the new colonial

administration of Iraq. Nine years later, and after Koldewey’s death in 1925, it was his

Andrae, Lebenserinnerungen eines Ausgräbers (2

edition; Stuttgart: Verlag Freies

Geistesleben, 1988), 274.

173

assistant Andrae who successfully negotiated the “return” of the German archaeological

property in 1926. Given the ill feeling between the two countries, the British decision to

send Babylonian finds to Berlin was an extraordinary gesture—but, of course, whose

property was it in the first place? For our purposes, it is critical to note that the

Babylonian finds were no “archaeological treasure” in the conventional sense of the

word. Out of five hundred thirty-seven crates, the first shipment that reached Berlin in

January 20, 1927, about four hundred were filled with broken pieces of bricks, some

with a faint trace of enamel glazing on one side.

For the most part, the Babylonian finds

were not free-standing works of art—and not even recognizable fragments of antique

sculpture—but a large mosaic of hundreds of thousands of pieces of baked mud. It was

Andrae’s task in 1928 to create new constellations from the most unassuming of

archaeological fragments.

An issue of the German Orient Society’s journal, the recollections of Andrae in his

posthumously published memoirs and some documents in the Walter Andrae Archive

give us a clear idea of how the reconstruction proceeded. The fragments of glazed brick

were first desalinated and waxed with paraffin in the chemical laboratories of the Berlin

Museum under the supervision of Prof. Rathgen in 1927. The following year Andrae

entrusted the task of sorting and reassembling the fragments to an expert in sculpture-

casting, Willy Struck, who, together with six to eight assistants and “the patience of an

angel” classified hundreds of thousands of pieces according to “find-spots” and

Eva Strommenger and Kay Kohlmeyer, Wiedererstehendes Babylon, exhibition catalog

(Berlin: Museum für Vor und Frühgeschichte, 1991), 53.

174

according to “types of animal or decorative motives.” The reconstruction deserves a long

quote in Andrae’s words:

Then, [Struck] started to put the fragments together, first into single bricks, and
finally into complete animals: lions, bulls and dragons, and then into various
decorative elements that went with them... One look at Struck’s infinitely long
worktable shows what a painstaking job this was. On the table everything was
arranged according to type, for instance all pieces with a lion’s eye ... were
classified together. We know that all 60 lions on one side of the street came from
one and the same mould. That is, all the fifty-odd bricks of about 33 cm length
and 10 cm height, which constituted one lion, were from the same mould... The
same applied to two kinds of bulls and dragons...

The ambiguity of this description consists in the fact that it presents assemblage of

archaeological fragments as an ordinary puzzle-game (“Geduldspiel”)

. The eye, the leg,

the jaw of a lion were fit together so as to assemble a figure out of the found fragments.

Yet, Andrae goes on to explain that fragments were grouped according to their types.

That is, all the fragments that might have belonged to an eye were put together. Andrae

reported that Koldewey had collected fragments from Babylon, which would be

sufficient to reconstruct one hundred and twenty lions. Even if classification according

to find-spots had prevented the fragments of a figure from being mistaken for the

fragments of another, such distinction would haven been lost on Struck’s worktable, at

the very moment the fragments were re-classified according to their types.

Andrae, “Von der Arbeit an den Altertümern aus Assur und Babylon,” Mitteilungen

der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 66 (April 1928): 20. Also cited in Ernst Walter
Andrae and Rainer Michael Boehmer, Bilder Eines Ausgräbers: Die Orientbilder von
Walter Andrae 1898-1919: Sketches by an Excavator (2

enlarged edition in German

and English Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1992), 144: n. 73.

Ibid.

175

Reading Andrae’s accounts and judging from two photographs of the assembly desk, it

seems that each time the restorers picked a lion’s eye from the desk they had to choose

among a large pool of fragments, which could have belonged to any of about one

hundered lions on one side of the Processional Street. The face of each brick was

reconstituted from a combination of six to seven fragments, which further increased the

choices that the restorers had to make each time they assembled a figure. Unlike a

jigsaw puzzle, the Babylonian walls had not one, but an infinite number of solutions.

In the instance when no fragment from the pool seemed adequate to fill in the missing

part, Andrae used modern bricks manufactured by three factories near Berlin.

addition to lions “produced” in this way to decorate the Processional Street, many others

were distributed to museums across the world. Andrae offered two “exemplars,” as he

calls them, to the Istanbul Archaeology Museum (formerly the Ottoman Imperial

Museum) and to the new Baghdad Museum in Iraq, as these were the institutions that

negotiated the division of the Babylonian finds with Berlin before and after the war

respectively. Others were sent to Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Göteborg, Chicago and to

other unspecified museums in the US, as well as to Dresden and Munich.

Three ceramic factories near Berlin, H. Körting in Oranienburg, Blumenfeld in Velten

and Mutz factory in Neu-Ruppin, manufactured the modern “Babylonian” bricks. See
Andrae, “Das Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin,” Museumskunde, Neue Folge III,
Heft 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1931), 76. See also Andrae Archive, Berlin,
Staat Bibliothek, document no. 21), 29.

Andrae, Lebenserinnerungen eines Ausgräbers (First published in 1961; 2

edition,

Berlin: Verlag Freies Geistesleben, 1988), 277.

176

Andrae was surely not interested in reassembling each lion out of its exact original

pieces, without mixing the parts of different lions with one another: such concern would

have been irrelevant, for the lions of Babylon had been mass produced. Hence by

transforming archaeological reconstruction into a system of “production,” Andrae

transgressed an established rule of modern aesthetics: the distinction between the

original work of art and its copies.

Not a single figure of bas-relief was reconstructed

by uniting its original pieces as they really were. But each figure consisted of a

combination of pieces gathered from different excavated walls, and of modern infill.

Each lion figure, in other words, includes antique pieces that might have belonged to any

of the one hundred lions on one side of the Processional Street.

Against common wisdom, the reconstructions of the Processional Street and of the Ishtar

Gate in the museum are not antique “originals” in the limited, 20

century definition of

the term, but a fascinating, and distinctively fin de siècle constellation of antique

fragments: an ornamental pattern that clearly reflects the preoccupations and taste of the

Jugendstil and the Art-Deco.

Having established this point, we have to underscore that there is nothing particularly

problematic in Andrae’s reconstruction of 1928, completed prior to the wide-spread

On the contrary to Walter Banjamin’s well-known thesis in his “The Work of Art in the

Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” it is not the concept of reproducibility, but those
of authenticity and “aura” that are products of recent modernity. By reproducing the
Babylonian architecture in Berlin, Andrae does not violate the ancient system of
ornament, but transgresses the modern, museum aesthetics, which is invested in the
uniqueness and authenticity of the ancient “work of art.”

177

embrace of—what I shall call—the modern cult of authenticity: imaginative restoration

was not yet fully outlawed by the advocates of “historic presentation.” Nor was the Art

Nouveau philosophy of art, which also nurtured the Jugendstil movement in Central

Europe, fully replaced by the Modern Movement, one that declared Art Nouveau’s pre-

occupation with ornament a “crime.”

Andrae’s reconstruction of Babylon could be

better understood when compared to another imaginative reconstruction of archaic

civilization, Sir Arthur Evans’ Minoan “palace” in Crete, which has been recently

acknowledged as among the most significant examples of Art Nouveau in Greece.

Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the museum’s “exhibit” (which is both ancient ornament

and modern work of art) seems to trouble some museum connoisseurs and

archaeologists, who are apparently convinced that acknowledging the influence of

modern taste, and of the changing ideas of historical reconstruction would depreciate the

museum’s object. In an exhibition catalog, Wiedererstehendes Babylon [Babylon

Reconstructed], for instance, Eva Strommenger and Kay Kohlmeyer characterize the

Babylon excavations and the subsequent reconstruction in the following terms:

The basis of the German success [in Babylon] was not due to the excavator’s
luck in finding material (Findersglück), but rather due to the development of a
new method of excavation and documentation. For the first time, a precise

See Adolf Loos. “Ornament and Crime” (1929), in Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime:

Selected Essays, Selected and with and introduction by Adolf Opel Riverside, translated
by Michael Mitchell (Calif., Ariadne Press, 1998).

See Anton Bammer, "Wien und Kreta: Judgendstil und minoische Kunst," Jahreshefte

des Österreichischen Archäologischen Institutes in Wien, 60 (1990): 129-152; see also
John K. Papadopoulos, “Knossos," in The Conservation of Archaeological Sites in the
Mediterranean Region, ed. Marta de la Torre (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation
Institute, 1997).

178

recording of the excavation finds was carried out, and the essential features of an
ancient cosmopolitan city were ascertained… Furthermore, the Ishtar Gate, the
Throne hall façade and the Processional Street stand today as a particularly
painstaking, scientifically grounded and technically challenging reconstruction,
which, in its concept, offers the museum’s visitors an exact (faithful) impression
of the antique architecture in original scale.

Surely, Andrae’s reconstruction was “scientifically grounded” just like Viollet-le-Duc’s

imaginative restoration of Gothic cathedrals was “rational.” That the German

archaeologist assiduously recorded his finds, however, does not necessarily mean that he

based his reconstruction on a positivist notion of “faithfulness” (exactness) to the

“original.” The theoretical framework, which legitimizes reconstruction only to the

extent it is scientifically “faithful” to the “original,” does not do justice to the complexity

of the case we face.

Among several questions that Andrae’s imaginative reconstruction of Babylon in Berlin

raise, I shall tackle two sets, which seem particularly relevant for our investigation of

architecture in the museum. Firstly, why did the German archaeologists spend nearly

two decades excavating Babylon, an extinct city, which unlike Pergamon, did not reward

their effort with spectacular finds (in fact an earlier expedition conducted by the

University of Pennsylvania was called off after a couple of years of frustration). What

did the German Orient-Society hoped to discover in the Biblical city—and to serve

which theological, cultural and political ends? Secondly, how did the German architects

reconstruct Babylon from the most inconspicuous mud-brick foundations into

spectacular “monuments”? How did they conceive architecture of an antique culture

Strommenger and Kohlmeyer, 5.

179

about which they had no theoretical or methodological preparation—at least nothing

comparable to the accumulation of expertise about Classical, Greek architecture?

Unlike classical architecture of Greece and Rome, which was studied and restored as

part of the Beaux Arts education, architecture of the Ancient Near East figured in the
19

century merely in the studies of Oriental religions and of the symbol. Georg

Fredrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (6 volumes, Leipzig and
Darmstadt: Carl Wilhelm Leske, 1810-23), a founding text of German Orientalistik, for
example, defined “allegory through architecture” as a branch of symbolic expression.
See especially Creuzer’s chart in volume I, 1819.

180

4. 2. Transgressing Bilderverbot: the Babel-Bible Controversy

The driving force behind the German expedition was the rising interest in Assyriology in

Germany in the last decades of the 19th century. Following the sensational discoveries

by the English adventurer Henry Austen Layard and the French consul to Mosul, Paul-

Emil Botta, a group of philologists were increasingly convinced that religious myths,

architectural forms, as well as linguistic formations which had been attributed to the

Egyptians and Hebrews, had in fact been originated in the third millennium B.C. in

Babylon. The founder of the German Orient-Society, professor of Semitic languages in

Berlin and founder of German Assyriology, Friedrich Delitzsch (1850-1922), was, if not

the most eloquent, the most outspoken of the German “Pan-Babylonists.”

In a lecture addressed to an audience of theologians and high state officials including

Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Berlin Academy of Music in January 13, 1902, Delitzsch

interpreted the recent discoveries in Mesopotamia. His aim was to establish that the

stories of the Old Testament had their “origins” in the Babylonian codes and legends.

He argued that “there existed as early as about 2250 BC a highly developed constitution,

together with a state culture” and “when the twelve tribes of Israel invaded Canaan, they

came to a land which was a domain completely pervaded by Babylonian culture.”

The

Marchand, Down From Olympus, 223.

Friedrich Delitzsch, Babel und Bibel, (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs Buchandlung, first

lecture, 1902; second lecture, 1905). The citations are from the English translation,
Babel and Bible, (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 37, 39.

181

main “evidence” Delitzsch presented in order to dispute the revelatory content of the Old

Testament was the Code of Hammurabi, found by the French archaeologist Marcel

Dieulefoy (1844-1920) in the extinct Persian city of Suse.

Having anticipated the

adverse reaction of his conservative audience, Delitzsch added that the “true religious

feeling” had nothing to fear from the outcome of the “scientific” excavations:

when freed from ... prejudice, as extolled by the prophets and poets of the Old
Testament, and as taught in its most sublime sense by Jesus, also the religious
feeling of our hearts, is so little affected, that it may rather be said to emerge
from the cleansing process in a true and more sympathetic form.

Delitzsch later published the lecture together with comparative physiognomies of racial

types, which contrast the profile of a Sumerian Priest after an antique sculpture, with

highly satirized, supposedly Jewish profiles. Although Delitzsch, a notorious anti-

Semite, acknowledged that the Sumerians, this “primeval race” of the third millennium

might not have been Aryans, he proudly declared that they were not a “Semitic” race.

Delitzsch’s lecture reached is patriotic climax in its finale when he projected a slide of

the Prussian expedition house in Babylon and when he declared that Germany finally

“pitched her tent on the palm-crowned banks of paradise... for Germany’s honor and

Germany’s learning.”

See Marcel Dieulafoy, L'acropole de Suse, d'après les fouilles exécutées en 1884,

1885, 1886 (Paris: Hachette, 1890-92).

Delitzsch, Babel and Bible, 67.

Ibid., 77.

182

Delitzsch’s lecture “Babel-Bible” stirred an immediate controversy in Germany. While

the Catholic and Jewish groups renounced the lecture, the reaction of the Evangelical

conservatives was not as positive as Delitzsh had anticipated. Unlike most of the

audience who strongly protested the lecture, Kaiser Wilhelm was very impressed with

Delitzsch’s performance, so much so that he asked the Assyriologist to repeat the lecture

on February 1st, this time, in the Royal Palace.

Emboldened by the support of the German monarch, Delitzsch launched a more direct

attack on the Old Testament in his second lecture of January 12, 1903. He had just

returned home from a brief visit to the German excavation site in Babylon with new

“evidence.” He argued that the Biblical “sin,” “paradise,” and the Jewish name for God,

“Yahweh” had their precursors in the Babylonian narratives. By focusing on the

parallels between the Old Testament and the Koran and comparing them to the Assyrian

narratives such as the Deluge Tablets and the Code of Hammurabi,

Delitzsch argued

that the Scriptures were only an imperfect transmission of an original code through the

“Semitic” tradition of story-telling: “Hebrew writer has freely altered the Babylonian

legend;” “the form in which these truths are clothed is human, altogether and

fantastically Oriental.”

By 1905 Delitzsch’s first lecture had sold sixty thousand copies and inspired one

thousand six hundred fifty articles and twenty-eight pamphlets in Germany alone. It was

Best-known ruler of the first Babylonian dynasty, who reigned c. 1792-1750 BC.

Delitzsch, Babel and Bible, 171.

183

immediately translated into English and distributed in Britain and North America.

Although Kaiser Wilhelm had to distance himself from Delitzsch’s thesis under

increasing pressure by religious conservatives, he found other ways to show his

friendship and support. Delitzsch preserved his prestigious academic position until

1921, as an increasingly outspoken anti-Semite.

An analysis of Delitzsch’s lectures shows that he suffered from persecution complex,

shared by the right-wing theorists of the late 19

century (such as Langbehn). Unlike

Langbehn, a convert to Catholicism, he sought the true (Germanic) religion in

Mesopotamia of the 3

millennia BC. He went as far as arguing that the Judeo-Christian

Scriptures were part of a millennial conspiracy against the “true religious feeling” of the

Germans. And yet, neither Delitzsch’s thesis nor his ideological program was

innovative: as early as the 1850’s the German philologist and the historian of Oriental

religions, Paul de Lagarde had called for an “authentically German, spiritual life.”

fact, it is not so much the paranoid nature of Delitzsch’s argument but his ability to

clothe an old theory with irrefutable “scientific evidence” from the German excavations

in Babylon that made him a celebrity.

Reinhard G. Lehmann, Friedrich Delitzsch und der Babel-Bibel-Streit (Göttingen,

1994), 50; see also Delitzsch, Babel und Bibel: Ein Rückblick und Ausblick (Stuttgart,
1904), 3; cf. Marchand, Down From Olympus, 224.

Marchand, Down From Olympus, 225.

For an analysis of Lagarde’s “Germanic religion” see Stern op. cit.

184

Delitzsch’s intention, however, was hardly a positivist demystification of religion,

although he occasionally assumed an anthropologizing tone whenever this fit his

purpose. For instance he suggested that “Semitic” people (the Arabs and Bedouins in the

region) should be studied anthropologically since their supposedly “fetishist” and

“animist” “character” altered the “original” Babylonian code.

Curiously, according to

Delitzsch, the “original” Babylonian code, unlike the “Hebrew legend,” was not the

product of a human culture: its revelatory, divine content could not be questioned. Hence

hidden behind a supposedly “scientific” project was essentialism: Delitzsch was

convinced that the ur-religion of the primeval race (perhaps of the primitive Germans)

was buried in the Iraqi desert, under Babylon’s rather unattractive ruins.

It is highly ambiguous, on the other hand, why Delitzsch so specifically targeted the

Second Commandment in his second lecture: “Quite specifically Israelitish is the second

commandment, the prohibition of every form of image-worship whatever, which seems

to have a directly anti-Babylonian point.”

The prohibition of the graven images is,

according to Delitzsch, not only a distortion of the “original” code but also intentionally

“anti-Babylonian.” It is possible that Delitzsch sought the original Babylonian language

(before the fall of the Tower) as inscribed in hieroglyphics or in some sort of graven

pictures: a primeval code that preceded the Assyrian cuneiform.

Delitzsch, Babel and Bible, 68.

Ibid., 191.

The French philologist Jules Oppert (1825-1905) had decoded the Assyrian script only

a few decades earlier. See Jules Oppert, Expédition scientifique en Mesopotamie
exécutée par ordre du gouvernement de 1851 à 1854 MM. Fulgence Fresnel, Félix

185

* * *

Robert Koldewey was an unorthodox choice to lead the excavation in the Ancient Near

East, as he was not formally trained as a philologist. Trained as an architect, he often

refused to destroy architectural ruins to unearth historical inscriptions underneath: he

was more interested in collecting examples of ancient mortar than ancient tablets.

This

suggests that Koldewey excavated the city of Babylon, not simply to produce evidence

for Delitzsch’s dubious theological theses, but to achieve a reconstruction of mythic

monuments including the Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel. As early as 1897,

Schöne, the general director of the Royal Prussian Museums, encouraged Koldewey to

collect fragments for a museum reconstruction.

Just like Heinrich Schliemann’s Troy

(Hisarlik), the fame of Babylon in modern consciousness had extended far beyond what

the extinct city had to offer. Two architects and an army of workers had to work for

several years to reconstruct an image of Babylon in Berlin.

Andrae, a twenty-three year old architect, recently graduated from the Technical

University of Dresden, started the first reconstruction on the excavation site as early as

1900. The fragments that Koldewey found on the excavation site seemed to indicate the

Thomas et Jules Oppert (Paris : Imprimerie impériale, 1857-63). See also Oppert, Les
incriptions commerciales en caractères cuneiforms (Paris, 1866).

Svend Aage Pallis, The Antiquity of Iraq: A Handbook of Assyriology (Copenhagen:

1956), 308; also cited in Marchand, Down From Olympus, 213.

Walter Andrae, “Das Vorderasiatische Museum zu Berlin,” 74.

186

presence of a lost work of art. The architects identified them as belonging to dragon or

bull figures in bas-relief. Koldewey also unearthed fragments of colored brick from the

area which was later identified as the Processional Street. The colored fragments and the

fragments of bas-relief did not match one another. It was, therefore, Andrae’s job to sort

out the possible connections.

We learn from Andrae’s memories that he found the job

particularly difficult: there was no indication of how the colored fragments could be

assembled.

His task consisted of drawing hypothetical animal figures, dividing them

into their smallest possible parts and comparing these parts with what the architect had

in hand: small fragments of mud-brick.

In the absence of any texts that could guide the reconstruction (no Assyrian architectural

treatise has survived), and mindful of his assistant’s education, Koldewey assigned

Andrae readings from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Besides

Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, Andrae also benefited from

reading Immanuel Kant’s “Dreams of a Spirit-seer Illustrated by Dreams of

Metaphysics.” Yet, Andrae found his spiritual guide to the reconstruction in Iraq in

Goethe’s theory of color. In his own words:

By my second year in Babylon a more fundamental and less philosophical light
dawned on me: color, which Goethe called ‘the experiences and sufferings of
light and form’—the shapes that nature places before our eyes for us to wonder

Ernst Walter Andrae and Rainer Michael Boehmer, 114.

Walter Andrae, Lebenserinnerungen eines Ausgräbers, 78.

187

at. I felt almost as though this revelation had been bestowed upon me as a
complete substitute for religion.

After a year of carefully piecing the fragments together Andrae produced the first and

highly hypothetical prototype of the “lion of Babylon.”

The passage was omitted in Andrae’s memoirs, Lebenserinnerungen eines

Ausgräbers, and was published posthumously in Ernst Walter Andrae and Boehmer,
120.

188

4. 3. Romantic Reconstruction: in Search of “Organic” Essence

The exhibition of Assyrian sculpture in the Crystal Palace, London, and the opening of

the first Mesopotamian rooms in the Louvre had a considerable impact on 19

century

architectural theory. This is chiefly due to the writings of the German architect Gottfried

Semper, then a refugee in London and Paris. Having observed Botta’s finds from

Khorsabad in the 1850’s, Semper formulated his theory of “dressing” [Bekleidung] in

which he challenged the classical interpretations of origin of architecture. He argued that

the art of building stemmed neither from imitation of nature in Ancient Greece, nor from

the “primitive hut” that resulted from the human need for protection. The origin of

architecture was the Assyrian textiles, the ornamental surfaces that were subsequently

translated into patterns of glazed brick. Once applied to architecture, Assyrian art

preserved the vivid colors and ornamental patterns of an earlier medium. Such an

interpretation also explained the lack of structural elaboration and the abundance of

ornamental patterns in the Ancient Near East. Semper still believed in the superiority of

Greek architecture based on its “tectonic” perfection—here he approached the

architectural historian Carl Bötticher’s theory of “tectonics.” And yet, Semper’s

Bekleidung amounted to nothing less than a revolution in architectural theory by

suggesting that Greek architecture was the refined product of a historical development.

Semper challenged the fixed taxonomies of architecture with cultural

189

transformism—some four decades after a comparable debate took place in natural

sciences—particularly in paleontology in the French academy.

The most complete reconstruction of Assyrian architecture on paper prior to Andrae’s

followed the excavations of the ancient Assyrian city of Dur Sharrukin (modern

Khorsabad) in 1852-54 by Victor Place (1818-1875), the French Consul of Mosul and

Botta’s successor. A Beaux-Arts architect and the winner of the Prix de Rome, Félix

Thomas (1815-1875) accompanied Place to Assyria and undertook a survey and

restitution of architectural ruins, published in 1867 in three volumes, Ninive et

l'Assyrie.

Place, like Botta before him, erroneously identified the Assyrian Palace of

Sargon II and the surrounding city (built between 717-707 BC) as the biblical city of

Nineveh, and hence the confusing title of his publication. The third volume is dedicated

to Thomas’s survey of the ruins and to his “essai de restauration,” which restored the

palace in a set of drawings.

No one other than Thomas, the only Beaux-Arts architect to set foot in Mesopotamia,

could feel so intensely the absence of a classical treatise about Assyrian monuments. “In

See the Cuvier-St. Hillaire debate in the French Academy of Sciences in 1830.

François Jacob offers an excellent overview of the debate and its philosophical
implications in La logique du vivant: une histoire de l’hérédité (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

Victor Place, Ninive et l'Assyrie. 3 volumes (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1867).

The authorship of the text “Essais de Restauration” is not clearly stated in the third

volume of Ninive et l'Assyrie. However, given the complexity of architectural, technical
details and the recognizably Beaux-Arts terminology, we can assume that either the
architect wrote it himself or that he closely supervised Place’s text.

190

the restoration of fragments that belong to the orders of classical architecture,” he

complained, “imagination [of the restorer] is guided by the existence of previously

known monuments. This was certainly not the case for the palace in “Nineveh,” where

no previous example, no “Asian Vitruvius” have survived to transmit the rules and the

canons. Nor was the archaeological evidence adequate for a systematic study of Assyrian

architecture.

Despite these difficulties, Thomas was determined to discover a “new architectonic

order.”

In the absence of structurally differentiated elements like column, capital,

entablature in Assyria, he focused on the system of ornament, what he called “la

décoration architectonique.” According to Thomas:

Architectonic decoration, which reinforces the contrasts of shade and light
[profiler] on the buildings, is exclusively the result of good ordonnance of the
constitutive members of construction [bonne ordonnace des membres constitutifs
de la construction] and of the assemblage of the used material… It determines
the form from the point of view of exterior beauty…

Hence all the parts of “architectonic decoration” are subordinate to the “harmony” of the

whole. It may seem bizarre to call Thomas’s treatise on Khorsabad “classical,” but, in

fact, its only non-classical feature is that “les anciens” are not the Greeks but the

Assyrians. (“Les modernes” are, as usual, the French.) Thomas goes on to argue that

Place, II: 1.

Place, II: 2.

Place, II: 44.

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Assyrians were more honest builders than the other peoples of antiquity: “The Greeks

did not escape the weakness” of, for example, imitating primitive wooden prototypes in

stone, a failure in providing the unity of material with form. “Absolute calmness [repos],

this ideal of architecture,” is embedded in Assyrian walls.

In contrast to his high-spirited treatise that construes a classical order in Mesopotamia,

Thomas curiously restored the ruins into a fantastically Oriental palace from the One

Thousand and One Night tales, conspicuously roofed with medieval Islamic domes.

Underlining the Oriental character of the ruins, Place also observed imperfections in this

ancient art, like the Assyrians’s obvious ignorance of perspective and their occasionally

“unnatural” depictions of animal, plant or human figures in wall paintings and sculpture.

At the entrance of an Assyrian temple, which the fantasizing Frenchmen mistook for an

Oriental “harem,” the excavators unearthed seven figures—including a lion—which had

been constructed out of glazed enamel bricks, and which were surprisingly well

preserved—unlike those the German excavators found in Babylon. A paragraph in

Ninive et l'Assyrie describes the lion as follows:

The lion ... is a piece of great beauty, the lines are well found, the contours are
well established and the proportions are of an attentive exactitude. The members
are well attached and depict a natural movement; we see the animal walking.
The head has a character of truth. The mouth, as it opens, answers exactly to the
general movement that the artist sought to render. Among the pieces that

Place, I: 208.

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antiquity left us, there are few that reveal a better-translated feeling of art, and
this alone suffices to give us a high idea of the taste of the Assyrians.

It is remarkable that for Place truth resides in Assyrian figures to the extent they

approach naturalist depiction. Haven mistaken a temple for a harem, the French

archaeologists did not take into consideration that the figures might have had religious

and ritual significance. Place’s description recalls instead a critique of a 19

century

salon painting.

* * *

Unlike Place and Thomas, the German excavators of Babylon projected a Romantic and

decisively non-classical theory of art onto the figures of the Ancient Near East. Having

interpreted a dragon figure, which he found on the walls of the Ishtar Gate, Koldewey

argued that this animal, or the “walking serpent” as the Babylonians had called it,

showed an “organic unity.” The figure was a proof for Koldewey of an “unmistakable

self creative genius in this ancient art” as it far exceeded all other fantastic creatures in

“the uniformity of its physiological conceptions.” The chimera-figure was so

harmoniously assembled that such an animal might have actually existed in nature.

Place, I: 118.

Robert Koldewey, Das wieder erstehende Babylon: die bisherigen Ergebnisse der

deutschen Ausgrabungen (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1914), 48-49; English translation by
Agnes S. Johns, The Excavations at Babylon (London, Macmillan and Co., 1914).

193

Koldewey’s understanding of ancient architecture recalls the theories of the German

Romanticism in Jena in the late 18th century. It was August Wilhelm Schlegel who

most eloquently defined “organic form” in his Lectures:

Organic form ... is innate; it unfolds (bildet) itself from within, and acquires its
determination contemporaneously with the perfect development of the germ. We
everywhere discover such forms in nature throughout the whole range of living
powers, from the crystallization of salts and minerals to plants and flowers, and
from these again to the human body. In the fine arts as well as in the domain of
nature, the supreme artist, all genuine forms are organic, that is, determined by
the quality (Gehalt) of the work. In a word, the form is nothing but a significant
exterior, the speaking physiognomy of each thing, which, as long as it is not
disfigured by any destructive accident, gives a true evidence of its hidden essence
(Wesen).

Romantic aesthetics provide the reconstruction with a set of guiding principles: First, as

Tzevan Todorov shows in his Theories of the Symbol, the work of art is like nature—it

does not imitate nature.

Just like a work of nature, the work of art is structured by its

inner coherence. “Organic form,” unlike “mechanical form” is never arbitrary.

Secondly, the exterior form, or physiognomy of a work of art is the consequence of its

“hidden essence.” The aim of the architect is not to imitate form, but to capture essence,

since the first is subordinate to the second.

* * *

August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, vol.II

(Stuttgart, 1966); English translation by J. Black, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art
and Literature, (2nd. ed London, 1904), 340; also cited in Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of
the Symbol, translated by Catherine Porter, 4th. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1995), 179-180.

Todorov, 180.

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The case presented by the Ishtar Gate was of a different order than the Processional

Street. Unlike the Processional Street where no lion figure remained intact, Koldewey

unearthed a number of dragon (sirrush) and bull figures on the foundations of the gate,

which had been stripped of their color and glazing. Koldewey predicted that at least

thirteen rows of alternating dragon and bull figures had decorated the structure. The

problem here was that there seemed to be no beginning and no end to these rows of

figures at top and bottom. Considering that “eight lower rows contained at least forty

animals and the upper five rows fifty-one” Koldewey calculated at least five hundred

seventy-five animal figures on the wall. At least two of these rows were below the

ground water level. Due to technical difficulty, the archaeologists had to stop their

excavation once they reached the water level, far from the foundations of the ancient

wall. Koldewey concluded that the building was never intended as a single composition.

Particularly “the lower rows were not intended to stand out free and meet the eye, at any

rate not for any considerable length of time.”

The building had been sinking

throughout Babylonian history and the level of the street pavement had been raised

several times to adjust to the rising ground level. The traces of three previous ground

levels could be seen in between the rows. Therefore, the Ishtar Gate was not a unified

structure but one that had been added to throughout the centuries. This, of course, means

the total absence of a circumscribed architectural original—a finished composition—an

idea that would appear certainly very disturbing to the Beaux-Arts architect, Thomas.

More specifically it meant that composition, the key word of the Beaux-Arts restoration,

Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon, 41-42.

195

was only secondary in importance to production, the key word for the German

Romantics.

Equally intriguing was the ornamental pattern of what Koldewey called the “Throne

Room Façade.” As shown in the watercolor and crayon drawing by Andrae, the

Babylonian bricks had marks on their reverse side indicating their position in the wall.

These marks were not in cuneiform writing but consisted of a notation of strokes and

dots whose combination resulted in discernible signs, and which guided the assembly of

the bricks into an ornamental pattern.

In all three cases—the Processional Street, the Ishtar Gate and the Throne Room

Façade—Koldewey and Andrae did not intend to reconstruct Babylonian architecture in

its original state. For there had hardly been a fixed original composition, a self-enclosed

and complete work of art in 6

century Babylon. They instead tried to understand the

system of production and assembly in ancient architecture. They intended, in other

words, to produce Babylonian architecture in Berlin, like speaking an old language

through its original grammar in modern times.

* * *

Koldewey writes in the excavation report, “The system of signs can be seen best on

the capitals. Here the markings consisted of numerals combined with dots. They are
marked on the upper edge of the bricks with a poor, somehow blackened glaze. The
signs that distinguish the courses are in the center, those for the vertical arrangement are
close to the vertical joints. Each of the latter signs is a counterpart of the sign near the
vertical joint of the brick adjoining it.” Ibid., 41-42.

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In the final analysis, a comparison of Thomas’s drawings of the Assyrian lion of the

“Harem Gate” with Andrae’s reconstruction of the lion of Babylon shows some

similarities: though he was invested in a Romantic theory of art, the German excavator

achieved a restoration which did not depart significantly from Thomas’s drawing of the

Assyrian prototype. Their major difference was in their interpretive framework: for

Thomas, the Assyrian lion is a product of classical mimesis, while for Andrae (just as for

Koldewey) it is the result of an inner essence, which probably would have been

incomprehensible to the Beaux-Arts architect. In other words, there seems to be a

disjunction between Andrae’s actual reconstruction and the discourse of Romantic

aesthetics that accompanied it in Koldewey and Andrae’s texts: the theory does not

translate into an artistic form.

In his memoirs, Andrae who, unlike Thomas, did not find a Babylonian lion intact,

carefully rules out all artistic influence and attributes the inspiration of his hypothetic

reconstruction to his reading of Goethe’s Naturwissenschaft. As late as 1908, however,

he was clearly influenced by Thomas’s restoration.

In 1904 Andrae left Koldewey in Babylon in order to excavate the extinct city of Assur

(the capital of Assyria) further north in Mesopotamia. During thirteen years, from 1899

to 1912, he left the region only twice. On September 1st, 1908 he attended the gala of

the “historical” pantomime play, “Sardanapal” (Assurbanipal), in Berlin, for which he

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had designed the “historically accurate” costumes and opera-set while he continued to

excavate the ancient city.

Kaiser Wilhelm, who strongly empathized with the dynastic problems of Assur, had

commissioned Delitzsch with a three-scene play and ordered Andrae to provide the

decor ranging from architectural setting to Assyrian hairstyles. As Andrae later recalls in

his memoirs, “the play told of a dangerous coalition of Assyria’s enemies, and the fall of

both the dynasty and the empire, and there was meant to be a moral here, not just for

those with their own dynasties and empires to worry about.” It was as if “the voice of

fate” was warning the Kaiser about the future.

Delitzsch’s play consisted of recitations

by allegorical figures, “The Assyrian Past” or “Knowledge,” which unlike his Babel-

Bible lectures bored the audience out of their minds. Despite overwhelmingly negative

reviews in Berlin’s newspapers the Kaiser was pleased with the production. He

decorated Delitzsch with the Prussian Order of the Red Eagle on the opening night. The

following morning the Berlin newspaper, Vossische Zeitung, pronounced: “the Assyrian

Ballet ‘Sardanapal’ is so boring that anyone who lasts to the end receives the Order of

the Crown, third class.”

Walter Andrae, Lebenserinnerungen, 132; also cited and translated into English in

Ernst Andrae and Boehmer, 128. Cf. Wilhelm II’s memoirs Ereignisse und Gestalten
aus den Jahren 1878-1918 (1922), 169.

Vossische Zeitung, 2.9, 1908, morning edition; cited in E. Andrae and Boehmer,

footnote 34, 127.

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Andrae’s design for the opera deserves attention since it is his first reconstruction of the

architecture of the Ancient Near East. The architect designed the stage in three

watercolors, which were enlarged to “real” scale by the technicians of the Unter den

Linden Opera in Berlin. Andrae’s design of the “Assyrian court” for the “Sardanapal” is

practically an adaptation of two restorations by Thomas, the “Harem Gate” and the city

gate, onto the stage.

The stage design of 1908 made a permanent imprint on Andrae’s later work. He based

his design for the Babylonian section of the Berlin State Museum in 1928 on a set of

watercolors and enlarged his paintings into a “full-scale” installation using the help of

the technicians of the same opera. Andrae clearly conceived the museum reconstruction

as an opera stage, making no significant distinction between an ephemeral décor and a

permanent installation.

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4.4. Symbol, Ornament, Art: Figures of the Counter-Enlightenment

In an unusually bitter critique published in a daily newspaper a week after the opening of

the Pergamon museum on September 1, 1930, Lothar Brieger argues that the Pergamon

Museum did not fulfill any of the initial expectations. It was not “beautiful” in the

traditional sense of the word, nor was it a “modern” museum that could answer the

demands of its time. It instead consisted of hypocritical and untrue reconstruction.

Brieger found the Ishtar Gate the “dullest” of all the exhibited objects in the museum.

The upper part of the gate, in particular, was simply “false, absurd and laughable.”

Andrae answered the criticism in November 1930 in a short essay, which was most

probably intended as a brochure or guide to the Near Eastern Department. The question,

Andrae argues, is whether one should reconstruct entire archaeological monuments

(Bauwerke), or a large part of them, in the museum. Given the restricted space

allocation as well as the material constraints, the Near Eastern Department could not be

expected to restore the monuments of Babylon to their original form. Instead the

reconstruction aimed at giving an “impression” [Eindruck] of the large “colored

surfaces” [Farbenflächen] of Babylon by restoring a large number of the ornamental

Lothar Brieger, “Nach der Feier die Kritik: Eine nüchterne Museumsbetrachtung,” in

Berliner Zeitung, 8.10.1930. The article was clipped and kept by Walter Andrae
(Andrae Archive, Staat Bibliothek, Berlin, document no. 440).

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reliefs. It was only in the “fantasy” of the observer that a full image of Babylon could be

created.

In a later essay written in 1931, Andrae raises the issues fundamental to reconstruction.

The critics of the Babylon room, he argues, did not understand that “compromise was

the essence [Wesen] of any museum.” No “artwork” [Kunstwerk], no “functional

object” [Gebrauchgegenstand] could be exhibited as a “museum-piece”

[Museumsschaustück] without losing their appropriate “setting” [Milieu]. Essential to

any museum is the displacement of the works of art from their “organic context” [aus

organischem Zusammenhang]. Andrae thus acknowledges that any quest to restore an

object literally to its “original” condition is absurd since it contradicts the very concept

of the museum. He rather raises the question “how did these objects stand in their past,

and how do they stand in their present and future; what did they mean to their creators

and what do they mean to us?”

The subsequent texts that Andrae wrote for the Near Eastern collection, particularly

those after 1933, are less apologetic and more ambiguous. The most ambiguous piece

was read to a group of visitors to the Babylon Hall on April 4, 1937. In this text, Andrae

chooses to introduce his reconstruction to the visitors with the voice of the “Spirit

[Geist] of Sumer,” whom he imagines to have been reincarnated for a brief moment

Andrae, “Vorderasiatisches Museum,” October 1930, unpublished 4 pages typescript,

Andrae Archive, document no. 17.

Andrae, “Das Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin” in Museumskunde, 73.

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after five thousand years, in order to illuminate the visitors. The Spirit talks with “an

understandable language, namely German” and even more surprisingly, uses

terminology that recalls that of Schopenhauer:

I admire your gut and strong will! I see through you as I did see through each
ancient Sumer man [in the ancient times] when I ruled them. If I were your
Spirit, I would expect you to have not only a strong will, but also strong feeling
(Empfinden). And I must say you would have to elevate your feeling to the same
strength as your will. The will is for you the most natural thing on earth. Yet, I
did not remark a strong feeling in you...

Andrae clearly imagined the Babylon room as the decor of a theatrical presentation of

the ancient civilization. His guided tours (in another performance prepared for April 24,

1937, Andrae spoke this time with the voice of the “Spirit of Assur”

) recall the

allegorical recitations of Friedrich Delitzsch in the pantomime-play “Sardanapal.”

Andrae’s theory of ornament, on the other hand, shows the author’s increasing

involvement in theosophy. In a 1925 text Andrae argues that the stock of decorative

motives in architecture originated as divine symbols, the substitution of divinity, and

were later transformed into purely formal patterns:

Originally the fruit-bearing … palm, probably the rosette, and the he-goats
represented symbolically the cult of the goddess Ishtar. Later these goat-figures,
generally on their knees, became simple ornaments with no deeper meaning... In

Andrae, “Führung, sumerische un babylonische Säle,” 7.4.1937, unpublished

typescript, Andrae Archive, document no. 212.

Andrae, “Führung, die assyrischen Säle,” 21.4.1937, Unpublished typescript, Andrae

Archive, document no. 213.

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the same way, the winged genii and bulls, mythological figures with health-
giving power, were first introduced with a definite intention until they
deteriorated into meaningless forms.

This process, for Andrae, is one of spiritual entropy. The architecture of Mesopotamia

was the physical testimony of a “process of degradation” through which the formerly

sacred symbols were depicted as ornaments. As Andrae explained in his “Symbol in

Architecture” (Baukunst), the sacred is the origin of architecture, par excellence. In so

far as the symbol preserves its original, divine essence in architecture, the world

preserves its meaning. When the symbol freezes into “meaningless ornament,”

everything on earth falls into an entropic oblivion; the meaning retreats from the world:

It is a question of tremendous actual importance--as it will always be--whether
our present time is capable to create new symbols and, therefore, a new
architecture characteristic of our time, or it is at least possible to bring old
symbols back to life. We should not ignore either of the possibilities. The entire
flow of history, from the Nordic culture, or the ancient Sumer (and perhaps from
much earlier times), through Classical Antiquity and through the Middle Ages
until our day, is a chain of newly created, reactualized and once again fallen
symbols. We know little about the enormous impulsive power of the earliest
symbols... Today, they look [to us] different from 2000 or 500 years ago.

Andrae, Farbige Keramik aus Assur und ihre Vorstufen in altassyrischen

Wandmalereien: nach Aquarellen von Mitgliedern der Assur-expedition und nach
photographischen Aufnahmen von Originalen im Auftrage der Deutschen Orient
Gesellschaft. (Berlin: Scarabaeus, 1923). The quote is taken from the English translation
with some modifications, Coloured Ceramics from Assur and Earlier Ancient Assyrian
Wall-Paintings, From Photographs and Water-colours by Members of the Ashur
Expedition Organised by the Deutsche Orient-Geselschaft, (London: Kegal Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd. 1925), 6.

Andrae, “Symbol in der Baukunst,” in Forschungen und Forschritte Jahrg., Nr. 26,

(Berlin, September 10, 1933, pp.373-374, (Andrae Archive, document no. 29).

203

Hence Andrae seems to thematize in the Babylonian section of the museum the age-old

enfeeblement of the “original” spirit in architecture. The museum was meant to

illustrate not only the process of spiritual entropy, the degradation of the symbol into

meaningless ornament, but also embody Andrae’s hope to reactualize the symbol, his

attempt to decipher the code, whose secret had long been lost.

In his art historical writing, Andrae argues that the earliest representation of God in

human form belongs to the first dynasty in Ur, around 3000 BC. Before this period

divine power was visualized in Mesopotamia via symbolic image (Sinnbild). Although

the archaeological layers that he excavated in the cities of Babylon and Assur belong to

much later periods, Andrae is clearly interested in this earlier age before the 4th

millennium, the age of archaic symbols. He focuses his attention not as much on the

ornamental motives that he found in Babylon, but on the memory of an earlier symbolic

age as they are preserved in these figures. In his lecture of March 16, 1934 in the

Pergamon Museum he focused on this point:

How did man come to the point of making for himself a picture [Bild] of the
deity? We are brought up with the prohibition: “Thou shalt not make to thyself
any image of God! [Du sollst Dir kein Bild von Gott machen!]. The image of
God [Gottesbild] is banned as graven image [Götzenbild]... What is the
difference between the deity who is signified by a symbol [Sinnbild] and one
who figures in human form [Menschenbild]? We would call the first “abstract,”
and the second “concrete,” in a quite unsatisfactory [classification]. The second,
no doubt demands higher creative power and requires higher knowledge and
wisdom, [especially] when one has lost the divine in man [himself]... The
question is, whether this is a better condition than the first one. I believe it is not!
I see such depiction as the result of a compulsive need [to give an appearance to

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God]; previously man had been in God and with God. Then, God moved towards
[the appearance of] man. Nevertheless, this is the birth [Wurzel] of Art.

The difficulty of translating Andrae’s text into English consists in the fact that

“Menschenbild,” which can be translated literally as “Man-image” or “man’s figuration”

means, at the same time, the “conception of man.”

As its opposite Andrae never uses

the word “Symbol,” but “Sinnbild” (literally, meaning/feeling-image) which also means

symbol. With the play of words Andrae implies that the mimetic (my word) faculty of

representing the deity in man’s form is at the same time the creation of the subjectivity

of man as independent of the divine essence. “Menschenbild” refers to the fall of man

from the world of the divine essence to the material world, and the secularization of the

latter.

The very moment when man depicted himself and his God as a separate man-like image,

he asserted his subjectivity in a world of representation. The moment when man

represented God in man’s appearance is the moment of inauthenticity. Mimesis, that is,

non-identical similitude, replaced meaning, just as ratio reframed the world as the world

of man’s domination.

Andrae, “Wintervortrag, Mensch un Gottheit” unpublished lecture, professed in the

Pergamon Museum in March or April 1934. Andrae Archive, document no. 142 Nr.3.1.,
3.

The Oxford-Duden German Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, reprinted with

corrections in enlarged format, 1995).

Cf. Andrae’s terminology with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s analysis of

“mimesis” and of the origins of Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment. See also
Rabinbach’s essay “The Cunning of Unreason: Mimesis and the Construction of Anti-
Semitism in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialetic of Enlightenment,” In the Shadow of

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In the light of Delitzsch’s ideological program, which initiated the excavations of the

German Orient Society in 1899, Andrae’s theosophy of the 1920’s is significant. In

contrast to Delitzsch’s simplistic attack on the Second Commandment as “anti-

Babylonian,” and his search for a picture-code that would reveal the true religion,

Andrae’s account of the origin of art and architecture in Babylon is remarkably

iconoclastic. Art (by which Andrae means mimesis) is born only when the original

meaning retreats from the world. Unlike Delitzsch who was in search of a revelation,

one that would expose the millennial conspiracy, Andrae does not seem to believe that

the retreat of meaning from the world in the 3

millennium can be reversed in

modernity.

* * *

Hence both archaic and modern, the Babylonian walls in Berlin present a fascinating

case. On the one hand, the Babylon expedition of the German Orient-Society was

motivated by the search for the original code of an ur-religion that preceded—what

Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment,” (Berkley,
Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997): “Enlightenment [in the
sense used by Horkheimer and Adorno] occurs at the intersection of two decisive
processes: the prohibition of the image and its displacement into the abstract system and
the need to differentiate self from nature. The Jewish proscription on images, the
Bilderverbot, is the origin of enlightenment and at the same time provides its redemptive
moment... Mythic mimesis, as Andrew Hewitt has argued, is already a step beyond
archaic images, a step toward the symbolic, to the point where ‘mimesis feeds into
rationality’. To fall back into the premythic world is to enter a matriarchal, magical
world populated by ‘ancient heroines’ and by Odysseus’ own mother; to fall back into
the ‘nondifferentiation of nature,” 179.

206

Delitzsch believed—its “distortion” in the “Hebrew legend”: the ur-religion of Babylon,

was supposed to match the inner “religious feeling” of the Germans. Driven by

Delitzsch’s dubious ideological program, the archaeological expedition was conceived

as the “return” of the German “spirit” into a landscape of entropy where the most distant

religion had been frozen, and was available only in broken symbols. Ornaments of

Babylon in the museum are not “works” that stand for themselves in front of an

experiencing subject. They are not objects of aesthetic experience but a sort of

redundancy, the traces left behind after the withdrawal of the original meaning from the

world. Just as “art” is, for Andrae, the fallen memory of the ur-religion, ornament is the

entropic ruin of the primordial “symbol.”

It is therefore little wonder that the German architects and theosophists, Koldewey and

Andrae believed that they were searching for something fundamentally different from

what the French and British archaeologists had looked for. Having immersed themselves

in pre-history, they had hoped to excavate spiritual origins of the “self” in the fields of

the “other.”

On the other hand, Andrae’s reconstruction in Berlin thematized not so much the

spiritual rootedness of Germany in the ur-religion of Babylon, but the displacement of

man in a modern world with no original meaning and with no hope of recovery. Unlike

the ultra-conservative theorists of “German Ideology,” Largarde and Langbehn, Andrae

offers no hope of redemption for contemporary Germans in religion or art. Instead, the

museum reconstruction of Babylon draws parallels between the impersonality of the

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mechanical modes of production in industrialized modernity, and the architectural

production of an archaic culture which flourished prior to the introduction of man as an

experiencing subject—prior to the “figuration of man” as the “concept of man”

[Menschenbild]. Hence Babylon, a city, which had little to offer in terms of physical

ruins, was made in Berlin to provide archaic images to modernity.

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Conclusion

_________________________________________________________________

On the Modern Cult of Authenticity

209

… Once tradition is no longer animated by a comprehensive, substantial force but
has to be conjured up by means of citations because ‘It’s important to have
tradition’, then whatever happens to be left of it is dissolved into a means to an end.
An exhibition of applied art only makes a mockery of what it pretends to conserve.
Anyone who thinks that art can be reproduced in its original form through an act
of the will is trapped in hopeless romanticism.
… Works of art can fully embody the promesse du bonheur only when they have been
uprooted from their native soil and have set out along the path to their own destruction.

Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum.”

Let me, then, revisit two questions I have raised at the beginning of this dissertation:

what is the “object” of the Pergamon Museum, a “museum of ancient architecture”? If

the museum’s exhibits are “works of architecture,” where does the frame of the museum

end, where does its exhibit, the “work,” begin?

As I have shown in Part 2, the integration of architectural elements with painting and

sculpture was a central component of Bode’s reform in museology. Responding to a fin-

de-siècle critique of museums as “mausoleums” of dead art, and building upon a general

disenchantment with 19

century “pedantic” Bildung, Bode’s living museum re-

contextualized the masterpieces of ancient art in the fictive architectural ensembles of

“style rooms.” Combining collections of painting and sculpture with those of decorative

arts, Bode aimed as much at restoring the original expressive content of “art” by

relocating it in a semblance of a historical, cultural setting, as at creating an

ideal—therefore, distinctively modern—setting for art’s experience. Architecture and

In Adorno, Prisms, 175-76, 185.

210

other decorative, applied arts were far from being the object of the museum: Bode

upheld a clear hierarchy in the arts, distinguishing oeuvre (ergon) from hors-d’oeuvre

(parergon), works of art from fictive architectural frames. Hence Bode’s museology

presents a fatal contradiction: he was only interested in architecture (parergon) in so far

as it enhanced the effect of the masterpiece (usually painting), hence ensuring the

autonomy of ancient painting as pure art. But in the very act of displaying painting in

“context” he was giving support to the German Art Nouveau—Jugendstil—belief that

“work” and frame—ergon and parergon—formed an inseparable totality, hence

effectively destroying the autonomy of the “work of art.”

It is not a mere coincidence

that Bode’s displays in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum correspond in time with the rise of

curatorial connoisseurship in Germany, which severed the museum’s ties with the

academy, as well as with an equally paradoxical cult of the original, which eventually

banned the display of copies and plaster casts in museums.

Marrying Bode’s reform in museology with the colonial daydreams of the Kaiserreich,

Messel’s project for the Royal Prussian Museum of 1907 was a significant departure

from its 19

century precedents, particularly from Berlin’s Neues Museum, in its

ordering and display of “art.” While the architecture of the Neues Museum was

conceived as a metaphor for Hegel’s philosophy, displaying art as the hieroglyphics of

the history of the Mind, Messel’s museum intended to map the world’s geography of

original works and authentic contexts in its interiors. As is evident in Messel’s Gothic,

Romanesque and Baroque interiors, the fictive architectural décor was essential in

I am grateful to Alan Colquhoun for bringing this contradiction to my attention.

211

conveying the idea of the context and, yet, subsidiary to the experience of the

masterpieces of ancient art.

The transformation between 1907 and 1930 of Bode and Messel’s imperial

museum—including Bode’s brainchild, the “Museum of Ancient German Art”—into a

“museum of ancient architecture” presents, in this sense, a fascinating case. For it was

not only the object of the museum but also the relation of this object with its museal

frame that changed.

I have surveyed this transformation in Parts 3 and 4 by tracing the history of the museum

reconstructions of Pergamon and Babylon. In the final analysis, the museum achieved

three different types of “works”—though these are not necessarily “objects.”

The museum-reconstruction of the Great Altar of Pergamon was initially conceived in

1899, in Wolff’s interim Pergamon Museum, as a hypothetic architectural setting, which

enhanced the display of the Hellenistic frieze, the Gigantomachy. In his project of 1907

Messel redesigned the West Façade of the “altar” as the central décor of a sublime and

phantasmagoric interior, the Altar-Raum. By 1930, the “altar” had curiously been

transformed into the chief exhibit of the museum: a process that paradoxically

objectified—as well as commodified—Messel’s décor without, however, restoring the

historic monument into a freestanding building. So much so that the overbearing effect

of the architectural exhibit came to overshadow the original pieces of antique sculpture,

instead of merely providing an architectural frame for their display. Even though the

212

museum’s critics in the late 1920’s and 30’s—archaeologists and art historians—

dismissed the museum’s presentation of Pergamon as “fake” or, in one instance, as

“kitsch,” it quickly became the most popular museum-display in Germany only a year

after the museum’s opening in 1930. Hence the “Great Altar” in the museum presents a

unique case: it was constructed in the museum based on a fanciful proportional

relationship with the Gigantomachy Frieze in order to provide an ideal context for

viewing Hellenistic sculpture, and was subsequently authenticated into an “antique

monument.”

Wiegand’s architectural exhibits, including the Market Gate of Miletus, on the other

hand, present a significantly different case. Here the intention was to piece fragments

together into a “monument” on the evidence of the archaeological fragments themselves,

even though the archaeological evidence was scarce. Similarly, Wiegand’s exhibits were

not initially conceived as a museal context for sculpture, but as a comparative

architecture collection. Unlike the plaster casts or fragments of antique architecture in

century Beaux Arts academies, however, the pedagogical function of these exhibits,

if any, is highly ambiguous. Far from being models of ancient orders, Wiegand’s

exhibits can best be characterized as a modern pastiche of ancient architecture—I use the

word here in two senses: Wiegand produced the exhibits out of heterogeneous,

composite materials, mixing a small quantity of antique fragments with brick, cement,

steel reinforcements and stucco that gave them the appearance of aged marble; secondly,

they are for the most part citations from hypothetic reconstructions of utilitarian,

provincial structures in Roman Anatolia. As Wiegand’s most eloquent critic, Scheffler,

213

did not fail to notice in the 1920’s, Wiegand’s partial “reconstruction” of the Market

Gate of Miletus actually fabricated a masterpiece out of a relatively insignificant,

utilitarian building. Such practice is perhaps not unusual, for a museum of ancient art

often produces “art” out of pre-Renaissance, utilitarian objects by framing them in the

museum. Yet, what makes Wiegand’s museum of ancient architecture problematic is

precisely this: he not only displaced ancient fragments from antique cities in Turkey but

also sought to create the effect of an architectural ensemble, which, he claimed, re-

enacted in the museum the original visual experience [Total Anschauung] of the ancients

who had built the monuments. And yet, such a picturesque-sublime idea of antique

architecture as “living-experience” [Erlebnis] seems, in retrospect, a distinctive product

of German modernity.

The reconstruction of the architecture of Babylon, on the other hand, is different from

the museum display of both the Pergamene and Milesian monuments. Andrae did not

intend to recover a lost historical object in the museum: he had merely an ornamental

pattern from 6

century B.C. Babylon to imitate. The Ishtar Gate and the Processional

Street of Babylon in the Pergamon Museum are decorative reenactments of much larger

structures whose proportions and size were freely altered to fit the modern space of the

gallery. As such, the Babylonian reconstruction recalls an Art Nouveau interior: a

modern constellation of antique fragments. Andrae’s production of the “Lion of

Babylon” in large numbers—many decorate the South Wing of the Pergamon Museum,

others were acquired by museums around the world—effectively transformed the

214

specimens of an archaic system of mass production into unique works of art, by

reproducing them in the museum.

Hence, although distinct from one another, these three groups of architectural exhibits

make one point clear: archaeological reconstruction in the museum transforms the

“original” meaning of ancient architecture, instead of merely restoring it. The exhibits’

authenticity, so central to their presentation in the museum today, depends neither on

their material duration, nor on their being unique in the place where the antique

architecture—now lost—had been originally built. Quite on the contrary, the exhibits

derive their authenticity from the very condition of their modern displacement into the

museum.

The translation of the lost monuments of antiquity into the exhibits of the modern

museum can perhaps best be characterized as a process of reproduction and

authentication, which manifests itself in two distinct and yet complementary spheres:

firstly, the phantasmagoric interiors of the museum transport viewers into another time,

and another place, reproducing, as it were, the experience of antique monuments from a

distance, had they remained intact as they “actually were” in history; secondly, the

hypothetic, partial reconstructions of lost monuments pose in the museum as “originals”

to be photographed. Perhaps more than the sublime effect of the actual interiors, the

dissemination of the photographic reproductions of “antique monuments”—in a wide

sphere ranging from art history surveys to Berlin souvenirs—effectively authenticate the

museum’s exhibits.

215

Here, it may be useful to open a parenthesis: by redefining the archaeological

reconstruction in the museum as a double process of reproduction and authentication, I

depart from the literary critic Walter Benjamin’s thesis in his “The Work of Art in the

Age of Its Technical Reproducibility.” Far from shattering uniqueness or autonomy of

the work of art, the reproduction of antique monuments in the museum, I contend, has

effectively constructed the “aura” of the work of art around the hypothetic models.

(Hence, the subtitle of my discussion of Andrae’s reconstruction of Babylon parodies

Benjamin’s title by reversing his thesis: “The Lion of Babylon in the Age of the Work of

Art.”)

* * *

It must also be clear that I have not aimed in this dissertation at a history of reception of

the antique monuments in the museum—an excellent and provocative history of the

reception of the Pergamene Altar was provided by Hans-Joachim Schalles—but at a

history of construction of antique “work” in the museum. By the same token, I disagree

with the common view that the Great Altar of Pergamon was “exploited,” “abused,” or

wrongly “appropriated” by 20

century German regimes, and above all the Nazis, who

made it a model of their official, ceremonial architecture. Such a view assumes that there

exists an antique “work,” an interior, a fixed expressive content whose meaning is

independent of the frames, demands and uses of modernity. And yet I have tried to show

that the “work” itself was shaped by the historical, artistic and ideological concerns of

216

the present that excavated and reconstructed it. The “monuments” of antiquity could not

have found their present forms anywhere other than Berlin in 20

century Germany.

By acknowledging that the “monuments” of antiquity in the museum are contingent with

the specific conditions of modern Germany, I do not mean to devalue the museum’s

exhibits, nor do I intend to dispute their status as achievements of past scientific

research. I do not follow the radical relativism of Paul Feyerabend, who, denying the

very possibility of critical hermeneutics, claims that all attempts to understand antiquity

is merely modern storytelling and as such, false “realism.” This study, in many ways,

underwrites Karl Popper’s counter-thesis: what makes museum exhibits problematic is

not the fact that they are (like all science) imperfect rapprochements with the truth of

antiquity, but, instead, their claim to certainty—in this case, the cult of authenticity that

the museum has nurtured. In the Pergamon Museum the uncertainties of the modern

science of archaeology were replaced with a sublime and highly phantasmagoric

spectacle of antiquity.

Delitzsch’s search for “archaeological evidence” in Babylon, and the political

controversy his attacks on the Old Testament stirred, or Wiegand’s unsubstantiated

claim that he reenacted the “original,” intuitive experience of the ancients in the

museum, which paved the way for the official representations of the “Nazi Olympics” of

1936, further support my thesis: hidden under the aegis of a positive science was the

myth of the unique calling of the Germans: a modern essentialism. In fact, as Wiegand’s

opening speech of 1929 makes clear, this phantasmagoria of antiquity, a spectacle of the

217

sublime for the masses, was intended to induce a sense of collective destiny among

viewers rather than present the merely scientific display of the “evolution” of

architecture, which Wiegand argued for elsewhere.

Reflecting on the ramifications of such a strategy on the vocation of the museum, it is

clear that Berlin’s “museum of ancient architecture” put a decisive end to the much-

embattled, humanistic Bildung that had fuelled the Prussian Museum a century earlier.

The aim was not, by any means, the education of the urban bourgeoisie with

“disinterested” art, but to “shock and awe” the most impressionable crowds with the

immediacy of a spectacle and towards no productive ends.

* * *

I shall conclude my remarks by revisiting the problem of “repatriation.” Admittedly, by

showing that the “monuments” of antiquity in the museum are constructions of modern

Germany—that is, the distinction between the “work” and its museal frame is fictive—I

stop short of invalidating the claims of restitution. For, as Tas-kIn elaborates in his

Sürgündeki Zeus [Zeus in Exile], the aim of such a campaign is not only to return the

“original” Zeus Altar, but also to remedy the violence inflicted on the “heritage” of a

local community by19

century cultural imperialism.

The risk of a campaign of “repatriation,” however, is precisely to underwrite the German

cult of authenticity while seeking to reverse the effects of German cultural imperialism.

218

For Tas-kIn’s definition of “exile” is invested in, not the presence, but rather the

conspicuous absence of a “monument” in its “original place.” Perhaps one of the most

intriguing outcomes of this present study is the suggestion that the “original place,” the

irreducible experience of “work” “under Mediterranean skies,” is an outcome of the

modern discourse on the museum. From Conze’s first remarks on Pergamon in the

1880’s to Wiegand’s triumphal opening speech of 1929, the discourse was marked by

lamentations for the lost “context” of art. This, however, should not come as a surprise,

for the very condition of the “work of art,” as Adorno has shown, is its being in

permanent exile.

219

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