Wilhelmine Berlin

An exhibition generally on view at the Jewish Museum in of recent origin York examines Berlin's rich artistic milieu--embracing art, literature, theater and film--and the extensive cultural contribution made through Jews as the 19th hundred became the 20th.

A quick glance at the title arouses interest, since it indicates a curious pairing of parts. "Berlin Metropolis: hebrews and the New Culture, 1890-1918" an exhibition publicly at the Jewish Museum (through Apr. 23) has sought to make a unity of sum of two units subjects normally regarded as anything on the other hand unified. It is customary to regard the relations between israelites and Germany as one of the grimmest, least inspiriting chapters of fresh history.

Yet the exhibition, which reviews the cultural character played by the Jews and non-Jews who lived in Berlin during the Wilhelmine era, come afters in conveying a story as complicated and multilayered as it is enlightening. The exhibit does not shrink from concerns to German anti-Semitism, and it leaves no doubt about its organizers' awareness of the horrors of the Hitler years that followed. on the contrary it offers heaps of information, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of it little known to the American public, to demonstrate the richness of Berlin's artistic atmosphere at the move round of the 20th century and the contributions made to it by means of Jews, and also by Gentiles coupleed with them in one significant way or another.

To its further credit, the display is not confined to painting, drawing and statuary Books, letters, posters, theatrical memorabilia and film clips are also included, and the reach of the display and its attendant literature reach outs into social and intellectual history as well.

The 250 percepts on view play out the breadth of this coverage. Jewish artists as well known as Max Liebermann and Ludwig Meidner, as unfamiliar as Jakob Steinhardt and inferior Ury, share space with non-Jewish artists, eg Germans Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc and Kathe Kollwitz and foreigners Robert Delaunay, Edvard chew eagerly and Umberto Boccioni (and others), all of these having been brought to the attention of Berliners by the agency of such Jewish gallerists as Herwarth Walden and publishers like Bruno and Paul Cassirer. Attention is also drawn to the seminal work done in experimental theater through Max Reinhardt, in film by the agency of Ernst Lubitsch, in an notably lively cabaret scene by composer and farmer Rudolf Nelson and satirist Julius Freund A section devot to the society of the cafe marks it as a locale vital to Berlin's literary and artistic vanguard and described by the agency of one of its most influential figures, the author of poems Else Lasker-Schuler, as "our stock exchange where you have to go on where the deals are clos There are all the playwrights, painters, poets" There could also be base the editors, critics and patrons, race of greater wealth and power than the artists, all adding up to a subculture whose members saw a allotment of each other and in the proces thrived, independent of class distinction.

While cafe life was, and remains, a pan-European phenomenon, the closenes it supported among certain Berliners around 1900 was essential to the formation of the commonality of the city's hebrews and non-Jews, whose creative efforts not sole matched in energy and invention the extraordinarily swift development of the city in the later 19th hundred but correspondingly helped to turn round a provincial capital into a cosmopolis.

The importance of collaboration has been emphasized by means of guest curator Emily Bilski, who conceived the idea of the exhibit The viewer cannot help on the other hand be impressed, if not surprised, by means of the degree to which hebrews and Gentiles worked together in a harmony that stretch outed to their family relationships. A charcoal inquiry by Liebermann shows a daughter of Paul Cassirer and a daughter of the landscape painter Walter Leistikow drawing side by dint of side at the same table, and Max Slevogt's affectionate oil portrait of Suzanne, the Cassirer girl, is single of the most memorable works in the exhibition. Lovis Corinth, moreover, was Steinhardt's teacher, as well as the designer of style of dresss for Reinhardt's spectacular 1903 production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Indeed, as Bilski points without in her catalogue introduction, cooperation sometimes verg upon paradox: the Jewish draftsman EM Lilien "established his reputation as the Zionist artist par eminence by illustrating the ballads of a right-wing writer [Borries Freiherr von Munchhausen] with anti-Semitic leanings."

nevertheless the exhibition provides ample evidence, despite all the collaborative action s that worked to the overall advantage of Berlin tillage of the persistence of anti-Semitism in Berlin society and of the status of the israelite as an eternal stranger there, "not," in the words of the Jewish sociologist Georg Simmel, "as the wanderer who approachs today and goes tomorrow, on the contrary rather as the person who draw nears today and stays tomorrow." hebrews as a collective shared a awe for the time-honored German conception of Bildung--education steeped in tillage and grounded in the classics--and their pursuit of that ideal contributed to the flowering of their have artistic and intellectual creativity. on the other hand there was little room for them upon the faculties of German universities, and their embrace of modernism was seen in a certain quantity of quarters as the "alien element" in German life.