Art of Germany (2010–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - A Divided Land - full transcript

For the poet Friedrich Schiller,
Germany wasn't a country.

It was a question mark.

"Germany?" he asked. "Where is it?
Where?

"I don't know where to find it."

The truth is that for most of
its history, Germany was not

a unified state, but an
assemblage of disparate parts.

Not a nation, so much as a process.

For centuries Germany was a construct
of the mind, the creation of writers,

painters, visionaries.

That's why art
has always been at its core.

Reflecting its diverse origins,
German culture is itself a unique



blend of passion and precision,
exact craftsmanship and the impulsive

gesture, a love of nature and a
love of the machine,

a need for escape
and desire for control.

And I believe that one of the
most revealing ways to explore the

complexities of the German character
is through the story of German art.

It's a tale of fascinating extremes.

From the ghouls and demons
of the German Middle Ages

to some of the most
beautiful sculptures ever created.

From the radiant landscapes of
Caspar David Friedrich

to the thrusting symbols of
Prussian power

and the abyss of the Third Reich,
where art was twisted into a

tool for terror.

It's an often dark story
but ultimately one of hope,

humanity



and renewal.

When the Romans ventured into
the heart of Europe,

in the first century BC,

the territory they encountered
was cold, damp, mysterious.

It was a world away
from the sunshine and

open vistas of ancient Italy.

It was the Roman historian
Tacitus who first gave this

place and its inhabitants a name,
they were the Germanic tribes and

this was Germania.

He said the place
bristled with forests.

He believed the people who lived here
had been fundamentally shaped

by their own primeval environment,
and the truth is for 2,000 years

the German creative imagination
has drawn strength from the idea

and memory of the forest, it's been
the central image for so many poets,

writers and above all, artists.

The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
believed that there was a single work

of art that expressed this
more vividly than any other,

an art form with its roots firmly
planted in the primeval forest.

It's the German Gothic cathedral.

Goethe likened it to,
"A sublimely towering tree of God

"with its thousand branches
and millions of twigs".

This is the Cathedral of St Peter.

It was once the tallest building in
the world, and for nearly 700 years

it's loomed over the city of Cologne.

Inside, distilled to its essence,
you'll find all

the intoxicating
variety of German art.

In fact, this is a microcosm of
art in the early German lands,

with work in every medium, expressing
many different moods.

There's the refined and austere,

like this rare medieval bronze
sculpture of the cathedral's founder,

Konrad von Hochstaden,
eyes fixed on heaven.

This richly gilded altarpiece of the
Cologne school of painting

commemorates the city's patron saints

in a burst of textile and gold.

But there's also the
dark and mysterious.

The most compelling work in the
cathedral is a painfully expressive

wooden sculpture of Christ,

dating back to the 10th century.

What's fascinating about
the art here is how it

pulls in opposing directions.

It shows just how schizophrenic and
contradictory German art can be.

Look up towards the vault
and you'll find these sinuous,

elegantly expressive stone
statues staring down at you.

But look down into the choir and
you'll find a very different, more

raucous world inhabited by these folk
figures and grotesques.

Goethe wasn't just mythmaking when
he likened the Gothic cathedral

to a forest.

These faces and figures really
do look as if they are peering

out from some forest undergrowth.

In fact, this whole place
feels like it hasn't been built,

it's just grown.

As the Middle Ages passed into the
Renaissance, what we now call Germany

simply didn't exist.

Instead there were the German lands,
a vast patchwork of separate cities,

states and fiefdoms, all just a part
of the sprawling Holy Roman Empire.

Although each territory had its
own identity and system of rule,

they were all subject to a succession

of distant emperors,
based in Spain and later Austria.

Despite their lack
of true independence,

in times of peace, centres like

Cologne could compete with
any of the great cities of Europe.

Cologne was part of the so-called
Hanseatic league, a confederation

of around 100 independent cities
whose life blood was commerce.

They pooled their resources and
became a great trading power

of medieval and Renaissance Europe.

With warehouses in Venice, London

and even as far afield
as Novgorod in Russia.

So while German culture could be
inward looking, feudal, provincial,

it was also receiving
an ever-changing quicksilver influx

of ideas from beyond its borders,

many far flung influences
to be absorbed and transformed.

It's a pattern exactly reflected
in the qualities of German art.

If you want to see this process in
action, the best place to come is the

Alte Pinakothek gallery in Munich

So what were artists getting up to
in the German lands during the second

half of the 15th century?

Well, part of
the answer at least is to be found in

this room which gives us a rather
wonderful panorama of northern and

central German painting at the time.

And what you notice first of all,
I think, is the influence of

Flanders of the northern Renaissance.

They've clearly been looking at

the work of artists like Rogier van
der Weyden or the van Eyck brothers.

You can see it everywhere in their
use of oil paint, these
vivid colours, these

crisply painted draperies and these
rather reserved porcelain faces.

But this is still very much a painter

working within the intellectual
context of the late Gothic world.

He doesn't paint a blue sky, he
paints a gold ground sky,

this is the vault of heaven -

not a naturalistic
depiction of the earth.

That begins to creep in here in this
rather more sophisticated work of art

by the master
of the Bartholomew altar.

Look at that wonderful almost
monochrome, bluey grey landscape

peeping up
above this brocade curtain.

But best of all here,
look at this vomiting yowling demon

with his staring yellow eyes.
Isn't he wonderful?

No on does ghouls better
than the Germans.

And you get a great
example of that over here,

where again,

we don't know the
name of the painter.

He's simply known as the master
of the legend of St Anthony.

It's a wonderfully vivid image,

a comic strip account of
the legends of St Anthony,

hundreds of different
incidents in his life.

But at the centre, the eye is just
drawn to it, this extraordinary image

of the saint being set about by five
of these fiendishly vivid demons.

And I think
the most striking thing about this

German Renaissance painting is the
way in which the artist makes devils,

demons, seem more real, more flesh
and blood than ordinary human beings.

Although German painters were
aware of the grace and refinement

of Renaissance art, they clung to the
superstitions of the Middle Ages.

So why did ghouls and demons so haunt
the German imagination?

The truth is

for many Germans, it really was as
if hell was just around the corner.

Most people led feudal lives,
dominated by trauma and hardship.

It's been estimated that the total
population of the Holy Roman Empire

was by 1340 around 15 million people.

Now the vast majority of those people

lived on the land
in rural villages or on farms.

But over the next hundred years,

their lives were to be dominated by a
succession of catastrophes, the Black

Death, bubonic plague was followed
by famine. Their feudal overlords

turned mercenary, robber barons
taking by force whatever they wanted.

Around a third of the entire
population,

that's five million people,
were wiped out.

No wonder that to many,

life itself seemed little more than
a form of barely organised anarchy.

In this world, the first priority of
the artist was not to create beauty -

it was to console and to comfort.

Here in the Alsatian town of Colmar,

there's one of the most fascinating
relics of this world...

..made for the prayers of patients

at a hospital for plague
and skin diseases,

people covered in boils

and weeping sores.

It's the Isenheim Altarpiece

and it was completed 1515
by Matthias Grunewald.

This is probably the most grotesque
depiction

of the Crucifixion in all of art.

It's enormous and just
astonishingly arresting.

It is a dermatological vision of
the Crucifixion

and I think you have to imagine

the people who would have prayed
before this image.

This is Grunewald's way of saying,

"Well, Christ suffered like you,
but don't give up hope.

"Pray to the image
and you may be cured."

Now, you might look at this and think

that Grunewald was an artist

almost compelled by his own
late-Gothic style,

that he didn't
make stylistic choices,

but if you look at the
right and left panels,

he shows us that, "Yes, I'm perfectly
well aware of Renaissance style."

Look at Saint Sebastian - almost
like a marbled Italian statue.

Look at Saint Anthony - depicted
with this rather solemn realism -

but then look just above
Saint Anthony

and there's this demon bursting
through the window and I think,

if you like,

that demon bursting through
the window is Grunewald's style.

The Isenheim Altarpiece was
originally a huge hinged structure,

only opened at special times,
such as Lent.

But now it's been dismantled,

so its inner world of imagery is
permanently visible...

and the second layer of paintings
is brighter,

more optimistic than the first.

These are very different images.
They speak of hope and redemption.

Up here, you've got this
visionary image of Christ

rising up out of the grave,
still in his winding sheets.

Can you imagine a more radiant
and transfigured body than that?

Because what's the first thing
you notice about his body?

The whiteness of the skin,
the purity.

It's as if he's been made whole,
he's been cured.

Think of that livid-green flesh
of the other image.

It's almost got that
before-and-after quality

of an advert for
some miraculous skin cream,

except what it's really advertising
is the power of prayer.

In the final set of images,
Grunewald returns to the dark side.

He shows Saint Jerome
in a Germanic wilderness.

Here, he's beset by demons
and devils.

A building smoulders
in the background,

and a disfigured peasant
lies suffering next to the saint.

The whole scene radiates fear
and anxiety.

What's Grunewald
really representing here?

It's almost like it's a picture of
the psyche of a deeply troubled time.

Yes, we can dream of salvation,
we can dream of being made whole,

but the reality is that
sickness will strike,

armies will loot and pillage,

and if that doesn't happen,

those forces that haunted the forest
of ancient times,

they're still there and they're
liable to come out and get you.

Art historians still disagree about
what label to attach

to this cryptic, slippery
masterpiece.

INAUDIBLE

Some say it's Renaissance,
others that it's Gothic.

The truth is that Grunewald
almost embraced the Renaissance...

..but in the end he recognised that
he was still painting

for people rooted in the old world
of medieval piety.

That same tension runs through

the work of the most famous German
artist of the period.

This is a self-portrait
by Grunewald's contemporary,

Albrecht Durer.

He completed it in 1498, a few
years after his first trip to Italy.

He's painted himself
in the Italian style,

almost as a male version
of Leonardo's enigmatic Mona Lisa.

But the landscape in the background
shows the Alps and, by implication,

the tug of his homeland.

He painted this self-portrait
just two years later.

This is very much Durer the German -
solemn, sober.

What's most striking is the face,
with its wide, sad eyes.

He's made himself look like
Jesus Christ...

But why?

I think the key to this picture
is in the date,

that's written just above
Durer's monogram. It says 1500 -

a very significant date,

because 1500 was the year
that many believed,

reading the Book of Revelations,

with its reference to the half time
after the time,

many believed that this was
the moment

when the end of the world
would begin.

This was the moment when the final
conflict would almost be upon us,

and I think what Durer is saying
in this self-portrait

is that we should all of us

imitate the example of Christ,
follow Christ more than ever before.

So, yes, Durer is
a man of the Renaissance,

but I think he's even more
a medieval man.

Durer was suspended between worlds,
the old and the new.

And the most powerful
example of that

is his work in a revolutionary,
recently invented medium -

the reproductive print.

Durer was a prolific printmaker,
using both copper and wooden plates.

At the Graphische Sammlung in Munich,

they've got a fine collection
of his woodcuts.

And what's striking is how Durer's
used the new medium of the print

to plunge you back in time,

back to a dark, Gothic way
of seeing and feeling.

Here, we've got Durer's
large passion,

which exemplifies his belief

that if apocalypse
really is round the corner,

we should all focus our attention
on the life of Christ.

And it's effectively a portable
version of a fresco cycle,

that you can put in a box,

carry around and look at
whenever you feel the need.

I think what's remarkable about Durer
is that he...

In a sense, it's something he's got
in common with Shakespeare!

..that he's so seethingly responsive
to human existence

and to humanity, that he doesn't
actually just focus on Christ.

He gives us the whole world.

It's as if Durer just cannot bear
a single inch of the image

to be devoid of incident.

On the theme of Germans
doing the best devils -

look at these wonderful devils
from the Harrowing of Hell.

I mean, it's full of sadness
in the eyes, actually.

There's a kind of pathos, that you
almost feel that Durer feels sorry

for these weird monsters whose job
it is to guard hell for ever.

But, for me, it's really this image,
the Entombment,

that really stays in MY mind.

And I think for good reason because
so much of the German art tradition

is about expressing human emotion,
cramming images full of feeling.

Look at the trees and their roots,
these agonised forms.

It's as if nature itself
is screaming out

at the moment of Christ's death,
and when you think

of the language that Durer
invented here,

this flattened, almost spaceless
collage of strong emotion,

a wall of feeling,
there's so much here

for the future of German
and indeed northern European art.

It's the death of Christ,

but it's the birth of a kind of
expressionistic language for art.

Durer's woodcuts took me back to
Goethe's cult of the German forest.

They even look like images
carved from root and branch,

or glimpsed through
forest undergrowth.

And those same forms and shapes
permeated the art of Germany

in all its rich variety.

Durer's become so synonymous with
German Renaissance art

that it's easy to forget that he was
actually the exception to the rule.

Deeply learned, widely travelled.

If you want to know
what kind of art most Germans knew,

looked at, looked to
and were moved by,

you have to look to a very different
but equally fascinating tradition.

It's one that takes you to the very
roots of German art...

..a very particular form
of sculpture...

and some of its finest examples are
in the most out-of-the-way places.

This is the village of Grosslangheim
in the Bavarian countryside.

The artists of every region developed
their own specialisations,

their own peculiar approaches to
style and subject matter,

but I sometimes think that we pay
insufficient attention

to the extent to which artistic style
is shaped by material. For example,

Imagine Florence and the art
of Tuscany without fresco painting.

Imagine Venice - too cold and humid
for fresco - without oil painting,

or here in Bavaria,
in southern Germany,

a whole tradition, an
extraordinary tradition of sculpture

grew from this material -

the wood of the limewood tree.

It was an art form that grew directly
out of the intense piety

of old, feudal Germany,

and you still have to seek it out,
not in grand museums,

but in little churches and chapels.

'I'd heard there were some
particularly fine sculptures here,

'in the Antoniuskapelle.'

TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN:

'Hardly anyone comes to see them,

'so the caretaker had to unlock
the chapel for me.'

Frau Sterig. Frau Sterig.

The works here were by the greatest
German limewood sculptor of them all,

Tilman Riemenschneider.

Wow.

I think so, too.

They are so beautiful.

'But to see just how fine
the carving was,

'I needed to grow
by a couple of feet.'

How very kind of you!

Danke schon.

No, they really are fantastic.

Seeing them almost face to face
like this,

you can see Riemenschneider's
true genius

is for capturing fine detail of
form and expression.

This figure of Saint Anthony -
look at him, emaciated, solemn,

his eyes lost in contemplation.

This is very much Saint Anthony,
the desert saint.

I love that detail of the belt.
What a fine piece of carving that is,

to get that belt clasp
stuck at that angle.

And that hair is absolutely
fantastic,

the hair of Anthony's beard.

The hand holding the book.

Little bits of thought on the part
of the sculptor

that make a difference between
something you really believe

and something you think is
somehow too theatrical.

And to think that here we are,
in a little chapel off a main road

in a pretty nondescript village
in Bavaria,

and we are looking at
some of the great masterpieces.

The two saints are just fragments
of what was once a larger,

now lost, altarpiece.

To experience the full effect of
a complete Riemenschneider,

its whole crowd of characters intact,

the best place to go is
Rothenburg ob der Tauber,

and its Jakobs-Kirche.

This is the Holy Blood Altar,

with its dense cluster of figures
carved from wood.

This is Tilman Riemenschneider's
narrative masterpiece.

It's absolutely stunning.
Stunning piece of work.

It's like a great tree planted
in the middle of the cathedral,

and at the centre you've got the
great drama of the last supper.

There's Jesus Christ
breaking the bread,

blessing the bread and the wine,
and saying at the same time,

"One of you here will betray me."

And look at all those apostles
on the right reacting.

"Who's it going to be? Who's going to
betray him? What's he talking about?"

It was designed for the performance
of a very specific religious ritual,

and the key to that
is its most unusual feature,

Judas, who's right in the middle
of the scene.

Why should Judas be right
in the middle of the scene?

Normally he's on the edge.

In order to explain it,

you've got to do a double take
and come back in again,

but this time imagining that we're
an early 16th century German.

OK, so I metaphorically take off
my art historian hat,

and I put on my medieval cap
of a penitent,

because this was a confession altar.

You would be sent here to confess,
because you'd done something bad.

And as I walk in,
I walk in on the line of Judas.

That is why Judas is there.

It's to make Judas into an alter ego
for me, the person coming to confess,

and as you're drawn in,
you become part of the sculpture,

you become the figure of Judas,

and the question is whether
you're going to do the right thing,

and you've got a bit of help,

because there's one figure, and he's
looking straight into my eyes.

and that's St Philip,
and he's giving me the choice.

He's saying,
"What do you want to do?"

And his hand, that right hand,
is pointing down here to the altar.

You can be like Judas,
or you can choose the bread and wine,

you can choose Christian faith,
you can choose redemption.

It's an extraordinary
piece of sculpture.

You're not just being drawn
into the theatre,

you're actually being co-opted,
given a role to play.

In fact you've been given
a choice of roles.

Are you going to be Judas or are
you going to be one of the saved?

Are you going to be damned or are
you going to be blessed? It's up to.

I'm very struck when looking
at Tilman Riemenschneider's work.

There's this sense
that he's finding forms

that almost exist already within
the potential of wood to create.

So it's not as if he's imposing
his own aesthetic on the wood,

he's finding it with the wood. It's
as if he's working with the material.

'I arranged to meet Bernard Lankers,

'the closest thing you'll find

'to a sculptor now working within
the German lime wood tradition.

'There's no call for full-scale
altarpieces any more,

'but the old woodcarver's skills
are still required

'in the specialised field
of frame-making.'

Are you almost trying to find
organic form inside the wood?

Yes. It's very important,

and very often if I carve

I'm not sure which
is the right drive in it,

and then I...

I make a test with my hand, and when
I feel good or I feel this line,

"Ah, OK," then I can do it.

Not only make a leaf
what is going round,

you must feel the line,

and then if you feel the line,
then you can carve this idea.

Can you show me the qualities you're
talking about with lime wood?

Can you explain with your tools
what it's like to cut lime wood,

why you like it?

Yes, OK. I try it.

So no messing about at the beginning!

What is the shape you have in your
mind, what is it you're making?

Or is it a secret?

Oh, no, no, no!

In my mind I have an idea
from the form,

it's only a big flower.

'I was very struck
by Bernard's eloquent hands,

'the sheer physicality
of his demonstration of working

'with the energies of the wood.'

'It made me all the keener

'to complete my Riemenschneider
pilgrimage.'

There was a particular work
I really wanted to see.

said to have been carved from a
single enormous piece of lime wood,

and completed in the year 1521.

It's to be found
in the church of Maria Im Weingarten,

above the village of Volkach.

Again, very much
off the beaten track.

It belonged to a 16th century society
of Beguines as they were called,

wealthy women who devoted themselves
to helping the sick and poor.

Coming here you really feel
what feudal life was like

in tiny rural communities,

where the good works
of a few good women

could be the only form
of social security.

The sculpture the Beguines
commissioned from Riemenschneider

was a delicate circle of wood,

encompassing
all their deepest values.

It's such a brilliant invention,
because the subject is a vision.

The vision of St John,
taken from the book of Revelations.

"I saw a woman clothed with the sun.

"Beneath her feet the moon,

"and on her head a crown."

The crown's gone, lost to time,

but you can still sense its presence
in the gestures of those two angels.

And it's in the form of a rosary,

and I think you have
to actually kneel down,

and imagine that the whole church
is full of women, like you, kneeling,

and you are looking up
at this image of the Virgin Mary,

and you pray together.

Each of those roundels
on the outside of the necklace

represents a different episode
from the life of Mary

Now, on each of those images
you would meditate,

so that this object
was an invitation to prayer.

And looking at it from here,

that V of drapery
in the middle of the figure,

it's clearly intended
by Riemenschneider

to place immense emphasis
on the fruitful womb.

And then if you look up at that
delightful little figure of Christ,

his flesh has got that slightly
wrinkly feel of a newborn,

and you can imagine all these woman
who've decided never to give birth,

to give themselves to Christ,

you can imagine that effect
that must have on them.

It's such a subtle,
clever object as well,

because there would
come a point

when the sun rose high up enough
in the sky that that whole image

would burn out,

and it would become like the vision
that St John had experienced.

There might be a kind of ecstasy
that would take place.

Riemenschneider,

essentially he's working with wood,
but he's also working with light.

He's like a renaissance
installation artist if you like,

creating these images, these effects,

that are almost designed to plunge
you into a state of hallucination.

It's a really remarkable thing.

Despite the rosary's aura
of peace and serenity,

this was a world in the throes
of a great religious change.

All across the German lands

there was growing unhappiness
with Catholic Rome,

with its doctrines
and its demands for money.

Germans felt they were being
duped by papal agents

hawking the promise of eternal life,
an insult to their faith.

In 1517, a monk called Martin Luther

nailed a list
of theological objections

to the door of his local church.

It sparked the Reformation, and a new
breakaway religion, Protestantism.

These satirical prints

show the depth of the German
Protestants' disgust.

They look like the grinning
medieval ghouls of old,

but what a world of difference.

These are images
of the Catholic clergy.

Even the Pope himself.

CHURCH BELLS RING

This is the town of Wittenberg, where
Luther first made his protestations.

But he preached politics too,

and his Reformation
was the first serious attempt

to bind the German lands
into a single nation.

In the city church there's a work of
art by Luther's friend Lucas Cranach,

a kind of painted manifesto
for the whole Protestant project.

Here in Wittenberg they call this
the Reformation altarpiece,

and I think that's apt, because
it is a wonderfully clear statement

of the new priorities of the church
after the Lutheran Reformation.

I don't think it's a masterpiece.

I find it a slightly cold,
distant, calculated picture,

but I also think that's the point.

It tells you
how to be a good Lutheran,

it spells out the principles.

Number one,
reduce the rituals of the church.

Under Luther the sacraments were
literally reduced from seven to two -

just baptism,
represented in the left-hand panel,

and the Eucharist, represented by
that last supper in the middle.

This is an altarpiece

that aspires to the condition
of an instruction manual,

and there at the bottom, I think
it's the image that says it all.

There is Martin Luther,
instructing his congregation.

It's through the word,
through meditating on the Bible,

that Christ will appear
in everyone's lives.

I think this picture
is an extremely eloquent expression

of Luther's great attempt to purge
German religion and German art

of the ghouls, demons
and superstitions of the past.

And what he wants to put in their
place is faith and reason.

Luther also saw the Reformation
as a means of nation-building,

a way to unite the disparate German
peoples under the banner of faith.

And there's a second work
in the church,

by Cranach's son,
that spells out this hope.

It's a cleverly manipulated,

highly political version
of the parable of the vineyard.

Cranach the younger has updated it
so that the idle labourers

are actually the Catholics.

There's the pope
in all his magnificence,

while bishops and priests
light pointless bonfires.

Others just loll about,

while down here a whole load of them
are throwing stones down the well.

But look at the Lutheran side of
the garden, what a picture of order.

It's a fantastic piece
of painted propaganda, and I think

it shows the extent to which in
the aftermath of Luther's teaching,

how a real them and us
mentality developed.

Them Italians, them Catholics,

and us sober Lutherans,

and that actually fed in

to a rising sense
of German nationalism,

that maybe one day the German lands
would become a place called Germany.

But it wouldn't quite
work out that way,

not for a fair few centuries and the
world these people really inhabited

turned out to be a lot more
fractious, divisive and dangerous

than this neat little garden
of opposing ideologies.

Luther's dream of a unified,
Protestant Germany

turned out to be just that - a dream.

Many states, especially in the south,
stayed loyal to Rome.

The old divisions simply gaped wider,
thanks to this new enmity.

The German lands became more
fragmented than ever before, more
vulnerable to invasion and attack.

And that truth, too, is reflected
in the mirror of German art.

This is one of the greatest pictures
ever created by a German artist.

Its Albrecht Altdorfer's
The Battle of Issus -

A painting inspired by a famous
ancient victory. Alexander the
Great's defeat of the Persians.

Altdorfer painted it at a very
charged moment in his own time

so I think, yes,
it looks back to a historical moment

but what it's really about
is the anxiety of the present.

We've got this astonishing
seething swarm of soldiers.

It's humanity but humanity conceived
with such energy and dynamism

it almost encrusts the surface,
the paint has become abstract.

They resemble whirlpools

or, if you look at them another way,
they might seem like an infestation

of hostile insects invading the land.

To me it's very much an image
of a middle European sense

of what it is to live in a land
that is utterly vulnerable.

It establishes so many things
that the German artist
will do and be capable of.

The idea that it is the vocation of
the German artist to depict
the great cycles of history,

to see into the future, to
imagine what will happen.

Altdorfer's picture did indeed
turn out to be prophetic.

The greatest war of the 17th century,
the 30 Years War,

would use the German lands
as its theatre.

It involved all the major continental
powers in a violent conflict
centred on faith.

These prints from the period
show how the battles unfolded

for the hapless German people
caught in the crossfire.

Towns and villages were pillaged,

and more than one in three
people lost their lives.

And when peace came in 1648
it resolved little.

The terms were decided by the great
powers of the day -

France, Sweden, Spain, who
were only too happy for
Germany to remain disunited,

forever subject to annexation,
conquest.

As the 17th century gave way to
the 18th and an era of uneasy peace,

their lack of real power still
nagged away at German rulers.

Little more than mini kings and
queens in their own backyards,

they indulged in images
of power instead.

This is Dresden,
now restored to its former pomp.

It was once one of a plethora
of German cities

where leaders fell in love with
a style known as the Baroque.

The perfectly grandiose manner for
their perfectly grandiose fantasies.

This palace is called the Zwinger,
a teetering edifice encrusted with
self-aggrandising allegories.

The palace was built at the beginning
of the 18th century by the most
flamboyant of those German Rulers,

Augustus the Strong.

His obsession with the pleasures
of art as a surrogate for power

are best experienced in a museum
called The Green Vault.

Augustus founded it
in 1723 to house his vast
collection of treasures.

Wandering through the mirrored
rooms of the green vault
is to enter a wunderkammer,

a cabinet of curiosities.

It's a labyrinth stocked with
the weird and the wonderful,

a strange parallel universe.

There are miniature statues
spouting precious coral -

once thought to be the blood
of the gods.

Art for Augustus was an ivory tower,
a place of escape

and there's a whole gallery
of ivory towers in here,

each one like an abstract chess
piece, devised for some private game.

There are delicately etched
ostrich eggs and a miscellany
of other marvels.

And at the centre of this palace
of enchantments is, aptly enough,
the image of an enchanted palace -

the creation of Augustus's court
goldsmith, the splendidly named
Johann Melchior Dinglinger.

Playful and exuberant as it appears,
it speaks of a very German form
of insecurity.

It's an imaginary doll's-house vision

of the court of the great Indian
mogul, Arungzeb,

the most powerful ruler in
the whole of the Indian subcontinent,

who was, in fact, Augustus
the Strong's exact contemporary.

And what it shows is
the festivities of his birthday
and people from all around the world

are bringing tribute.

You can see in the foreground

figures measuring out
gold and silver.

Everyone is processing towards the
great mogul, seated on his throne.

It's a fantasy of absolute rule and I
think one of the most telling details

is the fact that he left the figures
free-standing

so Augustus the Strong could play
with the whole thing like a child
playing with a doll's house.

I think that fact projects
you to the heart of the significance
of the whole scene

because at the same time
as this is being made,

England is dreaming of taking India,
making it part of its empire.

I think there is a huge amount
of fantasy in this object.

Augustus the Strong could play-act
the part of the mogul
but he was really

playing with a power he knew
he could never really possess.

I'm on my way to Vienna.

In the second half of the 18th
century it was the last seat of
the old, crumbling Holy Roman Empire.

An empire weakened by
the internal strife and division
at the heart of the German lands.

It was a courtier at
the imperial court in Vienna,

Friedrich Karl von Moser, who summed
their predicament and said,
"We are weakened by partition,

"strong enough to harm ourselves
yet powerless to save ourselves,

"a great, yet despised nation,
fortunate in theory but,
in fact, most pitiable."

This sense of disenchantment
was shared by many creative figures.

As the Enlightenment cam to dominate
intellectual thought
in the rest of Europe,

the Germans turned it into a movement
called Sturm und Drang -

Storm and Stress.

the anguished poetry of Schiller,

the tempestuous writings
of a young Goethe,

the simmering tensions
of a Haydn symphony.

That same spirit of frustrated
uncertainty is there in German art

but you have to seek it out
behind the grand facades.

Within Vienna's Belvedere Palace,
you'll find the work of an artist

who'd once been favoured
by the royal family,

and had created portraits
of the Empress and her consort.

But you'll find some very different
work by the very same artist in
the Belvedere's innermost sanctum.

His name was Franz Messerschmidt

and these are his
strangest creations.

They were sculpted in
the 1770s and '80s after
he'd been spurned by the court.

They're the very embodiment
of Sturm und Drang,

not in words
but in bronze and stone.

Messerschmidt created more
than 60 of these extraordinary,

grimacing character heads, as they
are known, during his later years

and nobody really knows
for sure why he did it.

To many of his contemporaries,
such as Friedrich Nicolai,

who met him and wrote
an account of their meeting,
he seemed simply like a lunatic.

Nicolai believed that Messerschmidt
thought he was possessed by demons

and that each of these heads was his
attempt to externalise the demon
and, by doing so, exorcise it.

But I think there is a more
interesting way of seeing them.

You could see the character heads
as beginning of something -

the ragged origins Freud's
ideas about the subconscious.

What more vivid image could there be
of the idea of the subconscious than

this extraordinary assembly of heads,
the notion that within each of us,

beneath the still surface of the
public self there lurk all these
unofficial desires and fears.

But to me, above all, what the
character-heads represent is

a kind of collective portrait of
a generation of writers, artists,

poets, dissidents, intellectuals
and visionaries united by

discontent and by
the desire for change.

You could see them as a portrait of
an as yet unformed German nation,

each face staring into the future.

But what an uncertain future it is.

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