Art of Germany (2010–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - Dream and Machine - full transcript

On a hill overlooking the River
Danube, there's a place that holds
the dream of a Bavarian king.

Frustrated by
foreign invasions, he fantasised
about creating a strong nation.

A united people,
who could expel all alien forces.

His name was Ludwig I,

and this is the temple he erected to
the idea of a place called Germany.

Valhalla.

It was conceived as
a mythological hall of heroes,

and it's filled with busts of German
geniuses, prophets and visionaries,

figures that conjure up
a hallowed vision of the past,

and on whose achievements
could also be built a future Germany.

The Renaissance artist,
Albrecht Durer.



The composer,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

I think the idea was
that all these people were intended
to embody the cultural,

creative, political, intellectual,
artistic qualities that would make
a German nation of the future great.

But, right at the heart of the space,
there's this warning figure,
the great philosopher Herder,

who said that nationhood
can bring as many evils as benefits.

"National glory," he said,
"is a great seducer."

The Napoleonic invasions at
the beginning of the 19th century
provoked widespread revulsion.

200,000 German men of fighting age

were sent to almost certain death
on Napoleon's Russian campaign.

With no strong leaders to protect
them, the German people felt as
vulnerable and as powerless as ever.

Where could they find the sense
of values to bring them together?

Where could they find a source of
strength to counter their weakness?

Fuelled by the ideals of the Romantic
generation, they looked to their
land. They turned to nature.



Some looked to the beauty
and spirit of the natural world,
which became the lifeblood

of the Romantic imagination
and inspired a painting tradition
which took German art to new peaks.

Others sought to harness the forces
within nature through science and
technology, to make Germany strong.

This is Hamburg,
home to one of the most anxious
and neurotically brilliant painters

of the early 19th century.

A tubercular young man
called Phillipp Otto Runge.

Like the English poet
William Wordsworth,

Runge believed that children
enjoyed a special bond with nature.

He sought to express this experience
in his painting.

The Hamburg Kunsthalle
owns the world's largest collection
of his work.

This picture shows the artist's
parents with his own children.

It might look like an
innocuous family portrait,

but there's more to it than that.

Runge painted this picture in 1806,
at a time when he'd been displaced

from Hamburg by war and had
gone to live with his parents

in the town of Wolgast
on the Baltic coast.

For me, it's as if
he's interrogating the generations

for an answer to the problems
of the moment.

His mother is almost
a spent husk of a woman.

There's almost something
brittle, not only about her skin

but about her clothing.

She's almost got the black carapace
of a large insect.

But the two young children,

they have a kind of energy
and vigour about them,

and a colour
about the way they are painted.

They are identified by the artist
with new life.

They hold these flowers.

I think he's looking at the two
halves of the painting,

which really are
the two halves of his own life,

because when you stand here,
you're standing with Runge himself,

he's the generation that's missing.

He's the generation
that's looking for answers.

And I think he finds,
or believes,

that the answer
must lie with the young.

There's something dangerous
and unruly about Runge's children.

It's as if they swell
out of the frame.

I think he used them to express
a whole generation's yearning
for the birth of a German nation.

The pictures that best reveal this
were in restoration,

but the conservators
kindly allowed me to sneak a look.

Often, my heart sinks when I hear

that a work that I want to look at
is in restoration,

because it means you're not going to
be able to see it properly but,

on this occasion,
it's a wonderful privilege.

We can see one of Runge's famous,
iconic works, Morning.

It's just been cleaned.
It's fresh as a daisy.

AND we're not looking at it
under glass,

so we can see the bare skin
of the painting itself.

This picture itself has actually

been through quite a lot.

After his death,
the painting was cut into pieces

and it's now been reassembled,
which explains why

we've got these areas
of neutral ground,

where we don't know
quite what would have been.

And, at the centre of it

is the image of the child.

Runge thought of childhood
as a truly sacred state,

when we are, so to speak,
directly in touch with nature.

Before the adult mind,

the rational mind,

has interfered with our ability

to engage with the world.

And that's what this picture
is all about.

It's the morning
of this child's life and,

as the child comes into the world,

over him hovers the figure, rather
like Botticelli's Venus, actually,

as well as like the Virgin Mary,
maternal love,

protecting this newborn child.

And yet, you can't help feeling
there's also, lurking within

this bright vision of a new dawn,
a terrible sense of foreboding.

It's an incredible image
of vulnerability, of helplessness.

Of, if you like,
the young German nation,

the German nation
that doesn't yet exist.

There's a real sense of darkness

at the centre of this picture.

Over here, we have a very different,

equally-compelling image
of the child.

This is not the child idealised.

These are real children,
children that Runge knew.

They're the children of a Hamburg
businessman called Hulsenbeck.

I think Runge has invested it

with his own mystical,
religious belief

that childhood
represents a sacred state.

And that's implicit
in his treatment of this figure,

Friedrich, who is shown as being
literally the closest to God,

because Runge has painted him

holding one of the leaves
of this bouquet of sunflowers,

and the sunflower represents,
symbolically, God,

because it's a flower
that always faces the sun.

And there's one
really interesting detail

which is that,
when they took the frame off,

they revealed this layer of blue.

Look at that beautiful pink
in the background.

That pink is discolouration.

It's the red ground coming through,

so in fact, that blue
represents the original colour.

I think that's important,
because it would have

given the whole painting
a much harder, sharper feel.

There's something strange
about this picture.

There's a tremendous sense

of defiance in those faces.

And I can't help feeling that Runge
has somehow projected into this

his own sense of the German
and the German artist's predicament.

Which is, simultaneously,
to be a kind of child,

to be powerless in a way,
and yet full of an energy

that just can't be contained,
a kind of rage,

a salutary desire for change.

Runge didn't live to see
this hunger for change fulfilled.

Ravaged by his illness,
he finally gave up the ghost in 1810,

aged just 33, while
the Wars of Liberation still raged.

When Napoleon was at last defeated
by Britain and her allies,

including Prussia, many Germans felt
they were finally emerging from
the darkness into a new dawn.

This is the defining image of Germany
in the Romantic Age.

The most famous German picture
of the entire 19th century.

The wanderer above a sea of mist.

It was painted by
Caspar David Friedrich.

He spent his life
attempting to capture

the mysterious spirit
of the German lands.

But what does it represent?

There are many possible alternatives.

The picture was painted in 1817 or
1818, just two or three years after

Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo,

so could it be a rallying cry
for incipient German nationalism?

Is it a great celebration of the
purification of the German lands,

their emptying-out of
foreign threat and hostility?

On the other hand,
it could be another expression

of the German Romantics'
spirit of nature worship.

The man wandering
in the mountains

could be communing with nature,
and therefore God.

He could be in the throes of a deep,
spiritual, religious experience.

Or could it be the opposite?

Is it an image of alienation?

It's a deeply hypnotic image and it
draws you in like no other painting

to Caspar David Friedrich's
enigmatic vision of the world.

Caspar David Friedrich saw in the
natural beauty of the German lands

the potential
to express his faith in God.

For nearly 40 years,
he rarely painted anything else.

Friedrich's birthplace
is a town called Greifswald
on the Baltic coast.

With its sharp northern light
and distinctive architecture,

it's a place that had a profound and
lasting effect on the young painter.

It's also home to
a little-known treasure trove
of pictures by Friedrich,

long hidden away in local,
private collections,

but recently acquired
by the town's museum.

Curator Birte Frenssen
agreed to show me round.

These are paintings that actually
have a connection with Greifswald

and the Baltic area.

They are, yeah.

This is the home town of
Friedrich's parents, Neubrandenburg,

which is near Greifswald,
30 kilometres away.

He loved this town.
He was often there.

Many of his sisters and brothers
were living here,

so there was a very near connection
to Neubrandenburg.

It is very interesting or very funny
that this church, at the moment

when Friedrich painted
this painting, it has no tower.

It was like a wooden construction.

So it wasn't this church.

So he's purified it
to this beautiful silhouette.

Yes, so he wanted an arrow that is
going into the sky, so he did this

with this tower
and it's very interesting,

because today the church
of Neubrandenburg looks like this.

The architect, he must have seen
the painting of Friedrich,

or just have known...

It's amazing, so Friedrich reinvented
the church so influentially
that when it was redesigned...

It is, in a way,
when you see today, you would say,

OK, we saw it this way,

but he was inventing this tower.

Are you yourself religious?

Are you a practising Christian?

Yeah, I am.
You are. And do you find...

I suppose it's a personal question,

but do you look at a Friedrich
painting and find it helpful?

In a way. It's a very strict way
and it's not very...

You don't have it in a minute,
I say.

So you have to look very intense,

just to stand here for 20 minutes
then you start seeing things.

And this is...
Friedrich is so very poetic.

But the star
of the museum's collection

was a luminous painting
of the ruins of a local abbey.

It's from his home town again, it's
a ruin of Eldena which is, like,

five kilometres away
from Greifswald.

And if you see it,
it isn't a landscape from here,

but he combines it with
the mountains of the Riesengebirge,

which he loved, too.
So, you see, in reality,

there's the water behind the ruin.
It's not a normal picture.

It's not a nature theme. There's
something more he wanted to tell us.

So are you saying that a Friedrich
painting is, fundamentally,

it's not the depiction
of an actual landscape.

Yes, never. Never. Never.

So it's a real collage.
It's a real collage.
It's all from different parts.

I have the feeling that this painting
is all about this radiant, beautiful,
remembered sky.

And I feel when I look at it

that it's one of those
vast, wide-open skies

that you get on the Baltic.

It is, yes,
he wants to have this light,

and you should have the feeling
that you want to go there,

not into the dark,
but into the light.

Well, I don't know
if I'm going to find that sky,

but I'm going to go to that ruin.

So you'll see the ruin. I really
will. I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you. Thank you.
It's been a great pleasure.

Friedrich had a deeply symbolic
relationship with the world.

The ruin at Eldena
was his symbol for mortality.

The sky, his heaven.

Always striving in his painting
to leave the darkness of the Earth

and reach towards the promise
of eternity held in the sky.

This is the Baltic island of Rugen,
not far from Greifswald.

It's a place that was always
close to Friedrich's heart.

When he married in 1818,

he brought his young wife Caroline
here for their honeymoon.

Friedrich believed
that it was up to every man

to find God for himself, in nature.

To him, the beauty and variety
of the natural world

was another form of God's word.

This is one of the first paintings
made after his honeymoon.

It shows the couple sailing
towards a city of Gothic spires

on their way to a new, blessed life.

As so often in Friedrich's art,
the yearning for God

seems intermingled
with a sense of patriotism and hope.

Is the distant city
an image of heaven?

Or an image of the ideal Germany?

Perhaps it's both.

I think his early years here
really were a time when he stocked up

with a lifetime's motifs.

Everywhere you look, you see part of
Friedrich's paintings. Those cliffs.

These boulders.
The ship, which became, for him,

the great symbol
of man's journey through life.

And above all, I think, for me,

the sense of a vast,
wide-open expanse of sea and sky.

He revisited that theme
again and again.

Pondering man's insignificance
before the vastness of the cosmos.

And there is more than just
religious ambition
behind Friedrich's paintings.

I think there is a strong element
of pride as well,

because this landscape had never
really been put on canvas before.

And I think one of
Friedrich's ambitions

was to show the rest of Europe,

the rest of the world how beautiful,
in its own way, Germany could be.

The Alte Nationalgalerie
in Berlin holds the greatest
collection of his paintings.

One that draws you into the heart of
Friedrich's personal struggle.

His complicated,
often troubled sense of faith.

He had lost his mother
when he was seven years old.

Six years later, his brother died
trying to save him from drowning.

I think,
because of those experiences,

he found it hard to believe
in an entirely benevolent God.

No picture reveals this
gnawing self-doubt more acutely

than The Monk By The Sea.

It's a depiction of nature
so elemental

that it might almost be
an abstraction.

Look at it through half-closed eyes
and you might almost be looking at

a painting by an American abstract
expressionist like Mark Rothko.

It's the whole world

distilled to just three elements.

This blank, almost cursory foreground
of land, the stretch of black,

brackish sea, surely the Baltic,

and then this great expanse

of bruise-coloured sky,

achingly empty.

And we know that Friedrich
deliberately intensified

that sense of emptiness.

He'd originally planned to include

two little sailing boats
in the composition

and you can still
just make out their ghosts.

What I think it's meant to show us

is the enlightened, romantic,
Protestant devotee of nature,

that solitary smear of a figure,

the monk, finding his own
personal sense of divinity.

A kind of confirmation of it

in the majesty of the natural world.

But the trouble is it's a picture
that leaves so much space for doubt

that it might almost be
a depiction of doubt itself.

Its companion picture,
The Abbey In The Oak Forest,

is, if anything, even bleaker.

It recalls again the ruins at Eldena,

but here they're set
against a murky, dusk sky.

A burial procession wends its way

towards that jagged tooth
of the abbey,

but you might be forgiven
for thinking

that what they are
really laying to rest

is all the certainties

of the old Christian faith.

The whole picture seems to be
about the death of something.

The trouble is that when you develop
the creed of a personal religion

to the extent that he did,

so that every day he had to recreate
his experience of God,

re-find his experience
of divinity before nature,

it placed such a burden
on the individual

as to be almost
impossible to sustain.

Yes, on a good day, Friedrich could
find God in a radiant evening sky,

but on so many other days,
the vision didn't come.

All he could see was darkness, death,

even a kind of anguish and I think
Friedrich, yes, he set out to be

a painter of a new kind
of Christianity,

but I think what he really created
was a very moving series of monuments

to an age of
deep, deep anxiety.

Enshrined in
Friedrich's sunnier pictures,

there was also
a dream of nationhood,

of a Germany united by faith.

The truth is, for most of Friedrich's
life, Germany WAS on the brink

of becoming a unified nation,
not in fantasy, but in hard reality.

There's a structure
that marks the very beginning

of that
huge political process.

At first sight,

you might take it
for some romantic Gothic spire,

but it's nothing of the kind.

It's a war memorial.

It proclaims the military might
of the state of Prussia,

and Prussia's determination
to forge a Greater Germany.

It was designed for Friedrich Wilhelm
III by his architect Schinkel,

and erected in 1821
to commemorate victory over Napoleon.

It's loomed over Berlin ever since.

Everything about this monument
speaks of war and success in war.

The siting, it's placed directly
above Templehof Street,

which is the wide avenue along which
Wilhelm Friedrich's troops

had actually expelled
Napoleon's soldiers.

And the key to its meaning is
that cross perched right on the top.

It's not the Christian cross,
it's the Iron Cross,

which had been designed by Schinkel
just a few years earlier

for Friedrich Wilhelm,
as a reward for military valour

and the Iron Cross
would remain the great German medal
for more than a century.

For a thousand years and more,

Germany had been weak, divided,
an easy target for foreign invaders.

This monument declares that,

under Prussian leadership,

and with Prussian technology,
that will never happen again.

"Let us arm, let us fight,
let us unite.

"Let us build
a great military machine."

Even the thick green paint
with which it's been rustproofed

was the product of new advances
made here in Berlin

in the field of chemistry.

The same paint would be used

to rustproof the fighter planes
and tanks of the future.

So while its design might
seem quaint and gothic,

this is
an aggressively modern object.

This is certainly no cathedral spire.

It's a great Prussian bayonet
thrust into the sky.

The Prussian desire for progress

would radically transform
the very fabric of Berlin.

Friedrich Wilhelm
embarked on a frenzy of building.

And charged Schinkel with
reorganising the shape of the city

and designing buildings
to express strength, sophistication,

ambition.

Classical columns and imperial eagles

were the symbols of Berlin's ambition
to become a new Rome.

And by 1861,
when Wilhelm I came to the throne,

that was fast becoming a reality.

There was an artist, a silent
witness who recorded every tremor

and nuance of this society
in the process of transformation.

Berlin famously is a city
that never is but is always becoming

and that was never more true
than in the mid-to-late 19th century.

And if one artist caught
Prussian culture at this

moment when it was in the throes of
great change, it was Adolph Menzel.

Here, in this
rapidly-dashed-off sketch,

he shows us the coronation of the man
who would become the first Kaiser

of a united German empire, Wilhelm I,

there he stands brandishing
his sceptre almost like a threat.

But if this was a society underpinned
by an ancient imperial notion of
monarchy,

it was a society also driven by

a passionate desire for consumption.

A society appetitive, voracious.

This is a kind of Berlin equivalent
of Manet's Bar At The Folies Bergere.

In fact, Adolph Menzel was very much
a painter of modern life
in the Manet mould.

But here he shows us people
eating and drinking, they're in love
not only with food and wine and

fine textiles, but they are also
drunk on light that's flooding
their evening's entertainment.

Menzel also shows us the extent to
which the whole Prussian project

is underpinned
by a steely military ambition.

It's a brightly colourful but
also slightly chilling image of
flag-waving Prussian nationalism.

Wilhelm I again, but this time
he is processing through the
streets of the city with his

army on his way to fight the Franco
Prussian war, the war that will lead

directly to the establishment of
an independent German empire.

What I like about Menzel, though, is
he doesn't just show us the official
public face of this new extraordinary

Prussian society,
he also takes us into its engine room

and shows us
what was driving it forward.

This is the masterpiece
of Menzel's realism

and his darkest picture.

It's a record of the exact
processes by which

railway tracks were constructed
at a Prussian rolling mill.

But it's really a modern Inferno.

An image of workers sentenced to toil
forever in the hot, murky foundries

creating the future Germany.

There's little space in this world
for rest or weakness.

But Menzel wasn't the only artist
to see modern Germany as
a place forged in hell.

Richard Wagner's
great opera cycle The Ring

has at its core the image of a forge,
controlled by the evil dwarf
Alberich.

What else but a mythic version
of Menzel's rolling mill?

A legend for modern Germany,
cut off from true nature,

shackled to the false gods
of science and the machine.

Wagner expressed that
sense of pessimism in a famous letter

that he wrote
to his fellow composer, Liszt,

in which he wrote, "Let us treat
this world only with contempt

"for it deserves no better."

"It's evil, evil, fundamentally evil,
it belongs to Alberich, no-one else."

In the end, Wagner accepted that
he couldn't change this evil world,

and used his art instead to
rise above it, into a space of
transcendent dream and myth.

His operas would in turn
inspire one of the most
spectacular German monuments.

A gleaming castle perched
on a Bavarian mountain top.

Neuschwanstein.

It was conjured into being
over almost 20 years,

between 1869 and 1886,
by the reclusive King Ludwig II.

Ludwig planned to live here alone,
attended only

by his servants,
communing with art and nature.

It's telling that Ludwig didn't
commission his artists to illustrate
Wagner's libretti, but to illustrate

the myths that Wagner himself
had drawn on, and in the process
I think those myths

got turned very much towards
Ludwig's own personal fantasies.

I think the ancient legends
fascinated him and enthralled him
because they gave him

the possibility,
in imagination at least,

of himself being able to
enter the world of the medieval past

and play out the part of
the knights of the holy grail,
Parsifal, Lohengrin, the Swan Prince.

I think of the whole castle as an
elaborate stage set where he could
act out the role of the ideal ruler.

Even the light fittings
strike me as a succession of
crowns to rest on the royal head.

As the reclusive Ludwig
retreated into the fantastical world

of Neuschwanstein, his grip was real
power was slipping inexorably away.

Prussia was steadily subsuming
and annexing Bavaria,

leaving Ludwig with only the world of
his own fantasies to govern and rule.

The climactic space of the whole
castle, the place where all the
threads of Ludwig's medievalist

fantasy come together,
is this space, with its
extraordinary blaze of colour,

the throne room.

It's a monument to the ideals
of absolute kingship
and the divine right of kings.

It's there on all sides in a mixture
of Byzantine and Gothic
languages of art.

Look up at the dome and you see
this cosmic starburst.

It's as if the eye of god is looking
down on Ludwig and blessing him.

And then that theme is repeated
in the apse above where you have

the figure of Jesus Christ
blessing Ludwig above
an assortment of medieval kings.

But the irony, of course,
is that this was all a pure fantasy.

Ludwig's Bavaria had lost
a crucial war against Prussia,

he'd had to sign
a humiliating treaty.

He was a king who didn't even have
control of his own army, and I think

the real meaning of this space,
the true symbolism of this space,
is carried by an absence.

Because on that dais,
where the throne was to have sat,
where Ludwig would have sat,

there is no throne.

He never got round to completing it.

And that's the truth about
Ludwig, he was a man without power.

He was a king without a throne.

This whole castle
is the swansong of ancient Germany,

with its many fiefdoms each ruled
by a separate absolute monarch.

By the time of Ludwig's death,
in suspicious circumstances,

that Germany truly was
a thing of the past.

The actual kingdom that he surveyed
from the solitude of his balcony

had long been absorbed into
Alberich's empire.

In 1871, the iron resolve
of Prussia's leaders

had finally wrestled the German lands
into a place called Germany.

In the decades that followed,
the country found itself

in the ever-tighter grip
of an economic boom.

Workers flooded to the capital,
Berlin, and the many electrical

and chemical plants
that were fuelling the advance
of the new empire.

Today there are few direct remains
of the city's 19th-century
industrial past,

but its main artery
does still survive -

the electrical rail system,

the Hochbahn.

It was created in the 1890s
to shuttle workers to
the recently-established factories.

I met with a Berlin historian,
Jurgen Kocha, to take a trip
into the city's frenetic past.

When I think of Germany,
when I read the statistics,

it's kind of amazing how quickly
the process of industrialisation
seems to have happened here.

It's true. Compared with Britain

and other early industrialisers,

large parts of Germany
had the advantage to start later

and that sometimes had some benefits
in terms of fast and successful
growth.

And it also is related to the fact

that the role of science
was very strong

traditionally in Prussia,
and some other German states.

The symbiosis of technical
knowledge, technical science

on one hand, and manufacturing
on the other, was very important.

Secondly, you have a strong
tradition of highly-skilled work

inside Germany, coming out of the
system of guilds and apprenticeship
systems, which continues.

That's very interesting.
So you are saying
the tradition of the skilled artisan,

that that actually comes out
of the German Middle Ages.

This distinction between
apprentices, journeymen
and masters is deeply built

into the old European, German
tradition of organising work,
and this proves to be an advantage.

At the beginning of the 20th century,
Germany was a true economic giant.

It led the world in chemical science.

It produced more steel than any
other nation in continental Europe.

Nearly half of all
of the world's electrical goods
were being made by Germany.

It's a powerful country.

The empire has been founded
and, you know, there is a lot of
nationalism around, there is a lot

of optimism around, and all these
explain a certain type of modernity

in this new empire.

But, as Menzel had prophesied,
there was a price to be paid
for this progress.

The rapid industrialisation
of Berlin was taking its toll on
the people creating it, the workers.

In only 50 years, Berlin's population
had swollen from just over 400,000
to nearly two million people.

The city struggled to cope
and, for many, poverty, illness
and misery became a way of life.

One artist witnessed
the deprivation at close quarters.

Her name was Kathe Kollwitz.

Kollwitz's husband, Karl, was
a doctor with a social conscience,
and the couple moved here to

the Prenzlauerberg district of Berlin
in the early 1890s, so that he could
minister to the sick and the poor.

It was a desperately overcrowded
rabbit warren of slum tenements
built to house the many thousands

of textile workers who'd flooded
to the city in search of work.

An early-20th-century Baedeker
guide simply said there is
nothing to see in this place.

But for Kollwitz, this was the
real Berlin, and she'd spend the
rest of her life depicting it.

Kollwitz often used events from
the past to explore the suffering
she saw in the present.

These images are from a series
called The Revolt Of The Weavers,

an industrial uprising
squashed 50 years previously.

For Kollwitz,
the parallels with the world she knew
were blatantly obvious.

Kollwitz drew increasingly on
her own personal experience.

She was particularly struck
one day by the sight of a woman

leaving her husband's surgery
with a terrible black eye.

She felt touched by more than
just one person's suffering,
as she noted in her diary.

Husband beaten down by work
in turn beats his wife

and in the end all the misery
devolves on the children.

It was just one image,
but in it she felt she'd seen an
entire pattern of social deprivation.

Kollwitz's drawings inspired
by people she encountered
are her most emotive works.

A heavily pregnant woman
in a tenement corridor.

An impoverished family,
crushed by hardship.

An anguished mother
cradling the body of her dead child.

The misery Kollwitz captured
was the reality the modernised
Germany didn't want to acknowledge.

Wilhelm II, the Kaiser who ushered
Germany into the 20th century,

didn't approve of Kollwitz's images.

Art that portrayed
unhappiness was, in his words,
a "sin against the German people".

This was state-approved art
in his modern Germany.

The first chancellor,
Otto Von Bismarck, standing proud,

surrounded by allegories
of German power.

Created at the start of the
20th century, these are aggressive,
muscular works of art,

crushing even the possibility of
dissent with the rhetoric of empire.

Anyone wanting to question
or challenge this strident

view of German destiny would have to
do so at the margins, in the shadows.

On the outskirts of the city there's
a museum devoted to a particular
group of avant-garde artists

who worked on the fringes
of modern Berlin.

They called themselves Die Brucke,
the bridge,

a symbol of their desire to connect
with the truth about
the modern world.

Those look great. Beautiful.

The museum archive contains some of
the most vibrant experiments of
their leader, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Here we have the drawings
of Kirchner.

The museum director, Magdalena
Moeller, offered to show me some
of his rarely seen sketches.

This is a beautiful drawing.
Oh, wow. That is something!

Even through the tracing paper,
you can see the graphic style.

What's the subject of this?

Potsdamer Platz, in Berlin.

It's a drawing of two prostitutes
on a small island
in the middle of the traffic.

I love that, this sort of circle,
he's almost put them on a stage.

Yes, at that time he was working
very much at night and walked

in the streets in these streets
of Berlin, and in these places.

What do you think he's
trying to get at here?

Is he trying to show the people of
Berlin this otherworld,
this seedy underworld?

Yes, he shows the life,
the crucial life in Berlin.

You have to earn your living
and it is hard to live in Berlin.

These feel like works of art
created by a man on the verge
of a nervous breakdown.

They have that sort of sense,
don't they, very highly-strung,
full of anxiety.

Later, he said, in war time he
was like the prostitutes in his
works, he was as lost as them.

So he said he felt as lost
as the prostitutes.

As lost as the prostitutes
at this time. Wow.

Everything he does is shot through
with nerves and anxiety.

Nowhere do we find the kind of
serene fauvism of Matisse.

Look at the colour of this picture,
it's so livid and angry and clashing.

Then if you look at
Kirchner's draughtsmanship,

I mean,
it's almost expressionism gone wild.

Is this a landscape,
is it foliage or is that barbed wire?

Its lines turned to the service of
the expression of personal anxiety.

And I think,

for me, perhaps his masterpieces
are these wonderful, well,
the drawings and these pastels

of Berlin at night.

But it's almost as if he's turned

these figures into stained glass
windows for the modern age.

These are the new saints and martyrs
of a disenchanted world.

And he's painted himself in
this portrait, a self portrait.

He's painted himself
and his model as...

..almost like totems
for this modern age of anxiety.

If I look into those dark eyes,

it's almost as if those figures
are holding their breath.

They know that something's
going to happen,

they know it's not going to be good
but they're are not quite sure
what it is.

When the First World War broke out in
1914, the great European states saw

it as a chance to quench Germany's
desire for power and influence.

Germany brought the full force
of its advances in technology
and science to bear on its enemies.

Poisonous gases,

aerial bombing, heavy artillery.

The results were catastrophic. German
defeat would come at a cost of human
life and suffering never seen before.

The Graphische Sammlung in Munich
contains a collection of prints

by an artist who served as
a machine gunner in the German army.

Otto Dix created
these compelling images.

They are among the very first
documents of the full horror
of modern warfare.

Otto Dix wanted to show
his experience, and he left

his record of it in the form of
this immensely powerful suite
of etchings called Der Krieg.

It's a kind of collage
of nightmare images.

Here you've got two skulls, as if
dredged up from the mud of the war.

Dix showing us the skull beneath the
skin of the noble rhetoric of war.

This was the war that
totally shattered any idea that

fighting could somehow be imbued with
chivalry or any sense of honour.

This was a dishonourable war
and it turned men into animals.

There they are,
huddled in their barracks.

Here we've got these two card players
with bestial grins on their faces

while their emaciated comrade
is combing his clothing for fleas.

And he doesn't flinch from
showing us the terrible nature

of the injuries made possible by the
new artillery of the First World War.

Look at this image of man whose
brains have been blown out,

and he has depicted them

almost like offal
on a butcher's table.

Dix was painfully aware,
acutely aware, that this was all

the science, all the advance, all the
progress of the industrial revolution

brought to bear on the human body.

This is was what we've learnt to do
to the human body and here, for me,

the most chilling image in the whole
suite of etchings is a group of men
about to mustard gas the enemy.

Now mustard gas was one of
the great Prussian inventions.

It was a product of
Prussian innovations in chemistry

and here it's being deployed by these
white-faced ghouls at the enemy.

Yet there were still those who
managed to persuade themselves
that this terrible war

would purify the world
and lead man into a new paradise.

The artist Franz Marc
wanted to capture, in his words,

"the quiver and flow of blood in
nature, trees, animals...the air."

He believed that the old romantic
dream of communing with nature
was about to become a reality,

and his symbol of that was the horse,

shown almost melting into a world
of heightened form and colour.

Stored within the same Munich
archive as Dix's horrors of war

are some of Marc's most delicate
and idyllic sketches.

They are absolutely wonderful things.

What is unusual about Marc is that
he manages to combine and abstract
language with a figurative language.

So on the one hand you've
got these forms that suggest
elemental energy and nature

in an almost symbolic sense but on
the other hand, you've got these
beautiful little images of innocence,

the deer, or the horse.

It's as if Marc sees himself as
a new Adam who is going to
re-enter the Garden of Eden.

He really believes that the world
will be transformed, that he's
on the brink of a great shift

in human relationships,
human society,

and that as a result of this,
man will become at one with nature.

But the most extraordinary
thing about these drawings

is when they were created and where.

Franz Marc created these drawings
while he was serving at the front
in the First World War.

In other words,
he managed to preserve

his sense of idealism
and nature worship in the face

of the most cataclysmically
violent, technological war
that the world had ever seen.

There is a sense of that violence
in some of these drawings,

particularly this one.

It looks like the world in the
throes of some kind of apocalypse.

But his story wouldn't end well.

He was on horseback, he was
struck by artillery and killed.

And I think he was the last
of the great German romantics.

That thread that goes back
to Friedrich and Runge, that thread,

with the death of Marc,
that thread is finally cut

and that sense of idealism

will very, very rarely be seen again
in German art.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd