Berlin

Wilhelm’s censure was aimed primarily at the director of the National Gallery, Hugo von Tschudi, a distinguished scholar with a true appreciation for modern art, particularly for the modern art of France. Doggedly, Tschudi found ways to acquire some important modern pieces for his museum despite the kaiser’s guidelines. For example, in 1897 he acquired a painting by Cezanne, becoming the first museum director in the world to do so. (The French state had just refused to include this painter’s works in its official collections.) Tschudi failed, however, to slip a major purchase of works by Delacroix, Courbet, and Daumier past the emperor’s vigilant eye. Spotting the paintings on a visit to the gallery, Wilhelm indignantly declared that the director “could show such stuff to a monarch who understood nothing of art, but not to him.” The rebuke infuriated Tschudi, who hated having to defer to a man he considered an art-ignoramus. Thus he gratefully accepted an offer to become the head of Bavaria’s royal museums in 1908.

Munich’s gain was Berlin’s loss. Tschudi’s successor, Ludwig Justi, also hoped to open the National Gallery to innovative works, but he lacked his predecessor’s dynamism and drive. Visiting the National Gallery in 1912, the distinguished American critic James Huneker wrote that he wanted to gnash his teeth over the plethora of mediocre paintings and the relative dearth of distinguished ones. He was appalled to discover that the museum’s French Impressionist works were all hung in a badly lighted room on the top floor. As for the rest: “The sight of so much misspent labor, of the acres of canvas deluged with dirty, bad paint, raises my bile.”

Many of the artists and intellectuals who enjoyed the Kaiser’s favor were faculty members at the Royal Academy of Art, the Academy of Music, or the University of Berlin. This last institution was the imperial capital’s most important center of higher learning. Located on Unter den Linden in a palace built in 1766 by Frederick the Great (but immediately abandoned by the king when he moved his court to Potsdam), the university was established in 1810 to help Prussia revitalize and throw off the domination of Napoleon. Among its founding patrons were the Humboldt brothers, Alexander and Wilhelm, whose organizing principle was the “unity of learning”—the symbiosis of humanism and the natural sciences. In the 1840s bronze statues of the brothers were erected in front of the main building (they are still there today). A century later, when the East German Communists took over the university, they changed the name from Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universitat to Humboldt-Universität. They also inscribed in the central hall a famous line from Karl Marx, who had attended the university in the late 1830s: “Philosophers have hitherto explained the world; it is now time to change it.”

By the beginning of the imperial period Berlin University was indeed helping to change the world, albeit more through practical learning than through philosophically inspired political action. As an intellectual ally of German industry and government, the university was a key player in Germany’s development as a world leader in technology, the natural sciences, and medicine. A brief look at the school’s contributions to the disciplines of medicine and physics should suffice to document this point.

Rudolf Virchow, a physician, biologist, and amateur archeologist (he was a friend and supporter of Schliemann) invented the modern discipline of pathology. He also promoted reforms in the meat-processing industry through his discovery of trichina worms in uncooked ham and sausage. He was somewhat less scientific in his approach to tuberculosis, typhus, and cholera; as a radical democrat (about which more below), he argued that these diseases were caused by poverty and overcrowding rather than by microorganisms. His remedies were therefore exclusively social: more rights for the poor rather than quarantine or disinfecting.

Berlin honored Virchow with a new hospital complex named after him. Opened in 1906, the facility was the most modern and technically advanced in the world. Strolling though its buildings and parklike grounds in 1909, Jules Huret found himself feeling ashamed for the dirty old Hotel Dieu in Paris.

The cleanliness, the order! Nowhere a scrap of paper or any kind of litter. Wastebaskets are placed here and there, and next to the white-painted benches are spittoons filled with antiseptic water. . . . Patients, dressed in blue-and-white-striped suits, wool stockings and leather sandals, freely walk the grounds. . . . Women sit on the benches, reading or knitting. It is the perfect picture of peace and comfort, allowing one to suppress thoughts of the pain contained within these walls. Verily, one wishes that all states would be blessed with such institutions.