Berlin

The artists who founded the Secession and pioneered in the transition to expressionism greeted the opening of hostilities in 1914 with enthusiasm. Lovis Corinth praised the furor teutonicus, which he said “showed the enemy that he could not disturb our peaceful existence with impunity.” Like so many of Berlin’s culturati, he demanded an end to the aping of foreign fashions. Max Liebermann, who had done as much aping as anyone, signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-three, that defense of German aggression in the name of cultural salvation. Paul Cassirer, the Secessionist patron, started a new art magazine in August 1914 called

Kriegszeit (Wartime), which featured patriotic exhortations and drawings from some of Berlin’s best known artists, including Liebermann, Julius Meier-Graefe, Max Beckmann, and Max Slevogt. The first issue contained a lithograph by Liebermann celebrating the spirit of 1914 as well as a declaration from Meier-Graefe saying that artists had to march along with politicians of all factions to the common goal of German victory. The magazine acknowledged Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Allies with a lithograph entitled “Roman Eagle in May 1915”; it showed a vulture perched on Michelangelo’s Moses

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By 1916, however, Berlin’s painters were visibly registering their frustration over a seemingly interminable war that was devouring young lives on the battlefields and engendering widespread misery at home. Cassirer, who returned to Berlin in 1916 after a stint at the front, replaced Kriegszeit with a new arts periodical called

Der Bildermann, which was considerably more critical of the war and its effects on German society. Among other troubling developments, the magazine recorded the escalating deterioration of socioeconomic conditions in the national capital. One of its contributors was Heinrich Zille, whose humorous depictions of lower-class life in Berlin had often tended to mask its misery, but who now offered grim commentaries on despair and loss: whole families getting morosely drunk; a woman and her children in their tenement room reading a letter informing them that the man of the house has been killed in battle. Ottomar Starke, a younger artist, zeroed in on the social cleavages magnified by war: his paintings showed profiteers rich enough to snub old acquaintances; a nouveau riche fop blithely ignoring a beggar wearing an iron cross.

The intensity with which the experience of war could magnify and transform the experience of the big city was exemplified in the work of Max Beckmann. He had lived in Berlin for several years before 1914, joining the expressionist scene but soon coming to dismiss expressionism as too mystical and otherworldly. “My heart beats for a raw average vulgar art,” he wrote in his journal in 1909, “which doesn’t live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.” Beckmann’s ambition, suggested the art critic Robert Hughes, was to be “a psychological realist in a bad age: the Courbet of the cannibals.” The war offered him ample opportunity to realize this ambition. His service as a medical orderly on the Western Front plunged him into a world at once horrific and strangely compelling—the grotesque carnival of spilled intestines and severed limbs, the ethereal beauty of searchlights and fire-belching cannon. After suffering a mental breakdown in 1915, Beckmann returned to Berlin and applied what he had learned at the front to the city, viewing it through the eyes of a survivor of hell who understands that much of the violent, claustrophobic, chaotic life of the trenches can also be found in the industrial metropolis. Out of this understanding came a series of drawings entitled, appropriately, Hell

, which he worked on through the revolution and published in 1919. Included was a piece called The Way Home, showing a maimed war cripple begging in a Berlin street, and The Family, featuring Beckmann’s own son playing with two hand grenades. Other drawings chronicled the channeling of wartime misery into revolutionary anger. In all these works, as in his extensive Weimar-era oeuvre, Beckmann gave expression to his conviction that it was the artist’s duty to live in the large city and help its inhabitants come to grips with the horrors of the present and future. “We must sacrifice our hearts and our nerves to poor deceived humanity’s horrible screams of pain. . . . That is the only thing that can motivate our quite superficial and selfish existence. That we give to people a sign of their fate.”