Barlach and the Conservative Revolution

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German Studies Review 36.2 (2013): 281–305 © 2013 by The German Studies Association.

ABSTRACT

Ernst Barlach and the Conservative Revolution

James van Dyke

This article examines the relationship between the artist Ernst Barlach and the

so-called conservative revolution, an overlooked aspect of his life and career. Of

particular interest are Barlach’s friendship with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, an

antiacademic and antibourgeois writer who became a leading political thinker on

the right, and an important essay on Barlach published in 1935 by the prominent

“young conservative” art critic Paul Fechter. Though Barlach was never politically

engaged, the article suggests the degree to which his work and career were shaped

by, and appealed to, such intellectuals.

Ernst Barlach is a canonical modern German artist and writer of the early twentieth century who was wary of mass movements, radical political parties, and strident ideological certainty, with the exception of the patriotic fervor that gripped him—like so many—after the outbreak of war in August 1914. On the one hand, he was never a friend of Social Democracy or Communism, the proletariat, and revolution.1 On the other hand, the mutual antipathy between Barlach and the dominant factions within the NSDAP and other extreme rightwing political organizations, especially the Stahlhelm, in the late 1920s and early 1930s is well known.2 To characterize Barlach’s postwar politics as “moderately liberal, with conservative tendencies,” as Peter Paret has, thus seems apt.3 The sculptor’s letters, diaries, and essays, one can elaborate, are the products of an educated and thoughtful man who was repulsed by extremism and chaos, wished for both order and tolerance, and saw himself as a loyal subject of the nation, though he claimed to be unconcerned with the political affairs of state. They indicate his faith in legitimate authority—embodied, at different times, by the leaders of the DDP, Moses, and Hindenburg—and his conviction in the inviolability of Geist.4

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In light of this, it may seem surprising to suggest, as the title of this article does, that a relationship existed between Barlach and the so-called conservative revolution, that is, the loose constellation of antidemocratic intellectuals on the right who, what-ever their numerous differences, all rejected not only the Weimar Republic but also the traditional conservatism and bourgeois culture of the Wilhelmine Empire, while regarding the all-too plebeian NSDAP with distaste.5 Indeed, considerable evidence attests to the sculptor’s unmistakable sense of distance from this position in Weimar Germany’s political culture. In March 1920, for instance, Barlach wrote to Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, one of the intellectual leaders of the conservative revolution, after reading several of his recent essays: “I see that I am no politician when I must see how much you are.”6 Two weeks later he wrote again, responding this time to Moeller van den Bruck’s vision of a new Reich: “What you write sounds promising, shows a way, offers hints of possibilities, one would be godless if one were to lose faith in the coming of the Reich. But—I am apparently godless, I believe in the path of the martyr, not like a dogma, but rather with foreboding, dread, and hope like the one in Gethsemane.”7 Twelve years after that, Barlach tried to read Das Dritte Reich, Moeller van den Bruck’s famous treatise of 1923 that the sculptor had received as a gift from its author before the latter’s suicide in 1925, but found it incomprehensible.8 Moreover, these responses to Moeller van den Bruck’s political writing seem to have been part of a larger pattern. It does appear that Barlach agreed to Moeller van den Bruck’s wish to publish a part of the artist’s wartime diary in late 1920, presumably in the journal of his postwar intellectual circle, Das Gewissen, though it is unclear whether the publication took place.9 On two occasions, however, once in 1919 and once in 1933, Barlach declined requests—giving different reasons, neither political—to reproduce or to publish work in journals aligned with the conservative revolution.10

It is thus impossible to see Barlach as an artist active in or committed to the conservative revolution during the years of the Weimar Republic. In this respect, he was very unlike the painter Rudolf Schlichter, who abandoned leftwing circles for Ernst Jünger’s cohort; the illustrator A. Paul Weber, who made drawings for Ernst Niekisch’s national revolutionary journal Widerstand; or even Max Beckmann, who consorted for whatever reasons with the group of elitist and cosmopolitan admirers of Fascism led by Karl Anton Prinz von Rohan (not to mention modern artists such as Emil Nolde, Franz Radziwill, and Arno Breker, who sympathized at least for a time with National Socialism). Nonetheless, Barlach and Moeller van den Bruck maintained a particularly close friendship and active intellectual exchange between 1909, when they met in Florence, and 1916, when Barlach’s enthusiasm for the war waned while Moeller van den Bruck completed his transformation from a modernist literary and art critic into a political thinker. This explains why Barlach wrote those letters in 1920, and continued occasionally to read Moeller van den Bruck’s publica-tions even after their correspondence had ceased. He remained interested in and

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engaged with his friend’s work, even if it exasperated him. Furthermore, neither the end of this friendship nor Barlach’s evident wish to keep his distance from the conservative revolutionary press stopped critics and commentators aligned with that form of antidemocratic political culture from writing about his work. One can point

though not yet extensively studied, art critic Paul Fechter.11 Since 1910, Fechter had been among the most important proponents of German Expressionism. After World War I, he belonged to Moeller van den Bruck’s “young conservative” circle within the conservative revolution.12 Most notably, it was Fechter who wrote the essay, after the prominent and popular art historian Wilhelm Pinder decided not to do so, for the volume of Barlach’s drawings published by the Piper Verlag in 1935, only to be suppressed by the state a short time later. This reception suggests that a small

The suppression of that book is an important episode in the hounding of Barlach between 1930 and his death in 1938, and it has been discussed at some length in a number of recent publications on this phase of the artist’s career.13 It is hence

account of Barlach, not to speak of those by more obscure rightwing writers. In fact, Fechter’s name appears nowhere in either of Paret’s books, neither in their pages nor in their indices. The friendship between the artist and Moeller van den Bruck, while frequently mentioned in intellectual biographies of the writer, has been simi-larly neglected in the art-historical literature. No one has followed up on Jill Lloyd’s old suggestion to examine more closely the implications of the interaction between the two men, though Barlach’s half of the correspondence is published.14 There is,

attention to these repressions in the literature on the artist’s biography and reception,

What becomes clear as a result of the approach taken here is that Barlach may have been an “artist against the Third Reich,” as Paret has argued, but that he and his work were nonetheless partly situated, even before World War I, in a network

-ism were not irreconcilable. This is not surprising. A growing body of art-historical scholarship has critically reassessed the ideological and political history of German modernism in the early twentieth century, from the place of national and even racial categories in Expressionist artistic culture to the range of relationships that existed between modern art and National Socialism. The ambition of this biographical and reception-historical approach, then, is not—as in the traditional, hagiographic work-and-life monographic study—to isolate the individual artist and to emphasize her or his transcendent exceptionality. It is, rather, to outline the institutional and


15 In this case, the effect of doing so is to point out the degree to which Barlach was typical, and by implication to suggest that the bonds between certain forms of modernism and nationalism in Germany were less about aberrant individual cases than about a relatively broad, if not structural alignment.16

The Russian Soul and German Cultural CritiqueThe drawings, sculptures, and writing that Barlach produced during and after the two months he spent with his expatriate brother near the city of Kharkov in southern Russia in the summer of 1906 were crucial for the rapid establishment of his reputa-tion as a protagonist in the modern artistic culture of Wilhelmine Germany, even

had already begun to emerge before his departure. That is not to say that the young artist had not had contact with the modern art world before that year. In late 1899,

founded Berlin Secession, the representative and controversial bastion of artistic modernism in the imperial capital city.17

in Kunst und Künstler, the mainstream journal associated more closely than any other with German modernism before 1914, dates from 1907. In an essay on the

Russischer Bettler, a

of reverie or even ecstasy, and characterized it and its pendant as “surprising” work that indicated that the talented young man, hitherto known only to a few cognoscenti, was maturing artistically (Fig. 1).18 In 1910, by which time Barlach had signed a contract with the leading modern art dealer Paul Cassirer and had won the Villa

critic contrasted the profound impact that the two months in Russia had had upon Barlach’s fundamentally Gothic and Romantic work with the year in Florence, which had apparently had had no effect at all. Among the illustrations were four drawings of

of another beggar was the last.19 Finally, in October 1912 Barlach—who by then was on the board of the Berlin Secession and was thought by some in modernist circles to be Germany’s greatest contemporary sculptor—published “Eine Steppenfahrt,” an extensively illustrated edited selection from the journal that he had kept in Russia. Just as he did in his sculptures and drawings, Barlach portrayed Russia in this text above all as a vast, elemental, soulful place—except where German immigrants had introduced entrepreneurial initiative, modern industrial production, and capitalist economics—populated by primitive existences who prayed, begged, and dreamed.20

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Figure 1. Ernst Barlach, Blinder Bettler (Blind Beggar), 1906, glazed terra cotta, 30.9 x 28.4 x

27.5 cm, as reproduced with the title Russischer Bettler (Russian Beggar) in Kunst und Künstler 5,

no. 9 (1907). (Photo: courtesy of Oberlin College Visual Resources)


that experience in the essentializing national or racial oppositions of primitivist dis-course, must have been based on three factors. First, it corresponded to his sense of himself as an artist and human being. In August 1911, Barlach declared that he felt more closely related to the mystical soul of the Russian or Asian man than to “the typical educated contemporary,” and that his wish to express the elemental quality of the people of his northern German homeland put him at odds with “European liberalism.”21 Second, and more strategically, the publication of “Eine Steppenfahrt” clearly echoed and built on the reception of his work since 1907. Third, it almost certainly was inspired by Barlach’s friendship and intellectual exchange with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck since 1909. Moeller van den Bruck was, after all, not simply an antibourgeois, antiacademic literary critic, essayist, translator, and art collector who had been a prominent member of Berlin’s bohemian subculture before his deci-sion to leave Germany for Paris in 1902.22

of which was issued by Piper in 1906.23 While in Florence in 1909, Barlach read at least two of Dostoevsky’s novels, Demons

and Crime and Punishment, in the new translation.24 It can thus safely be assumed that he also was introduced there to Moeller van den Bruck’s vision of the Russian author and his work as the highest genius and purest expression of a primitive or young “Russian soul” that stood opposed to the deracinated aestheticism, rationalist skepticism, and common sense of the old, enfeebled civilizations of the liberal West.25 Moeller van den Bruck, whose thinking had taken an increasingly nationalist turn since 1904, was not alone in thinking mythically about Russia as a place opposed to Western modernity. He was joined, for instance, by the cultural critical publisher Eugen Diederichs, who celebrated the enigmatic depths of the “Russian soul” and the illiberal ideas of Dostoevsky, suggesting that they were not entirely unrelated to authentic German culture and spiritual traditions.26

This image of Old—or rather young—Russia can be detected in Barlach’s essay

writing on Barlach, an essay that appeared in Der Tag just weeks before Barlach’s text appeared in Kunst und Künstler. Russia, the critic wrote there, was “the only land of Europe to which the degenerate forms of our culture have never come” and was home to “massive illiterates and pure natural people who had experienced no distortion in either their traditional appearance or their habits of life.” It was the encounter with this world, he believed, that had triggered Barlach’s radical break with the deadening schema and blinding constraints of academic tradition, namely classical proportion and Renaissance naturalism. The artist had returned from Russia with a rejuvenated plastic vision free of “miseducation” (Verbildung).27

Before 1914, the growing prominence of a mythic image of Russia in the critical

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thus seems to have been tied closely to Moeller van den Bruck’s emergent nationalist critique of Wilhelmine Germany’s bankrupt academic artistic culture in particular, and of moribund Western civilization in general.28 In broader terms, Barlach’s career between 1907 and 1914 was shaped by the intersection of modern artistic culture, modernist nationalism, and pessimistic cultural critique. After the war, however, the emphasis on the transformative impact of Russia on Barlach’s artistic vision evidently lost much of its allure as interest in Russia in general and Dostoevsky in particular became fashionable in Germany’s modern artistic culture, and as rightwing militants took the association of the sculptor with Russia as evidence of his alien and inferior racial constitution, and corresponding artistic degeneracy.29 Nonetheless, as late as 1934, at least one author advanced an argument much like Moeller van den Bruck’s. Nothing is known about Hans-Joachim Neitzke, but in 1934 he published a book about Barlach that shared Moeller van den Bruck’s appreciation of the artist as well as his belief in the different, competing racial characters of young, primitive nations or peoples and their old, declining rivals. In essence, Neitzke characterized the sculptor as a man who embodied the “German spirit between West and East.” What that meant, he asserted, was that Barlach had experienced the Russian soul as a liberation from Western rationalism (and Roman Catholicism), yet at the same time had overcome Russian chaos and baseness in order to give expression to the dynamic, visionary, metaphysical German spirit.30

Barbarism and the War ExperienceThe important role of Russia in the reception of Barlach’s work and in his fabrica-tion of a public self-image points to the intersection of modernism and cultural pes-simism in Imperial Germany. Yet the myth of Russia as a place essentially opposed to Western rationalism was only one controversial building block in the discursive construction of Barlach before, and after, the war. Even as they emphasized the catalytic effects of Russia’s primitive soulfulness, Barlach and several of his strongest supporters conceived of his work above all as part of a cultural tradition that, unlike the mediocre academic classicism prevalent in Imperial Germany, was authentically national or racial.

The central term in this line of thinking about Barlach’s work was “the Gothic.”

and that they recalled “the uncannily soulful expression of Gothic saints, seemingly encountered in a state of poetic terror, whose inner ecstasy twisted their limbs,

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ing discussion of Barlach’s Romantic spirit and bohemian habitus, “then one points


above all to artists of his kind.”32 This association of Barlach’s work with the Gothic grew even stronger following the publication one year later of Wilhelm Worringer’s popular book Formprobleme der Gotik, which had a powerful impact on German modern artistic culture and provided the foundation for the reception of Expression-ism both as a visionary art and as something essentially German. His sculpture was henceforth often described in terms of vision, spirit, and ecstasy, and was sometimes shown together with Gothic sculptures.33 This was taken to its farthest extent in 1929, when the director of the art museum in Lübeck, Carl Georg Heise, devised the plan

facade of the fourteenth-century Katharinenkirche. Barlach completed three before the collapse of the Weimar Republic made impossible the project’s full realization.34

Barlach was well aware of Worringer’s book, studying it closely by the end of July 1911. It is not entirely clear what he thought about the text, as he wrote that read-ing it “awakens the Berserker in me.”35 Perhaps that meant that the book elicited a sense of intense excitement in the sculptor, speaking to a sense of Germanic or Nordic identity. Perhaps it angered him. After all, Barlach and Moeller van den Bruck apparently admired other, earlier kinds of European sculpture as much as, if not more than, the Gothic, and they saw the roots of the sculptor’s anticlassical work in even more archaic things. Not only did Barlach speak highly later that year of the “hard,

small provincial city of Güstrow in Mecklenburg, but this startling mention of the “Berserkerwhich he privately expressed his violent distaste for bourgeois society by asserting the superiority of barbarism over culture, or by identifying himself as a barbarian.36 For his part, Moeller van den Bruck publicly advanced the idea of Barlach as a barbarian—or at least as a man in whom barbarian blood still provided a powerfully vital creative impulse—in both his essay on the sculptor of 1912 and in his book, Die italienische Schönheit, which appeared in 1913. The two friends thus both thought in the terms of a powerful model of historical and cultural production that saw “barbarian inva-sions” as that which had reinvigorated a senescent late Antique European culture during the early Middle Ages. This model had emerged as a key part of the Romantic “reaction against the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Empire,” and by 1900 its racializing proposal of an “opposition between the Germanic and Latin races” had become “the most common interpretative model of cultural production” in Europe.37

As inspiring as he made Barlach’s Russian experience out to be, Moeller van den Bruck never suggested that his friend’s work was an embodiment of the “Russian

Barlach’s style was derived at least in part from such exotic sources as Indian or Egyptian sculpture.38 In keeping with the belief that each people possessed an essential

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national or racial character and style, Moeller van den Bruck instead insisted that his -

tion and rebirth of our most national art, wood carving, which once was cultivated by all the Germanic tribes and was carried by the northern German Langobards as far as upper Italy. . . .”39 What is more, the unorthodox, antiacademic qualities of Barlach’s sculpture—its rhythmic simplicity and immediate expressivity—linked him in Moeller van den Bruck’s mind to “the barbaric assault of young peoples” that had saved humanity from the spiritless exhaustion of Hellenistic culture.40 Those qualities, the critic wrote, attested to Barlach’s descent from and identity with the Langobards, who in late Antiquity had infused the decrepit Italian civilization they had overrun with new life.41 As has already been discussed in the previous section, Moeller van den Bruck believed that both the Russians and the Germans were young peoples that should be united against the rationalistic civilizations of the old peoples of the West. The Germans, he thought, had something to learn from the Russians. Yet the Germans, he asserted, possessed a philosophical spirit and barbaric energy that distinguished them from the religious mysticism and fatalistic passivity that he associated with the Russian soul.42 He saw that national and racial spirit and energy materialized in Barlach’s work, which possessed “the expression that could only be given to it by a person of a Nordic race, a race perhaps occasionally storming into life but above all occupied with itself and primarily attuned to the cosmos.”43 It must be for that reason that when Barlach’s friend urged the Nationalgalerie in Berlin to acquire a piece by the rapidly rising sculptor in 1913, he did not suggest things like

to the Berserker warrior gazing to the heavens while coiled to strike, perhaps an alter ego of the artist carved in wood (Fig. 2).44

The Berserkerfeats of strength and daring while in a state of frenzied madness, an unarmored yet indomitable man whose loss of self and self-control enabled him to transcend normal inhibitions and limitations in order to overrun his foes.45 In 1914, the sculptor varied

Der Rächer, a drawing of which was published late that year as Der heilige Krieg in Kriegszeit, the patriotic journal launched by Barlach’s dealer Paul Cassirer in August 1914 (Fig. 3). This image, in which the charging barbarian warrior is about to invade the space of the viewer, presumably the kind of prosperous, intellectually sophisticated, culturally liberal—bourgeois—person who

years.46 The war, Barlach believed, was something more than the mere patriotism expected of loyal citizens by the imperial state.47 It was instead, as several letters and diary entries convey, an event that produced a powerful state of joyous exaltation


akin to the berserk warrior’s rage. In mid-August 1914, for instance, he expressed his pleasure to be alive at such a time, which he perceived as a “deliverance from the individual’s constant egotistical concerns, in short an expansion and elevation of the people.”48

of the war to the happy, excited obliteration of the self that one experienced when in passionate love.49 In January 1916, he praised Der Preussische Stil—Moeller van den Bruck’s latest book on culture as the expression of national essence—, hoped

trace on German society when the troops came home, and described how he forgot the humiliations of boot camp and the complaints of a conscript when marching at dawn. Engulfed by the rhythm of his column’s “half angry, half joyfully-cursing, grumbling, rumbling advance on nailed soles,” Barlach sensed at such moments the approach of “a new youth.”50

The perception of the war as an elemental, sublime event that was sweeping

bourgeois society and laying the foundation for a rejuvenated world was, as is well known, common among modernist artists and intellectuals in Germany before they

Figure 2. Ernst Barlach, Der Berserker (The Berserk Man), 1910, walnut, 66.7 x 88.5 x 30.1 cm,

Ernst Barlach Haus–Stiftung Hermann F. Reemtsma, Hamburg. (Photo: H.–P. Cordes)

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Figure 3. Ernst Barlach, Der heilige Krieg (The Holy War), 1914, lithograph, 41.3 x. 25.4 cm, as

reproduced in Kriegszeit, no. 17 (16 December 1914). (Photo: courtesy of the Division of Special

Collections, Archives and Rare Books, University of Missouri at Columbia)


51 It was also, if in much less grandiloquent terms and a far less euphoric tone, at the heart of the myth of the “war experience” that became a crucial component of the political ideology of the conservative revolution after the war’s end.52 Indeed, one might see in a few of Barlach’s letters written during the last two year of the war ideas prescient both of the conservative revolution’s vision of the army as a national community superior to civil society and of distinctions made by some, like Franz Schauwecker, between

ignoble service of material interests.53 In August 1917, Barlach characterized the army as the only thing in the world that had not disgraced itself, though he knew that the boredom and drill of military life behind the front were not for him.54 On 2 November 1918, he saw war above all as an instrument of the “mercantile imperialism” to which the English and the Americans subscribed, not of the idealistic overcoming of the world to which Germans, at their best, aspired. Defeat, he concluded, would save them from imperial debasement.55 Perhaps it was something of his old preference for archaic myth over educated liberalism, his view of barbarism as something superior to civilized culture, or his powerful experience of marching as a soldier, rather than simply a denunciation of war, that Barlach meant to convey in a drawing of 1920, Hunnish Warriors.56 Finally, in 1930 he explained that the cross in his war memorial

support of concepts that appeal for devotion to supraindividual ends.”57 One hears

disheartened about the war between 1916 and 1918, just as many who had regarded 58 As

his letters of 1920 attest, the disillusioned artist did not follow the path of his friend Moeller van den Bruck, who was galvanized by events. Furthermore, there is noth-ing in Barlach’s work to indicate that he shared in the conservative revolution’s postwar rationalization of destruction, legitimation of death, and celebration of the

steely body politic. To be sure, Barlach, unlike painters such as Otto Dix, Heinrich Hoerle, Barthel Gilles, and Josef Scharl, never broke taboos on showing the griev-

or mutilated. He treated them with grave dignity rather than satirical ridicule. Yet -

ated closely with the conservative memorial culture of the 1920s (though they were closer to that conception of the war memorial than the boulders, groves, abstract cenotaphs, and “altars of the Fatherland” that also were quite common in Germany).59 In his war memorial for Güstrow of 1927, Barlach transformed the berserk Rächer throwing himself at the enemy into one of his hovering spirits, structurally related to

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the recumbent steel-helmeted descendants of medieval kings (or Barbarossa) atop contemporaneous war memorials in Bremen and Munich, but suggesting only the con-

60 Death, lamentation, and horror demanded attention in the Magdeburg memorial of

the conventional monuments and in the trivial imagery that Barlach abhorred, but that most Germans seem to have expected.61 These aspects of his work, compounded

Jewish dealer (and who was believed by some himself to be a Jew or Slav), made his memorials unacceptable to many on the right.

Authenticity and the Tragedy of ArtBeginning in 1929, Barlach faced a rising tide of vitriolic criticism, much of which was published by militant individuals and groups in the DNVP, the NSDAP, and veterans’ associations such as the Stahlhelm. Building on complaints about the “Rus-

had occasionally been voiced even before 1914, these critics stridently denounced Barlach’s sculpture and especially the war memorials—as the expression of an alien racial constitution.62 With the establishment of the National Socialist dictatorship

of such criticism, and by one setback after another, culminating in the inclusion of Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in July 1937. Between

1929 and 1937, in short, Barlach was made into an “Art Bolshevist.”A large body of scholarship on individual careers, artistic ideologies and critical

debates, and art-political organizations and institutions now indicates, however, that this process was neither a simple nor a smooth one, as inexorable as it appears in retrospect. Rumors about the views of Party leaders on art swirled and those leaders

NSDAP sought to translate their competing positions into state policy. Barlach and the painter Emil Nolde in particular had their advocates among the National Socialist

believed Expressionism to be the authentic expression of the “German revolution.” The resulting uncertainty and contradictions fostered hope for improvement and seemed to offer room to maneuver. Indeed, Barlach and his supporters actively sought

his antagonists or testifying to his good will towards the new regime. Barlach wrote to hostile critics and was among the luminaries to sign Goebbels’ declaration acclaiming Hitler after the latter had aggrandized the powers of the Reich President in August 1934. Supporters continued to praise Barlach’s work in their essays and reviews. The


Figure 4. Ernst Barlach, Güstrower Ehrenmal (War Memorial for the Güstrow Cathedral), 1927,

bronze, 71 x 74.5 x 217 cm, as reproduced in Kunst und Künstler 25, no. 9 (1927). (Photo:

courtesy of Oberlin College Visual Resources)

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publisher Reinhard Piper, Barlach’s and Moeller van den Bruck’s old friend, offered in the summer of 1934 to bring out a major publication about the artist, which became the book that appeared in late 1935.63 Considerable attention has been paid to this book’s suppression in 1936, but less has been said about its contents.

The book was devoted to Barlach’s drawings rather than his sculpture, and

various people resting, waiting, and exposed to the elements. A few portrayed Biblical,

Thomas, a preacher in the desert, a person walking to the heretic’s pyre, furies, and witches. Others were drawn from Barlach’s illustrations of texts in the German literary canon: Faust and Mephisto during the Walpurgisnacht, two studies for illustrations of Schiller’s An die Freude, and seven drawings illustrating the Nibelungenlied. After Wilhelm Pinder, the prominent professor and popular art historian who had defended Expressionism in the debates of 1933 and 1934 but now wanted to avoid controversy, declined an invitation to contribute an introductory essay to the volume, the text was written by the critic Paul Fechter, who had supported the artist’s work in völkisch terms since 1920, at the latest.64

The weight given to the Nibelungenliedcharged place of the epic in Germany’s national culture since the early nineteenth century, and hence deserves closer attention. The seven drawings included in the volume out of the epic’s narrative order—Die Todgeweihten; Kämpfender Burgunde; Gunther und Hagen, umringt von Hunnen; Rüdeger reicht Hagen, dessen Schild zerhauen ist, den seinen; Hagen erschlägt das Kind der Kriemhild; Kriemhild erschlägt den gefesselten Hagen; and Der Kopf des Hagen—belonged to a series of seventeen

had made in 1922 and 1923 (Figs. 5–6). The series in turn represented the culmina-

had been in Florence with Moeller van den Bruck and the poet Theodor Däubler.65 The series’ gestural style, rough monumentality, and focus on the epic’s shockingly violent conclusion distinguish it from most earlier, more academic, more convention-ally heroic or romantic illustrations of the story. Though not political in any immediate sense, Barlach’s drawings’ thematization of vengeful betrayal and oppressive violence, Peter Paret has argued, also threw into question the prevalent Wilhelmine interpreta-

by Bernhard von Bülow’s invocation, in a speech to the Reichstag on 29 March 1909, of the concept of “Nibelungentreue.”66 In this view, Barlach’s treatment of the story did not lend itself to the production of popular myth and a usable past.


Figure 5. Ernst Barlach, Die Todgeweihten (Those Doomed to Die), 1922, charcoal on white

drawing paper, 509 x 375 mm, as reproduced in Ernst Barlach, Zeichnungen (Munich: R. Piper,

1935). (Photo: courtesy of Visual Resource Center, Department of Art History & Archaeology,

University of Missouri at Columbia)

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Figure 6. Ernst Barlach, Kriemhild erschlägt den gefesselten Hagen (Kriemhild Kills the Bound

Hagen), 1922, charcoal on white drawing paper, 508 x 374 mm, as reproduced in Ernst Barlach,

Zeichnungen (Munich: R. Piper, 1935). (Photo: courtesy of Visual Resource Center, Department

of Art History & Archaeology, University of Missouri at Columbia)


This is a compelling analysis, certainly containing much truth. However, Paret’s assessment does not take into account several important things that could change how the drawings are seen. First, it does not consider the relationship of Barlach’s

culture as an important part of his critique of contemporary bourgeois civilization, an interest no doubt fostered by the racializing model of the “barbarian invasions” that he evidently shared with Moeller van den Bruck. Second, while dismissing Fritz Lang’s and Thea von Harbou’s “trashy, sentimental” cinematic retelling of the story, Paret does not compare the drawings to similar, contemporaneous projects by Barlach’s peers, such as Lovis Corinth’s lithographic portfolio of 1921 on the exploits of Fred-erick the Great: the representation of a legendary, violent epoch of German history

Wilhelmine artistic culture did not correlate with a progressive political posture.67 Third, and most importantly, Paret’s account overlooks three crucial aspects of the drawings’ reception history.

Barlach did hesitate to include them in the volume, primarily because he feared that the raw energy of their lines would not reproduce adequately but also because he thought they were too challenging to contemporary taste.68 However, he seems to have had no concerns in 1933 about sending some of the most “striking” drawings of the series to be displayed in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin after its reinstallation by

National Socialist regime in Prussia and a prominent advocate of Expressionism as the characteristic art of the “German revolution” during the debates of 1933 and 1934.69 Schardt must have believed that Barlach’s drawings had an important place in the lineage of authentic Germanic art that he construed from Expressionism back to the art of the barbarian migrations.70 Second, the sequence of the drawings in the volume of 1935 prefaces the three drawings of the brutal murders that drive the narrative with four that emphasize precisely the sense of nobility, loyalty, and bravery that was at the heart of the epic’s conventional, popular understanding. Honorable soldiers

-lectual, described Barlach’s series as a “special achievement”—the “most powerfully

Barlach, the critic wrote, had made the series at “a time when the old world of the sagas enjoyed no particular favor in the German public sphere and its treatment promised little success.”71 He thus presented the drawings as proof that Barlach had been anything but a fashionable modernist in the much maligned “Weimar System.”

Fechter’s discussion of the drawings of the Nibelungenlied as powerfully focused depictions of sublime passion that emphasized the “Nordic elements” of the story was

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embedded in a broader presentation of Barlach in völkisch terms that undoubtedly was intended to be acceptable to National Socialist militants and familiar to many in

the usual claims about the relationship of the artist’s work to the Gothic, enhanced by the proposal of a particularly close kinship to the medieval popular culture embodied by Till Eulenspiegel. Most pronounced in Fechter’s text, however, was something that was not typical of Barlach’s reception from 1907 to 1929, namely the emphasis on the artist’s genealogy, his identity with the people of his home region, and his work as an expression of both. After rehearsing the results of recently published research into the artist’s ancestry, the critic declared that Barlach was a product of that part of Germany—Niederdeutschland—“in which German blood has stayed the most pure, the least diluted.”72 On this basis, Fechter drew a remarkable conclusion: Barlach’s work was challenging to many in Germany not because it was alien or degenerate, but precisely because it was so deeply rooted in its place, so authentically embodied a traditional vernacular or spoke an ancient dialect. The people of Niederdeutschland, Fechter wrote, felt at home in “the tangled roots of life” rather than in “the airless reaches of an idealized existence far from those roots.”73 Their art was demonic, grotesque, and comical, not beautiful and elegant; that was why Barlach’s work looked as it did.74 Recalling the argument he had made about the tragic alienation of art from life in response to the dismantling of Barlach’s memorial in Magdeburg the year before, Fechter declared that most modern Germans’ taste had been debased by the diluted, domesticated forms that had prevailed in academic art and middlebrow visual culture since the founding of the Reich in 1871. They had become too educated to

academic terms.75 Most, the critic concluded, were thus too deracinated, too civilized to grasp the autochthonous art of Barlach the Niederdeutsche.

Fechter’s essay tells us something about his contradictory, precarious position as -

ship. On the one hand, in 1933 and 1934 he enthusiastically declared his complete support for the new regime, either envisioning a new role for the art critic within it or agreeing with the state’s decision to remove Barlach’s monument, which he saw as the correct response to the tragic situation of art at present.76 Yet at the same time he, like many of Barlach’s critical supporters after 1929, presented the sculptor’s work as an authentic, German form of art, thus opposing many in the NSDAP, including several of its leaders. They did so by using the language of one of the foundational texts of German cultural pessimism, namely Julius Langbehn’s Rembrandt als Erzieher, which since 1890 had popularized, relatively speaking, the idea of Niederdeutschland as the last bastion of the authentic German Volk against the onslaught of modern


civilization.77

antimodernist National Socialist artistic culture in a way that recalls the conserva-tive revolution’s disdain for National Socialism as a plebeian product of rather than fundamental break with modern mass society and parliamentary democracy.

To be sure, the decision to commission Fechter, Moeller van den Bruck’s hagi-ographer,78 to write the essay was evidently made by Reinhard Piper, who was not only the publisher of important modernist texts such as the Blauer Reiter Almanach but also apparently an admirer of Langbehn.79 Barlach would have preferred to ask

and make minor corrections to the manuscript. Nonetheless, he was content with Fechter, never expressing concern about the völkisch ideology to which his writing had given expression since 1912.80 The sculptor must have been pleased to have a

may simply have become inured to being described in the terms of Langbehn’s book, of which he had been long aware; indeed, he had used them to describe himself on one occasion in 1932.81 Perhaps he regarded Fechter’s approach as the best he could get in National Socialist Germany. Given the ideas that had informed much of his life and work, however, it is also conceivable that Fechter’s thinking resonated with the artist, who, while criticizing the material ambitions of Wilhelmine imperialism, in November 1918 had described himself as “rather loosely völkisch.”82 Barlach had always been put off by radical politics and was repulsed by the culture of National Socialism, but for decades his self-image and professional identity had been shaped by the illiberal, antisocialist jargon of authenticity that emerged in late-nineteenth-century cultural pessimism and came to hardened maturity in the antidemocratic culture of the 1920s. Sharing a traumatic national history, a famous personal friend, an unpopular and impolitic sense of the art that mattered, and a highly developed vision of tragedy, in Hitler’s dictatorship the conservative revolutionary critic and the modernist sculptor were aligned.

University of Missouri-Columbia

Notes 1. See several entries in the war diary, in Ernst Barlach, Das Dichterische Werk in Drei Bänden, Band

3: Die Prosa II, ed. Friedrich Dross (Munich: R. Piper, 1959), 128, 194; as well as letters written to several correspondents between 19 December 1918 and 6 October 1920, in Ernst Barlach, Die Briefe, Band I, ed. Friedrich Dross (Munich: R. Piper, 1969), 532–33, 537–39, 544, 570, 595. (Hereafter cited as Prosa and Briefe.) In 1932, Barlach supported neither Ernst Thälmann nor Hitler for Reich President, but rather Paul von Hindenburg, even signing a public electoral appeal on the old Field Marshal’s behalf. See Barlach to Friedrich Düsel, 7 August 1932, Briefe II, 321.

2. See Prosa II, 397–431; Ernst Piper, Nationalsozialistische Kunstpolitik: Ernst Barlach und die “entartete Kunst”—Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); Christian Tümpel, ed., Deutsche Bildhauer 1900–1945: Entartet, exh. cat. Nijmeegs Museum Commanderie

James van Dyke 301

van Sint-Jan, Nijmegen (Zwolle: Wanders, 1992); and Peter Paret, An Artist Against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

3. Paret, Artist, 36. 4. In particular, see Barlach to Karl Barlach, 2 November 1918, Briefe I, 530–31. 5. The classic study, still valuable as a compendium of names and publications, is Arnim Mohler,

Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918–1932: Ein Handbuch, 4th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994). Two other useful overviews are Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik: Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933, 4th ed. (Munich: DTV, 1994); and Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (Houndmills Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).

6. Barlach to Moeller van den Bruck, 11 March 1920, Briefe I, 573. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.

7. Barlach to Moeller van den Bruck, 28 March 1920, Briefe I, 574. 8. Barlach to Karl Barlach, 14 November 1932, Briefe II, 332–33. 9. Barlach to Moeller van den Bruck, 25 November 1920, Briefe I, 598.10. Barlach to Rudolf Pechel, 5 April 1919, Briefe I, 542; Barlach to Friedrich Dross, 1 February

1933, Briefe II, 348–49.11. The only published scholarly treatment on Fechter is Andreas Zeisig, “Revision der Kunstbetrach-

tung: Paul Fechter und die Kunstkritik der Presse im Nationalsozialismus,” in Kunstgeschichte im “Dritten Reich,” eds. Olaf Peters, Ruth Heftrig, and Barbara Schellewald (Berlin: Akademie, 2008), 171–86.

12. Information on Fechter’s association with the “young conservatives” can be gleaned in particular from Möhler, Konservative Revolution, 409; and Volker Mauersberger, Rudolf Pechel und die “Deutsche Rundschau” 1919–1933: Eine Studie zur konservativ-revolutionären Publizistik in der Weimarer Republik (Bremen: Schünemann Universitätsverlag, 1971).

13. Paret, Artist, 91–107; and Peter Paret and Helga Thieme, Myth and Modernity: Barlach’s Draw-ings on the Nibelungen (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 53–54.

14. Jill Lloyd, review of Ernst Barlach—Werke und Werkentwürfe aus fünf Jahrzehnten, The Burl-ington Magazine 126, no. 971 (February 1984): 98.

15. See Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 19–25.

16. On the need to take into account the role of nationalism in European modernism before the war, see Walter Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 13–14.

17. On Barlach’s early career, see Paret, Artist, 32–34; Tümpel, Deutsche Bildhauer, 199–202; and Stephanie Barron, ed., German Expressionist Sculpture, exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 60–62.

Kunst und Künstler 5, no. 9 (1907): 355–56. Kunst und Künstler 8, no. 5 (1910): 265–70.

20. Ernst Barlach, “Eine Steppenfahrt,” Kunst und Künstler 11, no. 1 (1912): 3–12. On Barlach’s touristic gaze, see Jürgen Doppelstein, “Russland—mein Ursprung ist in dir: Kunst als Aneignung des Fremden” and “Fremd und doch daheim: Reisen als Selbstvergewisserung,” in Barlach und Russland: Ernst Barlachs Russlandreise im Sommer 1906, eds. Jürgen Doppelstein and Heike Stockhaus (Hamburg: Ernst Barlach Gesellschaft, 2002), 38–54, 111–27; and Jürgen Doppelstein, “einander fremd und unbewußt zu sein”: Ernst Barlachs Reisebericht “Reise ins Herz des südlichen Russland” als Bild kultureller Alterität: Verortung und Kritik eines Textes aus dem Jahre 1906 (Hamburg: Ernst Barlach Gesellschaft, 2008).

21. Barlach to Wilhelm Radenberg, 8 August 1911, Briefe I, 376. Barlach’s position changed during and after the war, when he began to distinguish his receptivity to what he had seen in Russia


from his sense of personal and national identity. See, Prosa II, 179; and Barlach to Karl Barlach, 6 October 1920, Briefe I, 594.

22. On Moeller van den Bruck’s life and early career, see Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 183–204; Hans-Joachim Schwierskott, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und der revolutionäre Nationalismus in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1962), 15–17; Elisabeth Kleemann, Zwischen symbolischer Rebellion und politischer Revolution: Studien zur deutschen Boheme zwischen Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik—Reventlow, Frank Wedekind, Ludwig Derleth, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Hanns Johst, Erich Mühsam (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985), 157–87; and Thorsten Kühsel, “Der ‘Preußische Stil’—Arthur Moeller van den Brucks Stilkonstruktion: Anmerkungen zu deren Rolle in der Kunstpolitik und der Kunstgeschichte zwischen 1916 und 1945,” in Kunstgeschichte im “Dritten Reich”: Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken, eds. Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters, and Barbara Schellewald (Berlin: Akademie, 2008), 205–23.

23. Christoph Garstka, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und die erste deutsche Gesamtausgabe der Werke Dostojewskijs im Piper Verlag 1906–1919 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998).

24. Barlach to Piper, Easter Monday, 1909, Briefe I, 311.25. Garstka, Moeller van den Bruck, 48.26. Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 1890–1933

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 177–79. For more on the reception of Dostoevsky by German cultural critics before World War I, see Leo Löwenthal, “Die Auffassung Dostojewskis im Vorkriegsdeutschland,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 3 (1935): 343–82; and Robert Williams, “Russians in Germany: 1900–1914,” Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 4 (October 1966): 121–49. On the popularization of the opposed idea of a “Russian peril” in the Wilhelmine public sphere, see Troy R. E. Paddock, Creating the Russian Peril: Education, the Public Sphere, and National Identity in Imperial Germany, 1890–1914 (Rochester: Camden House, 2010).

27. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, “Barlach,” Der Tag 467/215 (13 September 1912). 28. For another example of his nationalist critique of the middlebrow academic art which he took

to be prevalent in Imperial Germany, see Moeller van den Bruck’s contribution to Im Kampf um die Kunst: Die Antwort auf den “Protest Deutscher Künstler” (Munich: R. Piper, 1911), 148–53.

29. The pervasiveness of the interest in Russia—though not in the Bolsheviks—in modernist circles after the World War I is evident in the pages of Das Kunstblatt, the most important modern art journal in Germany from 1917 until 1933. See also: “Dostojewski ist mein Freund”: Graphiken, Gemälde und Buchillustrationen zu Dostojewski in der deutschen Kunst zwischen 1900 und 1950, exh. cat. (Altenburg: Lindenau-Museum, 1999).

30. Hans-Joachim Neitzke, Barlach: Deutscher Geist zwischen Westen und Osten (Eisenach: Erich Röth, 1934).

33. Magdalena Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst: Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie, 1911–1925 (Munich: Silke Schreiber, 1990), 99, 151–52, 160–62, 167. See also Tümpel, Deutsche Bildhauer, 200.

34. Piper, Nationalsozialistische Kunstpolitik, 88–90; Barron, Expressionist Sculpture, 61.35. Barlach to Piper, 21 July 1911, Briefe I, 374. Two years later, Barlach used Worringer’s notion

of the “sublime hysteria” of the Gothic to describe the poet Theodor Däubler, with whom both he and Moeller van den Bruck were befriended. See Barlach to Piper, 4 September 1913, Briefe I, 415.

36. Barlach to Moeller van den Bruck, 26 December 1911; and Barlach to Max Dietzel, 19 January 1914, Briefe I, 390, 423.

James van Dyke 303

37. Eric Michaud, “Barbarian Invasions and the Racialization of Art History,” October 139 (Winter 2012): 59–76, esp. 59–60.

38. In so doing, he ignored—or was not privy to—Barlach’s own thoughts about the full range of things—“even the sculptures of Africans and Indians”—that were of interest to the sculptor. See Barlach to Wilhelm Radenberg, 8 August 1911, Briefe I, 375, 377.

39. Moeller van den Bruck, “Barlach.”40. Moeller van den Bruck, “Barlach.”41. Arthur Moeller van den Brück, Die italienische Schönheit, 3rd, revised edition (Stuttgart: J.G.

1913.42. Garstka, Moeller van den Bruck, 91–92.43. Moeller van den Bruck, “Barlach.”44. Barlach to Moeller van den Bruck, 25 March 1913, Briefe I, 411–12.

Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 253–90; and Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 35–41.

46. Three months later, Barlach published another drawing on the thematic, though this time in a more realistic mode and with a less exalted title. Two German soldiers charge, apparently yelling, from right to left. Though they do not confront the viewer, their poses are essentially identical to that of Der Rächer, suggesting that the artist sought to propose a continuity or identity between the archaic warrior and his modern brethren. See “Sturmangriff,” Kriegszeit 1, no. 32 (24 March 1915).

and the concept of the Fatherland in his diary entry of 26 January 1915, Die Prosa II, 171.48. Barlach to Karl Barlach, 17 August 1914, Briefe I, 431. Translated in Paret and Thieme, Myth

and Modernity, 38. See also Barlach’s closely related diary entry of 26 January 1915, Prosa II, 171.

49. Barlach to Piper, 29 August 1914, Briefe I, 432.50. Barlach to Moeller van den Bruck, 2 January 1916, Briefe I, 462. For a related statement, see his

diary entry of 26 February 1916, Prosa II, 312. Though he quotes from this letter in his discus-sion of Barlach’s attitude towards military service, Peter Paret does not mention the last passage. See Paret, “Field Marshal and Beggar,” in German Encounters with Modernism, 1840–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 144–184, 161.

51. See, for instance, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Bürgerliche Kultur und künstlerische Avantgarde, 1870–1918: Kultur und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich (Berlin: Propyläen, 1994), 111–53.

52. See, for instance, Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken, 93–111; Woods, Conservative Revolu-tion, 7–28.

53. Woods, Conservative Revolution, 12–13.54. Barlach to August Gaul, 27 August 1917, Briefe I, 512. 55. Barlach to Karl Barlach, 2 November 1918, Briefe I, 530–31.56. The drawing is reproduced in Paret’s recent study of Barlach’s drawings of the Nibelungen. Though

he says little about it, he relates the drawing to Barlach’s war memorials, which he characterizes as “quiet denunciations of the massive inhumanity through which the world had passed from 1914 to 1918. . . .” See Paret and Thieme, Myth and Modernity, 102–3.

57. Barlach to Karl von Seeger, 6 February 1930, Briefe II, 207.58. Paret, “Field Marshal and Beggar,” 160–67. Paret’s and Thieme’s more recent account of Barlach’s

his attitude after only a few weeks. See Paret and Thieme, Myth and Modernity, 38–39.59. See Karl von Seeger, Das Denkmal des Weltkriegs (Stuttgart: Hugo Matthaes, 1930); Kathrin

Hoffmann-Curtius, “Altäre des Vaterlands: Zur Genese eines neuen Typus von Kriegerdenkmälern


in der Weimarer Republik,” in Visible Religion: Annual for Religious Iconography, eds. H. G. Kippenberg, L. P. van den Bosch, L. Leertouwer, and H. A. Wilte (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 142–71; George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 80–106; and Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 266–69.

60. For photos of the monuments in Munich and Bremen, see Seeger, Denkmal, 163–64.61. See Barlach’s diary entry of 8 August 1915 and his essay “Wider den Ungeist” of 1929, in Prosa

II, 270, 404–5.62. See Barlach to Reinhard Piper, 5 November 1912, Briefe I, 406; and Bushart, Geist, 55.63. The best account of Barlach’s career during these years is Paret, Artist, 77–107.64. Paul Fechter, “Ernst Barlach,” Kunst für Alle 36 (1920): 137–47.65. Paret and Thieme, Myth and Modernity, 100–101. Paret and Thieme characteristically only

mention Däubler, who reportedly saw in Barlach’s sculptures something like the “great forms” of the Nibelungenlied.

66. In addition to Paret and Thieme, Myth and Modernity, see Peter Paret, Kunst und Zeitgeschichte: Ernst Barlachs Zeichnungen zum Nibelungenlied, Festvortrag anlässlich der Verleihung der Ehrendoktorwürde (Berlin: Humboldt Universität, 2009).

67. Paret and Thieme, Myth and Modernity, 119. On Corinth’s series, see Maria Makela, “Lovis Corinth’s Themes: A Socio-Political Interpretation,” in Lovis Corinth, eds. Peter-Klaus Schuster, Christoph Vitali, and Barbara Butts, exh. cat. Haus der Kunst (Munich: Prestel, 1996), 59–68.

68. Barlach to Hugo Sieker, 5 August 1933; Barlach to Reinhard Piper, 13 January 1935; Barlach to Reinhard Piper, 14 May 1935; Barlach to Karl Barlach, 12 December 1935, Briefe II, 391, 522, 547, 596.

69. Barlach to Reinhard Piper, 21 July 1935; Barlach to Reinhard Piper, 27 March 1936; and Barlach to Joseph Goebbels, 25 May 1936, Briefe II, 567, 619, 637.

70. See Olaf Peters, “Museumspolitik im Dritten Reich: Das Beispiel der Nationalgalerie,” in Le Maraviglie dell’Arte: Kunsthistorische Miszellen für Anne Liese Gielen-Leyendecker zum 90. Geburtstag, eds. Anne-Marie Bonnet, et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 123–42.

71. Paul Fechter, “Ernst Barlach,” in Zeichnungen, by Ernst Barlach (Munich: R. Piper, 1935), 14.72. Fechter, “Barlach,” 8. Fechter’s account of Barlach’s genealogy was drawn from an article

originally published the year before by Friedrich Wilhelm Dross in the Mecklenburgischen Monatsheften, and then digested in Deutsche Zukunft. See “Barlachs Stammbaum,” Deutsche Zukunft 2, no. 2 (14 January 1934): 15.

73. Fechter, “Barlach,” 21.74. The association of Barlach’s work with the grotesque was not uncommon. It can be seen as early

by a conservative revolutionary author is found in two publications by Hans Bäcker, an obscure writer on the periphery of the national revolutionary circle around Ernst Niekisch. In 1934, Bäcker wrote a book that, between chapters on Hans Grimm and Ernst Jünger, described Barlach’s sculptures as potent images of the elemental extremes of human existence that drew one into the “world of the authentic.” See Hans Bäcker, Von deutscher Wirklichkeit und ihrer Bahn (Berlin: Widerstands-Verlag, 1934), 261–69; and Hans Bäcker, “Ernst Barlach,” Widerstand: Zeitschrift für nationalrevolutionäre Politik 8 (1933): 119–24.

75. Paul Fechter, “Die Tragödie der Kunst,” Deutsche Zukunft 2 (19 August 1934): 8. This argu-ment is also evident in earlier publications, such as Paul Fechter, Die Tragödie der Architektur (Weimar: Erich Lichtenstein, 1922).

76. Paul Fechter, “Der Zusammenbruch des Kunstbetriebes,” Deutsche Rundschau 23, no. 2 (1933): 9–12; Fechter, “Tragödie.”

77. Stern, Politics, 120, 129, 147–52. For a sample of this language in the critical reception of Barlach, see Piper, Nationalsozialistische Kunstpolitik, 27, 63, 94, 101, 105, 119. As early as 1910, Karl

James van Dyke 305

“Barlach,” 281.78. Paul Fechter, Moeller van den Bruck: Ein politisches Schicksal (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1934).79. Wolfgang Tarnowski, introduction to Ernst Barlach —Reinhard Piper. Briefwechsel 1900–1938

(Munich: Piper, 1997), 22, 24. 80. Barlach to Reinhard Piper, 6 August 1934; Barlach to Reinhard Piper, 13 January 1935; Barlach

to Reinhard Piper, 2 October 1935; Barlach to Paul Fechter, 2 October 1935, Briefe II, 485, 522, 582–84. On Fechter’s role in the emergence of the völkisch interpretation of German Expres-sionism, see Bushart, Geist, 103.

81. Barlach to Friedrich Düsel, 2 August 1890, Briefe I, 128; Barlach to Hans Oberländer, 24 June 1932, Briefe II, 313–14.

82. Barlach to Karl Barlach, 2 November 1918, Briefe I, 530.

Barlach and the Conservative Revolution

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