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Style or Transition?: The fallacies of classification discussed in the light of German architecture 1190–1260

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Willibald Sauerlander
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Extract

On the second of September 1895, the anniversary-day of the battle of Sedan — the decisive victory of the Prussians over Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 — the consecration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche took place in Berlin (Fig. 1). Like many other nineteenth-century churches the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche was as much a political as an ecclesiastical monument: a fortress against the destructive forces of anarchy and socialism — this is the German emperor’s own statement — and, needless to say, an expression of the national spirit. Such intentions on the part of the leading forces of the German monarchy had their impact on the choice of the style for this imperial memorial. This style had to fulfil several conditions: it had to look genuinely German, it had to be decently religious and it had to recall the imperial past of the medieval Empire. Franz Schwechten’s building is one of the last great examples of nineteenth-century eclecticism in Berlin. Combining Gothic rose-windows with Romanesque towers, it is a rehearsal of the so-called Rhenish transitional style, which was so much cherished by the newly-founded German empire and especially by the emperor Wilhelm II himself. The church was largely destroyed in the Second World War. Its original effect must have been rather like Hollywood: at the end of one of the most elegant nineteenth-century boulevards of the modern capital stood a monument looking like a Rhenish medieval church — St Peter’s at Sinzig or St Mary’s in Gelnhausen. Oberhofmeister Ernst von Mirbach, who was the leading force behind the project, wrote in 1897: ‘Die Kirche ist im spätgermanischen, dem sogenannten Übergangsstil entworfen. “Germanisch” und nicht mit dem falschen Worte “Romanisch” sollte man den Stil bezeichnen, welcher sich bei germanischen Volksstämmen eigenartig und grossartig herausbildete und in deutschen Gauen seine lieblichste und vollendetste Blüte erreichte.’ [’The church is in the late Germanic, the so-called transitional style. One should describe it as German and not use the inappropriate term Romanesque for this style, which was formed particularly and most splendidly by the German people and reached its fullest and most beautiful flowering in the German-speaking lands.’]

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 30 , 1987 , pp. 1 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1987

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References

Notes

1 For the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche see: Die Bauwerke von Berlin und Brandenburg. Stadt und Bezirk Charlottenburg. Bearb. Wirth, von Irmgard (Berlin, 1961), p. 74 fr.Google Scholar; Frowein-Ziroff, Vera, Die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Berlin, 1982), esp. p. 44 Google Scholar for the description by v. Mirbach.

2 Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et métiers, 16 (Neuchastel, 1765), col. 554/555.

3 Millin, , Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts, 11 (Paris, 1806), p. 701 Google Scholar.

4 For the meaning of ‘transitio’ in ancient Latin see Georges, , Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 2 (Basel, 1959), col. 3189Google Scholar.

5 Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species (Avenel Edition, 1979), p. 205.Google Scholar

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7 Quoted from Pevsner, Nikolaus, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1972), p. 20, note 19Google Scholar.

8 Rickman, Thomas, An attempt to discriminate styles of architecture in England from the Conquest to the Reformation (London, 1817)Google Scholar; see also Warton, Thomas, Observations on the Faery Queen of Spenser (London, 1763)Google Scholar.

9 Dallaway, James, Observations on English Architecture (London, 1806), p. 21 Google Scholar; von Schlegel, Friedrich, Grundzüge der gothischen Baukunst auf einer Reise durch die Niederlande, die Schweiz und einen Theil von Frankreich. In dem Jahre 1804–1805. Cited from von Schlegel, F., Ansichten und Ideen von der christlichen Kunst (Bonn, 1877), p. 217 Google Scholar.

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12 Whewell, William, Architectural notes on German churches (1830), quoted from Pevsner, op. cit. note 7., p. 45 ffGoogle Scholar.

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18 See Verbeek, Albert, ‘Ottonische und staufische Wandgliederung am Niederrhein’, in Beiträge zur Kunst des Mittelalters. Vorträge des I. Deutschen Kunsthistorikertages 1948 (Berlin, n.d.), p. 70 Google Scholar.

19 Kubach/Verbeek, op. cit. note 17, vol. 1, 513.

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21 See note 13.

22 See Franki, Paul, The Gothic. Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton, 1960), pp. 503.513.516Google Scholar.

23 For St Severin see Kubach/Verbeek, op. cit. note 17, vol. 1, 596 ff.

24 Erwin Panofsky in Jean Bony, op. cit. note 15, vol. 1, 81 ff.

25 For Münstermaifeld see Kubach/Verbeek, op. cit. note 17, vol. 11, 808 ff.

26 For Linz see Kubach/Verbeek, op. cit. note 17, vol. 11, 673.

27 See again Kubach/Verbeek, vol. 1, 107.

28 See Gall, Ernst, St Georg in Limburg an der Lahn. Festchrifl für Adolph Goldschmidt zum 60. Geburtstag (Leipzig, 1923), p. 7 ffGoogle Scholar; Bony, Jean, ‘The resistance to Chartres in early thirteenth century architecture’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, Ser. 3, xx/xxi (1957/58), 35 ffGoogle Scholar.

29 See the very pertinent remarks of Bandmann, Günther in ‘Das Langhaus des Bonner Münsters und seine künstlerische Stellung’, in Bonn und sein Münster (Bonn, 1947), pp. 108 ff.Google Scholar, especially pp. 117 ff. Bandmann is, however, still too much in favour of the autochthonous theory.

30 For Gelnhausen see, among others, Noack, W., Die Kirchen von Gelnhausen (Halle, 1912)Google Scholar; Fath, M., ‘Die Baukunst der frühen Gotik im Mittelrheingebiet’, Mainzer Zeitschrift, 63/64 (1968/69), 1 ff, and 65 (1970), 43 ffGoogle Scholar.

31 Förster, Ernst, Monuments d’architecture, de sculpture et de peinture de l’Allemagne. Architecture, tome 1er (Paris, 1859), p. 129 Google Scholar.

32 See Frowein-Ziroff, op. cit., note 1, p. 44ff.

33 For a discussion of these problems see Belting, H., Kroos, R., Sauerländer, W., in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 41 (1978), 181–258 Google Scholar.

34 For the Quedlinburger Altar once in the Berlin Museum see Stange, Alfred, ‘Deutsche Romanische Tafelmalerei’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, NF vii (1930), 125 ffGoogle Scholar.

35 See Grodecki, Louis, ‘Les problèmes de l’origine de la peinture gothique et le “maître de saint-Chéron” de la cathédrale de Chartres’, Revue de l’Art, 40-41 (1978), 43 ffGoogle Scholar.

36 See Sauerländer, W., ‘Die Naumburger Stifterfiguren. Rückblick und Fragen’, in Die Zeit der Staufer, Katalog der Ausstellung 1977, vol. v, Supplement: Vorträge und Forschungen (Stuttgart, 1979), 169 ffGoogle Scholar.

37 Dethard von Winterfeld, unpublished lecture delivered in 1981 at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

38 See Sauerländer quoted note 36.

39 For the windows at Naumburg see Wentzel, Hans, ‘Die Glasmalereien im Naumburger Westchor’, in Deutsche Kunst, hrsg. von Ludwig Roselius, Glasmalerei (Bremen und Berlin, 1944)Google Scholar; and Wentzel, H., Meisterwerke der Glasmalerei (Berlin, 1954)Google Scholar.