For Germans, as for others, the late 19th and early 20th centuries marked the high era of nation-building. Most obviously, this manifested itself in increasingly strident, and sometimes thoroughly intolerant, attempts to define a canon of national culture—not only in the visual and plastic arts, but also in music, literature and architecture. But the formation of national identity also took place in dialogue with the culture of others: arguments about the history of others were simultaneously statements about the imagined, or desired, collective self. As Martin Ruehl’s The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860-1930 shows, successive explorations of Quattrocento Florence in this tumultuous period generated a highly legible script for our own explorations of the German national imagination. His book is recommended to anyone wishing to understand the trajectories of this fascinating area of intellectual history.
Ruehl reminds us first that many liberal scholars of the late 19th century were first drawn to the Renaissance as a symbol of humanism, individualism and civic self-government. With Jacob Burckhardt, the Renaissance was seen as the moment of modernity’s breakthrough. Not for nothing were civic institutions such as town halls, theatres and concert halls built in Neo-Renaissance style. As many scholars have noted, this testified to the ongoing vibrancy of liberal politics in cities up and down Germany down to the turn of the century. So far, so comparatively familiar, yet Ruehl’s argument takes a bold, unfashionable—but thoroughly persuasive—turn in reminding us that this was not the only, and possibly not the most compelling, version of the Renaissance in circulation before the First World War.
Towards the turn of the century, Burckhardt’s take on the Renaissance gradually gave way to something else, as commentators started responding more to the violence of the period and to the realpolitik of its protagonists; by 1900, a new ideal of the Renaissance had emerged that was informed by the vitalist ideals of Nietzsche and his acolytes. As he rightly notes, German readings of Italian culture and history were also refracted through an often stridently anti-Catholic and anti-Italian lens. From the Kulturkampf of the 1870s through the anti-Italian emotions of the First World War and the renewed anti-Catholicism of the 1920s and the Depression, responses to the Renaissance were increasingly governed by a Protestant nationalist and German-centric vision of history.
Worse was to come. In a trenchant critique of the post-First World War writings of the historian Ernst Kantorowicz, Ruehl underlines the extent to which representations of the Renaissance became inflected with overtly nationalist and racist assumptions about Germany’s mission in the world. In the face of the author’s impressive dissection of Kantorowicz’s writings, indeed, previous scholars’ assertions that the historian had been a “nationalist, but not a racist” are left looking decidedly apologetic.
Finally, Riehl gives a fascinating account of how the pre-1933 tradition of German Renaissance studies migrated intellectually, with its refugee protagonists, to the US, leaving a gap in German acadaemia that has never really been filled. In the post-war era, Burkhardt’s notion that the Renaissance marked the birth of the modern world was supplanted by a consensus that the Reformation should lay proper claim to this role. Reformation studies have continued to prosper ever since, as the looming Luther Year will doubtless give us renewed cause to acknowledge. The nationalist and racist readings of the Renaissance that fuelled the climate in which the Third Reich was called forth, meanwhile, ultimately led to the demise in Germany of that field of study itself.
• Neil Gregor is the professor of modern European history at the University of Southampton where he specialises in modern German cultural history. He is writing a book about symphonic concert life in Nazi Germany
The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860-1930
Martin Ruehl
Cambridge University Press, 341pp, £65 (hb)