Peter M. McIsaac

PUBLIC‐PRIVATE SUPPORT OF THE ARTS AND GERMAN CULTURAL POLICY: The case of Wilhelm Bode

This paper provides a historical context for thinking about Germany’s recent embrace of sponsorship and private donations as a means of supporting education and the arts. The paper notes that the chief architect of a new national cultural policy, Michael Naumann, has justified a turn to public‐private collaborative arts funding with the argument that a market‐driven model of private responsibility for the arts stimulates greater citizen involvement in civic life and thus greater democracy. Yet Naumann has not reconciled this argument with Germany’s own history, in particular the fact that Germany’s Golden Age of private support of the arts coincided with the authoritarian German Empire (1871–1918). My analysis of this historical constellation, presented as a case study of one of Germany’s most important museum directors, Wilhelm Bode (1845–1929), argues that private support of the arts formed part of a larger strategy designed to wrest control of arts institutions away from traditional elites. My essay seeks to show that the rise of more responsive public forums was intended to make the fruits of German imperialism and economic domination available to more Germans, particularly middle class Germans. On this basis, the essay suggests two things. First, German imperialist society was less hierarchical and more broadly participatory than is often assumed, complicating its ability to figure as a negative foil today. Second, the harnessing of market forces to German culture was expected to deepen popular appreciation for chauvinistic conceptions of German nationalism that today seem to conflict with what German democracy might ideally be. With these points in mind, I contend not that sponsorship and private donations are incapable of promoting greater public involvement in the arts. Rather, the private sector might yield more democratic outcomes when publicly funded democratic institutions retain a strong voice in the direction of culture.

Rethinking Tableaux Vivants and Triviality in the Writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johanna Schopenhauer, and Fanny Lewald

This article rethinks the trivial status of tableaux vivants to generate insights into notions of femininity, aesthetics, identity, and high and low culture between 1780 and 1850. Arguing that a gendered, high/low cultural divide has obscured the complexity originally attributed to tableaux, the essay excavates the Goethezeit thinking that accompanied tableaux. In spite of not conforming to classical aesthetic categories, tableaux were deemed capable of rendering feminine desire visible and symbolically containable in the speechless female body. With this understanding, the essay illuminates both how tableaux construct Ottilie as a figure of renunciation in Goethes Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) and how Johanna Schopenhauers Gabriele (1819) and Fanny Lewalds Jenny (1843) interrogate feminine renunciation by varying Goethes device. Read in this manner, Gabriele reveals contradictions in Goethes notions of femininity, while Jennys performance as Ivanhoes Rebecca (1819) articulates an alternative femininity to Goethean renunciation at the same time as it mobilizes Ivanhoes critique of Jewish conversion and national identity for Lewalds German cultural context. (PMM)