Despite getting only one question wrong on my German citizenship test a few years ago, my knowledge of German history (I suspect, like many a Berlin migrant) contains some sizeable gaps. There are entire millennia during which I couldn’t tell you a single meaningful detail about the country – or the landmass, as it then was. Things begin to improve in the 20th century, and between 1933 and 1945 my knowledge reaches near-academic levels before tapering off again after 1989. Things pick up again around the time when I moved here in the late 00s.
It’s fair to ask what any of this has to do with art. Very little. But with the art world still in its wintry lull and Gallery Weekend not kicking off until early May, this is an ideal moment to visit the often-overlooked Deutsches Historisches Museum. Its current exhibition, Nature and German History. Faith – Biology – Power, takes you on a breathless ride through 800 years of entanglement between landscape, myth and nation-building. And it’s full of art – just not by many names you’d recognise.
Recognising our brain-addled attention spans, the exhibition moves at an electric pace – the institutional equivalent of doomscrolling – with videos, paintings, audio clips and artefacts unfolding into streams of fascinating tangents. Who knew rhubarb was named after the ‘barbarians’, those who were said to occupy the northern German lands beyond Roman influence? Delicate bookplate illustrations of the flavoursome plant appear alongside a preserved 1929 specimen. The show quickly segues to Luther’s hero, the most famous barbarian of all: Hermann the German, mastermind of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD – one of the most consequential ambushes in European history. Nearby hangs a portrait by Lucas Cranach of a plump, suspicious-looking Luther, dressed in all black.
The exhibition considers how Germany’s natural world has shaped its people – fed them, nurtured them, betrayed them – and how, in turn, they’ve shaped and oftentimes failed to protect it. The environmental consequences of straightening the Rhine near Karlsruhe in the 19th century are revealed alongside the protests against nuclear power in Wyhl in the 1970s. We see how ideas and new technologies sweep into the country, like the humble potato which arrived from Peru like a rock star, saving swathes of the population from starvation. In one memorable painting, Friedrich II of Prussia, the ‘Potato King’, resplendent in blue robes and bicorne hat, steps into a muddy field, urging peasants to plant the knobbly tuber.
The darker chapters are unavoidable, and the curators don’t shy away from big questions.
The darker chapters are unavoidable, and the curators don’t shy away from big questions indelibly entwined with German history. An open copy of Ernst Haeckel’s The History of Creation (1899) displays his diagram ‘Genealogy of the Twelve Species of Men’, an attempt to classify humanity into hierarchical ‘species’. Unsurprisingly, Indo-Germanians sit at the top. It’s a reminder that grotesque racial theories circulated long before the National Socialists later weaponised them. From here, the exhibition moves to Gustav Landauer and his book translations of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who rejected battle metaphors of nature – which privilege struggle for survival – in favour of cooperation and mutual aid. Throughout the exhibition, the idea of nature shifts constantly while the concepts around it become increasingly politicised.
This is a sprawling, somewhat hectic show, and wandering through it you realise you must have been shaped by these forces too. I’m now considered German. I even have a Kleingarten (and I’m also currently removing some toxic asbestos tiles from it). Yet this vast, culturally and environmentally diverse country often feels as though it’s passing me by. I know only a small part of it and see very little of it. Perhaps that’s why I remain oddly distant from the idea of Germany itself: the landmass, the landscape, the people. Then again, perhaps that distance is part of it too.
Nature and German History. Faith – Biology – Power is on until Jun 7 at the Deutsches Historisches Museum.
