The longing for the lost innocence outside the city has long been popular. It is such a big topic in literature that Julia Encke in the FAS attested to a “villageization” of literature. Whether Juli Zeh, Judith Herrman or Daniela Krien, the village is “the star of contemporary novels” and Zeh’s novel Under people from 2016 was the starting signal for the village renaissance. The book tells from multiple perspectives about conflicts that arise during the construction of a wind farm in Brandenburg, and the issues of our time can be seen on the narrow horizon. But, according to Encke, the world view of such novels gets stuck in the provinces, as if there were a connection between the village and a new coziness.
But the desire to get out and find the simple life is much older. The story begins in the 19th century, with the authors and artists who came to Lake Constance from the beginning of modernism, and to whom an exhibition in the Zeppelin Museum is now dedicated: Relationship Status: Open. Art and literature at Lake Constance.
At night and in stormy weather, the lake in southern Germany is a small angry sea. It is easy to understand why the Westphalian romantic Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was drawn here. The baroness from an old aristocratic family in Münster was unmarried and wanted to be a writer, so her only option was to flee the repressive Catholic family. In 1835 she fell in love with the wild and gentle landscape and decided to buy a house with a vineyard. But she could not enjoy her property for a long time because she died in May 1848. At night, on the shore of Lake Constance, you can actually feel a bit of space when the Swiss shore is barely visible.
Friedrichshafen is a sleepy place, but it became important thanks to the construction of zeppelins and aviation. Cars, airplane engines and, of course, airships. The museum building was once the port station on the north shore of the lake, an elegant, airy building clad in travertine. It was built between 1929 and 1933 and only opened when the Nazis were already in power. The design, committed to New Objectivity, suddenly fell out of time. The Allies threw bombs on the war-important small town until almost nothing was left of it. Today there is still the station building with the museum between the pedestrianized city center, which is perhaps a bit sadder here than elsewhere, and the lake. It is special because it is a technology museum – a part of the Hindenburg airship can be seen reconstructed – with an art collection.
The lake shores are a laboratory for so many things that defined the 20th century, and the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen now brings it all together. The curator Mark Niehoff wants the small-scale show to encourage participation and at the same time be as intimate as a living room. There is a lot to see and read: paintings, drawings, letters – after all, it’s about the open relationship that literature and fine arts have with one another. The exhibition requires slowing down, with its numerous exhibits arranged in showcases and niches, it is quite demanding in general.
It’s actually strange that this area, which played no significant role in politics or culture from the late Middle Ages until the 19th century, should have had such an appeal. The free imperial cities that settled here – St. Gallen, Constance, Überlingen, Lindau – fell into oblivion until the Romantics came here. Droste-Hülshoff lived almost exactly in the time between two revolutions – namely the French and the March Revolution. Her biography coincides with what the philosopher Hans Blumenberg once called an epochal threshold between the early modern period and the modern age.
impositions of modernity
This concentration of Central European modernity in one place may be due to the fact that Germany, Switzerland and Austria meet here. But it certainly has something to do with the remoteness of this place, one might almost say: with its provincial nature. First came the life reformers. The boarding school Schloss Salem was founded a little north of the lake right after the First World War, initially with a national and conservative focus, but the line changed because the founders were open to the ideas of the reform movement. The school attracted sophisticated and wealthy families of the Weimar Republic. Golo and Monika Mann studied here, as did the daughter of architect Mies van der Rohe. In those years, the myth of the boarding school was cemented, which continues to this day.
The reform disciples stand on the threshold of a time that is perhaps a little bit like ours. The Riga-born writer Bruno Goetz, for example. He moved to Lake Constance after living on Monte Verità in Ascona, where artists had settled around the turn of the century. They seek rejuvenation and a cure for the disease called modernity. With these ideas in his luggage, Goetz climbed down from the self-proclaimed mountain of truth and went to Lake Constance. He and his wife, the painter Elisabeth Goetz von Ruckteschell, moved into the house on the rainbow, where they created a kind of proto-hippie idyll. Crystalline paintings of eerily empty metropolises were created here, as an indictment of the impositions of the industrial age. Literary magazines were published and festivals celebrated. All this often by candlelight, because the bohemians couldn’t always pay their electricity bills. The neighbors quickly found a name for the oddball’s abode: Hunger Hill.
The house in turn belonged to the brother of Ludwig Binswanger, a student of CG Jung, a psychiatrist and director of the Bellevue mental hospital on the Swiss shore of the lake. That was a magic mountain for burnt-out intellectuals. Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann’s family were guests here, the director was friends with Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had his war trauma treated here and portrayed the psychiatrist with the sad eyes. Aby Warburg’s lecture on the rituals of Native Americans, in which the art historian interweaves mythical thinking with the philosophy of symbolic forms, has become famous. Warburg, who was in the mental institution because he had threatened to kill himself and his family, was supposed to speed up his recovery with the lecture. That was Binswanger’s idea. A strange interlacing of places and times had room in the bright, spacious rooms of the institution.
The end came soon. Some of the writers from the shore swore allegiance to Adolf Hitler in 1933, including Ludwig Finckh, a friend of Hermann Hesse, who then turned his back on him. It becomes clear how close land and healing sometimes are to blood and soil. The avant-garde drifted apart with the Nazi era. Others fled here to escape the terror. Otto Dix was forced by the Nazis to give up his professorship in Dresden. He went to Lake Constance and was bored: “There was nothing else here. I’ve been banished to the countryside,” he said later. You can see the frustration in the pictures of the big city painter. After 1945, the region could no longer really connect to the years before.
The hipster accusation
The exhibition lets characters appear like a social novel who are related, married or connected in loose affairs until your head is spinning. And that doesn’t even include the polyamorous ties surrounding the Mann and Wedekind families. The show seems completeist, as if it wanted to tell almost everything. How incidental is Relationship Status: Open but also a very contemporary exhibition, with all the trying out of new life plans, the mixture of work and life and creativity as the highest good. Nevertheless, it is precisely there that she is giving away her potential. Because Martin Walser, who was born on the lake and has lived there for a long time, has to serve as a bridge to the present, but many more paths lead to the present – but indirectly.
One of these begins with those who now consider themselves avant-garde looking back to the provinces. The critic Julia Encke finds that bad. She writes about rural mysteries and feuilleton darlings and how crazy it is to think that literature about the countryside has anything to do with society. She accuses authors of escapism and gentrification.
For example the writer and filmmaker Lola Randl. Encke accuses her of being a hipster. Randl (Friday 19/2019) probably written the best village novel of recent years – The Big Garden – who talks about earthworms, life and death with played naïve language. The cosmos in the vegetable patch, so to speak, and in doing so Randl finds a completely new form, a meticulous descriptive literature for organic gardeners. Encke’s bleak diagnosis is simply that becoming a village makes contemporary literature tedious and homogeneous. In the Uckermark (or on Lake Constance) you don’t notice anything about the shocks and fears of the major conflicts. How wrong she is can be seen in the Zeppelin Museum, because the detours of (literary) history often lead through the provinces, to the village and to the periphery, and sometimes the paths also start here.
One has to remember what Rem Koolhaas wrote in his 2020 book Countryside: A Report ushering in the new decade: “The land must be rediscovered and settled in order to stay alive.” And yes, we are at (not just) a threshold again – and fittingly, the center of gravity from relationship status: Open especially in the years between the wars of the last century – with scarce living space in the cities and all the challenges related to ecological management. According to the Dutch architect, the country has been a forgotten empire for too long. Maybe it’s time to talk about it again.
Relationship Status: Open. Art and literature at Lake Constance Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen until November 6th