On 11 September 1907 The Musical Courier issued a report describing Joachim's funeral in Berlin, noting the deceased's important role at the Hochschule für Musik – he was the only one on whom the title ‘“Director of the Hochschule”, as a whole’ was conferred – and comparing the funeral to that of a king. At the cemetery of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, named after Wilhelm I, grandfather of the dedicatee of Joachim's Kaiser Wilhelm Overture (1896), Beethoven's ‘Funeral March’ was played. Joachim, the composer of virtuoso fantasies, songs, character pieces, overtures ‘a l’école de Weymar’ (in the style of the Weimar School), concertos, cipher obsessions, works in the elegiac style, vocal pieces, melodramas, and marches, was subsumed in that same Prussian Hochschuldirektor and larger-thanlife German violinist to whom 200,000 guests paid their respects.

Joachim, a ‘king’ or Geigerkönig, as he was often designated in his last decades, but also a ‘durch und durch Deutscher Künstler’ (‘a German artist through and through’), was buried on 23 August 1907 as an artist whose ‘Germanness’, though noted as early as 1854, was now recognized. And if in the middle of the century the definition of ‘Germanness’ seemed open to interpretation – as evident in the diverse groups of musicians with different aesthetic banners who claimed it – since 1871 a distinctly political definition had developed. This chapter treats Joachim's Prussian sense of ‘Germanness’, more specifically, a particular definition that was related to his position at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, which he founded in 1869, and to the music he composed in his capacity as Hochschuldirektor.

In founding the Königlich Akademische Hochschule für Musik, by an intriguing turn of destiny Joachim realized Mendelssohn's earlier efforts in 1843 to establish a conservatory in Berlin under Friedrich Wilhelm IV, which had failed. Hence Mendelssohn moved the project to Leipzig, thereby attracting the twelve-year-old Joachim (or rather, his father), who, as a consequence, sent his son to the city. In Weissmann's history of Berlin, the year 1869 was singled out as especially noteworthy: ‘Joachim is called to Berlin. He will direct the newly founded royal conservatory of music [Hochschule für Musik]. This is more than a simple calling. It means giving new impulse to practical [instrumental] music in Berlin, which without a superior guiding spirit threatened to turn to silt in the sand and become mediocre.’