The Texts of a Visual Artist

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) is mostly known as an architect. But he was also a writer on architecture, and although he too primarily viewed himself as a practitioner, his role as a theoretician also served to bolster his confidence. The theoretical foundation of his work was important to him; he gave great attention to studying the texts of others as well as to writing his own. At the same time, Schinkel's ‘Theory’ is not a coherent and worked-out system, but is rather a collection of short texts from various contexts: official documents, journal entries, letters, notes on general theoretical problems. The question of what the comprehensive theoretical work that Schinkel announced in his lifetime might have looked like, remains unanswered today. This question is, however, not merely a matter of philological detail. We do not even know whether Schinkel would have chosen for the theoretical work he never produced the format of a traditional architectural textbook or whether he would have adopted a framework of dialogues and fragmentary drafts.

Incomplete and fragmentary though the theoretical work is that Schinkel left behind, the range of its allusions outside the realm of architecture is very varied. Schinkel's texts touch not only on the actual theory of architecture, but also take up wider questions of cultural criticism, general aesthetics, the philosophy of history, national culture and educational theory. In this, Schinkel's œuvre – his works of art as well as his theory – is both a component and a result of the network of ideas that made up German Idealism in general and their realisation in ‘Berliner Klassik’ in particular.

Homeric Warriors and Modern Combat Surgery

IN GOTTFRIED BENN'S PHILOSOPHICAL DIALOGUE “Drei alte Männer” (Three Old Men), Goethe is seen as a distanced, Olympian writer who declines to immerse himself in the morally suspect quagmire of current politics. This is not the place to discuss the validity of this poetic statement from the late 1940s — new interpretations paint a different picture of the stance of the “Weimarer Dichterfürst” (poet prince of Weimar) toward and of his involvement in the wars of his time — but Benn certainly formulated a longstanding and influential preconception about German idealism. German artists and thinkers, so the argument goes, fled from the political landscape of the French Revolution to the Arcadian lands of Greece to consort with tragic gods and supreme artists rather than radical politicians and modern militaries.

Goethe's close friend, Wilhelm von Humboldt — living in a private museum of ancient art which Berglar calls “a dream of classical Greece reborn on the sandy grounds of the Mark Brandenburg” — was one of many German thinkers from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries who spent most of his intellectual existence in ancient Greece.