Architecture in The Museum - Displacement, Reconstruction and Reproduction of The Monuments of Antiquity in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, Volume 1 (PHD Thesis)

ARCHITECTURE IN THE MUSEUM:
DISPLACEMENT, RECONSTRUCTION AND REPRODUCTION

OF THE MONUMENTS OF ANTIQUITY IN BERLINS PERGAMON MUSEUM
Volume I
S. M. Can Bilsel
A DISSERTATION
PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY
OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE
OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE

BY THE SCHOOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
NOVEMBER 15, 2003
UMI Number: 3107866
Copyright 2003 by
Bilsel, S. M. Can
All rights reserved.
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Copyright by S. M. Can Bilsel, 2003. All rights reserved.
Abstract
This dissertation is a study in the formation of modern knowledge about the architecture
of antiquity. Its main concern is to address an epistemic problem by exploring the
relationship between archaeologythe scholarly practice of excavating the pastand
the reconstruction and display of monuments of antiquity in the museumthe process
through which the history of art and culture becomes intelligible to modern viewers.
Exploring the framing of archaeological fragments by modern visions, I examine the
Pergamon Museum, a highly contested and, yet, immensely popular museum of ancient
architecture in Berlin, and three of its chief exhibits, the Great Altar of Pergamon, the
Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.
The first part of the dissertation, Architecture in the Museum, investigates the
architectural exhibits of the Pergamon Museum through the 20th century theories of
museology and historic preservation. Part 2, The Architecture of an Imperial Museum
in Berlin, studies how German imperialist discourse on art and Kultur was translated
into the actual ordering of works of art and cultural contexts in Alfred Messels project
of the Royal Prussian Museum of 1907 (todays Pergamon Museum). In Part 3, The
Altar and its Frames, I study the history of the museum displays and reconstructions of
the Great Altar of Pergamon, from Carl Humanns excavations of the castle of Bergama
iii
in 1878 to 1930 when the Pergamon Museum was opened to the public. The final part of
the dissertation focuses on Walter Andraes curious reproduction of Babylonian
architecture in the museums South Wing, reframing the products of an archaic industry
as unique works of art.
Focusing on the history of the construction of the Pergamon Museum, I expose the
ideological underpinnings of the process that transformed fragmentary archaeological
finds into complete museum-objects. I argue that, even though initially hypothetical, the
reconstituted monuments gained autonomy from the discursive field in which they had
found their form and, through the assumption of aesthetic distance and modern
spectatorship, have come to replace the lost antique originals instead of merely
representing them.
iv
Table of Contents
Volume I
Abstract ... iii
List of Illustrations . vii
Acknowledgements .... xvi
Part 1. Architecture in the Museum: Definitions and Problems

1. 1. Architectonic Restitution: Historical Monument versus Historical Dcor . 2
1. 2. Architecture in the Museum: Viewing the Fragment and the Whole 17
1. 3. Monuments in Exile: On the Location and Dislocation of Architecture 24
1. 4. On the Historical Method ...31
Part 2. The Architecture of an Imperial Museum in Berlin: Art and Kultur

2. 1. Alfred Messels Project for the Royal Prussian Museum, c. 1907 ... 39
2. 2. On the Vocation of the Museum: Bildung versus Kultur .. 60
2.3. Art versus Ethnology: Imperial Archaeology and Taxonomies of Culture ... 85
2. 4. The Style-Room: Between the Original Setting and the Bourgeois Intrieur 97
Part 3. The Altar and Its Frames: Reconstructing Pergamon

3. 1. Space and Relief in the Pergamon Room ... 106
3. 2. Antique Fragments and Modern Visions 118
3. 3. The Problem of Museum Reconstruction 135
3. 4. On the Museums Object: a Model, a Dcor and a Restored Monument 141
3. 5. The Museum of Ancient Architecture: Monuments for Mass-Spectacle 151
Part 4. Architectural Reproduction: Reconstructing Babylon

4. 1. The Lion of Babylon in the Age of the Work of Art 169
4. 2. Transgressing Bilderverbot: the Babel-Bible Controversy . 180
4. 3. Romantic Reconstruction: in Search of Organic Essence ... 188
4. 4. Symbol, Ornament, Art: Figures of the Counter-Enlightenment 199
Conclusion. On the Modern Cult of Authenticity . 209
Selected Bibliography .. 220
Volume II
Illustrations
Illustrations for Part 1 . 259
vi
List of Illustrations
Illustrations for Part 1

Fig. 1.1
The reconstruction of the West Faade of Great Altar of Pergamon,

completed in 1929, the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
Fig. 1.2
Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (6th to 5th
century B.C.), completed in 1930, Vorderasiatisches (Near Eastern)
Museum (in the Pergamon Museum), Berlin.
Fig. 1.3
Theodor Wiegand, the reconstruction of the Market Gate of Miletus (c.

160 A.D.), c. 1926-1929, the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
Fig. 1.4
Reconstruction of the Market Gate of Miletus (c. 160 A.D.), c. 19261929, Berlin.
Fig. 1.5
Detail From the Photograph of the Reconstruction of the Market Gate of

Miletus, c. 1926.
Fig. 1.6
Zeus in Exile from the cover of Sefa Tas- kIns book Srgndeki Zeus:
Bergamadan Berline, Berlinden Bergamaya).
vii

Fig. 2.1
Perspective drawing, showing Berlins Museum from the Southeast.
Fig. 2.2
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museums, completed in 1830, Berlin,

showing the main faade from the Lustgarten.
Fig. 2.3
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Site Plan of the (Altes) Museum showing the
Royal Palace (below) and the Custom Houses (Packhof) along the
Kupfergraben (above), 1823.
Fig. 2.4
August Stler, Forum with the Neues Museum, site plan, 1853.
Fig. 2.5
August Stler, Forum with the Neues Museum, elevations and

perspective.
Fig. 2.6
August Orth, master plan of the Museum Island, 1875.
Fig. 2.7
August Orth, plan of the Museum Island, second design, 1875.
Fig. 2.8
August Orth, master plan of the Museum Island. View from the
Kupfergraben canal.
viii
Fig. 2.9.
Alfred Messel, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Island, 1884, site plan.
Fig. 2.10

Island, 1884, elevation from the Kupfergraben.
Fig. 2.11

Island, 1884, section.
Fig. 2.12
Alfred Messel, Project for the Extension of the Royal Prussian Museum
and Development of the Museum Island, 22 August 1907.
Fig. 2.13
Alfred Messel, Project for the Extension of the Royal Prussian Museum.
Fig. 2.14
Alfred Messel, Project for the Extension of the Royal Prussian Museum
in Berlin, 30 October 1907. The first exhibition (ground) floor.
Fig. 2.15
Alfred Messel, Extension of the Royal Prussian Museum in Berlin, 30

October 1907. Section through the court and the Pergamon Altar-Room.
Fig. 2.16
Alfred Messel, Gothic Room.
Fig. 2.17
Alfred Messel, Baroque Room.
ix
Fig. 2.18
The view of August Stlers Neues Museum from the Kupfergraben, c.

1930.
Fig. 2.19
August Stler, Neues Museum, plan of the 1st and 2nd floors.
Fig. 2.20
August Stler, cross-section of the Egyptian Court with a view to the

Northwest.
Fig. 2.21
August Stler, cross-section of the main stairwell with a view to the

South.
Fig. 2.22
August Stler, cross-section in the Greek Court with a view to the North.
Fig. 2.23
August Stler, Egyptian Court in the Neues Museum.
Fig. 2.24
View of the Egyptian Department in the Neues Museum.
Fig. 2.25
Entrance of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
Fig. 2.26
Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Schematized floor plans after Ernst von Inhe.
Fig. 2.27
Wilhelm von Bodes arrangement of the Simon Room (dedicated to

James Simon) in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
Fig. 2.28
Wilhelm von Bode, arrangement of the Rembrandt Room in the Kaiser

Friedrich Museum.

Fig. 3.1
The reconstruction of the West Faade of the Great Altar of Pergamon,

completed in 1929, the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
Fig. 3.2
The Pergamonsaal in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
Fig. 3.3
Okeanos and other figures from the Gigantomachy (Western Frieze), as

displayed on the reconstruction of the West Faade of the altar, Pergamon
Museum.
Fig. 3.4
The reconstruction of the West Faade of the Great Altar of Pergamon in

relief against the background of the museum wall.
Fig. 3.5
The Telephos Room at the time of the reopening of the Pergamon

Museum in 1959.
xi
Fig. 3.6
Detail from Pergamonsaal showing a point where the reconstruction of

the altar meets the wall of the gallery.
Fig. 3.7
Slabs of the Gigantomachy Frieze (North Frieze) against the wall of the
museum.
Fig. 3.8
Detail from the Topographical Plan of Roman Pergamon by A. Attila and

U. Wulf.
Fig. 3.9
Volker Kstner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of Pergamon,

ground plan.
Fig. 3.10
Wolffram Hoepfner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of

Pergamon, ground plan.
Fig. 3.11

Pergamon, section.
Fig. 3.12

Pergamon, East Faade.
Fig. 3.13
Comparison of the reconstructed plan of the Great Altar with a schematic

plan of the Pergamonsaaal.
xii
Fig. 3.14
Bergama, Western Turkey, view from the citadel (the former Acropolis of
the Hellenistic Pergamon).
Fig. 3.15
Christian Wilberg, Excavations at the Byzantine Wall Where the First

Reliefs Were Found, 1879.
Fig. 3.16
Wilberg, Excavation Site of the Pergamon Altar, 1879.
Fig. 3.17
Zeus Group of the Gigantomachy (East Frieze) as displayed in the

Pergamon Museum, Berlin.
Fig. 3.18
The Temple of Pergamon in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy of

Arts, 1886, Berlin.
Fig. 3.19
Reconstructed view of the upper town (acropolis) of Pergamon during the

early Roman period as seen from the West.
Fig. 3.20
Emmanuel Pontremoli, plan of the actual condition of the ruins of the

Acropolis of Pergamon (c. 1890s).
Fig. 3.21
Emmanuel Pontremoli, monuments of the Agora and Acropolis of

Pergamon, restored plan.
xiii
Fig. 3.22
Two details from Emmanuel Pontremolis reconstruction of the Acropolis

of Pergamon, elevation.
Fig. 3.23
Emmanuel Pontremoli, reconstruction of the Great Altar, elevation.
Fig. 3.24
Ludwig Hoffmann, prize-winning project in the Schinkel-Competition,

1882, Dispositions-plan.
Fig. 3.25
Ludwig Hoffmann, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Island, 1884, site plan.
Fig. 3.26
Ludwig Hoffmann, competition entry, 1884, section of the Pergamon

Museum.
Fig. 3.27
Alfred Hauschild, prize-winning competition entry for the Museum

Island, site plan.
Fig. 3.28
Alfred Hauschild, prize-winning competition entry for the Museum

Island, 1884, section through the sculpture museum.
Fig. 3.29
Fritz Wolff, prize-winning competition entry for the Museum Island,

1884, site plan.
xiv
Fig. 3.30

1884, section through the Pergamon Museum.
Fig. 3.31

1884.
Fig. 3.32
Fritz Wolff, plans of the first Pergamon Museum (built in 1898,

demolished in 1908).
Fig. 3.33
Fritz Wolff, the Pergamon Museum (1898-1908), vestibule and entrance.
Fig. 3.34
Fritz Wolff, the reconstruction of the West Faade of the Great Altar of
Pergamon in the (first) Pergamon Museum (1898-1908).
Fig. 3.35
Fritz Wolff, the interior of the Pergamon Museum showing the South
Frieze of the Gigantomachy.
Fig. 3.36
Detail from the North Frieze of the Gigantomachy in Fritz Wolffs

Pergamon Museum.
Fig. 3.37
Fritz Wolff, Architecture Room in the Pergamon Museum (1902-1908).
Fig. 3.38
Fritz Wolff, Architecture Room in the Pergamon Museum (1902-1908).
xv
Fig. 3.39
Parts of column, capital and entablature from the Temple of Artemis in

Magnesia (Western Anatolia), as displayed in Fritz Wolffs Architecture
Room in the Pergamon Museum (1902-1908).
Fig. 3.40
Ludwig Hoffmann, master plan for the Museum Island and University,
1912.
Fig. 3.41
Ludwig Hoffmann, revision of the project for the Royal Prussian Museum
(originally designed by Alfred Messel in 1907), September 1913.
Fig. 3.42
Ludwig Hoffmann, revision of the project for the Royal Prussian

Museum, June 1914.
Fig. 3.43
Ludwig Hoffmann, revision of the project for the Berlin State Museum
(todays Pergamon Museum), January 1920.
Fig. 3.44
A partial wooden model of the faade of the Pergamon Museum showing

Alfred Messels original design of 1907.
Fig. 3.45
A partial wooden model of the faade of the Pergamon Museum in 1:1

scale, showing Ludwig Hoffmanns revision.
xvi
Fig. 3.46
A partial wooden model of the faade of the Pergamon Museum in 1914.
Fig. 3.47
Wilhelm Wille, revision and alternative project for the Berlin State
Museum (todays Pergamon Museum), 5 January 1921, upper exhibition
floor.
Fig. 3.48
Museum, 5 January 1921, lower exhibition floor.
Fig. 3.49
Museum, 5 January 1921, sections of the Pergamonsaal.
Fig. 3.50
Museum, 5 January 1921, interior perspective of the Pergamonsaal.
Fig. 3.51
Theodor Wiegand, the Market Gate of Miletus during its reconstruction,

12 August 1925.
Fig. 3.52
Theodor Wiegand, the Market Gate of Miletus during its reconstruction.
Fig. 3.53
Theodor Wiegand, the Market Gate of Miletus in the final stages of its
reconstruction.
xvii
Fig. 3.54
Theodor Wiegand, arrangement of Roman architecture from Western

Anatolia and Syria photographed against a black background.
Fig. 3.55
Theodor Wiegand, reconstruction of two columns and entablature of the

Temple of Artemis in Magnesia and other architectural elements from the
Hellenistic era (Western Anatolia).
Fig. 3.56
Theodor Wiegand, arrangement of Roman architecture from Western

Anatolia.
Fig. 3.57
The presentation of the Pergamonsaal to the participants of the congress

on the centennial of the German Archeology Institute (DAI), 21-25 April
1929.
Fig. 3.58
Celebration of Olympia in the Pergamonsaal during the Berlin Olympics,

1936.
Fig. 3.59
Wilhelm Kreiss, design for Soldiers Hall in the Supreme Command of

Armed Forces.
Fig. 3.60
Albert Speer, Zeppelinfeld Stadium designed for the National Socialist

Party day (Reichsparteitag-Gelande), Nuremberg, 1937.
xviii
Fig. 3.61
Albert Speer, Zeppelinfeld Stadium, elevations, sections and plan.

Fig. 4.1
Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (6th to 5th
century BC), completed in 1930, Vorderasiatisches Museum (in the
Pergamon Museum), Berlin.
Fig. 4.2
Detail of the museum partition between the reconstruction of the Market

Gate of Miletus and that of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.
Fig. 4.3
Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, detail.
Fig. 4.4
Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Processional Street of Babylon

(6th to 5th century BC) completed in 1930, Vorderasiatisches Museum (in
the Pergamon Museum), Berlin.
Fig. 4.5
View of the model of the Processional Street and the Ishtar Gate, detail
with the gate, the forecourt and the bastions.
Fig. 4.6
Walter Andrae, reconstruction of the Lion of Babylon from the

Processional Street.
xix
Fig. 4.7
Wilhelm Wille, revision of the Berlin State Museum (todays Pergamon

Museum), 5 January 1921, two sections through the South Wing.
Fig. 4.8
Wilhelm Wille, revision of the Berlin State Museum, 5 January 1921,

interior perspective of the reconstruction of the Processional Street of
Babylon.
Fig. 4.9
Walter Andrae, working drawing for the reconstruction of the

Processional Street of Babylon in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, 1927,
Berlin.
Fig. 4.10
Walter Andrae, working drawing for the reconstruction of the

Processional Street of Babylon in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, 1927,
Berlin. View toward the Ishtar Gate.
Fig. 4.11
Walter Andrae, working drawing for the reconstruction of the Throneroom of Babylon in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, 1927, Berlin.
Fig. 4.12
Walter Andrae, working drawing for the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate
of Babylon in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, 1927, Berlin.
Fig. 4.13
Assembly of the Babylonian brick fragments into figures and ornaments

of Babylon in Berlin, 1928.
xx
Fig. 4.14
Walter Andrae, First reconstruction on paper of the Lion of the

Processional Street at Babylon, 1899, Babylon (Iraq).
Fig. 4.15
Flix Thomas, plan of the general layout and the fortifications of the
Assyrian city of Dur Sharrukin (Khorsabad), which the 19th century
French archaeologists erroneously identified as Nineveh.
Fig. 4.16
Flix Thomas, Ornamented Gate (a gate to the ancient Assyrian city of

Dur Sharrukin), elevation and plan of the actual ruins, 1852-54.
Fig. 4.17
Flix Thomas, the Ornamented Gate, restored section.
Fig. 4.18
Flix Thomas, plan of the ruins of the Palace of Sargon II, 1852-54.
Fig. 4.19
Flix Thomas, two elevations of the palace of Sargon II in Dur Sharrukin

(Khorsabad), represented as an ensemble, 1852-54.
Fig. 4.20
Flix Thomas, a gate to the Palace of Sargon II, restored elevation, detail,
1852-54.
Fig. 4.21
Flix Thomas, Harem in Nineveh (in reality: Assyrian temple in Dur

Sharrukin), 1852-54.
xxi
Fig. 4.22
Flix Thomas, Gate Z of the Harem, restored elevation.
Fig. 4.23
Flix Thomas, Assyrian murals in a chamber of the Harem, actual

condition, 1852-54.
Fig. 4.24
Flix Thomas, Lion figure from the Assyrian murals in a chamber of the
Harem, restored on paper, 1852-54.
Fig. 4.25
A plan of the inner city of Babylon after the excavations of the GermanOrient Society 1899-1917.
Fig. 4.26
Dragon (Sirrush) Relief from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (6th to 5th century
BC).
Fig. 4.27
Walter Andrae, reconstruction of the Dragon (Sirrush) Relief.
Fig. 4.28
Illustration from Robert Koldewey, Das wieder Erstehende Babylon,

1913, comparing the claw of the Babylonian dragon with that of a bird
from Mesopotamia.
Fig. 4.29
Excavations at the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, 1902.
xxii
Fig. 4.30
Foundations of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon with colorless bull and dragon
reliefs after the excavations of the DOG.
Fig. 4.31
Reconstructed section drawing of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon showing

different ground levels of the Processional Street throughout the
centuries.
Fig. 4.32
Reconstructed section drawing of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.
Fig. 4.33
Walter Andrae, drawing showing the marking-system for placement of

the bricks of the Throne-room faade.
Fig. 4.34
Walter Andrae, a second drawing showing the marking-system for

placement of the bricks of the Throne-room faade.
Fig. 4.35
Walter Andrae, the reconstruction of the Throne-room Faade, completed

in 1930, Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin.
Fig. 4.36
Walter Andrae, sketch for stage-set I of the historical opera

Sardanapalus, 1907.
Fig. 4.37
Walter Andrae, sketch for stage-set II of the historical opera

Sardanapalus, 1907.
xxiii
Fig. 4.38
Walter Andrae, a reconstruction of the Processional Street of Babylon by

night.
Fig. 4.39
Walter Andrae, conceptual sketch about the origin of ornament.
Fig. 4.40
Walter Andrae, Die Symbole von Babylon (sketch, ink on paper).
xxiv
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Professor Alan Colquhoun for countless hours of intellectual discussion.

The precision and clarity of his criticism and the intellectual challenge he brought to my
work at every stage of its preparation turned this dissertation into a fascinating learning
experience. I am indebted to Professor M. Christine Boyer not only for her criticism of
my dissertation and intellectual inspiration but also for her generosity of spirit. By
offering her support in every form and occasion, Professor Boyer helped me survive the
odds of nearly five years of independent research. My sincerest thanks are also to
Professors Esther da Costa Meyer, Mark Jarzombek and Michael Jennings for agreeing
to be the examiners of this dissertation. I was fortunate to have inspiring teachers at the
Middle East Technical University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton
University who influenced the argument and methodology of this dissertation. My
engagement in the history of modern archaeology goes back to a paper I wrote for
Professor Emel Akzer in Ankara. My Masters thesis under Stanford Anderson provided
me with theoretical and methodological foundations upon which I build my later work.
Most of this dissertation was written during two years of residency as a pre-doctoral
fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. I am grateful to the GRIs director,
Thomas Crow, and to the staff of the Research and Education Department. The
xxv
comments and feedback of the Getty scholars, fellows and staff played a part in the
working out of the ideas presented here. I wish to thank especially Malcolm Baker,
Sarah Morris, John Papadopoulos, Kajri Jain, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Partha Mitter,
Deanna Petherbridge, Henry Millon, Marian Hobson, Mieke Bal, Sherrie Levine,
Benjamin Buchloh, Mario Carpo and Alexa Sekyra.
The staff of the Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen, the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, the
Deutsches Archologisches Institut, the Bauhaus Archiv offered me their kind assistance
during my research in the archives and manuscript collections in Berlin. I owe a special
debt of gratitude to Linda Nolan at the Getty Research Institute and Mary Burdett at the
University of San Diego for their help in compiling the bibliography, scanning the
illustrations and copy editing at various stages of my research.
I have received generous grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the
Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the Scientific and Technical Research Association of
Turkey (TUBITAK), and the University of San Diego, in addition to support from
Princeton University including scholarships from the Graduate School, the School of
Architecture, Council for Regional Studies, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International AffairsCenter for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.
The presentation of the chapters of this dissertation as work in progress in seminars,

conferences and public lectures, including presentations at the Getty Center, Yale
University, the annual international meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of
xxvi
Architecture in Istanbul, the Cotsen Institute at UCLA, Sanart Conference in Ankara and
in a conference organized by the doctoral students at MIT and Harvard University
helped me to reformulate my arguments. An earlier and significantly different version of
Part 3 was published in the Sanart conference proceedings edited by Ipek Treli (Space
and Relief in the Pergamon-Room, in Retrospective: Aesthetics and Art in the 20th
Century, Ankara: Sanart, 2002). I am grateful to Malcolm Baker, Maria Georgepoulou,
Jale Erzen and John Papadopoulos for their invitations and encouragement.
This project would not have been completed without the support of my colleagues,
friends and family. I wish to thank especially Ufuk Ersoy, Heiko Henkel and Tina
Lupton for our long and inspiring conversations at the first stages of my research. My
colleagues in the Department of Art at the University of San Diego Sally Yard and
David B. Smith offered their support during the completion of this dissertation. I would
like the express my deepest gratitude to Professor Yard for reading the entire dissertation
and for her perceptive comments.
I am grateful to my sister Cn Bilsel for reading the dissertation, for offering her
criticism and above all for being a role model as an architect, scholar and teacher. My
parents, architects, city planners and educators, have prepared the conditions that
induced critical inquiry at home, and gave us a passion for the mythologies and ruins of
ancient Anatolia, the traces of which I found many years later in the archives of Berlins
Pergamon Museum.
xxvii
My most profound thanks go to Juliana Maxim who read and most perceptively
commented on every stage of my manuscript. Her research in history and theory of
architecture inspired me in ways that I could not have imagined. Finally, I would like to
thank my son, Alin Emre, who was not born when this project started and yet whose
presence motivated me to end my containment in German archaeology, complete the
dissertation and, finally, let it go.
xxviii
Part 1
_______________________________________________________________________
Architecture in the Museum: Definitions and Problems
1.1. Architectonic Restitution: Historical Monument versus Historical Decor
We have now had a glimpse of all the rooms of the new museum. In all of them it
has proved possible to reconstruct the architectural masterpieces of ancient times
in their full original height, thus showing the real proportions and conveying to
the visitor an adequate sense of space. In this museum, the greatest museum of
architecture the world over, it is intended that visitors should rivet their attention
first and foremost on the immense ensemble and then be enabled to follow the
evolution of style from the sixth century B.C. down to the threshold of the
Christian era
Theodor Wiegand, The Pergamon Museum, c. 19301
The State Museum of Berlin, popularly known as the Pergamon Museum, is among the
most complex buildings of the German capital. Conceived as the extension of the Royal
Prussian Museum by Alfred Messel in 1907, the building was completed twenty-four
years later during the artistically productive and politically uncertain days of the Weimar
Republic. As the regimes that patronized the museum changed, so did the original
program and architecture of Messel within the space of three decades: the museum that
opened to the public in 1930 took its final shape in the hands of Berlins cultural
bureaucracy, whose factions had waged a museum war to gain more influence in its
plans. The museum met with immediate success in the 1930s when it was presented to
the public as the largest museum of architecture in the world. World War II spared the
Pergamon Museum but left it in a desolate condition. Its treasures were shipped to
Theodor Wiegand, The Pergamon Museum (Berlin: Reichsbahnzentrale fr den

Deutschen Reiseverkehr, n.d.), 20. Distributed in several languages by the German
Railways and tourism bureaus in the 1930s.
2
Moscow as part of what the Red Army called war reparations, only to return to a divided
Berlin in mid 1950s as a gift of the Soviet Union to the people of the Democratic
Republic. To this day, the museum is renowned for its gigantic interiors, which offer an
awe-inspiring vision of antique architecture. Walking through the galleries, the visitors
encounter the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Street of Babylon, the Market Gate of
Milet, the Great Altar of Pergamon among others. The presentation of Babylonian,
Hellenistic and Roman monuments in a historic sequence has made the Pergamon
Museum one of the most visited sites of Berlin, just as the photographic and filmic
reproduction made the masterpieces of antique architecture available to a large public.
At first sight there is nothing unusual about the idea of a museum that contains antique
monuments from the ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, given that the national
galleries of Europe have long assumed the task of exhibiting the arts of all humanity: a
privilege that has become a contentious issue over the last decades. Just as the Parthenon
friezethe so-called Elgin marblesis not in Athens but in the British Museum, so it
appears that the Great Altar of Pergamon and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon are currently
located in Berlin. Yet the more we reflect on the architectural exhibits of the Pergamon
Museum, the more problematic they become.
On the one hand, the exhibits of the Pergamon Museum are perceived as architectural
monuments, each of which testifies to a distant past. Most visitors would agree that
there in the museum we stand in the presence of the opera nobile of antiquity:
monuments that were brought to Berlin after nearly four decades of German
excavations in the Middle East prior to World War I. Thousands of miles away from
their original locations, the monuments are presented in the gallery as art objects, as
well as historical documents. On the other hand, the interiors of the museum could as
well be read as modern installations, which reconstruct an image of antiquity somehow
analogous to a theater dcor. Each monument is installed as a stage set that reenacts
the experience of a work that would not typically be contained within the interior of
the museum: an architectural ensemble, an antique city, or the totality of an ancient
civilization.
This semantic difficulty, the collapse of the boundary between a historical monument
and a historical dcor, has not troubled those who have described the museum before as
in, for instance, the museum guides, those unproblematized presentations of the
museums objects as archaeological reconstructions.2 There is nevertheless, an
unbridgeable gap between the two types of object: a historical monument endures from
the moment of its construction and subsequent restorations until the present; a historical
dcor, in contrast, reenacts a lived moment of history in every now of experience
within the controlled space of the stage. If the first survives the passage of time only by
In a concise history of the museum Olaff Matthes writes: The Pergamon Museum is
one of the most impressive museums of architecture in the world. It owes its existence
mainly to extremely successful excavations conducted by the museums of Berlin in Asia
Minor, above all in Pergamum (Pergamon), Magnesia, Priene, and Milet. In further
archaeological expeditions, the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Orient-Geselschaft
DOG) co-operated with the museums of Babylon, Assur, Uruk, and various other
Mesopotamian cities. However, it is the combination of reconstruction of architectural
monuments from Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Islamic antiquity that even today
confirms the Museums worldwide uniqueness. The Pergamon Museum, translated by
Nina Hausmann (Berlin: Berliner Ansichten, 1998), 9.
4
gradually falling into ruins, the later is ephemeral: it is bound to the time of the
spectacle.
The question then comes to mind: how can we characterize the architectural exhibits of
the Pergamon Museumoriginals, restorations or reconstructions? If, on the other
hand, the exhibits of the museum are a theatrical dcor, how do they relate to the historic
originals: do they represent, reproduce or replace the monuments of antiquity?
The monuments that are exhibited in the museum today have preserved neither their
material integrity nor their complete form throughout their histories. They were
destroyed, buried or transformed into other buildings prior to their archaeological
recovery. In the case of the Altar of Pergamon, the Hellenistic masterpiece of the
museum, the archaeologists extracted most of the sculptural fragments of the Great
Frieze from a Byzantine wall where they had been reused. While the archaeologists
shipped sculptural and architectural fragments from their excavations in Turkey, Syria
and Iraq, the arrangements of these fragments into monuments in the Pergamon
Museum is the result of modern imagination. Unlike the archaeological fragments from
which they are reassembled, the duration of these monuments is not a continuous
testimony to the history they have endured. Their display in the museum poses an
uneasy tension between two distinct temporal moments: the imaginary moment of their
original construction, and the moment in which they were reassembled in the museum as
a jigsaw puzzle. The architectural exhibits of the Pergamon Museum, in other words, are
not originals, if we understand original to mean a historical monument, which
carries the traces of its material duration from the moment of its initial construction to
the present, and which is a unique presence in the site where it was built.3
Nor can we describe the exhibits of the museum as restoration, in the 19th century
meaning of the word. The French architect and theorist, Eugne-Emmanuel Viollet-leDuc (1814-1879) defines restoration in his Dictionnaire raisonn (1866-1869, 10
volumes) as follows:
RESTORATION, s.f. Both the word and the thing are modern. To restore an
edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it means to
reestablish it in a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed at
any given time. The idea that constructions of another age can actually be
restored is an idea that dates only from the second quarter of our own [19th]
century, and it is not clear that this kind of architectonic restoration has ever been
clearly defined.4
Highly idiosyncratic in nature, Viollet-le-Ducs philosophy of restoration contradicts
the idea of reconstruction as it was conceived by the 19th century historical
schoolparticularly Leopold von Rankes (1795-1896) concept of wirkliche
Geschichte (actual/real history). It suffices to reflect on the techniques of historical
Cf. Walter Benjamin who writes, The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that
is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its material duration to its historical
testimony to the duration which it experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on
authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when material duration
ceases to exist. Revised from Harry Zohns translation, The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction [the translation of the German title may also be revised as
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility] in Hannah Arrendt, ed.,
Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). I am grateful to Michael Jennings
and Thomas Levine for a graduate seminar that focused on the article at Princeton
University.
4
Eugne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from

the Dictionnaire raisonn, introduction by Barry Bergdoll, translated by Kenneth D.
Whitehead (New York : G. Braziller, 1990).
6
representation as evidenced in the historical paintings or panoramas in the 19th century to

pinpoint this difference. The 19th century panorama offered the spectators the scenery of
a world-historical event depicted on the vast periphery of a circular interior. In the Sedan
panorama in Berlin, for instance, once admitted in the interior, the spectators could
relive, as it were, the moment when the outcome of the Franco-Prussian war of 1871
was decided. The concept of history as a linear trajectory is made manifest in the 19th
century panoramathe heterotopia of a time machine, which transposes the spectators
to the heart of a moment of historical destiny. The panorama turned history into a
spectacle for the masses.
Viollet-le-Duc in contrast, coined restoration as a practice that upholds the stylistic

and structural integrity of architecture above and beyond the historicity of a given
building. Having studied the system that underlies the constructional logic of a
monument, the 19th century restorer often redesigned the building in an ideal form,
which it had never had in history. Correcting the stylistic or structural mistakes of
the original builders was an important task of restoration. The restorer also erased
systematically the traces of later historic additionsfor instance, depriving the medieval
cathedrals of their Baroque additions, hence, forcing the building into a structural and
stylistic purity. It is therefore not so much the value of a monument as a historical
document as much as the architectonic principles it embodies that were of interest to the
19th century restorer.
The architectural exhibits of the Pergamon Museum differ from what Viollet-le-Duc
called restoration on two counts. First, the museum seeks to establish its credibility for
its viewers as a historical make-believe. The museum installation mimics the form of a
monument in a given historical period. In doing so it seems to transport the viewers into
a historical momenteven though this moment is vaguely defined by comparison with a
theater dcor or the 19th century panorama. The museum cultivates a sense of history
that is more akin to Rankes truism, to reconstruct as it actually was, than to Viollet-leDucs restoration.
Secondly, the museum exhibit of the Pergamene Altar is limited to a three-dimensional

facade put in an illusionary perspective that is suggestive of the whole monument. By
reducing the original building to a mainly visual presentation, the Pergamon Museum
hinders the structural integrity and constructional logic of architecture, which were dear
to Viollet-le-Duc. It is not as if the Hellenistic building is rebuilt in the museum as a
freestanding structure, but the museum reconstructs an image of the monument as a
tableau vivant, which not only can be seen but also partially occupied by the visitors.
We have to be equally cautious about concluding that the exhibits of the museum are a
historical dcor that reconstructs the originals as they actually were in antiquity. For,
the installations of the museum, unlike a theater dcor, display the effects of age on their
material: conveying a carefully calculated sense of authenticity to the visitors, as if the
monuments have endured weather throughout millennia.
It is precisely the effect of a monuments oldness that marked a major split in the
modern approach to historical monuments. The 19th century idea of architectural
restorationin contradistinction to historical reconstructionpresented a fatal
contradiction, one that seemed all the more problematic at the turn of the 20th century.
For restoration sought to both honor and effectively annul the idea of historical time
when it recovered historical architecture in a perfect state in the present: as Alan
Colquhoun puts it, the old takes on a surreal contemporaneity in the restorations of
Viollet-le-Duc.5 Yet, for the 20th century audience that expected to see the traces of
natural decay on an historical original, the appearance of a flawless historic monument
in a finished state appeared incredulous. It is precisely this problem that the Viennese
art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1905) puts into question in his Moderne Denkmalkultus
sein Wesen, seine Entstehung [The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and
Genesis] of 1903.6 He writes:
Alan Colquhoun, Thoughts on Riegl, Oppositions 25 (1982); reprinted as Newness

and Age Value in Alois Riegl, in Modernity and Classical Tradition: Essays in
Architectural Criticism 1980-1987 (Cambridge Ma.: The MIT Press, 1989).
6
Alois Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung (1903), in
Gesammelte Aufstze (Vienna: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag, 1929). The text was translated
into English by Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo as The Modern Cult of
Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982). An editorial by
Kurt W. Forster and separate commentaries by Ignasi de Sol-Morales and Alan
Colquhoun appeared in the same issue. A second andunfortunatelyseverely
abbreviated version by Karin Bruckner and Karen Williams translated the title as The
Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Development. Nicholas Stanley Price et
al. eds., Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage
(Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1995). Here I suggest translating the
sub-title of Riegls essay as Its Essence and Genesis. There is little question that the
German Wesen should be translated as essence, and not as character. As for
Riegls use of the word Entstehung: I take as a model the distinction Walter Benjamin
makes between Ursprung and Entstehung in his Epistemo-Critical Prologue to
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, translated by John Osborne as origin and
9
The fundamental aesthetic principle of our time concerning the age-value may be
formulated as follows: we expect from the hand of man the production of
complete works as symbols [Sinnbilder] of necessary and lawful becoming
[Werden]; from nature that works over time, on the other hand, we expect the
dissolution of completeness as symbol of equally necessary and lawful decay
[Vergehen]. Just as the appearance of decay (premature dilapidation) in recent
works disturbs us, so do the signs of new intervention (conspicuous restoration)
in old works. It is rather the clear perception of the cycle of natural becoming and
decaypure and lawfulthat modern man at the beginning of the 20th century
enjoys most.7 Thus, every work of man is conceived like a natural organism in
whose development one should not intervene; the organism should live
[ausleben] freely and man, at most, may protect it against premature destruction.
Hence the modern man sees part of his own life in a monument, and any
intervention on it disturbs him as if it is an intervention upon his own organism.8
Appointed director of the Commission for Preservation of Monuments, Riegl wrote
Moderne Denkmalkultus as an addendum to new legislation of historic preservation in
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His conclusions were meant to have immediate effects in
practice. In fact, it effectively brought to an end the ongoing cleansing of Gothic
cathedrals of their later baroque additions, a practice inspired by Viollet-le-Ducs
principle of restoration.9 Although pragmatic in scope, Riegls Denkmalkultus outlines
genesis respectively, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (New York, Verso
1985), 45.
7
The excess of adjectives Riegl uses to underline the unobstructed clarity, purity and
necessity of the natural law of becoming and decay makes it almost impossible to
translate this sentence. The original reads: Es ist vielmehr der reine, gesetzliche,
Kreislauf des naturgesetzlichen Werdens und Vergehens, dessen ungetrbte
Wahrnehmung den modernen Menschen vom Amfange des 20. Jahrhunderts erfreut.
Denkmalkultus, 162.
8
Ibid.,162, translation mine.
In The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural

Entertainments (Cambridge Ma.: The MIT Press, 1994) M. Christine Boyer writes:
Riegl thought the controversy surrounding the restoration work on the giant western
10
a vitalist phiolosophy, which is influenced by Friedrich Nietzsches philosophy of

life.10 Riegl shared Nietzsches distaste for 19th century historicism, and his fascination
with cyclical, natural time. Riegls concept of the monument rejects the idea of a
golden ageand all reconstruction that aims at returning the monument to its original
state. Instead Riegl seeks to minimize the modern intervention in the natural process of a
monuments aging. Far from freezing historical monuments in time, Riegls idea of
portal of St. Stephens Cathedral in Viennaa controversy that brought an end to the
work in the 1880s and again in 1902reflected the different ways a monument might
be valued in modern times. He believed there would be less trouble enveloping every
restoration attempt when the history and significance of these values were carefully
told; see also Margaret Rose Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of
Art (University Park Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 1992). On the influence of
Riegls thought on the practices of historic preservation see Wim Denslagen,
Architectural Restoration in Western Europe: Controversy and Continuity, translated
from Dutch by Jane Zuyl-Moores (Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura Press, 1994).
10
Recent research has shown that Riegls art history was engaged in a complex dialogue
with 19th century German philosophy and most specifically with the writings of Arthur
Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. In fact, Riegl not only read Nietzsches key
works The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations, but also discussed them with a
group of friends at the University of Vienna. Between 1875 and 1878, Riegl was an
active member of The Reading Society of German Students in Vienna (Der Leseverein
der deutschen Studenten Wiens). Admirers of Schopenhauers philosophy of will, the
members of the societyincluding Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freudbecame
receptive to the work of Nietzsche and the music of Richard Wagner as early as the mid
1870s (see William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). See also Diana Graham Reynolds, Alois Riegl
and the Politics of Art History: Intellectual Traditions and Austrian Identity in Fin-desicle Vienna, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego
(1997), 26-28. Hence it is plausible to argue that, although Riegl was trained in the
Institute for Austrian Historical Researcha school that resisted German idealismand
exposed to the methods of empiricism and positivism, Riegl was well informed about the
alternative positions that emerged from Germany. In fact, Nietzsches critique of 19th
century historicism, and his celebration of the inner force of life processes is clearly
present in Riegls mature work after Stilfragen [The Problems of Style] of 1893.
Refusing the Hegelian philosophy of history, Riegl maintained that art, more than being
determined by the Spirit external to it, has been driven by an internal urge throughout
history.10 His famous dictum Kunstwollen, could perhaps better be translated as arts
will, or will-to-art, than the common English version, artistic volition.
11
preservation consists of leaving monuments to fall gracefully into ruins and, thus,
complete their natural cycle of life. Repairs are allowed only when the structure has
been adopted for modern use, or when it was destroyed due to an unexpected human
catastrophe.
It is clear that reconstruction of archaeological monuments in the Pergamon Museum

contradicts Riegls principle of preservation to the extent that it intervenes in the
natural circle of the monuments becoming and decay. Yet, it is rather Riegls
utterly psychological theory that the modern subject and the modern masses engage
monuments through a vaguely defined feeling of age value that makes his text central
to an understanding of archaeological reconstructionsin situ, as well as museal.
Writing in a prophetic tone in 1903, Riegl argues that the value of a monument as a
historic document will soon be secondary to the immediacy of the atmospheric effect
[Stimmungswirkung] it exercises on the masses. The monument will be transformed in
the 20th century into an object that evokes emphatic reactions in the organism of the
beholders: an effect through which modern man could relate to the natural law of
becoming and decay to which his own body is subjected.11
11
Riegl writes: das Denkmal bleibt nur mehr ein unvermeidliches sinnfliges
Substrat, um in seinem Beschauer jene Stimmungswirkung hervorzubringen, die in
modernen Menschen die Vorstellung des gesetzlichen Kreislaufes vom Werden und
Vergehen, des Auftauchens des Einzelnen aus dem Allgemeinem und seines
naturnotwendigen allmhlichen Wiederaufgehens im Allgemeinen erzeugt.
Denkmalkultus, 150.
12
Meeting the publics growing expectation of age value, 20th century archaeology
refrained from the problematic task of faking the effects of age in their historical
reconstructions. Anastylosis, a technique of archaeological reconstruction that became
widely accepted around the 1920s, seems to accommodate both the archaeologists
quest for historicity and the popular feeling for material authenticity. Nicolas Balanos,
who is credited as one of the founders of the technique during the reconstruction of the
Athenian Acropolis, reassembled the monuments from the original fragments that are
either available on the site or that are found during the excavations. Modern materials
were used only when necessary, and mostly to reinforce the antique structures. In fact,
anastylosis is a practice that perfectly suits the modern concept of historic monuments.
Showing the difference between original historic fragments and modern materials used
in recent interventions has come to be seen as the ethical principle of historic
reconstruction.
At first sight, the distinction between authentic fragments and modern interventions
seem to be respected in the architectural exhibits of the Pergamon Museum. Yet, the
truth is certainly more complex. For instance, the reconstruction of the Market Gate of
Miletus by Theodor Wiegand (1864-1936), the renowned archaeologist and the director
of the Antiquity Collection in Berlin c. 1930, has little in common with the 20th century
practice of anasytlosis. A number of photographs taken during the construction of the
Market Gate in the Pergamon Museum, and other objects of the comparative
architecture rooms reveal that only a small percentage of the exhibits is made of antique
13
fragments.12 Wiegand achieved the Roman gate by using modern materials available
in Berlin at the time of the construction: iron, brick, cement and stucco. More troubling,
however, is the fact that Wiegand gave the gate the finish of aged marble, imitating, as it
were, the appearance of a Roman original, had it survived the effects of time up until our
own day. In factas Wiegands critics did not fail to take notice in the 1920ssuch
historical monuments did not survive in our day, and whether such a monument
existed at all in the Roman province of Asia, in Miletus, is a hypothesis that needs to be
proven.13
Noting the radical departure of the Pergamon Museum from traditional museology, an
article published by Office International des Muses [The International Museum Office]
in 1935the only text that calls into question the philosophical underpinnings of such a
presentationdefines the museums exhibits as architectonic restitutions (les
reconstitution architectoniques dans les muses). The author notes that, instead of
displaying the constitutive elements or parts of architecture, such as one expects to find
in the galleries of a Beaux Arts academy, the Pergamon Museum conveys to its visitors a
vision of the architectural ensemble. The idea of the ensemble, in other words, has
replaced the architectural specimen. Praising the Pergamon Museum for such a bold
vision, the article fails to identify the contradiction intrinsic in architectonic restitution.
12
Eight photographs of the Market Gate of Miletus and of other architectural exhibits
illustrate the process of reconstruction. Berlin-Dahlem, Deutsches Archologisches
Institut (DAI) Wiegand-Archiv, Kasten 21 Pergamonmuseum, Milettor,_Gall Prozess.
See my discussion of the reconstruction of the Miletus Gate in Part 3.
13
Karl Scheffler, Das Berliner Museumschaos, Kunst and Knster XXIV (April
1926): 261-272.
14
The author concludes that such restitution is justifiable only if the primary goal of the
museum is the preservation of historical originals.14 However, the practice of molding
isolated fragments into a seamless architectural whole, as Wiegand did in his recreation
of Hellenistic and late Roman architecture, is one that does not preserve but effectively
destroys the historical fragments. The architectonic restitution of the Pergamon
Museum sacrifices the specificity of the fragment for the generality of the whole.
In achieving an imaginative and imaginary ensemble, Wiegand seems consistent with

his own theory of theatrical and emphatic presentation of ancient history. In a museum
guide he wrote on the occasion of the opening of the museum in 1930, he appears to
make a subtle and ambiguous distinction by describing the exhibits as reconstructions
that convey the visitors an idea about the originals. He writes that the museum
reconstructs the architectural masterpieces of ancient times in their full original height,
thus showing the real proportions and conveying to the visitor an adequate sense of
space.15 Can we then interpret the architectural exhibits of the museum as full-size,
partial models that convey a faithful impression of architectural space, rather than
architectural originals themselves? The experience of the museum simulates an effect
similar to the perception of the original monuments, had they existed in antiquity, and
had they remained intact in our modernity.
14
Les reconstitution architectoniques dans les muses, Mouseion 29-30 (1935): 59-71.
15
Wiegand, The Pergamon Museum, 20.

15
Although Wiegand never openly acknowledges that the architectural restitutions of the
museum are not historical originals, his description raises an array of questions. Does the
museum recover an historical experience by mimicking the typical perception of the
ancient man who created these masterpieces: a visual experience about which we
know nearly nothing? Does the museum give modern Germans access to the original
experience of the Babylonians and the Hellenistic Greeks? Or does it merely promote a
picturesqueand therefore unmistakably modernidea of antiquity by imitating the
appearance of ruins in their natural landscapes?16 Yet isnt the enterprise of
reproducing the monuments of antiquity as ruins problematicin fact more problematic
than Viollet-le-Ducs restoration, which fabricated flawless monuments in a complete
formgiven that none of these ruins were freestanding in their original locations
when the German archaeologists began their work?
16
The French architectural historian Auguste Choisy argued in 1899 that the principles
of the Greek site planning depend on a picturesque idea, and that the experience of the
Parthenon in the Athenian Acropolis was originally intended as a succession of
pictures each seen from a privileged and definable viewpoint. See Histoire de
l'Architecture, I & II (1899) (Genve and Paris: Slatkine Reprints, 1987). This theory
has exercised influence on modern architects, most notably on Le Corbusier, who visited
Athens during his Voyage dOrient. More recently the American art historian Vincent
Scully revisited Choisys idea of the picturesque. He argued that the meaning of the
sacred Greek landscape can be grasped by looking at the ruins of ancient Greece in the
present as they stand in their original landscape. See The Earth, the Temple and the
Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (revised edition, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979). Scullys poeticand ahistoricaldescription of the original Greek experience as
it is embedded in the present-day ruins does not take into consideration that most of the
ruins available in situ are the products of modern archaeological reconstruction. It is
therefore impossible to have an original vision of the Greeks unmediated by modern
science.
16
1. 2. Architecture in the Museum: Viewing the Fragment and the Whole
Let us then address an ontological difficulty which is at the heart of Berlins selfacclaimed museum of ancient architecture. The idea of the museum of architecture
seems to rest on the assumption that architectures relation to its object is similar to the
relation of art to the work of art. Architecture, in other words, is an activity that creates
works, which need to be classified, preserved and displayed based on their historic and
artistic value. Yet, displaying a work of architecturesuch as a monumentliterally in
the museum poses an insurmountable problem: where does the frame of a museum end
and where does its exhibit, the work of architecture, begin?
From the conception of the first public museums of architecture in 18th century France to
the recent Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt by Oswald Mathias Ungers, one
thing has been clear: a museum of architecture, unlike a museum of art, does not contain
its object within the physical space of the gallery. Hence we expect to find in the
museum of architecture drawings, models, plaster casts, as well as building parts and
architectural fragments, but not an actual work of architecture. How can a
buildingassuming that a building is a work of architecturebe displayed inside of
another and maintain its objecthood as distinct from that of its container?17
17
One aspect of this problematic has been previously addressed. Eve Blau and Edward
Kaufman write in their introduction to an exhibition catalogue of the works from the
Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA): The Museum of Architecture occupies a
special place in the museum world. While Museums of painting, sculpture or decorative
arts collect, display and make available for study the objects themselves, architectural
17
Given the impossibility of containing architecture in the gallery, there have been two
significantly different ideas of a museum of architecture in current scholarship:
according to the first, the museum consists of either a representation or reproduction of
architecture (a museum of models, architectural drawings, photogrametric surveys or
photographs); according to the second, the museum contains not the work itself but the
fragments of the work: an ionic column-capital and a segment of architrave, for instance,
may stand for the whole Greek temple, as well as being an exemplar of the architectural
order.
In his essay, Architecture au muse? [Architecture in the Museum?] Hubert Damisch,

argues that museums of architecture emerged historically at the very moment when new
techniques of reproduction (in contradistinction to representation) became widely
available in the 18th century: the cork model and the plaster cast.18 Scale models had
been commonly used in the West at least since the Renaissance in order to conceive a
building before it was constructed. Yet the very idea of producing replicas of famous
museums collect and display not their subject-matter, but works that are representations
of itdrawings, prints, photographs, models, and books. Blau and Kaufmann eds.
Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation (Montreal:
Centre Canadien dArchitecture, 1989), 13; in Deutsches Architekturmuseum (the
German Architecture Museum) by Oswald Mathias Ungers we can clearly see the
metaphor of a house inside the house: the architect designed the service shaft of the
museum in the form of a roofed baldachin that reads like a separate house placed
inside the shell of the museum. See Deutsches Architekturmuseum, in Vittorio
Magnano Lampugnani ed., Museum Architecture in Frankfurt 1980-1990, 139-151.
18
Hubert Damisch LArchitecture au muse? Cahiers du Muse national dart

moderne 42 (Winter 1992), 63-78.
18
monuments and disseminating them in greater numbers seems to belong to a fairly recent
modernity. An Italian craftsman Antonio Chichi (1743-1816), for instance, is known to
have standardized thirty-six cork models of the antique monuments of Rome and sold
them to a large clientele in France and Germany.19 As these scale models attained a
place in the European salons as exhibition pieces, architecture gained a new audience:
that which was the secretive craft of the masters became a collectible item for the
amateurs. Yet, it is important to note that even though the process of replication granted
architecture aesthetic autonomy, the status of these models has always been different
from that of works of art: sculpture or painting. As Werner Szambien shows in his
Muse dArchitecture [Museum of Architecture], these objects were meant to remedy a
perceived shortcoming of picturesque or fantastic paintings of ancient monuments in the
18th century: their imprecision in representing architecture. Faithfulness to the surveyed
original was the primary quality of a scale model. Hence, the quest for precision made
the models strictly referential objects. Not surprisingly these three-dimensional
reproductions, rather than paintings, were to become the first objects exhibited in the
18th century museum of architecture. Interpreting the origins of the institution in
France, Damisch goes on to argue that the task of this type of museum has little to do
with the preservation of a work of art. The museum of architecture relates to the work
indirectly through the mediation of an imaginary component.20 The museum of
architecture is precisely where the work is imagined, yet, where it is absent.
19
Werner Szambien, Le Muse dArchitecture (Paris: Picard, 1988), 16.
20
Damisch has provided the most exhaustive analysis of this problematic: Ma thse
sera que le muse darchitecture ne devrait accueillir que des objets qui aient valeur
dexample, ou de modle, mais dans lacception strictement thorique, pitmologique,
19
Damischlike Szambien before himinterprets the museum of architecture primarily

as a museum of architectural models. Arguing that the museum of architecture is
structurally linked to the techniques and idea of reproduction, he underplays the
importance of another institution that emerged only a few decades later: Alexandre
Lenoirs Muse des Monuments Franais [Museum of French Monuments]. Originally a
temporary shelter that saved the fragments of royal and religious monuments from
destruction in the hands of the vandals during the Revolution, Lenoirs depot was to
become an ambitious museum of Gothic architecturethe first of its kindwhich
intended a historical and didactic presentation of the architecture of the nation. There is
little doubt that Lenoirs museum has stirred more controversy, both during and after the
years of Terror, than the 18th century museums of architectural models. It suffices to
recall Quatremere de Quincys relentless campaign against the Museum of French
Monuments, which ultimately succeeded in establishing that a museum of fragments,
which displaced originals from their context, was an unacceptable transgression of the
Neoclassical canon.
***
projective, et mieux encore projectile du terme (projectile sentendant, si lon croit

Littr, de ce qui lance, qui produit en quelque sorte la projection). Ce que le public, le
grand public aussi bien que le public specialis, cherchera au muse, en matire
darchitecture, ce seront desormais moins des modles qui devrait prter limitation, ou
des images plaisantes, des representations faites pour le sduir, que des informations
portant sur ce quil en est, ou peut en tre, du travail du projet: ce qui ne saurait aller
sans rtombes critiques au regard de la pratique actuelle de larchitecture, et de sa
gestion institutionelle, idologique, voire mme politique. LArchitecture au muse?
72-73.
20
A contemporaneous and well-documented schism emerged in Germany from the dispute

between Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Alois Hirt in the 1820s during the construction of
the Royal Prussian museum in Berlin (todays Altes Museum). While Hirt insisted that
the new institution be a place for study, a depository of specimens within the academy,
Schinkel famously defended the idea of the museum as an independent Gestalta
form and design. Frustrated by his exclusion from the commission of the Royal
Museum, Hirt objected to Schinkel that the art objects are not there for the museum;
rather the museum is there for the objects.21
Thinking through this dichotomy we may conclude that it underscores a divergence of

opinion within the Romantic (and therefore organicist) idea of history. Hirts seems to
advocate history as an independent organism, whose documents should enjoy certain
autonomy from the designs of the present, while Schinkel collapses the difference
between past and the present, making the fragments of history subordinate to a present
dcor. Throughout the 20th century this split of opinion seems to have recurred several
times: a distinctly modernist cult of the fragment which sought to maintain a
disjunction between the fragments of the past and the frame of the present has been
21
Cited in Douglas Crimp, The End of Art and the Origin of the Museum, Art Journal
46 (Winter 1987), 263; cf. Hirts Bericht an den Knig vom 15. Mai 1824, in Alfred
von Wolzogen ed., Aus Schinkels Nachlass: Reisetagebcher, Briefe und Aphorismen
(Berlin, 1863), III: 244-49; see also Hans Kauffmann, Zweckbau und Monument: Zu
Friedrich Schinkels Museum am Berliner Lustgarten, in Gerhard Hess, ed., Eine
Freundesgabe der Wissenschaft fr Ernst Hellmut Vits (Frankfurt / Main, 1963), 135-66.
For a recent history of the planning and conception for the Altes Museum see C. M.
Vogtherr, Berlin Knigliche Museum, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 39 (1997): 7302.
21
contradicted by new contextualist approaches seeking to integrate the old and the new
into a seamless whole. We see the contradictory ideas of the historical object as a
distinct fragment or as part of a dcor, in a variety of fields including museology,
historical preservation and urban design. The modernist city plans of the 20th century,
which preserved historical monuments while destroying systematically the urban fabric
around them, are parallel in that sense to modernist museology, which refused all
restoration and which sought to exhibit historical fragments as distinct sculptural
objects.22
It is indeed remarkable that the Pergamon Museum, which was completed exactly one
hundred years after Schinkels Altes Museum, seems to be caught between these two
positions that are handed down to us from German Romanticism: history as an
autonomous organism versus history as a present Gestalt. The important difference,
however, is that in the Pergamon Museum the dcor does not necessarily recover lived
history.23 Instead a constellation of antique fragments and modern decor creates the
22
In his reading of Riegls Denkmalkultus, Alan Colquhoun argues that Riegl

established a complementarity between the notions of newness and age-value. He
writes, although the two ideas are antithetical and must be kept rigidly separate, they
are also complementary, and dependent on each other. This idea corresponds closely to
the ideas of the Modern Movement, in which the preservation of historic monuments
sometimes went hand in hand with the destruction and rebuilding of the city (See Le
Corbusiers 1936 Plan Voisin for the Center of Paris). Historical works have here lost
their meaning as part of the fabric of time and space, and are preserved as emblems of a
generalized and superseded past. Thoughts on Riegl, Oppositions 25 (1982), 79;
reprinted as Newness and Age Value in Alois Riegl, in Modernity and Classical
Tradition, 214.
23
Cf. Stephen Banns analysis of two museums in early 19th century Paris, the Museum
of French Monuments, founded by Lenoir, and Muse de Cluny by Alexandre du
Sommerard in The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in
22
illusion of the presence of the architectural monument in the museum. In the

Pergamon Museum, the architectural object is self-referential, as if it is seen in a hall of
mirrors: it is more an end in itself than a means to represent history.
Therefore, I need to nuance the questions I have raised at the beginning: what were the
specific conditions in early 20th century Berlin that eventually naturalized an oxymoron
that emerged in the 18th century: architecture in the museum?
Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1984),

especially 87-89.
23
1. 3. Monuments in Exile: On the Location and Dislocation of Architecture
Even though these questions may sound purely theoretical, they gained new political and
architectural implications after the reunification of Germany. Extending its control over
the museums of former East Berlin, the Prussian Heritage Foundation (Stiftung
Preuischer Kulturbesitz) has taken firm action to unify the antiquity collections in the
historic Museum Island, collections that were divided between the East and the West in
1945.24 Following this new political initiative, Berlins Museum Island has become the
focus of a series of restricted architectural competitions.25 The prize-winning Masterplan
of the Museum Island by the British architect David Chipperfield proposes to connect
24
Wolf-Dieter Dube, Groe Plne fr Berlins schnste Schtze, in Berliner

Illustrierte, (13-14 March 1993).
25
The first competition for the restoration of August Stlers Neues Museum
(constructed between 1843-1855 and severely damaged during World War II) was
initially won in 1994 by the Italian architect Giorgio Grassi, whose project maintained
the solitary nature of the historic museumsparticularly Schinkels Altes Museumand
linked the Pergamon and the Neues Museums with a subtle and open colonnade. A
subsequent decision in 1998, however, reversed the results of the previous competition
and gave the commission for the renovation of the Neues Museum to the British
architect David Chipperfield whose prize-winning competition entry of 1994, in contrast
to that of Grassi, makes direct connection links between the museums. Both Grassi
and Chipperfields competition entries for the renovation of the Neues Museum were
published in Bundesbaudirektion ed., Museumsinsel Berlin: Wettbewerb zum Neuen
Museum (Stuttgart, Avedition, 1994); see also Museumsinsel, lArchitecture
daujourdhui 297 (February 1995): 80-83; about the later decision to give the
commision for the renovation of the Neues Museum to Chipperfield see Bernhard
Schulz, Museumsinsel Berlin: Entscheidung fr Chipperfield, Baumeister 95, no.1
(January 1995): 13.
24
the individual museums into a single destination for bus tourism, as well as more
sophisticated individual visitors, with the motto archaeological promenade.26
The most significant part of this archaeological promenade consists of the Pergamon
Museum, which will be reorganized and expanded according to a design by the German
architect Oswald Mathias Ungers. Arguably returning to the original intentions of
Alfred Messel, Ungers proposes to add a Western Wing to the museum in order to
display the Egyptian monuments brought to West Berlin after World War II. When
completed, the Pergamon Museum will present its visitors with an experience of two
thousand years of world history from Ancient Egypt to the Islamic Middle Ages.27 A
new central entrance and visitors center by Chipperfield that connects the Neues and
Pergamon Museums will make Berlins Museum Island no less glorious a center of
mass-tourism than I.M. Peis pyramid of the Louvre in Paris.
On the other hand, by granting a central role to the Pergamon Museum in Berlins new
archaeological promenade, the Berlin State Museums and the Prussian Heritage
Foundation have brushed aside the recurrent demands for repatriation that have sought
26
The consortium for the Master Plan of the Museum Island consists of David
Chipperfield Architects, Heinz Tesar, Hilmer & Sattler and Oswald Mathias Ungers. See
Heinz Tesar, Wege zum Masterplan: Museumsinsel Berlin 1998-2000 (Berlin: G & H,
2000).
27
Bernhard Schulz Pltzlich ist das Glasdach nicht mehr ntig: die
Architektenwettbewerb fr den Umbau des Pergamonmuseums ist entschieden, Der
Tagespiegel, 26 May 2000; Umbau und Erweiterung des Pergamonmuseums, Berlin,
Bauwelt 91, no. 22 (9 June 2000): 10; Nikolaus Bernau, Zurck zur Grundfrage!: Das
Pergamonmuseum wird von O. M. Ungers saniert und umgebaut, Deutsche Bauzeitung
134, no.7 (July 2000): 22.
25
to restitute these monuments to the countries of origin. In one case the campaign
initiated in the early 1990s by the city of Bergama in Western Turkey for the restitution
of the Pergamene Altar has caused a remarkable controversy.
In a short book Sefa Tas- kIn, the Social Democrat mayor of Bergama in the 1990s
voices the claims of the towns inhabitants against the museum of a distant European
city.28 As the title of the book, Zeus in Exile, suggests, the people of Bergama feel that
they were robbed of their cultural heritage, or more specifically, the major cultural
monument of their town is in exile in Berlin. Having argued that their culture is the
accumulation of all previous cultures, which flourished in Bergama in the past, the
modern inhabitants of the town demand the return of the Zeus Altar,29 which had been
displaced from Bergama during the German archaeological excavations of 1878-79.
On the cover of Tas- kIns book a Zeus figure dressed in ancient Greek attire is depicted
as he breaks his chains and as he steps towards his long lost home. This image, which
represents the ancient Greek God as the prisoner of a German museum, is perhaps the
28
Sefa Taskn, Srgndeki Zeus: Bergamadan Berline, Berlinden Bergamaya [Zeus

in Exile: From Bergama to Berlin, from Berlin to Bergama] Bergama Belediyesi Kltr
Yaynlar no. 4 (Izmir: Altindag Matbaaclk, 1991). I have written elsewhere on the
significance of the repatriation campaign, Zeus in Exile: Archaeological
Reconstitution as Politics of Memory, Working Paper Series no.14 (Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, 2000).
29
The 19th century interpreters maintained that the Great Altar was dedicated to Zeus.
Though Zeus was probably among the honorees of the Hellenistic monument, we cannot
establish this claim today with certainty. The Turkish public knows the monument with
the name given to it by the 19th century German archaeologists, although the monument
is exhibited as the Great Altar of Pergamon in the Berlin State Museum.
26
most powerful allegory of a repatriation case. A century after the German archaeologists
started excavations in their town, the people of Bergama selectively identified a
historical heritage for themselves. Curiously the heritage of the city of Bergama does
not depend on the presence, but on the conspicuous absence of an ancient monument,
which had once been in Bergama, yet which is exhibited in Berlin today.
The 1991 campaign for the repatriation of the Zeus Altar quickly gained popular
support on a national scale: according to one account sixteen million signatures were
collected to ask for the return of the monument from Germany. In 1991 alone, more
than one hundred articles appeared in the Turkish daily pressranging in tone from
mourning for the stolen altar to accusations that Mayor Tas- kIn was crazy in thinking
that the Germans might give the altar back at all.30 Tas- kIn, however, seems less
pragmatic than many of his critics in Turkey. In Zeus in Exile, he is interested in raising
the ethical dimensions of the case. He underlinescorrectlythat those who displaced
Bergamas heritage for the sake of preserving it were indeed in search of cultural roots
for their emerging 19th century empire. He adds, Today, they try to conceal the
inhuman dimensions of the [19th century project of] sharing the world.31
Another claim of repatriation had come from the Directorate of the Antiquities of Iraq,
shortly before the National Museum in Baghdad was pillaged in 2003as the
international community and the invading forces stood by. Having argued that the Ishtar
Gate of Babylon and the accompanying tower had been improperly displaced from the
30
The Turkish daily Milliyet reported that the petition for the repatriation of the altar
was endorsed by three million people, Zeus Iin Millyon Imza, 13 May 1992; see
Zeus Imza Rekoru Kryor, Tercman, 13 May 1992. A local newspaper from Izmir
reported ten months later that the number of petitioners reached sixteen million, Zeus
Sunaginin Geri Alnmas Iin Onalt Milyon Imza Topland, Yeni Asr, 25 March 1993;
see also Hacer zmakas and Yavuz zmakas, Bergama Kaynakas (Bergama
Bibliography) (Bergama Belediyesi Kltr Yaynlar No.12, Izmir: zgen Ofset, 1993).
31
Tas- kIn, Srgndeki Zeus, 51.

27
extinct city by the German archaeologists, the Iraqi directorate demanded the
monuments restitution.32
The citizens of Bergama, just like the directorate of Iraqi antiquities before the
occupation, grasp that a major violence was done to their heritage by the Berlin State
Museum, without however being able to identify in what way this violence was done,
making a somehow vague claim that architecture had been stolen just like a piece of
sculpture or painting.
Faced with the demands of repatriation, the Berlin Museum, on the other hand, has
assumed a defensive attitude, which invests in maintaining the myth of the
monuments absolute authenticity. A number of books published by the Museum in
the 1990s celebrate the archaeologists of the Wilhelmine age as the pioneers of modern
science. Looking behind the historical scenes these publications often assert in
between the lines that all the original elements of the altar which are on display today
have a secure legal status.33 Immersed in the political and legal aspects of these disputes,
32
Ewen MacAskill, Iraq appeals to Berlin for Return of Babylon Gate, The Guardian,
May 4 2002. As I will show in Part 3 on the German reconstruction of Babylon,
MacAskills interpretation that an Entire tower, the Ishtar Gate, was lifted and taken to
a museum in Berlin, where it remains today is not accurate.
33
The guide to the Pergamon Museum by Olaf Matthes illustrates this kind of uncritical
literature. Explaining to the visitors why all the monuments of the Pergamon Museum
were taken from the territories of the Ottoman Empire, but not from Greece, another
country rich in antiquities, Matthes writes that neither the Turkish authorities nor its
people had a historical consciousness of their Greek and Roman past in the 1870s:
...Turkish authorities and the tourists above all may regret that only the grid foundations
are left at Pergamon itself. What, however, would have been the fate of the great altar
and the friezes if the excavators had not rescued them from the hands of the lime
28
the critics and defendants of the Pergamon Museum do not seem to have reflected on a
basic question: what are these monuments that the local administrations seek to
repatriate; what are these objects that the museum refuses to give back?
Tas- kIn, in his repatriation campaign, seeks to remedy the symbolic violence the Berlin
Museum inflicted on Bergama by returning the original work of architecture to its
authentic place. I intend to show, on the other hand, that both the aura of the original
and the authenticity of the lost placea variant of the museum notion of contextare
the fabrications of the museum in the first place. True, there were a number of fragments
of a Hellenistic relief built into a Byzantine wall in Bergamas citadel in 1878. The
fascinating success of the Berlin Museum is not in restoring an original architectural
monument as it really was, but in creating an audience that is disposed to appreciate
the original, while yearning for the lost context. The archaeologist who laments the
displacement of the monuments into the museum, which spared the masterpiece
from a certain destruction and imprisoned it in the galleryno match to the
Mediterranean skiesis not only disingenuous, but also, knowingly or unknowingly,
justifies the German cultural hegemony as a painful and yet necessary exercise. The
politician of Bergama who feels victimized by German cultural imperialism,
nevertheless remains faithful to the German cult of authenticity. A history of the
Pergamene reconstruction in Berlin shows, however, that the monument has no
burners? It may indeed be doubted that the Gigantomachia would still exist as it does
today if Humann, in his time, had not so energetically opposed the current practice of
destroying antique marbles in Turkey. The Pergamon Museum (Berlin: Berlin Edition,
1998),15-16.
29
home to go back to, and not because, as the museum argues, it was legally acquired.
Even though the condition of architecture-in-the-museum is one of permanent exile,
there is no home to which the monument could return.
30
1.4. On the Historical Method
A number of histories have departed from the characteristically obsequious chronicles of

German archaeology to put into question the political and ideological aspects of
archaeology and museum displays during the Kaiserreich. To cite only a few examples:
Silke Wenks short biography of Theodor Wiegand presents the archaeologist less as an
infallible pioneer of the new discipline than an impresario of reactionary official culture
and a master of political intrigue, focusing on the ease with which Wiegand served the
authoritarian regimes.34 Published immediately before the German reunification,
Thomas Gaehtgens history of Berlins Museum Island underscores the connections
between the history of the collections and the Kunst- and Kulturpolitik of the Wilhelmine
Empire.35 An article by Nikolaus and Nadine Riedl explores the relation between the
Pergamon Museum and the official architecture of Germany, and
concludesinterestingly, though perhaps hastilythat the presentation of ancient
architecture in the museum helped re-classicize the German official architecture: the
authors find the echoes of Messels museum in the work of two generations of
conservative-modern architects from Peter Behrens to Albert Speer.36
34
Silke Wenk, Auf den spuren der Antike: Theodor Wiegand, ein deutscher Archologe
(Bendorf: Stadtverwaltung Bendorf / Rhein, 1985).
35
Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel im Deutschen Kaiserreich: Zur

Kulturpolitk der Museen in der wilhelminischen Epoche (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag,
1987). See also Gaehtgens, "The Museum Island in Berlin," in Gwendolyn Wright ed.,
The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology (Washington, D.C.:
National Gallery of Art, 1996), 53-77.
36
Nikolaus Bernau and Nadine Riedl, "Fr Kaiser und Reich: Die Antikenabteilung im
Pergamonmuseum," in Alexis Joahimides et al. eds., Museumsinszenierungen: Zur
31
Suzanne L. Marchands monumental history, Down From Olympus, offers not only a
survey of German philhellenism and archaeology from the 18th to the 20th centuriesa
history of ideas, institutions and discoursesbut also sheds light on relatively little
known aspects of the German engagement in the Near East prior to World War I.
Though Marchand does not intend a history of the Berlin Museums, much less an
architectural analysis, she offers a foundation upon which such analyses could be based:
first by showing how the gradual decline of the German philhellenic humanism was
paralleled, on the one hand, by the rise of cultural relativismthe German particularism
stemmed from a form of cultural relativismand, on the other hand, by the undeclared
colonial ambitions of the Wilhelmine Empire.37 She convincingly argues that the
Prussian pioneers of the grand-scale excavations were not merely in the service of a
disinterested science, but provided the infrastructure for a subsequently aborted effort
to colonize the Levant.
In the light of Marchands history, I study on the following pages the celebrated
monuments of the Pergamon Museumall of which originated from the territories of
an ailing Ottoman Empireas the glorious symbols of a future colonial empire that
never fully materialized. I hope my contribution to this debate will consist in
Geschichte der Institution des Kunstmuseums. Die Berliner Museumslandschaft 18301990 (Dresden and Basel: Verlag der Kunst, 1995), 171-189.
37
Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in

Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1996) (hereafter cited
as Down From Olympus).
32
establishing the Pergamon Museum not only as a cultural product of the colonial
daydreams of the Wilhelmine Reich, but also as the most significant manifestation of a
recurrent problem in history, as Western empires sought to represent their own
hegemony by appropriating the monuments of otherseither in a historic or
geographic sense.
By focusing on the philosophical and technical aspects of Pergamons museum

displaysi.e. by asking questions such as where does the original monument start,
where does its modern frame end; that is by posing the problem of architecture in
architectureI do not mean to overlook the political and ideological dimensions that
have been explored by Marchand, Wenk, Gaehtgens and others. Nor do I intend to
underplay the serious political ramifications of my challenging of the myth of the
monuments absolute authenticity. Quite on the contrary, I intend to show that the
museum restitution of an architectural objectwhether it seeks to recover the original
experience of the ancients who had built it, or the ideal conditions of viewing a work of
art by re-contextualizing it in the museumis an intrinsically ideological exercise.
In Part 2, The Architecture of an Imperial Museum in Berlin: Art and Kultur, I begin
by exploring the vocation of the art museum in Berlin from Schinkels day in the 1820s,
when the institution served the bourgeois ideal of humanistic Bildung, to an increasingly
tatist representation of world-history in the 1850s, and finally to its servitude to the
Kulturpolitik of an expansionist Kaiserreich. Focusing on Alfred Messel and Wilhelm
von Bodes project of the Royal Museum of 1907todays Pergamon MuseumI
33
investigate how the fin de sicle narratives of art and culture were translated into an
actual architecture: the ordering of the collections of artistic and cultural objects on the
museums plans. Hence the Royal Museum became a microcosm where the worlds
cultures were mapped. I argue that what are commonly seen as antique monuments
today were initially conceived as the interior furnishings of style-rooms: Bodes aim
was to remedy the displacement of art in the museum by constructing in the gallery a
semblance of the architectural context for which the works of artsculpture and
paintinghad been originally intended. Had this plan been carried out, the museum
would have consisted of a series of Hellenistic, Gothic, and Baroque rooms, each
presenting a dichotomy of works of art and architectural contexts.
In Part 3, The Altar and Its Frames: Reconstructing Pergamon, I study the historical
process between 1907 and 1930 through which Messel and Bodes style rooms were
transformed into the monuments of antiquity, just as the museum was redefined as a
museum of ancient architecture. I am particularly interested in underlining the paradox
of this process, which both reproduced and authenticated the monuments: architectureinside-architecture became both an autonomous work of art, an object of pure
contemplation, and a sublime interior, which is designed to awe and entertain the
masses.
In pursuing the history of archaeological reconstructions in the museum, I have not

found it always necessary to assume a single authorial voice: the reader will find intertextual readings of historical documents, as well as descriptions of the museums
34
objects in the present. This duality is perhaps most apparent in my discussion of the
Pergamon Room (Pergamonsaal), which starts with a lengthy description of the
experience of the interior from the position of an impersonal third person singular. In
doing so my aim is not to go back to Kants judgment by an impersonal mind, nor to
take for granted Wilhelm Diltheys psychological / intuitive experience (Erlebnis).38
Having revealed the reality effects of the Pergamon Room from the position of an
imaginary observer (who replaces me as the author), the chapter goes on to provide an
analysis of the art historical and aesthetic discourse concerning the modern presentation
of antique sculpture in the museum.
An overarching concept in this dissertation is a critique of organicism in 20th century

German architecture and intellectual culture. This critique comes to the foreground in
Part 4, Architectural Reproduction: Reconstructing Babylon, which is dedicated to the
curious reproduction / fabrication of Babylonian antiquities in the South Wing of the
Pergamon Museum. Starting from Walter Andraes production of the Lion of
Babylonas the Babylonians would have produced itI investigate the theories of the
symbol in Andraes writing of the origins of art and architecture. I attempt to show
how the late 19th century idea of Gesamtkunstwerkthe community of the artswas
transformed, by 1930, into a full-fledged esoteric tradition that sought to recover the
organic architecture that transcends human reason, influencing the writings and
38
For Wilhelm Diltheys neologism experience (Erlebnis) defined in contradistinction

to experience as knowledge (Erfahrung) see Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing,
Goethe, Novelis, Hlderlin (Leipzig: Verlag B. G. Teubner, 1916).
35
museum practices by the protagonists who sought to reverse mans alienation from the
original language.
***
From a methodological point of view, I undertake in this dissertation two distinct

projects. On the one hand, I intend to write history as a means of demystification by
exposing the ideological underpinnings of the process through which the museums
object has become a self-enclosed and aesthetically autonomous work of art. I argue
that, even though initially hypothetical, the reconstituted monuments gained autonomy
from the discursive field in which they had found their form, and through the assumption
of aesthetic distance and modern spectatorship, have come to replace the lost antique
originals instead of representing them: full-scale models of the Altar of Pergamon, the
Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the Market Gate of Miletus came to be seen as antique originals
themselves.
On the other hand, informed by hermeneutic theory, I argue that, although not antique
originals, the architectural objects in the museum are elevated into the category of the
work of art. And this is not so much because they embody an essence, an origin, a
timeless interior, but since throughout its afterlife in the museum the object gained
autonomy from both the intentions of the builders and the ideology of the restorers and
became a work that reflects as much modern taste as the antique one.
36
In focusing on an object, the Pergamon Museum, that has been excluded from
developmental histories of modern art and architecture, I am nevertheless interested in
establishing the museums radical modernity: its embeddedness in the modern German
intellectual, socio-cultural history and the phenomenon of mass culture. I am
particularly interested in knowing, in other words, why these monuments of
Hellenistic Greece and Babylon could not have found their specific form anywhere other
than Germany and at the turn of the last century: why the specific intersections between
the objects and discourses could not have happened anywhere else.
To underline the contingency of the objects and occurrences, however, does not
necessarily mean to adhere to a neo-historicist position: it is not to ask whether these
occurrences are paradigmatic or symptomatic of a historic trajectory. Instead, following
the example of Eric Michaud, I seek to call into question metaphors in the architectural
and aesthetic discourse many of which have been recurrent in different forms since the
18th century.39 By the same token, many of these problems have maintained their
actuality. To sum up, while I interrogate in this dissertation a particular museum in
Berlin, I raise issues that find particular resonance today: the problems of authenticity,
reproducibility and autonomy of architecture as an object of art.
39
I am grateful to Benjamin Buchloh for recommending Eric Michauds compelling

study of art under National Socialism, Un Art de lEternit: limage et le temps du
national-socialisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
37
Part 2
_______________________________________________________________________
The Architecture of an Imperial Museum in Berlin: Art and Kultur
38
2. 1. Alfred Messels Project for the Royal Prussian Museum, c. 1907
The liberal reforms after the Napoleonic wars created, in the European capitals,
symbolic centers where the values of the emerging bourgeoisie and a new civic order,
were celebrated. Nowhere did the idea of representing in architecture a new civic order
seem initially more promising, and yet suffer a more tragic defeat than in Berlins
Museum Island.1 Formerly known as the Spree Island, this narrow peninsula between the
banks of the Spree and the Kupfergraben rivers witnessed for nearly a century the
reformers aspiration to build an ideal community of artists and philosophers in the midst
of the Prussian garrison town, whose historical archetype they found in the Greek polis.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) conceived Berlins first museum on the southern
end of the Spree Island in 1822: a Neo-Greek temple, its row of Ionic columns facing the
Royal Palace across the Lustgarten.2 The museum promised to transform Berlin into an
Athens-on-the-Spree, which symbolized not so much the might of the Prussian state,
as its commitment to educate the public in the paradigms of civic virtue and high
morality.
One could perhaps compare the Gesamtkunstwerk of Berlins Museum Islandits

symbolic and civic programto Viennas Ringstrasse, although the latter was
constructed only after the 1840s. For an analysis of the the Viennese museum district
see Carl Schorske, Museum in Contested Space: the Sword, the Scepter, and the Ring,
in Thinking with History (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 105-124.
Approved by the Prussian monarch Frederich Wilhelm III, Schinkels museum (todays
Altes or Old Museum) was opened to the public in 1830.
39
The political reaction that prevailed in the following decades transformed the Museum
Island instead into a mirror of the pedantic taxonomies and cultural politics of the
Prussian state. As the holdings of the Royal Museum expanded to encompass the works
of a variety of civilizations, ancient and modern, a number of museums were built on the
Spree Island, each of which housed different collections of art. The way the collections
were classified, ordered and displayed in the museum revealed two competing
paradigms throughout the 19th century: while a broad coalition of classical philologists,
art historians and advocates of public education continued to privilege Greek sculpture
and Renaissance painting as paradigmatic of timeless virtue and morality, and therefore
essential for German education, 19th century historicism conceived of the history of
civilization as a linear trajectory driven by continuous progress. The very idea that
collections of art should be organized historically, and not based on a timeless aesthetic
hierarchy, posed a challenge to the Neoclassical, humanist tradition.
After the political unification of Germany in 1871, the architectural program of the
Royal Museum in Berlin was no longer seen as analogous to the history of the mind. Nor
did the architecture of the museumthat is, both the style of the building and the
program through which the collections of art were organized insideremain a potent
symbol of a civic or historical order. Instead, the fin de sicle museum in Berlin was
housed in an eclectic, Neo-baroque palace (i.e. the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, todays
Bode Museum). The arbitrary citations of architectural styles on the museums facades,
coupled with a chronological presentation of the period-styles in its interiors, reinforced
the disjunction between the container and the contents of the museum. Hence the late
40
19th century museum presented a contradiction: while historicism led to the conviction
that the art of each epoch presents a historical style that is retrospectively discernible in
the installation of the collection in the interiorthe style roomsthe eclecticism of
the facades made clear there was no longer a ruling style in the present.3
It is in response to the precarious terrain of the Prussian museums, caught between the
crises of German classical humanism and of 19th century historicism, that the last project
for the extension of the Prussian Royal Museum took shape. Conceived by two
prominent figures of Wilhelmine Germany, the architect Alfred Messel (1853-1909)4
and the art historian Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929),5 the project of the new Royal
I find it useful to differentiate between historicism and eclecticism, which are often
used interchangeably in architectural discourse to refer to the citation of historical styles
in contemporary architecture. Here, I use historicism to refer to the 19th century doctrine
that all phenomena, including art and architecture are determined by the trajectory of
history: an interpretive model that translates the Hegelian historical determinism into art
and architecture. Eclecticism, on the other hand, as Alan Colquhoun notes, originally
refers to the belief that the historical styles are emblems of the ideas associated with the
cultures that produced them. I seek to show on the following pages how the association
between style and culture had become arbitrary by the end of the 19th century. Hence my
use of eclectic, in reference to the fin-de-sicle museum simply means the use of styles
as arbitrary signs. See Colquhoun Three Kinds of Historicism, in Modernity and the
Classical Tradition, 3-19.
4
Alfred Messel, architect, best known for his design of the Wertheim Department Store
of 1904 in Berlin. Though Messel was presented in histories of modern architecture as a
pioneer of the Modern Movement avant la lettre i.e. Barbara Miller, Architecture and
Politics in Germany 1918-1945 (Cambridge Ma.: Harvard University Press,
1968)Walter Curt Behrendts 1911 biography remains the most comprehensive source
up until today. See also Alfred Messel 2 vols. (Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1905-11). For an
analysis of Messels concept of interior space see Julius Posener. Berlin auf dem Wege
zu einer Neuen Architektur (Munich: Prestel, 1979), esp. 454-58.
5
Wilhelm von Bode, art historian and museum curator, became Assistant Director of
Altes Museum in 1872, director of Department of Christian Sculpture in 1883, and
director of Berlins Painting Gallery in 1890. Bode was appointed the General Director
41
Museum attempted to combine the distinct buildings and collections of the Spree Island
into a single museum complex, while at the same time projecting a unified architectural
image to the new German capital.
Seeking to interpret Messels project of 1907todays Pergamon MuseumI shall

explore in the following pages the connections, if any, between the representations of the
emerging German Empire and the architectural language and program of the museum.
That the Kaiserreich commissioned a monumental museum in its capital to display
works it had acquired from its interests overseasthanks to state sponsored
archaeological excavations, ethnological expeditions and museum purchasespresents a
particularly difficult problem for the historians of modern Germany. It has been
suggested that the Museum Island is the particular result of Prussian and German
Kunst- and Kulturpolitik, just as the recent research has shown that the Pergamon
Museum was fueled by Wilhelmine Germanys Weltpolitik, more specifically by its
colonial ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, the territories of
the Ottoman Empire.6 And yet it is also established that the colonial ambitions of the
German Reich in the late 19th century, unlike that of other European empires, was
of the Prussian Royal (later State) Museums in 1906 and held this position until 1920.
Bode, whose ideas influenced museum displays in Germany, the United Kingdom and
the United States, remains to this day one of the most studied museum curators. For
Bodes role in shaping the Kultur- and Kunstpolitik of the Kaiserreich see Gaethgens
Die Berliner Museumsinsel, 11-65; for recent interpretations of Bodes museum displays
in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum see the special issue of Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen,
38 (1996). For a detailed biography see Manfred Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, Zwischen
Kaisermacht und Kunsttempel, Biographie (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1995) hereafter
cited as Wilhelm von Bode.
6
See Gaethgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel; Marchand, Down From Olympus.

42
notcould not be legitimized with a discourse of normative, universal civilization.7

There was neither an equivalent of a self-righteous mission civilisatrice, nor a selfcongratulatory white mans burden in the German Reich prior to the Great War. Hence
Bode and Messels project seems to present an impasse: even though an imperial
museum typically entails a representation of the history of the universal civilizationin
contrast to the more modest brgerlich values of the 19th century German museumits
patrons tended to see the Kaiserreich more as an embodiment of a peculiar Kultur than
the effectuator of the universal Zivilisation.
Hence the questions emerge of what was the vocation of an imperial museum in Berlin;
how did the architecture of the museum represent the totality of human experience in art,
history and culture? How did Messel and Bode translate the narratives of history and
anthropology into the actual organization of things in architectural space, and for which
political ends? Exploring the decline of the German humanistic Bildung (education of
the urban middle classes), on the one hand, and the crisis of historicism around the
1890s on the other, I shall attempt to understand how the colonial ambitions of the
Wilhelmine Empire were reconciled in the museum with the peculiarism of the German
Kultur.
***
About Kultur and Germanys manifest destiny see Stern, The Politics of Cultural
Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1963), esp. 150-52 (hereafter cited as Cultural Despair). See also Louis
Dumont, German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (Chicago: University of
Chicago Presss, 1994).
43
Appointed the General Director of the Prussian Royal Museum in 1906, Bode designed
the museums program, rallied political support and secured funding. According to the
guidelines Bode presented to the Prussian Parliament in February 1907, the new
complex consisted of three distinct museums: an extension for the Antiquity Museum,
the Near Eastern (Vorderasiatisches) Art Museum and, finally, the Ancient German
Art Museum.8
To draw the distinction between Antique and Near Eastern departments inevitably
required a number of assumptions on the part of a new generation of museum
administrators, in the absence of clear geographic or historical boundaries. For instance,
the Near East would come to include the Hittites, a civilization newly discovered by the
German archaeologists operating in central Turkey. The Hellenistic and Roman works
from Turkey and Syria were, however, Antique. The boundary between Antique and
Near Eastern art was, perhaps, self evident in the sense that it stemmed from a
division, which goes back to the 18th century in the classical and Oriental philology in
German academia,. While classical philologists studied Greece and Rome, the German
Orientalistik explored the origins of the Indo-European languages and religions.
For Bodes vision about the extension of the Royal Museum see Bode, Denkschrift
Erweiterungs- und Neubauten bei den kniglichen Museen in Berlin February 1907,
reprinted in Bode Mein Leben, Bd. 2 (Berlin: Verlag Hermann Reckendorf, 1930), 239248; see also Bode, Alfred Messels Plne fr die Neubauten der Kniglichen Museen,
in Jahrbuch der Kniglich Preuischen Kunstsammlungen 31, Berlin (1910): 59-63,
reprinted in Zentralinstitut fr Kunstgeschichte Mnchen ed., Berlins Museen:
Geschichte und Zukunft (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994), 244-46. See also Bode,
Mein Leben, Bd. 2, 182 92.
44
Semitic languages, Assyriology and Biblical archaeology were also considered in the
domain of the Orientalistik. After 1898, the newly founded German Orient Society
(Deutsche Orient-GesellschaftDOG) explored the ancient civilizations of
Mesopotamia, while the German Archaeology Institute (Deutsches Archologisches
InstitutDAI) focused on the Hellenistic and Roman periods in the Eastern
Mediterranean.9 Although the Near Eastern Museum responded to a practical necessity
of displaying the Mesopotamian findsseveral decades after the Assyrian exhibits in
London and Parisit was, nevertheless, significant within the German context: by
allocating the Mesopotamian finds to a Museum of Near Eastern Art Bode departed
decisively from the philological roots of the German Orientalistik: Mesopotamia offers
not solely a repository of archaic texts of interest to the students of the Old Testament,
but also works of art.
The Museum of Ancient German Art, on the other hand, was a radical departure from
the 19th century conception that allocated the material culture of the Germanic peoples
either to ethnology (Vlkerkunde) or the local heritage museums. Initially, Bode
conceived this museum as an extension of German and Dutch art collections from the
medieval, renaissance and the baroque ages in the Kaiser Friedrich Museumtodays
For a history of the German discipline of Orientalistik and its distinction from German
philhellenic humanism see Marchand, Down From Olympus, esp. ch. 5 and 6; see also
Marchand, The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case
of Josef Strzygowski, in Anthony Grafton and Suzanne L. Marchand eds., Proof and
Persuasion in History, History and Theory 33 (1994): 107-130. For a history of the
excavations of the German-Orient Society (DOG) see Gernot Wilhelm ed., Zwischen
Tigris und Nil: 100 Jahre Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft in
Vorderasien und gypten (Mainz am Rhein, Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998).
45
Bode museumwhich opened to the public two years earlier on the north end of the
Museum Island. Yet, in addition to the art of the German speaking peoples of the
Christian era, Bode also included in the museum the art of the Germans from the stone
age to the migration of peoples.10 The annexation of what Bode called the primitive art
of the Germanic tribes had portentous implications in its emphasis on the mythic
common roots of the Germans (including all the Nordic races) before they figured in
the Roman histories. One potential result of such a museumas I shall touch upon
laterwas a polemical appropriation of the Dutch and Flemish masters. Furthermore,
seeking to combine works of art with pre-historic or vernacular artifacts, Bode
deliberately fused the contents of the traditional art museum with those of the more
recent prehistory, ethnology (Vlkerkunde) and applied arts (Kunstgewerbe) museums.
Ranging from the art of the hunter and gatherer ancestors to the paintings of
Rembrandt, the Museum of Ancient German Art conveniently captured the nationalist
fervor of Germany under Wilhelm II. It seems, though, more as a result of Bodes
personal interests and convictions that the museum would focus on the art of the
Renaissance and the Baroque periods in Germany and the Netherlands. Bode apparently
did not think of modern art as much of an achievement for the Germans at the turn of
the century: apart from a few 18th century works that glorified the ruling dynasty in the
Kaiser Friedrich Museum no modern art was included in the new complex.
***
10
Bode, Alfred Messels Plne, 246.

46
Just as Bodes inclusion of cultures outside the canon of Western art history involved
some political risks, so did his choice of architect to carry out this program. Messel had
limited experience in official commissions: with the exception of a recent design for the
museum in his native Darmstadt, he was known primarily for his private and commercial
projects commissioned by an emerging class of nouveau-riche, German entrepreneurs
and businessmen. Furthermore, his innovative design for the Wertheim Department store
in Berlin, for which he is renowned today, had earned him the suspicion of Kaiser
Wilhelm II. The Kaiser, a self-assured conservative who fancied himself as the patron of
the arts and an amateur archaeologist, suspected Messel to be hyper-modern, and
therefore unfit for the royal commission.11 Bodes insistence in appointing Messel as the
architect of the Royal Museum may suggest that as early as 1906 the museum curator
favored a stylistic departure within the official architecture of imperial Germany: a
type of eclecticism with a mix of Nordic vernacular, Renaissance and Baroque elements
executed in monumental scale.12 It is more likely, however, that Bode was more
impressed with Messels skills as an interior decorator than his potential as a
revolutionary architect. He admired the house Messel had designed for Eduard Simon in
Berlin, particularly Messels ability to connect the architectural style of a high-bourgeois
interior with the objects of a private art collection. Bode must also have been well aware
of the Grossherzogliches Museum in Darmstadt, where the architect successfully
11
Bode, Mein Leben, 2: 18292; see also Volker Viergutz, Berliner Museumskrieg: ein
unverfentlichtes Kapitel der Lebenserinnerungen Ludwig Hoffmanns in Jrgen Wetzel
ed. Berlin Geschichte und Gegenwart: Jahrbuch des Landesarchivs Berlin (Berlin:
Landesarchiv, 1993), 85 (hereafter cited as Berliner Museumskrieg).
12
Cf. Bernau and Riedl, "Fr Kaiser und Reich, 171-89.

47
accommodated a difficult program (to exhibit objects as varied as paintings, sculpture,

historical weapons and natural history collections). Messel designed a clustered
building [gruppirtes Gebude] in Darmstadt, which was shaped by the specific needs
of each collection in lieu of imposing a rigid architectural form from outside.13
In addition to a difficult architectural program, Messel faced in Berlin a complex urban

setting. The existing museums of the Spree IslandSchinkels Altes Museum, Stlers
Neues Museum (compl. 1855), Johann Heinrich Stracks National Gallery (1876), and
the recently completed Kaiser Friedrich Museum (1904) by Ernst von Ihnehad been
built, though not haphazardly, with conflicting urban plans.14 It suffices to contrast
Stlers plans for the Spree Island with the project by August Orth, the chief architect of
13
In his analysis of Messels Darmstadt museum James J. Sheehan writes: The key to
the buildings interior design, therefore, is in its relationship to the various sorts of
objects it was meant to contain: painting, sculpture, antiquities, weapons and other
historical objects, and a natural history collection as well. To meet the different
requirements of these exhibits Messel designed a clustered building, with spaces
appropriate for various sorts of displays. Museums in the German Art World: From the
End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 174 (hereafter cited as Museums in the German Art World); see also Das
Darmstdter Landesmuseum von Alfred Messel: Skizzen, Entwrfe, Fotografien, 18911906, exhibition catalog (Darnstadt: Hessisches Landesmuseum, 1986).
14
For the history of the buildings of the Museum Island see Wilhelm von Waetzoldt,
Die Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin 1830-1930, Jahrbuch der Preuszischen
Kunstsammlungen 51 (1930): 25-204. Stephan Waetzoldt, Bauten der Museumsinsel
in Wilmuth Arenhvel ed., Berlin und die Antike, exhibition catalog (Berlin: Deutsches
Archologisches Institut, 1979), 361-74; Renate Petras, Die Bauten der Berliner
Museumsinsel (Berlin: Verlag fr Bauwesen, 1987); Stephan Waetzoldt, Plne und
Wettbewerbe fr Bauten auf der Berliner Museumsinsel 1873 bis 1896, Jahrbuch der
Berliner Museen 35, Beiheft (1993): 7-184; Berlins Museen: Geschichte und Zukunft
(Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994).
48
the City of Berlin in 1875, to understand how radically the late 19th century planning
departed from the idea of the Greek acropolis.
Located on a narrow peninsula tightly surrounded by Berlins historic Mitte and

Neukln, the Museum Island was not easily accessible from the main arteries of the
city.15 Schinkel dedicated the Spree Island behind the museum to the customhouses and
storage facilities alongside the Kupfergraben in his masterplan. Yet, the perspective
opening onto the Spree to the North, and the wide urban plaza in front of the Royal
Palace including Schinkels Lustgarten to the South made the Spree Island a highly
visible urban site. Stler took advantage of this relative isolation and visibility to
transform the Spree Island into a sanctuary of arts and sciences. The overall image
Stler intended to display along the Spree was less a Greek acropolis than a Roman
forum. Yet, unlike the Roman precedent this urban plaza was not woven into Berlins
dense urban fabric and, instead, revealed carefully calculated vistas through the gardens,
stairways, sculpture, and the neo-Roman temple fronts.16
The 1875 project by Orth, in contrast, redesigned the Museum Island as the center of a
bursting metropolis. From 1871 to 1875, Orth designed Berlins municipal railway
system (S-Bahn). Although the circumstances in which a major train line came to cross
the Museum Island through the middle are not exactly clearit was not included in the
15
Bode mentions the inaccessibility of the Museum Island as one of the major problems
of Berlins Museum district, Alfred Messels Plne.
16
See S. Waetzoldts entries in the exhibition catalog, Bauten der Museumsinsel, 36466; see also S, Waetzoldt, Plne und Wettbewerbe 7-184.
49
initial commission, but Orth later took full responsibility for itOrth seems to have seen
the S-Bahn as an opportunity to connect the Museum Island with the rest of Berlin. In a
sharp departure from the idea of the sanctuary of the arts, a retreat from the city, Orth
conceived of the Spree Island as a sort of node for public transportation.17 His plan of
1875 also reflected this vision: the entire Museum Island was developed into a gigantic
urban block. Orth integrated the detached museums by Schinkel and Stler, as well as
the National Gallery by Stark into a single complex, to such an extent that the space
between the museums would be read not so much as a ground but as light-wells. The
visitors circulation and the mass transit were solved on different levels: the S-Bahn
trains, for instance, crossed the Spree and the Kupfergraben with two bridges and
entered into a long tunnel inside the Museum Islands unified urban block. The two
facades of the gigantic urban block against the Spree and the Kupfergarben were dressed
conveniently in baroque attire, which Orth must have borrowed from 17th century
Rome.
Orths legacy in the Museum Island is not only themuch criticizedS-Bahn that
crosses the island from West to East on a long, elevated viaduct, but also a new urban
vision: a bustling metropolis in the making. In fact the subsequent projects for the
Museum Island prior to 1907 combined in essence Stlers idyllic sanctuary and
Orths urban block. For instance, in 1882 the Order of Architects and Engineers of
Berlin (Berliner Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein) organized the Schinkel
17
S. Waetzoldt Bauten der Museumsinsel, 364; Petras, Bauten der Berliner

Museumsinsel, 96-98.
50
Competition for the extension of the Museum Island: the winning project by Ludwig
Hoffmann, a close friend of Messel from Darmstadt and the future chief architect of
Berlin, is, to my mind, a return to Stlers idea, only re-clothed in late antique style.
Messel was to participate in a second architectural competition for the extension of the
Museum Island, which was organized by the Ministry of Culture in 1883though
without success. The ministry invited German architects to design two new
museumsthe antiquity and the Renaissance museumwhile it left to the participants
the decision of designing either a single building or a complex of several. The
participants were required to reintegrate the North and South of the Museum Island,
which had been divided by the S-Bahn, as well as providing a dignified monumental
character, with a simple [design] that refrains from unnecessary ornamentation.18 By
April 1884, fifty-two projects were submitted, including projects by Messel, Fritz Wolff
and Ludwig Hoffmann. Although none of the projects was implementedBode later
wrote in his memoirs that the competition brought no satisfactory solutionthe ideas
that emerged from this competition would later lead to Ihnes Kaiser Friedrich Museum
(the Renaissance Museum) and Wolffs so-called interim Pergamon Museum.19
Messels entry in this competition, which he presented with the motto Hellas and
Rome, sought a synthesis between Stlers forum and Orths unified urban block. He
18
S. Waetzoldt, Bauten der Museumsinsel, 362; Petras, Bauten der Berliner

Museumsinsel, 99.
19
Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, 120.

51
designed the Antiquity Museum across a large processional court facing the
Kupfergraben, while the Renaissance Museum found its place under a Roman Baroque
dome, similar to Orths project of 1875. The Antiquity Museum, a large vaulted
building, would house a reconstruction of the Great Altar of Pergamon. Differentiating
this building from the rest of the complex, Messel created a hermetic interior, which is
almost completely closed to the outside. Unlike Orth, Messel did not build the entire
museum island into a unified urban block: the detached museums are instead connected
to one another through bridges. However, his architecture is unmistakably baroqueI
use this term here not so much to refer to Messels stylistic preference, as his peculiar
treatment of spaces. In Messels project we find neither the picturesque transparency
(Anschaulichkeit) of Schinkels Neo-Greek temple in front of the Lustgarten, nor the
idyllic vistas of Stlers forum.20 Messel sculpts the void between the solid masses as if
the space is a tectonic matter: both the urban court opening to the Kupfergraben and the
interior of the Antiquity (Pergamon) Museum seem to be created by carving or emptying
out solid shapes.21
20
For an analysis of Schinkels Anschaulichkeit see Steven Moyano, Quality vs.

History: Schinkels Altes Museum and Prussian Arts Policy, The Art Bulletin volume
LXXII number 4 (December 1990): 601. Moyano shows how Schinkel associated
structural clarity with Classical Greek architecture, and, indirectly, with the prestige of
Classical education [Bildung].
21
Julius Posener contrasts Messels interior (Lichthof) of the Wertheim (1904) in Berlin
with the interiors of 19th century Parisian department stores such as Henri Blondels La
Belle Jardinire (1863) and Boileau and Gustave Eiffels Le Printemps (1876). He
concludes that the Parisian department stores are system-spaces (Systemrume), where
the light well serves the floors around it. Messels space on the other hand, is an
independent work of art. Unlike the French precedent Messel conceived of the Raum
as an object of Gestaltung. If the space of the French department store is
transparent, that of Wertheim is opaque. Posener, 453-58.
52
Revisiting the problem of the Museum Island nearly three decades later, Messel worked
from February to October 1907 on a number of sketches, which entertained the idea of
housing the new Antiquity, Near Eastern and German Museums in detached buildings,
each of which expresses the distinct theme of the collection it houses. It seemed at
first impossible, as Messel admitted to Bode, to provide enough room in the Museum
Island for the new collections, while connecting the existing buildings into a consistent
whole.22 Departing from the idea of detached museums for each collection, Messel
designed in July 1907 a gigantic structure that combined all three museums.23 He
organized three curatorial departments into a U-shaped complex around a large court,
which, as in his competition project of 1884, opened to the Kupfergraben. The Near
Eastern, the Antiquity and the German Museums were placed on the South, East and
North wings of the complex respectively. A less pronounced, one-storey wing for the
Egyptian antiquities extended from the Near Eastern Department to the south, filling the
narrow strip of land between the Neues Museum and the Kupfergraben. While Messel
placed his complex carefully between the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the Neues
Museum, he proposed to demolish and replace Fritz Wolffs Pergamon Museum, which
was built between 1897 and 1899, and which contained a full reconstruction of the Great
Altar.24 Messels complex was perhaps the most monumental, if not the most expensive
22
Bode, Alfred Messels Plne. 244.
23
Viergutz, Berliner Museumskrieg, 85.
24
The first Pergamon Museum by Wolffnow called the interim building in

literaturewas demolished only a few years after its completion, in order to open room
for Messels new museum. See the discussion of Wolffs museum in Part 3.
53
building in Berlin to that date, not least because it was placed partly on unstable ground
that was unfit for any permanent construction: shortly after the foundations were laid in
1909, they started to sink into the river basin, making the construction of the museum a
true engineering challenge.
An analysis of Messels drawingsnow available in lithographsshows the new Royal

Museum as a series of style-rooms, each of them furnished with archaeological
fragments, plaster casts and decorative elements.25 Works of art from a given historical
period would be displayed together with architectural and decorative elements of that
period in order to approximate the effect of the works in their original context. Had the
project been carried out according to Messels design, a visitor to Berlins Museum
Island would have experienced art in its distant origins in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the
Southern part of the complex. Approaching from the Egyptian galleries, a visitor would
have entered the Near Eastern Museum on the South wing where the antiquities of
South Arabia, Asia Minor and Syria were exhibited on two floors respectively.
25
Messel completed two stages of the project prior to his untimely death in 1909. The
first stage of August 22, 1907 included a site plan, plans of the two main exhibition
floors and major sections and elevations, which were published by Bode in 1910,
alongside the perspective renderings of the museum both from inside and outside. The
second stage of the project of October 30, 1907 illustrates that Messel designed the
interiors of the Antiquity and the German Museums in detail, while he left the Near
Eastern and Egyptian museums for a later stage. See Alfred Messel, Projekt fr den
Ausbau der Museumsinsel, Berlin August 22, 1907: Plans of the first and second main
exhibition floors, reduced in Bogdan Giseviuss lithographs into 1/1500 scale. A more
detailed project of October 30, 1907 consists of a site plan, two main elevations from the
Kufergraben and from the Spree in 1/3000 and floor plans in 1/1200 scale. Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz Zentralarchiv, Bauverwaltung der
Kniglichen Museen, Baudokumentation, I/BV 494 (hereafter cited as SMzB PK
Zentralarchiv).
54
Even though the Antiquity and the Near Eastern Museums were distinct from curatorial
and administrative points of view, Messel seamlessly combined them in the South wing,
perhaps to underline the cultural and historical connections between the Ancient Orient
and classical Greece. Approaching from the Near Eastern Museum, the visitor would
first encounter a reconstruction of the temple of Olympia in a two-storey gallery linked
by a staircase inside. Due to a well-enforced antiquities law in 19th century Greece, the
Prussian Museum acquired no originals from Olympia, the first excavation site of the
German Archaeology Institute. The Olympia room featured instead copiesplaster
castsof architectural and sculptural elements, particularly of the sculptural relief from
the pediment. A bridge connected the second floor of the Olympia room directly to the
plaster cast collection on the second floor of the Neues Museum.26
The overwhelming majority of the works in the Antiquity Collection originated from the
excavations in Western Turkey. In contrast to the Greek regulations, a more permissive
antiquities law in the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s allowed the Prussian Royal
Museums to acquire originals from the German excavations of Pergamon: the
Gigantomachy frieze from the 2nd century BC became the most celebrated holding of the
museum. Even though the Ottoman law was modified in the 1880s to ban all exports of
antiquities, it fell short of restricting the ambitions of the Prussian archaeologists. The
German Reich exercised direct political pressure on the Sublime Porte, sidelining the
26
Ibid.
55
Ottoman cultural bureaucracy and the Imperial Museum in Istanbul.27 Hence originals
from Priene, Milet and Didyma on Turkeys Ionian coast continued to reach Berlin.
Messel organized not only the Antiquity Museum but also the entire complex around a
gigantic interior, the Altar-Raum, where he partially reconstructed the Great Altar of
Pergamon from the 2nd century B.C. The Gigantomachy frieze would be displayed partly
on the West faade of the altar. Two exhibition rooms containing the architectural
fragments from Pergamon, to the North, and from Milet, Priene and Didyma to the
South, opened to the main Altar-Raum.28
Having experienced Greek, Hellenistic and Roman monuments in the Antiquity

Museum, the visitor would be able to proceed towards the German Museum in the North
Wing. The connection between the German and Hellenistic art seems less evident than
the link between the Near Eastern and Greek art. Looking at Messels plans, we may as
well assume that the art of the Roman Empire and of the late Roman antiquity were the
missing links between the Hellenistic Asia Minor and Medieval Europe.29
27
For a history of the Ottoman/Turkish Law of Antiquities in the 19th century see I.
Gnay Paksoy, BazI Belgeler IsIgInda OsmanlI Devletinin Kltr MirasI PolitikasI
zerine Dsnceler and Nur Akin, Osman Hamdi Bey, sr-I Atika Nizamnamesi ve
Dnemin Koruma AnlayIsI zerine Dsunceler, in Zeynep Rona ed., Osman Hamdi
Bey ve Dnemi Sempozyumu (Istanbul: Tarih VakfI Yurt YayInlarI, 1993).
28
See Messels perspectives of the interiors of the museum: Pergamon Room, Gothic
Room and Baroque Room, lithographs, SMzB PK Zentralarchiv, I/BV 494.
29
Though Bode included a Byzantine room in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and founded
the Islamic Department of the Royal Museum in 1904, those civilizations were not
included on Messels plans. Bode commissioned a separate museum for Asian Art by
the renowned architect Paul Bruno outside the Museum Island, which would encompass
56
On the ground floor, the German Museum featured two church-like interiors, one in
Romanesque and the other in Gothic style. Both rooms were to exhibit a variety of
objects from medieval altarpieces to drapery and weapons. Messel placed a baroque
room with rococo elements on the upper floor of the North Wing, near the bridge where
the new museum was linked to the Kaiser Friedrich Museums Renaissance and Baroque
collections. The art of the honorary ancestors of pre-historic times, on the other hand,
was assigned to a crypt-like room in the German Museums basement.
Judging from the tripartite organization of the complex, Babylonia, Greece and
Germany, one could conclude that Messel, like Stler before him, fulfilled in the
architecture of the museum G.W.F. Hegels (1770-1831) philosophy of history. It is true
that German art from the medieval to the baroque ages is added oddly to a narrative
ofapparentlyuniversal history, suggesting the migration of the Spirit from one
world-historical epoch to another.
A closer look suggests, however, that Bodes program does not offer a linear history of
civilization. The path from the ancient Orient to Greece and from Greece to Germany
was only one of the ways the museum could be experienced and it was by no means the
major one. Far from following a continuous line, the presentation of the history of art
was frequently ruptured, then woven back through unexpected correspondences and
Islamic art in addition to ancient Chinese and Japanese art. It was only after Brunos
Asian Art Museum was abandoned by the Weimar Republic that the Islamic Department
was added to the South Wing of Messels project in 1926.
57
contingencies between the exhibited cultures. Even though all the departments were
connected with one another, each of the collections could also be experienced as an
independent museum, which could be accessed from the city through a separate
entrance. The most ceremonial of these entrances was a monumental gateway, which,
across the main open court facing the Kupfergraben, led visitors directly to the
Pergamene Altar-Raum.
Nor was Messels Royal Museum a return to the Neoclassical ideal, which abandoned
the historicist organization of the collections for a return to a hierarchical ordering of
classical masterpieces.30 The prominence Messel gave to the post-classical, baroque
art of 2nd century BC Asia Minor, in lieu of the classical art of Hellas, is indeed
remarkable. The discovery of the Gigantomachy (the Battle of the Olympian gods with
Titans) in the 1880s created a shock in art historical circles. Highly expressive
representation of bodies in motion on the Pergamene Friezeits pathoschallenged
the Neoclassical interpretations of the art of the antiquity, which had been firmly in place
since Winckelmanns dictum, noble simplicity and calm grandeur. Pergamons
interpreters put into question the superiority of the classical art of Hellas over the
Hellenistic art of later antiquity, which had been overlooked or outright dismissed as
decadent prior to the 1880s. In contrast to the central location of Pergamon, the
classical Greek art of Olympiathe first major excavation site of the German
Archeology Instituteoccupied a marginal position in the museum plans on the South
30
Cf. Bernau and Riedl who argue that the Neoclassical forms of the facades of the
Pergamon Museum and the exhibition of antique architecture inside parallel the
simultaneous shift within the Wilhelmine official architecture around 1906-1907, 172.
58
wing of the complex: it was positioned not as the culmination of Greek art, but as a stage
leading to the later antiquity of Pergamon. Hellas was represented not so much as the
culmination of art and civilization, but as one point on a circle of culture, one of the
many steps leading to the great synthesis of the East and the West in the Hellenistic
Pergamon.
59
2.2. On the Vocation of the Museum: Bildung versus Kultur
The creation of the museum as a temple of knowledge in Revolutionary France

convinced the Prussian reformers that the central state had a compelling interest in
educating a scattered nation. Unlike the French precedent, however, the Prussian Royal
Museum never unambiguously endorsed the universal project of the Enlightenment. This
reluctance has as much to do with the rise of nationalist sentiment in Germany before
and during the Napoleonic wars as it has with the peculiarity of German Romantic
thought. The ideal of Enlightenment, just like the idea of universal civilization, was
associated, first, with the genteel manners of the French-speaking elite, and, then, with
the foreign invaders. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) was the first to idealize the
spontaneous and primitive ways of the German peasant. It should therefore not come as
a surprise that the German culture, defined in contradistinction to French civilization,
was a neologism introduced at the end of the 18th century.31 A surge in interest in local
traditions and Germanic Altertm and the opening of semi-private heritage
31
Even though Herder prefigured comparative and ethnological analyses, his notion of
Cultur refers merely to the achievements or products of the civilization in a given
present. The German word Cultur curiously languished in the early 19th century. A
concept that Herder and Kant used is conspicuously absent from Hegels Philosophy of
History. For a history of the concept see A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A
Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Milwood, N.Y.: Krauss Reprint Co., 1978).
For the German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation see Norbert Elias, The
Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1939), English translation by Edmund
Jephcott (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1978).
60
museums were to follow.32 The Prussian reformers knew well that, though it helped in
defeating the French, the German cultural peculiarism could as well pose a challenge to
the central authority of the Prussian state. In tailoring the civic function of the Royal
Museum, they sought to reconcile the disinterested, humanistic principlesidentified
with the statewith the peculiar character of the German Volk.
The foundation of the Royal Museum in Berlin underscores two assumptions about the
nature of art and society, whose origins we may trace to German idealism. First is the
conviction that art is disinterested and autonomous: it is detached from all the contexts
of practical life; secondly, art has a social purpose: exposure to art cultivates among the
ordinary citizens (that is middle class men) feelings of aesthetic pleasure and moral
restraint. Although this might appear a paradox, it is indeed perfectly consistent with the
work of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) who sees the social function of art only in its
aesthetic autonomy. Noting the shocking destruction brought by the mob during the
French Revolution, and the moral decadence and depravity of the educated upper
classes, Schiller concluded in On the Aesthetic Education of Man that the
development of civilization destroyed the wholeness of manthe unity of feeling and
reason: We see not merely individual persons but whole classes of human beings
32
See Suzanne L. Marchand, The quarrel of the ancients and moderns in the German
museums in Susan A. Crane ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2000).
61
developing only part of their capacities, while the rest of them, like a stunted plant, shew
only a feeble vestige of their nature.33
Eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself
grew to be only a fragment he never develops the harmony of his being and
instead of imprinting humanity upon his nature he becomes merely the imprint of
his science.34
As Peter Brger noted, Schiller introduced art precisely at this point as a means to
develop the totality of human potential. Only art, in its detachment from everyday
activities, may restore the wholeness of man, which had been shattered by centuries of
overspecialization. Schiller admired the Greeks, not so much because they achieved a
timeless civilization, but since he saw them as a historical people who explored the
totality of human potential, unlike modern society, which is shattered by the division of
labor. It suffices to recall a famous painting of the construction of the Parthenon in
Athens by Friedrich Schinkel, to see that German humanistic Philhellenism depended
less on the idea of a normative Classical civilization than the idealization of the Greeks
as an organic ur-community of philosophers and artists. The museum, from its outset,
was less a temple of civilizationin the French Enlightenment meaning of the
wordthan a cathedral of the ideal community.
33
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, translated by Reginald Snell

(New York: Friedrich Ungar Publishing Co., 1965), 38; also cited in Peter Brger,
Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984), 44-45.
34
Schiller, 40.
62
Reconsidering the conflict between Alois Hirt and Friedrich Schinkel, which I have
discussed in Part 1, and the events that led to Hirts resignation in this light, we can see
why Hirts concept of the museum as an extension of the academy of fine arts was not
popular among the ranks of the Prussian reformers: the museum was tailored for an ideal
community of non-specialists, in the search for inner harmony and human wholeness.
Indeed, when Humboldt was appointed in 1829 to supervise the installation of the works
of art in the Old Museum, he, just like Schinkel, favored a hierarchical and nonhistorical organization of the works of art. The works, in other words, were not
illustrations of historical development but embodied an aesthetic feeling that could be
accessible to all. In his report of June 14, 1833, Humboldt saw a link between the
aesthetic quality of the masterpieces and the task of national cultivation (Bildung), and
argued that only antique sculpture and the masterpieces of European painting had to be
included in the museum. For Classical sculpture and Renaissance painting would affect
the entire nation because they were accessible to natural feeling.35 Classical art was not
only to elevate the taste of the ordinary citizen, but also to speak to natural feeling and
intuition.
Idealistic as it was, this spontaneous link between high art and the inner feeling of the
Volk presented two fatal contradictions: First, the cultivation of the ordinary man by art,
though it seemingly transcended the feudal class structure of Prussia, involved no
political emancipation as such. Bildung promised first and foremost a key to the
bourgeois society: individuals were to join the respectable ranks of Bildungsbrgertum,
35
Steven Moyano, Quality vs. History: Schinkels Altes Museum 601.

63
thanks to merit, not privilege. Yet by the time the (Altes) museum opened to the public
political reform had suffered crucial setbacks in Prussia. In fact, as Prussias failure to
establish the constitution that had been promised in 1815 suggests, neither the monarch
nor the feudal establishment intended to share power with Germanys enlightened, artloving Volk. In an excellent analysis of Schinkels museum and its relationship with the
Prussian state, Steven Moyano points out the apparent contradiction in the attitude of the
German reformers when faced with the suppression of the constitution and censure.
Seeing the impossibility of representative government in the foreseeable future,
Humboldt, for one, argued in 1822 that the members of the middle class had to be
truly cultivated before participating in the assemblies.36 The autonomy of art in the
museum, just like disinterested aesthetic education, which transcends the social class
of the viewer, assumed a double function: to cultivate the middle class
(Bildungsbrgertum) and to provide a sanctuary from political conflict.
A second contradiction of the equation of art with Bildung, and the state with the patron
of the arts, is the fact that it led precisely to what Schiller had hoped to remedy: the
overspecialization of society. A new type of professional curator and museum
administrator eventually replaced amateurs of art. Moyano writes,
In this light, the goal of disseminating cultivation through art was an attempt to
recast society in the image of the museums advocates General administration
also claimed Bildung in the belief that the bureaucracy included the most
36
Ibid., 604.
64
educated and capable members of the society. Cultivation was theirs to allocate
in order to direct society from above.37
Despite Schinkels refusal to conceive the museum as an extension of the academy, the
new institution created within the context of Prussia was one of the most bewildering
cultural bureaucracies ever created, its job initially to oversee the acculturation of the
nation by means of exposure to an increasingly pedantic knowledge about art and its
history.
***
Less than two decades after Schinkels museum, August Stler built the Neues (New)
Museum on the Museum Island as a metaphor for the history of the mind
[Geistesgeschichte]. The museum, which was constructed between 1843 and 1859,
consisted of three floors, each of which corresponded to one stage of Hegels Aesthetics:
the symbolic, the classical and the romantic eras, which correspond to the unconscious,
conscious and rational minds respectively. The ease with which the architectural
program of the Neues Museum corresponded to the history of the mind could as well be
due to Hegels original metaphor, which presents history as a tripartite building: each
stage is built upon the foundations of the previous floor.
The triumph of historicism in the organization of the Neues Museum is politically

significant.38 It meant, above all, that the civic and social function of the museum, the
37
Ibid.
65
Bildungsideal, was replaced by academism: a narrowly didactic project of representing

Hegels history. The ground floor of the museum, which was dedicated to what Hegel
called symbolic art, was a metaphor for the roots of history. In addition to the objects
of prehistoric and non-historical (ethnological) peoples from overseas, it displayed the
infancy of history in ancient Egypt. It suffices to reflect on the organization of the
Egyptian collections by the German philologist and founder of Egyptology Karl Richard
Lepsius (1810-1884) to underscore the importance of historicism. Lepsius led the
Prussian scientific expedition to Egypt and Sudan from 1843 to 1845. He shipped to
Berlin a large number of architectural reliefs and inscriptions taken from the ancient
temples, in addition to drawings and actual artifacts, which he published in the twelvevolume Denkmler aus gypten und thiopien.39 Lepsius major contribution to
archaeology is the Egyptian chronology he established in 1849: he observed correctly
that the extinct civilization underwent significant evolution from the first dynasties of
the Old Kingdom to its later days.40 Organizing the collections in the Neues Museum,
Lepsius did not consider the aesthetic value, originality or uniqueness of the works, but
treated all the objects as historical specimens. He included only the works that could be
placed precisely in the chronology of Egypts dynastic history, and which could
38
For a discussion of historicism in the organization of the collections of the Neues

Museum see Guido Messing Historismus als Rekonstruktion. Die gyptische
Abteilung im Neuen Museum and Gunvor Lindstrm Historismus als
Ordnungsprinzip. Die Abgusammlung im Neuen Museum in Alexis Joahimides et al.
eds., Museumsinszenierungen, 51-66 and 67-80.
39
Richard Lepsius, Denkmler aus gypten und thiopien (Berlin: Nicolaische

Buchhandlung, 1849-1856).
40
Richard Lepsius, Die Chronologie der gypter (Berlin: Nicolaische

Buchhandlung, 1849).
66
therefore illustrate Egypts historic development.41 The Egyptian department in the

Neues Museum, in other words, treated Egyptian art merely as the hieroglyphics of
Egyptian history.
Equally significant was the organization of the second floor of the Neues Museum to
represent arts classical age. Unlike Schinkels Museum, the Neues Museum did not
comprise originals, but plaster-cast copies of the most representative Greek and Roman
sculpture. The visitors were offered a linear history of the development of antique art
from its archaic origins to its classical perfection. That Humboldt had rejected the plaster
cast as an exhibition object, and had allowed only originals in the Altes Museum only a
few decades earlier,42 illustrates how radically the historicist museumits perception of
art as illustration of the history of the minddeparted from Bildung, the civic task of the
museum.
By abandoning the autonomy and the vocation of art, the Neues Museum not only lived
up to Hegels tatismhe maintained that the modern State rather than the harmonious
community of the Volk was the final embodiment of world-historical processbut also
ceased to be a museum of art as such. For, the originals and the copies that adorn the
museums floors are not so much the content of the museum as vehiclessymbols and
allegoriesthrough which the history of the Idea is presented, though imperfectly. The
more art succeeds in depicting the idea of beauty with sensuous form the more it falls
41
Messling, 59.
42
Lindstrm, 67.
67
from the grace of history. In fact, Hegel maintained that the fundamental problem of
classical art is precisely the fact that it achieved beauty all too well: The deficiency of
the classical is art itselfa complete unification between spiritual and sensual
existence.43 The romantic art is superior to the classical only to the extent it achieved
self-transcendence though still in the form of art. The history of art would come to an
end, according to Hegel, only when the idea of Beauty is achieved, not in the outer form,
but in the spiritually inner world, when aesthetics is dissolved into ethics.
***
How Hegels iconoclastic conviction that arts development was driven to its final
transcendence by an idea external to it came to dominate the Prussian museums and
academic art history in the mid 19th century deserves a separate study. For my purposes,
however, it is important to note that Wilhelm Bode, and his generation of art historians,
curators and critics who came to shape the discourse about the museum in the 1890s
hardly believed in Hegels philosophy of history, and even less in the Hegelian faith in
historical progress.
The critique of the museum in the last decade of the 19th century is imbued with
pessimismif not cynicismabout the civic and didactic function of the institution,
which is a symptom, in retrospect, of a larger crisis in Prussian public education. The
43
See Donald Preziosi, Art in Art History: a Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), 104.
68
German intellectuals disenchantment with the museum at the end of the century has to
do as much with the institutions failure to achieve its original goalsto speak to the
inner feeling of the Volkas with its servitude to academism. Historicism, the view that
collections of art should be organized and understood in relation to the trajectory of the
universal history of the mind, added to the perception that the museums became the
mausoleums of art, where works are kept as relics of past epochs with no relevance to
the ordinary Germans feeling for life. What is more, it was not only the
disenfranchised art critic who voiced this opinion, but a new generation of museum
administrators and curators, among them Wilhelm Bode.44
As early as 1860, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt challenged the Hegelian
philosophy of history by introducing a new scholarly method, cultural history, which
was to exercise decisive influence on Bodes museology. In his Die Cultur45 der
Renaissance in Italienerroneously translated into English as The Civilization of
Renaissance in ItalyBurckhardt argues that the great art of the Renaissance was born
not merely from the revival of classical antiquity, but from antiquitys union with the
genius of the Italian people, as made manifest in the Florentine community.46 Culture,
unlike the pedantic Bildung, is the unconscious survival of genius in the blood of
44
For the German discourse of the art museum at the turn of the 20th century see
Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, esp. ch. 4, Museums and Modernism
1880-1914.
45
Burckhardt spelled the word with c unlike the modern German Kultur.
46
Jacob Burckhardt (1860), The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York:
Phaidon, 1950), 104.
69
humanity.47 The rebirth of genius in an organic community, either in the polis of

Athens or in the city-state of Florence, is manifest in every aspect of its life, from the
ingenuity of its handicrafts and the masterpieces of its art to its civic order.
It is true, as one historian has noted, that Burckhardts depiction of Florence bears some
political resemblance with his native Basel, one of the last bastions of Neohumanism in
the German speaking world: years after Humboldts education reform was stalled in
Prussia, the patrician-merchant families of Basel zealously protected the independence,
and the civic vocation of their university.48 Burckhardts cultural history of the
Renaissance stemmed as much from his dedication to his own community in Basel as his
disillusionment with 19th century Europe at large, its submission to the authoritarian
empires and its inability to create an organic culture. And yet Die Cultur der
Renaissance in Italien had a legacy above and beyond the historical circumstances in
which it was written. Although Burckhardts cultural history is often incorrectly
identified as historicist, it introduced an entirely different method: Burckhardt presents
the Renaissance communities as a series of synchronic cross-sections, which explored all
aspects of life in a given present. In lieu of the succession of events, causes and effects,
we find in Burckhardts book an analysis of works and contexts.49
47
Jacob [also Jakob] Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, lectures published

posthumously by Jakob Oeri (Berlin, Stuttgart: Verlag von Spemann, 1905), 52.
48
Carl E. Schorske, History as Vocation in Burckhardts Basel, in Thinking with

History, 56-70.
49
Ibid.
70
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is rightly cited as an intellectual source of the fin-desicle critique of the museum.50 Even though he did not target the art museum as such,
his writing effectively demolished two basic assumptions upon which the 19th century
museum had been built: arts autonomy from the practices of everyday lifewhich goes
back to Kant prior to Schillerand the very possibility of the history of the mind. In The
Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche mocked Kants definition of disinterested art, and the
unearthly pleasures of aesthetic contemplation as the country parsons naivet.51 He
favored insteada key argument in The Birth of Tragedythe Dionysian rites in
ancient Greece, where there was yet no distinction between the producers and receivers
of art as such.52 Art was not defined by aesthetic detachment of a disinterested subject
from the object of perception, but by mutual participation and performance. If the
autonomy of art from the praxis of life was artificial, so was the entire category of
Geistesgeschichte, which Nietzsche found irrelevant in the face of the eternity of the
circular processes of life.53
It was, however, not Nietzsche, the disaffected philologist-turned-philosopher, but an

embittered outsider to the academy, Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), who leveled the
50
Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, 140-143.
51
Cited in Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, 140.
52
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, translated by Douglas Smith (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Sheehan Museums in the German Art World,
141.
53
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, (1874) in
Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
71
most damaging critique, targeting the museum, along with the Gymnasium and the
academy as the major symptoms of Germanys cultural decline. Opinionated and halfeducated, Langbehn was no match to Nietzsche intellectually. Nietzsche however seems
to have influenced Langbehn by providing him, perhaps, not so much intellectual
venues, as with a personal obsession: it is possible that Langbehn, who apparently
suffered from severe megalomania, identified himself with the bermensch whose
advent Nietzsche prophesized. Having heard of Nietzsches mental breakdown in late
1889, Langbehn was taken by the obsession that he should save Nietzsche, whom he
had not met yet in person. He visited the philosopher in the Jena asylum every day for
two weeks, sought his legal guardianship and tried to bar Nietzsches loyal friends and
family from seeing him: only placing Nietzsche under his custody in Dresden, Langbehn
insisted, would save the child-like philosopher.54 If Langbehn was the savior, so was
the noble philosopher in mental distress a metaphor for the German Volk in despair.
Had Langbehn not succeed in inciting a widely popular anti-education movement in the
1890sone that influenced the proto-fascist Youth Movementhe would have stayed
an odd footnote to German intellectual history, as one of the readers Nietzsche
anticipated and feared most.55 As Fritz Stern put it: In 1890, Langbehn, a failure and
54
Stern, Cultural Despair, 107-08.
55
Stern in his The Politics of Cultural Despair seeks to defend Nietzsche against the
charges that he fathered the Germanic ideology epitomized by Langbehn. He argues
that the latter misread the great philosopher, turning Nietzsches complex thought into
tags and clichs that can be consumed by the masses. According to Stern the reception of
Nietzsches critique of 19th century philistinism and pedantry at best paved the way for
the success of Langbehns simpler and more ambiguous defense of irrationality.
72
psychopath, wrote a sensational bestseller, a rhapsody of irrationality, denouncing the

whole intellectualistic and scientific bent of the German culture, the extinction of art and
individuality, the drift toward conformity.56 Langbehns book Rembrandt als Erzieher
[Rembrandt as Educatormost probably an adaptation of Nietzsches title
Schopenhauer as Educator] met with a rare success when it was published in 1890,
reaching a thirty-seventh edition in less than two years.
Though its reception amounts to a mass euphoria in fin-de-sicle Germany, Rembrandt

als Erzieher offers neither a clear argument nor an exhaustive analysis. We may start by
noting that the book is not really about Rembrandt, the Dutch painter. It is an
unsystematic compilation of reflections about everything that seems to have occurred to
the authors mind: the noble roots of the Germans, the decline of the humanistic Bildung,
the doom of modern civilization as well as prophecies of salvation. Langbehn has
something to say about everything: the chapters of the book read German Art, German
Science, German Bildung, German Mankind [Menscheit].57 Though it imitates
Nietzsches later prose, the book defies all disciplines and genres. Characteristically,
Langbehn quotes a few words of wisdom by great men as tags for mass consumption
(Fichte says, to have a character and to be German are synonymous). His own
sentences either border tautology (One can become an expert, a scholar, but one must
56
Ibid., xii.
57
Julius Langbehn [signed: a German], Rembrandt als Erzieher (Weimar: Alexander

Duncker Verlag, 1922).
73
be born an artist) or feature simple deductions (therefore artistic culture [Bildung] is

superior to scholarly learning [Bildung]).
A consistent theme throughout the book is an ardent primitivism, which glorifies the
pure German peasant: the native German is by birth predisposed to be an artist. The
gymnasium and the academy are targeted throughout the book as two institutions of
pedantic learning that waste the natural talents of the Volk. Langbehn, who had a taste
for simple comparisons, likens the work of art to a single word and the museum to a
dictionary: just as the meaning of the word was embedded in the context of a living
language, so was the meaning of the work of art in the local traditions and the tribal
character of the artist.
Rembrandt, and a lesser hero Shakespeare, appear occasionally in the book to illustrate
the tribal and local character of great art and literature: the first is presented as the most
German of all German artists and the latter as the Germanic ur-poet. Their artistic
genius is the embodiment of the character of their tribeLangbehn presented them as
Niederdeutsche, the purest of the Germanic tribesand of the peculiarity of the soil.58
Hence as role models, they could inspire the Germans to discover their own intuitive,
artistic soul, their own predisposition to individuality and genius.59
58
Shakespeares native Germanic identity was evidenced, as Lanbehn did not fail to take
notice, by his name, which mean spear-shaker [Speerschttler], Langbehn, Rembrandt
als Erzieher, 211; see also Stern, Cultural Despair, 135 n.
59
One suspects that Langbehns motive in choosing the Dutch painter and the English
poet as two role models was little more than simple self-identification. Both, Langbehn
insists, were Niederdeutsch, that is, from the purest of the Germanic tribes. Langbehn,
74
Theoretically, Rembrandt als Erziehler draws from contradictory, and at times

antithetical positions in German idealism, without sublimating them into a synthetic
position. Langbehn conflates Herders Volksseele [soul of the people], which inspired
the study of anonymous vernacular traditions of the folk throughout the 19th century,
with the concept of the genius-artist, which he borrows from Romanticism. The
individuality of a genius-artist such as Rembrandt is, strictly speaking, the expression
of, not freedom, but his native tribal character. Hence it is artistic intuition but not
scholarly education that can save the Germans from cultural decline. All the ills of
modern society, including cosmopolitanism, alienation, fragmentation, could be
remedied by learning from Rembrandt what is already inherent in the character of the
purest Germans.
Not surprisingly, Langbehns book resonated particularly well with the right-wing critics
of modernity60: by 1890 a number of conservative intellectuals had been engaged in an
anti-positivistic and organicist critique of Germanys modernization. The German
who was born in Schleswig-Holstein, then ruled by the Danish throne, considered
himself a Niederdeutsch. He appears to have attributed his own genius and
individuality to his own high birth, and complained that he was
misunderstoodparticularly by the Prussians who were too mixed with Jewish, Slavic
and French blood. As Stern shows in his biography, Langbehn published Rembrandt
with the pseudonym, a German, and spent an absurd amount of time to conceal his
true identity; though few knew him, or were interested in finding out at that time.
According to Stern, the concealment of the authors identity worked unexpectedly as a
marketing strategy; many mistook Langbehn initially for Nietzsche or Paul de Lagarde,
the famous biblical scholar who had sought to coin a Germanic religion in the 1850s,
Cultural Despair, 109.
60
Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, 142.

75
ideology, as epitomized in Ferdinand Tnnies Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, also

published in 1887 [Community and Society, 1957], elaborated a reactionary attitude. It
persistently faulted the universal project of the Enlightenment for the devastating effects
of industrialization in the metropolis, and the alienation of the individual in capitalist
society, and dismissed the Enlightenmentwhich was seen as too French and therefore
un-Germanaltogether in favor of a return to the volkish ideal of the organic
community: one whose structure is embedded in the tradition of the soil and the preindustrial, handicraft production. New anthropological, and increasingly biologistic
definitions of Kultur were coupled with a revived interest in the ethnic ancestors of
modern day-Germans.
Among Langbehns admirers were also reformers and pioneers of aesthetic modernism:
the architect and founder of the German Werkbund, Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927);61
a leading patron of modern art, Karl Enst Osthaus (1874-1921); the pioneers of modern
museology Alfred Lichtwark (1852-1914) and Wilhelm Bode.62 In fact, Langbehns
carefully constructed image as an outsider who ruthlessly attacks the cultural
establishment while having no stake in it, is complicated by the fact that renowned
museum administrators, curators and art historians supported and financially patronized
a high-handed yet penniless Langbehn before and during the German-Rembrandt
controversy. Richard Schne, then the general director of the Prussian Royal Museum,
61
For Langbehns influence on Muthesius see Stanford Anderson, Introduction, in

Muthesius, Style-architecture and Building-art: Transformations of Architecture in the
Nineteenth Century and Its Present Condition, translated by Stanford Anderson (Santa
Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 6.
76
opened his house and private library to Langbehn. Without the encouragement of the art
historians Alfred Lichtwark and Woldeman von Seidlitz (1850-1920), who helped
Langbehn to study Rembrandt, the book would perhaps not have been completed.63
Bode, who met Langbehn upon Seidlitzs recommendation, agreed to cover the
publication expenses of Rembrandt als Elzieher from his own private funds in 1899,
when Langbehn failed to find a publisher for his manuscript. After L.H. Hirschfeld, a
publishing house in Dresden agreed to publish the book, Bode and Seidlitz sent copies of
Rembandt als Erziehler to their most affluent contacts in Germany and abroad.
Langbehn, who made a point of limiting the sale price to two Marks in order to make the
book available to ordinary Germans, did not object to reaching out to this most
distinguished audience.64
Nor is it a coincidence that Bode wrote the first professional review of the book in the
respected Preussische Jahrbcher in March 1890, which he titled Rembrandt as
Educator by a German. He praises the book as a polemic, derived from the innermost
life of the German spirit, which intends to find through a diagnosis of todays frequently
corrupt conditions the basis for the necessary rebirth of German art and culture.65
63
Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, 146.
64
Langbehns gave consent to the distribution of his book to affluent readers, with the
sole condition that the book not be sent to university professors and the Jews. Ohlsen,
Wilhelm von Bode, 149.
65
Bode, Rembrandt als Erzieher von einem Deutschen, Preussische Jahrbcher,

LXV:3 (March, 1890), 301-314. Also quoted in English translation in Stern, Cultural
Despair, 159.
77
It is indeed puzzling why Bode, who first curated Rembrandt paintings in the Royal
Museum, endorsed Langbehns gross misrepresentation of the Dutch master and ruthless
attacks on the institution. One cannot completely rule out the possibility that Bode, just
like Langbehns other admirers among Germanys cultural elite, was so taken by the
forcefulness of the authors argument and so attuned to the German ideology, that he
turned a blind eye to the inconsistencies or outright errors in Langbehns account.66 It is
more likely, however, that Bodes endorsement of the book reveals more than an
occasional sympathy for Langbehns ideology when he writes:
Although Rembrandt is only the thread by which the author unfolds his tapestry,
his appraisal of the great master is based on the knowledge of his work and a fine
understanding of his nature. What he says about him is often new and surprising,
always brilliant and presented with the warmth of glowing admiration for the
artist [The book] is certain of a distinguished place in the Rembrandt
literature.67
Langbehns book, to say the least, was hardly a distinguished contribution to the
Rembrandt literature. At least one leading Rembrandt scholar in the Netherlands to
whom Bode had sent a copy of Rembrandt als Erziehler, had brought to Bodes attention
some of Langbehns errors.68 Bodes personal correspondence with Langbehn also
suggests that Bodes review was carefully planned and coordinated with the author to
lend the book the very scholarly legitimacy that Langbehn denounces as decadent.69
66
Stern, Cultural Despair, 159.
67
Bode, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 303; Stern, Cultural Despair, 120 n.
68
See the Dutch art historian Abraham Brediuss letter to Bode, 26 November 1889,
Berlin, SMzB PK Zentralarchiv.
69
See Langbehns letter to Bode, 10 January 1890, SMzB PK Zentralarchiv.

78
Even if Bode agreed that Germany was corrupt and needed cultural and artistic
regeneration, one could hardly believe that he failed to see the feebleness of
Langbehns Kunstpolitik. Langbehn advocates reintegrating the urban proletariat with
the pastoral Volk and establishing a social aristocracy, a harmonious community in
which the peasants happily defer to the racial purity and artistic intuition of their lords: a
navethough not innocenteducation reform. He argues that only by exploiting the
artistic talent of the fewthe noblest, purest peasants could Germany transcend its
current state of mediocrity. Yet, it did not occur to the author that his populist
primitivism might contradict his political elitism. While Langbehn benefits from the
popular disillusionment with Bildung, particularly with secondary school education, he
offers no viable alternative. Instead, he substitutes Humboldts educated middle class
(Bildungsbrgertum) with a vague Bidungsaristokratismus, an absurd oxymoron.70
Bode, on the other hand, knew all too well that he could achieve reform in the museum
only by enlisting the financial and political support of the emerging class of Berlins
cosmopolitan (partly Jewish) bourgeoisie, which Langbehnan anti-Semiteloathed.
The question remains, then, of why Bode choose to underwrite Langbehns quixotic
opportunism?
Bode belonged to a new type of connoisseur-curator who came to dominate the German
museums at the turn of the last century. We may list at least three factors that contributed
to the rise of a new curatorial connoisseurship: the emergence of international art
70
Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 40.

79
markets, the rise of German nationalism in the aftermath of political unification, and the
critique of academic art history by hands-on museum curators who preferred instead a
practical Kunstwissenschaft.71 Bodes patronage of Langbehn is, in this light, the most
significant evidence that points to the relation between the movement for museum
reform and the rise of the German ideology at the turn of the century.
An ardent nationalist, Bode was profoundly concerned about how to display in the
museum the German character in art, which, he maintained, had been ignored by the
Royal Museum since its foundation.72 And yet, as a political realist who mastered the
mechanisms of power in Prussias cultural establishment, he conceived not of
Langbehns noble peasant, but the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of Berlin as the museums
preferred audience. A new class of entrepreneurs yearned for social legitimacy and had
the means to acquire prestigious collections of art. Bode, who gained his art historical
credentials not in the academy but through on-the-job experience and who mastered the
international art markets, offered Berlins rich collectors two invaluable assets: the
service of a renowned connoisseur who could distinguish, through half scientific and
half intuitive methods, an original masterpiece from an imitation (hence the difference
between a good and bad investment); secondly the service of a collector who can
tastefully display the originals in Berlins bourgeois intrieurs by taking into account
71
Alexis Joachimides, The Museums Discourse on Art: the Formation of Curatorial

Art History in Turn of the Century Berlin, in Susan A. Crane ed., Museums and
Memory (Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 200-19.
72
Bode, Denkschrift Erweiterungs- und Neubauten bei den kniglichen Museen in

Berlin.
80
both the social convenance of the patrons apartment and the originalusually
aristocraticsetting from which the work was displaced. Thanks to Bodes invaluable
advice, Berlins new class of entrepreneurs, who acquired a substantial quantity of
original works from Francedue to the war reparations imposed after the FrancoPrussian war, France was suffering an economic crisisand from the declining
aristocratic families in Italy and Britain, would appear less the unrefined Huns, as they
were commonly seen in the rest of Europe.73
Bode, a public servant who accepted no payment from the rich collectors, arranged for
substantial donations to the Royal Museum both in original works of art and in funds. He
also financed some of the major public projects such as the construction of the
Renaissance museum (Kaiser Friedrich Museum or todays Bode Museum) by enlisting
rich benefactors in Berlin in private associations; he founded the Verein fr
Kunstwissentschaft to finance Messels project.74 Bode, in this sense, is a founder of the
modern capitalist art museum for he turned upside down the Humboldtian relationship
between the public institution and its audience, the urban bourgeoisie. It was no longer
the state museum that contributed to the construction of an urban middle class by
educating the taste of the individual. It was instead the wealthy bourgeoisie that
sustained the Royal Museum and in doing so acquired social legitimacy.
73
Gaehtgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel, 12-13.
74
Each member of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum-Verein contributed a yearly

membership fee of 500 Mark. Considering that the association had about one hundred
members, Bode amassed considerable funds for the construction of the museum. See
Petras, 102-03.
81
Though contingent on the socio-political conditions of Germany at the turn of the

century, the new relation between the museum and its patrons had two lasting results:
firstly, the disciplinary autonomy of the connoisseur curatorship, which severed the
museums connection with the academy, and secondly, the construction of the cult of
authenticity in which the original work of art is thought to embody a unique essence,
which cannot be reproduced in its imitations or plaster casts: the task of the art museum
was no longer to educate the public but to highlight that authentic essence by creating
the best possible conditions for the exhibition. Bode ridiculed academic art historians
like his chief opponent, Hermann Grimm, who occupied the first regular art history chair
in the University of Berlin, and his successor Heinrich Wlfflin. Grimm was an oldfashioned Hegelian who did not comprehend why Bode would spend public funds to
acquire relatively insignificant originals instead of displaying copies of the most
significant masterpieces. He complainedcorrectlythat the Royal Museum no longer
provided visual aid for the education of art history in the university.75 Wlfflin, on the
other hand, constructed grandiose theories about the changes of epochal visions
throughout history, but could not always correctly establish the authorship and the
authenticity of a masterpiece, which Bode saw both as a test of competence and the goal
of art history.76
75
Joachimides, The Museums Discourse on Art, 204-10.
76
Ibid., 211-15.
82
Paradoxically, then, Langbehns primitivism had a particular appeal for the emerging
curatorial connoisseurship and the new art museum, and not simply because he
condemns humanistic Bildung and academic historicism alike. In his yearnings for
redemption, both cultural and spiritual, Langbehn enthrones art as a surrogate for
religion: art leads to the Volks salvation in and by itself.
Though Langbehns art may imply a type of autonomy, it surely departs from Schillers
autonomous art, which, as we have seen, fulfills its vocation through its detachment
from the context of everyday life. Nor is Langbehns art analogous to that of
Nietzsche, who challenges the rarefied experience of aesthetics, and emphasizes its
performative, ritual roots. Langbehn, in contrast, both intends to relocate art in its
authentic context, the character of the local tribe and the soil, and keep the aesthetic
distance that distinguishes an original masterpiece from the praxis of life: he
liberates the work of art from the museum and, yet, maintains the aura that had
resulted in the aesthetic differentiation of an object as a work of art in the museum in
the first place.
For our purposes here, it is important to note that Bodes aesthetic presentation made
Langbehns notion of redeemer-art (in contrast to didactic art) the very content of a new
museum: a museum that was put together by the technical expertise of the connoisseurcurator, and one that was intended for the innocent eye. Had it been carried out
according to Bodes original plans, the German Museum would have revealed further the
83
connection between the aestheticism of the connoisseur-curatorship and the populist

primitivism of Langbehns German ideology.
84
2.3. Art versus Ethnology: Imperial Archaeology and Taxonomies of Culture
A history of the Royal Museum and its later transformation needs to take into
consideration the prominent role archaeology came to play in the self-representations of
an increasingly aggressive, expansionist German Reich at the turn of the 20th century.
As shown in a recent history of German archaeology and Philhellenism by Suzanne
Marchand, German archaeology underwent a massive reorganization in the aftermath of
the unification, bringing under a central cultural bureaucracy not only the 19th centuryhumanistic disciplines of ancient philology and antiquarianism, but also the museums of
art and ethnology. The centralization under the state apparatus brought the German
sciences of things ancient into a unique position, allowing large-scale undertakings, such
as long-term excavations in Olympia and Pergamon.
During the reign of Wilhelm II the imperial patronage of archaeology in the Eastern
Mediterranean and the Near East reached its most ostentatious dimensions, compelling
scholars to serve under increasingly nationalistic and, at times, comically pompous
representations of the German throne. Fuelled by the enthusiasm of the Kaiser for
ancient dynastic histories, the Reich mobilized unequalled resourcesfinancial, political
and diplomaticfor the exploration of ancient sites in a geography expanding from the
Aegean Sea to ancient Mesopotamia: the vast territories controlled by the Kaisers ailing
friend, the Ottoman Empire. The vast region claimed for German science perfectly
coincided with Germanys systematicand officially undeclareddesigns on the
85
Ottoman Empire: the connection between the science of the past and Germanys political
interests in the future of the region became all the more clear during the construction of
the Istanbul-Baghdad Railway. The foundation of the German Orient Society (DOG) in
1898 by a board of trusteesincluding Georg von Simmens, the director of Deutsche
Bankmarked the beginning of a new era in the Western exploration of the ancient
Near East. Starting with the excavations of Babylon and Assur, the German Orient
Society unearthed the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, completing the sporadic
explorations by the British, French and American travelers in the 19th century.77
Notwithstanding the political designs of the German archaeological institutionsto

provide an infrastructure for a future German occupation78the effects of German
archaeology in the Near East were phenomenal. Within four decades, from the
Pergamon excavations of 1883 to 1918 when Germany and its Turkish ally were
defeated in World War I, systematic excavations of a dozen archaeological sites
transformed the modern knowledge of the ancient civilizations of the Eastern
Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.
The new German archaeology was less dependent on the 19th century dilettantes,
adventurers and treasure hunters like the Englishmen Henry Layard (Nineveh) or the
German Heinrich Schliemann (Troy) who had pursued the European publics attention
77
Marchand, Down From Olympus, esp. ch. 6, The Peculiarities of German Orientalism
(188-227).
78
Ibid.
86
more than a systematic documentation of the sites.
As a new generation of German
archaeologists commenced excavations in some of the most important sites of the

ancient world from todays Iraq to Turkeys Ionian coast, the age of sensational
discoveries in the Orient gave way to the era of grand-scale archaeology: long-term
explorations in ancient sites, which reached their objective as a cumulative effort of
generations of archaeologists working under Western colonial and national institutions.79
In other words, the German excavations prior to World War I radically modernized
archaeology, transforming it into a professional practice, which claimed a degree of
scientific objectivity. And yet, the professionalization of the discipline tended also to
compromise the spirit of humanism as professed by the mandarins of classical Greece
and Rome.
The famed amateurs, the engineer Carl Humann (1839-1896) and the architect Robert
Koldewey (1855-1925), were succeeded by their assistants, Theodor Wiegand and
Walter Andrae (1875-1956), a new generation of archaeologists trained in the field.
These archaeologists professed first-hand knowledge about the civilizations they
discovered. Sponsored directly by the Kaiser, they also proved able bureaucrats who
survived countless controversies within Prussias cultural establishment. Wiegand, the
son-in-law of the powerful Siemens family, for instance, was equally at ease in
orchestrating byzantine intrigue in Istanbul and Berlin at the height of the Wilhelmine
Empire. Despite the fall, in 1918, of the regime that favored them, both figures came into
prominent administrative positions in the Berlin State Museum. It was under the
79
See Marchand, Down From Olympus.

87
supervision of these archaeologists-turned-museum directors that todays Pergamon

Museum would take shape.
***
The extraordinary expansion of the holdings of the Prussian Royal Museum during the
Kaiserreich was undoubtedly a practical outcome of imperial archaeology. As early as
the 1850s, shortly after Lepsius shipped the Egyptian finds to Berlin, the Prussian
museum was reshaped to represent the experience of humanityartistic, cultural and
historicalin the spatial organization of a museum: the historical and ethnological
narratives are translated into actual architectural spaces.
By the end of the 19th century, however, the realization that the history of humanity is
not a continuous and linear evolution from one world-historical stage to the following,
but consists of several cultural circles that have come into contact with one another at
several points in their developments, made the totality of the experience of humanity
unrepresentable. No single chart of the genealogy of art and culture could be agreed
upon. Nor could the taxonomies of artistic and cultural objects in historical or
ethnological narratives be easily translated into an architectural diagram.
The theories of cultural diffusion, which emerged particularly from fin-de-sicle Austria,
explored manifold connections between the Western and Oriental cultures, seeking the
common origins of Celtic, Greek, Mesopotamian and Islamic art. Whether that origin
88
was to be found in Egypt, before it was perfected in Greece and transmitted to Europe
and the Islamic Near East, as Alois Riegl and others maintained,80 or whether there
existed an ur-Aryan culture in Persia, which lent its forms both to the German and
Islamic cultures, as Riegls chief opponent Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) argued,81
matters less compared to the revolution such inquiry entails in the historians method. In
the absence of written record, formal analysis of the decorative ornament came to be
accepted as a viable historical method, just as the similarities and differences in style
were seen as evidence of cultural continuities or ruptures.82
***
One crucial result of the new historiographic positions in Germany and Austria was the
blurring of the boundaries between works of art and ethnological objects. As early as
1880, the acquisition of artifacts from cultures historically and geographically distant to
Germany initiated an intense debate among the ranks of the Royal Museum. Initially all
objects of non-Western civilizations, including Chinese and Islamic artifacts, were
included within Berlins ethnologic collections: the museum made no distinction
between the objects of popular crafts and those of more sophisticated courtly traditions.
80
Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations For a History of Ornament (1893),

translated by Evelyn Kain (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).
81
Josef Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom: Beitrge zur Geschichte der Sptantiken und
Frhchristlichen Kunst (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1901).
82
See Marchand, The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism:
The Case of Josef Strzygowski.
89
Though the necessity of studying the peoples oversees was not in dispute, all the more
necessary because of Germanys new-found colonial ambitions, how to integrate the
ethnological collections into the rubric of the 19th century museum raised a number of
questions: should the objects of ancient Oriental civilizations from the Sumer to the
Islamic middle ages be displayed alongside the masterpieces of Western art? Could nonWestern art, if such categorization could be justified at all, be presented for the aesthetic
enjoyment of the German public?
As general director, Richard Schne (1840-1922) is responsible for expanding the scope
of the Royal Prussian Museums in Berlin, adding several new departments including the
Vlkerkunde Museum. Yet, Schne did not fully understand the implications of the vast
expansion of the museum to encompass objects that had not previously been considered
art. He wrote in 1880 that the ethnological collection could no longer be embraced
within the art museum derived from the principles of Wilhelm von Humboldt. One could
not enjoy these objects artistically: ethnological objects constituted a category outside
art.83
The ethnological collections of the Royal Museum, which go back to the expeditions of
the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) in South America, were
initially exhibited, as we have seen, on the ground floor of the Neues Museum, and
represented the symbolic age of the civilization. Yet the construction of a distinct
83
Festschrift zur Feier ihres 50 jhrigen Bestehens am 2.8. 1880: Zur Geschichte der
Kniglichen Museen in Berlin (Berlin, 1880), 56; cited in Gaehtgens, The Museum
Island, 63.
90
Museum of Ethnology (Vlkerkunde) on the Kniggrtzer street between 1880 and 1886
institutionalized the distinction between the categories of work of art and ethnologic
object: if works of art were historical, the ethnological objects were non-historical.
From the ethnologistsrather self-servingperspective, art was a sub-category of
culture. Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), head of the new Vlkerkunde Museum,
significantly narrowed the domain of art museum to encompass only the artistic
products of a historical people.84 Hence Bastian not only requires all art to be historical,
but also uses culture in a non-elitist sense that has little in common with, for instance,
the meaning Burckhardt assigned to the word three decades earlier: the sum of the
achievements of a golden age, such as those of classical Hellas or Florence of the
Renaissance.
One outcome of limiting art to the domain of the historical was the transformation of
the museum of art into the museum of art historyas, for instance, the Art History
Museum in Vienna. Yet, the historical peoples of Europe also produced crafts, objects
of good taste for practical use (including architecture), which necessitated a category
outside of the disinterested domain of fine arts. Faced with the decline in the taste of
the European public after the industrial revolution and the perceived superiority of the
traditional crafts and ornamental designs of India and North Africa, the South Kensigton
Museum in London (est. 1851, now the Victoria and Albert) provided a new model. The
museum was intended not so much for the general publicits aim was not to cultivate
84
Cited in Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch, Hundert Jahre Museum fr Vlkerkunde Berlin:

Zur Geschichte des Museums, Baessler-Archiv, Beitrge zur Vlkerkunde, Neue Folge
21 (1973): 4; see also Gaethgens, The Museum Island in Berlin, 63.
91
the moral and civic character of the middle classesas for professionals, designers and
industrialists. That the Kunstgewerbe Museum (Museum of Applied Arts) was financed
initially by the Prussian Ministry of Tradenot by the Ministry of Culturesuggests
that the institution was seen as instrumental for economic development, alongside the
arts and crafts school.85 Even when the new museum on Prinz Albert Street was
incorporated into the Royal Museum in 1885, the civic and moral benefits one could
gain from such collections were far from established.
The disagreement about the future expansion of the Royal Museumthe first of nearly
half a century of museum wars among the competing factions of Prussias cultural
bureaucracyerupted in 1880 between Schne, the general director, and Bode, then the
director of the Department of Christian Sculpture. Faced with a lack of space on the
Museum Island and Berlins expanding collections, Schne intended to separate the
ethnology and applied arts collections from the more traditional collections of fine arts.
According to Schne, while the Museum Island would continue to house the collections
of fine arts, emphasizing arts origins and its highest achievements in the ancient
Mediterranean, the ethnology and applied arts collections would be housed in new
museum buildings, miles from the Museum Island, on what later became Prinz Albert
Street. Bode, in contrast, proposed to integrate Berlins Painting Gallery
(Gemldegalerie) with the Department of Christian Sculpture into a new Renaissance
85
Gaehtgens, The Museum Island in Berlin, 64.

92
Museum on Prinz Albert Street: a museum that would display the art of Italy and
Germany from the Middle Ages to the end of the baroque era.86
The debate has been presented in histories as an encounter between a conservative

Schne who subscribed to the old-fashioned idea of fine arts, and a reformist Bode who
introduced the more recent ideas of the Kulturgeschichte.87 In fact, there is little doubt
that Bodes Renaissance Museum was informed by his reading of Burckhardts Die
Cultur [Kultur] der Renaissance in Italien: instead of comparing and contrasting the
aesthetic values of a single art form in the gallery, Bode sought to reintegrate painting
with other achievements of a given culture. That Bode was in tune with more recent
historiographic approaches, however, does not necessarily mean that his museum was
more socially progressive than Schnes.
Schne maintained that the distinct methodologies of art history and ethnology made
these two types of museum irreconcilable: the ethnologists collected specimens whereas
art historians sought masterpieces. Art and ethnology museums also had different tasks.
The scientific curiosity about the primitive man or the instrumental interest of
professionals in the ornamental designs of pre-industrial cultures should be kept separate
from the vocation of the museum of fine arts. Hence the Museum Island would remain a
sanctuary of moral and civic Bildung, unadulterated by scientific and practical interests.
86
Petras, 100.
87
Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, 110-11; Gaehtgens, The Museum Island in Berlin, 65;
Petras, 100.
93
Even though Schne seems to have prevailed initiallymost museum directors sided
with Schnehe had to accept over the years compromises due to Bodes increasing
influence with the royal family and Berlins powerful class of entrepreneurs. Two
museums, the interim Pergamon Museum by Fritz Wolff and the Renaissance
Museumnamed after the late Kaiser Friedrichwere constructed on the Museum
Island. Bode, who became the director of the Gemldegalerie in 1890 and oversaw the
construction of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, eventually transformed the very structure
of the Royal collections. He founded early Christian and Byzantine, Near Eastern
(1899), Islamic (1904) and East Asian Art (1907) departments, and planned for the
Ancient German Art Museum. Most of these new collections were housed initially in
Bodes Kaiser Friedrich Museum and, in many instances, in spite of Schnes fierce
opposition.
Bode, unlike Schne, seems to have taken notice that the superiority of the
Mediterranean civilization and its privileged place in the humanistic Bildung could no
longer be defended in the face of the rise of cultural relativism. In fact, in its defense of
the German culture against the advances of universal civilization, the German ideology
put into crisis the humanistic vocation of art. Compared with the newfound necessity to
honor the heritage of the ancestral Germanic tribes, or to display the cultural objects of
the other primitives overseas, the privilege of the art of the historical
peoplesGreeks in particularcame under constant scrutiny.
94
In a memorandum concerning the extension and the new buildings of the Royal
Museum, published in February 1907 shortly after he succeeded Schne as the general
director, Bode clarifies his vision of a new museum. Noting that ancient German art
has been neglected by the Royal Museumin fact, such a collection was nowhere to be
found in Germanyhe underlines the difference between a museum of German art and a
museum of applied arts or cultural history. Bodes Museum of Ancient German Art,
alongside the museums of East Asian and Islamic art, would not necessarily present
cultural history as a general picture of the fundamental character of the German art and
its various developments.88 That the German Art Museum was one among a series of
new art museums dedicated to Near Eastern, Islamic and East Asian art suggests that
Bodes vision was more than an opportune response to the rising Germanophilia.
Overall, Bodes new museum was an attempt to rescue art from the crisis brought
about by the fin-de-sicle cultural relativism: he redefined art as a fundamental
experience, which is not simply a specimen of cultureethnologic objectas such, but
which, in its sublimity and essence, embodies the fundamental character of a people.
Bode transformed Langbehns exclusively Germanic cult of art into a cross-cultural,
rather than universal, category, analogous to the sacred. For Bode, unlike Langbehn,
authentic context and original art could be embodied as much in a Chinese bronze or
Islamic ornament, as in the unacknowledged masterpieces of the pre-historic Germans.
88
Bode makes a distinction between the Museum of Ancient German Art and cultural
history or applied arts museums such as the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg or the
Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz. See Denkschrift Betreffend
Erweiterungs- Und Neubauten bei den Kniglichen Museen in Berlin (1907), in Bode,
Mein Leben, II: 242-44.
95
It is in this context that we may understand the innovation Bode brought to the Berlin
Museums: the simultaneous introduction of Germanic and Asian art museums. By
abandoning the dependence of art on Bildung and redefining it as a non-elitist, and yet
profound experience shared by every culture, Bode prefigured the postwar discourse of
art and of the family of man, one that we find in the writing of another connoisseur of
Oriental art, Andr Malraux.
96
2.4. The Style Room: Between the Original Setting and the Bourgeois Intrieur
Bodes Stilraum (style-room) must be seen as a technique of museum display through

which the curator negotiated between the monumental character of the imperial museum
and the taste of the private, bourgeois viewer. As early as 1880, Bode opposed Schnes
plans to centralize the Royal collections on the Museum Island, which would lead
inevitably to an officially sanctioned taste in the representation of the history of art, and
favored instead the dispersion of the collections within the city into pseudo-aristocratic
private residences. Though it was constructed on the Museum Island and not on the site
favored by Bode, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum reflected Bodes idea of the museum.
Though most exhibition rooms in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum were identified with a
master or a historical school, such as the Rembrandt room, a few were dedicated to
private collections and were named after the donor. Hence more than a comprehensive
survey of historical styles, the museum celebrated a new political order: the cultural and
artistic choices of the Kaiserreicha Kulturstaatcould be sustained only thanks to the
taste of the museums affluent benefactors.89 It mattered little, at least in the
representation of the museum, that such private taste was mediated by Prussias
powerful connoisseur-bureaucrat, Bode, who was responsible for selecting and
organizing the collections.
89
Gaehtgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel, 116-18.

97
By reshaping the public museum along with the taste of the private collector, Bode
was responding to a fin-de-sicle critique: the public museum, Bode maintained, stacked
the works of art in a warehouse, which, due to the overabundance of masterpieces and
the lack of appropriate conditions of display, distracted the attention of the viewers.
Explaining his alternative technique of display to an English audience in 1891, Bode
writes that the chief aim of the museum should be
the greatest possible isolation of each work and its exhibition in a room which,
in all material aspects, such as lighting and architecture, should resemble, as near
as may be, the apartment for which it was originally intended.90
Hence Bode set forth two objectives: first, to recontextualise the masterpiece in a
semblance of the historical setting for which it was intended in the first place; secondly,
to isolate the work from other masterpieces. Bode opposed the comparative displays of
the 19th century museum, which often grouped the very best examples of painting
together. The painting could better be served, he argued, by combining it with works of
lesser artistic value, usually sculpture and architectural decoration.
The characteristic features of Bodes style-rooms in which he pursued these two

objectives are well known.91 Unlike the earlier displays of the Royal Museums, which
classified the arts according to their medium, Bode integrated paintings, sculpture, and
90
Bode, The Berlin Renaissance Museum, Fortnightly Review, 50 (1891): 506-15;

cited in Malcolm Baker, Bode and Museum Display: The Arrangement of the KaiserFriedrich-Museum and the South Kensigton Response, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen
(1996): 144 (hereafter cited as Bode and Museum Display).
91
Malcolm Baker provides an excellent critique of Bodes museum displays in Bode

and Museum Display, 144-52; see also Gaehtgens, Berliner Museumsinsel, 12-23; See
Petras for photographs of Bodes museum displays.
98
applied arts into historical ensembles within the museum interiors to evoke the periodstyle. As early as 1888, nearly two decades before the opening of the Kaiser Friedrich
Museum, Bode petitioned the Prussian Ministry of Culture to acquire, in addition to
original paintings and sculpture, original architectural elements such as
portals, fireplaces and ceilings of the Italian renaissance in order to exhibit
painting and sculpture in a series of rooms each of which is furnished in a way
that corresponds to the exhibits with genuine, contemporary decoration.92
Though it integrated works of art with applied arts, Bodes style-room had little in
common with the American period rooms, which displayed all the contents of a
historical interior from Europe and reinstalled it within the museum.93 When we take for
example Bodes organization of the Rembrandt Room, it becomes clear that Bode did
not intend to replicate an existing, or an archetypal historical Dutch interior.
Nor did Bode recontextualize the works within modern life by imitating, as it were, the
living room of a private collector. The visitor could certainly not sit and make himself at
92
eine Reihe von Rumen in einer den darin auszustellenden Kunstwerk ganz
entsprehenden Weise mit echten gleichzeitigen Dekoration auszustatten. Geheimes
Staatsarchiv Preuicher Kulturbesitz (GStAPK), I.HA Rep.76 Ve Sekt,
Kulturministerium, 15 Aby. VIII, Nr.2., Bd.10: 10-12; cited in Ohlsen, Wilhelm von
Bode, 134.
93
In a recent book on the history of the Art Museums in Berlin the editors offer three
definitions based on the way the interior of the museum relates to its historical contents
in the German museology: (1) an Epochenraum combines originals that belong to a
historical or stylistic epoch in the modern museum without imitating the architectural
context of the time. (2) A Stilraum, in contrast to Epochenraum, imitates a historical
interior by using architectural elements that match the style of the exhibited objects. (3)
A Period Room (used in English in German texts) displaces the original architectural
elements of a historic interior and restores them as an actual room in the museum. Alexis
Joachimides et al. eds., Museumsinszenierungen, 235.
99
home on a period-chair in front of a Rembrandt, for the furniture, just like the painting,
was a museum display. And yet, unlike an applied arts collection, the utilitarian and
decorative objects are not presented for inspection. They are merely in a subsidiary role
as accompaniments to the paintings. The symmetrical organization of decorative
objects and sculpture in the interior was designed to draw attention to the masterpieces.94
In combining these objects into an aesthetic ensemble, Bode claimed to approximate in a
modern interior the original experience of the paintings, had they not been displaced
from the rooms for which they were intended. Such a claim of course poses an
insuperable problem.95
The dependence of a work of art on a historical or cultural context is already implied in

the very notion of style: the 19th century historical consciousness maintained that all
works embody some binding characteristics of the periods during which they were
executed, which are often not discernible by the artists themselves, but visible to the
retrospective gaze of the connoisseur. The conformity of the period style with the
dominant taste of an epoch is justified by the fact that the work does not only entail a
peculiar expression but it is put to use within a context: the Rembrandt painting
94
Baker, Bode and Museum Display, 150.
95
Some of those problems have been thoroughly addressed. Gaehtgens, for instance,
finds a paradox in Bodes intention to recontextualise the masterpieces in the
museums at a time when more Renaissance and Baroque interiors across Europe were
deprived of their original works of arts due to the Berlin Museums unstoppable appetite
for originals. Berliner Museumsinsel, 16. Malcolm Baker, on the other hand, points out
that, The harmonious qualities of Bodes [style-] rooms mask the underlying
disjunction between original setting and the place of the de-contextualised figure in the
museum, Bode and Museum Display, 150.
100
originally decorated a 17th century Dutch interior. This said, we have also to mention
that style for Bode was not so much a historical, interpretive tool, as it was for the fin de
sicle historians, but an operative, aesthetic category. By creating a semblance of the
historical and cultural setting in a museum-interior, Bode turned upside down the
relation between art and context: works can only be experienced in their authentic
architectural context, and yet the architectural context is only subsidiary to the
experience of the original work.
However, that which makes a work a masterpiece, worthy of unwavering attention, is

its aesthetic differentiation from the context of its original use: hence the difference
between art and applied arts, between painting and architectural ornament. The
decontextualisation of art is not a shortcoming of the exhibition techniques of the 19th
century museum, as Bode maintained, but a structural transformation in the status of the
object, which made the institution of the museum necessary in the first place. For, as
Theodor Adorno once wrote, even if the masterpieces of art are liberated from the
museums and hung in their original places in aristocrats palaces across Europe, they
would still remain museum objects without museums, to the extent that they remain
object of pure aesthetic contemplation.96
***
96
Theodor W. Adorno, Valry Proust Museum in Prisms, translated by Samuel and

Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Ma.: The MIT Press), 184
101
Despite the risk of oversimplifying the complex intersections between the taxonomies of
art and culture and the history of Prussian Museums, we may summarize the history of
Berlins Museum Island prior to the Pergamon Museum as the succession of three
distinct mentalities. At its origin the Prussian Royal Museum presented a direct
correspondence between the museum and the project of social reform. The museumits
architectural style, as well as its contentswas seen as a potent emblem for civic virtue
and morality. The architecture of the museum, in other words, did not raise a distinct
problem, but was an organic part of the vocation of art as Bildung.
The discrepancy between the architectural language and program of the museum
emerges arguably for the first time in the Neues Museum, thanks to the decline of
Humboldtian Bildung and the triumph of Hegelian historicism. While Stler intended an
idyllic Roman foruma sanctuary of arts and sciencesin the midst of the city, his
collaboration with the leading Prussian academicians and philologists such as Lepsius
resulted in building the Neues Museum as a metaphor for the philosophy of history. Had
Stler instead chosen an eclectic language, a combination of architectural styles that
correspond to the symbolic, classical and romantic collections on the faade of each
floor respectively, he would have contradicted Hegels historical determinism (the forms
belonging to distinct historical ages cannot co-exist in a given present). For the Neues
Museum did not present so much what art had been in the past, but what it was leading
to, its final transcendence. I have argued that subjugating art into the idea of historical
progress, a telos external to art, served a conservative project that consolidated the
102
authority of the Prussian state (a bewildering cultural bureaucracy), over the initial
project of instituting a civic community.
Bodes notion of the Renaisssance Museum, which found its expression in Ihnes Kaiser
Friedrich Museum, abandoned the mid-century idea of the museum as a metaphor for
history. Yet, Bode did not go back either to the earlier idea of the museum as Bildung.
The architecture of Ihnes Neo-Baroque palace-museum has no moral or historical
message to convey. In its interiors Bode intended to create the authentic experience
(Erlebnis) of art, by reconstructing a semblance of cultural and historical contexts.
And yet, Bodes architectural context in the museum is strictly speaking fictional and
modern and it does not replicate the historical interior from which the work was
displaced. I have attempted to trace some of the intellectual origins of Bodes dichotomy
of art and context, from the work of Burckhardt and Nietzsche to that of Langbehn.
Several other sources could also be suggested, among these Wilhelm Diltheys theory of
experience (Erlebnis) in literary criticism and Konrad Fiedlers formalism in art.
Bodes curatorial connoisseurship was formalist in the sense that it rejected all earlier
notions that art mirrors something other than itself, either a moral idea, or the idea of
historical development. Instead, Bode subscribed to a vague definition of art as national
character, which he owes to Langbehns vaguely allusive and confused theory of art as
the redeemer of the Volk.
Basing his museology on a dichotomy of art and context, Bode created a new schism
between the architectural style of the museum and the styles of its interiors. Only the
103
neutrality of the white cube, which would be introduced nearly two decades later, could
resolve the disjunction between the interior and the exterior of the museum. The
transformation of the Royal Museum of 1907 into the Pergamon Museum presents a
fascinating case in that senseeven though the Pergamon Museum never became a
modernist gallery.
When Messel wrote to Bode in 1907, having tried without success to match the theme of
each collection with the architectural style of the museum in which it is housed, he was,
perhaps, warning Bode that such correspondence is no longer possible.97 He provided
instead simple facades in Berlins characteristic vernacular classicisim (Zopfstil), which
hide hermetic interiors, each of which reconstructs a context for a different art and
culture. If Stlers museum embodied the history of civilization, turning art into a
hieroglyphics of history, Messels museum mapped in architectural space the human
geography of arts and cultures.
97
Messels letters to Bode, 2 July 1907 and 7 August 1907, Berlin, SMzB PK,
Zentralarchiv.
104
Part 3
_______________________________________________________________________
The Altar and Its Frames: Reconstructing Pergamon
105
3. 1. Space and Relief in the Pergamon Room
Let me begin by noting the difficulty of describing the object. The truth is that we do not
know exactly what the object is or what it stands for. Some earlier accounts call it the
Zeus Altar of Pergamon, others simply the Great Altar, referring to a modern
presentation of a lost monument. Most visitors would agree that in the museum we stand
in the presence of one of the opera nobile of the history of art. Yet, what sort of object is
exhibited in the museum? Can it be displaced and replaced? And what about the modern
space of the gallery, the architecture of display, the optical reality-effects, the discursive
and aesthetic parameters that sustain the authenticity of experience?
From a strictly architectural point of view the object of experience is a modern interior.
The observer enters the room from a gate off the center, facing the main exhibit with a
sharp perspective angle. The Pergamon Room, or the Pergamonsaal as it is called in
German, is a rectangular prism approximately twenty meters high, fifty-one meters wide
and thirty-two meters deep. On all sides, the room is surrounded with light-colored walls
with no window to the outside with the exception of its translucent ceiling. Filtered
through the double layers of the glass roof, daylight gives the room its peculiarly austere
character. The exhibited objects are arranged alongside the inner walls of the room. The
space that the giant prism defines is mostly left empty in the form of a large void.
106
The moment of entrance was no doubt conceived as one of the most important aspects of
the Pergamonsaal, leaving a permanent impression on the viewer. The visitors attention
is immediately directed to the faade of an ancient monument from the Hellenistic city
of Pergamon, reconstructed on the opposite side of the room. Two wings of this faade
extend from the rear wall of the Pergamonsaal towards the observer. As sculptural
objects in space, these two wings give the impression that the reconstructed altar is a
freestanding monument. They also frame the overall composition as seen from the
entrance.
The other three walls, which remain on two sides and at the back of the observer at the
moment of entry, are mostly left unoccupied. They rise 20m from the ground and meet
the glass ceiling with a simple ornamental moulding, a classicizing cornice. The flat and
mostly unarticulated surfaces of these walls give the impression that the altar is exhibited
inside a giant Platonic prism.
Near their lower edge, these three walls exhibit a long frieze in sculptural relief. The eye
of the observer scans the frieze horizontally, although the frieze is placed significantly
higher than eye level. Approximately one hundred thirty meters in length, the
Gigantomachy frieze once decorated the four sides of a freestanding altar in
Pergamon. It represents a scene from the mythic battle of the Olympian gods with the
giants. The frieze, which depicts the extremely expressive forms of bodies in motion, has
inspired modern artists and writers alike since Carl Humann shipped its fragments to
Berlin during the excavations of Pergamon in 1878-1886. Given its cultural and art
107
historical importance we may assume that the display of the Gigantomachy is the
primary concern that shaped the Pergamonsaal of the Berlin Museum. Here in the hall
we may observe two different strategies of display. Most of the marble panels of the
frieze are exhibited on the walls of the room, independently from the reconstructed altar.
They are not exactly hung on the wall in the way a picture canvas is displayed in a
gallery, rather they are incorporated into the plaster finishing of the modern walls. Only
a small portion of the frieze, which actually corresponds to two wings of the altar beside
the great stairway, is exhibited with its architectural context as incorporated into the
reconstructed faade.
As the observer proceeds towards the faade and reaches the broad flight of the great
stairway, the experience changes drastically. The viewer no longer contemplates the altar
as a tableau from a distance, but rather walks through the scenery. The large steps
somewhere in the middle of the Pergamonsaal define the boundary that demarcates the
space of the museum in front of the altar, from the space of the altar proper. Judging
from its white marble finish, we may conclude that the stairway is a part of the original
altar, more than a modern architectural element. Yet the visitors are not only allowed to
step on it, they are encouraged to ascend the stairs. This is in sharp contrast, for example,
to the columns, base and entablature of the altar, which are vigilantly protected against
tactile perception. As in any other museum, security officers watch the crowd that might
feel compelled to actually touch the monument.
108
The stairs take the viewer through the altar, presenting the sculptural frieze on both
sides. The sculptural figures that are kneeling on these very steps powerfully integrate
the exhibit with its frame. At the end of the stairs the viewer reaches a higher platform,
which leads first across a row of Ionic columns to a vestibule overlooking the
Pergamonsaal, and then, through a gate, to a separate exhibition room of the museum.
This room is named after Telephos, referring to a separate frieze that narrates the legend
of the founding of the city of Pergamon. Here a series of complementary impressions are
exposed. The gallery, which runs parallel to the reconstructed faade, provides the
visitor with a view of the Pergamonsaal from above and through the columns of the
peristyle. The impression is certainly that of looking at the Pergamonsaal from inside
the monument: a view from inside out. The Telephos Room constitutes an architectural
interior, which is curiously experienced as distinct from the overall interior of the
Pergamonsaal. This architectural boundary between the Pergamonsaal and the Telephos
Room is perceived as the threshold between the outside and the inside. Even though the
observer physically leaves one exhibition hall and enters another, a masterful treatment
of enclosures gives the visitor the impression of entering a freestanding Hellenistic
building. Hence the modern Pergamonsaal is translated into an impression of the antique
Pergamon Altar, as seen both from outside and inside.
A closer look suggests that the Pergamonsaal consists of critical points, which unfold
the optical construction of its reality-effect. Characteristically, these are located at the
very sites where the reconstructed altar meets the museums wall. If we ignore for a
moment the two freestanding wings and focus on the central colonnade of the Zeus
109
Altar, we will see that this central section is a sculptural articulation of the modern
partition wall between the Pergamonsaal and the Telephos room. From a distant
perspective, however, the central colonnade looks like the peristyle of an ancient
monument, while the section of the wall immediately above the colonnade is
dematerialized. In order to give the Pergamon Altar its discernible faade, the eye
erases the modern partition wall in the background, as if it is simply the sky. This effect
that brings the Pergamonaltar to the foreground while effacing the architectural frame is
the result of a simple contrast between the highly articulated faade, attributed to antique
Pergamon, and the neutral surface of the modern museum. Yet, the aesthetic aspect of
this contrast is nevertheless remarkable: The Pergamon Altar is read as a work of art
against the background of a non-ground.
So far we have observed that the Pergamonsaal consists of carefully chosen visual
effects which present the semblance of an antique building in a modern interior, and that
this presentation occurs in two distinct yet complementary spheres of perception. The
first sphere is analogous to the contemplation of a picture. At the moment of entrance,
the observer sees the Pergamon Altar as an ensemble at a glance. The aesthetic
distance between the observer and the object of perception lends the reconstructed altar
an effect of completeness, which it physically lacks. The large void in front of the altar
magnifies the effect of depth and compels the observer to read the sculptural relief as the
image of a building. It is also important to note that this effect is not necessarily a
trompe loeil in the limited definition of the term. It does not construe the third
dimension out of a two-dimensional picture. Yet the reconstruction of a representative
110
partwhich is technically speaking a combination of freestanding sculptural forms and

sculptural relief, conveys the effect of the whole monument.
Secondly, the architectural promenade through the altar gives the visitor the impression
of occupying the original space of a Hellenistic building. More specifically it gives an
impression of crossing the boundary between inside and outside. It evokes a sense of
enclosure and exposure in the face of an imaginary landscape. The distant perception of
the altar as a picture and the subsequent experience of an enclosure do not conflict with
one another because of what we may call a scenario of experience, or rather, a
mnemonic sequence. In other words, the observer is overwhelmed by the vision of an
ensemble, prior to examining the reconstructed altar with close-ups in profile. The vision
proceeds from the general to the particular and constitutes a visual field that restores an
architectural continuum. Even though the wall of the gallery cuts through the altar as a
picture plane, the impressions of a moving eye restore the third dimension beyond this
plane. The depth of the Pergamon Altar extends in front of the viewer in high relief as a
fictive space.
***
Archaeological evidence shows that a major Hellenistic monument with elaborate

sculptural program was built in the castle of Bergama, in Western Anatolia, most
probably during the reign of Eumenes II (2nd century BC)only decades before 133
when Attalus III bequeathed the kingdom to Rome, and Pergamon became the provincial
111
capital of Roman Asia. The monument stood on a lower terrace of the Pergamene
acropolis, south of the sacred precinct of Athena, facing the vast valley of the Bakray
(antique Caicus river). Following a peculiar Hellenistic type it consisted of a colonnaded
open court on an elevated podium (built upon 36.80 x 34.20 m foundations). The
monumental frieze Gigantomachy surrounded the high podium on all sides. A
monumental stairway, which faced the valley on the West side, gave access to an inner
court. An inner structure, walled with a balustrade on three sides and opening to the
Westperhaps a sacrificial altarwas housed in this court. The inner court was also
embellished by a smaller frieze, which showed the story of Pergamons mythic founder,
Telephos.98
Conclusive evidence stops there: we have remarkably little knowledge about the
program and function of the antique building. We call it an altarmost often, the
Great Altar of Pergamonfor its architecture seems to fit a peculiar type of monument
in Hellenistic Anatolia, and for the only Roman writer who testified to its presence,
Lucius Ampelius called it ara, though he failed to identify to whom the altar was
98
A number of publications that followed the first German excavations of 1878 and
1886 attempted to reconstruct the Great Altar of Pergamon: Richard Bohn, the architect
of the excavations, published the first reconstruction of the ground plan of the
Hellenistic altar in the preliminary excavation reports published in 1880 and 1888; Otto
Puchstein reassembled and arranged the Gigantomachy Frieze in 1888-89; Hans
Schrader studied the sacrificial altar and the Telephos Frieze in two publications, Die
Opfersttte des pergamenischen Altars, Sitzungsberichte der Kniglich Preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 6 (July 1899): 612-25
and Die Anordnung und Deutung des pergamenischen Telephos-frieses, Jahrbuch des
Deutschen Archologischen Instituts 15 (1900): 97-135; A volume dedicated to the
architecture of the Great Altar, Der grosze Altar. Der obere Markt by Jakob Schrammen,
appeared in a series of official museum publications, Altertmer von Pergamon (Berlin:
Georg Reimer, 1906).
112
dedicated.99 For our purposes it is important to underscore the hypothetic nature of all
architectural reconstruction. Particularly the function and the form of the structure,
which was housed in the inner court, cannot be established with certainty: it might have
served as a sacrificial altar for the actual slaughtering of animals, an ash altar for the
burning of the offerings, a palatial court for festive banquets, or as the figurative altar of
a victory monument where the enemies of the Greeks, mythic and real, were depicted in
a set of reclining sculptures.100
99
It is likely, given the prominent position of the figures of Zeus and of Athena
Nikephoros (victory-bringer) on the East frieze, that the two Olympians were among the
honorees of the altar. This, however, does not rule out the possibility that the altar was a
shrine to a mortal (which may or may not have included a tomb), perhaps dedicated to
the hero Telephos, or to a member of the Royal family, most likely queen mother
Apollonis (died 183 B.C.?). None of these hypotheses, as Andrew Stewart has recently
noted, is exclusive: the altar may have had several honorees. See Stewart, Pergamo Ara
Marmorea Magna: On the Date, Reconstruction and Functions of the Great Altar of
Pergamon, in From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture in Context, eds. Nancy T. de
Grummond and Brunilde S. Ridgway (Berkeley Calif.: The University of California
Press, 2000), 37.
100
Volker Kstner and Wolffram Hoepfner have recently proposed two reconstructions
of the Great Altar on paper, which differ both from Bohns 19th century reconstruction
and from each other in a number of details. Hoepfner also led a team that reconstructed
the altar in a new (1/20) scale model built from corian. While Kstner argues that the
sacrificial altar for burnt offerings may have been roofed by a baldachin, Hoepfner
endorses an older hypothesis that the sacrificial altar was either used for unburnt
offerings or contained a figurative representation of sacrifice. According to Hoepfner the
defeated enemies of the Greeks, Amazons, Persians and Celts were represented on the
altar. See Kstner, Der Pergamonaltar als Bauwerk, in Wir Haben eine ganze
Kunstepoche gefunden! Ein Jahrhundert Forschungen zum Pergamonaltar, exhibition
catalog (Berlin, DDR: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1986); Kstner, The Architecture
of the Great Altar and the Telephos Frieze, in Pergamon: the Telephos Frieze from the
Great Altar, Rene Dreyfus and Ellen Schraudolph eds. (San Francisco: Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, 1997), vol. II: 68-82. See also Hoepfner, Bauliche Details
am Pergamonaltar, Archologischer Anzeiger (1991): 189-202; Hoepfner, Siegestempel
und Siegesaltre: der Pergamonaltar as Siegesmonument, in Wolffram Hoepfner and
Gerhard Zimmer eds., Die griechische Polis: Architektur und Politik (Tbingen: Ernst
Wasmuth Verlag, 1993); Hoepfner, Der vollendete Pergamonaltar, Archologischer
113
Even though it might not be apparent to viewers at first glance, there is a correspondence
between the actual position of the Gigantomachy frieze on the museum walls and its
original location on the historical altar in Hellenistic Pergamon. Given that only the
West faade of the Hellenistic altar is reconstructed in the Pergamonsaal (opened to the
public in 1930) the German restorers needed to develop a peculiar order of presentation
for the East, North and South segments of the Gigantomachy.
A landmark novel in contemporary German literature, Die sthetik des Widerstands

[The Aesthetic of Resistance] by Peter Weiss, captures this critical issue in one
paragraph. Weisss novel, which narrates the resistance of a group of German insurgents
against the Nazi regime, starts with a description of the Gigantomachy frieze in the
Pergamon Museum. In an extended description that reanimates the sculptural figures in
narrative time, the author transforms the scene of the Gigantomachy into an allegory of
the German struggle against fascism. In the last paragraph of the first section, Heilmann,
the character from whose voice the author speaks, observes the peculiar strategy of the
reconstruction. He notices that inside the Pergamonsaal the spatial function was turned
inside out and that the exterior surface of the temple became the inner walls of the
room. When we face the stairs of the West faade, we have behind us the East faade,
that is, the back side of the temple, which was only partially reconstructed. Likewise on
Anzeiger (1996): 115-134. Hoepfner Model of the Pergamon Altar (1:20), in Rene
Dreyfus and Ellen Schraudolph eds., vol. II: 59-67.
114
the right of the observer, the southern frieze extends through the wall of the
Pergamonsaal, while the North frieze is located on the left-hand side.101
Hence the presentation of the frieze in the museum is remarkable: it offers the viewer an
opportunity to inspect the one hundred and thirty-five-meter long frieze without breaking
the original order of the sculptural figures. And yet, by displaying the Gigantomachy on
the inner walls of a gallery, the museum effectively turned the Hellenistic building
outside-in like a glove. (Admittedly, the analogy of glove is helpful only to a certain
degree: for while the exterior facades of the Hellenistic monument were translated into
the inner faades of the Pergamon Museum, the sculpture on display in Berlin is not a
mirror image of the antique frieze.) In other words, the frieze of the historical altar,
which could be experienced only by a viewer who circled around the monument, became
the panoramic vision of an observer who stands in the middle of the Pergamonsaal.
Only when we reflect on the place of the observer who sees all the four facades of an
antique building, can we underscore the ambiguity of the museum presentation. No need
to say that the space defined by the four faades of a building is intuitively perceived as
its inside. Yet the viewer of the Pergamonsaal is given the impression of seeing the
monument from the exterior: a mental eye sees both the back and the front of the same
building from the same standpoint. It is therefore not so much the Great Altar of
Pergamon, which was uprooted and displaced from its original site, but the subject who
101
Peter Weiss, Die sthetik des Widerstands (1975) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
taschenbuch edition, 1998), 19.
115
looks at the altar. Conceptually omnipresent, yet physically absent, this observer who
sees the monument from everywhere is, actually, nowhere.102
To sum up: the object presented in the Pergamonsaal is not so much a restoration of a
freestanding architectural monument as a conceptual model of ancient architecture. The
museum presentation created the atmosphere of experiencing the Hellenistic altar not by
restoring it to its entire form, but by citing a hypothetic reconstruction of its faades in
four picture planes, and pasting them on the interior walls of the museum. To put it
polemically, the modern presentation deprived the Great Altar of Pergamon of its
buildinghood. The status of the altar as a freestanding tectonic corpus is compromised to
achieve the visual effect of an artistic whole. To the contrary of the common impression,
it is not that a historic altar was displaced and relocated in a modern interior; rather, the
prism of the Pergamonsaal functions as a giant apparatus that construes the Great Altar
as a modern spectacle.
The basic characteristic of such presentation, as we shall see, is that it does not
acknowledge its own status as a conceptual model, and, instead, amounts to a makebelief: a tableau vivant. Such presentation is achieved by constructing in the modern
102
According to Weiss, the strategy of display in the Pergamon Museum is one that
renders the works completely dependent on the subjectivity of the viewer. The museum,
in other words, presupposes its audience. In a remarkable passage, Weisss hero,
Heilmann, asserts that the Pergamon Museum compels us to better understandwhat he
calls the theory of relativity. The sudden encounter with the monuments of Pergamon,
Milet and Babylon in the adjacent rooms of the museum, the sudden transition from the
forms of one century to another, which is immediately accompanied with the experience
of the modern metropolis, is a dizzying occurrence. The museum both disorients and
reorients its visitor, and induces the subject to take a new position. Ibid.
116
gallery a fictive boundary between the antique space of the Hellenistic altar and the real
space of the modern museum.
117
3.2. Antique Fragments and Modern Visions
The museum reconstruction of the Great Altar is often presented as a result of the
successful German excavations in Pergamon in the last decades of the 19th century.103
This statement, though literally correct, underplays an essential aspect of the relation of
German imperial archaeology with the Prussian Royal Museum: the promise of
achieving a spectacular museum reconstruction in Berlin was the main motive that led
the Prussian State to sponsor excavations in Western Turkey in the first place. When the
expatriate German engineer-architect Humann shipped his private finds from the castle
of Bergama, he failed initially to obtain the official support of the Royal Museum. It was
the newly appointed director of Berlins Antiquity Collection, Alexander Conze (18311914),104 who first saw the potential of reconstructing a monumental Hellenistic Frieze,
the Gigantomachy, from the fragments of human and animal figures in high relief.105
103
See for example Matthes, The Pergamon Museum, especially Introduction, 9. Cf.
Kunze, Der Pergamonaltar und die hellenistische Kunst Griechenlands: Geschichte und
Stand der Erforschung, in Wir Haben eine ganze Kunstepoche gefunden!, ed. Kunze,
5-9. A history of the reception of the Pergamon Altar in Germany by Hans-Joachim
Schalles, on the other hand, shows the way Pergamene art came to be identified in the
19th century with the self-representation of the Wilhelmine Reich. See Schalles, Der
Pergamonaltar: zwischen Bewertung und Verwertbarkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986); Schalles, Rezeptiongeschichtliche Nachlese zum
Pergamonaltar, in Modus in Rebus Gedenkschrift fr Wolfgang Schindler, eds. D.
Rsler and V. Strmer (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1995), 189-200. Although I am
indebted to Schalles excellent study, I depart from his history of reception by arguing
that the Pergamene works of art did not stand on the shore of modern history but they
were actually shaped by it. Hence the appropriation of antique art is not, in my mind,
abuse or explotation of it by modernity: I intend here, in other words, a history of
modern construction of Pergamene art.
104
Alexander Conze was appointed as director of the Sculpture Collection of the Royal
118
As often is the case when archaeology is seen as a means for museum reconstruction of
monuments, the first German campaign in Pergamon was guided by a Romantic idea of
a golden age, and a determination to recover it at all cost. Neither Humann who had been
trained as an architect in Berlin, and had pursued most of his career as a road engineer in
Turkey, nor Conze, a curator of Greek sculpture, showed much interest in preserving the
historical strata belonging to the Byzantine and the Turkish Karasi Beylik eras in the
castle. The late antique and medieval structures were systematically destroyed to obtain
the fragments that might help a hypothetic reconstruction of the acropolis to its stage
during the Hellenistic and early Roman eras.
Seeking to recover a monument, which had once stood in the castle of Bergama, and
which had long since been absorbed into other historical structures, the German restorers
tackled two extraordinarily difficult problems: first, how to reassemble the fragments of
sculptural relief, most of which were embodied within an 8th century Byzantine wall,
into their original Hellenistic configurationrecovering the Gigantomachy, a
masterpiece of the 2nd century BC; secondly, to recover the architectural monument to
which the frieze belonged. As early as 1878, Conze instructed Humann to seek not
merely single works of arts, but rather to keep in view the whole structure of the altar,
Prussian Museum (Berlin) in 1877, and the director of the German Archaeology Institute
in 1881.
105
Matthes, The Pergamon Museum, 12.

119
the true object of inquiry.106 In fact, Conzes quest to recover a lost Hellenistic
monument was also fuelled by the remarkable landscape of ruins in Bergama, which so
impressed the visitors and the excavators. Towering some two hundred and fifty meters
above the Bakiray valley, the terrace where Humann excavated offers a vertiginous
view: the modern Turkish town on the Bakiray valley covers to this day only partly the
ruins of a much larger Hellenistic and Roman settlement.
***
Among thousands of pages of excavation reports, official and private correspondence,

personal memoirs, two documents from Humanns handa letter he wrote to Conze in
1878 and his first excavation report of 1878-79provide a synoptic view of the process
through which the Gigantomachy was restored.
Since the start of the first official campaign sponsored by the Prussian State on
September 9, 1878, Humann and an army of workersTurkish and Greek locals who
enlisted for the excavationshad dug a long trench on the lower terrace of the castle
along the Byzantine wall. Over ten months of excavations the trench had disclosed
several figures built into the wall: fragments of human and animal scenes carved on
slabs of white marble. Pursuing the foundations of a lost monument, Humann extended
106
See Conzes letter to Humann, 16 July 1878, Chronik der Ausgrabung von
Pergamon 1871-1886, ed. Eduard Schulte (n.p., n.d.); also cited in Marchand, Down
From Olympus, 95. Conze predictedcorrectlythat the sculptural fragments Humann
recovered belonged to a freestanding altar with an open court and not to a Greek temple.
120
the trench to the East where he encountered four marble panels in April 1879. In his
letter to Conze of July 22, 1879, and in his excavation report, Humann describes the
events of July 21 when the excavators turned over the marble slabs and brought their
sculptural relief into light. In his excavation report Humann writes,
I had visitors in Pergamon; my wife had come over from Smyrna [Izmir] and
also Dr. Boretius from Berlin, on his trip through the Orient. It was July 21 when
I invited the visitors to the [excavation site in the] castle to observe the turning of
the slabs, which were standing outwards with their backsides and against the
debris. While we were ascending, seven mighty eagles circled the castle,
anticipating good luck.107
According to Humanns vivid description, first a serpent-legged giant was turned over
and fell into the trench: the figure, whose back was stretched with fervor, and whose left
arm was raised defensively, faced toward an opponent to the left. Larger than life and
chimerical, the figure did not seem familiar to Humann. The second slab to be
uncovered displayed the powerful torso of an Olympian who towered over the
composition. His robe was wind-blown around the torso and between the legs, clearly
suggesting the posture of stepping in attack. His arms extended to the adjoining slabs,
which were still lost. If the figure had a head, it would perhaps have turned toward the
serpent-legged giant to engage him in battle. The identity of the torso escaped Humann
at first. Then the excavators uncovered a third figure: a slightly built, but muscular giant
who had fallen to his knees. His left hand held with pain the right shoulder from which
the arm hung, slack and lifeless. Then, a fourth panel came to light: a giant who wore a
107
Humanns erster Bericht ber Pergamon, 1878/79, in Der Entdecker von Pergamon
Carl Humann: ein Lebensbild, ed. Theodor Wiegand (Berlin: G. Grotesche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1930), 42.
121
shield and sword, yet, defeated in the battle, fell on his back. Rays of a thunderbolt had
cut through his body and pierced his thighs. The lightning that struck this last figure left
little doubt in Humanns mind about the identity of the giants opponent. Who in
Olympus would use such a weapon?
I feel your presence, Zeus! [Ich fhle deine Nhe Zeus!] Feverish, I am rushing
around the four marble slabs; here the third [slab] fits onto the first one; the
snakes of the big giant clearly turn toward the slab with the giant on his knee.
The upper part of the slab where a giant has stretched his arm, wrapped in fur, is
missing; but one sees clearly that he is fighting above the fallen one. Could it be
that he is fighting against the greatest god? Surely, yes, his left foot, covered by
the garment, disappears behind the kneeling giant. Three slabs fit together, I
exclaimed, and am already with the fourth one; it fits toothe giant struck by
lightning falls under the god. I am literally shaking, my entire body; there,
another piece comes alongwith my nails, I am scraping off the soillion skin,
it is the arm of the giantnext to him, a tangle of scales and snakesthe Aegis!
It is Zeus! Such a magnificent work was bestowed upon the world again and
crowned our efforts; the Athena group [a previously discovered group of the
Gigantomachy] found its most beautiful counterpart. Deeply moved, three of us
stood around the delicious find until I sat down on Zeus and cried in tears of
joy108
Humanns description of the discovery in his letter to Conze, is virtually identical,
though it makes more pointed references to the supernatural signs that presaged the
discovery of the Zeus group: Seven eagles circled the tip of the castle, and I asked Mr.
Boretius whether he knew anything about the birds; he believed it meant good luck.
After identifying the slabs as the Zeus Group, Humann adds, that is why the flying of
seven eagles.109
108
Ibid., 42-43.
109
Humanns letter to Conze, 22 July 1879, Der Pergamon Altar: Entdeckt, Beschrieben
und Gezeichnet von Carl Humann, ed. Eduard Schulte (Dortmund: Ardey Verlag, 1959);
reprinted in Friedrich Karl and Eleonore Drner, Von Pergamon zum Nemrud Dag: Die
archologischen Entdeckunken Carl Humanns (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von
Zabern, 1989).
122
Humanns description reveals the quasi-mythic consciousness that discovered the

Gigantomachy. For instance, Ich fhle deine Nhe Zeus! which he awkwardly inserted
both in the letter and report, breaks with the usual narrative voice of the author (who,
exactly, feels the presence of Zeus?). As a pronouncement in the tradition of the
Hellenistic soothsayers, this exclamation clearly belongs with the eagles that had circled
the castle the morning of July 21, 1879.
If the role of Humann in this drama of discovery is to foretell the return of the
masterpiece, the role of his immediate audience is equally crucial. Humann presents
his two non-specialist visitors, Dr. Boetius and Mrs. Humann (who resided in Izmir and
occasionally traveled to Bergama) as skeptics.110 They come to embrace the slabs of
Gigantomachy only at the end of Humanns reconstruction, not when the fragments fall
into the trench, but only when Humann presents compelling evidence about the identity
of the god represented. One could ask whether the Greek and Turkish workers who
turned over the slabs also felt the presence of Zeus along with the three Germans.
Humann, who studied and compared the work habits of his Muslim and Christian
Orthodox workersin order to obtain higher efficiencyis silent about the reaction of
his workers to the discovery. Nor does he mention how they perceived the miraculous
signs that presaged it. That their reaction, unlike that of a Dr. Boretius in his grand tour
in the Orient, is totally irrelevant is not without significance: even though the work was
110
Cf. Humanns account with an article published by Boretius in Nationalzeitung about

the discovery of the Zeus Group, n.d., reprinted in Schulte, 59.
123
bestowed upon the world, the reconstruction was intended, at least initially, for a
specific audience. The discovery of Pergamon, that is the destruction of the medieval
structures in order to recover a lost antique image is, above all, a process of cognition: it
could be achieved only by a group that was predisposed to see the cognates of Zeusthe
aegis, the thunderbolts, the eagles etc--but cared little about the late antique and
medieval castle.
Humanns biographers quoted indefatigably this moment of original discovery.111 In

the 1920s and the 30s, the narration of the quasi-mythic events that had led to the
discovery of the Zeus Group effectively helped to refashion the image of the expatriate
architect as a pioneer of the emerging German nation, the discoverer of Pergamon
andmore astonishinglythe savior of the frieze (in the light of the recent
repatriation debates, such a title has a political significance).
The historical personality is undoubtedly more complex: Humann entered the service of
the Ottoman Government under the premier minister Fuat Pasha in 1864. He was sent on
Turkish engineering missions in Syria and Palestine. He first arrived in Bergama in order
to construct the Bergama-Dikili road and commanded as many as two thousand
construction workers in the region. Having established his engineering headquarters in
Bergama he started collecting antique marble from the castle in 1869. Though an
admirer of Greek architecture, what made Humanns service invaluable for the German
Reich after 1871 was certainly not his knowledge of Greek antiquities. Few foreigners
111
See especially Wiegand, ed., Der Entdecker von Pergamon, Carl Humann.
124
knew the infrastructure of Western Anatolia as well as one who had actually helped
build it. Humanns contacts with the Ottoman Turkish bureaucracy in the province
[vilayet] of Izmir also proved crucial in undertaking grand-scale excavations and
successfully exporting the finds from Pergamon, Magnesia on Byk Menderes
(Maeander) (1891-93) and Priene (1896).112
***
As early as 1886 the Zeus Altar of Pergamon came to be identified with the glory of
the Kaiserreich. The similarities between the Pergamene Kingdom that was patron to the
monument and the Prussia that recovered it, seemed convincing: the Attalids, like the
Prussians, were committed to reviving Hellenism, paid tribute to the high culture,
religion and traditions of classical Athens, and unified Hellenistic Anatolia under their
rule (building a second Greek empire after Alexander). To make matters worse, the
major victory of the Pergamenes was against the much-hated Celts (often cited as the
Gauls,113) who invaded Anatolia in the 2nd century BC. In fact, even though we cannot
establish whether the original altar was intended to celebrate Eumenes IIs victory over
the Celts, there is little doubt that fin-de-sicle Germany embraced the monument as one
that crowned the Prussian victory over France.
112
See Karl and Drner, Von Pergamon zum Nemrud Dag, 11-24.
113
The bronze Pergamene sculptural group representing the Celts is available today only
in marble Roman copies. See for example Epigonos (?) Dying Gaul, in Museo
Capitolino, Rome and Epigonos (?) Gaul Killing Himself and his Wife, in Museo
Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Altemps, Rome.
125
It is thus little wonder that the first reconstruction of the city of Pergamon in Berlin was
a panorama, a popular entertainment, which flourished in Europe and in the United
States in the 19th century.114 The occasion was the exhibition celebrating the hundredth
anniversary of the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1886, as well as the 25th
anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm Is ascension to the Prussian throne. In addition to a
number of colonial pavilions,115 the exhibition also featured a Temple of Pergamon, a
temporary structure that celebrated the achievements of the German archaeologists under
the Kaisers patronage.116
The Temple of Pergamon was an architectural wonder: its base consisted of a

reconstruction of the elevated podium of the Great Altar of Pergamon, which was
decorated by plaster casts of the Gigantomachy frieze. On top of the Pergamene podium
a reconstruction of the Zeus Temple of Olympia was mounted. This architectural
chimera, which fused two monuments of two distinct cities and of two distinct historical
periods into a single structure, was dedicated to the achievements of German
114
For a history of the panorama, see Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a
Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
115
The exhibition also featured a Kaiser-Dioramaa misleading name that shouldnt

be confused with the optical viewing device designed around the same years. The
installation presented the recent achievements of German colonialism in central Africa in
five different panoramas. The architects of the exhibition chose to house the colonial
installations in a replica of the Temple of Denderra in Egypt, which dates not from the
pharonic Egypt, but rather from the Hellenistic period: an exceptional symbolism to
incorporate Africa into the German empire without giving up the high Hellenic ideal. See
Schalles, Rezeptionsgeschichte Nachlese zum Pergamonaltar, 190.
116
Ibid., 188.
126
archaeology: Olympia and Pergamon were the two major sites recently excavated by the
German Archaeology Institute. Although we have nearly no information about the
architects, Kyllmann and Heyden, it is clear that they conceived the temple as a
popular entertainment and did not intend a restoration of either historical monument.117
In a recent article which focuses on the exhibition, Hans-Joachim Schalles points out a
few inconsistencies in the presentation of the citations of the Zeus Temple on Olympia
and of the Great Altar in Pergamon. First, echoing the 19th century debate on
polychromy in Greek architecture, the frieze on the pediment of the Olympia Temple
was fully painted, while the casts of the Gigantamochy frieze were left white.118
Secondly, the German architects altered freely the sequence of the figures of the
Gigantomachy in order to accommodate the decorative program of the new building.
The two most celebrated sculptural elements, the Zeus and the Athena groups, which
originally belong to the East faade of the altar were presented on its front, on the most
prominent site of the modern temple.
Walking up the stairs of the Pergamon Altar through the peristyle of the Olympia
Temple, visitors entered a large semi-circular room. The interior wall of the half-rotunda
117
Oettermann, The Panorama, 257.
118
Only three years later in 1889 the Berlin art historian, Heinrich Wlfflin writes:
Whereas one could imagine the Pantheon frieze with a gold ground, which might form
an effective foil to the beautiful contours of the figures, this would not be possible with a
more painterly relief like the Pergamene Gigantomachia, which relies entirely on the
effects of moving masses, and for which a gold ground would only create a wild and
completely inappropriate confusion of color. Wlfflin, Renaissance and Baroque,
translated by Kathrin Simon (London, Collins, 1964), 63.
127
featured the Pergamon Panorama painted on a fourteen by sixty meter-long canvas.

The semi-circular Pergamon Panorama was adapted from a perspective by Richard Bohn
(1848-1898) who joined Humanns excavations in 1879. According to the exhibition
guide, the panorama depicted
a moment in the annual feast of Pergamon, one of the capitals of the province
of Asia Minor during the Roman Empire The theater was splendidly
decorated, the lodge of the governor was covered with red cloth. The
performance has just ended and some of the spectators proceed towards different
exits through narrow stairs. Most of them hurry towards the altar and the market,
and can still be seen on the processional way of sacrifice as they approach the
Zeus Altar.119
As Schalles argues, the depiction of people on their way to the altar of sacrifice, this
episode from the life of the war and art-loving Hellas can easily be recognized as a
motto in the self-image of the Kaiserreich.120 In summer 1886 some one thousand and
five hundred actors in period costume dramatized the victorious wars of the Attalids
against the invading Gauls, using the Temple of Pergamon as an open-air dcor. Both
the Pergamon Panorama and the Temple of Pergamon of 1886 played a crucial role in
the German self-identification with the antique city.
Even though the chimerical mixture of the Gigantomachy with the Zeus Temple of
Olympia had little effect on the later museum reconstructions, the idea of presenting a
panoramic view of the acropolis in an interior as an ensemble remained a powerful
influence. Hence as early as 1886, the Pergamon Panorama presented a phantasmagoric
119
E. Fabricius, cited in Schalles, Rezeptionsgeschichte, 195.
120
Ibid.
128
vision of Pergamon as a sublime landscape, curiously contained in a Pergamon

Templereversing the relation between the Hellenistic altar and the historical
landscape in which it once stood.
***
The French response to the Pergamon Panorama of 1886 came more than a decade later
with the monumental publication of Pergame by the historian Maxime Collignon and the
architect Emmanuel Pontremoli. Alarmed by the German appropriation of major
archaeological sites in the Eastern Mediterranean, the French Ministry of Education
sponsored a number of archaeological publications, which brought together a prizewinning architect of the Beaux Arts academy with a historian of antiquity, usually a
member of the French School in Athens. Although the restoration of antique monuments
in Italy in a conventional set of drawings had long been part of the Beaux Arts
pedagogythe winners of the prix de Rome after 1880 persistently chose the recently
excavated sites in Greece and Turkey as the topic of their 4th year-restoration
projects121the architects collaboration with the historian was aimed at creating a new
type of scholarship in archaeology beyond the purpose of enhancing architectural
education.122
121
For an overview of the projects by the fellows of the French Beaux Arts academy in
Rome see the exhibition catalog, Paris, Rome, Athnes: le voyage en Grce des
architectes franais aux XIXe et XXe sicles (Paris: L'cole nationale, 1982).
122
In one instance the French historian Bernard Haussoullier and the architect
Emmanuel Pontremoli carried out excavations in 1895-96 in the temple of Didyma in
Western Turkey, in a desperate and ultimately failed attempt to compete with the
129
It is bemusing, given the contemporaneous and distinctively anti-French celebration of

Pergamon in Berlin, that Collignon starts the book by arguing one should look nowhere
other than Versailles in order to understand Pergamon.123 According to Collignon, both
the palace of Louis XIV and the seat of Eumenes II were conceived as an architectural
ensemble, a visual expression of the absolute power of the king. Vaguely allusive, this
comparison proved extremely influential on the subsequent interpretations of the site
plan of Pergamon.124 And yet Collignons comparison plays out a deep
misunderstanding: even if the capital of the Attalids were composed intentionally around
an actual viewpointit was not; the acropolis was an accumulation of several historical
layerssuch a privileged viewpoint would have to correspond to the symbolic place of
the king proper, the embodiment of divine authority. This was certainly not the case in
antique Pergamon: the kings palace was one among many monuments that could be
seen by a traveler who approached the city from the valley.
German Archaeology Institute (DAI). See Pontremoli, Didymes: fouilles de 1895 et 1896
(Paris: E. Leroux, 1904). In other cases, French historians and architects studied
archaeological evidence already available in situ or in the Berlin museums. We may cite
the restoration of Olympia by Laloux and Monceaux, Epidaurus by Defrasse and Lechat,
among the most remarkable publications. Pergame of 1900 is a significant example of
this genre.
123
M. Colignon and Emmanuel Pontremoli, Pergame: restauration and description des

monuments de lacropole (L. H. May, 1900), 229.
124
Looking at a small fragment of the antique city of nearly one million inhabitants
historians often interpreted Pergamon as scenographic urbanism, a giant stage-set that
pivots around the theater, opening to the vast valley, and hence celebrating the absolute
power of the suzerain.
130
Pontremolis impressive drawings, which he had originally submitted to the Beaux Arts
academy as his 4th year project in Rome [envoi de Rome], restored the Pergamene
Acropolis into a harmonious composition, an ensemble.125 Unlike the Pergamon
Panorama, which is based on Bohns perspective, and where the modern viewer is
expected to occupy a central viewpoint (from which the ancient city as a theater-stage is
looked at), Pontremoli restored the acropolis in a set of Beaux-Arts drawings (most
remarkably in an elevation, which interpreted the antique city as a single and gigantic
faade). Even though the French architect restored the acropolis into its complete form
during the Roman era, he, unlike Bohn, does not depict a given historical moment in
Pergamon. Pontremoli made clear his disdain for theatrical restorations of antiquity,
which depicted man in historical attire on the architectural drawings alongside the
restored monuments.126 His elevations of the city of Pergamon, just like the drawings of
Olympia by his teacher, Victor Laloux, are curiously devoid of people but overly
populated by a large number of Greek sculptures: the uncanny vision of an antique city
in a perfect state, suddenly abandoned by its people.
125
A student of Victor Laloux [who is known for his monumental reconstruction

drawings of Olympia in 1883], Pontremoli won the first prize in 1890 in the Beaux Arts
competition and was sent to Rome. As a pensionnaire in the French academy in Rome,
he first worked on the architectural restitution of monuments in three Italian cities, as
was expected during his first three years. For his fourth and final project of restitution,
however, he chose Pergamon. In Summer 1894 Pontremoli traveled to Berlin to work on
the fragments of the Pergamon Altar and especially those of the Gigantomachia frieze.
He must have seen them as exhibited in the Altes Museum.
126
See Pontremoli, Didymes.

131
A comparison of the hypothetic restorations of the Great Altar by German and French
architects is fascinating: it shows how the archaeological evidence available at the end of
the 19th century could be interpreted to restore two radically different buildings. Based
on a comparison of the archaeological fragments with the grid foundations in Bergama,
Bohn achieved the first hypothetic reconstruction of the altar in 1880127, in which he
conceived of the altar as an architectural frame for viewing a baroque sculptural
group. Based on the superficial resemblance of the Pergamene sculpture to 17th century
sculpture in Rome, German art historians called the art of the 2nd century AD Anatolia
Hellenistic baroque, a category defined in opposition to classical art. Fuelled by the
neo-baroque style in German architecture in the 1860s, and by German art historys
preoccupation with baroque in the 1890s, the Pergamene altar has been interpreted up
until today as a post-classical or baroque structure.128
127
Volker Kstner, Architecture of the Great Altar, 68.
128
Representation of movement in painting and sculpture had become a central problem

in German aesthetics and art history by the end of the 19th century. Some of the
discussion was literally formulated in the aftermath of Carl Humanns discovery, by a
group of scholars who were inspired by the Hellenistic figures of the Gigantomachy
frieze. In striking contrast to restrained, static and canonical representation of the human
body in Classical Greek sculpture, the Pergamon frieze offers an intense and exaggerated
way of expressing movement. The discovery of the Gigantomachy frieze put into
question the Neoclassical scholarship that had ignored Hellenistic art as decadent or
imitative of the classical age, and cast doubt on Johann Joachim Winckelmanns (17171768) famous dictum on the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of Greek sculpture.
The Gigantomachy frieze presents formal features that are almost entirely missing from
classical Greek art. In Art in the Hellenistic Age, J.J. Politt identifies some of these
characteristics as undulating surfaces; agonized facial expressions; extreme contrasts of
texture created by deep carving of the sculptural surface with resultant areas of highlight
and dark shadow; and the use of open forms which deny boundaries and tectonic
balance. See Art in the Hellenistic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 111. It was not until the first years of the 20th century that the term Hellenistic
Baroque came to describe the Pergamene architecture and sculpture. We owe this
artistic category largely to the influence of the German art historian Heinrich Wlfflin
132
In contrast to the German interpretations, the French architect who studied the fragments
of the Gigantomachy in the Berlin Museum in 1894 and surveyed the foundations of the
monument in Bergama, conceived the altar as a curiously art nouveau ziggurat.129 In
Pontremolis project the Gigantomachy surrounds a towering structure where the
monumental stairs lead to the high terrace of a sacrificial altar. Pontremolis fantastically
Oriental monument reveals the continuing influence of the British art historian James
Fergusson who restored on paper the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in 1862.130
The subsequent reconstructions on paper by Jakob Schrammen in the official publication

Altertmer von Pergamon of 1906, and by Armin von Gerkan, which guided the
museum display of the late 1920s, departed from Bohns initial plan only in minor
(1864-1945). In his Renaissance and Baroque (1889), a history of architecture of the

period immediately after the Renaissance in Italy, Wlfflin posits baroque as the
diametrical opposite of the classical idea in architecture. Baroque, then, besides referring
to a specific historical period in 17th century Italy, is a general tendency that periodically
surfaced in Western art, and usually as a reaction against a classical epoch. Wlflins
generalization of baroque into a circular, world-historical category is indebted to the
similarity he perceived between the Italian baroque and the Hellenistic art of Pergamon.
See especially Arnold von Salis, Der Altar von Pergamon: ein Beitrag zur erklrung des
Hellenistischen Barockstils in Kleinasien (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1912).
129
A graduate of the Beaux Arts academy, Pontremoli executed most of his buildings in
art nouveau style. See for instance his Villa Kerylos, France for the archaeologist
Thodore Reinach, built 1902-08. Pierre Pinon, The Architect and the Archaeologist:
the Villa by Emmanuel Pontrmoli for Theodore Reinach, Lotus International, 60
(1989): 112-27.
130
See Fergusson, The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus Restored (London: J. Murray,

1862). See also Fergusson, The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored: An Essay
on the Ancient Assyrian and Persian Architecture. (Delhi: Goyal Offset Printer. First
reprint 1981).
133
details. Since the subsequent excavations did not reveal substantial new evidence, our
knowledge about the superstructure of the altar essentially does not exceed that of Bohn
in 1888. The axial spans of the colonnade, the shape and function of the sacrificial
altar, the height of the building, the placement of the freestanding sculpture can only be
hypothetically reconstructed.
134
3.3. The Problem of Museum Reconstruction
By the end of the first campaign in 1880, Humann had shipped ninety-seven frieze slabs
and approximately two thousand fragments of the Gigantomachy, alongside thirty-five
slabs of the smaller Telephos. In his excavation report he predicted that the original
Gigantomachia covered an area of 135 X 2.30 m., and the sculptural fragments he sent to
the museum corresponded roughly to three-fifths of the original frieze.131 Hence, while a
substantial portion of the Great Frieze has survived, the architectural fragments Humann
uncovered are incomplete, making a restoration of the monument from its original pieces
impossible. Similarly, the grid foundations, which Humann uncovered on the altar
terrace in Bergama in 1879, scarcely reveal a specific scheme for the floor plan of the
monument.132 As for nearly fifty fragments of ceiling slabs that have survived, Humann
left them in Bergama, where they can still be seen around the foundations.
From the moment that the fragments of the Gigantomachy reached Berlin, the question
of how to integrate the frieze with its architectural setting preoccupied the restorers. Two
131
Humann, Die Ausgrabungen zu Pergamon. Geschichte der Untersuchung.

Vorlufiger Bericht, Jahrbuch der Kniglich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen I (1880):
129-56; also cited in Ursula Kstner, Excavation and Assembly of the Telephos
Frieze, eds. Rene Dreyfus and Ellen Schraudolph, vol. I: 25.
132
These foundations, unlike the marble upper structure, were constructed from the
locally available tufa; their partitions were independent from those of the upper
structure. No more than two marble steps on the East faade have survived: we have no
fragment of the monumental stairs of the West faade. See V. Kstner, The
Architecture of the Great Altar, 69.
135
different approaches presented themselves in the architectural competition for the

extension of Berlins Museum Island in 1884. While a group of participants proposed to
display the frieze on a partial reconstruction of the Great Altar, an arrangement that
imitated the original setting of the Hellenistic relief (e.g. entries by Fritz Wolff, Ludwig
Hoffmann and Alfred Messel); other architects conceived a more museal presentation,
displaying the frieze on the wall of a large museum interior (for instance, the winning
project by Alfred Hauschild).133
The Gigantomachy was first reassembled inside the Pergamon Museum, an interim
building designed by Fritz Wolff on the Museum Island. Even though the building was
constructed between 1897 and 1899, the sorting and assembly of the fragments of
Gigantomachy was completed only in 1901, when the museum was opened to the public.
At first sight, Wolffs design presents a simple idea: a full-scale reconstruction of the
Pergamene altar placed inside a large square of about fifty meters on each side. The
architects treatment of the exterior facades of the museum, particularly the vestibule, in
Neoclassical style gives the impression of a Hellenistic altar placed inside a slightly
larger Greek templea building inside a building. And yet, as the photographs of the
museum galleries show, the shell of the museum was not experienced from inside as an
uninterrupted container. Wolff divided the space of the museum into three distinct areas,
each of these roofed in a different way. The area between the principal faade of the
Great Altar with its monumental stairs and the vestibule of the museum was roofed with
133
See S. Waetzoldt, Bauten der Museumsinsel.

136
a high vaulted ceiling. The architect surrounded the North, East and South segments of
the Gigantomachy with a narrow corridor, focusing direct light onto the frieze from the
museums windows. Inside the interior wall of the museum, which was read as the
exterior faade of the Pergamene Altar, Wolff placed a comparative architecture gallery:
the interior of the reconstructed altar, so to speak, is not an elevated inner court, as in
the historical original, but a sunken room lit through its glass ceiling. This large, central
space featured fragments from extinct cities in Western Anatolia, Pergamon, Priene and
Magnesia.
According to Volker Kstner, Wolffs reconstruction of the altar in an architecturally

neutral interior, anticipated 20th century museum aesthetics. The interior of the first
Pergamon Museum was simple and relatively free of architectural ornament, unlike
Bodes style-rooms in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.134
Yet, despite its simplicity Wolffs museum was not by any means a precursor of the
white cube of the typical modernist gallery: it did not make a self-conscious statement
about the neutrality of the architectural frame in which originals were exhibited.
Quite the contrary, Wolff presented no ontological difference between the reconstructed
altar and its neoclassical container. Instead, Wolffs Pergamon Museum acknowledged
both the partial reconstruction of the Great Altar (that is, the inner wall of the museum)
134
Volker Kstner, Das alte Pergamonmuseum Berliner Museumsbauplne gegen Ende

des 19. Jahrhunderts in Staatliche Museum zu Berlin Forschungen und Berichte 26,
(Berlin, DDR: Henschelverlag, Kunst un Gesellschaft, 1987).
137
and its modern frame, the Neoclassical museum, as modern-day constructions: they are
the inseparable parts of a late 19th century design.135
Hence the first Pergamene reconstruction in the museum presents a historical irony:
Wolffs design was the only instance, in more than a century of museum displays, which
integrated all the segments of the Gigantomachy into an architectural reconstruction of
the Hellenistic altar. And yet, unlike his successors, Wolff did not see the reconstruction
of the altar as a museum exhibit in its own right: the reconstructed altar is merely an
imitation of the original architectural context of the frieze. The guide to the Pergamon
Museum of 1904 makes this point clear: The purpose which governed the plan of the
Museum was the erection of a building in which the frieze of the Great Altar of
Pergamon might find, as nearly as possible, its original setting and light.136
The question remains of why Wolffs museum, whose construction took nearly four
years, was demolished only eight years after its opening. True, structural problems of the
first Pergamon Museum and the unstable ground of the Museum Island were cited as
reasons for replacing it in 1908. One nevertheless wonders about the wisdom of building
135
In contrast to the make-believe of todays Pergamonsaal, Wolff invited the viewers

to an interesting negotiation of the original plan of the altar and its adapted uses in the
gallery. This is particularly apparent in the entrance of the museum. Wolff bisected the
large monumental stairs of the Great Altar in the middle and introduced modern stairs
that descended to the sunken architecture galley. Inside the two projecting wings
(risalites) of the reconstructed West faade Wolff inserted two staircases leading to the
study collection upstairs for more specialized visitors. See Royal Museums of Berlin,
Guide to the Pergamon Museum (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1904).
136
Ibid.
138
a much heavier structure on the same ground, as Messel and his successors did between
1908 and 1930. Furthermore, the entire South Wing of Messels building was intended
for a silted rift, unfit for construction. The ground needed to be stabilized with wooden
palisades, steel trusses and reinforced concrete vaults: an illogically expensive and
lengthy solution to the perceived problem.137
It is more likely that Wolffs design did not satisfy the expectations of the fin de sicle
public, which must have kept a vivid memory of the colonial display of the Pergamon
Panorama two decades earlier. Wolffs building left too narrow a spaceseven to nine
metersbetween the altar and its modern shelter. The visitors could experience the
Gigantomachy from all four sides. But they did not have the chance to experience the
building as an ensemble from a distance, which reduced the monumental effect of the
museum interior. Such a reconstruction was apparently not deemed appropriate to
representing the glory of the German Reich. At least one visitor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was
particularly disappointed with Wolffs rigorous and yet modest display of the
Gigantomachy.138 Wolffs Museum was demolished in 1908 to give its place to Messels
new museum. The Gigantomachy had to wait until 1930 for the completion of its new
home.
137
See the engineer O. Leithofs design of the steel construction for the foundations of
the South Wing. SMzB PK Zentralarchiv, I/BV 365; see also Matthes, 45-47.
138
See Ohlsen, Wilhelm von Bode, 200.

139
A comparison of Wolffs plans with Messels perspective of the Altar-Raum of 1907

shows that the latter remedied the perceived failure of the first Pergamon Museum.
Unlike Wolff, Messel displayed a reconstruction of the West Faade of the altar from an
awe-inspiring perspective angle and from a considerable distance. While Messel also
displayed the frieze on the interior walls of the gallery, he left the center of the AltarRaum unoccupied.
It seems that Messel was neither interested in reconstructing the Great Altar according to
its historical plan, nor did he intend to create the ideal architectural setting for the
Gigantomachyin fact, as critics of the project noticed in the 1920s, the scale of the
Altar-Raum and its fictive reconstruction of the West Faade distract viewers from an
experience of the Gigantomachy. He intended to create a hermetic interior, with an
overwhelming and unique experience. It is the unique experience conveyed by this
Raum, and not a reconstruction of the altar, that should be cited among Messels major
contributions to the history architecture.
140
3. 4. On the Museums Object: a Model, a Dcor and a Restored Monument
The museum that opened to the public in October 1930 departed significantly from
Messel and Bodes project of 1907. This transformation was partly due to the
interventions of the architect, Ludwig Hoffmann (1852-1932), who oversaw the
completion of the museum after Messels untimely death in 1909.
Hoffmann, just like his close friend Messel, had several occasions to develop ideas for
the architecture of the Museum Island throughout his career. He first came to
prominence by winning the Schinkel Competition for the Development of the Museum
Island in 1882. Hoffmann also participated in the competition of 1884 with a successful
entry. His design of the Antiquity Museum was in many ways similar to Messels in the
same competition: both architects placed a full-scale reconstruction of the Pergamon
Altar in a large museum, and conceived of a processional court in front of the Antiquity
Museum opening to the Kupfergraben. Having become the city planning councilor of the
City of Berlin in 1896, Hoffmann designed and actually built a large number of public
buildings, among which are the Mrkisches Museum (1899-1908) and Stadthaus (19021911) in Berlin. Around 1910 Hoffmann abandoned his earlier Neo-Baroque and
eclectic building style and, like other influential architects who reshaped the official
141
architecture of Wilhelmine Germany, started to build in simple Neoclassicism often

making reference to Berlins local classicism [Zopfstil] of the 18th century.139
Hoffmanns projects between 1911 and 1920, which altered Messels original plan,
seldom received positive reviews from his contemporaries. The protagonists of the
emerging Modern Movement, Walter Curt Behrendt, Adolf Behne and Karl Scheffler
saw the chief architect of Berlin as a proponent of the ancien rgime, and found his
monumental Neoclassicism anachronistic.140 Behne, who wrote several articles on the
Pergamon Museum in the daily press in the 1920s dismissing it as an uncanny child of
the Wilhelmine spirit, accused Hoffmann of blocking the transparency of Berlins
urban center.141 Scheffler wrote in 1924 that Hoffmann spoiled everything that had
been good in Messels project, and everything that had been bad became worse.142 By
139
See Hans J. Reichhardt and Wolffgang Schche, Ludwig Hoffmann in Berlin: die
Wiederentdeckung eines Architekten (Berlin: Landesarchiv, 1987); Volker Viergutz,
"Der Nachlass Ludwig Hoffmann: Stadtbaurat fr Hochbau in Berlin von 1896-1924"
Museums Journal (Berlin) 8, 1 (January 1994): 48-51; Viergutz, Berliner
Museumskrieg.
140
In his biography of Messel, Behrendt compared the architect with Hoffmann. While
Hoffmann, according to Behrendt, is a neoclassicist who achieves beauty through the

laws of proportion Messel, is an artist who feels the effect of plastic form and heard
the melody of architectural beauty. Behrendt, 132.
141
For Behnes critique of the Pergamon Museum and Hoffmann see his papers and
manuscripts in Berlin, Bauhaus-Archiv. Especially his typescript, Das auf dem
Pergamon-Altar geopferte Deutsche Museum, printed in Die Weltbhne 42 (1930):
583-85. See also Behne, Vernunft oder Reprsentation im Stdtebau? Sozialistische
Monathefte 62 (5. June 1925): 352-54; Behne, Die Museumsinsel eine Tragdie
Berliner Stdtebaues, Das neue Frankfurt 4 (1930): 211-13.
142
Cited in Bernau and Riedl, Fr Kaiser und Reich, 172.

142
attributing the Pergamon Museum to Hoffmann, architectural historians have

conveniently cleared Messelthe progressive architectfrom the responsibility of
designing what has come to be seen a politically and artistically reactionary landmark.143
It is therefore curious that, as at least one historian of the Museum Island noted,
Hoffmanns interventions between 1911 and 1928 could as well be read as an attempt to
modernize Messel and Bodes museum interiors.144 From his first project of January
1911 onward Hoffmann took issue with Bodes style rooms, opposing the integration of
works of art with architectural or decorative elements. He favored instead a neutral,
simple, modern room [neutral gehaltene einfache moderne Zimmer], which is
suitable for the display of any collection. The minutes of the official meetings of the
Commission for the New Building Construction [Baukomission] underscore Hoffmanns
struggle with Bode. At least in one instance, on 18 November 1915, Hoffmann burst out
in anger, accusing Bode of effectively blocking his plans to modernize the museum for
the previous five years. Although the General Director, Hoffmann argued, had conceded
to changes on Messels exterior facades, he had rejected any compromise in the
Museums interiors.145
143
As late as 1994, for instance, Goerd Peschken calls Hoffmanns alterations to

Messels project a provincial stupidityand he does not mean provincial in a kind
way. Der Messel-Bau, in Zentralinstitut fr Kunstgeschichte Mnchen, Berlins
Museen: Geschichte und Zukunft (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994), 239-246.
144
See Gaehtgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel, 114; also cited in Marchand, Down From
Olympus, 289-90.
145
See the official minutes of the meetings (Sitzungs-Protokol) of the Baukomission, 18

November 1915, Bauverwaltung der Kniglichen bzw. SmzB PK Zentralarchiv, I/BV
327 (Cf. I/BV 328 for the copy of the minutes with Willes manuscript corrections).
143
Though Hoffmanns understanding of the interior seems more in tune with emerging
museal aesthetics in the first decades of the 20th century, it remains to be seen whether
his project was truly more modern than that of Messel. An analysis of Hoffmanns
plan of September 1913 shows that the architects struggle to simplify Bodes stylerooms was consistent with his persistent quest to classicize Messels museumcomplex.146 While Messel and Bode conceived of the museum as a series of selfcontained interiors, organized around an open court or extending along the
Kupfergraben, each of which reconstructs a cultural and architectural context for the
period art, Hoffmanns composition conceived of the complex as a unified monument
organized around a strictly symmetrical axis. Though Hoffmanns interventions in
Messels site plan seem relatively insignificant at first sight, he effectively transformed
the court into a Neoclassical, processional axis. Furthermore, by raising the building as
much as five meters, Hoffmann gave the museum a much more monumental appearance
than Messel had intended. Overall, as Behne correctly noticed, Hoffmanns museum
looks severely heavier and bulkier than Messels project of 1907.147
Having conceived the Pergamon Museum as an urban landmark, Hoffmann sought to

remedy its relative isolation in Berlins historic center. His urban plan of 1912 for the
Museum Island and the University, cut a monumental East-West axis through the
146
See Hoffmanns project of September 1913, lithograph, SMzB PK Zentralarchiv,

I/BV 494.
147
Behne, Vernunft oder Reprsentation im Stdtebau?

144
existing urban fabric, connecting the processional court in front of the museum to the
Hegelplatz behind the University of Berlin (todays Humboldt University). Had
Hoffmanns urban plan been implemented, the West faade of the Great Altar,
hypothetically reconstructed in the museum, would crown one end of a monumental
urban axis.148
***
Todays Pergamonsaal was achieved after a lengthy and remarkably experimental
process of design: different alternatives for the interior arrangement of the room were
built in the museum as full-scale wooden models. The records of the Building
Commission show that decisions were often taken after the museum directors,
archaeologists and other members of Prussias cultural bureaucracy inspected the
models.
Even though the alternatives the commission considered over the years are varied both in
their strategy of museum display and concept of historical reconstruction, two major
tendencies could be detected. The vaulted, false-ceiling of Messels Altar-Raum was
simplified and regularized: by 1914 the Pergamonsaal had become a pure rectangular
148
Cf. Hoffmanns master plan for Athens, Greece in 1910. See Hartwig Schmidt, Das
Wilhelminishe Athens. Ludwig Hoffmann Generalbebauungsplan fr Athen,
Architectura 9/9 (1979): 30-44; see also Hans J. Reichhardt and Wolffgang Schche,
Ludwig Hoffmann in Berlin: die Wiederentdeckung eines Architekten (Berlin:
Landesarchiv, 1987), 36-37.
145
prism.149 A second, and perhaps a more intriguing development occurred in the room
which is adjacent to the Pergamonsaal, and which extends to the West of the Museum
Island, towards the Spree. In Messels project the contents and function of this room are
not linked to the Pergamene reconstruction. Curiously, in the projects of the 1910s and
20s this room has first become a sort of annex to the Pergamonsaal and then was
transformed into todays Telephos Roomeven though the plan of the Telephos Room
is not analogous to that of the inner court of the historical structure. By 1920 it had come
to be perceived as the interior of the reconstructed altar.
Such perception, however, is complicated, as we have seen, by the display of the East,
South and North sections of the Gigantomachy as detached from the reconstructed West
Facade. In fact, Hoffmann proposed to reconstruct the remaining four faades of the
historical altar and paste them on the remaining interior walls of the Pergamonsaal.
Hence instead of the presentation of a monument of the altar from a distance,
Hoffmann sought to integrate the Gigantomachy into a semblance of its original
architectural setting on all four walls of the Pergamonsaal. Wiegand is mostly
responsible for blocking Hoffmanns plans and giving the gallery its final shape.150 The
archaeologist must have thought that reducing the altar to a mere architectural context
149
As late as September 1913, Hoffmann maintained the vaulted ceiling Messel had
designed for the Pergamonsaal. The following project of June 1914 transformed the
Pergamonsaal into a simple rectangular prism. I/BV 494
150
In the final analysis Wiegand, the director of the Antiquity Collection, was more
influential than Hoffmann in shaping the Pergamonsaal. See the official correspondence
of the museum directors about the construction and interior arrangement of the
Pergamon Museum, 1914-15 and 1920-31. SMzB PKB, Zentralarchiv, I/BV 329.
146
for the Gigantomachy would confuse viewers and, more importantly, would diminish the
imposing effect of the monument seen as an ensemble from a critical distance.
Although the projects for the museum between 1911 and 1930 are single-handedly
attributed to Hoffmann, Wilhelm Wille (1877-1929), a relatively unknown architect,
played a crucial role in the museums design, particularly in developing the Near Eastern
Museum in the South Wing of the complex.151 We may assume that while Hoffmann,
who oversaw a large number of public projects simultaneously, was responsible for more
general decisions, Wille executed most of the projects.
Apparently frustrated with Hoffmanns complacency, Wille developed two alternative

projects for the museum in 1921 and 1927, which, in both instances, created
controversies. Unlike Hoffmann, Wille believed that Messels Altar-Raum contained
a false representation of the Hellenistic altar and should be abandoned.152 In his
project of 1921, he proposed instead to restore the altar to its full architectural plan. This
required extending the Pergamonsaal considerably by constructing a large niche where
the floor plan of the antique building could be fitted. In sharp contrast to Messels
original idea, Willes project can be read as if a historical monument is restored to its
original plan and grafted, as it were, into the space of a modern museum.
151
Wille developed nine alternative designs for the Near Eastern Museum between
1912-1914. See the projects in SMzB PKB Zentralarchiv, I/BV 494.
152
Sitzungs-Protokol, July 1920, SMzB PKB Zentralarchiv, I/BV 327.

147
Even though Wille proposed to restore the entire Great Altar to its original plan, his
presentation of the altar in the museum was still frontally organized: the monument
could be seen from three sides, but not from its back. In what appears to be a
compromise in his truthful representation, Wille had to paste the rear (East) faade of
the Great Altar on the museum wall, opposite the West faade of the restored altar.
Hence inside Willes Pergamonsaal, the viewer would have found him/herself
effectively occupying a place between the front and back of a Hellenistic building, as
well as inspecting its entire plan.
We also learn from the official records of the Building Commission that Wille developed
six years later a second alternative for the Pergamonsaal. This time, having altogether
dismissed Messels reconstruction as a theater stage, he proposed to restore the
Pergamon Altar as a freestanding building inside the Pergamonsaal. To the dismay of
the other members of the Commission, Wille provided Berlins daily press with a
critique of Messels original idea as well as an account of the advantages of his own.153
Willes design eventually found supporters in the Prussian Ministry of Culture under the
Weimar Republic, which further infuriated Berlins conservative museum
administration. The Building Comission meeting of July 1, 1927 when Willes project
153
Daily Berliner Tageblatt of 9 April 1927 argues that the Altar Raum is so small
that only part of the altar can be exhibited. The author adds To enlarge the room to
contain the full depth of the altarwould have a greater effect.
148
was considered and rejected is particularly informative, underscoring the divergent

concepts of reconstruction debated by archaeologists and architects.154
Offering qualified support to Willes alternative plan, Carl Heinrich Becker (18761933), the Prussian Minister of Culture (1925-30) and renowned scholar of Islamic Art,
opened the discussion by comparing two different types of museum display: the first is a
purely museal presentationthe display of the original frieze inside a modern
museumwhile the second entails the reconstruction of the Great Altar as an
architectural object [corpus]. Demanding that museum directors pay closer attention
to Willes alternative plan, Becker underscored the ambiguity of Messels AltarRaum: it was neither a museal presentation, nor an architectural restoration. It
reminded Becker of a theater dcor, or a Kulissea theater back stage.155
Eventually Wiegand prevailed and Willes idea of full architectural restoration was
defeated on the grounds that the remaining space in the Pergamonsaal would be limited
and it would not give the observer the chance to experience the faade from a distance
and through a wide perspective angle. According to Wiegand, the contemplation of the
whole monument at a glanceand not a freestanding architectural restorationwas the
aim of the Pergamonsaal. Furthermore, Wiegands argument in defense of Messels
reconstruction is telling: he countered Beckers criticism by arguing that the Kulisse-
154
Minutes of the meeting of the Museum Building Commission on 1 July 1927, SMzB
PKB Zentralarchiv, I/BV 327.
155
Ibid.
149
like effect of the museum display was precisely what the Hellenistic builders had
intended in the first place.156 The aim of the museum, according to Wiegand, is neither
to create a purely museal presentation of works, nor to restore an architectural
corpus, but, rather, to recapture the original, theatrical spectacle of the ancients.
The controversy over the Pergamonsaal continued after Willes death in 1929. Perhaps
more than Willes alternative plan, his critique of Messelsand Hoffmannsdesign
as a theater-stage and a false representation became the starting point of subsequent
criticism.157
156
Ibid.
157
Daily Der Tag of 23 April 1929a few months before the architects
deathreported that Willes alternative was never made public. Yet the author argues
that the full restoration of the Great Altar, as suggested by Wille, would be logical only
if the altar is restored in its original place in Western Anatolia.
150
3.5. The Museum of Ancient Architecture: Monuments for Mass Spectacle
The construction of the Pergamon Museum in the1920s had provoked one of the most
bitter controversies on the representation of art and culture in modern Germany. The
main participants in this debate were the constituents of the cultural bureaucracy which
the Weimar state inherited from the Kaiserreich, as well as critics who futilely attempted
to modernize that very apparatus: archaeologists, architects, art critics, politicians and
advocates of education reform.158 What appeared at first a territorial skirmish among the
competing humanistic disciplines to demand more space on Berlins Museum Island for
the object of their study, quickly escalated into an ideological battle. Theoretically,
Berlins Museum Waras it is known in the literatureevolved amidst the rise of
cultural relativism: while an increasingly biologistic definition of culture became
commonplace, the idea of universal civilization was marginalized. From then on, no
normative judgment about the hierarchies of art and culture could be taken for granted
without causing a political controversy.
Writing in 1921, in the wake of Germanys military defeat, economic collapse and
political turmoil, the art critic Karl Scheffler (1869-1951) offered a harsh account of the
Wilhelmine Kulturpolitik in his Berliner Museumskrieg. He observed, acutely, that the
158
For analysis of Berlins Museum War and its significance see Marchand, Down
From Olympus, 288-94. See also Silke Wenk Theodor Wiegand: Chronik, in Auf den
Spuren der Antike, 24-26; Frank Matthias Kammel, Neuorganisation unserer Museen
oder vom Prfstein an dem sich die Geister Scheiden, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen
34 (1992): 121-136.
151
general strategy of display in the Pergamon Museum was determined by a mania of

completeness and a faade mentality. In lieu of exhibiting archaeological fragments
as distinct objects, the museum chose to integrate them into an architectural dcor.
Mocking the imperialist ambitions of the archaeologists, Scheffler wrote: If the era of
the Wilhelmine Reich had lasted fifty years longer, if the war had come later and
excavations continued, we would surely have had to make room in the museum for an
entire Greek city.159
Two visions came to clash in Berlins Museum War: Bodes idea of the museum of
art and culture, which sought to give priority to the completion of the German Museum
on the historical Museum Island and the Asian Art Museum in Dahlem; and the
archaeologist Wiegands position to transform Messels building into a grandiose
antiquity museumthe museum of ancient architecture as Wiegand called it. Unlike
Bodes style rooms, Wiegands museum would feature completed facades or ensembles
of architectural elements from antiquity. Whereas the influence of Bode waned during
the Weimar yearshe resigned as the General Director of the Berlin State Museums
(former Royal Prussian Museums) in 1920, and kept an increasingly symbolic post as
the director of the New Building Commission until 1928Wiegand became one of the
most influential figures of the Prussian cultural bureaucracy during the Weimar years,
first as head of Berlins Antiquity Collection and then as the director of the German
Archaeology Institute (DAI), a position he kept during the first years of the National
159
Karl Scheffler, Berliner Museumskrieg, 76 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921). Cited and
translated into English in Marchand, Down From Olympus, 290 n.107.
152
Socialist era, until his death in 1936.160 As early as the 1920s Wiegand successfully
blocked Bodes plans and diverted the severely limited funds of the Weimar State to his
museum of ancient architecture.
In this light, Schefflers Berliner Museumskrieg appears as an attempt to support Bode in

a losing battle. The megalomaniac archaeologist with faade mentality that Sheffler
refers to is, undoubtedly, none other than Wiegand. Enraged by the decision to abandon
the Asian Art Museum in Dahlem, Scheffler echoes in his book the ideas already put
into practice by Bode decades earlier in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. He underlines the
necessity of distingusihing the masterpieces of Asian art (those produced by courtly
traditions in East Asia and the Middle East)from ethnological objects of primitive
peoples.161
***
If Bodeand later Schefflerattempted to rescue Asian and Germanic art from the
hands of the ethnologistsconstruing high art as a cross-cultural category, Wiegands
position about the hierarchies of ancient arts and cultures is more ambiguous. He fought
a fierce battle to defend the primacy of Mediterranean antiquities over ancient Germanic
or Asian art in the museums plans. And yet, his choice of ancient architecture as the
160
Watzinger, Carl, Theodor Wiegand: ein deutscher Archologe 1864-1936 (Munich,

C.H. Beck, 1944), 351-56.
161
Scheffler, Berliner Museumskrieg, 7-42.

153
principal exhibit of the museum and the emphasis he gave to Hellenistic and provincial
Roman monuments in Anatolia instead of the classical art of Hellas show that Wiegand
departed significantly from the vocation of the 19th century museum, Bildung.
Unlike most of his predecessors, Wiegand did not come to prominence in German
archaeology as a scholar of classical philology. He made a career for himself as an
excavatorhe directed excavations in Miletus, Didyma and Pergamon after Humanns
deathand a political liaison in Istanbul, who successfully imported archeological finds
to Berlin from the Ottoman Empire. A man of action, Wiegand founded and commanded
a field artillery unit, the so-called German-Turkish Commandos for the Protection of
Antiquities in 1914-1918, during the Turkish-British war in Sinai and Palestine. Using
German reconnaissance planes and his military staff, he surveyed a number of
archaeological sites in Sinai, Palestine and Syria, which appeared in a series of
impressive publications after the war.162
Wiegands success in shipping the archaeological finds to Berlin, in violation of the

Ottoman Law of Antiquities, was often thanks to his friendships with the Turkish
officials in key positions including Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910), the director of the
Imperial Museums and the founder of the Beaux Arts academy in Istanbul, and Cemal
Pas- a, (1872-1922) the commander of the 4th Turkish army and the war-time governor of
162
See Theodor Wiegand, Sinai, Wissenschaftliche Verffentlichungen des deutschtrkischen Denkmalschutz-Kommandos, heft 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1920), 1-35;
see especially a monumental survey of Damascus, Carl Watzinger and Karl Wulzinger:
Damaskus: Die Antike Stadt, heft 4 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1921).
154
Syria and Arabia. When his contacts failed to comply with his demands, Wiegand
proved to be a true brinkman, who did not refrain from using the financial influence of
his father-in-law, Georg von Siemens, the director of the Deutsche Bank, as leverage.163
Wiegands philhellenism, which was crucial in transforming Bodes German Museum

into a museum of ancient architecture, was not so much rooted in the classical
philological traditions as in his quest for an imposing and graphic presentation of the
monuments of antiquity, which he called Total Anschauung (view, intuition,
experience, contemplation).164
As early as 1908 a controversy erupted over the display of the Market Gate of Miletus,
the fragments of which Wiegand shipped from Turkey. Despite Hoffmann and Bodes
fierce opposition, Wiegand was determined to open room in Messels plans for a
grandiose reconstruction, and ultimately succeeded in securing Kaiser Wilhelm IIs
support. In his diaries Wiegand writes that he impressed Wilhelm by presenting him a
full-scale model of the Milesian gate from the right distance24 mthat allowed the
German monarch to see the monument as a whole. Wiegand also argues that
Hoffmann attempted to hinder the effect of the scenery by initially arranging Kaisers
viewpoint too close to the modelonly 10 meters: an effort Wiegand noticed and
prevented the day of the Kaisers visit. This anecdote is certainly as telling about
163
See Marchand, Down From Olympus, especially 202-05.
164
Theodor Wiegand, Pergamon-Museum,: 15 July 1925, SMzB PKB

Vorderasiatisches Museum, 17; cited in Marchand, Down From Olympus, 291.
155
Wilhelm as Wiegands idea of museum displaythe Kaiser was flattered to learn that
the distance between the Cesars seat and the arches of the procenium in the Roman
theater was equal to the distance of his viewpoint to the Milesian model at that very
moment. (What Augustus thought right, Your Majesty will find proper).165
Impressed by Wiegands presentation Wilhelm ordered that the recently acquired
Market Gate of Miletus be reconstructed into its real scale [in wirklicher Gre] like a
theater backdrop [Kulisse]. The Kaiser also approved Wiegands proposal to place the
reconstruction inside the museum, in between two exhibition rooms.166
An analysis of Wiegands reconstruction of the Market Gate of Miletus and of his

arrangement of the comparative architecture rooms two decades later shows that Total
Anschauung meant for Wiegand little more than a visually pleasing composition of
fictive architectural ensembles in the museum. A number of photographs that have
survived in the archives of the German Archaeology Institute give a glimpse of the
process through which a relatively small quantity of antique fragments were mixed with
brick and cement, reinforced by steel and covered with stucco, producing, as it were,
antique architecture in the museum as composite objects.167 The most remarkable
165
Cited in Matthes, The Pergamon Museum, 59. See also Wiegand, Wichtige
Ergnzungen zu meinen Tagebchern etc Cospel, DAI Wiegand-Archiv, Kasten 25.
166
Auszug II.1358.10, SMzB PK Zentralarchiv, I/BV 327.
167
As early as 16.8.1922 Wiegand lists the benefits of using modern materialsbrick,

cement and stuccoin the completion [Ergnzung] of antique monuments in a letter
he sent to the museum directors. New materials, according to Wiegand, are cheap and
preferable in terms of strength. He notes that limestonewhich had been chosen by
Wilhelm II in 1910 for the finish of the museumconveys the best effect of antique
architecture. SMzB PK Zentralarchiv, BV 329.
156
aspect of these photographs is perhaps not so much their evidential nature, showing how
little of the museums exhibits are indeed antique, but the fact that they were used as the
very medium through which the exhibits were designed. The photographs show the
architectural objects in different stages of their construction and in different
arrangements. Often set against a black background, the architectural ensembles were
photographed with a human figure or a mannequin to suggest the scale of the visitors.
Some of the black and white prints in the Wiegand archive were sketched upon with red
pencil.168 Far from being merely a matter of convenience, the use of photography in the
composition of these ensembles underscores a new development in museology. Wiegand
understood well that the photographic reproduction of the monuments of antiquity in
the museum reach a wider audience than the museum itself. Once completed, the
monuments were meant not only to awe the visitors who walk into the gallery, but also
to be photographed.
***
The critics of the Pergamon Museum in the 1920s and the early 1930s focused
primarily on the question of material authenticity. It seemed problematic to them that
imitations of antique monuments posed in the museum as originals. The museums
most eloquent critic, Scheffler obtained and published in 1926 some of the photographs
of the antique exhibits during their construction. Schefflers article, which
168
Eight black and white prints by Max Krajewski, Lichtbildwerkstatt (Charlottenburg,

Berlin) some of them with sketches with red pencil. Pergamonmuseum, Milettor, GallProzess, in DAI, Wiegand-Archiv, Kasten 21.
157
accompanies the photographs, warns the German public against what the author sees as a
deliberate forgery. About the reconstruction of the Great Altar of Pergamon Scheffler
writes, the only original component is the frieze, all the rest is built artificially out of
plaster and cement. Just like the other architectural reconstructions in the museum the
Pergamonsaal exemplifies, according to Scheffler, the triumph of quantity over quality,
plaster over marble, the pedantic over the artistic, and the imitation over the original.
The material inauthenticity of the architectural elements, Scheffler argues, compromises
the integrity of the original frieze as well.169
In another critique published in a daily newspaper in Dresden in April 1929, Dr. Paul F.
Schmidt characterizes the Pergamon Museum as an artistic [act of] barbarism against
archaeology. The very intention of the museum to create a picturesque and romantic
ensemble, Schmidt contends, violates the ethics of professional archaeology. By
erecting antique monuments in real scale and out of cement and plaster, the restorers
ignored one basic principle of the discipline: the dependence of the truth claim on the
materiality of the archaeological finds. Having thus condemned from the outset the very
intention of substituting the effect for the material truth, Schmidt goes on to criticize
the restored monuments. He finds the artistic effect of reconstruction in the Pergamon
Museum disastrous. According to the author, the freestanding columns, gates and
other elements from the Hellenistic and late Roman periods were carelessly
reconstructed in the comparative architecture rooms without respect to their original
169
Karl Scheffler, Das Berliner Museumskaos, Kunst und Knstler (April 1926): 26667.
158
proportions. Furthermore, Schmidt dismisses the Pergamonsaal as a theater-dcor.

Apart from the material inauthenticty of this dcor, the author fears that the authenticity
of the frieze has also been compromised, since one could hardly distinguish authentic
from copy.170 In another article published in the daily Berlin newspapers two days later
on April 22, Schmidt attacks the Pergamon Museum with another eye-catching title:
Millions Were Wasted for Kitsch. The authors argument is analogous to that of the
previous article in its general lines. Yet in this article Schmidt uses the terms kitsch,
ornamental, decorative interchangeably to characterize the restoration, which is
clearly contrasted with authentic, freestanding and archaeological.
Though Scheffler and Schmidt were the most outspoken critics of the Pergamon
Museum, they were certainly not the only ones. A survey of the daily newspapers in
Berlin between 1926 and 1931 reveals a discourse that persistently put into question both
the political ambition and the aesthetic strategy of the reconstruction. A newspaper
published a few days before Schmidts articles on April 17, 1929 cynically called the
Pergamon Museum The Commercial-Mall State Museum, accusing the restorers for
the commodification of archaeological finds.171 Another article from April 1929
characterizes the reconstruction of Pergamon under glass ceiling as a modern
panopticon. It does not however elaborate on the perceived analogy of the
170
Paul F. Schmidt, Das Pergamon-Museum: Eine knstleriche Barbarei der

Archologie, Dresdner Nachrichten, 20 April 1929.
171
Georg Stein, Magazin Statt Museum, Berliner Brsen-Courier, 17 April 1929.

159
Pergamonsaal to the infamous model for the 18th century prison designed by the English
philosopher Jeremy Bentham.
Common to many critics of the Pergamon Museum in the 1920s is the tendency to point
to the rift between the appearance and the historic essence of the reconstructed
monuments. The characterization of the exhibits as a theater dcor often sufficed to
dismiss them as fakes. Hence the critics seem to subscribe to a rather strict
understanding of authenticity. They contended that an object which was not an antique
original had no place in the museum.
In retrospect, we may certainly defend the exhibits of the Pergamon Museum against
such orthodoxy: a conceptual model or a hypothetic reconstruction should certainly have
a place in a museum of ancient architecture. And yet, Wiegands intention was by no
means to acknowledge the status of the objects for what they are: he instead chose to
authenticate, if not the objects themselves, then the experience of viewers who encounter
them. The deliberate confusion of fictive reconstructions with antique monuments
surfaced particularly clearly in 1929.
The Pergamonsaal was first presented to an international group of archaeologists in

1929 on the occasion of the centennial of the German Archaeology Institute (DAI). The
general director of the State Museums in Berlin, Wilhelm Waetzold, and the director of
the Antiquity Collection, Wiegand, emphasized in their respective speeches that the
primary task of the museum was to achieve a living [lebendig] presentation of the
160
work of art. In Waetzolds words, the museum needed to highlight the elementary
force of the artwork [elemantar Gewalt der Kunstwerk].172
Wiegand, on the other hand, argued that a museum reconstruction should aim at
conveying the whole at a glance [der Blich auf Ganze], unlike archaeological research,
which was all too often lost in the particular aspects of the past and hence could not see
the entire world picture. What followed was a comically dramatized praise of the
monuments of antiquity. The Nietzschean, Wagnerian tone of Wiegands speech
culminated in its finale, where he invoked an Apollonian - Dionisian duality. Having
invited the guests to observe the extravagantly rich pictorial decoration [Schmuck]
that surrounded them, he likened the Pergamonsaal to a powerful symphony that recaptures the triumph of light over unbridled wilderness and barbarism. Perhaps the
time has come, he added, that all the cultivated peoples of the world unite under a
single will that the two thousand-year old work that rises here be a warning symbol
for all the acculturated peoples on earth.173
In both speeches the critique of 19th century philistine culture and a profound distrust for
knowledge about history are made manifest. As Silke Wenk noted in an excellent
biography of Wiegand, the non-verbal persuasive power of the Pergamon Museum
172
See Waetzoldts speech, Hunderdtjahrfeier des Archologischen Institut, (Berlin,

1930): 112; also cited in Wenk, Auf den Spuren der Antike, 50.
173
Wiegand, manuscript of the speech given at the centennial of the German

Archaeology Institute (DAI), 22 April 1929, Pergamon Museum, Zum Tagebuch
1929, DAI, Wiegand-Archiv, Kasten 21.
161
differentiated it from its precedents. In other words, the modern museum meant to
overcome 19th century historicism so as to reinstate an essentialist trust in the
unmediated power of art. The strategy of the museum entailed the sacralization of the
work of art by restoring an aurato use Walter Benjamins wordaround supposedly
original monuments of antiquity. Waetzolds speech made this aura particularly clear,
by calling the Pergamon Museum what it truly became within three decades: a sacred
island in the ocean of the modern life of the metropolis.
The sacralization of the museums exhibits as works of art, and the new investment in
the immediacy of their artistic message, unfold a new populism, which was shared by
the Weimer politicians and the cultural establishment that the republic inherited from the
Wilhelmine Empire. In fact, the triumphal tone of the opening speeches hardly conceals
the complex circumstances, which led the social democrat governments of the Weimar
Republic to yield to the demands of the conservative cultural bureaucracy and to
appropriate half-heartedly this major symbol of the Wilhelmine imperialism. For, if
Oppeln-Bronikowski, the Prussian Minister for Science, Art and Public Education, a
social democrat, saw in the immediacy of the Pergamonsaal a means of reaching out to
the underprivileged and uneducated classes,174 Wiegand, an affluent conservative,
viewed the social mission of the museum as making the masterpieces of Greece and
Rome accessible to the German Volk. Hence departing from the 19th century critique
of the museum as mausoleums and from the rejection of philistine Bildung, Wiegand
aimed at creating a new museum, one that was in agreement with the early 20th century
174
See Oppeln-Bronikowskis comments cited in Wenk, Auf den Spuren der Antike, 50.
162
Germanys characteristically vitalist, right-wing populism: quoting Wiegand, a daily

newspaper of 23 April 1929 declared that the Pergamon Museum is neither a museum
of dead-architecture, nor a place for past cultures, but a living folk-museum [ein
lebendiges Volksmuseum].175
Wiegand, more than any other, understood that a new audience had emerged for the
museum. The museum of ancient architecture was not intended for a small group of
artists, intellectuals or students of ancient architecture, many of whom readily dismissed
its exhibits as fakes. Nor was the task of the museum necessarily Bildung in the 19th
century meaning of the word. A century after the emergence of the Berlin Museum as an
institution for the elevation of the taste of the bourgeois public, the Pergamon Museum
was intended for the most impressionable crowds: conveying an immediate and aweinspiring image, the museum of ancient architecture created a peculiar type of massspectacle. Wiegands strategy of display met unequalled popular success: only a year
after its opening on October 30, 1930, more than one million people visited the
Pergamon Museum.176
***
175
Tausend Archologen im Pergamon-Museum, Danziger Neueste Nachrichten (23

April 1929).
176
Oppeln-Bronikowski reports that from October to February, in the first five months,
600 000 people visited the Pergamon Museum. Pro Pergamo, Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung, Abend-Ausgabe (10 February 1931).
163
In this lightthat is, in the light of the process of sacralization of the monuments in
the museum, which cultivates a vaguely allusive sense of authenticity and of the
accessibility of a sublime message for the masseswe may understand the enthusiasm
of the National Socialist rulers of Germany for the Pergamon Museum. In fact, the
Pergamon Museum not only served as the backdrop for pathetic spectacles that
reenacted an image of ancient Greece during the Berlin Olympics; the reconstruction of
the Great Altar was also to become a recurrent model of the Nazi official architecture.
Soldiers Hall by Wilhelm Kreiss, which was to be erected on the monumental NorthSouth axis of Germania, would-be capital of the Nazi Empire, and the Zeppelinfeld
Stadium by Albert Speer in Nuremberg are the most significant examples.
In early 1934 Speer, still a relatively unknown member of the National Socialist Party,
received his first major commission from Adolf Hitler: a permanent stone installation
that was to replace the temporary bleachers on the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremberg for the
celebrations of Reich-Partie Day. Going far beyond the scope of the assignment, Speer
designed a major monument: an ambitious project that also marked his political debut.
Speer recalls in his memoirs:
I struggled over those first sketches until, in an inspired moment, the idea came
to me: a mighty flight of stairs topped and enclosed by a long colonnade, flanked
on both ends by stone abutments. Undoubtedly it was influenced by the
Pergamum [Pergamon] altar. The indispensable platform for honored guests
presented problems; I tried to place it as unobtrusively as possible midway in the
flight stairs.177
177
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer (1969), translated by
Richard and Clara Winston (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970), 65.
164
And yet, what Speer ignores is precisely this: he was not influenced by the Hellenistic
altar itselfnow lostbut by the Pergamonsaal, the most popular museum display in
Germany. Just as the Pergamonsaal consists of a large void for the awe-struck masses,
so, too, does the permanent installationas Speer called itof the Zeppelinfeld. The
analogy between the two, however, stops there: admittedly, the museum and the paradeground had a different relation with the masses. The crowds visited the Pergamonsaal
with the hope of seeing an antique originalalthough such object was nowhere to be
found. The Zeppelinfeld framed a political rally. The first seemingly transforms
architecture into an object of spectacle, the second highlights a setting in which the
crowd itself is the exhibit.
***
Consequently, the reconstruction and display of Pergamene art in Berlin underwent a

metamorphosis through which both the task of the museum and the status of its object
have changed. Initially the reconstruction of the Great Altar was seen as a museal setting
for the Gigantomachy Frieze. Instead of displaying the sculptural relief as detached
fragments, the museum sought to reintegrate it into a hypothetic reconstruction of its
original architectural context. In Wolffs first Pergamon Museum, for instance, the
function of the altar was merely to create the ideal conditions of viewing for the
Hellenistic sculpture. Even though the first Pergamon Museum achieved a partial
restoration of the altar, the altar was not seen as the object of the museum. Hence in
Wolffs museum the distinction of the work of art from its frame was not ambiguous:
165
architectureeither the shell of the museum or the partial reconstruction of the

altarserved as the modern frame of antique sculpture.
Departing significantly from the earlier concept of the museum, Messel intended in his
Altar-Raum a self-contained interior, which transfers the viewer into antique
Pergamon: an interior that conveys the feeling of standing in front of a monument in a
distant historical present. By displaying the West Faade of the altar from a distance,
Messel provided an impressive representation of ancient architecture, one that eventually
distracted the viewers from an experience of the Gigantomachy. And yet, the AltarRaum did not restore an architectural monument: the exhibit of the museum was merely
a sculptural articulation of the modern wall of the museum.
Curiously, between 1910 and 1930, Messels Altar-Raum underwent a significant

transformation. In fact, it was not so much the hypothetic reconstruction of the West
Faade but its relation with the museal frame in which it was displayed that changed.
The Great Altar in Berlin, which was initially conceived as a context for antique
sculpture, was eventually objectified and authenticated inside a gigantic prism: antique
architecture became the exhibit of the museum. So much so that, since it opened to the
public in 1930, the museum has conveyed to its visitors the erroneous impression of an
antique building displaced from its original site and relocated inside the modern
museum.
166
Hence Wiegands museum of ancient architecture has come to pose a paradox: the
exhibits of the museum are endowed with a sense of authenticity thanks to their aesthetic
differentiation from their museal frame, the architecture of the museum. Wiegands
photographs showing the architectural exhibits against a black background are quite
telling: the object of the museum is meant to be a work of art against a non-ground.
While antique architecture came to the foreground, the architecture of the museum was
effaced. And yet, in the final analysis, the distinction between the museums frame and
its exhibits is merely fictive.
Hence the question remains of what is the object, the exhibit of the modern
Pergamonsaal: a fictive architectural context for the Gigantomachy frieze; a hypothetic
conceptual model of an antique building, which conveys an idea about the original
without actually restoring it; a partial architectural faade, an exhibit in its own right?
Admittedly these three definitions of the museums object are not mutually exclusive.
The Pergamonsaal may exhibit several things at once: a partial reconstruction, a fictive
context and an architectural model. What is problematic, however, is precisely that
Wiegands museum of ancient architecture constructed, and has maintained up until
today, an undue cult of authenticity: obscuring the hypothetic, fictive and conceptual
nature of the museums exhibits.
167
Part 4
_______________________________________________________________________
Architectural Reproduction: Reconstructing Babylon
168
4.1. The Lion of Babylon in the Age of the Work of Art
An ambiguous site in the Pergamon Museum, and perhaps the most fascinating of all the
exhibits, is a double-sided gate that demarcates the Antiquity Collection
(Antikensammlung) from the Near Eastern Museum (Vorderasiatisches Museum).
Approaching from the Antiquity Collection, the structure is perceived as the Market
Gate of Miletus, Wiegands reconstruction of a Roman gate from the 2nd century AD. As
the visitor walks through the gate, the austere, limestone finish of Miletus yields its place
to a sudden burst of colors, chiefly vivid dark blue and yellow. Countless fragments of
enamel compose glazed bricks, which for their part are assembled into the appearance of
a gate of the Ancient Near East. Looking from the Near Eastern section of the museum
the doorway represents the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. Dragon and bull figures in bas-relief
decorate the gate. Perhaps a modern monument to Janus, the animistic spirit of doorways
in Ancient Rome, the reconstructed gate offers two faces to the visitor: one in Western,
late antique, and the other in archaic, Oriental attire.
Having entered the Near Eastern Museum, a careful visitor may observe some
discrepancies in the presentation of the Ishtar Gate. The historical gate (as can be seen in
a scale-model, also displayed in the gallery) was much higher (about 12 m) than the
museum-reconstruction. As many as thirteen rows of animal figures decorated the
original gate, compared to only five rows on the museum-reconstruction. Clearly, the
proportions of the reconstructed gate have little in common with those of the Babylonian
original.
169
Furthermore, one can observe a duality in the museum display of the Ishtar Gate: the
bricks on the lower part, particularly those of the bull and dragon figures, are composed
of a large quantity of broken fragments: the face of each brick consists of a mosaic of
several glazed pieces, suggesting that they were assembled of antique originals. Unlike
the fragmentary appearance of the lower section, the bricks on the upper parts are
flawless. They are clearly the products of modern brick manufacturers, which attempted
to imitate the Babylonian technique of glazing.
***
A professor of history of architecture and the director of the Near Eastern Section of the
State Museum in Berlin, Walter Andrae undertook an unprecedented project of
archaeological reconstruction in 1928. His design of the interior of the Near Eastern
section of the museum consists of a creative rearrangement of about 300.000 broken
fragments of glazed brick into an image of the ancient city of Babylon. At the center of
Andraes plan is a thirty meter-long, eight meter-wide, double-height gallery, which
leads the visitors to the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate. Andrae conceived the gallery
as a shortened replica of the Processional Street of Babylon. Built during the reign of
Nebukadnezzar (6th century BC), the Processional Street was originally about three
hundred by sixteen meters and was surrounded on two sides with glazed brick walls. No
less than one hundred and twenty lions in bas-reliefperhaps as many as two
170
hundreddecorated the walls of the Processional Street on either side.1 Since the
figures on one side of the street were the mirror image of those on the other, there must
have been two prototypes of lion figures, one walking to the right and one walking to the
left. All lions on the Processional Street were otherwise identical. The Babylonian
walls were clearly the products of a highly industrialized process, an archaic system of
architectural production in large quantities, which Andrae was determined to reinterpret
in Berlin.
Initially, the reconstructed lion figures were to be displayed on the South wing of
Messels complex, in the Near Eastern section designed by the architects Hoffmann and
Wille. As early as the 1910s Wille developed a number of alternatives for the Near
Eastern Museum, many of which arranged the Mesopotamian collections along a long
and double-height gallery. Though it would have also displayed the reconstructions of
the Babylonian reliefs on both sides, Willes gallery recalled more the interior of a
Gothic cathedral than a sacred street in Ancient Mesopotamia.
Trained as an architect, Andrae rejected these museum plans, which, in his own words,
had been imposed on him as a fancy dress costume that did not fit properly. He found
the imagination of the architects, Hoffmann and Wille, rather limited. Whereas color
had been an essential part of Andraes reconstructions of Babylonian and Assyrian
antiquities since 1900, Willes interiors were inappropriately somber and dull. Given the
Walter Andrae, Vorderasiatisches Museum, October 1930, 4 pages typed manuscript,

Andrae Archive, Berlin, Staat Bibliothek, 17.
171
fierce battles that had been fought over Messels plans for nearly a decadethe socalled Museum Warsit should not come as a surprise that Andrae did everything in
his power to undermine Willes plans. He went as far as redesigning the interiors of the
Near Eastern Museum, which he represented in a number of watercolor perspectives, a
medium he mastered during long years of excavations in Babylon and Assur. He called
upon the scenery-dcor painters of the Berlin State Opera to enlarge his watercolors into
life-size models, painted on wood and paper, and installed them in the South wing. It
was this full-size wooden installation that convinced both the Prussian Ministry of
Culture and the museum administration to replace Willes earlier plans with Andraes
design. The positive impression created by Andraes installation also convinced the
ministry to reconstruct a large number of lions to decorate the gallery, although it had
instructed earlier that only two exemplars of the Babylonian lion be reconstructed for
they were all the same.2
The fragments that Andrae used in his reconstruction found their way to Berlin after a
long process. The archaeological excavations of the German Orient-Society (Deutsche
Orient-Gesellschaft, DOG) directed by Robert Koldewey between 1899 and 1917 in the
extinct city of Babylon came to an abrupt end with the Great War when the OttomanTurkish army retreated from Mesopotamia. As the provinces of Baghdad, Mosul and
Basra were given to British mandate, the German finds were seized by the new colonial
administration of Iraq. Nine years later, and after Koldeweys death in 1925, it was his
Andrae, Lebenserinnerungen eines Ausgrbers (2nd edition; Stuttgart: Verlag Freies

Geistesleben, 1988), 274.
172
assistant Andrae who successfully negotiated the return of the German archaeological
property in 1926. Given the ill feeling between the two countries, the British decision to
send Babylonian finds to Berlin was an extraordinary gesturebut, of course, whose
property was it in the first place? For our purposes, it is critical to note that the
Babylonian finds were no archaeological treasure in the conventional sense of the
word. Out of five hundred thirty-seven crates, the first shipment that reached Berlin in
January 20, 1927, about four hundred were filled with broken pieces of bricks, some
with a faint trace of enamel glazing on one side.3 For the most part, the Babylonian finds
were not free-standing works of artand not even recognizable fragments of antique
sculpturebut a large mosaic of hundreds of thousands of pieces of baked mud. It was
Andraes task in 1928 to create new constellations from the most unassuming of
archaeological fragments.
An issue of the German Orient Societys journal, the recollections of Andrae in his
posthumously published memoirs and some documents in the Walter Andrae Archive
give us a clear idea of how the reconstruction proceeded. The fragments of glazed brick
were first desalinated and waxed with paraffin in the chemical laboratories of the Berlin
Museum under the supervision of Prof. Rathgen in 1927. The following year Andrae
entrusted the task of sorting and reassembling the fragments to an expert in sculpturecasting, Willy Struck, who, together with six to eight assistants and the patience of an
angel classified hundreds of thousands of pieces according to find-spots and
Eva Strommenger and Kay Kohlmeyer, Wiedererstehendes Babylon, exhibition catalog

(Berlin: Museum fr Vor und Frhgeschichte, 1991), 53.
173
according to types of animal or decorative motives. The reconstruction deserves a long

quote in Andraes words:
Then, [Struck] started to put the fragments together, first into single bricks, and
finally into complete animals: lions, bulls and dragons, and then into various
decorative elements that went with them... One look at Strucks infinitely long
worktable shows what a painstaking job this was. On the table everything was
arranged according to type, for instance all pieces with a lions eye ... were
classified together. We know that all 60 lions on one side of the street came from
one and the same mould. That is, all the fifty-odd bricks of about 33 cm length
and 10 cm height, which constituted one lion, were from the same mould... The
same applied to two kinds of bulls and dragons...4
The ambiguity of this description consists in the fact that it presents assemblage of
archaeological fragments as an ordinary puzzle-game (Geduldspiel)5. The eye, the leg,
the jaw of a lion were fit together so as to assemble a figure out of the found fragments.
Yet, Andrae goes on to explain that fragments were grouped according to their types.
That is, all the fragments that might have belonged to an eye were put together. Andrae
reported that Koldewey had collected fragments from Babylon, which would be
sufficient to reconstruct one hundred and twenty lions. Even if classification according
to find-spots had prevented the fragments of a figure from being mistaken for the
fragments of another, such distinction would haven been lost on Strucks worktable, at
the very moment the fragments were re-classified according to their types.
Andrae, Von der Arbeit an den Altertmern aus Assur und Babylon, Mitteilungen
der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 66 (April 1928): 20. Also cited in Ernst Walter
Andrae and Rainer Michael Boehmer, Bilder Eines Ausgrbers: Die Orientbilder von
Walter Andrae 1898-1919: Sketches by an Excavator (2nd enlarged edition in German
and English Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1992), 144: n. 73.
5
Ibid.
174
Reading Andraes accounts and judging from two photographs of the assembly desk, it
seems that each time the restorers picked a lions eye from the desk they had to choose
among a large pool of fragments, which could have belonged to any of about one
hundered lions on one side of the Processional Street. The face of each brick was
reconstituted from a combination of six to seven fragments, which further increased the
choices that the restorers had to make each time they assembled a figure. Unlike a
jigsaw puzzle, the Babylonian walls had not one, but an infinite number of solutions.
In the instance when no fragment from the pool seemed adequate to fill in the missing
part, Andrae used modern bricks manufactured by three factories near Berlin.6 In
addition to lions produced in this way to decorate the Processional Street, many others
were distributed to museums across the world. Andrae offered two exemplars, as he
calls them, to the Istanbul Archaeology Museum (formerly the Ottoman Imperial
Museum) and to the new Baghdad Museum in Iraq, as these were the institutions that
negotiated the division of the Babylonian finds with Berlin before and after the war
respectively. Others were sent to Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Gteborg, Chicago and to
other unspecified museums in the US, as well as to Dresden and Munich.7
Three ceramic factories near Berlin, H. Krting in Oranienburg, Blumenfeld in Velten

and Mutz factory in Neu-Ruppin, manufactured the modern Babylonian bricks. See
Andrae, Das Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin, Museumskunde, Neue Folge III,
Heft 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1931), 76. See also Andrae Archive, Berlin,
Staat Bibliothek, document no. 21), 29.
7
Andrae, Lebenserinnerungen eines Ausgrbers (First published in 1961; 2nd edition,

Berlin: Verlag Freies Geistesleben, 1988), 277.
175
Andrae was surely not interested in reassembling each lion out of its exact original
pieces, without mixing the parts of different lions with one another: such concern would
have been irrelevant, for the lions of Babylon had been mass produced. Hence by
transforming archaeological reconstruction into a system of production, Andrae
transgressed an established rule of modern aesthetics: the distinction between the
original work of art and its copies.8 Not a single figure of bas-relief was reconstructed
by uniting its original pieces as they really were. But each figure consisted of a
combination of pieces gathered from different excavated walls, and of modern infill.
Each lion figure, in other words, includes antique pieces that might have belonged to any
of the one hundred lions on one side of the Processional Street.
Against common wisdom, the reconstructions of the Processional Street and of the Ishtar
Gate in the museum are not antique originals in the limited, 20th century definition of
the term, but a fascinating, and distinctively fin de sicle constellation of antique
fragments: an ornamental pattern that clearly reflects the preoccupations and taste of the
Jugendstil and the Art-Deco.
Having established this point, we have to underscore that there is nothing particularly
problematic in Andraes reconstruction of 1928, completed prior to the wide-spread
On the contrary to Walter Banjamins well-known thesis in his The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technical Reproducibility, it is not the concept of reproducibility, but those
of authenticity and aura that are products of recent modernity. By reproducing the
Babylonian architecture in Berlin, Andrae does not violate the ancient system of
ornament, but transgresses the modern, museum aesthetics, which is invested in the
uniqueness and authenticity of the ancient work of art.
176
embrace ofwhat I shall callthe modern cult of authenticity: imaginative restoration

was not yet fully outlawed by the advocates of historic presentation. Nor was the Art
Nouveau philosophy of art, which also nurtured the Jugendstil movement in Central
Europe, fully replaced by the Modern Movement, one that declared Art Nouveaus preoccupation with ornament a crime.9 Andraes reconstruction of Babylon could be
better understood when compared to another imaginative reconstruction of archaic
civilization, Sir Arthur Evans Minoan palace in Crete, which has been recently
acknowledged as among the most significant examples of Art Nouveau in Greece.10
Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the museums exhibit (which is both ancient ornament
and modern work of art) seems to trouble some museum connoisseurs and
archaeologists, who are apparently convinced that acknowledging the influence of
modern taste, and of the changing ideas of historical reconstruction would depreciate the
museums object. In an exhibition catalog, Wiedererstehendes Babylon [Babylon
Reconstructed], for instance, Eva Strommenger and Kay Kohlmeyer characterize the
Babylon excavations and the subsequent reconstruction in the following terms:
The basis of the German success [in Babylon] was not due to the excavators
luck in finding material (Findersglck), but rather due to the development of a
new method of excavation and documentation. For the first time, a precise
9
See Adolf Loos. Ornament and Crime (1929), in Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime:
Selected Essays, Selected and with and introduction by Adolf Opel Riverside, translated
by Michael Mitchell (Calif., Ariadne Press, 1998).
10
See Anton Bammer, "Wien und Kreta: Judgendstil und minoische Kunst," Jahreshefte
des sterreichischen Archologischen Institutes in Wien, 60 (1990): 129-152; see also
John K. Papadopoulos, Knossos," in The Conservation of Archaeological Sites in the
Mediterranean Region, ed. Marta de la Torre (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation
Institute, 1997).
177
recording of the excavation finds was carried out, and the essential features of an
ancient cosmopolitan city were ascertained Furthermore, the Ishtar Gate, the
Throne hall faade and the Processional Street stand today as a particularly
painstaking, scientifically grounded and technically challenging reconstruction,
which, in its concept, offers the museums visitors an exact (faithful) impression
of the antique architecture in original scale.11
Surely, Andraes reconstruction was scientifically grounded just like Viollet-le-Ducs
imaginative restoration of Gothic cathedrals was rational. That the German
archaeologist assiduously recorded his finds, however, does not necessarily mean that he
based his reconstruction on a positivist notion of faithfulness (exactness) to the
original. The theoretical framework, which legitimizes reconstruction only to the
extent it is scientifically faithful to the original, does not do justice to the complexity
of the case we face.
Among several questions that Andraes imaginative reconstruction of Babylon in Berlin

raise, I shall tackle two sets, which seem particularly relevant for our investigation of
architecture in the museum. Firstly, why did the German archaeologists spend nearly
two decades excavating Babylon, an extinct city, which unlike Pergamon, did not reward
their effort with spectacular finds (in fact an earlier expedition conducted by the
University of Pennsylvania was called off after a couple of years of frustration). What
did the German Orient-Society hoped to discover in the Biblical cityand to serve
which theological, cultural and political ends? Secondly, how did the German architects
reconstruct Babylon from the most inconspicuous mud-brick foundations into
spectacular monuments? How did they conceive architecture of an antique culture
11
Strommenger and Kohlmeyer, 5.

178
about which they had no theoretical or methodological preparationat least nothing

comparable to the accumulation of expertise about Classical, Greek architecture?12
12
Unlike classical architecture of Greece and Rome, which was studied and restored as
part of the Beaux Arts education, architecture of the Ancient Near East figured in the
19th century merely in the studies of Oriental religions and of the symbol. Georg
Fredrich Creuzers Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Vlker (6 volumes, Leipzig and
Darmstadt: Carl Wilhelm Leske, 1810-23), a founding text of German Orientalistik, for
example, defined allegory through architecture as a branch of symbolic expression.
See especially Creuzers chart in volume I, 1819.
179
4. 2. Transgressing Bilderverbot: the Babel-Bible Controversy
The driving force behind the German expedition was the rising interest in Assyriology in
Germany in the last decades of the 19th century. Following the sensational discoveries
by the English adventurer Henry Austen Layard and the French consul to Mosul, PaulEmil Botta, a group of philologists were increasingly convinced that religious myths,
architectural forms, as well as linguistic formations which had been attributed to the
Egyptians and Hebrews, had in fact been originated in the third millennium B.C. in
Babylon. The founder of the German Orient-Society, professor of Semitic languages in
Berlin and founder of German Assyriology, Friedrich Delitzsch (1850-1922), was, if not
the most eloquent, the most outspoken of the German Pan-Babylonists.13
In a lecture addressed to an audience of theologians and high state officials including

Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Berlin Academy of Music in January 13, 1902, Delitzsch
interpreted the recent discoveries in Mesopotamia. His aim was to establish that the
stories of the Old Testament had their origins in the Babylonian codes and legends.
He argued that there existed as early as about 2250 BC a highly developed constitution,
together with a state culture and when the twelve tribes of Israel invaded Canaan, they
came to a land which was a domain completely pervaded by Babylonian culture.14 The
13
Marchand, Down From Olympus, 223.
14
Friedrich Delitzsch, Babel und Bibel, (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs Buchandlung, first
lecture, 1902; second lecture, 1905). The citations are from the English translation,
Babel and Bible, (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1903), 37, 39.
180
main evidence Delitzsch presented in order to dispute the revelatory content of the Old
Testament was the Code of Hammurabi, found by the French archaeologist Marcel
Dieulefoy (1844-1920) in the extinct Persian city of Suse.15 Having anticipated the
adverse reaction of his conservative audience, Delitzsch added that the true religious
feeling had nothing to fear from the outcome of the scientific excavations:
when freed from ... prejudice, as extolled by the prophets and poets of the Old
Testament, and as taught in its most sublime sense by Jesus, also the religious
feeling of our hearts, is so little affected, that it may rather be said to emerge
from the cleansing process in a true and more sympathetic form.16
Delitzsch later published the lecture together with comparative physiognomies of racial
types, which contrast the profile of a Sumerian Priest after an antique sculpture, with
highly satirized, supposedly Jewish profiles. Although Delitzsch, a notorious antiSemite, acknowledged that the Sumerians, this primeval race of the third millennium
might not have been Aryans, he proudly declared that they were not a Semitic race.
Delitzschs lecture reached is patriotic climax in its finale when he projected a slide of
the Prussian expedition house in Babylon and when he declared that Germany finally
pitched her tent on the palm-crowned banks of paradise... for Germanys honor and
Germanys learning.17
15
See Marcel Dieulafoy, L'acropole de Suse, d'aprs les fouilles excutes en 1884,
1885, 1886 (Paris: Hachette, 1890-92).
16
Delitzsch, Babel and Bible, 67.
17
Ibid., 77.
181
Delitzschs lecture Babel-Bible stirred an immediate controversy in Germany. While

the Catholic and Jewish groups renounced the lecture, the reaction of the Evangelical
conservatives was not as positive as Delitzsh had anticipated. Unlike most of the
audience who strongly protested the lecture, Kaiser Wilhelm was very impressed with
Delitzschs performance, so much so that he asked the Assyriologist to repeat the lecture
on February 1st, this time, in the Royal Palace.
Emboldened by the support of the German monarch, Delitzsch launched a more direct
attack on the Old Testament in his second lecture of January 12, 1903. He had just
returned home from a brief visit to the German excavation site in Babylon with new
evidence. He argued that the Biblical sin, paradise, and the Jewish name for God,
Yahweh had their precursors in the Babylonian narratives. By focusing on the
parallels between the Old Testament and the Koran and comparing them to the Assyrian
narratives such as the Deluge Tablets and the Code of Hammurabi,18 Delitzsch argued
that the Scriptures were only an imperfect transmission of an original code through the
Semitic tradition of story-telling: Hebrew writer has freely altered the Babylonian
legend; the form in which these truths are clothed is human, altogether and
fantastically Oriental.19
By 1905 Delitzschs first lecture had sold sixty thousand copies and inspired one
thousand six hundred fifty articles and twenty-eight pamphlets in Germany alone. It was
18
Best-known ruler of the first Babylonian dynasty, who reigned c. 1792-1750 BC.
19

182
immediately translated into English and distributed in Britain and North America.20
Although Kaiser Wilhelm had to distance himself from Delitzschs thesis under
increasing pressure by religious conservatives, he found other ways to show his
friendship and support. Delitzsch preserved his prestigious academic position until
1921, as an increasingly outspoken anti-Semite.21
An analysis of Delitzschs lectures shows that he suffered from persecution complex,

shared by the right-wing theorists of the late 19th century (such as Langbehn). Unlike
Langbehn, a convert to Catholicism, he sought the true (Germanic) religion in
Mesopotamia of the 3rd millennia BC. He went as far as arguing that the Judeo-Christian
Scriptures were part of a millennial conspiracy against the true religious feeling of the
Germans. And yet, neither Delitzschs thesis nor his ideological program was
innovative: as early as the 1850s the German philologist and the historian of Oriental
religions, Paul de Lagarde had called for an authentically German, spiritual life.22 In
fact, it is not so much the paranoid nature of Delitzschs argument but his ability to
clothe an old theory with irrefutable scientific evidence from the German excavations
in Babylon that made him a celebrity.
20
Reinhard G. Lehmann, Friedrich Delitzsch und der Babel-Bibel-Streit (Gttingen,

1994), 50; see also Delitzsch, Babel und Bibel: Ein Rckblick und Ausblick (Stuttgart,
1904), 3; cf. Marchand, Down From Olympus, 224.
21
Marchand, Down From Olympus, 225.
22
For an analysis of Lagardes Germanic religion see Stern op. cit.

183
Delitzschs intention, however, was hardly a positivist demystification of religion,

although he occasionally assumed an anthropologizing tone whenever this fit his
purpose. For instance he suggested that Semitic people (the Arabs and Bedouins in the
region) should be studied anthropologically since their supposedly fetishist and
animist character altered the original Babylonian code.23 Curiously, according to
Delitzsch, the original Babylonian code, unlike the Hebrew legend, was not the
product of a human culture: its revelatory, divine content could not be questioned. Hence
hidden behind a supposedly scientific project was essentialism: Delitzsch was
convinced that the ur-religion of the primeval race (perhaps of the primitive Germans)
was buried in the Iraqi desert, under Babylons rather unattractive ruins.
It is highly ambiguous, on the other hand, why Delitzsch so specifically targeted the
Second Commandment in his second lecture: Quite specifically Israelitish is the second
commandment, the prohibition of every form of image-worship whatever, which seems
to have a directly anti-Babylonian point.24 The prohibition of the graven images is,
according to Delitzsch, not only a distortion of the original code but also intentionally
anti-Babylonian. It is possible that Delitzsch sought the original Babylonian language
(before the fall of the Tower) as inscribed in hieroglyphics or in some sort of graven
pictures: a primeval code that preceded the Assyrian cuneiform.25
23
24
Ibid., 191.
25
The French philologist Jules Oppert (1825-1905) had decoded the Assyrian script only
a few decades earlier. See Jules Oppert, Expdition scientifique en Mesopotamie
excute par ordre du gouvernement de 1851 1854 MM. Fulgence Fresnel, Flix
184
***
Robert Koldewey was an unorthodox choice to lead the excavation in the Ancient Near
East, as he was not formally trained as a philologist. Trained as an architect, he often
refused to destroy architectural ruins to unearth historical inscriptions underneath: he
was more interested in collecting examples of ancient mortar than ancient tablets.26 This
suggests that Koldewey excavated the city of Babylon, not simply to produce evidence
for Delitzschs dubious theological theses, but to achieve a reconstruction of mythic
monuments including the Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel. As early as 1897,
Schne, the general director of the Royal Prussian Museums, encouraged Koldewey to
collect fragments for a museum reconstruction.27 Just like Heinrich Schliemanns Troy
(Hisarlik), the fame of Babylon in modern consciousness had extended far beyond what
the extinct city had to offer. Two architects and an army of workers had to work for
several years to reconstruct an image of Babylon in Berlin.
Andrae, a twenty-three year old architect, recently graduated from the Technical
University of Dresden, started the first reconstruction on the excavation site as early as
1900. The fragments that Koldewey found on the excavation site seemed to indicate the
Thomas et Jules Oppert (Paris : Imprimerie impriale, 1857-63). See also Oppert, Les
incriptions commerciales en caractres cuneiforms (Paris, 1866).
26
Svend Aage Pallis, The Antiquity of Iraq: A Handbook of Assyriology (Copenhagen:

1956), 308; also cited in Marchand, Down From Olympus, 213.
27
Walter Andrae, Das Vorderasiatische Museum zu Berlin, 74.

185
presence of a lost work of art. The architects identified them as belonging to dragon or
bull figures in bas-relief. Koldewey also unearthed fragments of colored brick from the
area which was later identified as the Processional Street. The colored fragments and the
fragments of bas-relief did not match one another. It was, therefore, Andraes job to sort
out the possible connections.28 We learn from Andraes memories that he found the job
particularly difficult: there was no indication of how the colored fragments could be
assembled.29 His task consisted of drawing hypothetical animal figures, dividing them
into their smallest possible parts and comparing these parts with what the architect had
in hand: small fragments of mud-brick.
In the absence of any texts that could guide the reconstruction (no Assyrian architectural
treatise has survived), and mindful of his assistants education, Koldewey assigned
Andrae readings from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Besides
Schopenhauers The World as Will and Representation, Andrae also benefited from
reading Immanuel Kants Dreams of a Spirit-seer Illustrated by Dreams of
Metaphysics. Yet, Andrae found his spiritual guide to the reconstruction in Iraq in
Goethes theory of color. In his own words:
By my second year in Babylon a more fundamental and less philosophical light
dawned on me: color, which Goethe called the experiences and sufferings of
light and formthe shapes that nature places before our eyes for us to wonder
28
Ernst Walter Andrae and Rainer Michael Boehmer, 114.
29
Walter Andrae, Lebenserinnerungen eines Ausgrbers, 78.

186
at. I felt almost as though this revelation had been bestowed upon me as a
complete substitute for religion.30
After a year of carefully piecing the fragments together Andrae produced the first and
highly hypothetical prototype of the lion of Babylon.
30
The passage was omitted in Andraes memoirs, Lebenserinnerungen eines

Ausgrbers, and was published posthumously in Ernst Walter Andrae and Boehmer,
120.
187
4. 3. Romantic Reconstruction: in Search of Organic Essence
The exhibition of Assyrian sculpture in the Crystal Palace, London, and the opening of
the first Mesopotamian rooms in the Louvre had a considerable impact on 19th century
architectural theory. This is chiefly due to the writings of the German architect Gottfried
Semper, then a refugee in London and Paris. Having observed Bottas finds from
Khorsabad in the 1850s, Semper formulated his theory of dressing [Bekleidung] in
which he challenged the classical interpretations of origin of architecture. He argued that
the art of building stemmed neither from imitation of nature in Ancient Greece, nor from
the primitive hut that resulted from the human need for protection. The origin of
architecture was the Assyrian textiles, the ornamental surfaces that were subsequently
translated into patterns of glazed brick. Once applied to architecture, Assyrian art
preserved the vivid colors and ornamental patterns of an earlier medium. Such an
interpretation also explained the lack of structural elaboration and the abundance of
ornamental patterns in the Ancient Near East. Semper still believed in the superiority of
Greek architecture based on its tectonic perfectionhere he approached the
architectural historian Carl Bttichers theory of tectonics. And yet, Sempers
Bekleidung amounted to nothing less than a revolution in architectural theory by
suggesting that Greek architecture was the refined product of a historical development.
Semper challenged the fixed taxonomies of architecture with cultural
188
transformismsome four decades after a comparable debate took place in natural

sciencesparticularly in paleontology in the French academy.31
The most complete reconstruction of Assyrian architecture on paper prior to Andraes

followed the excavations of the ancient Assyrian city of Dur Sharrukin (modern
Khorsabad) in 1852-54 by Victor Place (1818-1875), the French Consul of Mosul and
Bottas successor. A Beaux-Arts architect and the winner of the Prix de Rome, Flix
Thomas (1815-1875) accompanied Place to Assyria and undertook a survey and
restitution of architectural ruins, published in 1867 in three volumes, Ninive et
l'Assyrie.32 Place, like Botta before him, erroneously identified the Assyrian Palace of
Sargon II and the surrounding city (built between 717-707 BC) as the biblical city of
Nineveh, and hence the confusing title of his publication. The third volume is dedicated
to Thomass survey of the ruins and to his essai de restauration, which restored the
palace in a set of drawings.33
No one other than Thomas, the only Beaux-Arts architect to set foot in Mesopotamia,
could feel so intensely the absence of a classical treatise about Assyrian monuments. In
31
See the Cuvier-St. Hillaire debate in the French Academy of Sciences in 1830.
Franois Jacob offers an excellent overview of the debate and its philosophical
implications in La logique du vivant: une histoire de lhrdit (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
32
Victor Place, Ninive et l'Assyrie. 3 volumes (Paris: Imprimerie impriale, 1867).
33
The authorship of the text Essais de Restauration is not clearly stated in the third
volume of Ninive et l'Assyrie. However, given the complexity of architectural, technical
details and the recognizably Beaux-Arts terminology, we can assume that either the
architect wrote it himself or that he closely supervised Places text.
189
the restoration of fragments that belong to the orders of classical architecture, he

complained, imagination [of the restorer] is guided by the existence of previously
known monuments. This was certainly not the case for the palace in Nineveh, where
no previous example, no Asian Vitruvius have survived to transmit the rules and the
canons. Nor was the archaeological evidence adequate for a systematic study of Assyrian
architecture.34
Despite these difficulties, Thomas was determined to discover a new architectonic

order.35 In the absence of structurally differentiated elements like column, capital,
entablature in Assyria, he focused on the system of ornament, what he called la
dcoration architectonique. According to Thomas:
Architectonic decoration, which reinforces the contrasts of shade and light

[profiler] on the buildings, is exclusively the result of good ordonnance of the
constitutive members of construction [bonne ordonnace des membres constitutifs
de la construction] and of the assemblage of the used material It determines
the form from the point of view of exterior beauty36
Hence all the parts of architectonic decoration are subordinate to the harmony of the
whole. It may seem bizarre to call Thomass treatise on Khorsabad classical, but, in
fact, its only non-classical feature is that les anciens are not the Greeks but the
Assyrians. (Les modernes are, as usual, the French.) Thomas goes on to argue that
34
Place, II: 1.
35
Place, II: 2.
36
Place, II: 44.

190
Assyrians were more honest builders than the other peoples of antiquity: The Greeks
did not escape the weakness of, for example, imitating primitive wooden prototypes in
stone, a failure in providing the unity of material with form. Absolute calmness [repos],
this ideal of architecture, is embedded in Assyrian walls.37
In contrast to his high-spirited treatise that construes a classical order in Mesopotamia,

Thomas curiously restored the ruins into a fantastically Oriental palace from the One
Thousand and One Night tales, conspicuously roofed with medieval Islamic domes.
Underlining the Oriental character of the ruins, Place also observed imperfections in this
ancient art, like the Assyrianss obvious ignorance of perspective and their occasionally
unnatural depictions of animal, plant or human figures in wall paintings and sculpture.
At the entrance of an Assyrian temple, which the fantasizing Frenchmen mistook for an
Oriental harem, the excavators unearthed seven figuresincluding a lionwhich had
been constructed out of glazed enamel bricks, and which were surprisingly well
preservedunlike those the German excavators found in Babylon. A paragraph in
Ninive et l'Assyrie describes the lion as follows:
The lion ... is a piece of great beauty, the lines are well found, the contours are
well established and the proportions are of an attentive exactitude. The members
are well attached and depict a natural movement; we see the animal walking.
The head has a character of truth. The mouth, as it opens, answers exactly to the
general movement that the artist sought to render. Among the pieces that
37
Place, I: 208.
191
antiquity left us, there are few that reveal a better-translated feeling of art, and
this alone suffices to give us a high idea of the taste of the Assyrians.38
It is remarkable that for Place truth resides in Assyrian figures to the extent they
approach naturalist depiction. Haven mistaken a temple for a harem, the French
archaeologists did not take into consideration that the figures might have had religious
and ritual significance. Places description recalls instead a critique of a 19th century
salon painting.
***
Unlike Place and Thomas, the German excavators of Babylon projected a Romantic and
decisively non-classical theory of art onto the figures of the Ancient Near East. Having
interpreted a dragon figure, which he found on the walls of the Ishtar Gate, Koldewey
argued that this animal, or the walking serpent as the Babylonians had called it,
showed an organic unity. The figure was a proof for Koldewey of an unmistakable
self creative genius in this ancient art as it far exceeded all other fantastic creatures in
the uniformity of its physiological conceptions. The chimera-figure was so
harmoniously assembled that such an animal might have actually existed in nature.39
38
Place, I: 118.
39
Robert Koldewey, Das wieder erstehende Babylon: die bisherigen Ergebnisse der
deutschen Ausgrabungen (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1914), 48-49; English translation by
Agnes S. Johns, The Excavations at Babylon (London, Macmillan and Co., 1914).
192
Koldeweys understanding of ancient architecture recalls the theories of the German

Romanticism in Jena in the late 18th century. It was August Wilhelm Schlegel who
most eloquently defined organic form in his Lectures:
Organic form ... is innate; it unfolds (bildet) itself from within, and acquires its
determination contemporaneously with the perfect development of the germ. We
everywhere discover such forms in nature throughout the whole range of living
powers, from the crystallization of salts and minerals to plants and flowers, and
from these again to the human body. In the fine arts as well as in the domain of
nature, the supreme artist, all genuine forms are organic, that is, determined by
the quality (Gehalt) of the work. In a word, the form is nothing but a significant
exterior, the speaking physiognomy of each thing, which, as long as it is not
disfigured by any destructive accident, gives a true evidence of its hidden essence
(Wesen).40
Romantic aesthetics provide the reconstruction with a set of guiding principles: First, as
Tzevan Todorov shows in his Theories of the Symbol, the work of art is like natureit
does not imitate nature.41 Just like a work of nature, the work of art is structured by its
inner coherence. Organic form, unlike mechanical form is never arbitrary.
Secondly, the exterior form, or physiognomy of a work of art is the consequence of its
hidden essence. The aim of the architect is not to imitate form, but to capture essence,
since the first is subordinate to the second.
***
40
August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen ber dramatische Kunst und Literatur, vol.II
(Stuttgart, 1966); English translation by J. Black, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art
and Literature, (2nd. ed London, 1904), 340; also cited in Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of
the Symbol, translated by Catherine Porter, 4th. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1995), 179-180.
41
Todorov, 180.
193
The case presented by the Ishtar Gate was of a different order than the Processional
Street. Unlike the Processional Street where no lion figure remained intact, Koldewey
unearthed a number of dragon (sirrush) and bull figures on the foundations of the gate,
which had been stripped of their color and glazing. Koldewey predicted that at least
thirteen rows of alternating dragon and bull figures had decorated the structure. The
problem here was that there seemed to be no beginning and no end to these rows of
figures at top and bottom. Considering that eight lower rows contained at least forty
animals and the upper five rows fifty-one Koldewey calculated at least five hundred
seventy-five animal figures on the wall. At least two of these rows were below the
ground water level. Due to technical difficulty, the archaeologists had to stop their
excavation once they reached the water level, far from the foundations of the ancient
wall. Koldewey concluded that the building was never intended as a single composition.
Particularly the lower rows were not intended to stand out free and meet the eye, at any
rate not for any considerable length of time.42 The building had been sinking
throughout Babylonian history and the level of the street pavement had been raised
several times to adjust to the rising ground level. The traces of three previous ground
levels could be seen in between the rows. Therefore, the Ishtar Gate was not a unified
structure but one that had been added to throughout the centuries. This, of course, means
the total absence of a circumscribed architectural originala finished compositionan
idea that would appear certainly very disturbing to the Beaux-Arts architect, Thomas.
More specifically it meant that composition, the key word of the Beaux-Arts restoration,
42
Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon, 41-42.

194
was only secondary in importance to production, the key word for the German
Romantics.
Equally intriguing was the ornamental pattern of what Koldewey called the Throne
Room Faade. As shown in the watercolor and crayon drawing by Andrae, the
Babylonian bricks had marks on their reverse side indicating their position in the wall.
These marks were not in cuneiform writing but consisted of a notation of strokes and
dots whose combination resulted in discernible signs, and which guided the assembly of
the bricks into an ornamental pattern.43
In all three casesthe Processional Street, the Ishtar Gate and the Throne Room
FaadeKoldewey and Andrae did not intend to reconstruct Babylonian architecture in
its original state. For there had hardly been a fixed original composition, a self-enclosed
and complete work of art in 6th century Babylon. They instead tried to understand the
system of production and assembly in ancient architecture. They intended, in other
words, to produce Babylonian architecture in Berlin, like speaking an old language
through its original grammar in modern times.
***
43
Koldewey writes in the excavation report, The system of signs can be seen best on
the capitals. Here the markings consisted of numerals combined with dots. They are
marked on the upper edge of the bricks with a poor, somehow blackened glaze. The
signs that distinguish the courses are in the center, those for the vertical arrangement are
close to the vertical joints. Each of the latter signs is a counterpart of the sign near the
vertical joint of the brick adjoining it. Ibid., 41-42.
195
In the final analysis, a comparison of Thomass drawings of the Assyrian lion of the
Harem Gate with Andraes reconstruction of the lion of Babylon shows some
similarities: though he was invested in a Romantic theory of art, the German excavator
achieved a restoration which did not depart significantly from Thomass drawing of the
Assyrian prototype. Their major difference was in their interpretive framework: for
Thomas, the Assyrian lion is a product of classical mimesis, while for Andrae (just as for
Koldewey) it is the result of an inner essence, which probably would have been
incomprehensible to the Beaux-Arts architect. In other words, there seems to be a
disjunction between Andraes actual reconstruction and the discourse of Romantic
aesthetics that accompanied it in Koldewey and Andraes texts: the theory does not
translate into an artistic form.
In his memoirs, Andrae who, unlike Thomas, did not find a Babylonian lion intact,
carefully rules out all artistic influence and attributes the inspiration of his hypothetic
reconstruction to his reading of Goethes Naturwissenschaft. As late as 1908, however,
he was clearly influenced by Thomass restoration.
In 1904 Andrae left Koldewey in Babylon in order to excavate the extinct city of Assur
(the capital of Assyria) further north in Mesopotamia. During thirteen years, from 1899
to 1912, he left the region only twice. On September 1st, 1908 he attended the gala of
the historical pantomime play, Sardanapal (Assurbanipal), in Berlin, for which he
196
had designed the historically accurate costumes and opera-set while he continued to
excavate the ancient city.
Kaiser Wilhelm, who strongly empathized with the dynastic problems of Assur, had
commissioned Delitzsch with a three-scene play and ordered Andrae to provide the
decor ranging from architectural setting to Assyrian hairstyles. As Andrae later recalls in
his memoirs, the play told of a dangerous coalition of Assyrias enemies, and the fall of
both the dynasty and the empire, and there was meant to be a moral here, not just for
those with their own dynasties and empires to worry about. It was as if the voice of
fate was warning the Kaiser about the future.44 Delitzschs play consisted of recitations
by allegorical figures, The Assyrian Past or Knowledge, which unlike his BabelBible lectures bored the audience out of their minds. Despite overwhelmingly negative
reviews in Berlins newspapers the Kaiser was pleased with the production. He
decorated Delitzsch with the Prussian Order of the Red Eagle on the opening night. The
following morning the Berlin newspaper, Vossische Zeitung, pronounced: the Assyrian
Ballet Sardanapal is so boring that anyone who lasts to the end receives the Order of
the Crown, third class.45
44
Walter Andrae, Lebenserinnerungen, 132; also cited and translated into English in
Ernst Andrae and Boehmer, 128. Cf. Wilhelm IIs memoirs Ereignisse und Gestalten
aus den Jahren 1878-1918 (1922), 169.
45
Vossische Zeitung, 2.9, 1908, morning edition; cited in E. Andrae and Boehmer,
footnote 34, 127.
197
Andraes design for the opera deserves attention since it is his first reconstruction of the
architecture of the Ancient Near East. The architect designed the stage in three
watercolors, which were enlarged to real scale by the technicians of the Unter den
Linden Opera in Berlin. Andraes design of the Assyrian court for the Sardanapal is
practically an adaptation of two restorations by Thomas, the Harem Gate and the city
gate, onto the stage.
The stage design of 1908 made a permanent imprint on Andraes later work. He based
his design for the Babylonian section of the Berlin State Museum in 1928 on a set of
watercolors and enlarged his paintings into a full-scale installation using the help of
the technicians of the same opera. Andrae clearly conceived the museum reconstruction
as an opera stage, making no significant distinction between an ephemeral dcor and a
permanent installation.
198
4.4. Symbol, Ornament, Art: Figures of the Counter-Enlightenment
In an unusually bitter critique published in a daily newspaper a week after the opening of
the Pergamon museum on September 1, 1930, Lothar Brieger argues that the Pergamon
Museum did not fulfill any of the initial expectations. It was not beautiful in the
traditional sense of the word, nor was it a modern museum that could answer the
demands of its time. It instead consisted of hypocritical and untrue reconstruction.
Brieger found the Ishtar Gate the dullest of all the exhibited objects in the museum.
The upper part of the gate, in particular, was simply false, absurd and laughable.46
Andrae answered the criticism in November 1930 in a short essay, which was most
probably intended as a brochure or guide to the Near Eastern Department. The question,
Andrae argues, is whether one should reconstruct entire archaeological monuments
(Bauwerke), or a large part of them, in the museum. Given the restricted space
allocation as well as the material constraints, the Near Eastern Department could not be
expected to restore the monuments of Babylon to their original form. Instead the
reconstruction aimed at giving an impression [Eindruck] of the large colored
surfaces [Farbenflchen] of Babylon by restoring a large number of the ornamental
46
Lothar Brieger, Nach der Feier die Kritik: Eine nchterne Museumsbetrachtung, in
Berliner Zeitung, 8.10.1930. The article was clipped and kept by Walter Andrae
(Andrae Archive, Staat Bibliothek, Berlin, document no. 440).
199
reliefs. It was only in the fantasy of the observer that a full image of Babylon could be
created.47
In a later essay written in 1931, Andrae raises the issues fundamental to reconstruction.
The critics of the Babylon room, he argues, did not understand that compromise was
the essence [Wesen] of any museum. No artwork [Kunstwerk], no functional
object [Gebrauchgegenstand] could be exhibited as a museum-piece
[Museumsschaustck] without losing their appropriate setting [Milieu]. Essential to
any museum is the displacement of the works of art from their organic context [aus
organischem Zusammenhang]. Andrae thus acknowledges that any quest to restore an
object literally to its original condition is absurd since it contradicts the very concept
of the museum. He rather raises the question how did these objects stand in their past,
and how do they stand in their present and future; what did they mean to their creators
and what do they mean to us?48
The subsequent texts that Andrae wrote for the Near Eastern collection, particularly
those after 1933, are less apologetic and more ambiguous. The most ambiguous piece
was read to a group of visitors to the Babylon Hall on April 4, 1937. In this text, Andrae
chooses to introduce his reconstruction to the visitors with the voice of the Spirit
[Geist] of Sumer, whom he imagines to have been reincarnated for a brief moment
47
Andrae, Vorderasiatisches Museum, October 1930, unpublished 4 pages typescript,

Andrae Archive, document no. 17.
48
Andrae, Das Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin in Museumskunde, 73.

200
after five thousand years, in order to illuminate the visitors. The Spirit talks with an
understandable language, namely German and even more surprisingly, uses
terminology that recalls that of Schopenhauer:
I admire your gut and strong will! I see through you as I did see through each
ancient Sumer man [in the ancient times] when I ruled them. If I were your
Spirit, I would expect you to have not only a strong will, but also strong feeling
(Empfinden). And I must say you would have to elevate your feeling to the same
strength as your will. The will is for you the most natural thing on earth. Yet, I
did not remark a strong feeling in you...49
Andrae clearly imagined the Babylon room as the decor of a theatrical presentation of
the ancient civilization. His guided tours (in another performance prepared for April 24,
1937, Andrae spoke this time with the voice of the Spirit of Assur50) recall the
allegorical recitations of Friedrich Delitzsch in the pantomime-play Sardanapal.
Andraes theory of ornament, on the other hand, shows the authors increasing
involvement in theosophy. In a 1925 text Andrae argues that the stock of decorative
motives in architecture originated as divine symbols, the substitution of divinity, and
were later transformed into purely formal patterns:
Originally the fruit-bearing palm, probably the rosette, and the he-goats
represented symbolically the cult of the goddess Ishtar. Later these goat-figures,
generally on their knees, became simple ornaments with no deeper meaning... In
49
Andrae, Fhrung, sumerische un babylonische Sle, 7.4.1937, unpublished

typescript, Andrae Archive, document no. 212.
50
Andrae, Fhrung, die assyrischen Sle, 21.4.1937, Unpublished typescript, Andrae

Archive, document no. 213.
201
the same way, the winged genii and bulls, mythological figures with healthgiving power, were first introduced with a definite intention until they
deteriorated into meaningless forms.51
This process, for Andrae, is one of spiritual entropy. The architecture of Mesopotamia
was the physical testimony of a process of degradation through which the formerly
sacred symbols were depicted as ornaments. As Andrae explained in his Symbol in
Architecture (Baukunst), the sacred is the origin of architecture, par excellence. In so
far as the symbol preserves its original, divine essence in architecture, the world
preserves its meaning. When the symbol freezes into meaningless ornament,
everything on earth falls into an entropic oblivion; the meaning retreats from the world:
It is a question of tremendous actual importance--as it will always be--whether

our present time is capable to create new symbols and, therefore, a new
architecture characteristic of our time, or it is at least possible to bring old
symbols back to life. We should not ignore either of the possibilities. The entire
flow of history, from the Nordic culture, or the ancient Sumer (and perhaps from
much earlier times), through Classical Antiquity and through the Middle Ages
until our day, is a chain of newly created, reactualized and once again fallen
symbols. We know little about the enormous impulsive power of the earliest
symbols... Today, they look [to us] different from 2000 or 500 years ago.52
51
Andrae, Farbige Keramik aus Assur und ihre Vorstufen in altassyrischen

Wandmalereien: nach Aquarellen von Mitgliedern der Assur-expedition und nach
photographischen Aufnahmen von Originalen im Auftrage der Deutschen Orient
Gesellschaft. (Berlin: Scarabaeus, 1923). The quote is taken from the English translation
with some modifications, Coloured Ceramics from Assur and Earlier Ancient Assyrian
Wall-Paintings, From Photographs and Water-colours by Members of the Ashur
Expedition Organised by the Deutsche Orient-Geselschaft, (London: Kegal Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd. 1925), 6.
52
Andrae, Symbol in der Baukunst, in Forschungen und Forschritte Jahrg., Nr. 26,
(Berlin, September 10, 1933, pp.373-374, (Andrae Archive, document no. 29).
202
Hence Andrae seems to thematize in the Babylonian section of the museum the age-old
enfeeblement of the original spirit in architecture. The museum was meant to
illustrate not only the process of spiritual entropy, the degradation of the symbol into
meaningless ornament, but also embody Andraes hope to reactualize the symbol, his
attempt to decipher the code, whose secret had long been lost.
In his art historical writing, Andrae argues that the earliest representation of God in
human form belongs to the first dynasty in Ur, around 3000 BC. Before this period
divine power was visualized in Mesopotamia via symbolic image (Sinnbild). Although
the archaeological layers that he excavated in the cities of Babylon and Assur belong to
much later periods, Andrae is clearly interested in this earlier age before the 4th
millennium, the age of archaic symbols. He focuses his attention not as much on the
ornamental motives that he found in Babylon, but on the memory of an earlier symbolic
age as they are preserved in these figures. In his lecture of March 16, 1934 in the
Pergamon Museum he focused on this point:
How did man come to the point of making for himself a picture [Bild] of the
deity? We are brought up with the prohibition: Thou shalt not make to thyself
any image of God! [Du sollst Dir kein Bild von Gott machen!]. The image of
God [Gottesbild] is banned as graven image [Gtzenbild]... What is the
difference between the deity who is signified by a symbol [Sinnbild] and one
who figures in human form [Menschenbild]? We would call the first abstract,
and the second concrete, in a quite unsatisfactory [classification]. The second,
no doubt demands higher creative power and requires higher knowledge and
wisdom, [especially] when one has lost the divine in man [himself]... The
question is, whether this is a better condition than the first one. I believe it is not!
I see such depiction as the result of a compulsive need [to give an appearance to
203
God]; previously man had been in God and with God. Then, God moved towards
[the appearance of] man. Nevertheless, this is the birth [Wurzel] of Art.53
The difficulty of translating Andraes text into English consists in the fact that
Menschenbild, which can be translated literally as Man-image or mans figuration
means, at the same time, the conception of man.54 As its opposite Andrae never uses
the word Symbol, but Sinnbild (literally, meaning/feeling-image) which also means
symbol. With the play of words Andrae implies that the mimetic (my word) faculty of
representing the deity in mans form is at the same time the creation of the subjectivity
of man as independent of the divine essence. Menschenbild refers to the fall of man
from the world of the divine essence to the material world, and the secularization of the
latter.
The very moment when man depicted himself and his God as a separate man-like image,
he asserted his subjectivity in a world of representation. The moment when man
represented God in mans appearance is the moment of inauthenticity. Mimesis, that is,
non-identical similitude, replaced meaning, just as ratio reframed the world as the world
of mans domination.55
53
Andrae, Wintervortrag, Mensch un Gottheit unpublished lecture, professed in the

Pergamon Museum in March or April 1934. Andrae Archive, document no. 142 Nr.3.1.,
3.
54
The Oxford-Duden German Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, reprinted with

corrections in enlarged format, 1995).
55
Cf. Andraes terminology with Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adornos analysis of
mimesis and of the origins of Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment. See also
Rabinbachs essay The Cunning of Unreason: Mimesis and the Construction of AntiSemitism in Horkheimer and Adornos Dialetic of Enlightenment, In the Shadow of
204
In the light of Delitzschs ideological program, which initiated the excavations of the
German Orient Society in 1899, Andraes theosophy of the 1920s is significant. In
contrast to Delitzschs simplistic attack on the Second Commandment as antiBabylonian, and his search for a picture-code that would reveal the true religion,
Andraes account of the origin of art and architecture in Babylon is remarkably
iconoclastic. Art (by which Andrae means mimesis) is born only when the original
meaning retreats from the world. Unlike Delitzsch who was in search of a revelation,
one that would expose the millennial conspiracy, Andrae does not seem to believe that
the retreat of meaning from the world in the 3rd millennium can be reversed in
modernity.
***
Hence both archaic and modern, the Babylonian walls in Berlin present a fascinating
case. On the one hand, the Babylon expedition of the German Orient-Society was
motivated by the search for the original code of an ur-religion that precededwhat
Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, (Berkley,

Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997): Enlightenment [in the
sense used by Horkheimer and Adorno] occurs at the intersection of two decisive
processes: the prohibition of the image and its displacement into the abstract system and
the need to differentiate self from nature. The Jewish proscription on images, the
Bilderverbot, is the origin of enlightenment and at the same time provides its redemptive
moment... Mythic mimesis, as Andrew Hewitt has argued, is already a step beyond
archaic images, a step toward the symbolic, to the point where mimesis feeds into
rationality. To fall back into the premythic world is to enter a matriarchal, magical
world populated by ancient heroines and by Odysseus own mother; to fall back into
the nondifferentiation of nature, 179.
205
Delitzsch believedits distortion in the Hebrew legend: the ur-religion of Babylon,

was supposed to match the inner religious feeling of the Germans. Driven by
Delitzschs dubious ideological program, the archaeological expedition was conceived
as the return of the German spirit into a landscape of entropy where the most distant
religion had been frozen, and was available only in broken symbols. Ornaments of
Babylon in the museum are not works that stand for themselves in front of an
experiencing subject. They are not objects of aesthetic experience but a sort of
redundancy, the traces left behind after the withdrawal of the original meaning from the
world. Just as art is, for Andrae, the fallen memory of the ur-religion, ornament is the
entropic ruin of the primordial symbol.
It is therefore little wonder that the German architects and theosophists, Koldewey and
Andrae believed that they were searching for something fundamentally different from
what the French and British archaeologists had looked for. Having immersed themselves
in pre-history, they had hoped to excavate spiritual origins of the self in the fields of
the other.
On the other hand, Andraes reconstruction in Berlin thematized not so much the
spiritual rootedness of Germany in the ur-religion of Babylon, but the displacement of
man in a modern world with no original meaning and with no hope of recovery. Unlike
the ultra-conservative theorists of German Ideology, Largarde and Langbehn, Andrae
offers no hope of redemption for contemporary Germans in religion or art. Instead, the
museum reconstruction of Babylon draws parallels between the impersonality of the
206
mechanical modes of production in industrialized modernity, and the architectural

production of an archaic culture which flourished prior to the introduction of man as an
experiencing subjectprior to the figuration of man as the concept of man
[Menschenbild]. Hence Babylon, a city, which had little to offer in terms of physical
ruins, was made in Berlin to provide archaic images to modernity.
207
Conclusion
_________________________________________________________________
On the Modern Cult of Authenticity
208
Once tradition is no longer animated by a comprehensive, substantial force but

has to be conjured up by means of citations because Its important to have
tradition, then whatever happens to be left of it is dissolved into a means to an end.
An exhibition of applied art only makes a mockery of what it pretends to conserve.
Anyone who thinks that art can be reproduced in its original form through an act
of the will is trapped in hopeless romanticism.
Works of art can fully embody the promesse du bonheur only when they have been
uprooted from their native soil and have set out along the path to their own destruction.
Theodor W. Adorno, Valry Proust Museum.1
Let me, then, revisit two questions I have raised at the beginning of this dissertation:
what is the object of the Pergamon Museum, a museum of ancient architecture? If
the museums exhibits are works of architecture, where does the frame of the museum
end, where does its exhibit, the work, begin?
As I have shown in Part 2, the integration of architectural elements with painting and
sculpture was a central component of Bodes reform in museology. Responding to a finde-sicle critique of museums as mausoleums of dead art, and building upon a general
disenchantment with 19th century pedantic Bildung, Bodes living museum recontextualized the masterpieces of ancient art in the fictive architectural ensembles of
style rooms. Combining collections of painting and sculpture with those of decorative
arts, Bode aimed as much at restoring the original expressive content of art by
relocating it in a semblance of a historical, cultural setting, as at creating an
idealtherefore, distinctively modernsetting for arts experience. Architecture and
In Adorno, Prisms, 175-76, 185.

209
other decorative, applied arts were far from being the object of the museum: Bode
upheld a clear hierarchy in the arts, distinguishing oeuvre (ergon) from hors-doeuvre
(parergon), works of art from fictive architectural frames. Hence Bodes museology
presents a fatal contradiction: he was only interested in architecture (parergon) in so far
as it enhanced the effect of the masterpiece (usually painting), hence ensuring the
autonomy of ancient painting as pure art. But in the very act of displaying painting in
context he was giving support to the German Art NouveauJugendstilbelief that
work and frameergon and parergonformed an inseparable totality, hence
effectively destroying the autonomy of the work of art.2 It is not a mere coincidence
that Bodes displays in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum correspond in time with the rise of
curatorial connoisseurship in Germany, which severed the museums ties with the
academy, as well as with an equally paradoxical cult of the original, which eventually
banned the display of copies and plaster casts in museums.
Marrying Bodes reform in museology with the colonial daydreams of the Kaiserreich,
Messels project for the Royal Prussian Museum of 1907 was a significant departure
from its 19th century precedents, particularly from Berlins Neues Museum, in its
ordering and display of art. While the architecture of the Neues Museum was
conceived as a metaphor for Hegels philosophy, displaying art as the hieroglyphics of
the history of the Mind, Messels museum intended to map the worlds geography of
original works and authentic contexts in its interiors. As is evident in Messels Gothic,
Romanesque and Baroque interiors, the fictive architectural dcor was essential in
I am grateful to Alan Colquhoun for bringing this contradiction to my attention.

210
conveying the idea of the context and, yet, subsidiary to the experience of the
masterpieces of ancient art.
The transformation between 1907 and 1930 of Bode and Messels imperial
museumincluding Bodes brainchild, the Museum of Ancient German Artinto a
museum of ancient architecture presents, in this sense, a fascinating case. For it was
not only the object of the museum but also the relation of this object with its museal
frame that changed.
I have surveyed this transformation in Parts 3 and 4 by tracing the history of the museum
reconstructions of Pergamon and Babylon. In the final analysis, the museum achieved
three different types of worksthough these are not necessarily objects.
The museum-reconstruction of the Great Altar of Pergamon was initially conceived in

1899, in Wolffs interim Pergamon Museum, as a hypothetic architectural setting, which
enhanced the display of the Hellenistic frieze, the Gigantomachy. In his project of 1907
Messel redesigned the West Faade of the altar as the central dcor of a sublime and
phantasmagoric interior, the Altar-Raum. By 1930, the altar had curiously been
transformed into the chief exhibit of the museum: a process that paradoxically
objectifiedas well as commodifiedMessels dcor without, however, restoring the
historic monument into a freestanding building. So much so that the overbearing effect
of the architectural exhibit came to overshadow the original pieces of antique sculpture,
instead of merely providing an architectural frame for their display. Even though the
211
museums critics in the late 1920s and 30sarchaeologists and art historians
dismissed the museums presentation of Pergamon as fake or, in one instance, as
kitsch, it quickly became the most popular museum-display in Germany only a year
after the museums opening in 1930. Hence the Great Altar in the museum presents a
unique case: it was constructed in the museum based on a fanciful proportional
relationship with the Gigantomachy Frieze in order to provide an ideal context for
viewing Hellenistic sculpture, and was subsequently authenticated into an antique
monument.
Wiegands architectural exhibits, including the Market Gate of Miletus, on the other
hand, present a significantly different case. Here the intention was to piece fragments
together into a monument on the evidence of the archaeological fragments themselves,
even though the archaeological evidence was scarce. Similarly, Wiegands exhibits were
not initially conceived as a museal context for sculpture, but as a comparative
architecture collection. Unlike the plaster casts or fragments of antique architecture in
19th century Beaux Arts academies, however, the pedagogical function of these exhibits,
if any, is highly ambiguous. Far from being models of ancient orders, Wiegands
exhibits can best be characterized as a modern pastiche of ancient architectureI use the
word here in two senses: Wiegand produced the exhibits out of heterogeneous,
composite materials, mixing a small quantity of antique fragments with brick, cement,
steel reinforcements and stucco that gave them the appearance of aged marble; secondly,
they are for the most part citations from hypothetic reconstructions of utilitarian,
provincial structures in Roman Anatolia. As Wiegands most eloquent critic, Scheffler,
212
did not fail to notice in the 1920s, Wiegands partial reconstruction of the Market
Gate of Miletus actually fabricated a masterpiece out of a relatively insignificant,
utilitarian building. Such practice is perhaps not unusual, for a museum of ancient art
often produces art out of pre-Renaissance, utilitarian objects by framing them in the
museum. Yet, what makes Wiegands museum of ancient architecture problematic is
precisely this: he not only displaced ancient fragments from antique cities in Turkey but
also sought to create the effect of an architectural ensemble, which, he claimed, reenacted in the museum the original visual experience [Total Anschauung] of the ancients
who had built the monuments. And yet, such a picturesque-sublime idea of antique
architecture as living-experience [Erlebnis] seems, in retrospect, a distinctive product
of German modernity.
The reconstruction of the architecture of Babylon, on the other hand, is different from
the museum display of both the Pergamene and Milesian monuments. Andrae did not
intend to recover a lost historical object in the museum: he had merely an ornamental
pattern from 6th century B.C. Babylon to imitate. The Ishtar Gate and the Processional
Street of Babylon in the Pergamon Museum are decorative reenactments of much larger
structures whose proportions and size were freely altered to fit the modern space of the
gallery. As such, the Babylonian reconstruction recalls an Art Nouveau interior: a
modern constellation of antique fragments. Andraes production of the Lion of
Babylon in large numbersmany decorate the South Wing of the Pergamon Museum,
others were acquired by museums around the worldeffectively transformed the
213
specimens of an archaic system of mass production into unique works of art, by

reproducing them in the museum.
Hence, although distinct from one another, these three groups of architectural exhibits
make one point clear: archaeological reconstruction in the museum transforms the
original meaning of ancient architecture, instead of merely restoring it. The exhibits
authenticity, so central to their presentation in the museum today, depends neither on
their material duration, nor on their being unique in the place where the antique
architecturenow losthad been originally built. Quite on the contrary, the exhibits
derive their authenticity from the very condition of their modern displacement into the
museum.
The translation of the lost monuments of antiquity into the exhibits of the modern
museum can perhaps best be characterized as a process of reproduction and
authentication, which manifests itself in two distinct and yet complementary spheres:
firstly, the phantasmagoric interiors of the museum transport viewers into another time,
and another place, reproducing, as it were, the experience of antique monuments from a
distance, had they remained intact as they actually were in history; secondly, the
hypothetic, partial reconstructions of lost monuments pose in the museum as originals
to be photographed. Perhaps more than the sublime effect of the actual interiors, the
dissemination of the photographic reproductions of antique monumentsin a wide
sphere ranging from art history surveys to Berlin souvenirseffectively authenticate the
museums exhibits.
214
Here, it may be useful to open a parenthesis: by redefining the archaeological

reconstruction in the museum as a double process of reproduction and authentication, I
depart from the literary critic Walter Benjamins thesis in his The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. Far from shattering uniqueness or autonomy of
the work of art, the reproduction of antique monuments in the museum, I contend, has
effectively constructed the aura of the work of art around the hypothetic models.
(Hence, the subtitle of my discussion of Andraes reconstruction of Babylon parodies
Benjamins title by reversing his thesis: The Lion of Babylon in the Age of the Work of
Art.)
***
It must also be clear that I have not aimed in this dissertation at a history of reception of
the antique monuments in the museuman excellent and provocative history of the
reception of the Pergamene Altar was provided by Hans-Joachim Schallesbut at a
history of construction of antique work in the museum. By the same token, I disagree
with the common view that the Great Altar of Pergamon was exploited, abused, or
wrongly appropriated by 20th century German regimes, and above all the Nazis, who
made it a model of their official, ceremonial architecture. Such a view assumes that there
exists an antique work, an interior, a fixed expressive content whose meaning is
independent of the frames, demands and uses of modernity. And yet I have tried to show
that the work itself was shaped by the historical, artistic and ideological concerns of
215
the present that excavated and reconstructed it. The monuments of antiquity could not
have found their present forms anywhere other than Berlin in 20th century Germany.
By acknowledging that the monuments of antiquity in the museum are contingent with
the specific conditions of modern Germany, I do not mean to devalue the museums
exhibits, nor do I intend to dispute their status as achievements of past scientific
research. I do not follow the radical relativism of Paul Feyerabend, who, denying the
very possibility of critical hermeneutics, claims that all attempts to understand antiquity
is merely modern storytelling and as such, false realism. This study, in many ways,
underwrites Karl Poppers counter-thesis: what makes museum exhibits problematic is
not the fact that they are (like all science) imperfect rapprochements with the truth of
antiquity, but, instead, their claim to certaintyin this case, the cult of authenticity that
the museum has nurtured. In the Pergamon Museum the uncertainties of the modern
science of archaeology were replaced with a sublime and highly phantasmagoric
spectacle of antiquity.
Delitzschs search for archaeological evidence in Babylon, and the political

controversy his attacks on the Old Testament stirred, or Wiegands unsubstantiated
claim that he reenacted the original, intuitive experience of the ancients in the
museum, which paved the way for the official representations of the Nazi Olympics of
1936, further support my thesis: hidden under the aegis of a positive science was the
myth of the unique calling of the Germans: a modern essentialism. In fact, as Wiegands
opening speech of 1929 makes clear, this phantasmagoria of antiquity, a spectacle of the
216
sublime for the masses, was intended to induce a sense of collective destiny among
viewers rather than present the merely scientific display of the evolution of
architecture, which Wiegand argued for elsewhere.
Reflecting on the ramifications of such a strategy on the vocation of the museum, it is

clear that Berlins museum of ancient architecture put a decisive end to the muchembattled, humanistic Bildung that had fuelled the Prussian Museum a century earlier.
The aim was not, by any means, the education of the urban bourgeoisie with
disinterested art, but to shock and awe the most impressionable crowds with the
immediacy of a spectacle and towards no productive ends.
***
I shall conclude my remarks by revisiting the problem of repatriation. Admittedly, by

showing that the monuments of antiquity in the museum are constructions of modern
Germanythat is, the distinction between the work and its museal frame is fictiveI
stop short of invalidating the claims of restitution. For, as Tas- kIn elaborates in his
Srgndeki Zeus [Zeus in Exile], the aim of such a campaign is not only to return the
original Zeus Altar, but also to remedy the violence inflicted on the heritage of a
local community by19th century cultural imperialism.
The risk of a campaign of repatriation, however, is precisely to underwrite the German

cult of authenticity while seeking to reverse the effects of German cultural imperialism.
217
For Tas- kIns definition of exile is invested in, not the presence, but rather the
conspicuous absence of a monument in its original place. Perhaps one of the most
intriguing outcomes of this present study is the suggestion that the original place, the
irreducible experience of work under Mediterranean skies, is an outcome of the
modern discourse on the museum. From Conzes first remarks on Pergamon in the
1880s to Wiegands triumphal opening speech of 1929, the discourse was marked by
lamentations for the lost context of art. This, however, should not come as a surprise,
for the very condition of the work of art, as Adorno has shown, is its being in
permanent exile.
218
Selected Bibliography
_________________________________________________________________
219
Adorno, Theodor, W. Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press 1997, 9th printing.
Akin, Nur. Osman Hamdi Bey, sr-i Atika Nizamnamesi ve Dnemin Koruma
Anlayisi zerine Dsunceler. In Osman Hamdi Bey ve Dnemi Sempozyumu,
edited by Zeynep Rona. Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yurt Yayinlari, 1993.
Albenda, Pauline. Monumental Art of the Assyrian Empire: Dynamics of Composition

Styles. Monographs of the Ancient Near East, vol. 3, fasc. 1. Malibu: Undena
Publications, 1998.
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Architecture in The Museum - Displacement, Reconstruction and Reproduction of The Monuments of Antiquity in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, Volume 1 (PHD Thesis)

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Architecture in The Museum - Displacement, Reconstruction and Reproduction of The Monuments of Antiquity in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, Volume 1 (PHD Thesis)

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Copyright:

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ARCHITECTURE IN THE MUSEUM:

DISPLACEMENT, RECONSTRUCTION AND REPRODUCTION

RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE

NOVEMBER 15, 2003

UMI Number: 3107866

Copyright 2004 ProQuest Information and Learning Company.

Copyright by S. M. Can Bilsel, 2003. All rights reserved.

Part 1. Architecture in the Museum: Definitions and Problems

Part 2. The Architecture of an Imperial Museum in Berlin: Art and Kultur

Part 3. The Altar and Its Frames: Reconstructing Pergamon

Part 4. Architectural Reproduction: Reconstructing Babylon

Conclusion. On the Modern Cult of Authenticity . 209

Selected Bibliography .. 220

Illustrations for Part 1

The reconstruction of the West Faade of Great Altar of Pergamon,

Theodor Wiegand, the reconstruction of the Market Gate of Miletus (c.

Detail From the Photograph of the Reconstruction of the Market Gate of

Illustrations for Part 2

Perspective drawing, showing Berlins Museum from the Southeast.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museums, completed in 1830, Berlin,

August Stler, Forum with the Neues Museum, elevations and

August Orth, master plan of the Museum Island, 1875.

August Orth, plan of the Museum Island, second design, 1875.

Alfred Messel, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Alfred Messel, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Alfred Messel, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Alfred Messel, Extension of the Royal Prussian Museum in Berlin, 30

Alfred Messel, Gothic Room.

Alfred Messel, Baroque Room.

The view of August Stlers Neues Museum from the Kupfergraben, c.

August Stler, cross-section of the Egyptian Court with a view to the

August Stler, cross-section of the main stairwell with a view to the

August Stler, Egyptian Court in the Neues Museum.

View of the Egyptian Department in the Neues Museum.

Entrance of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.

Wilhelm von Bodes arrangement of the Simon Room (dedicated to

Wilhelm von Bode, arrangement of the Rembrandt Room in the Kaiser

Illustrations for Part 3

The reconstruction of the West Faade of the Great Altar of Pergamon,

The Pergamonsaal in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

Okeanos and other figures from the Gigantomachy (Western Frieze), as

The reconstruction of the West Faade of the Great Altar of Pergamon in

The Telephos Room at the time of the reopening of the Pergamon

Detail from Pergamonsaal showing a point where the reconstruction of

Detail from the Topographical Plan of Roman Pergamon by A. Attila and

Volker Kstner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of Pergamon,

Wolffram Hoepfner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of

Wolffram Hoepfner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of

Wolffram Hoepfner, reconstruction drawing of the Great Altar of

Comparison of the reconstructed plan of the Great Altar with a schematic

Christian Wilberg, Excavations at the Byzantine Wall Where the First

Wilberg, Excavation Site of the Pergamon Altar, 1879.

Zeus Group of the Gigantomachy (East Frieze) as displayed in the

The Temple of Pergamon in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy of

Reconstructed view of the upper town (acropolis) of Pergamon during the

Emmanuel Pontremoli, plan of the actual condition of the ruins of the

Emmanuel Pontremoli, monuments of the Agora and Acropolis of

Two details from Emmanuel Pontremolis reconstruction of the Acropolis

Emmanuel Pontremoli, reconstruction of the Great Altar, elevation.

Ludwig Hoffmann, prize-winning project in the Schinkel-Competition,

Ludwig Hoffmann, entry in the architectural competition for the Museum

Ludwig Hoffmann, competition entry, 1884, section of the Pergamon

Alfred Hauschild, prize-winning competition entry for the Museum