DOI Artikel:
Muthesius, Stefan: Old English, altdeutsch: some nineteenth-century appropriations of a "homely" past
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14574#0272
260
STEFAN MUTHESIUS
Revivalists, did believe in the complète virtue of their chosen style or styles, yet did not claim exclusivity
or précision. Thus the most vital point to be made in this contribution is that the movements under discussion
were unique and highly créative efforts in the way they conjured up a very spécifie kind of old world. Their
protagonists shared with the Gothic revivalists a concern that went far beyond buildings and their décor,
a conviction born out of some trends in eighteenth century political thinking and reinforced during
Romanticism, namely that of the close link between buildings, culture and even politics. To understand
a building of the past one must set it into its own "original" world, one must imagine the people who used
it, buildings were understood as close reflections of the whole way of being of their original occupants. The
two greatest Neo-Gothicists of the nineteenth century, Pugin and Viollet le Duc, although not directly involved
with the movements discussed here, had a crucial influence with their postulâtes of the complète
interdependence of architecture and people's habits, feelings and activities.
As one would expect, there were close parallels between the English and the German movements. The
Gothic Revival in secular architecture was very largely an English "invention", while the Gothic revival in
religious architecture and décoration was largely due to the thoughts and efforts of German Romanticism.
The Germans were well informed of, and imitated English Neo-Gothic, while the English were deeply
influenced by German Neo-Gothic during the 1830s and 1840s. As regards Old English, this movement
started in the 1830s, a few décades earlier than the German movement and it also lasted much longer. The
German movement, by contrast, really flourished only for a dozen or so years, in the 1870s, and soon ended
up condemned by many, if not most. Crosscurrents between the two movements can be noted, more important
however was simply their parallelity.
The buildings and the décor, or the texts and the illustrations produced by the Old English and altdeutsch
movement were in no way as highly placed on the scale of intellectual and artistic achievement as Neo-
Gothic. Their chief aim was in fact the opposite, namely popularity. There is no need here to examine that
term, or its older German équivalent, volkstiimlich, in ail their twentieth century complexity, but one may
take them very simply in the sensé of broadening the population base. Neo-Gothic had been, strictly speaking,
as style for the élite, and then mainly for the churches. The ordinary citizen, that is, the middle-middle
classes, not to even mention the working classes, could never afford Gothic. Old English runs parallel with
the widening of the franchise (e.g. the Reform Act of 1832) and altdeutsch with the introduction of the
universal (maie) vote from 1871. Thèse "popular" styles also went in tandem with the gênerai increase in
wealth; a rapidly increasing proportion of citizens could afford some measure of décoration. This indicates
the sphère with which thèse two movements were primarily concerned, not with the palace or castle of the
richest and most individualistic patrons, definitely not with the church, nor with the higher honorific sphères
of public life, but with the more ordinary domestic world of a larger proportion of citizens. One may see the
new "Old ..." as part of the nineteenth-century's effort to evaluate the "ordinary".
At this point one should enter a reflection on the term "old" itself and the way its meanings, and the
values it may contain, kept changing. It must suffice here to remember the Renaissance use of "antiquity",
cherishing certain values of beauty because of their great âge. Apart from that, however, "old" would be
synonymous with being outmoded, or simply with bad. A major new mode of thought arose in the eighteenth
century with the revaluing of éléments from the past which did not conform to the values of art and civilisation
of the présent. They were now declared as historically spécifie, as having to be understood in the context of
their time, not according to the values of one's own time - in this case the eighteenth century, as a mode of
thinking later to be called historicism (Historismus). At the same time the aesthetic of the sublime taught the
art connoisseur to get exited by the tenebrosity, massiveness and even "ugliness" of non-Classical architecture,
such as the médiéval cathedrals or the Egyptian pyramids: the old appeared strange, distant, yet one could get
close to it at the same time. Throughout the nineteenth century we can follow the dialectic of the appropriation
of the distant while toying with the contrast distance - nearness. The poet Karl Gerok, when introducing. in
1885, a lavish pictorial présentation of the Proverbs in which the illustrator transferred the Old Testament
world into altdeutsche domestic surroundings and dress, in oder to "[...] uns heimathlich naher zu riicken,
ohne dass ein gewisser idealer Duft der Ferne verwischt wird" (to bring [theml close to us, without wiping
away a certain scent of distance) (111. 17)2.
2 Das Lob des tugendsamen Weibes. Spriiche Salomonis 31..., von L. v. Kramer und K. Gerok, 2nd édition,
Miinchen 1885 (reprint: Dortmund 1979).
STEFAN MUTHESIUS
Revivalists, did believe in the complète virtue of their chosen style or styles, yet did not claim exclusivity
or précision. Thus the most vital point to be made in this contribution is that the movements under discussion
were unique and highly créative efforts in the way they conjured up a very spécifie kind of old world. Their
protagonists shared with the Gothic revivalists a concern that went far beyond buildings and their décor,
a conviction born out of some trends in eighteenth century political thinking and reinforced during
Romanticism, namely that of the close link between buildings, culture and even politics. To understand
a building of the past one must set it into its own "original" world, one must imagine the people who used
it, buildings were understood as close reflections of the whole way of being of their original occupants. The
two greatest Neo-Gothicists of the nineteenth century, Pugin and Viollet le Duc, although not directly involved
with the movements discussed here, had a crucial influence with their postulâtes of the complète
interdependence of architecture and people's habits, feelings and activities.
As one would expect, there were close parallels between the English and the German movements. The
Gothic Revival in secular architecture was very largely an English "invention", while the Gothic revival in
religious architecture and décoration was largely due to the thoughts and efforts of German Romanticism.
The Germans were well informed of, and imitated English Neo-Gothic, while the English were deeply
influenced by German Neo-Gothic during the 1830s and 1840s. As regards Old English, this movement
started in the 1830s, a few décades earlier than the German movement and it also lasted much longer. The
German movement, by contrast, really flourished only for a dozen or so years, in the 1870s, and soon ended
up condemned by many, if not most. Crosscurrents between the two movements can be noted, more important
however was simply their parallelity.
The buildings and the décor, or the texts and the illustrations produced by the Old English and altdeutsch
movement were in no way as highly placed on the scale of intellectual and artistic achievement as Neo-
Gothic. Their chief aim was in fact the opposite, namely popularity. There is no need here to examine that
term, or its older German équivalent, volkstiimlich, in ail their twentieth century complexity, but one may
take them very simply in the sensé of broadening the population base. Neo-Gothic had been, strictly speaking,
as style for the élite, and then mainly for the churches. The ordinary citizen, that is, the middle-middle
classes, not to even mention the working classes, could never afford Gothic. Old English runs parallel with
the widening of the franchise (e.g. the Reform Act of 1832) and altdeutsch with the introduction of the
universal (maie) vote from 1871. Thèse "popular" styles also went in tandem with the gênerai increase in
wealth; a rapidly increasing proportion of citizens could afford some measure of décoration. This indicates
the sphère with which thèse two movements were primarily concerned, not with the palace or castle of the
richest and most individualistic patrons, definitely not with the church, nor with the higher honorific sphères
of public life, but with the more ordinary domestic world of a larger proportion of citizens. One may see the
new "Old ..." as part of the nineteenth-century's effort to evaluate the "ordinary".
At this point one should enter a reflection on the term "old" itself and the way its meanings, and the
values it may contain, kept changing. It must suffice here to remember the Renaissance use of "antiquity",
cherishing certain values of beauty because of their great âge. Apart from that, however, "old" would be
synonymous with being outmoded, or simply with bad. A major new mode of thought arose in the eighteenth
century with the revaluing of éléments from the past which did not conform to the values of art and civilisation
of the présent. They were now declared as historically spécifie, as having to be understood in the context of
their time, not according to the values of one's own time - in this case the eighteenth century, as a mode of
thinking later to be called historicism (Historismus). At the same time the aesthetic of the sublime taught the
art connoisseur to get exited by the tenebrosity, massiveness and even "ugliness" of non-Classical architecture,
such as the médiéval cathedrals or the Egyptian pyramids: the old appeared strange, distant, yet one could get
close to it at the same time. Throughout the nineteenth century we can follow the dialectic of the appropriation
of the distant while toying with the contrast distance - nearness. The poet Karl Gerok, when introducing. in
1885, a lavish pictorial présentation of the Proverbs in which the illustrator transferred the Old Testament
world into altdeutsche domestic surroundings and dress, in oder to "[...] uns heimathlich naher zu riicken,
ohne dass ein gewisser idealer Duft der Ferne verwischt wird" (to bring [theml close to us, without wiping
away a certain scent of distance) (111. 17)2.
2 Das Lob des tugendsamen Weibes. Spriiche Salomonis 31..., von L. v. Kramer und K. Gerok, 2nd édition,
Miinchen 1885 (reprint: Dortmund 1979).