In 1837, a German queen arrived in Athens for the first time to take her place alongside her Bavarian consort, Otto, the first king of Greece. Determined at all costs to evoke fitting connections with the ancient Greek past, the Athenian authorities had decided to bestow the youthful Amalia of Oldenburg with a singular gift:
the symbol of the city in the form of a living bird of Minerva, legs and wings bound with white and blue silk ribbons. No sooner had the Queen stepped ashore than she almost fell over the great number of olive branches strewn in her way, only then to have to attend to that poor little screech owl that by then was practically frightened to death.Footnote 1
According to the recollections of Ludwig Ross, the recently appointed master of the king's antiquities, Queen Amalia was literally hampered by ancient Greek symbolism as she attempted to attain her throne of dominion.
As this vignette reveals, there is rather more to the long-standing relationship between Greece and Germany than merely (to use Suzanne Marchand's phrase) ‘the obsession of the Schillerian German literary and scholarly elite with the ancient Greeks’.Footnote 2 Nevertheless, studies of German philhellenism have tended to focus upon the idealization of Greece by German intellectuals – many of whom had never once set foot on Greek soil – rather than considering the very real, at times reciprocal, at times ambivalent or even brutal, relationship which existed between contemporary Germans and the Greek state from the Greek War of Independence onwards. Idealization and idealism have had a considerable effect upon this relationship and its associated Realpolitik, to be sure – but that was never the whole story.
Now, some two decades after the publication of Suzanne Marchand's seminal survey of the archaeological, institutional, and educational aspects of German graecophilia, Down from Olympus (1996), and just over eighty years after the first appearance of Eliza M. Butler's The tyranny of Greece over Germany (1935), which first established German philhellenism as a noteworthy (and potentially sinister) cultural phenomenon in scholarly discourse,Footnote 3 the time seems ripe for an appraisal of more recent studies on the subject. How far have scholars perpetuated the narratives which we find in the two aforementioned monographs, and how far have they set off on fresh intellectual trajectories which can illuminate the phenomenon from novel (and often interdisciplinary) perspectives? How far do new studies tend to confirm (or rebut) that notion of German cultural exceptionalism which posits a sort of Hellenophile Sonderweg – frequently culminating in the tyranny of Germany over Greece imposed by force of arms under the Third Reich – when interpreting the vicissitudes of the Graeco–German relationship? This essay aims to explore some of the recent developments in the literature on German philhellenism which have emerged in the past decade or so, drawing on research in a variety of different disciplines – Germanistik, classical philology and reception studies, Modern Greek studies, intellectual history, philosophy, art history, and archaeology.
In so doing, perhaps the most important question to answer right at the outset is also the most tendentious: what is it that makes German philhellenism seem so distinctive? After all, the general importance of classical antiquity for the construction of national identities from the Renaissance onwards is increasingly well documented; examples abound the world over, from America and Mexico to India and Japan, as a growing body of research, chiefly conducted by scholars of classical reception, can attest.Footnote 4 Moreover, even if philhellenism was arguably most prevalent in Europe, it was hardly unique to Germany; indeed, Yannis Hamilakis has termed Hellenism ‘one of the most pervasive Western intellectual and social phenomena’.Footnote 5 The lust for the appropriation and display of Greek antiquities burned as fiercely in Napoleon's breast (or in Lord Elgin's) as it ever did in that of King Ludwig I of Bavaria or Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the dominance of classicizing aesthetics in art and architecture could be discerned from Paris to St Petersburg, not only in German metropoleis.Footnote 6 Indeed, French or British travellers’ accounts of journeys to Greece were far more common than those written by Germans during the eighteenth century, while the British were seemingly almost as eager as their German counterparts to posit racial or homosocial affinities between ancient Athenians or Spartans and latter-day Britons (it is no accident, it seems, that Oscar Wilde's most famous protagonist was named Dorian Gray).Footnote 7
Yet, for all of these similarities, commentators down the ages seem to have been united in their affirmation of the difference in quality evinced by German philhellenism, in contrast with its non-Teutonic counterparts. There was never any question that an ‘Augustan’ age would dawn in the German lands. Yes, Germany might turn at times towards other cultural counter-poles – the Italian Renaissance, for instance, or the Orient – not to mention the pull exerted by the indigenous, Germanic past.Footnote 8 Yet the attraction which led Herder to mock the idea of the ‘natural Greek, who, by Pythagorean transmutations of souls, has once more come to life in Germany’,Footnote 9 or which caused Wilhelm von Humboldt to proclaim that the Greeks ‘are to us what they were to their gods – flesh of our flesh’,Footnote 10 seemed to have an undeniable depth and longevity – perhaps precisely because its initial adherents had based their idealization so firmly upon imagination, rather than on any lived experience of Greece and its ruins in the present. While the characterization of German philhellenism as an ‘ersatz-religion’ might seem somewhat overstated, Schiller's depiction of the ‘hot fever of Graecomania’, which replaced the ‘cold fever of Gallomania’ at the turn of the nineteenth century, certainly has a ring of truth.Footnote 11 It is telling, perhaps, that the longest entry of all in the (unfinished) 167-volume German Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Kunst (1813–89), one of the most prized epistemic endeavours of its day, spanned a gargantuan total of eight volumes and 3,668 pages; its subject – ‘Griechenland’.Footnote 12
In the pages which follow, I will endeavour, first, to give a brief resumé of the traditional framing of German philhellenism as a historical and cultural phenomenon. I will then survey in more detail the advances on – and amplifications of – this model which have been put forward in recent scholarship. Finally, I will more briefly touch upon a number of concurrent developments in Hellenic studies, which may arguably be helpful in illuminating the three-way connections linking the concrete political relationship between Germany and modern Greece on the one hand, and the idealized cultural relationship (or elective affinity) between Germany and ancient Greece on the other. In so doing, I do not wish to make any claims to absolute bibliographical exhaustiveness; rather, I simply intend to present the reader with some of the most cogent and suggestive tendencies which have emerged within the field as a whole over the course of the past dozen years (2004–16).
I
Despite their differing approaches – Butler's flamboyantly rhetorical exploration and castigation of the Germans’ ‘slavish’ adoration of the ancient Greeks, and its poetic effects from the Enlightenment onwards, versus Marchand's sober and meticulously researched analysis of the institutionalization of philhellenic Bildung in the service of classical and archaeological scholarship – one man above all provides the catalyst and starting point for both scholars’ narratives: Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68).
It was Winckelmann, with his dramatic and inimitable life-story – from rags to riches to sordid death at the hands of his Italian lover – who first caught the German imagination when he proclaimed in his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst (Thoughts on the imitation of Greek works in painting and the art of sculpture, 1755) that ‘the only way for us to become great, and even, if possible, matchless, is to emulate the ancients’.Footnote 13 Bolstered by the later hero-worship of some of Germany's greatest Romantic authors – including Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Lessing – Winckelmann's oeuvre laid the ground for the appropriation of Greek achievement (primarily, but not solely, in artistic realms) as a form of national legacy.Footnote 14
Indeed, when we speak of the ancient Greece which the German Romantics and their descendants so adored, in a sense, we are speaking of ‘Winckelmann's Greece’ – a truth which Butler emphasizes even in her introduction.Footnote 15 From this point onwards, the ancient Greece of the German imagination existed neither as Athens, nor Sparta, nor any other historical city-state, but rather as a sort of composite dream-world, characterized above all by that Apolline ‘noble simplicity and sedate grandeur’ (edle Einfalt und stille Größe) which Winckelmann ironically believed he had discovered most authentically in those Roman copies of Greek statuary which constituted his only real connection with the Hellenic past. As Can Bilsel has put it: ‘What makes Winckelmann's [work on ancient art] fascinating…is the author's masterful translation of the absence of evidence available to his contemporaries into the presence of an ideal.’Footnote 16
Winckelmann's conception of Greek freedom was also welcome in the new context of a burgeoning German national identity defined in opposition to French dominion, even if no German nation-state yet existed as a vessel within which to contain it. Although parallels between the multiplicity of Greek city-states and the German plethora of principalities had long been bruited, this particular form and style of appropriation was something new.Footnote 17 In a simultaneous emulation and rejection of the French paradigm, which had demonstrated how effectively a modern political and artistic identity could be forged through identification with ancient imperial Rome, German national pride demanded the annexation of an even more august and antiquated ideal. Hence, as Glenn Most has argued, the Germans ‘could retain the structure of ancient models [whilst choosing] to follow a culture which was not only more ancient even than Rome, but was also acknowledged by most of the canonical Latin authors to be their own unattainable model and source of inspiration’.Footnote 18
From henceforward, Rome would generally be portrayed as the antithesis of everything German – too Popish, too French, too universalist. And, just as Greece had triumphed culturally over Rome even when subjected to her political tyranny, so too would Germany triumph over her Napoleonic nemesis. Germans might be Greek, and they might even be Germanic – but after the Wars of Liberation, and even more so after the unifying victories of the Franco-Prussian Wars, they would never be Roman.Footnote 19 Post-unification, this nationalist philhellenism might take on new forms, increasingly with an explicitly racial bent. But even beforehand, it still constituted a powerful nexus of ideas of cultural and artistic superiority upon which to build a nation – not to mention an invincible claim to educational excellence.
From Wilhelm von Humboldt's founding of Berlin University and his establishment of the humanistic Gymnasium as the key element in the Prussian secondary-school system (c. 1810–11) onwards, the ideal of Bildung – ‘self-cultivation, disinterested cultivation of the beautiful, good, and true, [and] admiration of the ancients’ – had become part and parcel of the ‘conventionalized predilections’ of the educated middle classes, the Bildungsbürgertum, as well as of the aristocracy.Footnote 20 Where Winckelmann had endorsed Bildung as the aesthetic contemplation of an idealized ancient Greek perfection, Humboldt promoted Bildung as a teleology of the self which, through the devotion of scrupulous scholarly attention to the substance of ancient texts, would ultimately lead to individual intellectual and artistic fulfilment.
Yet, as philhellenism gradually transformed itself, politically and socially, ‘from left, to liberal, to right, and from the fetish of young outsiders to the credo of aged academicians’ during the course of the long nineteenth century, its institutional basis began to come under threat from two separate (though not wholly unrelated) angles.Footnote 21 First, the rise of Germanophilia, in tandem with the rise of nationalism after German unification, and the growing academic standing of the sciences (military or otherwise), led to increasingly frequent and rancorous attacks on the very conception of an educational system which, through its unparalleled emphasis on Latin and Greek, was (in Kaiser Wilhelm's memorable words) turning out ‘young Greeks and Romans’ rather than ‘nationally-minded young Germans’.Footnote 22 The imperial school-reform conferences in 1890 and 1900, which set in train the slow and painful deconstruction of the Gymnasium’s monopoly on admission to higher education, sounded the death-knell for the prestige of humanistic Bildung – even if its adherents were only to realize the full extent of their cultural emasculation once the turmoil of the Great War and its immediate aftermath had faded.
Secondly, the overwhelmingly positivist approach, still clinging to the Apolline certainties of the Winckelmannian vision, which had characterized Romantic and Humboldtian philhellenism, gave way to a series of darker, archaizing, unashamedly Dionysian visions of the ancient past, which privileged the mythic, the vitalist, and the irrational over any simplistic notions of Greek nobility, simplicity, and grandeur (Nietzsche clearly has much to answer for here). The life-reform and nudist movements’ appropriations of the Greek body beautiful as a model for latter-day ‘Deutsch-Hellenes’, Freudian mythopoiesis with its psychoanalytical reinvention of legendary Greek figures, the arcane pederastic rituals of the poetic circle around Stefan George, or even the elitist paideia peddled by the purveyors of the so-called ‘Third Humanism’ – all of these anti-positivist readings of the Hellenic ideal were charged with a Dionysian strength and symbolism which the stale and desiccated ‘Classicism’ (Klassizismus) of the nineteenth century could no longer match.
It was into this morass of irrationalist, vitalist, and at times explicitly racist idealism that National Socialism was able to insinuate its doctrine of German blood kinship (Blutverwandtschaft) as opposed to merely spiritual kinship (Geistesverwandtschaft) with the ancient Greeks, hailing the latter as pure Aryans, the illustrious forebears of the modern German race. As Hitler pointed out with irritation when Himmler's obsession with resurrecting the culture of the godforsaken ancient Germanic tribes became too prominent, the ancient Athenians had built the Parthenon at a time when Germanic tribesmen were still stuck in mud huts; hence, ‘if anyone asks us about our ancestors, we should continually allude to the ancient Greeks’.Footnote 23
Yet the manifold abuses perpetrated under a philhellenic aegis during the Third Reich were arguably enough to ensure the fragmentation and demise of philhellenism during the ensuing post-war decades, leaving Germany with little more than a watered-down ‘NATO-humanism’.Footnote 24 To quote Suzanne Marchand once more: ‘Thanks…to the Nazis’ unscrupulous exploitation of Romantic-era linkages between aesthetic normativity, disinterested science, and state power, it is unlikely that the Bundesrepublik would now wish to claim that its citizens possess some sort of special access to the Geist of the ancient Greeks.’Footnote 25 If the writing had been on the wall for philhellenism for almost a century beforehand, by the 1970s, it seemed to have gone to its grave unmourned and unsung.
Such, at least, is the story with which we have become familiar. In the following section, I will proceed to delineate the ways in which recent literature on German philhellenism has explored and expanded various facets of this narrative, sometimes taking them in directions which one might not necessarily have anticipated, yet all of which can arguably lend us significant new insights into the nature of philhellenism as a phenomenon.
II
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his unparalleled stature in the field, the figure of Winckelmann and his reception continues to play a significant role in scholarly discussions of German philhellenism – not least in the form of two groundbreaking monographs by Katherine Harloe and Esther Sophia Sünderhauf.Footnote 26
Harloe's study, Winckelmann and the invention of antiquity (2013), maintains that Winckelmann and his oeuvre should be considered crucial to the ‘disciplinization’ of the study of the ancient world. While he has often been hailed as the disciplinary ‘father’ of art history or classical archaeology, Harloe wishes to emphasize above all the debt owed to Winckelmann by classical scholarship (Altertumswissenschaft) – and not merely in the sense that he was routinely hailed as a Romantic and untimely ‘founding hero’ at the annual ‘Winckelmann Day’ festivities which German universities continued to celebrate until well into the twentieth century.Footnote 27 Instead, she portrays Winckelmann as a humanist who successfully bridged and transcended the contemporary gulf between antiquarianism and scholarship, articulating the cultural and aesthetic value of investigating the ancient world afresh, and providing new ways of producing knowledge – whether through detailed analysis of classical art, or through advancing novel intellectual models of ancient societies’ cultural and historical development.
Even as the professionalization of Altertumswissenschaft during the course of the nineteenth century led to increasing disdain for Winckelmann's methods, conclusions, and credentials, leading to the eventual enthronement of more ‘modern’ or ‘scientific’ philologists such as Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) as the undisputed kings of classical scholarship, Harloe demonstrates that these men's engagement with (and criticism of) Winckelmann's way of ‘doing’ ancient history was still indispensable in constructing their ideals of what good scholarship should be.Footnote 28 Leading philological figures, including Wolf himself, Herder, and Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), were all influenced by Winckelmann in complex ways, and ultimately they could all (at least partially) endorse his vision of ancient culture as enabling the cultivation of aesthetic taste and the ennoblement of the intellect.Footnote 29 Winckelmann's prejudices regarding the hierarchy of ancient peoples, as supposedly evidenced by the rise and fall of their artistic skill and sensibility, also had a long-standing impact on the innate prejudices of Altertumswissenschaft as a discipline.Footnote 30
Meanwhile, Sünderhauf's survey, Griechensehnsucht und Kulturkritik (2004), takes a more broad-brush approach. Covering similar territory chronologically to the latter half of Down from Olympus (which she deems inspirational), Sünderhauf analyses the reception of Winckelmann's ‘idealized antiquity’ over the longue durée, primarily (though not exclusively) from an art-historical perspective.Footnote 31 While the reception of the figure of Winckelmann himself – for instance, at the aforementioned university celebrations – is adequately delineated, it is the changing reactions to classicizing and graecophile aesthetics in general which constitute Sünderhauf's primary focus. She portrays the rise of the phenomenon of ‘Winckelmannolatry’ as a form of defensive response by the entrenched humanist professoriate to their growing loss of prestige and the influx of modernist trends, and depicts their increasing co-optation of Winckelmann as a bourgeois national hero (what she calls his ‘typification and ideologization’) as an attempt to reclaim relevance in an increasingly fraught environment, caught between the competing claims of nationalist jingoism and the avant-garde.Footnote 32 Even if the Greek ideal could not trump modernity, perhaps it could at least mould it into a suitably classicizing form. Graecophilia could thus provide spiritual protection against the anarchy and nihilism of the so-called ‘Zeitalter der Nervosität’ (age of anxiety) and cultural pessimism, for classicizing modern art still possessed the power to soothe, to project that longing for purity, simplicity, wholeness, greatness, and power which had redoubled after the carnage and humiliation of the Great War.Footnote 33 In this context, the philhellenic ideal could awaken yearnings for a new aesthetic of strength and resilience too, which not only found its outlet in the praise of the Lebensreformer for the Greeks’ gymnastic training of the physical body (which presented Winckelmann as an unlikely forerunner of the back-to-nature movement), but also in a new, conservative form of art – that ‘monumental classicism’ which was to reach its notorious apogee in the Hitlerian sculpture of an Arno Breker or a Josef Thorak, or the grandiloquent architectural visions of an Albert Speer.Footnote 34
Sünderhauf treats the Third Reich as heralding a so-called ‘Winckelmann-Renaissance’ which reached its apex with the founding of the Winckelmann-Gesellschaft in 1940 – by the end of the Second World War, the society had attracted an unprecedented 1,126 members from various walks of life. For the first time, a complete edition of Winckelmann's works was being funded by the state (under the aegis of the Reich Youth Leadership), and, aside from the obvious recycling of aspects of Winckelmannian philhellenism in the context of Hitler's own fascination with ancient Greek art and his ‘sculpturalized’ ideal of the National Socialist ‘new man’, Winckelmann's shade was also used to legitimize the Wehrmacht's invasion of Greece.Footnote 35 It was in this spirit that German soldiers on the Akropolis were lionized for ‘seeing Greek art through Winckelmann's eyes’, and congratulated for sending relevant photographs home for the Winckelmann-Gesellschaft's collection.Footnote 36
In general, Sünderhauf's survey provides a salutary catalogue of the ways in which Winckelmann's legacy was constantly and variously reappropriated in changing political circumstances, under four different regimes, whilst arguing for the ‘special role’ (Sonderrolle) which German philhellenism has played historically. However, her monograph also provides a vivid and multi-faceted (if occasionally slightly abstruse) fleshing-out of some of the key anti-positivist elements in the philhellenic narrative described in section I above. This is most successfully accomplished in the richly illustrated sections on the collocation of modern Germans and ancient Greeks in the German visual imagination – witness the common theme of ‘living statues’ in early twentieth-century German photography, or the lack of embarrassment with which so-called ‘German-Hellenes’ would send in pictures of themselves posing naked to life-reform-movement magazines.Footnote 37
Another, more recent monograph also illuminates the anti-positivist aspects of German philhellenism: Barbara Stiewe's Der ‘Dritte Humanismus’ (2011). Although Stiewe focuses on the graecophile intellectual activities of psychologist and philosopher Eduard Spranger (1882–1963), philologist Werner Jaeger (1888–1961), and the poetic circle around Stefan George (1868–1933), rather than on the reception of Winckelmann and his aesthetics, her work is explicitly conceived as a complement to Sünderhauf's, though focusing on intellectual history instead of art history.Footnote 38
Stiewe characterizes the ‘Third Humanism’ as a loose-knit programme of renewal which identified an ahistorical vision of Greek antiquity as the best possible model for twentieth-century society, privileging a new form of ancient-Greek-oriented Bildung (conceived as paideia) which would supposedly bring about a golden age of graecophile culture, realizing German individual and national potential to the full.Footnote 39 While previous studies of the Third Humanism had merely considered its academic manifestations, Stiewe presents a broader, cultural interpretation of the movement; she argues that it was both more widespread, and more dependent on pre-war ideas and ideals, than has hitherto been admitted.
Characterized by a hectic, agonistic dynamism, rather than the restful harmony of the Greeks of the Goethezeit, and attached to a militaristic, elitist conception that was more Doric than Ionic, the Third Humanism was unashamedly presentist. Yet Stiewe is also careful to trace the origins of the Third Humanism's utopian ideals back to their eighteenth-century philhellenist roots, while at the same time acknowledging the manifold differences in perspective which the alienations and crises of the early twentieth century had wrought on the Third Humanists’ philhellenic consciousness. Thus, for example, while Werner Jaeger's paideia concept owes much to Humboldt's ideal of Bildung, its sensibility was very different, promoting a masculine ideal of Platonic elitism which could serve as a model for the regeneration of the German national community after Germany's shocking defeat in the First World War.Footnote 40 In general, the Third Humanists privileged what Stiewe terms an ethos of ‘Doric Prussianism’, which elevated archaic Hellas over the classical and the Spartan warriorly ideal over the intellectual achievements of Athens.Footnote 41
For the most part, Stiewe is more sensitive to the dangers of National Socialist teleology than Sünderhauf, and so, despite the Third Humanism's commonalities with Nazi ideology, she is careful to distinguish between the ways in which the Third Humanism shaped the Third Reich's ‘mental prehistory’ (mentale Vorgeschichte), and the more negligible contribution which it actually made to classical studies in Hitler's Germany. Most fanatical Nazi classicists declared the Third Humanism to be far too ‘vague’ and ‘unpolitical’ to make a useful contribution to their movement, and so it was only fleetingly that a few of the Third Humanists (Jaeger included) believed that the Third Reich might provide the fulfilment of their eagerly awaited golden age.Footnote 42 Nevertheless, Stiewe's reading also contributes to the conception of a German philhellenic Sonderweg, since she explicitly portrays the Third Humanism as a movement unparalleled in any other nation.Footnote 43
Indeed, one of the most original Hellenophile movements of all in fin de siècle Europe, and one which Stiewe treats at some length as representative of the Third Humanism, was the George-Kreis, the exclusive circle of artists and intellectuals who had elected to become acolytes of the eccentric yet widely celebrated poet Stefan George, and who vociferously proclaimed their attachment to the slogan ‘Hellas ewig unsre Liebe’ (‘Hellas, eternally our love’). George's ‘mystagogic’ activities had already merited a brief and somewhat censorious chapter in Butler's Tyranny; unsurprisingly, scholarship on the circle has advanced significantly in subsequent decades.Footnote 44 One of the most enlightening recent publications on the Kreis, Melissa Lane and Martin Ruehl's A poet's Reich: politics and culture in the George Circle (2011), also sheds light on the group's philhellenic predilections – particularly in the essays by Melissa Lane on the circle's ‘Platonic politics’, and by Adam Bisno on ‘Stefan George's homoerotic Erlösungsreligion’.Footnote 45
Not only do the authors stress most forcefully the circle's ‘passionate concern’ for Plato, and its members’ self-identification with the world of the philosopher's Republic (dubbing the Kreis a ‘secret kingdom’, led by George as a composite ‘founder–legislator–leader–master–poet–lover–educator’); they also explore the circle's idealization of homoeroticism through the educative relationship between lover and beloved; a staple of Plato's Symposium.Footnote 46 In George's case, as well as in that of other more explicitly homosexual groups such as the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, homoeroticism was seen as synonymous with a predisposition ‘to feel most deeply…the historical continuity from antique Athens, through classical German literature, to the present-day German nation…[They] shared the sense that German society had lost touch with its Greek roots.’ The Greek ideal of male beauty therefore had to be sought out, recreated, and celebrated within a modern context, in order to revive Hellenic cultural standards after centuries of Christian barbarism. Within the George-Kreis, this tendency became ritualized in the quasi-worship of George's youthful companion Maximin (Maximilian Kronberger, 1888–1904), who had died of meningitis aged just sixteen, and whom George and his disciples posthumously elevated to the status of a neo-Greek divinity.Footnote 47
The importance of philhellenic readings of ancient Greek (and particularly Platonic) pederasty and pedagogy for the history of homosexuality has also been the subject of recent debate more generally, not least in Daniel Orrells's illuminating study of Classical culture and modern masculinity (2011).Footnote 48 Orrells explores the British as well as the Teutonic context, focusing in particular on Freud, Wilde, Pater, Jowett, Symonds, and the first German philologists. He contends that the idea of ‘Greek’ or ‘Socratic’ love formed a crucial symbolic space within which men of a homosexual bent could understand, explore, and legitimize their experiences of same-sex desire.
Yet Orrells's monograph is arguably just as much concerned with questions of historicism as with contested interpretations of Socratic Bildung – or rather, the two themes are inextricably entwined. For the underlying argument here is that the elucidation of same-sex desire was crucial to the process of historicizing the ancient world, so that ‘understanding Greek pederastic pedagogy became one of the most important ways in which modern thinkers could reflect upon the nature of…their knowledge’.Footnote 49 In Orrells's view, the exemplarity of the pederastic–pedagogical relationship functioned as both a model and an anti-model for the production of Bildung and of Wissenschaft, so that pioneering classical scholars such as Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761), Moritz Hermann Eduard Meier (1796–1855), and Karl Ottfried Müller (1797–1840) were concerned to portray the historical difference of Greek pederasty in ways which admirably displayed their own positivist credentials.Footnote 50
It is precisely this leitmotif of the rise of historicism, and the concomitant historicization of the ancient world, which has most frequently underpinned studies of German philhellenism within the past half-dozen years. As we have already noted, Katherine Harloe's study of Winckelmann and his reception analysed the development and subsequent historicization of Altertumswissenschaft as a discipline during the crucial transition period between antiquarianism and historicism (c. 1760–1830). However, two further recent monographs also address the reciprocal relationship between German idealist philhellenism and historicism, one from a more philosophical and one from a more historical perspective.
In his Genealogy of the tragic (2014), Joshua Billings analyses idealist philosophies of tragedy through a historicist lens, claiming that ‘for idealist thinkers, elaborating a historical way of meaning for ancient literature seemed to demand, on the one hand, a contextual understanding of Greek tragedy, and on the other, an account of tragedy's place in modernity’.Footnote 51 From this standpoint, he treats in detail the philosophies of tragedy put forward by Schiller, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel, tracing their legacies for subsequent historicist thought on Greece, and blending approaches taken from philology, philosophy, and intellectual history.Footnote 52
Meanwhile, Damian Valdez's German philhellenism: the pathos of the historical imagination from Winckelmann to Goethe (2014) examines the relationship between the German idealists and Enlightenment historiography, placing the historicity of the Greek world centre-stage. Through his analysis of the work of scholars such as Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) and Friedrich Jacobs (1764–1847), Valdez shows clearly how contemporary concerns about the role of women or the problem of luxury were played out and debated on an antique stage. Nor were such questions merely the preserve of mouldering antiquaries or professors in Göttingen's ivory towers; rather, they resonated widely with the educated public, who would avidly devour the debates on Greek femininity or the virtues of male friendship which were presented to them in mainstream periodicals such as Der Teutsche Merkur or Attisches Museum.
All of these works encourage us to consider with closer attention the underlying interconnections between historicism and Romanticism.Footnote 53 In a sense, it seems that, the closer that moderns approach to gaining concrete knowledge of the ancients, the more painfully they must acknowledge the vast distances which separate them from antiquity. Like Winckelmann, the lover of Greece seems doomed to remain forever abandoned on the barren seashore of scholarly endeavour, desperately gazing after a dear departed sweetheart whose barque has already receded far into the distance, never to return.Footnote 54
The final three works which concern us in this section also draw on the common trope of German idealization of Greece – but this time within the context of the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities, privileging the notion of Greece as a place that ‘matters’ precisely through mediated perceptions of its materiality. Hence, all the authors in question are more or less invested in the view that ‘representations of contemporary Greece, and critical approaches to it, have owed (and still owe) much to the structural position that suspends Greece between its own antiquity and any given observer's modernity’.Footnote 55 Constanze Güthenke, in Placing modern Greece: the dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770–1840 (2008), investigates depictions of the Greek landscape in both German and Greek Romantic poetry (written before, during, and after the Greek War of Independence), exploring the ways in which literary representations of modern Greece consistently tend to express the tension between modern reality and antique ideal, even when composed by authors who had never visited the Greek mainland.
Meanwhile, Christopher Meid's Griechenland-Imaginationen: Reiseberichte im 20. Jahrhundert von Gerhart Hauptmann bis Wolfgang Koeppen (2012), and Nafsika Mylona's Griechenlands Gedenkorte der Antike in der deutschsprachigen Reiseliteratur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (2014) are explicitly concerned with accounts by those German travellers who did visit modern Greece. Both Mylona and Meid are keen to stress the extent to which the images of antiquity provided by humanistic Bildung formed a kind of ‘projection screen’ which obscured any unmediated engagement with modern Greece itself; for these travellers, to quote Hugo von Hofmannsthal, antiquity functioned most particularly as a ‘magic mirror, in which we hope to see our own form in foreign, purified guise’.Footnote 56
While Mylona construes as ‘sites of memory’ a number of different locations where ancient and modern frequently intersect in German travellers’ writings – the Akropolis first and foremost, but also the ruins of Mycenae and Delphi – using a topographic structure, Meid's monograph follows a more conventional chronological narrative, beginning with the archaizing perspectives of the fin de siècle, and ending with the rationalization and scepticism which (in his view) characterize the post-war ‘crisis of philhellenism’.Footnote 57 Nevertheless, both authors are well aware of the fundamentally ‘intertextual’ nature of their travellers’ journeys and perceptions. Even when they are standing on the hallowed ground of the Akropolis itself, these German philhellenes are attempting to live out a fantasy mediated through visions of Greek antiquity, rather than engaging with the brave new world of Greek modernity.
This complex interplay between expectation and reality – so frequently resulting in disappointment with the physical manifestations of that very modernity – has also formed a crucial component in what for the sake of argument we may call the ‘real’, that is to say the political, relationship between Germany and modern Greece. It is this aspect of German philhellenism that we shall touch upon in the final section of this essay. Here, my analysis will close by presenting some interpretative keys and conclusions which it is hoped might fruitfully stimulate and guide future scholarship.
III
The distant past has always weighed down upon the inhabitants of modern Greece with a singular gravity, to such an extent that recent post-colonialist studies of contemporary Greek culture and national identity claim that antiquity has become the state's new ‘secular religion’.Footnote 58 After all, what other nation in the world is so consistently forced to preface its name with the epithet ‘modern’?
Indigenous Greek Hellenism has therefore tended to conform to the philhellenist tropes previously fostered by other Western nations, leading to what Dimitris Plantzos has termed the ‘utter enslavement of Greece to Hellas’ – as well as an obsession with the so-called ‘continuity thesis’; the idea that the modern Greeks are the direct descendants and the only worthy heirs of the ancient Greeks.Footnote 59 In this context, the Akropolis functions in particular as a sort of monumental panopticon, a symbol par excellence of a Hellenism from which living Greeks are perpetually excluded, yet one which also elicits a constant feeling of guilt in modern Greeks for not living up to their classical heritage – an accusation which foreign philhellenes have often been wont to share.Footnote 60
Whether in the context of media coverage of the 2004 Athens Olympics or the 2015 Greek economic crisis, such tropes continue to surface unabated; even in the twenty-first century, Western views of contemporary Greece still ‘[oscillate] between a valued past and a deficient modernity’.Footnote 61 The idea of the modern Greek as a ‘dirty descendant’ was probably most aptly (and tactlessly) demonstrated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, when visiting Corfu, insisted on giving thousands of Easter eggs made of soap to all the Corfiote children, because he deemed them so filthy.Footnote 62 Thus, as Christopher Meid and others have pointed out, the abstract idealization of the glories of ancient Greece could have potentially fatal consequences, when intermingled with a racially legitimized contempt for modern Greeks (following the nineteenth-century orientalist Jacob Philipp Fallmerayer's thesis of their debased Slavic origins); the disappointment felt by members of the German occupying forces during the invasion of Greece by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War clearly had an impact on the readiness with which some were ready to condone atrocities against the indigenous population.Footnote 63 This was the dark side of that philhellenic kinship which was supposed to exist between ancient Greeks and Germans, but which left no space for modern Greeks.Footnote 64 In this reading, the supposed ‘colonial violence’ imposed by European artists, scholars, and archaeologists in their appropriation of Greek antiquity (and its surviving material antiquities) could, under the wrong conditions, descend into the perpetration of literal violence against the oppressed inhabitants of an occupied nation – an atrocity of rather more moment than a mere performance of Tieck's adaptation of Sophocles's Antigone with incidental music by Mendelssohn.Footnote 65
Yet to depict the ‘real’ Graeco–German relationship purely in such terms would be a gross misrepresentation and over-simplification; Germany's co-option of modern Greece in the nineteenth century may have been driven by idealizing passions, but it was never merely colonialist in the brute sense of the term. Rather, we need to appreciate the reciprocal interplay between idealization and reality which formed a constant background to the two countries’ political engagements.
This tendency may be noted right from the outset, with Greece's initial entry onto the European stage during the Greek War of Independence (1821–32). While it may be true that those Germans who decided to dedicate their pens, their purses, or their martial prowess to the Greek cause (das Land der Griechen mit dem Säbel suchend!) were motivated in part by a passion for Greece as a symbol, not only of antique freedom, but also of the promise of a Europe whose states had all been freed from the tyranny of absolutism, they were still ready to bleed and die for their modern Greek counterparts.Footnote 66 Moreover, Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827), the foremost German poet and publicist of the campaign, celebrated internationally as ‘Germany's greatest philhellene’, was adamantly dedicated to putting forward the perspective of the modern Greeks, rather than writing from a distanced, archaizing, and aestheticizing external viewpoint. For Müller, the hearts of the Hellenes, not the marble of their ancient temples, were what was truly at stake in the battle against the barbarian Ottoman Turks.Footnote 67
Once a Bavarian prince had been installed as Greece's first king, Teutonic influence in shaping the future of the fledgling state was to become yet more pronounced. Without the Bavarian regency, Athens might never have been inaugurated as the national capital (before, its seat had been the port of Nafplio), and it was German wealth and architectural expertise which endowed the city with all the crowning glories of a self-respecting European capital: a state university, library, museum, public gardens – not to mention the royal palace.Footnote 68 Yet it was also Otto's court architect Leo von Klenze (1784–1864) who, in Can Bilsel's words,
decided to limit the interventions in the Acropolis, rejecting…a proposal by his Prussian rival Friedrich Schinkel to build the royal palace there. No major buildings would be constructed on the Acropolis. The young kingdom invested its resources to preserve and safeguard the ruins in lieu of restoring them to a finished state.Footnote 69
In a sense, Klenze was creating what Yannis Hamilakis has termed the ‘“archaeological record” of the Hellenic national dream’, cementing antiquity as a mythical basis for the new nation through concrete action, and through the establishment of the state's first ever archaeological laws and institutions.Footnote 70
Even after the Wittelsbachs’ rule came to an abrupt end with King Otto's deposition in 1862, warm relations were cultivated between Greece and Germany, to the extent that, even during the early years of the Third Reich, a German invasion would have seemed utterly unthinkable.Footnote 71 Indeed, Sünderhauf has documented some telling examples of the open diplomacy which existed between the Third Reich and the dictatorial Metaxas regime, the self-proclaimed ‘Third Hellenic Civilization’.Footnote 72 In 1936, the city of Athens named a street after Winckelmann himself ‘in gratitude for his immortal legacy, without which the [current] resurrection of the ancient Greek spirit would have been unthinkable’, and both nations also collaborated on propagandistic publications during this period, including Unsterbliches Hellas (Undying Hellas, 1937), a pamphlet designed by the Greek embassy in Berlin in concert with the National Socialist Foreign Office, which emphasized the supposed Graeco–German racial relationship.Footnote 73
In sum, the image of swastika-toting German officers standing proudly in possession of the Akropolis a few years later is a powerful and yet at the same time a profoundly distracting one. For it also has the capacity to obliterate our interest in the century-long relationship of co-operation which preceded it, which had an unparalleled and formative effect on the material as well as the cultural development of the modern Greek state. By taking into account some of these new studies of Greek national identity and its discontents, and juxtaposing them with recent insights from the literature on philhellenism, we can perhaps move beyond an image of Greece and its latter-day inhabitants as merely passive in the face of abstraction, idealization, or effacement by Germans (or other Europeans). Rather, we can begin to acknowledge and analyse the real interconnections between the two states on a political level, as well as the reciprocal effects of these on the phenomenon of German philhellenism itself. Existing portrayals of the arguably singular – and at times singularly destructive – effect which that idealization could have, when taken to its most racist and belligerent extremes, can be qualified by the emergence of a more subtle and complex picture of this relationship: neither wholly a tyranny of Greece over Germany, nor solely a tyranny of Germany over Greece.
