Style or Transition? The Fallacies of Classification Discussed in the Light of German Architecture 1190-1260

Abstract

On the second of September 1895, the anniversary-day of the battle of Sedan — the decisive victory of the Prussians over Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 — the consecration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche took place in Berlin (Fig. 1). Like many other nineteenth-century churches the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche was as much a political as an ecclesiastical monument: a fortress against the destructive forces of anarchy and socialism — this is the German emperor’s own statement — and, needless to say, an expression of the national spirit. Such intentions on the part of the leading forces of the German monarchy had their impact on the choice of the style for this imperial memorial. This style had to fulfil several conditions: it had to look genuinely German, it had to be decently religious and it had to recall the imperial past of the medieval Empire. Franz Schwechten’s building is one of the last great examples of nineteenth-century eclecticism in Berlin. Combining Gothic rose-windows with Romanesque towers, it is a rehearsal of the so-called Rhenish transitional style, which was so much cherished by the newly-founded German empire and especially by the emperor Wilhelm II himself. The church was largely destroyed in the Second World War. Its original effect must have been rather like Hollywood: at the end of one of the most elegant nineteenth-century boulevards of the modern capital stood a monument looking like a Rhenish medieval church — St Peter’s at Sinzig or St Mary’s in Gelnhausen. Oberhofmeister Ernst von Mirbach, who was the leading force behind the project, wrote in 1897: ‘Die Kirche ist im spatgermanischen, dem sogenannten Ubergangsstil entworfen. “Germanisch” und nicht mit dem falschen Worte “Romanisch” sollte man den Stil bezeichnen, welcher sich bei germanischen Volksstammen eigenartig und grossartig herausbildete und in deutschen Gauen seine lieblichste und vollendetste Blute erreichte.’ [’The church is in the late Germanic, the so-called transitional style. One should describe it as German and not use the inappropriate term Romanesque for this style, which was formed particularly and most splendidly by the German people and reached its fullest and most beautiful flowering in the German-speaking lands.’]

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