"On a hill overlooking the River Danube, there's a place that holds the dream of a Bavarian king." "Frustrated by foreign invasions, he fantasised about creating a strong nation." "A united people, who could expel all alien forces." "His name was Ludwig I, and this is the temple he erected to the idea of a place called Germany." "Valhalla." "It was conceived as a mythological hall of heroes, and it's filled with busts of German geniuses, prophets and visionaries, figures that conjure up a hallowed vision of the past, and on whose achievements could also be built a future Germany." "The Renaissance artist, Albrecht Durer." "The composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart." "The philosopher, Immanuel Kant." "I think the idea was that all these people were intended to embody the cultural, creative, political, intellectual, artistic qualities that would make a German nation of the future great." "But, right at the heart of the space, there's this warning figure, the great philosopher Herder, who said that nationhood can bring as many evils as benefits." ""National glory," he said, "is a great seducer."" "The Napoleonic invasions at the beginning of the 19th century provoked widespread revulsion." "200,000 German men of fighting age were sent to almost certain death on Napoleon's Russian campaign." "With no strong leaders to protect them, the German people felt as vulnerable and as powerless as ever." "Where could they find the sense of values to bring them together?" "Where could they find a source of strength to counter their weakness?" "Fuelled by the ideals of the Romantic generation, they looked to their land." "They turned to nature." "Some looked to the beauty and spirit of the natural world, which became the lifeblood of the Romantic imagination and inspired a painting tradition which took German art to new peaks." "Others sought to harness the forces within nature through science and technology, to make Germany strong." "This is Hamburg, home to one of the most anxious and neurotically brilliant painters of the early 19th century." "A tubercular young man called Phillipp Otto Runge." "Like the English poet William Wordsworth," "Runge believed that children enjoyed a special bond with nature." "He sought to express this experience in his painting." "The Hamburg Kunsthalle owns the world's largest collection of his work." "This picture shows the artist's parents with his own children." "It might look like an innocuous family portrait, but there's more to it than that." "Runge painted this picture in 1806, at a time when he'd been displaced from Hamburg by war and had gone to live with his parents in the town of Wolgast on the Baltic coast." "For me, it's as if he's interrogating the generations for an answer to the problems of the moment." "His mother is almost a spent husk of a woman." "There's almost something brittle, not only about her skin but about her clothing." "She's almost got the black carapace of a large insect." "But the two young children, they have a kind of energy and vigour about them, and a colour about the way they are painted." "They are identified by the artist with new life." "They hold these flowers." "I think he's looking at the two halves of the painting, which really are the two halves of his own life, because when you stand here, you're standing with Runge himself, he's the generation that's missing." "He's the generation that's looking for answers." "And I think he finds, or believes, that the answer must lie with the young." "There's something dangerous and unruly about Runge's children." "It's as if they swell out of the frame." "I think he used them to express a whole generation's yearning for the birth of a German nation." "The pictures that best reveal this were in restoration, but the conservators kindly allowed me to sneak a look." "Often, my heart sinks when I hear that a work that I want to look at is in restoration, because it means you're not going to be able to see it properly but, on this occasion, it's a wonderful privilege." "We can see one of Runge's famous, iconic works, Morning." "It's just been cleaned." "It's fresh as a daisy." "AND we're not looking at it under glass, so we can see the bare skin of the painting itself." "This picture itself has actually been through quite a lot." "After his death, the painting was cut into pieces and it's now been reassembled, which explains why we've got these areas of neutral ground, where we don't know quite what would have been." "And, at the centre of it is the image of the child." "Runge thought of childhood as a truly sacred state, when we are, so to speak, directly in touch with nature." "Before the adult mind, the rational mind, has interfered with our ability to engage with the world." "And that's what this picture is all about." "It's the morning of this child's life and, as the child comes into the world, over him hovers the figure, rather like Botticelli's Venus, actually, as well as like the Virgin Mary, maternal love," "protecting this newborn child." "And yet, you can't help feeling there's also, lurking within this bright vision of a new dawn, a terrible sense of foreboding." "It's an incredible image of vulnerability, of helplessness." "Of, if you like, the young German nation, the German nation that doesn't yet exist." "There's a real sense of darkness at the centre of this picture." "Over here, we have a very different, equally-compelling image of the child." "This is not the child idealised." "These are real children, children that Runge knew." "They're the children of a Hamburg businessman called Hulsenbeck." "I think Runge has invested it with his own mystical, religious belief that childhood represents a sacred state." "And that's implicit in his treatment of this figure," "Friedrich, who is shown as being literally the closest to God, because Runge has painted him holding one of the leaves of this bouquet of sunflowers, and the sunflower represents, symbolically, God, because it's a flower that always faces the sun." "And there's one really interesting detail which is that, when they took the frame off, they revealed this layer of blue." "Look at that beautiful pink in the background." "That pink is discolouration." "It's the red ground coming through, so in fact, that blue represents the original colour." "I think that's important, because it would have given the whole painting a much harder, sharper feel." "There's something strange about this picture." "There's a tremendous sense of defiance in those faces." "And I can't help feeling that Runge has somehow projected into this his own sense of the German and the German artist's predicament." "Which is, simultaneously, to be a kind of child, to be powerless in a way, and yet full of an energy that just can't be contained, a kind of rage, a salutary desire for change." "Runge didn't live to see this hunger for change fulfilled." "Ravaged by his illness, he finally gave up the ghost in 1810, aged just 33, while the Wars of Liberation still raged." "When Napoleon was at last defeated by Britain and her allies, including Prussia, many Germans felt they were finally emerging from the darkness into a new dawn." "This is the defining image of Germany in the Romantic Age." "The most famous German picture of the entire 19th century." "The wanderer above a sea of mist." "It was painted by Caspar David Friedrich." "He spent his life attempting to capture the mysterious spirit of the German lands." "But what does it represent?" "There are many possible alternatives." "The picture was painted in 1817 or 1818, just two or three years after" "Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, so could it be a rallying cry for incipient German nationalism?" "Is it a great celebration of the purification of the German lands, their emptying-out of foreign threat and hostility?" "On the other hand, it could be another expression of the German Romantics' spirit of nature worship." "The man wandering in the mountains could be communing with nature, and therefore God." "He could be in the throes of a deep, spiritual, religious experience." "Or could it be the opposite?" "Is it an image of alienation?" "It's a deeply hypnotic image and it draws you in like no other painting to Caspar David Friedrich's enigmatic vision of the world." "Caspar David Friedrich saw in the natural beauty of the German lands the potential to express his faith in God." "For nearly 40 years, he rarely painted anything else." "Friedrich's birthplace is a town called Greifswald on the Baltic coast." "With its sharp northern light and distinctive architecture, it's a place that had a profound and lasting effect on the young painter." "It's also home to a little-known treasure trove of pictures by Friedrich, long hidden away in local, private collections, but recently acquired by the town's museum." "Curator Birte Frenssen agreed to show me round." "These are paintings that actually have a connection with Greifswald and the Baltic area." "They are, yeah." "This is the home town of Friedrich's parents, Neubrandenburg, which is near Greifswald, 30 kilometres away." "He loved this town." "He was often there." "Many of his sisters and brothers were living here, so there was a very near connection to Neubrandenburg." "It is very interesting or very funny that this church, at the moment when Friedrich painted this painting, it has no tower." "It was like a wooden construction." "So it wasn't this church." "So he's purified it to this beautiful silhouette." "Yes, so he wanted an arrow that is going into the sky, so he did this with this tower and it's very interesting, because today the church of Neubrandenburg looks like this." "The architect, he must have seen the painting of Friedrich, or just have known..." "It's amazing, so Friedrich reinvented the church so influentially that when it was redesigned..." "It is, in a way, when you see today, you would say," "OK, we saw it this way, but he was inventing this tower." "Are you yourself religious?" "Are you a practising Christian?" "Yeah, I am." "You are." "And do you find..." "I suppose it's a personal question, but do you look at a Friedrich painting and find it helpful?" "In a way." "It's a very strict way and it's not very..." "You don't have it in a minute, I think." "So you have to look very intense, just to stand here for 20 minutes then you start seeing things." "And this is..." "Friedrich is so very poetic." "But the star of the museum's collection was a luminous painting of the ruins of a local abbey." "It's from his home town again, it's a ruin of Eldena which is, like, five kilometres away from Greifswald." "And if you see it, it isn't a landscape from here, but he combines it with the mountains of the Riesengebirge, which he loved, too." "So, you see, in reality, there's the water behind the ruin." "It's not a normal picture." "It's not a nature theme." "There's something more he wanted to tell us." "So are you saying that a Friedrich painting is, fundamentally, it's not the depiction of an actual landscape." "Yes, never." "Never." "Never." "So it's a real collage." "It's a real collage." "It's all from different parts." "I have the feeling that this painting is all about this radiant, beautiful, remembered sky." "And I feel when I look at it that it's one of those vast, wide-open skies that you get on the Baltic." "It is, yes, he wants to have this light, and you should have the feeling that you want to go there, not into the dark, but into the light." "Well, I don't know if I'm going to find that sky, but I'm going to go to that ruin." "So you'll see the ruin." "I really will." "I'm looking forward to it." "Thank you." "Thank you." "It's been a great pleasure." "Friedrich had a deeply symbolic relationship with the world." "The ruin at Eldena was his symbol for mortality." "The sky, his heaven." "Always striving in his painting to leave the darkness of the Earth and reach towards the promise of eternity held in the sky." "This is the Baltic island of Rugen, not far from Greifswald." "It's a place that was always close to Friedrich's heart." "When he married in 1818, he brought his young wife Caroline here for their honeymoon." "Friedrich believed that it was up to every man to find God for himself, in nature." "To him, the beauty and variety of the natural world was another form of God's word." "This is one of the first paintings made after his honeymoon." "It shows the couple sailing towards a city of Gothic spires on their way to a new, blessed life." "As so often in Friedrich's art, the yearning for God seems intermingled with a sense of patriotism and hope." "Is the distant city an image of heaven?" "Or an image of the ideal Germany?" "Perhaps it's both." "I think his early years here really were a time when he stocked up with a lifetime's motifs." "Everywhere you look, you see part of Friedrich's paintings." "Those cliffs." "These boulders." "The ship, which became, for him, the great symbol of man's journey through life." "And above all, I think, for me, the sense of a vast, wide-open expanse of sea and sky." "He revisited that theme again and again." "Pondering man's insignificance before the vastness of the cosmos." "And there is more than just religious ambition behind Friedrich's paintings." "I think there is a strong element of pride as well, because this landscape had never really been put on canvas before." "And I think one of Friedrich's ambitions was to show the rest of Europe, the rest of the world how beautiful, in its own way, Germany could be." "The Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin holds the greatest collection of his paintings." "One that draws you into the heart of Friedrich's personal struggle." "His complicated, often troubled sense of faith." "He had lost his mother when he was seven years old." "Six years later, his brother died trying to save him from drowning." "I think, because of those experiences, he found it hard to believe in an entirely benevolent God." "No picture reveals this gnawing self-doubt more acutely than The Monk By The Sea." "It's a depiction of nature so elemental that it might almost be an abstraction." "Look at it through half-closed eyes and you might almost be looking at a painting by an American abstract expressionist like Mark Rothko." "It's the whole world distilled to just three elements." "This blank, almost cursory foreground of land, the stretch of black, brackish sea, surely the Baltic, and then this great expanse of bruise-coloured sky, achingly empty." "And we know that Friedrich deliberately intensified that sense of emptiness." "He'd originally planned to include two little sailing boats in the composition and you can still just make out their ghosts." "What I think it's meant to show us is the enlightened, romantic, Protestant devotee of nature, that solitary smear of a figure, the monk, finding his own personal sense of divinity." "A kind of confirmation of it in the majesty of the natural world." "But the trouble is it's a picture that leaves so much space for doubt that it might almost be a depiction of doubt itself." "Its companion picture, The Abbey In The Oak Forest, is, if anything, even bleaker." "It recalls again the ruins at Eldena, but here they're set against a murky, dusk sky." "A burial procession wends its way towards that jagged tooth of the abbey, but you might be forgiven for thinking that what they are really laying to rest is all the certainties of the old Christian faith." "The whole picture seems to be about the death of something." "The trouble is that when you develop the creed of a personal religion to the extent that he did, so that every day he had to recreate his experience of God, re-find his experience of divinity before nature," "it placed such a burden on the individual as to be almost impossible to sustain." "Yes, on a good day, Friedrich could find God in a radiant evening sky, but on so many other days, the vision didn't come." "All he could see was darkness, death, even a kind of anguish and I think Friedrich, yes, he set out to be a painter of a new kind of Christianity, but I think what he really created was a very moving series of monuments" "to an age of deep, deep anxiety." "Enshrined in Friedrich's sunnier pictures, there was also a dream of nationhood, of a Germany united by faith." "The truth is, for most of Friedrich's life, Germany WAS on the brink of becoming a unified nation, not in fantasy, but in hard reality." "There's a structure that marks the very beginning of that huge political process." "At first sight, you might take it for some romantic Gothic spire, but it's nothing of the kind." "It's a war memorial." "It proclaims the military might of the state of Prussia, and Prussia's determination to forge a Greater Germany." "It was designed for Friedrich Wilhelm III by his architect Schinkel, and erected in 1821 to commemorate victory over Napoleon." "It's loomed over Berlin ever since." "Everything about this monument speaks of war and success in war." "The siting, it's placed directly above Templehof Street, which is the wide avenue along which Wilhelm Friedrich's troops had actually expelled Napoleon's soldiers." "And the key to its meaning is that cross perched right on the top." "It's not the Christian cross, it's the Iron Cross, which had been designed by Schinkel just a few years earlier for Friedrich Wilhelm, as a reward for military valour and the Iron Cross would remain the great German medal for more than a century." "For a thousand years and more," "Germany had been weak, divided, an easy target for foreign invaders." "This monument declares that, under Prussian leadership, and with Prussian technology, that will never happen again." ""Let us arm, let us fight, let us unite." ""Let us build a great military machine."" "Even the thick green paint with which it's been rustproofed was the product of new advances made here in Berlin in the field of chemistry." "The same paint would be used to rustproof the fighter planes and tanks of the future." "So while its design might seem quaint and gothic, this is an aggressively modern object." "This is certainly no cathedral spire." "It's a great Prussian bayonet thrust into the sky." "The Prussian desire for progress would radically transform the very fabric of Berlin." "Friedrich Wilhelm embarked on a frenzy of building." "And charged Schinkel with reorganising the shape of the city and designing buildings to express strength, sophistication, ambition." "Classical columns and imperial eagles were the symbols of Berlin's ambition to become a new Rome." "And by 1861, when Wilhelm I came to the throne, that was fast becoming a reality." "There was an artist, a silent witness who recorded every tremor and nuance of this society in the process of transformation." "Berlin famously is a city that never is but is always becoming and that was never more true than in the mid-to-late 19th century." "And if one artist caught Prussian culture at this moment when it was in the throes of great change, it was Adolph Menzel." "Here, in this rapidly-dashed-off sketch, he shows us the coronation of the man who would become the first Kaiser of a united German empire, Wilhelm I, there he stands brandishing his sceptre almost like a threat." "But if this was a society underpinned by an ancient imperial notion of monarchy, it was a society also driven by a passionate desire for consumption." "A society appetitive, voracious." "This is a kind of Berlin equivalent of Manet's Bar At The Folies Bergere." "In fact, Adolph Menzel was very much a painter of modern life in the Manet mould." "But here he shows us people eating and drinking, they're in love not only with food and wine and fine textiles, but they are also drunk on light that's flooding their evening's entertainment." "Menzel also shows us the extent to which the whole Prussian project is underpinned by a steely military ambition." "It's a brightly colourful but also slightly chilling image of flag-waving Prussian nationalism." "Wilhelm I again, but this time he is processing through the streets of the city with his army on his way to fight the Franco Prussian war, the war that will lead directly to the establishment of an independent German empire." "What I like about Menzel, though, is he doesn't just show us the official public face of this new extraordinary" "Prussian society, he also takes us into its engine room and shows us what was driving it forward." "This is the masterpiece of Menzel's realism and his darkest picture." "It's a record of the exact processes by which railway tracks were constructed at a Prussian rolling mill." "But it's really a modern Inferno." "An image of workers sentenced to toil forever in the hot, murky foundries creating the future Germany." "There's little space in this world for rest or weakness." "But Menzel wasn't the only artist to see modern Germany as a place forged in hell." "Richard Wagner's great opera cycle The Ring has at its core the image of a forge, controlled by the evil dwarf Alberich." "What else but a mythic version of Menzel's rolling mill?" "A legend for modern Germany, cut off from true nature, shackled to the false gods of science and the machine." "Wagner expressed that sense of pessimism in a famous letter that he wrote to his fellow composer, Liszt, in which he wrote, "Let us treat this world only with contempt" ""for it deserves no better."" ""It's evil, evil, fundamentally evil, it belongs to Alberich, no-one else."" "In the end, Wagner accepted that he couldn't change this evil world, and used his art instead to rise above it, into a space of transcendent dream and myth." "His operas would in turn inspire one of the most spectacular German monuments." "A gleaming castle perched on a Bavarian mountain top." "Neuschwanstein." "It was conjured into being over almost 20 years, between 1869 and 1886, by the reclusive King Ludwig II." "Ludwig planned to live here alone, attended only by his servants, communing with art and nature." "It's telling that Ludwig didn't commission his artists to illustrate Wagner's libretti, but to illustrate the myths that Wagner himself had drawn on, and in the process I think those myths got turned very much towards Ludwig's own personal fantasies." "I think the ancient legends fascinated him and enthralled him because they gave him the possibility, in imagination at least, of himself being able to enter the world of the medieval past and play out the part of the knights of the holy grail, Parsifal, Lohengrin, the Swan Prince." "I think of the whole castle as an elaborate stage set where he could act out the role of the ideal ruler." "Even the light fittings strike me as a succession of crowns to rest on the royal head." "As the reclusive Ludwig retreated into the fantastical world of Neuschwanstein, his grip was real power was slipping inexorably away." "Prussia was steadily subsuming and annexing Bavaria, leaving Ludwig with only the world of his own fantasies to govern and rule." "The climactic space of the whole castle, the place where all the threads of Ludwig's medievalist fantasy come together, is this space, with its extraordinary blaze of colour, the throne room." "It's a monument to the ideals of absolute kingship and the divine right of kings." "It's there on all sides in a mixture of Byzantine and Gothic languages of art." "Look up at the dome and you see this cosmic starburst." "It's as if the eye of god is looking down on Ludwig and blessing him." "And then that theme is repeated in the apse above where you have the figure of Jesus Christ blessing Ludwig above an assortment of medieval kings." "But the irony, of course, is that this was all a pure fantasy." "Ludwig's Bavaria had lost a crucial war against Prussia, he'd had to sign a humiliating treaty." "He was a king who didn't even have control of his own army, and I think the real meaning of this space, the true symbolism of this space, is carried by an absence." "Because on that dais, where the throne was to have sat, where Ludwig would have sat, there is no throne." "He never got round to completing it." "And that's the truth about Ludwig, he was a man without power." "He was a king without a throne." "This whole castle is the swansong of ancient Germany, with its many fiefdoms each ruled by a separate absolute monarch." "By the time of Ludwig's death, in suspicious circumstances, that Germany truly was a thing of the past." "The actual kingdom that he surveyed from the solitude of his balcony had long been absorbed into Alberich's empire." "In 1871, the iron resolve of Prussia's leaders had finally wrestled the German lands into a place called Germany." "In the decades that followed, the country found itself in the ever-tighter grip of an economic boom." "Workers flooded to the capital, Berlin, and the many electrical and chemical plants that were fuelling the advance of the new empire." "Today there are few direct remains of the city's 19th-century industrial past, but its main artery does still survive " "the electrical rail system, the Hochbahn." "It was created in the 1890s to shuttle workers to the recently-established factories." "I met with a Berlin historian, Jurgen Kocha, to take a trip into the city's frenetic past." "When I think of Germany, when I read the statistics, it's kind of amazing how quickly the process of industrialisation seems to have happened here." "It's true." "Compared with Britain and other early industrialisers, large parts of Germany had the advantage to start later and that sometimes had some benefits in terms of fast and successful growth." "And it also is related to the fact that the role of science was very strong traditionally in Prussia, and some other German states." "The symbiosis of technical knowledge, technical science on one hand, and manufacturing on the other, was very important." "Secondly, you have a strong tradition of highly-skilled work inside Germany, coming out of the system of guilds and apprenticeship systems, which continues." "That's very interesting." "So you are saying the tradition of the skilled artisan, that that actually comes out of the German Middle Ages." "This distinction between apprentices, journeymen and masters is deeply built into the old European, German tradition of organising work, and this proves to be an advantage." "At the beginning of the 20th century, Germany was a true economic giant." "It led the world in chemical science." "It produced more steel than any other nation in continental Europe." "Nearly half of all of the world's electrical goods were being made by Germany." "It's a powerful country." "The empire has been founded and, you know, there is a lot of nationalism around, there is a lot of optimism around, and all these explain a certain type of modernity in this new empire." "But, as Menzel had prophesied, there was a price to be paid for this progress." "The rapid industrialisation of Berlin was taking its toll on the people creating it, the workers." "In only 50 years, Berlin's population had swollen from just over 400,000 to nearly two million people." "The city struggled to cope and, for many, poverty, illness and misery became a way of life." "One artist witnessed the deprivation at close quarters." "Her name was Kathe Kollwitz." "Kollwitz's husband, Karl, was a doctor with a social conscience, and the couple moved here to the Prenzlauerberg district of Berlin in the early 1890s, so that he could minister to the sick and the poor." "It was a desperately overcrowded rabbit warren of slum tenements built to house the many thousands of textile workers who'd flooded to the city in search of work." "An early-20th-century Baedeker guide simply said there is nothing to see in this place." "But for Kollwitz, this was the real Berlin, and she'd spend the rest of her life depicting it." "Kollwitz often used events from the past to explore the suffering she saw in the present." "These images are from a series called The Revolt Of The Weavers, an industrial uprising squashed 50 years previously." "For Kollwitz, the parallels with the world she knew were blatantly obvious." "Kollwitz drew increasingly on her own personal experience." "She was particularly struck one day by the sight of a woman leaving her husband's surgery with a terrible black eye." "She felt touched by more than just one person's suffering, as she noted in her diary." "Husband beaten down by work in turn beats his wife and in the end all the misery devolves on the children." "It was just one image, but in it she felt she'd seen an entire pattern of social deprivation." "Kollwitz's drawings inspired by people she encountered are her most emotive works." "A heavily pregnant woman in a tenement corridor." "An impoverished family, crushed by hardship." "An anguished mother cradling the body of her dead child." "The misery Kollwitz captured was the reality the modernised Germany didn't want to acknowledge." "Wilhelm II, the Kaiser who ushered Germany into the 20th century, didn't approve of Kollwitz's images." "Art that portrayed unhappiness was, in his words, a "sin against the German people"." "This was state-approved art in his modern Germany." "The first chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck, standing proud, surrounded by allegories of German power." "Created at the start of the 20th century, these are aggressive, muscular works of art, crushing even the possibility of dissent with the rhetoric of empire." "Anyone wanting to question or challenge this strident view of German destiny would have to do so at the margins, in the shadows." "On the outskirts of the city there's a museum devoted to a particular group of avant-garde artists who worked on the fringes of modern Berlin." "They called themselves Die Brucke, the bridge, a symbol of their desire to connect with the truth about the modern world." "Those look great." "Beautiful." "The museum archive contains some of the most vibrant experiments of their leader, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner." "Here we have the drawings of Kirchner." "The museum director, Magdalena Moeller, offered to show me some of his rarely seen sketches." "This is a beautiful drawing." "Oh, wow." "That is something!" "Even through the tracing paper, you can see the graphic style." "What's the subject of this?" "Potsdamer Platz, in Berlin." "It's a drawing of two prostitutes on a small island in the middle of the traffic." "I love that, this sort of circle, he's almost put them on a stage." "Yes, at that time he was working very much at night and walked in the streets in these streets of Berlin, and in these places." "What do you think he's trying to get at here?" "Is he trying to show the people of Berlin this otherworld, this seedy underworld?" "Yes, he shows the life, the crucial life in Berlin." "You have to earn your living and it is hard to live in Berlin." "These feel like works of art created by a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown." "They have that sort of sense, don't they, very highly-strung, full of anxiety." "Later, he said, in war time he was like the prostitutes in his works, he was as lost as them." "So he said he felt as lost as the prostitutes." "As lost as the prostitutes at this time." "Wow." "Everything he does is shot through with nerves and anxiety." "Nowhere do we find the kind of serene fauvism of Matisse." "Look at the colour of this picture, it's so livid and angry and clashing." "Then if you look at Kirchner's draughtsmanship," "I mean, it's almost expressionism gone wild." "Is this a landscape, is it foliage or is that barbed wire?" "Its lines turned to the service of the expression of personal anxiety." "And I think, for me, perhaps his masterpieces are these wonderful, well, the drawings and these pastels of Berlin at night." "But it's almost as if he's turned these figures into stained glass windows for the modern age." "These are the new saints and martyrs of a disenchanted world." "And he's painted himself in this portrait, a self portrait." "He's painted himself and his model as... ..almost like totems for this modern age of anxiety." "If I look into those dark eyes, it's almost as if those figures are holding their breath." "They know that something's going to happen, they know it's not going to be good but they're are not quite sure what it is." "When the First World War broke out in 1914, the great European states saw it as a chance to quench Germany's desire for power and influence." "Germany brought the full force of its advances in technology and science to bear on its enemies." "Poisonous gases, aerial bombing, heavy artillery." "The results were catastrophic." "German defeat would come at a cost of human life and suffering never seen before." "The Graphische Sammlung in Munich contains a collection of prints by an artist who served as a machine gunner in the German army." "Otto Dix created these compelling images." "They are among the very first documents of the full horror of modern warfare." "Otto Dix wanted to show his experience, and he left his record of it in the form of this immensely powerful suite of etchings called Der Krieg." "It's a kind of collage of nightmare images." "Here you've got two skulls, as if dredged up from the mud of the war." "Dix showing us the skull beneath the skin of the noble rhetoric of war." "This was the war that totally shattered any idea that fighting could somehow be imbued with chivalry or any sense of honour." "This was a dishonourable war and it turned men into animals." "There they are, huddled in their barracks." "Here we've got these two card players with bestial grins on their faces while their emaciated comrade is combing his clothing for fleas." "And he doesn't flinch from showing us the terrible nature of the injuries made possible by the new artillery of the First World War." "Look at this image of man whose brains have been blown out, and he has depicted them almost like offal on a butcher's table." "Dix was painfully aware, acutely aware, that this was all the science, all the advance, all the progress of the industrial revolution brought to bear on the human body." "This is was what we've learnt to do to the human body and here, for me, the most chilling image in the whole suite of etchings is a group of men about to mustard gas the enemy." "Now mustard gas was one of the great Prussian inventions." "It was a product of Prussian innovations in chemistry and here it's being deployed by these white-faced ghouls at the enemy." "Yet there were still those who managed to persuade themselves that this terrible war would purify the world and lead man into a new paradise." "The artist Franz Marc wanted to capture, in his words," ""the quiver and flow of blood in nature, trees, animals...the air."" "He believed that the old romantic dream of communing with nature was about to become a reality, and his symbol of that was the horse," "shown almost melting into a world of heightened form and colour." "Stored within the same Munich archive as Dix's horrors of war are some of Marc's most delicate and idyllic sketches." "They are absolutely wonderful things." "What is unusual about Marc is that he manages to combine and abstract language with a figurative language." "So on the one hand you've got these forms that suggest elemental energy and nature in an almost symbolic sense but on the other hand, you've got these beautiful little images of innocence, the deer, or the horse." "It's as if Marc sees himself as a new Adam who is going to re-enter the Garden of Eden." "He really believes that the world will be transformed, that he's on the brink of a great shift in human relationships, human society, and that as a result of this, man will become at one with nature." "But the most extraordinary thing about these drawings is when they were created and where." "Franz Marc created these drawings while he was serving at the front in the First World War." "In other words, he managed to preserve his sense of idealism and nature worship in the face of the most cataclysmically violent, technological war that the world had ever seen." "There is a sense of that violence in some of these drawings, particularly this one." "It looks like the world in the throes of some kind of apocalypse." "But his story wouldn't end well." "He was on horseback, he was struck by artillery and killed." "And I think he was the last of the great German romantics." "That thread that goes back to Friedrich and Runge, that thread, with the death of Marc, that thread is finally cut and that sense of idealism will very, very rarely be seen again in German art." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"