Landscape Imagery, Politics, and Identity in a Divided Germany, 1968-1989

Abstract

Catherine Wilkins’s monograph draws on a chronologically wide-ranging base of sources to weave a complex narrative of the late Cold War. She grounds her analysis in the premise that both West and East Germans, and Germans across time, shared a common interest in and identification with the image of the untamed Northern landscape. Such tropes marked the landscape painting of artists of the German Romantic school of the early nineteenth century. By comparing these landscape tropes present in the work of six Cold War German artists—three from East Germany and three from West—with German Romantics of the early nineteenth century, Wilkins argues that Germans living in the two German states after the Second World War shared many of the same issues and concerns. Wilkins sketches in her first chapter the political and cultural environments in both postwar Germanies that led to emergence of the 68er movement, showing that the movement’s interest in issues such as the unresolved legacies of the Second World War, changing gender dynamics and structures, evolving individual and collective relationships with spirituality, environmental destruction and the division of Germany ‘empowered’ (p. 27) the six artists who provide the material for the core of her analysis. The focus of her second chapter is on the century before to help illustrate that German Romantics of the early nineteenth century existed in a similar larger milieu, one also marked by the aftermath of devastating war, changing views of gender and of religion, potential environment devastation and German division. This context informed the Romantic landscape paintings of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Blechen.