The Land of Cockaigne: The German Art Market and the First World War*

Abstract

Abstract This article reconstructs changes in the German art market during the First World War on the basis of an art-price index for the years 1910 to 1918. The art market during the war was closely tied to the monetary deterioration of the German economy, which undermined trust in paper money. Through an analysis of prices and auction reports, this article shows that from 1916 onwards, the public invested in art, evidence that the pattern of expenditure for tangible assets more commonly associated with postwar hyperinflation had already taken off during the war. At the same time, the First World War precipitated the disintegration of a bourgeois milieu of collectors, marking a transition from the traditional market into a modern and rational auction more open to speculative incentives. The inflow of new buyers shook the hierarchies and conventions of the market. Reports published in the auction journal Der Kunstmarkt provide insight into the reactions of insiders from Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum to this transformation. The more visible the monetary value of art, the bigger these insiders’ contempt for newcomers, whom they found guilty of overthrowing the rules of patronage of the old market. Derogatory depictions of new buyers as either investors or war profiteers were a means for insiders to define their own socio-cultural standing at a time of crisis, establishing a pattern that would subsequently characterize many postwar debates on both politics and culture.