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Look closely and it becomes clear that the subject has two left feet and one leg is disturbingly longer than the other. But Tischbein’s portrait of Goethe is still the most famous painting in Germany, which makes its appearance in Britain nothing short of remarkable.
“It is a great, great thing and the generosity in lending it is extraordinary,” said Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, admitting he had not been expecting a yes when he requested it.
The huge Goethe in der Campagna by Tischbein normally lives in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and is known by all Germans – sometimes as much for its anatomical defects as its importance. The painting is going on display in the UK for the first time as one of the stars of a new exhibition at the British Museum examining 600 years of German history using objects which evoke memories pretty much all Germans share. Exhibits cover subjects from Martin Luther to the Brothers Grimm to the Berlin Wall.
Given that Germany’s history is more complicated and swirling than just about any other European country, MacGregor admitted that the organisers of the show were taking a lot on. “It is a completely impossible task, an absurd task,” he said, but an important one. “It is part of what we are about. The museum was set up to understand the world and you can only do that by thinking what the world looks like from somewhere else. The way you do that is by thinking how do those people consider their past.”
Another loan is the hovering statue in the exhibition’s final room – a large and poignant bronze figure of an angel which was designed in 1927 by Ernst Barlach as a war memorial for Güstrow cathedral.“It is completely unlike any war memorial in Britain or France,” said MacGregor. “It is actually about the folly of allowing the war and the sadness of the consequences rather than the heroism of those who died.“It is the sculptural equivalent of the war poets, it is Barlach finding a monumental expression of Wilfred Owen.”
The sculpture was, naturally, hated by the Nazis and melted down for weapons in 1938. Fortunately, some brave friends of Barlach found the original plaster cast in a Berlin foundry a year later and made a second version which they buried.
After the war, Güstrow ended up in the east, while the sculpture, Der Schwebende, was buried in the west. So the statue ended up in Cologne until the early 1950s when a third version was made and given – remarkably given the cold war was at its chilliest – to Güstrow as a symbol of friendship.
MacGregor said: “It has acquired these extra layers, this third version has far more meaning than the original Barlach one. That statue is a sort of biography of Germany in the 20th century.”
The work is now a symbol of union and its loan had to be agreed by the cathedral’s congregation. “It is very touching,” said MacGregor. “I never thought they would agree to lend it – not for a moment. The congregation decided that because it was about reconciliation and peace and the need to re-establish connections that it should come to London on the centenary of the first world war.”
Members of the congregation will visit the show on Wednesday before the exhibition’s public opening on Thursday. On Monday, a two-metre section of the Berlin wall became the latest exhibit to be lifted in to place although this will be visible to any visitor to the British Museum – along with a 1953 Volkswagen Beetle in the Great Courtyard.
One of the more challenging aspects of the show was how to represent the Holocaust and the answer came in a loan from Buchenwald concentration camp – a replica iron gate which carried above it the words Jedem das Seine (To Each His Due).
The gate was the work of a former Bauhaus student Franz Erlich and it is possible to tell from the shape of the letters that he was inspired by Bauhaus artists, a school despised by the Nazis.
The gate is essentially a subtle act of defiance. “It must have given him his dignity,” said MacGregor.
The exhibition is accompanied by MacGregor’s BBC Radio 4 series, Germany: Memories of a Nation. ’ BBC A book will be published at the end of the series on 6 November.
Germany: Memories of a Nation, sponsored by Betsy and Jack Ryan. At the British Museum 16 October-25 January, entry £10.
