Or the Astonishing Visions of Hermann Hendrich
A few months ago, my writer friend Harold Rhenisch came by, on his pilgrimage through Germany, digging up the taproots and ostracons of his family and past. Here in Neuchâtel, we visted the Dürrenmatt Museum (something of a concrete mausoleum) and the Laténium (delightful, with a copy of the Gundestrup Cauldron on display, around which we turned and turned for the longest time, inventing stories to go with it) and got talking about this business of museums and how they reveal so much more than just what they have on display. On his return home, he sent me a web link, with the admonition “Check this out.”
So, of course, I did.
I immediately ended up immersed in a wonderful collection of documents – mostly paintings – and realized that I knew half of them already, but had never pinned a name on them.
Well, it’s done. Pin firmly in place, time to make amends for my negligence.
Hermann Hendrich was born in 1854, to modest parents, in the town of Heringen/Kyffhaüser Kreis, in Thuringia. 1870 sees him a lithographer’s apprentice, and in 1872, he is doing catalogue illustrations for a lamp factory in Hannover. In Hannover, he attends a representation of “Tannhauser”, perhaps his first impulsion, via Wagner, to the realm of Teutonic myth. 1875, Berlin: Hendrich works for another lithographer, and takes classes at the Escke art school. 1876: a trip with a friend to Norway, where (besides falling hopelessly in summer-love with a Swedish girl) he sets eyes on the landscapes dear to Norse myth and legend. Back in Berlin, his submissions to the annual salon are refused. He leaves for Amsterdam. Hendrich meets and marries his wife Clara, and they go to the USA for their honeymoon (he has a brother in Auburn, New York). Thanks to an American patron with a generous chequebook who buys all the work he has for five thousand dollars, they live first in Newport (where painting simple maritime scenes seems too dull for him) and finally New York, which disenchants him with America. The couple return to Munich. Hendrich sees the work of Arnold Böcklin, the Swiss symbolist, which he admires, but above all he returns to the opera, and Wagner definitively conquers his imagination.
Another trip to Norway in 1885 results in five large landscape paintings on the theme of Beowulf (since lost), and the Prussian Ministry of Education and the Arts offers him a sponsorship of several years if he enrolls at the academy in Berlin. Hendrich accepts the offer, and remains there until 1889. That year, the Kaiser notices his work and commissions a painting. In Hendrich’s own words:
“One day, I received a note from a court official that his majesty the Kaiser wanted to order a larger painting with the title “Atlantis”. The idea was as follows: a Viking perishes on a stormy night, while in front of him, Valhalla appears. Enthusiastically, I began work and soon went to the Kaiser, to offer my draft. The Kaiser was more or less satisfied with my composition; he only wanted to have the Northern Lights a bit more effective. “Yes, your Majesty!” I answered. So, I painted the Northern lights as effectively as possible and returned with my new draft to the palace. Being in the company of a select group of people, the Kaiser was quite gracious, he tapped me on the shoulder and said “Well done, you can start painting. But, wait a minute, in the top left-hand corner you could place the moon, which is reflected in the water.” I must have had the devil in me, as I said, of course in all modesty, “I’m sorry your Majesty, but with these strong Northern Lights, the moon would hardly be shown to its advantage.” “Well, do it then wthout the moon. Goodbye.” I soon realized, with this silly remark, I threw away my chances of any further orders and of the title of Professor. But I got along.”
He does get his professorship nevertheless, in 1910. As for the original painting that the Kaiser dithered over, it was most probably destroyed during the war. (About half of Hendrich’s paintings were likely lost.) Hendrich’s star, however, is on the rise; he exhibits regularly in Berlin and Munich.
In 1901, the “Walpurgishalle” on the Hexentanzplatz in Thale is officially opened. Sporting a tall helm with wings, a decidedly Wagnerian Odin dominates the gabled facade, flanked by his faithful ravens, Hugin and Munin, in turn flanked by the direwolves Hati and Skoll. Built to house a series of five paintings inspired by Faust, it is still standing today, albeit shorn of its pillars.
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In 1903, in the same vein, the Sagenhalle is constructed in Schrieberhau (in the region of Szklarska Poreba in the Sudeten Mountains, now in Poland). Taken with the wild landscape, Hendrich had resolved to build another hall, perhaps with the idea of ultimately founding a utopist artist’ colony which could resist, in a neo-romantic wilderness retreat, the encroaching and increasingly vociferous voices of modernism. Whatever the case, Hendrich is also much taken with the mythical personnage of Rübezahl, a local giant, and does several moving and unusual landscapes featuring not Rübezahl himself, but his shadow. Jormungandr (or his compatriot Nidhoggr) orns the facade of the Sagenhalle, Thor’s hammer is suspended above a torque hanging between two tall poles shaped like lances. All in all, it ressembles an eccentric’s summer retreat, more at home at the Exposition Universelle in Paris than in the mountains.
The Sagenhalle is unfortunately a victim of the war in 1945.
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In 1907, Hendrich is involved in the founding of the Werdandibund, an anti-modernist movement which protests vehemently against the modernist and decadent movements, proning a more positive role for art. The Werdandibund* was founded by Friedrich Seesselberg, a professor of architecture “in the medieval style” at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. Proning the regionalist-nationalist approach, the Werdandibund, amongst other preoccuparions, pretended that “national” art could only truly be painted by citizens of the nation. They also extolled the virtues of vernacular architecture, constructed of local materials. Did Hendrich really condone the principles of some of the company he kept? Certainly not a modernist, he is a staunch Victorian, or even more fatefully, and illustrator in a painter’s smock, seeking the approbation of an intellectual elite that ends up having no time for his preoccupations and finally dismisses his visons as anachronistic. Despite the often grim aura of his paintings, he sees his role as an interpreter, not a revolutionary; his commentary is not temporal, but spritual and mythological; thus he ends up skirmishing in a rear guard for a lost cause, in a grudging retreat.
In 1913, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth, the Nibelungenhalle is officially opened on the Drachenfels in Königswinter. The completion is held up because of the war, and a statue of Siegfried, commssioned from Frank Metzner, the creator of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig, remains unfinished. The Midgardserpent, 200 feet long, winds his length around the floor, and the interior of the domed roof represents the Northern firmament. (The roof was damaged during the war, and was rebuilt.) In 1933, a dragon’s cave, complete with a 50-foot dragon is created nearby, to link the Drachefels to the legend of Siegfried. (The dragon is really quite cuddly, and is still there today.)
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Hendrich is involved in the design of the building, which contains twelve monumental paintings based on Wagner’s Ring der Nibelungen, from the Rhiengold to the Götterdämmerung. Runic-inspired letters spell out the name on the facade, bas-reliefs show the dwarfs hammering Wotan’s sword and forging the Ring. One Ring to Rule them all… twenty-four years later, a professor in Oxford will rewrite the legend yet again.
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Hendrich continues to exhibit regularly, and extension is added to the Sagenhalle in 1916, and in 1926 (Hendrich is now 72) the Halle Deutcher Sagenring is inaugurated in Burg an der Wupper.
Hendrich is not involved in the design, but he provides many paintings based on Germanic myth, amongst which his paintings for Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parsifal. But the museum does not catch the attention of the public, and is destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. (Removed for safekeeping before the war, Hendrich’s paintings are subsequently transferred to the Nibelungenhalle.)
On May 17th of the same year, a grand exhibition of his work is held in Bayreuth for the 50th anniversary of the Bayreuther Festspiele. But, his star is fading and his work no longer inspires. He dies in 1931. His wife Clara follows him in 1938.
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The buildings Hendrich created are really pagan places of worship, but once removed; they are temples to a certain idea of paganism, not to paganism itself. This is Faust, not Beltane, Wagner, not the Volsungs. It is inherently anachronistic, as the mythological Teutonic world he consecrates was never placed inside real walls, but paintings must be protected from the weather, and stone is a durable ensconcing of the frailty of vision. Hendrich in a sense brings this mythological past from the so-called Dark Ages straight into the Industrial Age, a quantum leap of centuries, from the toppling of Irminsul to the premiere of the Rhiengold in 1869. In this, he echos the diligent ressurection of a mythological past for Germany (just as the English drafted Saint George into the ranks, and other nations did, or attempted to do, elsewhere with their “own” mythical heroes). Sign of the times, his compositions echo the operatic, his characters often minuscule in grandiose and dramatically lit sets. As spectators, we may be offered a front-row seat but no binoculars; the scope of the entire stage is truly the focus.
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Left: The Ride of the Valkyrie. Centre: Thor, the Thunder God. Right: Wotan, the Wanderer.
Hendrich’s possibly apocryphal account of his failure to win more than the Kaiser’s passing interest and his attempts to shrug it off are bitter and saddening. Perhaps he staked too much faith in the consideration of a fickle monarch who had other – and far more serious – preoccupations. One world was ending and another was about to begin. Also, each new generation of art is the equally fickle son of the father that begets it, spending as much energy the annihilation of what went before on as the creation of what will in turn be disowned by the next generation. (Wouldn’t do to let the old man down; art movements are rather like Roman emperors, continually involved in plots and assassinations.)
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Left & centre: The Giant Rübezahl. Right: The Sleeping Giant
Artistic canons change quickly, the abandonment of the figurative-narrative for other pictorial modes left Hendrich behind, and even the deification of Wagner’s oeuvre was not enough to pull him along in its wake. Quite simply, he went out of style and has not yet come back in. It’s a grand shame.
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In one of those brisk accelerations that history occasionally operates, when tastes change irrevocably and abruptly, Hendrich’s view of the world, with Wotan in the wings, was abandoned. Sadly, he lived to see this turning away from his heathen horizons, but perhaps mercifully died before the world collapsed, yet again, in 1939.
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Three paintings of Hendrich’s Parsifal cycle.
But, since his predilections lie in a realm where there the inheritance is sparse, where the visions of myth correspond to few artefacts and precious little on the ground, so to speak, Hendrich makes his true contribution to art history in his inventing of these worlds, and the indelible mark that he and his contemporaries – Von Stassen most notably, and to some degree Rackham and even Segrelles (though he is closer to Goya than Goethe) – have left. Think imagery of the Nine Worlds, think Rhine gold and like maidens, likely it’s the imagery of the 19th century that will spring full-blown into your mind.
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Now, this is where I blithely depart from any reliable reasoning, and sally far out on the limb of speculation, but it seems clear to me that there is something quintessential in Hendrich’s work simply because of its persistence of vision. More prosaically, he is also popular with Image Libraries, so his work appears, often anonymously, at best his name is listed in small print in the picture credits section, in dozens of encyclopaedias and collections of Northern myth and legend, along with a healthy number of other now largely forgotten Victorian painters. (Immortality of a sort comes with expiration of copyright.) Modernism may have booted them off centre stage and slammed the door in their faces, but they continue to patiently provide for our craving for imagery of realms beyond easy imagining. In that, Heinrich Hendrich attains something he perhaps never himself dreamt of, mildly intoxicated by the accolades of his peers, and obnubilated by the shifting of spotlights to other art movements.
Quite simply, he has achieved a modest form of immortality by bestowing form on a world of myth, despite there being no stone on which he managed to engrave his epitaph.
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Persistence of vision is a vindication in itself. Forgettable images are, well, easily and usually forgotten, but those that somehow strike a chord, however faint, remain, and are not subjected to the fashion of the times. The artist’s name can fade (and usually does), but that note remains in the air. As he says of his paintings in his short, rather sentimental (and a little bitter) autobiography, written possibly when he was in his 50’s, and first published in 1906: “May they contribute to a lasting memory of the wonderful tales and legends of our great prehistoric times and ay they bring them back to life, so that the dark clouds which hound us be driven away by a shining sunrise… This is my richest reward.”
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But, where Hermann Heindrich rises above these considerations is in his absolute dedication to his cause, in his pursuit of a personal paganism, wholly given to a cause which excludes all that is not at once both intensely personal and equally intensely self-effacing. There is curiously no self-aggrandizement in his desire to build museums of his own work, he is creating places of refuge and contemplation, and while his art adorns the walls, it is less on display than it is intended to disappear by being the open door into a mystical realm. (At the risk of going out on a limb, true religious art isn’t calling out “See how cleverly I’m made, wasn’t the man who painted me a clever lad?” Rather it sublimates undeniable skill of execution to serve depth of sentiment.) His desire to build his “halls” is a desire to provide focal points in a landscape, be it geographical or transtemporal. Placing his work on display in these buildings is a reminder of what he wants us to be looking for. We are not to only admire his paintings, but to finally see beyond the mundane into that dimension of myth-personification of the elements and the forces of the world. Whatever labels can be stuck on Heinrich Hendrich, they all come off in a good summer storm, leaving only one: that of naturalist, tireless advocate of the mythological and spiritual dimensions of nature.
And, in the end, now that we’ve exhausted all our other options – domination, colonization, industrialization, preservation, eco-conservation – it just may be he’s got something worthwhile to say to us after all.
* The “Werdandibund zur Förderung jungdeutscher Kunst”, named of course after the Norn Verðandi (the present or “in the making”; her sisters Urðr and Skuld are fate and debt) was founded in 1907 by the initiative of art professors Friedrich Seeßelberg and Henry Thode. Hendrich was apparently a co-founder as was Siegfried Wagner. In concept it was a counter-movement to the modernists, based in a romanticised German nationalism very much along the lines of Richard Wagner’s work. Its goal was a “renewal of Germany” by way of German art. Its philosophy was based on Thodes previous lectures of 1905, which were, as a reaction to the writings of Meier-Graefes, severe attacks on the secessions, especially Impressionism as a foreign, jewish and thus amoral style. Instead, Arnold Böcklin and Hans Thoma were held high as an ideal of religious and German art.
The Werdandi-Bund had more than 500 members, among them the Worpsweder artists, Max Klinger and may architects and authors. (The Worpsweder was an artist’s and writer’s colony created in 1889 – Rainer Maria Rilke numbered among the founders.)
From 1908 Seeßenberg was publisher of the magazine “Werdandi: Monatsschrift für deutsche Kunst und Wesensart”, from 1909 “Wertung: Schriften des Werdandibundes e. V.”. Also from 1909: a series of books called “Werdandi-Werke”, from 1910: the “Werdandi-Bücherei”. All were published until 1914 by Eckardt in Leipzig.
The Werdandibund was likely abandoned by World War I, as there is no mention of activities after 1914. (Seeßenberg and many others fought in the war.) It is likely that Hendrich, apart from his initial enthusiasm for a crusade to protect and promote his mythical visions, had moved away by that time. An essay by renowned cultural-historian Prof. Dr. Rolf Parr of the University of Bielefeld from 1990 called the Werdandi-Bund: »Der größte Humbug, den wir in den letzten Zeiten erleben durften«. (“The biggest humbug we had the pleasure to experience in past times.”)
This newsletter would not be here without the kind assistance of Elke Rohling. Her website dedicated to the life and work of Hermann Hendrich is here.
Elke Rohling is a schoolteacher who, after studying German literature, history and education, (and later English) at the universities of Hagen and Muenster, developed a keen and abiding interest in history, mythology and art. (When pressed to pick a favourite artist or two, she cites J.W. Waterhouse and Hermann Hendrich.) She has also edited a book and DVD on Hendrich’s life and work, which can be ordered from her shop. (For the time being, the site is principally in German, but an English version is coming. In the meantime, you can admire the pictures.) All the images in this newsletter are used with her kind permission.
The “Nibelungenhort” is a non-profit organisation seeking to preserve and restore the Nibelungenhalle and the Walpurgishalle. If you wish to know more, contact Elke directly via the association’s website.
Other relevant links: Nibelungenhalle, Sagenhalle.
The footnote on the Werdandibund is largely the work of Tobi Putzo, and is reproduced with his premission and my thanks.
